The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,103

upon the face of Valentine Kukarov.”

“You’re slandering me in my own home,” Mapes said, “in front of a roomful of witnesses.”

“They say it ain’t bragging if it’s true,” I told him, “and the same thing holds for slander.”

“You can’t prove any of this.” He got to his feet. “Allegations, nothing but allegations. I’m damned if I’m going to listen to allegations.” I don’t know if he was going for the front door or the dining room, but his body language was saying See ya later, Allegator.

He didn’t get very far. Before he could take the first step, the two feds rose to their feet, while the two trios of cops and goons at the room’s two exits all but linked arms to block his flight. That gave him pause, and then Michael Quattrone said, “Sit down, Mapes,” and he sat.

“The operations,” I said, “were a success. Dr. Mapes gave Kukarov a new nose and refigured his jawline. He shaved his cheekbones to make him look less Slavic, and took ten to fifteen years off his appearance by lifting what had begun to droop, tightening the loose skin on the neck, and doing a little work around and under the eyes. He got rid of a scar at the side of Kukarov’s mouth. Nobody knew about it back in Latvia, he’d grown the beard to hide it, but it was a distinguishing mark in the American version of Kukarov, and Mapes got rid of it for him. He pitched the blond hairpiece, reworked the hairline with a combination of surgery and electrolysis, improved the eyebrows permanently with some more electrolysis, and taught his patient to dye his hair and eyebrows a light brown that was becoming enough while less attention-getting than what he’d had. Besides”—I glanced pointedly at Mapes, who glow-ered back from beneath his rug—“sooner or later someone recognizes even the best wig for what it is, and starts wondering what you’d look like without it.”

“So he fixed him up good,” Ray said. “Then what?”

“Then he took some more photographs,” I said, “and collected the balance of his fee, and sent the Black Scourge of Riga on his way.”

“Excuse me,” said Grisek, the man from the Latvian embassy. “Kukarov allowed him to retain these photographs?”

“Certainly not. He’d always been cautious to the point of paranoia on the subject of photos, and now that he had a new face he certainly didn’t want pictures of it floating around.”

“Ah.”

“Mapes insisted on taking the photos,” I said, “because he needed them for reference while the work was in progress. The surgeries took months, and he took more shots along the way to chart his progress. And he snapped a last batch upon completion as well, so that he and his patient could view them side by side, Before and After, and see just how substantive a change Mapes had worked in Kukarov’s appearance.”

“That’s standard,” Mapes said. “Everyone in the field does it.”

“That’s what you told Kukarov. And he let you do it because you assured him that, when your work was over, all copies of the photos would be destroyed.”

“The man insisted.”

“As other men had insisted before him. And you agreed, as you had agreed before. But you didn’t keep your word, did you? You held on to four photos, mug shots, really. Before and after, full-face and profile. Just as you kept of all your patients, legitimate and criminal.”

He winced a little at the last word, then rallied to tell me what a valuable, even essential, reference library the photos constituted.

“Pardon my Latvian,” I said, “but that’s a load of crap. You kept the pictures to feed your ego. You knew you shouldn’t have the pictures, so you didn’t keep them with the rest. Instead you Scotch-taped them to the pages of a book and stuck it on the shelf in your office. Maybe you got a kick out of it, having it right out in plain sight, where anybody could pick it up and page through it. But of course nobody did. Principles of Organic Chemistry, Volume Two. Sounds like a real page-turner, doesn’t it?”

“They were readily available for reference,” he said, “yet secreted so that no one would find them. You said it yourself, Rothenberg.” I didn’t correct him. The man was hopeless. “Even if you were searching the place, you’d never pick up that book. And no one would stumble on it by accident.”

“Suppose they’d read Volume One, and didn’t want to miss the sequel? Never mind. Let’s say