The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,66

so sure. My apartment was tossed by the people who killed Lyle and…you know what? I’m going to call them the Lyles. I don’t know if they were married or living together or just good friends, but I’m sick of saying Schnittke.”

“It doesn’t roll trippingly off the tongue, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t. Anyway, the same people did those two things, because they gave both doormen the same treatment.”

“Sort of a signature. They’re the ones we’ve been calling the perps.”

“Right, the perps. I don’t know who’s who, Carolyn. It’s all too deep for me. All I know is the book was in Mapes’s den, and it shouldn’t have been there.”

“And you took it.”

“I know, and don’t ask me why. It may not have been the brightest thing I ever did. I broke into his house and emptied his safe, and I was nice and anonymous about it, and then I took the book, and that narrows the suspect list from all burglars to a burglar with a particular interest in a particular book by Joseph Conrad. I might as well have taken along an etching tool and signed the safe.”

“Bern, he just lost a quarter of a million dollars.”

“Not quite.”

“Close enough. He just lost the price of a studio apartment—”

“Well, a pretty nice studio apartment, in a good neighborhood.”

“—and you think he’s even going to notice the book is missing, or give a rat’s ass about it if he does? Besides, the book’s not the McGuffin. It’s a fake McGuffin, and people only want it until they find out it’s not what they want.”

“Isn’t that true of everything?”

“Bern—”

I got to my feet, holding my hands palm-outward to ward off more questions. “It’s too deep for me,” I said. “All of it.”

“Where are you going, Bern?”

“A bar.”

“You’re gonna get drunk? You can stay right here, Bern. I’ve got plenty of booze in the house.”

“But no softballs.”

“Huh?” She waved the thought away, like a pesky fly. “You just drank a quart of coffee, and now you’re going out drinking? You’ll get falling-down drunk, and you’ll lie there with the shakes from the coffee. I don’t think it’s a great idea, Bern.”

“I’m not going to get drunk,” I told her. “I’m barely going to drink. I’m going to a bar in Murray Hill. I want to see just how far coincidence goes these days.”

I took a cab to Parsifal’s. That’s the only sensible way to get there from the West Village, especially at that hour, and when I thought about the money in Carolyn’s bathtub, I figured I could afford it.

It was late, but when I’d been there earlier, guzzling Pellegrino, it had felt like the kind of joint that keeps selling booze as long as the law allows. The law in New York lets you keep going until four every night but Saturday, when the bars have to close an hour early, at three in the morning. (When you’re dealing with drinking laws in New York, counterintuitive is definitely the way to go.)

The crowd at Parsifal’s was a little lighter than it had been earlier, but these people made up for it in volume, as their alcohol intake raised their personal decibel levels. Collectively, they added up to something well below your average wide-open motorcycle engine, but a long ways up from the well-bred purr of a Rolls-Royce. I could still hear myself think, though why I would want to was another question.

The same blonde bartender was on duty, and I don’t know how she remembered me, but she proved she did by asking me if I wanted a Pellegrino. I shook my head and said I’d have scotch.

“Good for you,” she said. “Any particular brand? The bar pour is Teacher’s.”

“You don’t have Glen Drumnadrochit, do you?”

She wrinkled her nose and said she’d never even heard of it, and I wasn’t hugely surprised. I’d only come across it once, at an eccentric bed-and-breakfast in the Berkshires,* and when I came home I had three bottles of it in my suitcase. I made them last as long as I could, but they were gone now, and I wondered if I’d ever taste anything that good again.

The thought alone spoiled me for Teacher’s, and I asked for a single malt, and they had a decent selection of them. I settled on Laphroaig, perhaps out of pride in my ability to pronounce it, and ordered a double. It’s got a distinctive taste, one that you have to acquire. I’d acquired it some years ago, but it