The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,74

a crowd they’d get on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and found that they got a sort of rainy-Saturday-afternoon crowd. There’s something warm and welcoming about a bar on a day like that, but after you get over being warmly welcomed, you notice that everybody there gives off an air of desperation.

I’m sure I was no exception myself. I took a stool at the bar, where Sigrid’s role was now being played by a black woman with short curly hair that either she or God had colored red. She was as tall as Sigrid and had the same cheekbones, along with the same subliminal message: Sleep with me and you’ll die, but it’ll be worth it.

I ordered Laphroaig and took a long time drinking it, meting it out in small sips. I was making progress, or it was; by the fourth sip, it tasted pretty decent.

While I sipped at it, I worked my way around the bar, talking to no one but listening to everybody. I was hoping to hear a particular low-pitched voice, but didn’t really expect to. There was no one in the place who looked like my image of the man, and there was no one there who sounded like him, either.

Most of the time I wasn’t listening that hard, anyway, because I was busy thinking. You ought to be able to work this out, I told myself. The whole thing was full of coincidences, and when you have that many of them, sooner or later they start fitting together in meaningful ways. That’s what I told myself, anyway, but I kept turning the pieces around in my mind, and I couldn’t quite make anything out of them. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, I decided, with some pieces missing. If I got hold of the missing pieces I might still be stumped, but at least I’d have a shot at it.

I went to the phone, dropped more coins into it than it used to cost, dialed a string of numbers that I remembered only because I’d dialed them twice already today, and listened to the phone ring in Ray Kirschmann’s house. If a phone rings and there’s no machine to answer it, does it make a sound? I decided it makes the sound of one hand clapping, which was about as much applause as I was capable of today, anyway. It rang until I was tired of listening to it, and then I hung up and went back to the bar. There’d been a sip or two left in my glass, and there’d been more cash on the bar than I would have left for a tip, but the bartender (whose name I hadn’t caught, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Sigrid) had thought I’d left and taken it all away.

I really hate weekends.

Twenty-Seven

The rain stopped sometime after midnight Saturday, too late to do most of the city any good, and started up again before dawn, in plenty of time to ruin Sunday. I went out for breakfast and came home with the paper. I still didn’t have either copy of Lettuce Prey at hand, but the Sunday Times was enough to see anybody through a rainy Sunday, and clear into the middle of the week. Even after I’d tossed all the advertising supplements in the recycling bin, and added those sections like Jobs (which I don’t want) and Automobiles (which I don’t need), I still had enough paper left to make a person have second thoughts about freedom of the press.

I settled in with it, pausing now and then to try Ray Kirschmann in Sunnyside. Around eleven his wife answered, just home from church. No, she said, Ray wasn’t home. He’d had to work, he hadn’t even been able to go to services with her. I gave her my name and number, and she said she’d pass them on to him if he called in, but she sounded as though that wasn’t likely to happen.

I tried the precinct and left a message there as well, and went back to the Real Estate section, where there was an inspiring story of a couple who’d searched high and low for a place that would accommodate both their hobbies, although they preferred to call them areas of interest. He built elaborate layouts for his model trains, while she collected weathervanes and old farm equipment. For a mere eight million dollars they’d bought an old warehouse in Nolita, which is not, as you might suppose, a Nabokovean tale about