Lawrence Block - The Burglar on the Prowl

"He'd almost have to, Ray. These days it's almost as hard to go through life without a name as it is without a Social Security number."

"You wanna tell me his name, Bernie?"

"Can't."

"Can't? What do you mean, you can't?"

"My lips are sealed," I said. "Don't you read the papers? There was a case in Denver where the cops tried to make a bookstore owner divulge what books one of her clients had bought. He was a dope dealer, and they wanted to prove he'd bought a copy ofHow to Make Crystal Meth in Your Very Own Kitchen. "

"Who'd publish somethin' like that?"

"That may not be the exact title. The point is, Joyce Meskis took a stand, and it must have cost her a fortune in legal fees, but she won. And if she could put her life on the line for the principle of the Freedom to Read, I don't see how I can do less."

"What a load of crap," he said. "What's this Polack Conrad have to do with cooking crank at home? You're blowin' smoke, Bernie, but it don't matter. You don't want to tell me the name, that's fine. I'll tell you a name instead. How's that?"

"You've lost me, Ray."

" Arnold Lyle."

" Arnold Lyle."

"Ring a bell?" I shook my head. "How about Shirley Schnittke?"

" Arnold Lyle and Shirley Schnittke. Schnittke?"

"I think I'm pronouncin' it right."

I suppose it was possible, although when he tried for Mondrian it always came out Moon Drain. " Arnold Lyle and Shirley Schnittke. I can see the two names carved into the trunk of a tree, with a heart around it pierced by an arrow. Who are they, anyway?"

"Remember Rogovin's first name?"

"Give me a moment, it's on the tip of my tongue."

"Spit it out, why don't you?"

"Lyle," I said. "Arnold and Shirley are the Rogovins?"

"They were," he said. "Now they're toast. Fingerprints came back, and that's who they turned out to be, with records almost as long as yours. They both came over from Russia a few years back and went straight to Brighton Beach. There's a lot of hardworkin', law-abidin' Russians in Brighton Beach, but he wasn't one of 'em an' neither was she."

"He came over from Russia with a name like Arnold Lyle."

"Naw, he changed it when he got here. Changed it legally, which musta made it the last legal thing he ever did. Far as anybody knows, Schnittke's the name she was born with."

"Some people are just lucky that way," I said.

"They took that apartment less'n a month ago. Sublet it, signed a one-year lease, an' paid cash. Don't ask me where they came up with the name Rogovin."

"Maybe they were thinking of Saul Rogovin."

"Who the hell's that?"

"He pitched for the Buffalo Bisons fifty years ago," I said. "Or maybe Syrell Rogovin Leahy. She's a writer, and I've actually got a book of hers in the store."

"That's nice, Bern. Let's stick with their real names, Lyle and Schnittke. Names don't mean nothin' to you, huh?"

"Not a thing."

"They musta already owned the safe. The rest of the furniture came with the place, but we got in touch with the owner, an' she don't know nothin' about a safe. An' we contacted the companies in town that sell safes, an' nobody sold 'em one."

"That's interesting," I said, although I'm not sure it was. "Why are you telling me all this, Ray?"

"That's a question I oughta be askin' myself, Bernie."

"And?"

"First off," he said, "I'm pretty sure you didn't have nothin' to do with this."

"So am I, and it seems to me I told you that early on."

"Yeah, but when I start automatically takin' your word for anythin', it's time for them to ship me to the funny farm. This time, though, it looks like you're tellin' the truth. An' I figure it's an opportunity for the both of us."

"An opportunity?"

He nodded gravely. "Over the years," he said, "you an' I done pretty good together, Bern."

"On balance," I said, "I'd have to agree with you."

"There's somethin' here that a lot of people want. Whatever it is, they want it bad enough to kill for it."

"And that looks like an opportunity to you? To me it looks like an opportunity to leave the country."

"If I was to break this case," he said, "it'd be a real good collar. Now that we know who the Rogovins are, an' what with all that shootin' in the street, it ain't my case anymore. Major Cases took it over. But that don't mean I can't put in a little work on it, an' if I was to crack it open, well, it'd look pretty good for me."

"I'm sure it would. Where do I come into it, Ray?"

"Not every case gets solved," he said. "Good police work only goes so far."

"A lot of the time," I said, "it goes too far."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Thing is, you got Lyle and Schnittke in the middle of this, you're talkin' some kind of organized crime. A lot of the time you can't close those cases, even though you got a pretty good idea who did it. But whether we close it or not, there could be a nice payoff in it, Bernie."

"If we were to find what everybody's looking for."

"Bingo," he said.

"You still don't know what it is, do you?"

"No. How about you?"

"Not a clue."

"Well," he said, "one of us might learn something. What do you say we pool our information? You find out somethin', you let me know. An' the vice is versa, as far as that goes."

"And if there's a payoff?"

"Fifty-fifty," he said. "Except the credit, which I'll take, because it wouldn't do you much good. Unless we could get the mayor to give you a citation, Citizen of the Week or somethin', but I'd have to say it's a long shot, what with your record an' all. But a straight fifty-fifty split on the cash."

"That's fine," I said. "I'll go along with your tailor on that one."

"My tailor? What are you talkin' about? I don't have a tailor."

"Really? I figured Omar the Tent Maker got all your business."

"Is that a crack? An' who the hell is he, anyway?"

"It's sort of a crack," I said, "but nothing too serious. And he's toast now, like Arnold and Shirley, but back when he was still fresh pita bread he was a Persian poet named Omar Khayyám, and he said a lot of good things. 'Take the cash and let the credit go' was one of them."

"The cash an' the credit, huh?" He considered the matter. "Well, he's no tailor of mine," he said. "I want 'em both."

There's a store on 23rd Street off Fifth Avenue that sells prepaid cell phones. There are, I'm fairly sure, similar establishments all over town, but you generally only notice that sort of place when you're in the market, and even then your eyes can skip right over them. I'm sure I'd have found one on 14th Street, just a few blocks from where Ray left me to sip the dregs of my four-dollar latte, but it seemed simpler to go to the place I knew about, and I did.

I gave the clerk some money and he gave me a phone that would stop working after I'd spent a certain number of minutes talking on it. I forget how many minutes I had coming, because I knew I wasn't going to use more than the merest fraction of them. There was only one number I was planning to call, and I didn't expect to call it more than once or twice, maybe three times at the outside.

I left the store with my new cell phone in my breast pocket, and I just started walking, and after I'd gone a couple of blocks I realized where I was headed. I looked at my watch, and I had plenty of time, and this seemed like a reasonable way to kill it. I let my feet keep on walking in the direction they seemed to have chosen for themselves, and before very long I was standing diagonally across the street from a white brick building at the corner of Third Avenue and 34th Street. I'd walked past that building Wednesday night, I'd walked all over the damn neighborhood, but I hadn't had any reason to notice it.

I looked it over, and all it looked like was a white brick apartment building of the sort that went up all over the city around forty years ago. Ugly no-frills architecture, cheap construction, ceilings as low as the building code permitted, and walls you could detect a fart through, even if you were deaf. They don't build 'em like that anymore, and it's a damn good thing.