Lawrence Block - The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

“Out with it, man,” said Tsarnoff. “Who has it?”

“Probably no one,” Todd said.

“Ridiculous! Someone must know.”

“Someone must have known once, some leader of the Anatrurian movement. Perhaps several people knew. You have already said that my father was lucky to get out of Anatruria with his life. Others were not so lucky. So many were taken from their families, only to receive a bullet in the back of the neck and burial without ceremony in an unmarked grave. I would guess that many secrets were buried along with those men, and that the number of the Swiss account was one of those secrets.”

He sighed again. “I remember sitting at a café after my last meeting with a lawyer and a banker, sitting with a glass of wine and wishing my father had taken the portfolio to the grave with him as some Anatrurian had taken the account number. But instead he’d entrusted it to me. In a sense, he’d pressed a crown on my head, and it was not so easy to lay it aside. I told you how I had never thought of Anatruria. Now I could scarcely think of anything else.”

“Who could even say how much the wealth might be?” This from Rasmoulian, his eyes wide at the possibilities. “It could be nothing. It could be millions.”

“The money is the least of it,” the king said. “What am I to do? That is the only question of any importance.”

Ray didn’t understand, and said so.

“For decades,” the king said, “the world’s few reigning kings have been anachronisms, while uncrowned royals have been little more than a joke. But all of a sudden this is not so. There are monarchist movements throughout all of the old Eastern Bloc. Portions of portions of nations are all at once reaching out and achieving sovereignty. If Slovenia and Slovakia can join the United Nations, is an independent Anatruria such an impossibility? If Juan Carlos can be king of Spain, and if men can seriously urge a Romanov restoration in Russia -the Romanovs! in Russia!-”

“Not entirely out of the question,” Tsarnoff allowed.

“-then who is to say Anatruria cannot have a king? And who am I to deny my people if indeed they want me?” He smiled suddenly, and now the resemblance was unmistakable-to Ilona’s photograph of Vlados, to Mikhail’s own photo of his father resplendent in uniform. “And so I came to New York,” he said, “to get away from Europe, and to decide what I shall do next.”

“It looks as though Hugo Candlemas followed you here,” I said. “As I said, he picked me to steal the portfolio from you, although I didn’t know what I was stealing or whose apartment I was taking it from.”

“Not like you, Bernie,” Ray said.

“I know,” I said. “It wasn’t. I don’t know why I went for it, and all I can come up with is a combination of his charm and all those Bogart movies I was watching. He made the proposition one afternoon, and the following night I was with a man named Hoberman, on my way to…excuse me, but what do I call you? Your Highness? Your Majesty?”

“‘Michael’ will be fine.”

“I was on my way to Michael’s apartment.”

“Hoberman,” Ray said. “That’s a name you mentioned before, Bernie.”

I nodded. “Cappy Hoberman was the ram, one of the five agents in Anatruria. Candlemas paired me with him because Hoberman could escort me into the high-security building where Michael lives. He could go there on the pretext of visiting another tenant in the building.”

“Which is where I come in,” Charlie Weeks said.

“Interesting,” Tsarnoff said. “Of all the buildings in all the cities in America, the young king moves into yours.”

The line had a familiar ring to it. I had an answer, but Weeks got there first. “No coincidence at all,” he said. “Michael gave me a call as soon as he got to New York. He’d never met me, of course, but I’d kept in touch with Todor ever since I helped him get out of Anatruria two steps ahead of the KGB. Michael needed a place to stay, and I knew there was an owner in the building looking to sublet, and he liked the place and moved in right away.”

“As it turned out,” I said, “I didn’t steal the portfolio. I’ll admit I tried, Michael, but I couldn’t find it.”

“There was one night last week when I took it from the apartment,” he said. “Ilona thought a friend of hers should see one of the documents.”

“I must have just missed it. Meanwhile, Cappy Hoberman went back to Candlemas’s apartment, where somebody stabbed him to death.”

“Wait a minute,” Ray said. “That’s the guy? Hoberman?”

“Right.”

“Cap Hob,” he said, staring hard at me. “Cap Hob. Captain Hoberman.”

“Right.”

“But why in the hell would he-”

I held up a hand. “It’s complicated,” I said, “and it’s probably easier all around if I just tell it straight through. Cappy Hoberman was stabbed to death in the Candlemas apartment. But he lived long enough to leave a message. He printed C-A-P-HO-B in block capitals on the side of a handy attaché case.”

“Which happened to belong to a certain burglar we all know,” Ray said.

“Didn’t it,” I said sourly. “He died, and left a dying message that didn’t make sense to anyone. Meanwhile, Hugo Candlemas disappeared.”

“So this Candlemas killed him,” Ilona said.

“It seems obvious, doesn’t it? But who was Candlemas? Well, he was someone who knew Hoberman and Weeks, someone who was familiar with Anatrurian history and had come over from Europe to keep tabs on Michael here. And he was someone with a lot of fake ID, because in addition to forged identification in the name of Hugo Candlemas, he also had high-quality counterfeit passports in the names Jean-Claude Marmotte and Vassily Souslik. That gives it away. I should have known before, but-”

“The last name you mentioned,” Tsarnoff said. “Say it again, sir, if you please.”

“Vassily Souslik.”

“Souslik,” he said, and chuckled. “Very good, sir. Very good indeed.”

“What is so good?” Rasmoulian demanded. “It is good because he has a Russian name? I do not understand.”

“Now that you mention it,” Ray said, “neither do I. I’m the one told you about those names, Bernie, and they didn’t mean a thing to me, an’ if they meant anything to you I never heard a peep out of you about it. What in hell’s a sousnik, anyway?”

“A souslik,” I said. “Not a sousnik. And it’s a Russian word, which is why Mr. Tsarnoff understood it and why the rest of us didn’t, although you’ll find it in some English dictionaries and encyclopedias. And it means a large ground squirrel indigenous to Eastern Europe and Asia.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake,” Ray said, “that explains everything, don’t it? A big fat squirrel. That cracks the case wide open, all right.”

“What it does,” I said, “is identify Candlemas for us. So does his French alias, because a marmot is pretty much the same thing as a souslik. But I should have known earlier on if I’d been paying attention to what he called himself this time around. Candlemas is a church festival commemorating the purification of the Virgin Mary and the presentation of the infant Christ in the temple. But it’s celebrated on the same date every year like Christmas, not tied to the lunar calendar like Easter.”

Someone asked the date.

“February second,” I said.

They met this with mystified silence and shared the silence like Quakers through whom God had, for the moment, nothing to say. Then Wilfred, silent skulking Wilfred, said, “My favorite holiday.”

Everybody looked at him.

“Groundhog’s Day,” he said. “Second of February. Most useful holiday of the year. He pops out, he don’t see his shadow, you got yourself an early spring. Bright sunny day, he sees his shadow, forget about it. Six more weeks of winter.”