Lawrence Block - The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

“Bear-naard, I have tears in my eyes.”

“I’d kiss them away,” I said, “but I wouldn’t be able to stop. So long, sweetheart. I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll never forget you,” she said. “I’ll never forget Twenty-fifth Street.”

“Neither will I.” I took her arm, eased her out the door. “And why should you? We’ll always have Twenty-fifth Street.”

It was a full week before I got around to telling Carolyn about that final evening in Ilona’s company. I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to keep it from her. But it turned out to be a busy time for both of us. I kept my usual hours in the bookstore, and put in some overtime as well, riding the Long Island Rail Road to Massapequa one evening to appraise a library (for a fee; they didn’t want to sell anything), and spending another evening at a book auction, bidding on behalf of a customer who was shy about attending those things himself.

Carolyn had a busy schedule herself, with a kennel club show coming up that meant a lot of dogs for her to pretty up. And there were a lot of phone calls and visits back and forth when Djinn and Tracey got back together again, and Djinn accused Tracey of having an affair with Carolyn, which was what Djinn had done after a previous breakup. “Pure dyke-o-drama,” Carolyn called it, and eventually it blew over, but while it lasted there were lots of middle-of-the-night phone calls and phones slammed down and loud confrontations on street corners. When it finally cleared up, she plunged with relief into the new Sue Grafton novel she’d been saving.

So we had lunch five days a week and drinks after work, and then on Tuesday, a week and a day after Memorial Day, we were at the Bum Rap after work and Carolyn was telling a long and not terribly interesting story about a Bedlington terrier. “From the way he acted,” she said, “you’d have sworn he thought he was an Airedale.”

“No kidding,” I said.

She looked at me. “You don’t think that’s funny?”

“Yeah, it’s funny.”

“I can see you think it’s a scream. I thought it was funny.”

“Then why aren’t you laughing?” I said. “Never mind. Carolyn, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” And then I signaled Maxine for another round of drinks, because this was going to be thirsty work.

I told her the whole story and she listened all the way through without interrupting me, and when I was done she sat and stared at me with her mouth open.

“That’s amazing,” she said. “And you didn’t say a word about it for a week and a day. That’s even more amazing.”

“I just kept forgetting to bring it up,” I said. “You know what I think it was? I must have wanted a little time to digest it.”

“Makes sense. Bern, I’m amazed. I don’t want to work the word to death, but I am. I’ll tell you this, kiddo. It’s the most romantic story I ever heard in my life.”

“I guess it’s romantic.”

“What else could it be?”

“Stupid,” I said. “Real stupid.”

“You gave away a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Something like that.”

“To a woman you’ll probably never see again.”

“I might see her on a stamp,” I said. “If Anatruria makes the cut. But no, I’ll probably never see her again.”

“She didn’t even know about the stamps, did she? That you had them, or that they were worth anything.”

“Tsarnoff or Rasmoulian would have known what they were worth, or at least known they were worth plenty. Candlemas might have known-he had a collector’s orientation. The others didn’t think in those terms. And no, nobody knew I had them, least of all Ilona.”

“And you gave them to her.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you got to make the famous hill-of-beans speech.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Why’d you do it, Bern?”

“They needed the money,” I said. “I can always use money, but I can’t pretend I had a genuine need for a hundred thousand dollars. They needed it.”

“Hell, Bern, the hip dysplasia people need it, too, and it was all I could do to get twenty bucks out of you.”

“The stamps came from Anatruria,” I said.

“I thought they came from Hungary.”

“You know what I mean. They were issued in the cause of Anatrurian freedom, and if they were worth all that money after all those years, then the money belonged to the cause. If there is such a cause, or if there even is such a country.” That was confusing, and I stopped and took a sip of my drink and started over. “If she hadn’t shown up at the Musette,” I said, “I don’t know what I would have done. I meant to call the king and give him the stamps, and maybe I would have done it, but maybe not. I just don’t know.

“But the point is she did show up. I bought that extra seat, and I swear I wasn’t all that surprised when she wound up sitting in it.”

“And once she did…”

“I held her hand, fed her popcorn, took her home, gave her a fortune in rare stamps, and sent her on her way.”

“With the hill-of-beans speech echoing in her cute little ears.”

“Forget the hill-of-beans speech, will you?”

“Schweetheart, the hopes and dreams of a couple of little shitkickers like you and me don’t amount to a hill of beans when you pile ’em up next to the Anatrurian Alps, and-”

“Dammit, Carolyn.”

“I’m sorry. You know what happened to you, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“All those movies.”

“That’s what I was going to say.”

“You watched Bogart do the noble self-sacrificing thing one time too many, and when the opportunity came your way, you didn’t have a prayer. Poor Bernie. Everybody made something out of this business but you. Ray was the big winner. What did he wind up with, forty-eight grand?”

“He had to spread that around a little. The official story now is that Candlemas killed Hoberman, then went down to the Lower East Side to cop some dope.”

“Right, he was your typical junkie.”

“And got shot when the deal went sour. I would guess somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand dollars’ll wind up in Ray’s pocket.”

“And of course he insisted you take some of the money.”

“It must have slipped his mind.”

“Not fair, Bern. After all, you solved the whole case. He just stood there.”

“He doesn’t just stand. He looms.”

“Good for him. He gets the money, Ilona and the king get the stamps, and the three mouseketeers get the bearer shares and go chasing after the lost treasure of Anatruria. And what about you? You didn’t even get laid.”

“Maybe that was dumb, too,” I said. “But all she’s going to be for me is a memory, and I didn’t have to repeat the experience to be sure I’d remember it. I’m in no danger of forgetting.”

“No.”

I picked up my drink, held it to the light. “Anyway,” I said, “it’s not as though I wind up empty-handed.”

“How do you figure that, Bern?”

“I got the bone woodchuck from Candlemas’s apartment, remember?”

“Wow, Bern.”

“And when I stopped by Charlie Weeks’s place, the stamps weren’t all I swiped. I got the mouse carving Hoberman gave him.”

“Gee, you can just about retire when you sell those two little beauties, can’t you?”

“No, I think I’ll hang on to them as souvenirs. My real profit comes tomorrow night.”

“What happens tomorrow night?”

“A man named Sung-Yun Lee goes to see The Chink in the Armoire. ”

“Is that a show?”

“On Broadway, at the Helen Hayes. Very hot ticket. I got a pair from a scalper and it cost me perilously close to two hundred bucks.”