Lawrence Block - The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

“Oh,” I said, and was ready to stammer out some lame excuse when fifteen nights at the movies came along and rescued me. “Not tonight, sweetheart,” I drawled. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take a rain check.” And I kissed her lightly on the lips and tucked her into the cab and watched her ride away from me.

Some lucky night.

Iwoke up surprisingly clear-headed, if not entirely thrilled about it, and was downtown in time to open my store at ten. I fed Raffles and refilled his water dish, dragged my three-for-a-buck table outside, and settled myself behind the counter with Will Durant. The world, he reassured me, had always been a pretty nasty place. I found this curiously comforting.

I had the front door closed against the chill of the morning, and so I got to hear the tinkling of little bells each time it opened. I had a couple of early browsers, rang up two sales for a few dollars each, and looked through the sack of books that Mowgli brought me. He’s a curious creature who looks as though he might indeed have been raised by wolves-gaunt, hollow-eyed, with a mop of hair and a scraggle of beard. Speed and acid have burned some substantial holes in his brain, and he’d dropped out of a doctoral program in English at Columbia to take up a nomadic existence, shifting his residence from one abandoned building to another as circumstances dictated.

He’d collected books during his student days, and on the way down he sold them off piecemeal. His stock was pretty much gone by the time he found his way to Barnegat Books, but I’d bought a few things from him then, including a nice clean set of Kipling. He’d disappeared for the better part of a year, and I gather he started sucking on a crack pipe and pretty much lost touch with the planet for a while there, but when he turned up again he had his act together, in a marginal sort of way. He nowadays limited his chemical adventures to a little righteous herb and the odd hit of organic mescaline, and supported himself by buying books at street fairs and thrift shops and flea markets and reselling them to people like me.

I picked out a few things, passed on the rest. He had some nice fifties paperback noir, David Goodis and Peter Rabe, but my customers wouldn’t pay collector prices for that kind of material. “Figured as much,” he said. “I’ll run these by Jon at Partners and Crime. Thought you might like to see them, though. Don’t you love the covers?”

I agreed they were great. I picked out a biography of Thomas Wolfe and Mark Schorer’s life of Sinclair Lewis and a couple of other books I thought I could sell, and we hemmed and hawed until we found a price we could both live with. Toward the end I asked him a question I ask most of my regular suppliers.

“These aren’t stolen,” I said. “Are they, Mowgli?”

“How could they be otherwise? ‘Property is theft.’ You know who said that, Bernie?”

“Proudhon.”

“Give the man a cigar. Proudhon indeed. Matter of fact, St. John Chrysostom said something much along the same line. You wouldn’t expect it of him, would you?” We kicked that around, and then he said, “What can I tell you, Bernie? None of this stuff was stolen by me, unless it’s stealing to buy a David Goodis first from the Sally Ann for two bits when I know I can get a finif for it. Is that stealing?”

“If it is,” I said, “then we’re all in trouble.”

The next time the bell rang it was a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses who wanted to talk with me, and we had a nice conversation. Proudhon’s name didn’t come up once, or St. John Chrysostom’s, either. I had to cut the conversation short-they’d still be talking if I hadn’t-but they went away happy and I went back to Will Durant. And a few minutes later the bells sounded again, but this time I didn’t look up until I heard a familiar voice.

“Well, well, well,” said the best policeman money can buy. “If it ain’t Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s boy Bernard. Every time I see you you got your nose in a book, Bernie. Which more or less figures, seein’ as you got your ass in a bookstore.”

“Hello, Ray.”

“‘Hello, Ray.’ You want to put more energy into it, Bernie. Otherwise it don’t sound like you’re glad to see me.”

“Hello, Ray.”

“That’s a little better.” He leaned forward, propped an elbow on my counter. “But you always seem nervous when I drop in for a visit, like you’re waitin’ for the third shoe to drop. Why do you figure that is, Bernie?”

“I don’t know, Ray.”

“I mean, whattaya got to be nervous about? Respectable businessman, never strays on the wrong side of the law, it oughta be a load off your mind when a sworn police officer comes into your place of business.”

“Sworn,” I said.

“How’s that, Bernie?”

“I like the phrase,” I said. “A sworn police officer. I like it.”

“Well, be my guest, Bernie. Use it anytime the urge comes over you. Say, tell me something, will you?

“If I can.”

“Ever seen this before?”

He’d been holding it out of sight below the counter.

“Indeed I have,” I said. “Many times. It’s my attaché case. How do you know Hugo, and why has he got you running errands for him?”

“What the hell are you talkin’ about, errands?”

“Well, what else would you call it? I told him he didn’t have to be in any rush to return it.” I reached for the case, and Ray snatched it away from me. I looked at him, puzzled. “What’s going on?” I demanded. “Are you giving me the damn thing or aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He set it down flat on the counter, settled his thumbs on the little buttons. “What do you figure’s inside?”

“The Empire State Building.”

“Huh?”

“The Lindbergh baby. How many more guesses do I get? I don’t know what’s inside it, Ray. When Hugo Candlemas left here the other day there were some hand-colored engravings he didn’t want to risk creasing, along with a couple of other packages he’d picked up along the way.”

“I didn’t know you sold pictures, Bernie.”

“I don’t,” I said. “Don’t ask me where he bought them. All I sold him was a book of poems for five bucks plus tax.”

“And you threw in this here? Very generous of you.”

“I lent it to him, Ray. He’s a decent old gent and a good customer. I can’t pay the rent on guys like him, but he’s pleasant company and he usually buys something before he leaves. Why? What’s this all about, anyway?”

He popped the locks, opened the case.

“Why, it seems to be empty,” I said. “Nice showmanship, Ray, but a little bit anticlimactic, don’t you think?”

“It looks empty,” he said. “Don’t it? But it ain’t.”

“Because it contains air? What is this, physics class?”

“I got no need for physics,” he said, “bein’ as I’m regular as clockwork. What’s in here’s your prints, Bernie.”

“The engravings?” I leaned forward, squinted. “They seem to have grown transparent. I don’t see them.”

“Not that kind of prints. Your fingerprints.”

“My fingerprints?”

“A full set.”

“Well, that’s nice,” I said, “but not terribly surprising. It’s my case. I already told you that.”

“So you did, Bernie, and what’s surprisin’ is for you to admit it.”

“Why shouldn’t I admit it? What have I got to be ashamed of? It’s not Louis Vuitton, but it’s a perfectly respectable piece of luggage. And if you’re going to tell me it’s stolen, the statute of limitations ran out a long time ago. I must have owned the thing for eight or ten years.”

He struck a pose not unlike Rodin’s Thinker and took a long searching look at me. “You’re slicker than ice on the sidewalk,” he said. “I thought you’d twitch a little when I showed you the case, but no, it was like you expected it. That was you on the phone, right?”