The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,39

have to work late. She might still turn up.”

We talked about the film we’d just seen, and about the one coming up. Then I went back to my seat and watched Black Legion.

It’s an early one, released in 1937, with Bogart playing a member of the Ku Klux Klan, only they called it the Black Legion and the members wore black hoods sporting white skulls and crossbones. I’d seen it sometime within the past year on AMC, and it wasn’t that great then, and by the time the picture got under way I knew Ilona wasn’t going to show up. It seemed to me that I’d known all along.

I felt like walking out, but I stayed where I was and got caught up in the film in spite of myself. The film had a neat twist. At the end, with Bogart arrested for murder, it turns out that the Legion was set up by the crime syndicate for commercial purposes. Maybe they had a stranglehold on the hood-and-sheet business. They want Bogart to plead self-defense, but for the sake of his wife’s reputation he turns state’s evidence instead, bringing down the whole Black Legion and saving the day for truth and justice.

Even so, he winds up with a life sentence. The poor son of a bitch, he must have had the worst lawyer since Patty Hearst.

Don’t ask me why, but I went across the street to make sure she wasn’t waiting for me over a cup of coffee. And of course she wasn’t. I scanned the room from the doorway, then left and went back to my place.

I called her number and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. I picked up what I’d come home for and went out again, taking the same combination of subways I take to work every morning but getting off a stop sooner than usual, at Broadway and Twenty-third. I just missed my crosstown bus and was all set to hail a cab, but what was my hurry?

I walked across Twenty-third Street and tried her number one last time from a pay phone two blocks from her apartment. When my quarter came back I walked the rest of the way and stood on the sidewalk across the street from her building. Simple Pleasures, the ground-floor shop, was closed and dark. There were no lights in the fourth-floor windows, but that didn’t tell me anything. Her apartment was in the back of the building.

I put my hand in my pocket, felt the burglar’s tools I’d gone home for. It seemed to me that I had no moral right to enter Ilona’s apartment. I evidently didn’t have much in the way of moral fiber, either, but I’d known that for years.

I looked both ways and crossed the street—it’s a one-way street, but try telling that to the guys on bicycles delivering Chinese food—and then I looked both ways a second time and mounted the half-flight of steps to the vestibule of her building. I checked the buzzers for one marked MARKOVA and couldn’t find it, but there was only one top-floor buzzer with no name on it, and I decided that had to be hers. (This, incidentally, was faulty reasoning; Carolyn’s buzzer on Arbor Court is still marked ARNOW, the long-vanished tenant of record. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in New York more people have learned anonymity from Rent Control than ever discovered it in a 12-Step program.)

I leaned on the unmarked buzzer, and either it was hers or it rang in some other empty apartment, because it went unanswered.

The trouble with front doors is that they’re right out there in public view. A tenant, coming or going, can catch you in the act. A passerby can spot you from the street. The longer you spend mucking about with the lock, the more likely it is that this will happen.

On the flip side, the nice thing about front doors is they’re rarely very hard to open. They’re just spring locks—if they used deadbolts an upstairs tenant couldn’t buzz anyone in—and the locks see so much action that they become as loose and as yielding as, well, a very old practitioner of an ancient profession, let us say. This one at least had a protective lip so you couldn’t loid your way in with a credit card or strip of spring steel, but aside from that it had precious little going for it. About the only person it could be expected to keep