Lawrence Block: The Burglar on the Prowl

"Of course not. They saw him come out of my store, and they had to assume he had the photos, because what else would he have gone there for? So they shot him and took what he was carrying, and it was nothing but a Joseph Conrad novel, and not even a first edition."

"So the Russians had the book."

"Maybe."

"Maybe? What do you mean, maybe?"

"I think there was probably a Russian behind the wheel," I said, "and another one firing the gun. But I think there was a third person in the car, and I think that person was Colby Riddle."

"In the murder car."

"That would be my guess. He looked at the book and knew right away what had happened. He took it home with him, or back to his office, and he paged through it and made absolutely sure there were no pictures in it. And then he took it to his friend Mapes's office and let Mapes look, and commiserated with Mapes about the problems they were having. 'Here,' he told Mapes. 'You might as well hang onto this goddamn thing. Call it a souvenir.' "

"And Mapes took it home?"

"And left it on the desk in his den, where I found it that very same night after I cleaned out his safe."

"And you brought it home."

"Which seemed like a mistake at the time," I said, "but I couldn't get over the surprise of finding it there. The last I'd seen of it, someone was snatching it out of a fat man's dead hands for reasons I couldn't begin to fathom. And here it was, on Mapes's desk."

"Wow. And he never knew it was gone?"

"How would he know? It was just an old book, with nothing valuable about it. He could have thrown it out in the first place. He kept it, but that didn't mean he was going to sit down and read it. He tossed it on his desk, and wouldn't have noticed it was gone unless he went looking for it."

"But he could have noticed, Bern."

"I know," I said, "and that worried me, but only a little. Because the last thing I did Monday night-although it was well into Tuesday morning by then-was drive out to Riverdale and let myself into his house for a second time."

"Through the milk chute."

"Don't remind me. It went smoother this time. Maybe I lost a pound or two, or maybe I improved with practice. I took the book along, and I'd already fixed it up, taping the photos in place. I could have just dropped it on his desk, I suppose, but I didn't want him paging idly through it, so I found a place on his shelf. The spine's dark, you don't notice it right away, but it would show up in a search. If he'd already missed it, well, that might have been tricky, but I knew I was in the clear when he came downstairs after showing his empty safe to the IRS boys. His reaction made it very clear he hadn't had a clue the money was missing. That meant he hadn't missed the book, because if he'd been aware that something had disappeared, the first thing he'd have done was check the safe to see if anything else was gone."

She took it all in, and asked a few more questions, and I did the best I could to answer them. Then she pointed out that Ray knew I'd had the photos. So how did he think they'd found their way into the book, and the book onto Mapes's shelf?

"Ray's a practical man," I said. "He's not as stupid as you think he is."

"He couldn't be, Bern, or he'd die because he forgot to breathe."

"He only thinks about things if he has to," I said. "He knows I had the photos, and if he thought about it he'd wonder how they got where they did, and how I knew they were there, and, well, any number of things. But what he wanted me to do was pull a rabbit out of a hat, and I did, and he wasn't about to ask who the rabbit's father was, or how much I paid for the hat. Instead he concentrated on the fact that he'd brought in a fellow the press is calling the Date-Rape Bandit of Murray Hill, at the same time that he was solving a crime Major Cases had yanked out from under him."

"So he came out of it okay."

"Smelling like a rose."

"I could say something," she said, "but it would reveal me as a mean-spirited human being, so I'll keep it to myself. And you know what? I'm glad Ray came out of it okay. I mean, you and I did all right, didn't we?"

"My Get Out of Dodge fund is replenished. And I've got money in the bank, and I just yesterday got a line on a carpenter who'll build me a hidey-hole every bit as good as the one Quattrone's clowns wrecked."

"And you've got a girlfriend."

"Oddly enough, I do. And I don't have to worry what she'll think when she finds out I'm a burglar, because she already knows."

"And it doesn't bother her?"

"Sooner or later it will, and sooner or later the relationship'll fall apart. But for the time being she's okay with it."

"I'm happy for you, Bern. She's really nice."

"So's Lacey."

"Yeah," she said, beaming. "We both did fine. I've got a safe-deposit box stuffed with money, plus I've got a really neat girlfriend who thinks I'm pretty neat myself."

"I gather LBD's not a problem at this stage."

She blushed, something she doesn't do often. LBD stands for Lesbian Bed Death, a name coined to describe the curiously sexless state of so many long-term lesbian relationships. It seems to me heterosexual couples have the same problem, but we don't have a cute term for it. We just call it marriage.

"I thought Marty and Marisol might get back together again," she said, changing the subject deftly. "But I guess that's a thing of the past, huh?"

"They were both ready to move on. And they didn't have trouble finding somewhere to move. Marisol's seeing a lot of Wally these days."

"I guess it's hard for a woman to resist someone who just saved her life."

"And hard for a guy to resist someone whose life he just saved, especially if she looks like Marisol. It's got him over his hopeless crush on that Chinese waitress, so now he's not spending all his time at that dopey teahouse."

"That's good."

"And he's keeping up his martial-arts training, which is also good. On the downside, he's studying Latvian."

"Why? Marisol speaks perfect English."

"I know that," I said, "and so does Wally. That's just the way he is. Pardon my Latvian, but the other day he wished me Dauds laimis jaungada. That means Happy New Year."

"Really? When do Latvians celebrate New Year?"

"January first, remarkably enough, so he was eight months early."

"Or four months late."

"Look, he's happy. Meanwhile, Marty and Sigrid couldn't be happier. He's the married older man she always wanted, and she's the hot gorgeous blonde everybody always wanted."

"Including me, Bern, but I've got my hands full just now. Is that why you invited them to Riverdale? Because you figured they'd be right for each other?"

"Well, I had to have Sigrid there to back up Marisol's date-rape story. And I thought Marty deserved a chance to see the shitheel get what was coming to him. But yeah, I sort of had it in mind that the two of them might hit it off."

"What a storybook ending," she said, and sighed. Then she straightened up and leaned forward. " Bern, the photos. What happened to the photos?"

"You saw them. In the copy of The Secret Agent. "

"Right. What happened to them after Mapes and Johnson went off to Central Booking?"

"Oh," I said. "Well, I sort of took them."

"Sort of? What do you mean,sort of?"

"When no one was looking," I said, "I picked it up. Otherwise it might have spent the next fifty years in an NYPD evidence locker."

"And you wanted it for a souvenir?"

I shook my head. "I already gave it away."

"You gave it away. Wait a minute, let me guess. You gave it to the little man from the Latvian embassy."

"Mr. Grisek."

"So they'll hunt down the Black Scourge of Riga after all."

"They'll try. He seems to have pretty good survival instincts, but they're highly motivated. So we'll see."