Lawrence Block - The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

“I think it does.”

“How, for God’s sake? It was almost half a century ago. Most of those people are dead.”

“Let me ask you this,” I said. “Were you ever in a country called Anatruria?”

“Sweet Christ,” he said. “That’s no country. Before Garibaldi and the Risorgimento, they used to say that Italy was just a geographical expression. Anatruria wasn’t even that.”

“They had a king, didn’t they?”

“Old Vlados? I’m not sure if he ever set foot inside his own purported realm. They proclaimed independence around the time of the Treaty of Versailles, you know, but it seems to me they did so from a distance. By the time I heard mention of Anatruria it was three decades later and Vlados was an old man living where you’d expect him to be, in Franco’s Spain or Salazar’s Portugal, I can’t remember which. Anatrurian independence was an idea whose time had come and gone. No one gave it a thought, no one outside of a handful of ethnocentric lunatics who’d been marrying their cousins for a few generations too many.”

“And the five of you?”

“And the five of us, the Bob and Charlie Show. We were supposed to foment a rebellion. Now who could have thought that was a good idea? Or a feasible one?” He shook his head. “A few years later I was back in the States, out of the game. And there was an uprising in Hungary, students hurling Molotov cocktails, trying to take out Russian tanks with bottles of gasoline. The rabbit died there.”

“The rabbit?”

“Bob Bateman. We all had animal code names. I was the mouse, of course. That’s why Cappy brought me the little carving, though how he laid hands on it is something else again. Bateman was the rabbit. Well, he looked a little like a rabbit, didn’t he? A rabbity face, a rabbity nose, a rabbit’s timid manner, although there was nothing timid about him when the chips were down. I didn’t look much like a mouse, but it was somebody’s contention that I was shy in a presumably mouselike fashion. I don’t think I was shy, but I may have been.”

“What about Hoberman?”

“He was the ram, putting his head down and charging straight ahead. Playing college football, I imagine he ran every play right into the middle of the line. Rob Rennick had a sly feline quality, so he was the cat. And you ought to be able to guess Charles Wood’s code name.”

“The elephant,” I said.

“The elephant? Why an elephant, for heaven’s sake?”

“Never forgets,” I said. “Keeps his trunk packed. I never met the man, so why would you think I’d be able to guess his code name?”

“Ah, well. It will become instantly obvious when I say it. His was the only code name with purely verbal origins. His name was Chuck Wood and his code name was the woodchuck. I can’t say he bore any physical resemblance to the animal, but there was a patient but obdurate quality to his work. He would just gnaw away at something forever until he carried the day.”

“And the carvings?”

“A man named Letchkov made them. That’s a Bulgarian name. He was Bulgarian, like most of them in that crowd, although to call him that was tantamount to challenging him to a duel. He would insist he was Anatrurian. Letchkov was an old man then, so he’d be long since dead. An animal for each of the five of us, and there were others in the series, too. A pig, a goat, some I can’t recall. Some of the Anatrurian activists, you see, had animal code names of their own.”

“What became of the carvings?”

“They stayed behind in Anatruria, if you want to call it that. Or at least I assumed they did. My little mouse seems to have found a way to cross the water. A long way for a little mouse to swim.”

“If it’s the same mouse.”

“It would surprise me greatly,” he said, “to learn that it was not. But I’ve talked far too long about a closed chapter of my life, Mr. Thompson, and while I don’t suppose I’ve compromised national security at this late date, I think I’ll give you a chance to tell me how our actions in Anatruria could possibly have linked you with Cappy Hoberman, and brought you into this building.”

“There’s a young woman I’ve been seeing,” I said. “She’s Anatrurian, and-”

“What’s her name?”

“Ilona Markova.”

“That sounds Bulgarian, and could be Anatrurian.”

“She told me she was Anatrurian,” I said, “and she had a map of Eastern Europe on her wall with the borders of Anatruria outlined in red. And a photograph of Vlados and Liliana in a place of honor in her apartment.”

“Liliana,” he said. “That was the queen, all right. I’d forgotten her name. Did your friend tell you how Liliana died?”

“She didn’t even tell me who the two people were. How did Liliana die?”

“In a car crash in the south of France a year or so before the outbreak of the Second World War. Vlados was badly injured but survived. It was an article of faith among Anatrurian separatists that the car was ambushed by agents of IMRO.”

“IMRO?”

“The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, and God knows that sort of thing was their style, but would they waste time assassinating the pretender to the mythical throne of a nonexistent nation? My guess is that Vlados was drunk. Or his chauffeur was, if he had one.” He’d been looking across the room at the landscape on the far wall. Now he swung his eyes around to me. “How’d you know it was them? Vlados and Liliana?”

“From the stamps.”

“The stamps? Oh, of course! The Anatrurians we worked with talked about the stamp issue, as if a printing press in Budapest could somehow have established the legitimacy of their cause. I don’t know that any of them had actually seen any of the elusive stamps. You don’t own a set, do you? I understand they’re quite scarce.”

I explained about the illustrations in the Scott catalog.

“All right,” he said. “A friend of yours is Anatrurian, and would seem to regard herself as a loyal subject of Vlados the One and Only. There must be more to explain your interest.”

“She’s disappeared.”

“I see. Utterly?”

“Without a trace.”

“What ties her to the Boccaccio? Was it her idea you break into an apartment here?”

“No.”

“Which apartment? Who lives there?”

“ Apartment 8 – B, and I don’t know who lives there. But he’s another Anatrurian.”

“And how do you know that?”

“He had a photo of Vlados.”

“You’re serious? Yes, I can see you are. The same photo? The same pose, I mean to say, not the same physical object.”

“A different photo. He’s alone in this one, and he’s wearing a uniform.”

“The royals love military dress,” he said, “especially when they haven’t got a country to go with the uniform. You did enter the apartment, then. You must have, in order to have seen the photo.”

“Yes.”

“And left with what you’d gone to get?”

“No. I was interrupted,” I said, and explained how I’d hid in the closet, emerging to find the portfolio gone.

“You must still have been trapped there when Cappy left. He didn’t stay any time at all. I’d expected a longish visit, but I’d guess he was in and out of here in ten minutes. For my part, I can’t say I pressed him to stay. His presence brought up memories, not all of them welcome. His gift had much the same effect. The mouse. I always thought it the best of Letchkov’s carvings, but that may have been because it was mine. My code name, I mean. Now the actual carving’s mine, isn’t it, and I’m glad to have it, but I find I care less and less about possessions with each passing year. What’s happened to Cappy?”

The question caught me off-balance, but I didn’t have to hesitate. I’d known it was coming sooner or later and had made up my mind how I was going to answer it.