Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

“Because it might be cheaper than paying me.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Then how could I use you some other time? Look, carry some heat if it’s gonna make you feel better. Except all you do then is get nervous and shoot your own foot off. I swear you got nothing to worry about from me. You bring me the box and you get your four gees.”

“Gees,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Thou, kay, gees. Grand.”

“Huh?”

“Four big ones.”

“What’s the point?”

“You’ve got so many nicknames for money, that’s all. You’re like a thesaurus of slang.”

“Something wrong with the way I talk, Rhodenbarr?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing. It’s just me. My nerves, I guess. I get all keyed up.”

“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I just bet you do.”

And now I sat up on Rod’s couch and looked at my watch. It was getting on for midnight. I’d gotten out of the Flaxford apartment with plenty of time to spare, but all the same it didn’t look as though I’d be in Pandora’s by twelve-thirty. My thousand dollars in front money was but a memory and the remaining four big ones were never to be mine, and at one o’clock my nameless friend would be sipping his Scotch and wondering why I’d decided to stand him up.

Oh, sure he would.

I don’t know just when I got to sleep. A little after midnight a wave of exhaustion hit me and I got out of my clothes and into Rod’s bed. I was just on the verge of sleep when I sensed an alien presence hovering at the bedside. I told myself I was being silly, and you know how well that sort of thing works, and I opened my eyes and saw that the alien presence was a split-leaf philodendron on a small stand by the side of the bed. It had as much right to be there as I did, if not more, but by the time we’d taken each other’s measure I was awake again, my mind spinning around in frenzied circles and not getting anywhere.

I switched on the radio part of Rod’s stereo, set the volume low, and perched in a chair waiting for the music to end and the news to come on. You know how when you want music there’s a newscast every fifteen minutes? Well, the reverse is just as true. Cops, taxis, newscasts, nothing’s ever there when you want it.

Ultimately there was a newscast, of course, and I listened intently to any number of items in which I had no interest whatsoever, and the round-voiced announcer did not have Word One to say about a burglary and murder on East Sixty-seventh Street. Nada. Zip.

I switched to another station but of course I had half an hour to wait for their newscast, having just missed it, and they were playing a bland sort of folk-rock. When the singer started telling me that his girl’s voice was a stick of chalk drawn across the blackboard of his soul (I swear I’m not making this up) I remembered I was hungry. I went to the kitchen and opened drawers and cabinets and peered inside the fridge, and you’d have thought Old Mother Hubbard lived there. I managed to turn up half a box of Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice (formerly Buddhist and now Presbyterian, I suppose), a discouraging-looking can of Norwegian sardines in mustard sauce, and a lot of little jars and tins of herbs and spices and sauces which could have perked up food if there had been any around. I decided I’d make myself some rice, but a look into the box showed me that I was not the first uninvited guest to take note of it, and Uncle Ben had been further converted, this time from rice to roach shit.

In another cupboard I found an unopened box of spaghetti, which I decided might be palatable with olive oil provided that the oil wasn’t rancid, which it was. At this stage I began to think that perhaps I wasn’t hungry after all, and then I opened another cupboard and discovered that Rodney Hart was a soup fiend. There were sixty-three cans of Campbell ’s soup in that cupboard, and I know the exact number because I counted them, and I counted them because I wanted to know just how long I could stay alive without leaving the apartment. At the concentration-camp rate of a can a day I was good for two months, and that was plenty of time, I told myself, because long before my soup ran out the police would arrest me and in no time at all I’d be serving a sentence for first-degree murder, and feeding me would be the state’s problem.

So there was really nothing to worry about after all.

I started to shake a little but forced myself to concentrate on the process of opening the can. Rod’s can opener was pretty primitive, considering that soup was the mainstay of his existence, but it did the job. I dumped concentrated Chicken With Stars soup into a presumably clean saucepan, added water, heated the mess on the stove, pepped it up with a little thyme and a dash of soy sauce, and was sitting down to eat it just as the folk-rock station came through with a five-minute news summary. It repeated some of the items I’d already heard on the jazz station, told me far more than I needed to know about the weather, since I didn’t dare go out in it anyway, and had nothing to say about the late J. F. Flaxford or the murderous burglar who had done him in.

I finished my soup and tidied up in the kitchen. Then I went through some more cupboards until I found Rod’s booze collection, which consisted in the main of things like a bottle of ancient blackberry brandy with perhaps an ounce of the crud left in the bottom of it. That sort of treasure. But there was, incredibly, a fifth of Scotch about two-thirds full. Now this particular Scotch was some liquor store’s private label, and it had been bottled over in Hackensack, so what we had here was not quite in the Chivas and Pinch class.

But burglars can’t be choosers. I sat up for what was probably a long time, sipping Scotch and watching the really late movies on Channel 9, switching every half hour (when I remembered) to check out the radio news. Nothing about J. Francis, nothing about me, though after a while I probably could have heard the item and not paid any attention to it.

In one of those drab hours just before dawn I managed to kill the television set (having already done as much for the bottle) and insert myself a second time between Rodney’s sheets.

The very next thing I knew there was a crashing noise and a girl’s voice saying, “Oh, shit! ”

No one ever returned more abruptly to consciousness. I had been deep in dreamless sleep and now I was jarringly awake. And there was someone in the apartment with me, someone female, and judging by her voice she was in rather close proximity to my no-longer-sleeping form.

I lay very still, trying to go on breathing as one breathes in sleep, hoping that she had not noticed my presence even as I realized that this was impossible. Who was she, anyway? And what the hell was she doing here?

And how was I going to get out of this mess?

“Shit,” she said again, taking the word right out of my mouth. This time the syllable was addressed not to the Fates but to me. “I woke you up, didn’t I? I was trying not to. I was being so quiet, just slipping around watering the plants, and then I had to go and knock the stupid thing over. I hope I didn’t hurt the plant. And I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

“It’s all right,” I told my pillow, keeping my face to it.

“I guess my plant-watering talents won’t be needed anymore,” she went on. “Will you be staying here for a while?”

“A couple of weeks.”

“Rod didn’t mention anything about anyone staying here. I guess you just got in recently, huh?”

Damn her, anyway. “Late last night,” I said.

“Well, I’m terribly sorry I woke you up. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make us a cup of coffee.”

“There’s just soup.”