Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Rye

Some places get all huffy when their customers get drunk, as if they’d sold you the booze never for a moment suspecting you intended to drink it. But no, you actually went and swallowed the terrible stuff, and then you had the poor taste to let it affect you. Well, shame on you, buster, and kindly take your business somewhere else.

But they’re not like that at the Bum Rap. It’s acceptable to be drunk there, as long as you don’t disturb the other drunks. And I didn’t disturb them. There was a point when I led them in song, and that might have disturbed someone with a fine ear for music, but all of us Bum Rappers seemed to be having a good enough time.

I don’t have any clear memory of getting out of there, but all at once we were on the street, me and my new best friend. I rushed to the curb and hailed everything that came along-trucks, vans, off-duty cabs, and a bus. None of them stopped, curiously enough, but a cab did, finally, and I made Henry take it.

“I’ll get the next one,” I said. “Nothing to it.” And off he went, and I caught myself just as I was about to hail a blue-and-white police cruiser.

I kept my arm down, but even so it seemed to me that the two cops were looking at me as they sailed on by. “Bernie,” I said to myself, talking out loud and trying not to slur my words, “Bernie, old boy, you’re drunk as a lord, tight as a tick, high as a kite. You’ve got to get home before you get in trouble. Wait for a yellow car with a light on top. That’s the kind to wave at. It’s the only kind to wave at.”

I may have erred on the side of caution, because a cab or two got by me before I could get my hand up. But eventually I must have snagged one, because the next thing I knew I was riding in it. And I was tired, too, so much so that I could barely keep my eyes open.

I must have closed them. They were closed when I became aware of the cabdriver, to whom I had evidently bonded. “My frien’, my frien’,” he was saying, with a certain degree of urgency, and one of those accents that can cope with no more than one consonant at the end of a word. “My frien’, we are here. You wan’ to sleep, you mus’ go to your room.”

I didn’t see why he couldn’t leave me alone. But I sighed and opened my eyes. I leaned forward and squinted at the meter. It was hard to make out and I decided I was reading it wrong, because what I thought I saw was $3.60, and it generally costs me ten bucks plus a tip to get home, which is one reason the subway generally gets my business.

But this would have been a bad night for the subway.

I got out, leaned against the cab, got out my wallet, and found a ten and two singles. “Your meter’s wrong,” I said. “You ought to see about getting it fixed.”

He took the money, looked at the bills, then looked at me. I asked him if something was wrong. Wasn’t that enough money? Did he want more?

“Is plenny money,” he said. “You go in your house, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and looked around. “Where is it? Where are we?”

“Where you say.”

“Where I say?”

“Where you say to take you. We here, my frien’. You go to your bed, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and let go of the cab for a moment, and when I reached for it again it was gone. I got my balance, no easy task, and I turned around for a good look at my house, which I have to say didn’t look like my house at all.

Well, that might explain the low fare. The cabby, upset at having a fare sleeping in his cab, had just dropped me any old place-and I, willing to believe we’d gone all the way to the Upper West Side, had insisted on paying him accordingly.

But where the hell were we?

I straightened up and focused on the building in front of me, and either it was swaying or I was, and logic suggested the instability was mine. There was something written on the canopy, but how was I going to read it?

Definitely not my building, no matter what the driver said. And yet it did look familiar.

Was I intent on visiting a friend? This certainly wasn’t Carolyn’s place on Arbor Court, although the meter would have been about right. Some other girlfriend? I didn’t know where Alice Cottrell lived, we’d only been to my place, but maybe I’d given the driver some exgirlfriend’s address, out of force of habit. Well, force of nonhabit, since I didn’t have any old girlfriends I was in the habit of dropping in on. Force of rye whiskey, call it.

I walked up to the entrance, and it still looked familiar. I opened the door and went in, and the entranceway looked familiar, too. I looked past some chairs and couches to a fireplace, and I looked up over the fireplace, and I saw a little furry chap in a royal blue hat and a bright red jacket and boots the very color of the cab that had brought me here.

Oh.

I straightened up, and I walked a perfectly straight line over to the desk, where a round-shouldered man with the air of a defrocked accountant was reading one of Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories of the Napoleonic Wars.

“Jeffrey Peters,” I said. “Room 415. I’d like my key, please.”

Iwoke up eight hours later, well rested, glad to be alive, with a clear head and a feeling that all was right with the world, and if you believe that I know a bunch of really nice guys who’d love to play poker with you.

Because that’s not how it happened at all. A pair of sensations woke me, one centered an inch or so behind my forehead, the other in the pit of my stomach. My head, throbbing, alerted me that to move was to risk death, while my stomach advised me that it was about to reject what I’d been unwise enough to put into it.

I stayed right where I was, eyes clenched shut, trying to will the day away. I wasn’t sure where I was, but it didn’t feel like my own bed. And I couldn’t dismiss the awful sensation that I wasn’t alone in it.

I forced my eyes open, and another pair of eyes looked back at me from only inches away. Little shoe-button eyes, and of course it was Paddington, and that brought it all back, or at least as much as I was destined to remember, the last moment of which I’ve already told you about-marching carefully across the lobby and demanding my room key. I couldn’t recall what had happened after that, but it wasn’t hard to reconstruct, for here I was in my room.

I got up and showered and shaved. My head didn’t literally split in two, nor did I get sick to my stomach. The little kit with my shaving gear, which I’d tucked into my suitcase, held aspirin as well, and a good thing. I put on clean socks and underwear-in case of a traffic accident, or a police frisk-and the shirt and slacks and jacket I’d been wearing the day before.

The shirt and pants were on hangers, I was pleased to note, and the jacket was hung over the back of the chair. That, it seemed to me, was a Very Good Sign. If I’d had it together sufficiently to hang up my clothes, then I couldn’t have been too bad, could I?

Ah, the little lies we try to tell ourselves. Memory, the thief of self-esteem, assured me I’d been in a bad way indeed. Just because I was neat didn’t mean I’d been sober.

Just for openers, telling the cabby to take me to the Paddington had not been the act of a sober man, or even a halfway sane drunk. I had to get back to the hotel, had to figure out a way to reclaim my tools and gloves before they turned up in an evidence locker, had to get my hands on Cynthia Considine’s rubies before somebody else did.

But how? The last I’d seen of the Hotel Paddington, and it of me, I’d been wearing handcuffs and a hangdog expression. If I had to return to the scene of the crime, a bit of indirection seemed called for. Illicit entry via the basement, say. A little capering across the rooftops. I couldn’t just walk right in as if I owned the place.