The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,8
Hugo Candlemas had advised me. “You won’t find anything else worth the taking. The man’s some sort of company stooge. He doesn’t collect anything, doesn’t go in for jewelry. You won’t find any substantial cash on hand.”
And what was in the portfolio?
“Papers. We’re bit players in some sort of corporate takeover, you and I. At the very least, we’ll split a reward for recovering the documents, and your share of that will be a minimum of five thousand dollars. If I can entertain offers from the other side, you might net three or four times that amount.” He beamed at the prospect. “The portfolio’s leather with gold stamping. There’s a desk, and if it’s not right on top you’ll find it in one of the drawers. They may be locked. Will that present a problem?”
I told him it never had in the past.
There was a desk, all right, Scandinavian in design, made of birch and given a natural finish. There was nothing on top of it but a hand-tooled leather box and an 8x10 photo in a silver frame. The box held pencils and paper clips. The photo, in black and white, showed a man in uniform. No GI Joe, this lad; his outfit was fancy enough to get him a place behind the desk at the Boccaccio. He was wearing glasses and a toothy grin, which made him look like Theodore Roosevelt, and he had his hair parted in the middle, which made him look like a drawing by John Held, Jr.
He looked familiar, but I couldn’t tell you why.
I pulled up a chair, sat down at the desk and got to work. There were three drawers on each side and one in the middle, and I tried the middle one first, and it was open. And, right smack in the middle of it, there sat a calfskin portfolio, tan in color, stamped in gold with an ornamental border and a network of fleurs-de-lis.
Remarkable.
I sat still for a moment, just looking at the thing and listening to the silence. And then the silence was broken by the unmistakable sound of a key in a lock.
If I’d been doing anything—shuffling through drawers, opening closet doors, picking a lock—I’d have missed it, or reacted too late. But I registered it instantly and sprang from the chair as if I’d been waiting for that very sound all my life.
Years ago, before my time and yours, there was a baseball player in the old Negro Leagues named Cool Papa Bell. I gather he was capable of swift and sudden movement; he was frequently compared favorably to greased lightning, and it was said of him that he could turn off the bedroom light and be in bed before the room got dark. I had always thought of that as colorful hyperbole, but now I’m not so sure. Because I shoved the drawer closed, switched off a lamp, switched off another lamp, raced across the room to kill the overhead light, dove into the hall closet, and yanked the door shut, and it seems to me I was holed up there, flattening myself against the coats, before the lights went out.
If not, I came close.
More to the point, I had the closet door shut before the other door was opened. If my intruder hadn’t fumbled a little with the keys, he’d have walked in on me. On the other hand, if he was thin-blooded enough to have worn a topcoat, or anxious enough to have toted an umbrella, he’d be opening the closet door any second now, and then what was I going to do?
Time, I thought. Upstate, with low companions and nothing good to read. But maybe it wouldn’t come to that. Maybe I could talk my way out of it, or bribe a cop, or get Wally Hemphill to work a legal miracle. Maybe I could—
There were two of them. I could hear them talking, a man and a woman. I couldn’t make out what they were saying—the closet door was thick and fit snugly—but I could hear them well enough to distinguish the pitch of their voices. Two of them, a man and a woman, in the apartment.
Oh, wonderful. Candlemas had assured me I’d have plenty of time, that the portfolio’s current owner was out for the evening. But he was quite obviously back, and he had his girlfriend with him, and all I could hope for was that they would go to sleep fairly soon, and without opening the closet door.