Now, thirty-two hours later, I rang one of four bells in the vestibule of his brownstone. He buzzed me in and I climbed three flights of stairs. He was waiting for me at the top of the stairs and led me into his floor-through apartment. It was very tastefully appointed, with a wall of glassed-in bookshelves, a gem of an Aubusson carpet floating on the wall-to-wall broadloom, and furniture that managed to look both elegant and comfortable.
One deplorable effect of a lifetime of larceny is a tendency of mine to survey every room I walk into, eyes ever alert for something worth stealing. It’s a form of window shopping, I guess. I wasn’t going to take anything of Candlemas’s-I’m a professional burglar, not a kleptomaniac-but I kept my eyes open just the same. I spotted a Chinese snuff bottle, skillfully carved from rose quartz, and a group of ivory netsuke, including a fat beaver whose tail seemed to have gone the way of all flesh.
I admired the carpet, and Candlemas showed me around and pointed out a couple of others, including a Tibetan tiger rug, an old one. I said I was sorry to be late and he said I was right on time, that it was the third member of our party who was late, but that he should be arriving at any moment. I turned down a drink and accepted a cup of coffee, and was not surprised to find it rich and full-bodied and freshly brewed. He talked a little about Winthrop Mackworth Praed, and speculated on what he might have done if tuberculosis hadn’t shortened his life. He’d had a seat in the House of Commons; would he have gone further in politics and let poetry take a back seat? Or might he have grown disillusioned with political life, quit writing the topical partisan doggerel he’d turned to toward the end, and gone on to produce mature work to put his early verses in the shade?
We were batting that one around when the doorbell rang, and Candlemas crossed the room to buzz in the new arrival. We waited for him at the top of the stairs, and he turned out to be a thickset older fellow with a pug nose and a broad face. He had a drinker’s complexion and a smoker’s cough, but you could have been deaf and blind and still known how he got through the days. Unless you had a bad cold, say, and couldn’t smell the booze on his breath and the smoke in his hair and clothes. Even so you might have guessed from the way he took the stairs, pausing on the landings to catch his breath, and still having to take his time on the final flight of steps.
“Captain Hoberman,” Candlemas greeted him, and shook his hand. “And this is-”
“Mr. Thompson,” I said quickly. “Bill Thompson.”
We shook hands warily. Hoberman was wearing a gray suit, a blue-and-tan striped tie, and brown shoes. The suit looked like what you used to see on third-level Soviet bureaucrats before perestroika. The only man I knew who could look that bad in a suit was a cop named Ray Kirschmann, and Ray’s suits were expensive and well-cut; they just looked to have been tailored for somebody else. Hoberman’s outfit was a cheap suit. It wouldn’t have looked good on anybody.
We went into Candlemas’s apartment and reviewed the plan. Captain Hoberman was expected within the hour on the twelfth floor of a high-security apartment building at Seventy-fourth and Park. He was my ticket into the building. Once he got me past the doorman, he’d go keep his appointment while I kept an appointment of my own four floors below.
“You will be alone,” he assured me, “and uninterrupted. Captain Hoberman, you will be how long on the twelfth floor? An hour?”
“Less than that.”
“And you, Mr. uh Thomas, will be in and out in twenty minutes, although you could take all night if you wished. Should the two of you arrange to meet up and leave the building together? What do you think?”
I thought I should have skipped the whole thing and hopped into the first cab when I had the chance. Instead of riding off with a beautiful woman, I’d wound up learning more than I wanted to know about Chinese herbs. I’d spent the past two weeks watching Humphrey Bogart movies, and it seemed to have done something to my judgment.
“It sounds unnecessarily complicated,” I said. “It’s not all that hard to get out of a building, unless you’ve got a TV set under your arm or a dead body over your shoulder.”
It’s not that hard to get into a building, either, if you know what you’re doing. I’d said as much to Candlemas the previous day, suggesting that we could get along without Captain Hoberman. But he wasn’t having any. The captain was part of the package. I needed my captain about as much as Toni Tennille needed hers, and had as little chance of dumping him.
Hoberman paused at each landing on the way down the stairs, too, and when we got outside he took hold of the cast-iron railing while he got his bearings. “You tell me,” he said. “Where’s the best place to get a cab?”
“Let’s walk,” I said. “It’s only three blocks.”
“One of ’em’s crosstown.”
“Even so.”
He shrugged, lit a cigarette, and off we went. I counted that a victory, but changed my mind when he steamed on into the Wexford Castle, an Irish bar on Lexington Avenue. “Time for a quick one,” he announced, and ordered a double shot of vodka. The bartender, who looked like a man who’d seen everything but remembered none of it, poured from a bottle with a label showing a Russian wearing a fur hat and a fierce grin. I started to say that we were supposed to get to our destination by midnight, but before I had the sentence out the captain had downed his drink.
“Something for you?”
I shook my head.
“Then let’s get going,” he said. “Supposed to get there before midnight. That’s when the late shift comes on duty.”
We hit the street again, and the drink seemed to loosen him up. “Here’s a question for you,” he said. “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”
“It’s a question, all right.”
“Known that fellow a long time, have you?”
Thirty-two hours, getting on for thirty-three. “Not too long,” I admitted.
“What do you make of this? When he told me about you, he didn’t use your actual name. He called you something else.”
“Oh?”
“I want to say Road and Track, but that’s not it. Road and Car? Makes no sense. Roadieball?” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, but it sure wasn’t Thompson. Wasn’t even close.”
“Well, he’s getting on in years,” I said.
“Hardening of the brain,” he said. “That how you read it?”
“I don’t think it’s that extreme, but-”
“It’s enough to worry me,” he said, “and I don’t mind telling you that. There’s a whole lot at stake here, a whole lot of people’s hopes riding on this. But I don’t guess I have to tell you that, do I?”
“I guess not.”
“Talk too much anyway,” he said. “Always been my problem.” And he didn’t say another word until we got to the building.
It was a fortress, all right. The Boccaccio, one of the great Park Avenue apartment buildings, twenty-two stories tall, its sumptuous Art Deco lobby equipped with enough potted plants to start a jungle. There was a doorman out front and a concierge behind the desk, and damned if the elevator didn’t have an attendant, too. All three of them wore maroon livery with gold braid, and a pretty sight they were. They wore white gloves, too, which almost spoiled the effect, giving them the look of Walt Disney animals until you got used to it.
“Captain Hoberman,” Hoberman told the concierge. “I’m here to see Mr. Weeks.”
“Oh, yes, sir. Mr. Weeks is expecting you.” He checked his book, made a little note in it, then looked up expectantly at me.
“And this is Mr. Thompson,” Hoberman said. “He’s with me.”
“Very good, sir.” Another little note in the book. Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a piece of cake getting in here on my own. Still-
The elevator attendant had been watching all this from across the lobby, and probably heard it, too; Hoberman had a booming voice, audible, I suppose, from stem to stern. When we approached he said, “Twelve, gentlemen?”
“Twelve-J,” Hoberman said. “Mr. Weeks.”
“Very good, sir.” And up we went, and out we popped on twelve. The attendant pointed us toward the J apartment and watched after us to make sure we found our way. When we got there Hoberman shot me a look and cocked a bushy eyebrow. The stairwell, my immediate goal, was just steps from where we stood, but the elevator was still within my view and the attendant was still doing his job. I stuck out a finger and poked the doorbell.
“But what will I say to Weeks?” Hoberman wondered. Softly, thanks be to God.
“Just introduce me,” I said. “I’ll take it from there.”
The door opened. Weeks turned out to be a short pudgy fellow with bright blue eyes. He was wearing a hat in the house, a black homburg, but it was his hat and his house, so I guess he had the right. The rest of his outfit was less formal. A pair of suspenders with roosters on them held up the pants of a Brooks Brothers suit. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his tie was off and his expression was understandably puzzled.
“Cappy,” he said to Hoberman. “Good to see you. And this is-”
“Bill Thompson,” Hoberman said. And off to the side, and not a moment too soon, I heard the elevator door draw shut.
“I live in the building,” I said. “Ran into-” Cappy? No, better not “-this gentleman in the lobby, got so caught up in conversation I rode right on past my stop.” I laughed heartily. “Good to meet you, Mr. Weeks. Good evening, gentlemen.”
And I walked on down the hall, opened the fire door, and scampered down the stairs.
At least there were no cameras in the stairwells.
The Boccaccio was wired for closed-circuit TV. I’d seen the bank of monitors behind the concierge’s desk. One showed the laundry room, and others scanned the street in front, the passenger and service elevators, the service entrance around the corner on Seventy-fourth, and the parking spaces in the subbasement.
The building had stairwells at either end, so to include them in your closed-circuit surveillance you’d need two cameras on each floor, and an equal number of screens for the concierge to go blind staring at. But there’s another way to do it: one or more of the screens can be set up to receive multiple channels, and whoever’s monitoring the operation can sit back with a remote control and channel-surf the hours away.
I didn’t think that was the setup they had here, but I couldn’t know until I was actually in the stairwell. I hadn’t been all that worried, though. I’d guessed stairwell surveillance was unlikely, and even if they had it I figured I could get around it.
See, when you’ve got that high a level of protection, you never have an incident. Nobody who doesn’t belong ever gets across the threshold in the first place, not even the guys from Chinese restaurants who want nothing more than to slip a menu under every door in Manhattan. With that much security, naturally you feel secure. And, when nothing bad ever happens, you stop paying close attention to your own security devices.
Look what happened at Chernobyl. They had a gauge with a warning device on it, and when the crunch came it didn’t fail, it worked the way it was supposed to. And some poor dimwit looked at it and decided it must be broken because it was giving an abnormal reading. So he ignored it.
This notwithstanding, I was just as glad to know I wasn’t going to wind up on America ’s Funniest Home Videos.
Four floors below I made sure the hall was clear, then walked the length of it to 8-B. I rang the doorbell. I’d been assured there would be nobody home, but Candlemas could be wrong about that, or he could have steered me accidentally to the wrong apartment. So I rang the doorbell, and when nothing happened I took the time to ring it again. Then I fished out my set of lockpicking tools and let myself in.
Nothing to it. If you’re looking for state-of-the-art locks, don’t look in a luxury building on Park Avenue. Look in the tenements and brownstones where there’s neither doorman nor concierge. That’s where you’ll find window gates and alarm systems and police locks. 8-B had two locks, a Segal and a Rabson, both of them standard pin-and-tumbler cylinders, solid and reliable and about as challenging as the crossword puzzle in TV Guide.
I knocked off one lock, paused for breath, and knocked off the other one-and all in not much more time than it takes to tell about it. In a funny way, I was almost sorry it was so easy.
See, lockpicking is a skill, and on the list of technical accomplishments it ranks several steps below brain surgery. With proper instruction, anyone with minimal manual dexterity can learn the basics. I’d taught Carolyn, for example, and she’d become fairly good at opening simple locks, until she stopped practicing and got rusty.
But for me it’s different. I have a gift for it, and it’s more than a matter of technique. There’s something otherworldly about the whole enterprise, some altered state I slip into when I’m breaking and entering. I can’t really describe it, and it would probably bore you if I could, but it’s Magic Time for me, it really is. That’s why I’m as good as I am at it, and it also helps explain why I can’t stay away from it.
When the second lock sighed and surrendered, I felt the way Casanova must have felt when the girl said yes-grateful for the conquest, but sorry he hadn’t had to work just a little bit harder for it. I sighed and surrendered my own self, turned the knob, stepped inside, and drew the door quickly shut.
It was dark as a coal mine during a power failure. I gave my eyes a minute to accustom themselves to the darkness, but it didn’t get a whole lot brighter. This was good news, actually. It meant the drapes were drawn and the apartment was light-tight, which in turn meant I could flick on all the lights I wanted. I didn’t have to skulk around in the darkness, bumping into things and cursing.
I used my flashlight first to make sure that all the drapes were drawn, and indeed they were. Then, with my gloves on, I flicked the nearest light switch and blinked at the glare. I put my flashlight back in my pocket and took a deep breath, giving myself a moment to relish that little shiver of pure delight that comes over me when I’ve let myself into some place in which I have no business being.
And to think I actually tried to give all this up…
I locked both locks, just to be tidy, and looked around the large L-shaped room. That was all there was to the apartment, aside from a tiny kitchen and a tinier bathroom, and it was furnished in a very tentative fashion, with the kind of Conran’s-Door Store-Crate amp; Barrel furniture newlyweds buy for their first apartment. A rug with pastel colors and a geometric pattern covered about a third of the parquet floor, and a platform bed filled the sleeping alcove.
I looked in the closet, checked a few of the dresser drawers. The occupant was a male, I decided, but there were enough female garments on hand to suggest that he had either a girlfriend or a problem of sexual identity.
“Just take the portfolio,” Hugo Candlemas had advised me. “You won’t find anything else worth the taking. The man’s some sort of company stooge. He doesn’t collect anything, doesn’t go in for jewelry. You won’t find any substantial cash on hand.”
And what was in the portfolio?
“Papers. We’re bit players in some sort of corporate takeover, you and I. At the very least, we’ll split a reward for recovering the documents, and your share of that will be a minimum of five thousand dollars. If I can entertain offers from the other side, you might net three or four times that amount.” He beamed at the prospect. “The portfolio’s leather with gold stamping. There’s a desk, and if it’s not right on top you’ll find it in one of the drawers. They may be locked. Will that present a problem?”
I told him it never had in the past.
There was a desk, all right, Scandinavian in design, made of birch and given a natural finish. There was nothing on top of it but a hand-tooled leather box and an 8x10 photo in a silver frame. The box held pencils and paper clips. The photo, in black and white, showed a man in uniform. No GI Joe, this lad; his outfit was fancy enough to get him a place behind the desk at the Boccaccio. He was wearing glasses and a toothy grin, which made him look like Theodore Roosevelt, and he had his hair parted in the middle, which made him look like a drawing by John Held, Jr.
He looked familiar, but I couldn’t tell you why.
I pulled up a chair, sat down at the desk and got to work. There were three drawers on each side and one in the middle, and I tried the middle one first, and it was open. And, right smack in the middle of it, there sat a calfskin portfolio, tan in color, stamped in gold with an ornamental border and a network of fleurs-de-lis.
Remarkable.
I sat still for a moment, just looking at the thing and listening to the silence. And then the silence was broken by the unmistakable sound of a key in a lock.
If I’d been doing anything-shuffling through drawers, opening closet doors, picking a lock-I’d have missed it, or reacted too late. But I registered it instantly and sprang from the chair as if I’d been waiting for that very sound all my life.
Years ago, before my time and yours, there was a baseball player in the old Negro Leagues named Cool Papa Bell. I gather he was capable of swift and sudden movement; he was frequently compared favorably to greased lightning, and it was said of him that he could turn off the bedroom light and be in bed before the room got dark. I had always thought of that as colorful hyperbole, but now I’m not so sure. Because I shoved the drawer closed, switched off a lamp, switched off another lamp, raced across the room to kill the overhead light, dove into the hall closet, and yanked the door shut, and it seems to me I was holed up there, flattening myself against the coats, before the lights went out.
If not, I came close.
More to the point, I had the closet door shut before the other door was opened. If my intruder hadn’t fumbled a little with the keys, he’d have walked in on me. On the other hand, if he was thin-blooded enough to have worn a topcoat, or anxious enough to have toted an umbrella, he’d be opening the closet door any second now, and then what was I going to do?
Time, I thought. Upstate, with low companions and nothing good to read. But maybe it wouldn’t come to that. Maybe I could talk my way out of it, or bribe a cop, or get Wally Hemphill to work a legal miracle. Maybe I could-
There were two of them. I could hear them talking, a man and a woman. I couldn’t make out what they were saying-the closet door was thick and fit snugly-but I could hear them well enough to distinguish the pitch of their voices. Two of them, a man and a woman, in the apartment.
Oh, wonderful. Candlemas had assured me I’d have plenty of time, that the portfolio’s current owner was out for the evening. But he was quite obviously back, and he had his girlfriend with him, and all I could hope for was that they would go to sleep fairly soon, and without opening the closet door.
They didn’t sound sleepy, though. They sounded fervent, even impassioned, and I realized why I couldn’t make out what they were saying. They were talking in a language I couldn’t understand.
That covered everything but English, actually. But there are other languages I can recognize when I hear them, even if I can’t understand what it is I’m hearing. French, German, Spanish, Italian-I know what those all sound like, and can even catch the odd word or phrase. But these folks were flailing away at one another in a tongue I hadn’t heard before. It didn’t even sound like a language, but more like what you used to hear when you tried to play a Beatles album backward, looking for evidence that Paul was dead.
They went on nattering and I went on stupidly trying to make sense out of it, and struggling mightily not to sneeze. Something in the closet was evidently playing host to a little mold or mildew, and I seemed to be the slightest bit allergic to it. I swallowed and pinched my nose and did all the things you think of, hoping they’ll work and knowing they won’t. Then I got angry, furious at myself for getting in a pickle like this, and that worked. The urge to sneeze went away.
So did the conversation. It died out, with only an occasional phrase uttered and that pitched too low to make out, even if you knew the language. There were other sounds, though. What the hell were they doing?
Oh.
I knew what they were doing. A platform bed doesn’t have springs to squeak, so I didn’t have that particular auditory clue, but even without it the conclusion was unmistakable. While I languished in the closet, these clowns were making love.
I had only myself to blame. If only I hadn’t dawdled, wandering around the apartment, checking the fridge, counting the paper clips in the leather box on the desk. If only I hadn’t held the silver-framed photo in my hand, turning it this way and that, trying to figure out why it was familiar. If only I had behaved professionally, for God’s sake, I could have been in and out before the two of them turned up, with the portfolio locked away in my attaché case and a fat fee mine for the collecting. I’d have been out the door and out of the building and-
Wait a minute.
Where was the attaché case?
It certainly wasn’t in the closet with me. Had I left it alongside the desk, or somewhere else in the apartment? I couldn’t remember. Had I even brought it to the apartment? Had I set it down while I picked the locks, or tucked it between my knees?
I was pretty sure I hadn’t. Well, had I had it with me when I entered the Boccaccio at Captain Hoberman’s side? I tried to visualize the whole process-up in the elevator, saying a few words to Mr. Weeks in 12-J, then hotfooting it down four flights of stairs. It didn’t seem to me that I’d been carrying anything, except for five pounds I could have done without, but it was hard to be sure.
Had I left it home? I remembered picking it up, but I could have put it down again. The question was, had I had it when I left my apartment?
The answer, I decided, was yes. Because I could recall having it in my hand when I hailed Max Fiddler’s cab for the second time that night, and balanced on my knees when he asked if I was on my way to a business appointment.
Had I left it in his cab? I had his card, or his Chinese herbalist’s card, anyway, with Max’s phone number on it. There was nothing I needed in the attaché case. There was, in fact, nothing in it at all. It was a good case and I’d owned it long enough to get attached (or even attachéd) to it, but I certainly could live a rich and rewarding life without it if I had to.
But suppose he brought it back of his own accord. He knew where I lived, having dropped me off and picked me up at the same location. I didn’t think I’d mentioned my name, or Bill Thompson’s name either, but he could describe me to the doorman, or-
What the hell was I working myself up about? I was going stir-crazy in the damned closet. It was an empty attaché case with no identification on it and nothing incriminating about it, and if I got it back that was great, and if I didn’t that was fine, and who cared?
Anyway, I’d had it with me when I got out of the cab. Because I could remember switching it from one hand to the other in order to ring Hugo Candlemas’s doorbell. Which meant I’d probably left it there when Hoberman and I set out on our fool’s errand, unless I’d left it at the Wexford Castle, and I didn’t think I had. I had almost certainly left it up in Candlemas’s apartment, in which case I could get it back when I went there to drop off the portfolio and collect my money.
Assuming I ever got out of the closet.
Outside, the fires of love were but glowing embers, to judge from the sound track. Maybe, I thought, I could just leave. Maybe they wouldn’t notice.
Right.
I wondered what Bogart would do.
In the past fifteen days I had watched thirty movies, all of them either starring or featuring Humphrey Bogart. Some of them were films that everybody knows, like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca and The African Queen, and others were movies that nobody’s ever heard of, like Invisible Stripes and Men Are Such Fools. My companion at these outings, sitting beside me and sharing my popcorn, seemed to believe that the Bogart on-screen persona would tell you all you needed to know to cope with life. And who was I to say her nay?
But I couldn’t think of anything better for Bogart to do than the course I’d chosen for myself, which was an essentially passive one. I was waiting for something to happen. Maybe Bogart would have taken the bit in his teeth and the bull by the horns and made something happen, but it seemed to me that he was most apt to do that when he had a gun in his fist. I didn’t even have my fucking attaché case. All I could lay my hands on was a coat hanger.
Outside my door, activity seemed to have resumed, but of a different sort. They were walking about now, and carrying on an audible if incomprehensible conversation.
And then there was a loud sound, and something or someone bumped into the closet door, and then there was silence. Seconds later a door opened-not, thank God, the closet door, but what sounded like the front door. Then it closed. Then more silence.
And then, finally, I heard the sound that had started the whole thing, a key in a lock. Whoever it was must have walked halfway to the elevator before deciding to come back and lock up. Maybe the afterthought was prompted by natural tidiness, or maybe the door-locker figured this way it would take them longer to discover the body.
Because I’d played this scene before. Once before I’d ducked into a closet when somebody came home unexpectedly. That was on Gramercy Park, and the apartment was Crystal Sheldrake’s, and when I got out of her closet I found her on the floor with a dental scalpel stuck in her heart. I have stumbled over altogether too many dead bodies in the course of my young life, and maybe you get used to it, but I haven’t yet, and don’t much want to.
And it had happened again, I just knew it. That was what had bumped into the closet door before-a body, dead as Spam, making the awkward transition from vertical to horizontal. Now it would be in the way when I tried to open the door, and I’d wind up tampering unwittingly with evidence and trying to squeeze through an opening that would have been a snug fit for Raffles.
Or maybe the body wasn’t dead. Maybe the person on the other side of the closet door had been merely knocked senseless, and would recover consciousness even as I was emerging from my refuge. A consummation devoutly to be wished, certainly-if one had to have bodies lying about, it was preferable that they be alive-but I didn’t really feel up for much in the way of human contact just now. I offered up a quick prayer to St. Dismas, the patron saint of burglars. Let the body be alive but unconscious, I implored him. Better yet, I thought, let it be in Schenectady -but maybe that was too much to ask.
A thought came to me, unbidden, irresistible: Bogart would get the hell out of the closet.
I opened the door, and of course there was no body there. I went all through the place, making sure; while a dead body is not something you want to run into, neither is it the sort of thing you’d care to overlook. No body, anywhere in the apartment. Two people had entered and two people had left, and one of them had stumbled against the closet door on the way out.
The bed, neatly made up before, was a rumpled mess now. I looked at the tangled sheets and felt embarrassed for my own voyeuristic role. It had been involuntary, God knows, and I hadn’t seen anything, or made sense of what I’d heard, but I still found it disquieting to look upon the whole thing.
Aside from the bed, you’d never know anyone had been in the place. The guy in the uniform, the Jazz Age Teddy Roosevelt, still grinned dopily from the silver frame. The same clothes still hung in the closet, the same paper clips still huddled together in the leather box.
But the portfolio was gone.