The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,51

managed to lay hands on it?” His eyes sought mine. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

“No.”

“How could you? We knew each other many years ago, Cappy Hoberman and I. Along with Wood, of course, and Rennick and Bateman. The five of us were known back Stateside as the Bob and Charlie Show. Rennick and Bateman were both named Robert, you see, and the rest of us were all Charles. Working together, we had to modify our names. Alliteration suggested Rob for Rennick and Bob for Bateman. I remained Charles, but Wood became Chuck, which was what he’d been called as a boy. And we called Hoberman Cappy.”

“Because he was a captain?”

“Ha! All he ever captained was his college football team. He had the air of a leader, that’s all. And we didn’t have ranks. We weren’t military. Officially, we didn’t exist.” He took a sip of coffee. “These are ancient cats I’m letting out of the bag. I can’t think anyone would care at this late date. The Cold War’s over, isn’t it? I don’t know that we’ve won it, but the other side does seem to have lost. Or at least to have wandered off the playing field.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, ages ago. When was Masaryk killed in Czechoslovakia? You wouldn’t remember, but I ought to. 1948? Our little adventure began the year after that. My God, I was only a boy. I thought I was a grown man, I thought I was mature beyond my years, but I must have been callow beyond sufferance.”

“And you were in Czechoslovakia?”

“Why would you think that? Oh, because I mentioned Masaryk. No, we were south and east of Czechoslovakia. We were in the Balkans, mostly. Slipping across borders, exchanging code words in café’s and back alleys. We thought it was a game, and we believed what we were doing was very much in the national interest. And I daresay we were wrong on both counts.”

“What did you do?”

“Raised people’s hopes and risked their lives, and risked our own as well.” He was silent for a moment, thinking about it. “None of it matters now,” he said, “and it can’t have much to do with your recent visit, can it?”

“I think it does.”

“How, for God’s sake? It was almost half a century ago. Most of those people are dead.”

“Let me ask you this,” I said. “Were you ever in a country called Anatruria?”

“Sweet Christ,” he said. “That’s no country. Before Garibaldi and the Risorgimento, they used to say that Italy was just a geographical expression. Anatruria wasn’t even that.”

“They had a king, didn’t they?”

“Old Vlados? I’m not sure if he ever set foot inside his own purported realm. They proclaimed independence around the time of the Treaty of Versailles, you know, but it seems to me they did so from a distance. By the time I heard mention of Anatruria it was three decades later and Vlados was an old man living where you’d expect him to be, in Franco’s Spain or Salazar’s Portugal, I can’t remember which. Anatrurian independence was an idea whose time had come and gone. No one gave it a thought, no one outside of a handful of ethnocentric lunatics who’d been marrying their cousins for a few generations too many.”

“And the five of you?”

“And the five of us, the Bob and Charlie Show. We were supposed to foment a rebellion. Now who could have thought that was a good idea? Or a feasible one?” He shook his head. “A few years later I was back in the States, out of the game. And there was an uprising in Hungary, students hurling Molotov cocktails, trying to take out Russian tanks with bottles of gasoline. The rabbit died there.”

“The rabbit?”

“Bob Bateman. We all had animal code names. I was the mouse, of course. That’s why Cappy brought me the little carving, though how he laid hands on it is something else again. Bateman was the rabbit. Well, he looked a little like a rabbit, didn’t he? A rabbity face, a rabbity nose, a rabbit’s timid manner, although there was nothing timid about him when the chips were down. I didn’t look much like a mouse, but it was somebody’s contention that I was shy in a presumably mouselike fashion. I don’t think I was shy, but I may have been.”

“What about Hoberman?”

“He was the ram, putting his head down and charging straight ahead. Playing college football, I imagine he ran every play right into the middle of the