Lawrence Block - The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

Then came the tricky part. Down the stairs and all the way to where he’d parked the car, he covered Candlemas with one hand in his pocket gripping the pistol; he was ready to fire through his own coat if he had to, and it was a good coat, the very one he was wearing today. It was late and the streets were empty; he waited for an opportune moment, then forced Candlemas to climb into the trunk. He locked the trunk, got behind the wheel, and drove downtown.

And yes, he knew the streets of the Lower East Side, and knew he and his prisoner would be undisturbed in one of the abandoned buildings to be found down there. He had asked Candlemas many questions, and had obtained some answers, but by no means managed to get the whole story. He knew that a bookstore proprietor had been engaged to steal some very valuable documents from an apartment in the building Hoberman had emerged from, and he got my name from Candlemas, and the name of the store. He knew there was an Anatrurian connection, and that was about all he knew.

He might have learned more, but there was another accident. Candlemas tricked him, pretending to cooperate fully, lulling him into inattention, then making a bid to escape. Once again Rasmoulian’s reflexes sprang unbidden into action, and Candlemas, trying to get away, was shot dead. A single bullet had snuffed out the man’s life.

Accidents, two of them. What else could you call what had occurred? It was tragic, he regretted it deeply, he was a man who had always deplored violence. Surely he could not be held accountable for the violence that had taken place in spite of all he had done to prevent it?

“Yeah, well, accidents’ll happen,” Ray said. “Guy who got stabbed, I looked at him lyin’ there and I knew I was lookin’ at one hell of an accident. You see a guy with four stab wounds in him, you know right off he’s been in a real bad accident.”

“My reflexes are good,” Rasmoulian said.

“I guess they are. Candlemas, now, down there on Pitt Street, was tryin’ to escape when he got hisself cut down. I got to say, though, he wasn’t very good at it, because there were powder burns on his ear, so he couldn’t have escaped more than a foot or so from the gun that killed him. Guy like that, he better not set up shop givin’ people escape lessons.”

There was a stretch of silence, broken by Charlie Weeks, who leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs first. “There are accidents and accidents,” he said.

“Can’t argue with that,” Ray allowed.

“It was an accident, for instance, that I myself played an unwitting part in Cappy Hoberman’s death. I’m less inclined to regret Chuck Wood, considering the little stunt he pulled in Anatruria.”

I’d let that pass once, but enough was enough. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“I beg your pardon, weasel?”

“Let’s ease up on the ‘weasel’ routine,” I said. “You can call me Bernie. What I don’t think is that the woodchuck sold out the good guys in Anatruria.”

“Really? That’s what we all thought.”

“I think it was the mouse,” I said. “I think you must be proud of it, too, or you probably wouldn’t hang on to that letter of commendation from Dean Acheson.”

“Now how could you possibly know about that?” Weeks said. “If I had a letter like that I’d certainly keep it in a locked drawer, wouldn’t I? And you’ve never been in my apartment that I wasn’t constantly in the same room with you.”

“It’s puzzling, all right,” I said.

He seemed to shrink under the combined gaze of Ilona and Michael, melting away like the water-soaked Wicked Witch of the West. “It was a strategic decision made at a high level,” he said. “I had no part in the decision and no choice but to implement it.”

“And the good sense to see that it was the woodchuck who got blamed for it, and not the mouse.”

“It happened over forty years ago. I won’t apologize for it now, or explain the justification. I was a young man then. I’m an old man now. It’s done.”

“And the two men Rasmoulian killed?”

“I never thought that would happen,” he said. “I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Cappy Hoberman called up, came to see me on the flimsiest of pretexts, and was eager to be on his way almost immediately. It never occurred to me he was running interference for a burglar. I thought he wanted something, or was setting me up somehow. For all I knew he’d tumbled to the way it all went kerblooey in Anatruria, and he had some curious notion of revenge.” He shrugged. “The whole point is I didn’t know. I needed to call someone who could tag him and report back. And the redoubtable Assyrian tagged him a little more forcefully than any of us would have preferred.”

“It is unfair,” Ilona said.

“Life’s unfair, honey,” Charlie Weeks said. “Better get used to it.”

“It is unfair that you get away with this, while Tiglath Rasmoulian pays the penalty.”

“There should be no penalty,” Rasmoulian said. “An accident, an act of self-defense-”

“I got to tell you,” Ray Kirschmann said. “We got us a problem here.”

Another silence. Ray let it stretch for a bit, then broke it himself.

“Way I see it,” he said, “I got enough to arrest Mr. Ras-” He broke off, made a face. “What I’m gonna do is call you TR,” he told Rasmoulian, “which is your initials, and also stands for Teddy Roosevelt, who it just so happens was police commissioner of this fair city before he got to be president of the United States.”

“Thank you very much,” Rasmoulian said.

“I got enough to arrest TR,” Ray said, “an’ I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s enough to indict him. He confessed to a double homicide after bein’ Mirandized one or two times, dependin’ how you calculate it. So his confession ain’t admissible, since nobody wrote it down an’ got him to sign it, or had the presence of mind to tape it. But anybody here could testify that he confessed, same as a cellmate can rat out a defendant, sayin’ he confessed, except in this case it happens to be the truth. TR here did confess, an’ we all heard him.”

“So?”

He glared at me. “So I can arrest him, an’ as far as the trial’s concerned, well, who knows what’ll happen, because you never know. What I can promise you, though, is he’ll get bail. Was a time nobody made bail on a murder charge, but now they do, an’ my guess is TR here’ll have to post something like a quarter mil max and he’s on the street. And once he’s on the street, citizen of the world that he is, all he’s gotta do is bail out, if you follow me.”

“Bail out?”

“Skip the country, forfeit the bond, and go about his business. And what’s even more of a shame is me and my fellow officers’ll be makin’ life hard for all the rest of you, even with TR here off the hook and out of the country. Takin’ testimony from Mr. Weeks, inquirin’ into the source of Mr. Sarnoff’s income-”

“Tsarnoff, officer.”

“Whatever. Makin’ sure everybody’s papers are legit. An’ of course there’ll be reporters crawlin’ up everybody’s ass, poppin’ flash bulbs at the king an’ queen of Anna Banana-”

“Anatruria.”

“Whatever. Be more important for you people to remember the name of the country, bein’ as they’ll probably wind up sendin’ you back to it. Not Mr. Weeks, though, on account of he’s an American citizen, an’ they’ll most likely want to keep him around so Congress can ask him some questions.”

He went on in this vein, probably longer than he had to. After all, these people were professionals. They’d played the game before, in the Balkans and the Middle East.

Weeks said, “Officer…Kirschmann, is it?” He picked up his homburg, balanced it on his knee. “You know, I got a speeding ticket a couple of years ago in the state of Montana. They had to pass a speed limit there, and in order to qualify for federal highway funds it had to be a max of sixty-five on the interstates and fifty-five everywhere else.”