The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,93

so easy to lay it aside. I told you how I had never thought of Anatruria. Now I could scarcely think of anything else.”

“Who could even say how much the wealth might be?” This from Rasmoulian, his eyes wide at the possibilities. “It could be nothing. It could be millions.”

“The money is the least of it,” the king said. “What am I to do? That is the only question of any importance.”

Ray didn’t understand, and said so.

“For decades,” the king said, “the world’s few reigning kings have been anachronisms, while uncrowned royals have been little more than a joke. But all of a sudden this is not so. There are monarchist movements throughout all of the old Eastern Bloc. Portions of portions of nations are all at once reaching out and achieving sovereignty. If Slovenia and Slovakia can join the United Nations, is an independent Anatruria such an impossibility? If Juan Carlos can be king of Spain, and if men can seriously urge a Romanov restoration in Russia—the Romanovs! in Russia!—”

“Not entirely out of the question,” Tsarnoff allowed.

“—then who is to say Anatruria cannot have a king? And who am I to deny my people if indeed they want me?” He smiled suddenly, and now the resemblance was unmistakable—to Ilona’s photograph of Vlados, to Mikhail’s own photo of his father resplendent in uniform. “And so I came to New York,” he said, “to get away from Europe, and to decide what I shall do next.”

“It looks as though Hugo Candlemas followed you here,” I said. “As I said, he picked me to steal the portfolio from you, although I didn’t know what I was stealing or whose apartment I was taking it from.”

“Not like you, Bernie,” Ray said.

“I know,” I said. “It wasn’t. I don’t know why I went for it, and all I can come up with is a combination of his charm and all those Bogart movies I was watching. He made the proposition one afternoon, and the following night I was with a man named Hoberman, on my way to…excuse me, but what do I call you? Your Highness? Your Majesty?”

“‘Michael’ will be fine.”

“I was on my way to Michael’s apartment.”

“Hoberman,” Ray said. “That’s a name you mentioned before, Bernie.”

I nodded. “Cappy Hoberman was the ram, one of the five agents in Anatruria. Candlemas paired me with him because Hoberman could escort me into the high-security building where Michael lives. He could go there on the pretext of visiting another tenant in the building.”

“Which is where I come in,” Charlie Weeks said.

“Interesting,” Tsarnoff said. “Of all the buildings in all the cities in America, the young king moves into yours.”

The line had a familiar ring to it. I had an answer, but Weeks got there first. “No coincidence at all,” he said. “Michael gave me a call as soon as he got to New York. He’d never met me, of course, but I’d kept in touch with Todor ever since I helped him get out of Anatruria two steps ahead of the KGB. Michael needed a place to stay, and I knew there was an owner in the building looking to sublet, and he liked the place and moved in right away.”

“As it turned out,” I said, “I didn’t steal the portfolio. I’ll admit I tried, Michael, but I couldn’t find it.”

“There was one night last week when I took it from the apartment,” he said. “Ilona thought a friend of hers should see one of the documents.”

“I must have just missed it. Meanwhile, Cappy Hoberman went back to Candlemas’s apartment, where somebody stabbed him to death.”

“Wait a minute,” Ray said. “That’s the guy? Hoberman?”

“Right.”

“Cap Hob,” he said, staring hard at me. “Cap Hob. Captain Hoberman.”

“Right.”

“But why in the hell would he—”

I held up a hand. “It’s complicated,” I said, “and it’s probably easier all around if I just tell it straight through. Cappy Hoberman was stabbed to death in the Candlemas apartment. But he lived long enough to leave a message. He printed C-A-P-HO-B in block capitals on the side of a handy attaché case.”

“Which happened to belong to a certain burglar we all know,” Ray said.

“Didn’t it,” I said sourly. “He died, and left a dying message that didn’t make sense to anyone. Meanwhile, Hugo Candlemas disappeared.”

“So this Candlemas killed him,” Ilona said.

“It seems obvious, doesn’t it? But who was Candlemas? Well, he was someone who knew Hoberman and Weeks, someone who was familiar with Anatrurian history and had come over from Europe to keep