come along?”
“Of course. And I’ll dress up like we said last night? Nothing’s changed, Bernie.”
I let that pass and looked at my watch. “It’s a quarter after ten,” I said. “Figure two hours to do everything we have to do plus a margin for error, so that makes what? I’ll meet you at the restaurant at twelve-thirty. How does that sound?”
“It sounds fine.”
I got the wig and cap and she came around and helped me with the bobby pins. I wanted to do it myself but I forced myself to stand still while she poked around there. “If I’m not there by one o’clock,” I said, “you can assume I got arrested.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Lots of things aren’t. Don’t forget to lock up. The streets are full of burglars.”
“Bernie—”
“I mean it. It’s a jungle out there.”
“Bernie—”
“What?”
“Just be careful.”
“Oh, I’m always careful,” I said, and let myself out.
Chapter
Eleven
In the taxi heading uptown I thought about Ellie (whom I found myself still thinking of as Ruth) and wondered why I’d gotten so steamed with her. She told me a lie or three, but so what? On balance she’d placed herself in jeopardy to help a total stranger who looked to be a murderer in the bargain. On the strength of her vaunted intuition she’d put herself on the line for me. So what if she kept her name to herself? That seemed like no more than a sensible precaution—if I got nailed by the long arm of the law, I wouldn’t be able to drag her into it. Not so long as I didn’t know who she was.
And then, when the old animal passions began to churn, she felt bad about the deception. So she told me her name, and everything was right out in the open where it belonged.
So what was my problem?
Well, for openers, I’d been honest with her. And that was a new experience for me. In all my previous relationships with women, a central fact was always kept secret. Whatever else women learned about me—what I ate for breakfast, what I wore to bed, how I like to make love, whether I preferred the smooth or the crunchy peanut butter—they never got to find out what I did for a living. I would explain that I was between positions or that I had a private income or was in investments. Occasionally, if we were not likely to be more to each other than two ships passing in the night, I would equip myself with an interesting business or profession for the duration. At one time or another I had been a magazine illustrator, a neurosurgeon, a composer of modern classical music, a physical education instructor, a stockbroker, and an Arizona land developer.
And I’d always been comfortable playing one of these roles. I’d always told myself that I did this sort of thing because I couldn’t afford to let a lady friend know what I really did to support myself, but now I wondered if that was true after all. The more I thought about some of those ladies, the more I got the feeling that they might have reacted pretty much the way Ellie did. Burglary, after all, is the sort of career people are apt to perceive as exciting, the moral implications notwithstanding, and it’s been my observation that most women have highly adaptable moral systems.
I’d kept my career a secret because I liked being secretive. Because I didn’t want anyone to know me all that well.
With Ruth—no, dammit, Ellie, the woman’s name is Ellie, at least until she tells me different—with Ellie, I had no choice. And as a result she’d gotten very close to the real Bernard Rhodenbarr, and at the same time I’d found out what it was like to be intimate with a girl without holding so much of myself in reserve.
And all along I was whispering the wrong name into her ear. The shoe was on the other foot. That’s what it was. All those years of automatically lying to women and now one of them had turned the tables, and I didn’t seem to like it much.
I let the cab drop me right at my door. Not the front door, though, but the service entrance around the corner. I gave the driver one of Peter Alan Martin’s limp five-dollar bills and sent him on his way. Easy come, easy go.
I’d been prepared to pick the service entrance lock in broad daylight, that being safer on the balance than slipping past the doorman,