Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

So we walked up and down the street, and though we didn’t pick up any candy we did work everything out. We settled our terms and established that I would keep my schedule flexible for the next week or so. It wouldn’t go more than that, he assured me.

He said, “I’ll be in touch, Rhodenbarr. Next time I see you I’ll give you the address and the time and everything you gotta know. Plus I’ll have your thousand in front.”

“I sort of thought you might let me have that now.”

“Haven’t got it on me. You never want to carry heavy cash on the street at night. All these muggers, these junkies.”

“The streets aren’t safe.”

“It’s a jungle.”

“You could let me have the address now,” I suggested. “And the name of the man who won’t be home when I crack his crib. Give me that much time to check things out.”

“You’ll have all the time you need.”

“I just thought-”

“Anyway, I don’t happen to have the name or address at the moment. I told you about my memory, didn’t I?”

“Did you?”

“I coulda sworn I did.”

I shrugged. “It must have slipped my mind.”

Later that night I spent some time wondering why I’d agreed to do the job. I decided I had two motives. The money was first, and it was certainly not trivial. The certainty of five thousand dollars, plus the security of having the job already cased, outweighed the two-in-the-bush of setting up a job cold and then having to haggle with a fence.

But there was more to it than money. Something about my shmoo-shaped friend suggested that it would be unwise to refuse him. It’s not that there was anything in particular I feared would happen to me if I told him to go roll his hoop. It just seemed unlikely to be a good idea.

And then there was curiosity. Who the hell was he? If I didn’t know him, why did he seem so damned familiar? More important, how did he know about me? And what was his little game all about in the first place? If he was a pro, recognizing me as another pro, why were we circling each other like tropical birds in an involved mating ritual? I didn’t necessarily expect ever to learn the answers to all these questions, but I felt they might turn up if I saw the thing through, and I didn’t have any other work I was dying to do, and the money I had in reserve wouldn’t last forever, and…

There’s a luncheonette I go to once or twice a month on Amsterdam Avenue between Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth. The owner is a Turk with an intimidating moustache and the food he serves is every bit as Turkish, if less intimidating. I was sitting at the counter two days after my first meeting with my new-found friend. I’d just finished polishing off an exceptional bowl of lentil soup, and while I waited for my stuffed grape leaves I glanced at a selection of meerschaum pipes in a glass case on the wall. The man with the moustache goes home to Turkey every spring and returns with a satchel full of pipes, which he insists are better than anything you can buy over the counter at Dunhill’s. I don’t smoke a pipe so I’m not really tempted, but whenever I eat there I look at the pipes and try to figure out if there’s a pipe smoker on earth I’m a close enough friend to so that I can buy him one of these beauties. There never is.

“My old man used to smoke a meerschaum,” said a familiar voice beside me. “Only pipe he owned and he musta smoked it five, six times a day. Over the years the thing turned as black as the deuce of spades. He had this special glove he always wore when he smoked it. Just on the one hand, the hand he held the pipe in. He’d always sit in the same chair and just smoke that pipe real slow and easy. Had a special fitted case he kept it in when he wasn’t smoking it. Case was lined in blue velvet.”

“You do turn up at odd times.”

“Then one day it broke,” he went on. “I don’t know whether he dropped it or set it down hard or it just got too old or whatever the hell happened. My memory, you know.”

“Like a sieve.”

“The worst. What’s funny, the old man never got hisself a new pipe. Not a meerschaum, not a briar, not anything. Just quit the habit like it was no habit at all. When I think about it what I always come up with is he just never believed anything would happen to that pipe, and then when it did he realized that nothing on earth lasts forever, and if that was the case he figured the hell with it and he wouldn’t smoke anymore. And he didn’t.”

“There’s a reason you’re telling me this story.”

“No reason at all. Just that it came to mind looking at those pipes there. I don’t want to interrupt your meal, Rhodenbarr.”

“One might say you’ve already done that.”

“So I’ll be on the corner gettin’ my shoes shined. I don’t guess you’ll be too long, will you?”

“I guess not.”

He left. I ate my grape leaves. I hadn’t intended to have dessert but I decided the hell with it and ate a small piece of too-sweet baklava and sipped a thick cup of inky Turkish coffee. I thought about having a second cup but figured it would keep me awake for four years and I didn’t want that. So I paid the man with the moustache and walked to the shoeshine stand on the corner.

My friend told me everything I’d always wanted to know about J. Francis Flaxford and his blue leather box. If anything, he told me more than I wanted to know without answering any of my more important questions.

At one point I asked him his own name. He slid his soft brown eyes across my forehead and treated me to a look of infinite disappointment.

“Now I could tell you a name,” he said, “but then what would you know that you don’t know now? Not too much chance that it would be a real name, is there?”

“Not too much, no.”

“So why should we make complications for ourselves? All you got to know is where and when to get the box, which we just went over, and how and where to give it to me so you can get the other four grand.”

“You mean we’ll plan that in advance? I thought I’d just go about my business and one of these days you’d turn up breathing over my shoulder at the delicatessen. Or maybe you’d be in the basement laundry room when I went down to throw my socks in the dryer.”

He sighed. “You’ll be inside Flaxford’s place nine, nine-thirty. You’ll be outta there by eleven, eleven-thirty the latest. Can’t take too long to take a box out of a desk. You’ll want to go home, have a drink, take a shower, change your clothes, that kind of thing.” And drop off burglar tools and such, along with whatever sundry swag I might happen to acquire. “So you take yourself some time, and then what you do, you go to a place nice and convenient to your apartment. There’s a bar on Broadway and I think it’s Sixty-fourth Street, called Pandora’s. You know it?”

“I’ve passed it.”

“Nice quiet place. Get there, say, twelve-thirty and take a booth at the back. There’s no waitress so what you do is you get your drink at the bar and carry it back to your table.”

“Sounds as though I’d better wear a suit.”

“It’s private and it’s quiet and they leave you alone. You’ll get there at twelve-thirty and you might have to sit there half an hour.”

“And then you’ll turn up around one?”

“Right. Any problem, you wait until half past one and then you take the box and go home. But there won’t be no problems.”

“Of course not,” I agreed. “But suppose someone tries to take the box away from me?”

“Well, take cabs, for Chrissake. You don’t want to walk around at that hour. Oh, wait a minute.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You think I’d knock you over for a lousy four thousand dollars? Why would I do that?”