The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,4

the shelves.”

“Even so,” he said, and sighed gently. He had a thin face, hollow in the cheeks, and a white mustache so perfect it looked to have been trimmed one hair at a time. “Mr. Rhodenbarr,” he said, his guileless blue eyes searching mine, “I just want to say two words to you. Abel Crowe.”

If he hadn’t commented on the appropriateness of Raffles’s name, I might have heard those two words not as a name at all but as an adjective and a noun.

“Abel Crowe,” I said. “I haven’t heard that name in years.”

“He was a friend of mine, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

“And of mine, Mr.—?”

“Candlemas, Hugo Candlemas.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet a friend of Abel’s.”

“It’s my pleasure, Mr. Rhodenbarr.” We shook hands, and his palm was dry and his grip firm. “I shan’t waste words, sir. I have a proposition to put to you, a matter that could be in our mutual interest. The risk is minimal, the potential reward substantial. But time is very much of the essence.” He glanced at the open door. “If there were a way we could talk in private without fear of interruption…”

Abel Crowe was a fence, the best one I ever knew, a man of unassailable probity in a business where hardly anyone knows the meaning of the word. Abel was also a concentration camp survivor with a sweet tooth the size of a mastodon’s and a passion for the writings of Baruch Spinoza. I did business with Abel whenever I had the chance, and never regretted it, until the day he was killed in his own Riverside Drive apartment by a man who—well, never mind. I’d been able to see to it that his killer didn’t get away with it, and there was some satisfaction in that, but it didn’t bring Abel back.

And now I had a visitor who’d also been a friend of Abel’s, and who had a proposition for me.

I closed the door, turned the lock, hung the BACK IN 5 MINUTES sign in the window, and led Hugo Candlemas to my office in back.

CHAPTER

Two

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