The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart

  I frowned, as if that would bring the photograph into sharper focus. The woman, I remembered, had shoulders like a halfback. But she didn’t get them on a football field, or in a gym, either. She was wearing shoulder pads, even more exaggerated than the ones that had blossomed anew in the recent shoulder-pad renaissance.

  You weren’t seeing shoulder pads as much lately. And you weren’t seeing silver fox stoles either, the kind she was wearing with little heads and feet still attached. They hadn’t experienced a revival, as far as I knew, and I could understand why.

  Probably an old photo. Notes from the world of fashion notwithstanding, it had looked like an old photograph to me. Was it because cameras were different then? Had the print faded with time? Or was it just that people composed their faces differently in different eras, so that their faces were indelibly marked as if with a date stamp?

  He was a crowd pleaser, this Smilin’ Jack. A credit to his dentist, too. Damn, where had I seen his beaming countenance before? And what would he look like if he covered those big teeth with his lips and took a serious picture?

  He had a face that would look good on a coin, I decided. Not an old Roman coin, his wasn’t that sort of face. Something more recent….

  Bingo.

  I don’t think I said anything, but maybe my ears perked up, because Raffles leaped from his perch over in Philosophy & Religion and came out to see what was going on. “Not a coin,” I told him. “A stamp.”

  That seemed to satisfy him; he did a set of stretching exercises and trotted off to the john. I found my way to Games & Hobbies, where there was a Scott’s world postage stamps catalog on the very bottom shelf, right where I’d last seen it. It was four years out of date but too useful a store reference to consign to the bargain table.

  I carried it to the counter and flipped pages until I found the one I was looking for. I squinted at an illustration, then closed my eyes entirely and compared it to the picture in my memory.

  Was it the same guy?

  I thought it was, but it was hard to be sure. Postage stamps are illustrated in black and white in the catalog, and at less than half their actual size. Years ago there was a federal regulation in the United States requiring that an illustration of a postage stamp be broken by a horizontal white line, so that unscrupulous persons couldn’t cut them out of the book, paste them on envelopes, and defraud the government. Nowadays, when a ten-year-old can run off color Xeroxes of twenty-dollar bills that will make it past your average bank teller, that old rule has been discarded as obsolete, and it’s now legal to illustrate postage stamps as realistically as you wish, and to print actual-size photographs of U.S. currency.

  The more recent stamp illustrations don’t have the white lines, but the catalog people haven’t troubled to rephotograph all the earlier issues, and the stamps I was looking at were of that sort, having been issued over seventy years ago. I tilted the book to get all I could from the light, and I squinted like the first runner-up in a gurning competition, and finally I went to my office in the back and looked through drawers until I found the magnifying glass.

  Even with the glass, the results were not anything you’d want to go to court with. Of the series of fifteen stamps, the folks at Scott had chosen to illustrate only four. Three showed local scenes, including a church, a mountain, and a gypsy leading a dancing bear on a leash. In each of these, an unsmiling version of the man in Ilona’s photograph gazed at you from a circular inset in the upper right corner.

  The fourth stamp shown was the 100-tschirin stamp. (The nation’s currency was based on the tschiro, and each tschiro was worth a hundred dikin. The cheapest stamp was a single dik. It’s remarkable how much you can learn from a postage stamp catalog, even an outdated one, and of how little value the information is.) The 100-tschirin stamp was the high value of the series, and it differed from its fellows in two respects. It was larger, about one and a half times their size, and it was vertical in format, taller than it was wide. And the portrait of Ilona’s buddy, instead of being confined to a little porthole up in one corner, filled the entire stamp.

  Hard to be sure. The reproduction, as I’ve said, left a lot to be desired. And I didn’t have the photograph with me, just my memory of the photo, glimpsed briefly in the dim and flickering light of a single candle. So I couldn’t swear to it, but it certainly looked to me as though this was the man.

  Vlados I, the first—and so far the only—king of Anatruria.

  For a minute there it looked like I was on to something.

  My God, I thought, it all tied together. Ilona wasn’t just someone who wandered in to buy a book. It wasn’t sheer coincidence that, of all the bookstores in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine. It was all part of—

  Part of what?

  Not part of the abortive burglary, and not part of the death of Hugo Candlemas. Because what did Anatruria have to do with all that, or that with Anatruria? Nothing. Ilona had a photo of the erstwhile king of Anatruria in her room, just as she had a map on her wall with the country’s purported borders outlined thickly in red. And why not? She was an Anatrurian, and she might well be a patriotic one, though not without an ironic sense of the comic-opera aspect of it all.

  Was there a coincidence? It seemed to me there had to be a coincidence, but I couldn’t spot it. What gave it all a touch of the dramatic, at least at first glance, was that it had taken me something like sixteen hours to figure out why the guy with the big smile looked faintly familiar. If I’d recognized him on the spot, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. “Oh, there’s King Vlados, I’d know him anywhere, even in the apartment of one of his loyal subjects.”

  On the other hand, if I’d passed his photograph without the barest twinge of recognition, I would never have known who he was. Or, come to think of it, cared.

  So if anything was remarkable (and it certainly seemed as though something ought to be) it was that I had subconsciously retained the image of Vlados in my mind from an earlier glance through the Scott catalog. But that, damn it to hell, wasn’t remarkable either, because I’d looked up Anatruria in that very volume a week or so ago, after Ilona had acknowledged it as her birthplace. That was why I’d been able to rattle off all that historical data so glibly, impressing the daylights out of Carolyn.

  I used the magnifying glass and had another look at His Highness. He was better, I decided, at flashing smiles than at looking solemn. The smile might not have been appropriate for a serious philatelic occasion like this, but it gave him a leg up on the legion of royal twits who’ve left their faces on the stamps and coins of Europe. I wondered what might have been the source of his claim to the Anatrurian throne, and if he was related to the other kings and princelings. Most of them are descended one way or another from Queen Victoria, and are almost as much fun at parties as she was.

  What about Vlados’s consort, she of the high-piled hair and the pathetic little foxes? The Scott people hadn’t provided a picture of her, but they were nice enough to tell me her name. According to the descriptive listing, she appeared twice in the series—alone on the 35-tschirin stamp, and with her husband on the 50-tschirin denomination. And her name was Queen Liliana.

  Scott’s hadn’t priced the Anatrurian issues, noting at once that they were very rare and of dubious philatelic legitimacy; they had been printed to carry not the mail but a message, and, while postally used copies did in fact exist, these seemed to represent contrived cancellations affixed by postmasters sympathetic to the cause of Anatrurian independence.

  So Scott knew they were valuable, but didn’t want to go on record with a price. There weren’t many specimens up for grabs, and then again there weren’t all that many hands out there grabbing. If the stamp collection I knocked over happened to contain a set of these gummed portraits of good King Vladdy, I could figure out how to unload them. It would take a little research—specialized catalogs, auction records, some library time spent closeted with back issues of Linn’s. I might not net as high
a percentage of retail value as I would with more popular material, but I wouldn’t have any real trouble getting a decent price.

  But that wasn’t my problem, because I didn’t have the stamps. I had an Anatrurian girlfriend, but Anatruria was out of business as a stamp-issuing enterprise half a century before she was born, and she might not even know her country had a postal history.

  Might that not be something for us to talk about? I could lift the photo from its hallowed place on her footlocker and say, “Ah, King Vlados, and his lovely Queen Liliana! I’d recognize them anywhere.” Would that impress her? Would she be dazzled by my familiarity with her nation’s history, touched by my interest in her heritage?

  Maybe. Or maybe she’d just raise her eyebrows the slightest bit and give me that look of skeptical amusement.

  I reached for the phone and dialed her number again, with no more success than the other times I’d tried.

  Then the little guy came in and stuck a gun in my face.

  CHAPTER

  Nine

  When I first saw him on his way through the door I thought he was a kid wearing his father’s clothes. He couldn’t have been more than five-three, and judging by the way he walked he already had lifts in his shoes. He had a very narrow face, as if it had gotten in the way when Mother Nature clapped her hands. His nose was long and narrow, his lips thin. His hair and eyebrows were black and his skin was very pale, almost translucent. There were patches of color on his cheeks, but they were more suggestive of consumption than radiant good health.

  He was wearing a lime-green sport shirt with flowing collar points and he’d buttoned it all the way up to the neck. His pants were of high-gloss blue gabardine, and his shoes were wing-tip slip-ons of woven brown leather. He was wearing a hat, too, a straw panama with a feather in its band, and I think it must have been the hat that made him look like an overdressed child. It was the crowning touch, all right.

  “Name your price,” he said.

  I didn’t hesitate. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m afraid it’s not for sale.”

  The first thing I thought—the only thing I thought—was that he was looking to buy my store. I didn’t delude myself that he’d made a study of Barnegat Books and concluded that it was a gold mine. On the contrary, I figured he saw it as the commercial real estate equivalent of a teardown; he’d buy me out so that he could take over my lease, sell my whole stock en bloc to Argosy or the Strand, and establish in Barnegat’s stead a Thai restaurant or a Korean nail shop, something that would be a great cultural asset to the neighborhood. I get offers like that all the time, strange as it may seem, and I don’t bother explaining that I own the building, and that consequently I’m the landlord as well as the tenant. For one thing, that part’s a secret; for another, it would simply invite further inquiry. I just tell them all the business is not for sale, and sooner or later they believe me and go away.

  But not this fellow. Damned if he didn’t reach into his pocket and come out with a gun.

  It was a very small gun, a flat nickel-plated automatic with pearl grips, small enough to carry in his pants pocket, small enough to fit in his very small hand. I don’t know what caliber bullet it held—.22 or .25, I suppose—but either one will kill you if it hits you in the right place, and he was right across the counter from me, close enough to put a bullet wherever he wanted it.

  If I’d thought it over I’d have been terrified. He was just the right size to be one of those sawed-off psychopaths you used to see on the screen all the time, those little reptilian hit men who seem to kill without hesitation, and certainly without any change of expression. And here he was in my store and pointing a gun at me.

  “You idiot!” I snapped. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Put that away this minute.”

  Well, see, it looked like a toy. Like a cap gun, say, or like a cunningly disguised cigarette lighter. I’m not saying that’s what I thought it was, I knew it was a real gun, but I can’t think of anything else that would explain my reaction. Instead of reacting sensibly in fear and trembling, I was pissed off. Where did this, this kid, get off coming into my store and waving a gun around? And didn’t the little punk need a stern talking-to?

  “Right this minute!” I said when he hesitated. “Don’t you realize you could get in trouble with that thing? Do you know what time it is?”

  “Time?”

  “It’s four-thirty,” I said. “And there’s a policeman who’s due here any minute, and how would you feel standing there with that thing in your hand and having a cop walk in on you? How’d you like to try explaining that?”

  “But—”

  “God damn it, put it away!”

  And damned if he didn’t do just that. “I…I am sorry,” he said, the spots of color on his cheeks darkening even as the rest of him seemed to grow paler still. He glanced at the gun as if it were something shameful, hiding it in his hand as he lowered it and tucked it back where it had come from. “I did not mean…I would not wish…I deeply regret…”

  “That’s better,” I said graciously. “Much better. Now tell me what I can do for you. Is there a book you’re looking for?”

  “A book?” He looked at me, his eyes as wide as they could get. “You know what I am looking for. And please, I regret the gun. I only meant to impress you.”

  “There are better ways to make an impression,” I said.

  “Yes, of course, of course. You are of course correct.”

  He had a foreign inflection to his speech, and he hissed his S’s. I hadn’t noticed this earlier; it was the sort of subtlety that slides right past me when I’m looking down the barrel of a gun.

  “I will pay,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “I will pay an excellent price.”

  “How much?” And for what, I wondered.

  “How much do you want?”

  “As much as I can get.”

  “You must understand that I am not a rich man.”

  “Then perhaps you cannot afford it.” Whatever it was.

  “But I must have it!”

  “Then I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

  He thrust his narrow face forward, aimed his sharp chin at me. “You must assure me,” he said, “that he does not have it.”

  “Who are we talking about?”

  He grimaced. “Must I say his name?”

  “It would help,” I said.

  “The fat man,” he said. “Tsarnoff.”

  “Sarnoff?”

  “Tsarnoff!”

  “Tsorry,” I said.

  “He is dangerous. And you cannot trust him. Whatever he tells you, it is a lie.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, really. And I will tell you something else. Whatever he will pay, I will pay more. Tell me he does not already have it!”

  “Well,” I said honestly, “I can tell you he didn’t get it from me.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Just to clear the air,” I said carefully, “and to make sure we’re not at cross-purposes here, suppose you tell me what it is.”

  “What it is?”

  “That you’re seeking from me. You want it and Tsarnoff wants it. Well, why don’t you come right out and say what it is?”

  “You know what it is.”

  “Ah, but how do I know that you know what it is?”

  “No!” he cried, and doubled up his fists and pounded my counter. I hate it when people do that. “Please, I beg of you,” he said. “I am very high-strung. You must not tease me.”

  “It’ll never happen again.”

  “I need the documents. You may retain the rest, I want only the documents, and I will pay well, whatever you ask if only it is within reason. I am a reasonable man, and I believe you are a reasonable man yourself, yes?”

  “Reason,” I said, “is my middle name.”

  He frowned. “I thought ‘Grimes.’ Is it not so?”

  “Well, yes. You’re quite right. It was my mother’s maiden name.”
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  “And Rhodenbarr? This is your name also?”

  “That too,” I agreed. “It was my father’s maiden name. But what I just said, about Reason being my middle name, that’s an idiom, an expression, a figure of speech. It’s a way of saying that I’m a reasonable man.”

  “But I am just saying this myself, yes?” He shrugged. “It confuses me, this language.”

  “It confuses everybody. Right now I’m confused, because I don’t know your name. I like to know a man’s name if I’m going to do business with him.”

  “Forgive me,” he said, and reached into his pocket. I braced myself, but when his hand came out the only thing in it was a leather card case. He extracted a card, glanced dubiously at it, and presented it to me.

  “Tiglath Rasmoulian,” I read aloud. In response he drew himself up to his full height, if you want to call it that, and clicked his heels.

  “At your service,” he said.

  “Well,” I said brightly, “I’ll just hang on to this, and if I ever come across these mysterious documents, I’ll certainly keep you in mind. In the meanwhile—”

  The red patches blazed on his cheeks. “You are treating me like a child,” he said. There’s not a single S in that sentence, so I don’t see how he could have hissed it, but I swear that’s what he did. “That is not a wise thing to do.”

  And his hand went into his pocket.

  It stayed there while his eyes swung toward the door, which had just opened. “Ah,” I said, “just the man I’ve been waiting for. Ray, I’d like you to meet Tiglath Rasmoulian. Mr. Rasmoulian, this is Officer Raymond Kirschmann of the New York Police Department.”

  I didn’t get the impression that this was what Rasmoulian had been hoping to hear. He took his hand out of his pocket but did not offer it to Ray. He nodded formally to Ray, then to me. “I will go now,” he said. “You will keep it in mind, what we discussed?”

  “Definitely,” I said. “Have a good weekend. Oh, don’t forget your book.”