The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,25

over, he’s been slapped by his mother, Marjorie Main, and shot dead on a fire escape by Joel McCrea. There were a lot of other good people in the movie, including Claire Trevor and Sylvia Sidney and Ward Bond, along with Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey, who had evidently wandered over from the Bowery. Lillian Hellman wrote the screenplay and William Wyler directed, but my favorite credit was costumes, by someone named Omar Kiam.

During Bogie’s death scene, Ilona reached over and took my hand.

She held it through to the end of the picture, and when she came back from the ladies’ room at intermission she reached to take my hand in both of hers. “Bear-naaard,” she said.

“Ilona.”

“I was afraid you would not be here tonight. All day I was afraid.”

“What made you think that?”

“I don’t know. When I rode off in the taxi last night fear clutched at my heart. I thought, ‘I will never see him again.’”

“Well, here I am.”

“I am so glad, Bear-naard.”

I gave her hand a squeeze.

The second feature was The Left Hand of God, one of Bogart’s last films. He plays an American pilot in China during the war, working for Lee J. Cobb, who’s a Chinese warlord. Cobb’s men kill a priest, and Bogart winds up escaping in the dead priest’s clothing and holing up at a mission, where he poses as the priest’s replacement, reminding me a little of Edward G. Robinson in Brother Orchid.

It all works out in the end.

Across the street, we sipped cappuccino and split an eclair. After a long silence she said, “I was so worried, Bear-naard.”

“Were you? I knew he and the nurse were going to wind up together. I thought he might have to kill Lee J. Cobb, but that was a nice touch, having them throw dice.”

“I am not talking about the film.”

“Oh.”

“I thought I had lost you. I thought you were on your way to another woman.”

“Didn’t I tell you it was a business appointment?”

“But you would say that, no? Even if it were not so.” She looked down at her hands. “I would understand if you were with another woman. I have been…distant. But I have had so much on my mind these past weeks. The only time I feel alive is when we are in the movies together. The rest of the time I can barely breathe.”

“What’s the matter, Ilona?”

She shook her head. “I can’t talk about it.”

“Sure you can.”

“Not now. Another time.” She sipped her cappuccino. “Tell me about your business appointment. Or is it a confidential matter?”

“Someone had a library for me to look at,” I said. “I usually do that sort of thing in the early evening, but we’ve been at the movies every night. I thought I would be safe scheduling it for late last night.”

“Because I have been hard to get, yes?”

“Well…”

“You have another library to look at tonight, Bear-naard?”

“No.”

“I have a few books. I do not think they are valuable, but maybe you can come and see them.” She extended her forefinger, ran it along my jawline, then touched it to my lips. “But perhaps you have another business appointment, and I will have to go home all by myself.”

It turned out she lived on Twenty-fifth Street between Second and Third avenues, in a fifth-floor walk-up over a shop called Simple Pleasures. They sold crystals and incense and tarot cards, and signs in the window advertised classes in witchcraft and bondage.

The stairs were steep, and there were lots of them. I could imagine what Captain Hoberman would have made of them.

She lived in one of the two rear apartments, just one room with a single window that looked across an airshaft to the blank wall of a much taller building on Twenty-sixth Street. She turned on the bare-bulb ceiling fixture, then switched it off as soon as she’d turned on a green-shaded brass student lamp on the little one-drawer desk, then turned that off after she’d lit the three candles that stood on top of an old-fashioned brass-bound footlocker in the far corner. The flames of the candles illuminated the artifacts of a little homemade shrine. There were photos, framed and unframed, an icon of a Madonna and child, another of a bearded sunken-eyed saint, and a collection of other small objects, including a quartz crystal that could have come from the shop downstairs.

Otherwise the apartment didn’t have much to make it hers. A pair of plastic milk cartons housed her books, and a bound broadloom remnant, stained