The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,38

now, and why wouldn’t he? He’d been seeing me every night for the past two and a half weeks.

He said he hadn’t recognized me at first, that he wasn’t used to seeing me without my lady friend. That, I told him, was the problem. I gave him Ilona’s ticket and said she’d evidently been delayed en route. He assured me there would be no problem; he’d let her in and steer her toward where I was sitting.

I went and bought popcorn. What the hell, I hadn’t had anything to eat since that slice of pizza around noon. It felt strange, though, sitting there with no one next to me, dipping into the popcorn without risk of encountering another hand.

I glanced around the theater, surprised at what a large proportion of the audience looked familiar to me. I don’t know that there were many diehards like us who never missed a night, but a lot of people came more than once. I guess if you saw one Bogart picture you saw them all, or as many as you could.

If we ran to type, I couldn’t tell you what the type was. There were quite a few college kids, some with the serious look of film students, others just out for a good time. There were older West Siders, the intellectual-political-artsy crowd you see at the free afternoon concerts at Juilliard, and some of them had probably seen many of these films during their initial run. There were singles, gay and straight, and young marrieds, gay and straight, and people who looked rich enough to buy the theater, and people who looked as though they must have raised the price of admission by begging on the subway. It was a wonderfully varied crowd, drawn together by the enduring appeal of an actor who’d died more than thirty-five years ago, and I was happy to be a part of it.

But not as happy as I would have been if Ilona were sharing my popcorn.

The thought made the popcorn stick in my throat, but sometimes it tends to do that anyway. I told myself it was a little early to start wallowing in self-pity, that she’d be slipping into the seat beside me any minute now.

The seat was still empty when they brought the house lights down. I wasn’t surprised, not really. I fed myself another handful of popcorn and let myself get lost in the movie.

That’s what it was there for.

The first feature, Passage to Marseille, was made in 1944, not long after Casablanca and obviously inspired by it, although the credits said it was based on a book by Nordhoff and Hall. (You remember them, they wrote Mutiny on the Bounty.) Bogart plays a French journalist named Matrac who’s on Devil’s Island when the movie opens, framed for murder and serving a life sentence. He and four others escape, only to be picked up on the high seas by a French cargo ship. Of course the convicts want to go fight for France—has there ever been anyone as fiercely patriotic as a criminal in a Hollywood movie?—but France has just surrendered, and Sydney Greenstreet wants to turn the ship over to the Vichy government. His attempted mutiny is thwarted, and Bogart and his buddies join a Free French bomber squadron in England. His plane is the last to return from a mission, and after it lands his crewmates bring him off, dead.

Well, hell, he died for a good cause, and until then he got to spend time with Claude Rains and Peter Lorre and Helmut Dantine and, well, all the usual suspects. It wasn’t the best film he ever made, but it was a quintessential Bogart role, the hard-bitten cynicism shielding the pure idealist, the beautiful loser coolly victorious in defeat.

A shame she had to miss it.

When the lights came up I checked with the usher and he shrugged and shook his head. I inquired at the box office, tried her number from a pay phone in the lobby. Nothing. On my way back into the theater the usher asked me if I wanted to cash in my unused ticket. I told him to hang on to it, that she might still turn up.

At the refreshment stand a tall guy with a goatee but no mustache said, “All by yourself tonight.”

I’d seen him and his dumpling of a girlfriend just about every night, but this was the first time either of us had spoken. “All alone,” I agreed. “She said she might