The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,100

order, or perhaps a Greenwich Village bohemian left over from the 1950s, but then he wouldn’t have been accompanied by a pair of hoodlums. His name was Georgi Blinsky, and mothers in Brighton Beach invoked it to scare their children.

Blinsky looked around the room, but the only person he seemed to notice was Michael Quattrone, whom he acknowledged with a curt nod. Quattrone nodded back at him, and Blinsky found a chair and sat in it, while his two thugs posted themselves at the room’s two entrances, where they glared at Quattrone’s thugs and ignored the cops.

Next came Colby Riddle, who’d just wanted something to read. He used the lion’s head knocker, but very tentatively, and was equally tentative when it came to mounting the threshold and coming into the house. “I’m still not sure why I’m here,” he said. “But here I am.”

I picked out a chair for him, not wanting to confound him with choices, and got back to the door in time to open it for Sigrid Hesselblad, who was wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans out at the knees and no makeup and no lipstick, and who looked drop-dead gorgeous.

Next up was a Mr. Grisek, a short and pudgy fellow dressed like a pre-Glasnost delegate to an Eastern Bloc conference on tractor maintenance. He was in fact a Latvian diplomat, and he had a one-person entourage, and that one person deserted him at the door, returning to sit behind the wheel of the limo parked across the street. Grisek didn’t seem to know anybody in the room, nor did they know him; he took a seat and waited for something to happen.

He got there at 2:05, and I decided I’d wait five more minutes and then get the show on the road. I don’t know if you’ve been counting, but I think that came to twenty-two, including me but not including the guy in the limo. I may be forgetting someone. It was a big room, but we were doing a pretty good job of filling it.

Ray was giving me a look, and people were squirming in their chairs, and it was time to get going or serve them drinks, or else I was liable to find myself facing a mutiny. I moved into position and cleared my throat, and right on cue the doorbell rang. It was Marty Gilmartin, looking splendid in a powder-blue cashmere jacket over pale gray flannel slacks. His shirt was open at the neck, and he was wearing an ascot, and was the rare sort of man who could do so without looking like a dork.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he murmured. “I had a cabdriver from hell, and he must have been trying to find his way home.” I told him he was just in time, and he found himself a seat. He must have noticed Marisol Maris, and he’d have had to have spotted Crandall Rountree Mapes, aka The Shitheel, but he gave no sign of it.

My throat was already clear, but I cleared it again and got everybody’s attention. There was any number of ways I could have started things off, but there’s a lot to be said for tradition, and sticking with the tried and true.

“Good afternoon,” I said. “I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here…”

Thirty-Seven

Once upon a time,” I said, “there were three independent republics on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania was on the west, Estonia was on the east, and the one in the middle was Latvia. They came into independent existence at the end of the First World War, and disappeared again at the onset of the Second. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Soviet Union grabbed up the Baltics. Then, when Hitler went to war with Russia two years later, the Wehrmacht marched through the Baltics on their way to Stalingrad.”

The Latvians in my audience seemed to be paying the most attention to this little history lesson, and they were the ones who already knew it.

“When the Nazis retreated,” I went on, “the Red Army marched in again, and the Soviets established each former republic as a member state of the USSR. But the hunger for independence never died in those countries, as evidenced by the rapidity with which they broke free when the Soviet Union began to fall apart under Gorbachev.

“Almost half a century before that, when the war ended, partisan bands hid out in the forests