Lawrence Block - The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

Carolyn said, “Values? What do you mean, Bern? Is that like how many points they’re worth in Scrabble?”

“It’s the sound they make.” I pointed to the blackboard. “It took me forever to think Cappy’s dying message might be in Cyrillic,” I said, “and for two reasons. For one, he was an American. Early on I didn’t know the case had an Anatrurian connection, or that he’d ever been east of Long Island. Besides, all six of the letters he wrote were good foursquare red-blooded American letters. But it so happens they’re all letters of the Cyrillic alphabet as well.”

“I do not know this alphabet,” Rasmoulian said carefully. “What do they spell in this alphabet?”

“The A and the O are the same in both alphabets,” I said. “The Cyrillic C has the value of our own S. The P is equivalent to our R, just like the rho in the Greek alphabet. The H looks like the Greek eta, but in Cyrillic it’s the equivalent of our N. And the Cyrillic B is the same as our V.”

In a proper chalk talk, I’d have printed a transliteration of the Cyrillic on the slate. Instead I gave them a few seconds to work it out for themselves.

Then I said, “Mr. Tsarnoff, I don’t know which alphabet Circassians favor, but certainly you’ve spent enough time in the former Soviet Union to be more familiar than the rest of us with Cyrillic. Perhaps you can tell us what message the gallant Hoberman left us.”

Tsarnoff stayed in his chair, but just barely. His face was florid and his eyes bulged; if Charlie Weeks wanted an animal name for him, you’d almost have to go with bullfrog.

“It is a lie,” he said.

“But what does it say?”

“S-A-R-N-O-V,” he said, pronouncing each letter separately and distinctly, as if pounding nails into a coffin. “That is what it says, and it is a lie. It is not even my name. My name is Tsarnoff, sir, T-S-A-R-N-O-F-F, and that is not at all what you have written there, in Cyrillic or any other alphabet known to me.”

“And yet,” I said, “it strikes one as an extraordinary coincidence. I suppose you would pronounce it Sarnov, and-”

“That is not my name!”

“Tsue me,” I said. “It’s not that far off.”

“I never met your Captain Hoberman! Until this moment I never heard of him!”

“I’m not sure that last is true,” I said, “but we’ll let it go. The point you’re trying to make is that you didn’t kill Hoberman, and you can give it a rest, because I already know that.”

“You do?”

“Or course.”

“Then why did Hoberman write his name?” Ray asked.

“He didn’t,” I said. “He didn’t write a damn thing. That’s a dying message, whether you pronounce it Caphob or Sarnov, and Hoberman was doing the dying, and it was his blood that formed the letters and his forefinger that traced them. I don’t know if Hoberman even knew Cyrillic after so many years away from the region, but it certainly wasn’t second nature to him, and what he’d automatically turn to in his haste to name his killer before his life drained out of him.”

“Then who left the message?” Carolyn wanted to know. “Not what’s-his-name, the groundhog-”

“The woodchuck. No, of course not. The killer left the message as a diversionary tactic. He probably chose Cyrillic because he knew little about his victim beyond the fact that he was somehow connected to Balkan politics. He wrote what he did because he wanted to implicate you, Mr. Tsarnoff, and he misspelled your name because his familiarity with Cyrillic was tenuous. So what do we know about our killer? He is not Anatrurian, he did not know his victims from the days of the Bob and Charlie Show, and he has a murderous antipathy toward Mr. Tsarnoff.”

“Piece of cake,” said Ray Kirschmann. “Gotta be Tigbert Rotarian, don’t it? Only thing, if he’s in the rug business, why’s he want to ruin a good carpet like that?”

Rasmoulian was on his feet, his face whiter than ever, his patches of color livid now. He was protesting everything at once, insisting he was not in the rug trade, he had killed no one, and his name was not whatever Ray had just said it was.

“Whatever,” Ray said agreeably. “I’ll make sure I got the name right when we get down to Central Booking. Main thing’s did he do it or not, an’ I think you still got your touch, Bernie. Tigrid, you got the right to remain silent, but I already told you that, remember?”

Rasmoulian’s mouth was working but no sound was coming out of it. I thought he might go for a gun, but his hands stayed in sight, knotted up in little fists. He looked like a kid again, and you got the sense that he might burst into tears, or stamp his foot.

The whole room was silent, waiting to see what he’d do. Then Carolyn said, “For God’s sake, Tiggy, tell ’em it was an accident.”

Jesus, I thought. What could have induced her to come out with a harebrained thing like that?

“It was an accident,” Tiglath Rasmoulian said.

It was unquestionably an accident, he explained. He had never meant to harm anyone. He was not a killer.

Yes, admittedly, he had been armed. He had outfitted himself that evening with a pistol and dagger as well, although it was never his intention to use either of them. But this was New York, after all, not Baghdad or Cairo, not Istanbul, not Casablanca. This was a dangerous city, and who would dream of walking its streets unarmed? And was this not even more to be expected if one was of diminished stature and slightly built? He was a small person, if not the dwarf that a certain hideously obese individual was wont to label him, and he could only feel safe if he carried something to offset the disadvantage at which his size placed him.

And yes, it was true, he had received a telephone call from Mr. Weeks, with whom he had had occasional business dealings over the years. At Mr. Weeks’s request, he’d driven to the Boccaccio and parked across the street with the motor running. When Hoberman emerged from the building he watched him flag a cab and tailed him a short distance to what would be the murder scene. He entered the brownstone’s vestibule just as Hoberman was being buzzed in and caught the door before it closed, following his quarry upstairs to the fourth-floor apartment. But evidently his activities had not gone unnoticed; he was standing in the hallway, trying to hear what was going on inside and deliberating his next move, when the door opened suddenly and Hoberman grabbed him by the arm and yanked him inside.

He had no time to consider the matter. His response was automatic and unthinking; in an instant the dagger was free of its sheath and in his hand, and in another instant it was in Hoberman’s body. He did not know who the man was, nor had he any knowledge of the identity of the other man, the slender white-haired fellow in the suit and checkered vest. He did not know anything of the pursuit in which the two were engaged. All he knew was that he had just killed a man. Reflexively, of course, and in self-defense, to be sure, but the man was dead and Tiglath Rasmoulian was in trouble.

The white-haired man, the one they now seemed to be calling the woodchuck, was far too slow to react. He just stood there, staring in shock, and before he could do anything Rasmoulian was holding a gun on him. He put him against a wall with his hands in the air while he went through the pockets of the man he’d killed until he came up with a wallet. He stuffed it in his own pocket to examine at leisure.

And, while he was kneeling by the unfortunate man’s body, yes, something came over him, some hostility to an old foe. He took hold of the poor man’s hand, dipped the forefinger in the blood, and wrote that foe’s name on a convenient surface, which happened to be the side panel of an attaché case. And if his Cyrillic was imperfect, well, he’d come close enough. It was a barbaric alphabet anyway.