The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,21

a wrestling promoter in the Ozarks.”

“You’re making this up.”

“I am not. According to the program, Reagan has a small part.”

“Reagan? Ronald Reagan?”

“That’s the one.”

“Well, at least it’s only a small part. Wrestling in the Ozarks. And square dancing, I’ll bet. Why else would they call it Swing Your Lady?”

“You’re probably right.”

“Wrestling and square dancing and Ronald Reagan. You know what, Bern? I bet you get lucky tonight. Any woman who’d make a man go through all that has got to reward him for it.”

“I don’t know, Carolyn.”

“I do,” she said. “Better pack your toothbrush, Bern. Tonight’s your lucky night.”

And, after Bogart had followed his electrifying portrayal of Captain Queeg with a stint as barnstorming wrestling promoter Ed Hatch, and after his wrestler had quit the business to marry a lady blacksmith and spend the rest of his life shoeing horses, we’d gone across the street for a quick espresso and a little holding of hands and trading of long looks. Then we went outside and I hailed her a cab, and when I held the door for her she came into my arms for a kiss.

“Bear-naaard,” she murmured. “Come with me.”

“Come with you?”

“Come home with me. Now.”

“Oh,” I said, and was ready to stammer out some lame excuse when fifteen nights at the movies came along and rescued me. “Not tonight, sweetheart,” I drawled. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take a rain check.” And I kissed her lightly on the lips and tucked her into the cab and watched her ride away from me.

Some lucky night.

CHAPTER

Six

I woke up surprisingly clear-headed, if not entirely thrilled about it, and was downtown in time to open my store at ten. I fed Raffles and refilled his water dish, dragged my three-for-a-buck table outside, and settled myself behind the counter with Will Durant. The world, he reassured me, had always been a pretty nasty place. I found this curiously comforting.

I had the front door closed against the chill of the morning, and so I got to hear the tinkling of little bells each time it opened. I had a couple of early browsers, rang up two sales for a few dollars each, and looked through the sack of books that Mowgli brought me. He’s a curious creature who looks as though he might indeed have been raised by wolves—gaunt, hollow-eyed, with a mop of hair and a scraggle of beard. Speed and acid have burned some substantial holes in his brain, and he’d dropped out of a doctoral program in English at Columbia to take up a nomadic existence, shifting his residence from one abandoned building to another as circumstances dictated.

He’d collected books during his student days, and on the way down he sold them off piecemeal. His stock was pretty much gone by the time he found his way to Barnegat Books, but I’d bought a few things from him then, including a nice clean set of Kipling. He’d disappeared for the better part of a year, and I gather he started sucking on a crack pipe and pretty much lost touch with the planet for a while there, but when he turned up again he had his act together, in a marginal sort of way. He nowadays limited his chemical adventures to a little righteous herb and the odd hit of organic mescaline, and supported himself by buying books at street fairs and thrift shops and flea markets and reselling them to people like me.

I picked out a few things, passed on the rest. He had some nice fifties paperback noir, David Goodis and Peter Rabe, but my customers wouldn’t pay collector prices for that kind of material. “Figured as much,” he said. “I’ll run these by Jon at Partners and Crime. Thought you might like to see them, though. Don’t you love the covers?”

I agreed they were great. I picked out a biography of Thomas Wolfe and Mark Schorer’s life of Sinclair Lewis and a couple of other books I thought I could sell, and we hemmed and hawed until we found a price we could both live with. Toward the end I asked him a question I ask most of my regular suppliers.

“These aren’t stolen,” I said. “Are they, Mowgli?”

“How could they be otherwise? ‘Property is theft.’ You know who said that, Bernie?”

“Proudhon.”

“Give the man a cigar. Proudhon indeed. Matter of fact, St. John Chrysostom said something much along the same line. You wouldn’t expect it of him, would you?” We kicked that around, and then he said, “What can