Lawrence Block - The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

“Bernie…”

“Think about the man you just met in my store. That was no more than half an hour ago, Ray, and you looked right at him, but did you really see him? If you had to do it, could you furnish a description of him?”

“Sure,” he said. “Name, Tignatz Rasmoolihan. Height, five foot two. Weight, a hundred an’ five. Color of hair, black. Color of eyes, green.”

“Really? He had green eyes?”

“Sure, matched his shirt. Probably why he picked it, the vain little bastard. Complexion, pale. Spots of rouge here an’ here, only it ain’t rouge, it’s natural. Shape of face, narrow.”

He went on, describing the clothes Rasmoulian was wearing down to an alligator belt with a silver buckle, which I certainly hadn’t noticed. I must have seen it but it didn’t register. “That’s amazing,” I said. “You barely looked at him and you got all that. You fluffed the name a little, but everything else was picture-perfect.”

“Well, I’m what you call a trained observer,” he said, clearly pleased. “I’ll screw up a name now an’ then, but I get the rest of it right most of the time.”

“Now that just shows you,” I said. “I’m the other way around. I guess I’m just more verbal than visual. I’ll get the names right every time, but the faces are another story.”

“I guess it comes from hangin’ around books all the time.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Instead of gettin’ out and mixin’ with people.”

“That must be it.”

“So?”

“How’s that, Ray?”

“So are you gonna ID this poor dead son of a bitch or what?”

“Just hypothetically,” I said. “Suppose I wasn’t a hundred percent certain.”

“Aw, Jesus, why’d you have to go an’ say a thing like that?”

“No, let me finish. I get the impression that my identifying the body is really nothing more than a formality.”

“That’s exactly what it is, Bernie.”

“You’ve probably already identified him from fingerprints and dental records. You just need somebody to eyeball the deceased and confirm what you already know.”

“So far we didn’t get any kind of a bounce from the prints or the dental records. But we sure as hell know who he is.”

“So it’s just a formality.”

“Didn’t I just say that, Bernie?”

I made up my mind. “All right,” I said. “It’s Candlemas.”

“Way to go, Bern. For the record, you’re formally identifying the man you just saw as Hugo Candlemas, right?”

If this had been a movie there’d have been an ominous chord right about now, so that you’d know the hero was about to put his foot in it. No, you’d want to cry. No, you fool, don’t do it!

But would he listen?

“Ray,” I said, “there’s no question in my mind.”

Ray dropped me at the subway and I was in my own apartment with time for a shower and shave before I headed for the Musette. I was there first so I bought two tickets and waited in the lobby.

I was still waiting when they opened the doors and started letting people take seats. I followed the crowd inside and threw my jacket over a pair of seats halfway down the aisle on the left, then went back to the guy taking tickets. He knew me by now, and why wouldn’t he? He’d been seeing me every night for the past two and a half weeks.

He said he hadn’t recognized me at first, that he wasn’t used to seeing me without my lady friend. That, I told him, was the problem. I gave him Ilona’s ticket and said she’d evidently been delayed en route. He assured me there would be no problem; he’d let her in and steer her toward where I was sitting.

I went and bought popcorn. What the hell, I hadn’t had anything to eat since that slice of pizza around noon. It felt strange, though, sitting there with no one next to me, dipping into the popcorn without risk of encountering another hand.

I glanced around the theater, surprised at what a large proportion of the audience looked familiar to me. I don’t know that there were many diehards like us who never missed a night, but a lot of people came more than once. I guess if you saw one Bogart picture you saw them all, or as many as you could.

If we ran to type, I couldn’t tell you what the type was. There were quite a few college kids, some with the serious look of film students, others just out for a good time. There were older West Siders, the intellectual-political-artsy crowd you see at the free afternoon concerts at Juilliard, and some of them had probably seen many of these films during their initial run. There were singles, gay and straight, and young marrieds, gay and straight, and people who looked rich enough to buy the theater, and people who looked as though they must have raised the price of admission by begging on the subway. It was a wonderfully varied crowd, drawn together by the enduring appeal of an actor who’d died more than thirty-five years ago, and I was happy to be a part of it.

But not as happy as I would have been if Ilona were sharing my popcorn.

The thought made the popcorn stick in my throat, but sometimes it tends to do that anyway. I told myself it was a little early to start wallowing in self-pity, that she’d be slipping into the seat beside me any minute now.

The seat was still empty when they brought the house lights down. I wasn’t surprised, not really. I fed myself another handful of popcorn and let myself get lost in the movie.

That’s what it was there for.

The first feature, Passage to Marseille, was made in 1944, not long after Casablanca and obviously inspired by it, although the credits said it was based on a book by Nordhoff and Hall. (You remember them, they wrote Mutiny on the Bounty. ) Bogart plays a French journalist named Matrac who’s on Devil’s Island when the movie opens, framed for murder and serving a life sentence. He and four others escape, only to be picked up on the high seas by a French cargo ship. Of course the convicts want to go fight for France-has there ever been anyone as fiercely patriotic as a criminal in a Hollywood movie?-but France has just surrendered, and Sydney Greenstreet wants to turn the ship over to the Vichy government. His attempted mutiny is thwarted, and Bogart and his buddies join a Free French bomber squadron in England. His plane is the last to return from a mission, and after it lands his crewmates bring him off, dead.

Well, hell, he died for a good cause, and until then he got to spend time with Claude Rains and Peter Lorre and Helmut Dantine and, well, all the usual suspects. It wasn’t the best film he ever made, but it was a quintessential Bogart role, the hard-bitten cynicism shielding the pure idealist, the beautiful loser coolly victorious in defeat.

A shame she had to miss it.

When the lights came up I checked with the usher and he shrugged and shook his head. I inquired at the box office, tried her number from a pay phone in the lobby. Nothing. On my way back into the theater the usher asked me if I wanted to cash in my unused ticket. I told him to hang on to it, that she might still turn up.

At the refreshment stand a tall guy with a goatee but no mustache said, “All by yourself tonight.”

I’d seen him and his dumpling of a girlfriend just about every night, but this was the first time either of us had spoken. “All alone,” I agreed. “She said she might have to work late. She might still turn up.”

We talked about the film we’d just seen, and about the one coming up. Then I went back to my seat and watched Black Legion.

It’s an early one, released in 1937, with Bogart playing a member of the Ku Klux Klan, only they called it the Black Legion and the members wore black hoods sporting white skulls and crossbones. I’d seen it sometime within the past year on AMC, and it wasn’t that great then, and by the time the picture got under way I knew Ilona wasn’t going to show up. It seemed to me that I’d known all along.