must be like going to the dentist.”
“Far as the color, I’d say she’s not gonna be too fussy. Just so it’s one of your up-to-date colors. Your platinum, your champagne. Not the old dark-brown shades.”
I nodded, conjuring up an image of Mrs. Kirschmann draped in fur. I didn’t know what she looked like, so I allowed myself to picture a sort of stout Edith Bunker.
“Oh,” I said suddenly. “There’s a reason you’re telling me this.”
“Well, I was thinkin’, Bern.”
“I’m out of the business, Ray.”
“What I was thinkin’, you might run into a coat in the course of things, know what I mean? I was thinkin’ that you and me, we go back a ways, we been through a lot, the two of us, and—”
“I’m not a burglar anymore, Ray.”
“I wasn’t countin’ on a freebie, Bernie. Just a bargain.”
“I don’t steal anymore, Ray.”
“I hear you talkin’, Bern.”
“I’m not as young as I used to be. Nobody ever is but these days I’m starting to feel it. When you’re young nothing scares you. When you get older everything does. I don’t ever want to go inside again, Ray. I don’t like prisons.”
“These days they’re country clubs.”
“Then they changed a whole hell of a lot in the past few years, because I swear I never cared for them myself. You meet a better class of people on the D train.”
“Guy like you, you could get a nice job in the prison library.”
“They still lock you in at night.”
“So you’re straight, right?”
“That’s right.”
“I been here how long? All that time you haven’t had a single person walk in the store.”
“Maybe the uniform keeps ’em away, Ray.”
“Maybe business ain’t what it might be. You been in the business how long, Bern? Six months?”
“Closer to seven.”
“Bet you don’t even make the rent.”
“I do all right.” I marked my place in Soldiers Three, closed the book, put it on the shelf behind the counter. “I made a forty-dollar profit from one customer earlier this afternoon and I swear it was easier than stealing.”
“Is that a fact. You’re a guy made twenty grand in an hour and a half when things fell right.”
“And went to jail when they didn’t.”
“Forty bucks. I can see where that’d really have you turning handsprings.”
“There’s a difference between honest money and the other kind.”
“Yeah, and the difference comes to somethin’ like $19,960. This here, Bern, this is nickels and dimes. Let’s be honest. You can’t live on this.”
“I never stole that much, Ray. I never lived that high. I got a small apartment on the Upper West Side, I stay out of night clubs, I do my own wash in the machines in the basement. The store’s steady. You want to give me a hand with this?”
He helped me drag the bargain table in from the sidewalk. He said, “Look at this. A cop and a burglar both doin’ physical work. Somebody should take a picture. What do you get for these? Forty cents, three for a buck? And that’s keepin’ you in shirts and socks, huh?”
“I’m a careful shopper.”
“Look, Bern, if there’s some reason you don’t wanna help me out on this coat thing—”
“Cops,” I said.
“What about cops?”
“A guy rehabilitates himself and you refuse to believe it. You talk yourselves hoarse telling me to go straight—”
“When the hell did I ever tell you to go straight? You’re a first-class burglar. Why would I tell you to change?”
He let go of it while I filled a shopping bag with hardcover mysteries and began shutting down for the night. He told me about his partner, a clean-cut and soft-spoken young fellow with a fondness for horses and a wee amphetamine habit.
“All he does is lose and bitch about it,” Ray complained, “until this past week when he starts pickin’ the ponies with x-ray vision. Now all he does is win, and I swear I liked him better when he was losin’.”
“His luck can’t last forever, Ray.”
“That’s what I been tellin’ myself. What’s that, steel gates across the windows? You don’t take chances, do you?”
I drew the gates shut, locked them. “Well, they were already here,” I said stiffly. “Seems silly not to use them.”
“No sense makin’ it easy for another burglar, huh? No honor among thieves, isn’t that what they say? What happens if you forget the key, huh, Bern?”
He didn’t get an answer, nor do I suppose he expected one. He chuckled instead and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I guess you’d just call a locksmith,” he said. “You couldn’t pick