The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,76
he was gettin’ ready to cross the street when he got blown away instead. So that tells me to look south an’ east of your bookstore, an’ what did we find on 10th Street between University an’ Fifth?”
“A car?”
“A Buick,” he said, “pulled up smack dab alongside a fire hydrant.”
“It’s good you got there before the traffic squad towed him.”
“Couldn’t happen, Bern. He had DPL plates. Diplomatic immunity might not keep him from gettin’ shot full of holes, but it kept his car from gettin’ hauled off to the pound. It mighta kept us from searchin’ his car, I’m not too clear on the rules, but as fate would have it I had the car open before I even noticed the DPL tags. Careless of me.”
“But convenient.”
“Photo ID in the glove compartment, a driver’s license plus his credentials from the Latvian embassy. Guy’s name is Valdi Berzins, an’ accordin’ to the embassy he had somethin’ to do with the Latvian mission to the UN, but nothin’ too important. That was all we got from him outside of his address, which was a hotel, the Blantyre on East 51st Street. He had a room there by the month. Not a bad hotel, but not the Carlyle, either. Only thing we found in the room was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, an’ the last I heard they were lookin’ for someone to translate ’em.”
“Pardon my Latvian,” I said. “I assume that’s the language they’re in?”
“Some’s Russian, goin’ by the letters. They’re in that alphabet they got, that’s like Greek but worse.”
“Cyrillic.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it’s Russian. The others are in our alphabet, for all the good it does. An’ there’s one in English, speculatin’ that the Black Scourge of Riga might be hidin’ out here in America.”
“The Black Scourge of Riga. Did they give his name?”
“Yeah,” he said, “an’ it’s a whole string of vowels an’ consonants. He’s some kind of war criminal, would be my guess.”
“Another doddering old European who might have been a concentration camp guard. Whatever he did, he probably can’t remember doing it.” I thought a moment. “How old was Arnold Lyle?”
“I forget. Why?”
“Because he changed his name from something, and it probably had vowels and consonants in it. If the Black Scourge of Riga was a war criminal, he’d have to have been at least twenty-five in 1945, and probably older than that. Otherwise he’d have been the Junior Assistant Black Scourge of Riga. But say he was twenty-five. That would make him what, eighty-four?”
“Forget it. Lyle was fifty tops.”
“It was just a thought. There’s a connection there, Ray. Not to the clipping about the Black Scourge, but some kind of connection tying Berzins to Lyle.”
“They’re both Russians.”
“Except for Berzins, who’s Latvian. But Latvia was part of the Soviet Union back when there was such a thing. Not originally, because it was independent between the two world wars, but then the Russians took it over along with the rest of the Baltics. Ray? How hard would it be to get into the murder apartment? The one at 34th and Third?”
“It’s a crime scene, Bernie. It’s sealed.”
“Oh.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to get in there.”
“Oh, well, we’ll just ask permission from the guys in Major Cases. ‘Bernie here’s a convicted burglar, plus he’s an early suspect in the case, an’ he’d like to poke around the crime scene. Any of youse got a problem with that?’ ”
“I thought we could do it off the books.”
“Sneak you in, in other words. Why?”
“Two people died in that apartment,” I said, “plus the doorman downstairs. They all got killed because someone went there looking for something.”
“Which we don’t know what it is.”
No, but I was beginning to have an idea. “We know they didn’t get it.”
“Bernie, I saw the safe. It was cleaner’n a whistle.”
“So if the McGuffin was in the safe, the perps got it.”
“Who the hell’s McGuffin, an’ where’d he come from?”
“It’s a name,” I said, “for the thing everybody wants, because we have to call it something and we don’t know what it is. If it was in the safe, they got it. But suppose it wasn’t?”
He frowned at me. “Why’d they have a safe an’ not put the thing inside? Unless they didn’t have it in the first place.”
“A possibility,” I admitted, “but I think they had it, and I think they were planning to sell it, and they bought the safe so they could keep the money in it when they got paid, because they were expecting a lot