The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,69
Do you come here often?”
“No. What’s your sign?”
“Yeah, I can’t believe I asked a question like that. ‘Do you come here often?’ And anyway that’s not how it feels.”
“How what feels?”
“The feeling,” she said. “I have this feeling that I really know you on some almost mystic level. More than that, I have the feeling that you really know me.” She frowned. “This is ridiculous. I didn’t think I was feeling the drinks, but evidently I am. I’m babbling away like an idiot.”
“More like a brook.”
“What a sweet thing to say! Bernie?”
“Bernie.”
“If you drink up I’ll buy you another La-whatchamacallit.”
“Laphroaig,” I said. “But one’s plenty. Why don’t I buy you another of those instead?”
“Thanks, but no. I’m not really much of a drinker, although you wouldn’t know it by the way I made the first one disappear.”
“You needed it.”
“I guess. I’m in here more nights than I’m not, but it’s rare for me to have more than two drinks. Although the other night…”
“What?”
“Well, it was weird. I had my usual two drinks, nothing fancy, plain old gin and tonic, and I think I must have had a blackout.”
“Oh?”
“I can’t even remember leaving the bar. I woke up with the worst hangover I ever had in my life. I mean, I don’t have hangovers. I don’t have blackouts, either. I think the only time I had one before was in my freshman year in college, when we played this version of Truth or Dare where you kept having to take a drink. God only knows what I drank that time, but it was a whole lot more than I had the other night.”
“Ah, youth.”
“I was young, all right. And I didn’t have a hangover, I woke up feeling fine, but I didn’t remember the last hour or so of the evening. But everybody told me I was perfectly fine, I didn’t do anything weird or outrageous.”
“No harm done, then.”
“But the night before last,” she said, and frowned. “You weren’t here that night, were you? Wednesday, it would have been.”
“The only other time I’ve been here,” I said, “was earlier this evening. I stopped in after work and had one drink.”
“Laphroaig?”
“Pellegrino water. You can’t really develop a taste for it, but you don’t need one.”
“You just drink it. And you liked it here and came back.”
“Uh-huh.”
“After work, you said. What kind of work?”
“I have a bookstore.”
“Really? Are you Mr. Barnes or Mr. Noble?”
“Well, nobody ever called me Mr. Noble. Actually I’d have to say I’m more like Mr. Strand. It’s a secondhand bookstore. But a whole lot smaller than the Strand.”
“It sounds like fun. Half the lawyers I know would love to quit and open a used bookstore. The other half can’t read. Where is it? Right here in the neighborhood?”
“Eleventh Street between Broadway and University.”
“And you dropped in here after work?”
She was wasted on real estate deals, I decided. She should have been taking depositions and cross-examining witnesses. I’d been in the neighborhood delivering a book to a good customer, I told her, and Parsifal’s had caught my eye.
“And you popped in for a Pellegrino.”
“For a Perrier, actually, but Pellegrino’s what they had.”
“And you’re adaptable.” She put her hand on mine. It was just conversational, but I’ve noticed something. When a woman starts touching you, it is a Good Sign.
“This is really strange,” she said. “See, I didn’t go home alone Wednesday night.”
“You’re just saying that to shock me.”
“Silly,” she said, and touched my hand again. “There’s no reason for you to be shocked, but I am, a little. Not at the idea of going home with somebody. I mean, if two grownups get a sort of mutual urge, what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing that I can think of.”
“But I don’t remember it, Bernie! I don’t know who the guy was or what happened, and that shocks me. In fact it scares me a little. Who the hell did I bring home? It could have been Mr. Goodbar.” She’d been looking down, and now she raised her eyes to mine. “It wasn’t you, was it?”
“I wish.”
“That’s the second really sweet thing you’ve said in, what, ten minutes? Bernie, I know it wasn’t you, there’s no way it could have been you, you’ve never even been here before. But why do I have the feeling we’ve been—”
“Lovers?”
“Well, intimate, emotionally if not physically. I had that feeling the minute I walked in here.”