The Burglar on the Prowl (22 page)

T
here was a bell, of course, but I used the lion’s head door knocker and gave it a couple of good thumps. I heard footsteps, and then the door opened, and the man who’d opened it must have whistled a different tune at the breakfast table, because the face he was wearing didn’t look much like a smile button. I could only hope he didn’t have a gun in his pocket, because he didn’t appear at all glad to see me.

“Mr. Rothenberg,” he said.

Well, a lot of people get it wrong. Aside from relatives, I’ve never come across another Rhodenbarr. I suspect the name was the gift of an overworked immigration officer at Ellis Island, but what it may have been before then is anybody’s guess. People who hear it are apt to turn it into something else, while people who encounter it in print tend to mispronounce it. I don’t know why, it’s simple enough, ROAD-in-bar, but for some folks it turns into a tongue-twister.

“It’s Rhodenbarr,” I said. “And you’re Dr. Mapes.”

He was, but my saying so didn’t make him visibly happier. Aside from the downcast expression, I’d have to say he looked pretty good. I knew he was around Marty’s age, but his face was younger than his years, with no pouches under the eyes, no loose skin hanging
like crepe on his neck, and a minimum of the little lines that life etches into people’s faces.

His hair was dark, too, and he had a full head of it. Younger than his years, I thought, but they showed in the stoop of his shoulders and the liver spots on the backs of his hands. He might have sipped from the fountain of youth, and even splashed some of its waters on his face, but he hadn’t gone for full-body immersion.

He led me inside to the living room, where his wife was waiting. She’d set out a plate of sandwiches with their crusts cut off, along with a thermos of coffee and a pair of bone china cups and saucers. She invited me to make myself at home, and said she’d just leave us men alone, as she had to be off right away if she was going to be on time for her afternoon bridge game.

I decided that Mrs. Mapes, like her husband, looked young for her age, and then I wondered how I could know that, since I had no way of knowing how old she was. Then I worked it out that her face, firm and unlined, looked younger than the rest of her. She had a dumpy figure and an old lady’s walk, but if you just looked at her face…

And then, of course, the penny dropped. The man was a plastic surgeon, for God’s sake. You’d expect him to give his wife the most youthful face his craft could furnish. And, while he would hardly operate on himself, surely he’d avail himself of the services of a skilled colleague. It wouldn’t inspire confidence in a prospective patient to confront a plastic surgeon with his face sagging halfway to his waist, with a wart here and a wart there and deep wrinkles all around. It would be as disconcerting as a visit to a snaggle-toothed dentist. But the occasional nip and tuck, along with periodic injections of Botox, could make the years go away. Mapes’s own face was his own best advertisement.

And as for the hair, dark and abundant…well, damned if the old goat wasn’t wearing a rug. It was a very good one, but once I looked for it I could spot it for what it was, and right away I felt a lot more in control of the situation. Nothing gives you the upper hand like knowing the other guy is wearing somebody else’s hair.

We stood around until Mrs. Mapes had backed out of the driveway and driven off. Then he pointed to the spread on the coffee table. “My wife insisted on this,” he said. “She believes in applying a veneer of sociability to an essentially commercial transaction, and in this instance a distasteful one at that. But help yourself to sandwiches and coffee, if you like.”

“That’s awfully gracious of you,” I said, “but I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you clear all that out of here. There isn’t nearly enough to go around, and I’d hate for any of the others to feel left out.”

“Others?”

“I guess I forgot to tell you,” I said. “Company’s coming. Let’s see, we’ve got the sofa and the love seat and those chairs. We’re going to need more chairs. Why don’t you give me a hand, and for starters we’ll bring in the six ladderbacks from the dining room.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t want any other people coming here.”

“You didn’t even want me,” I said, “but that’s the way it goes. They’re on their way, and I couldn’t stop them now even if I wanted to. Come on, Doc. Don’t just stand there looking young. Grab a chair.”

I’d come up on the subway arriving right on schedule at one o’clock. It took a while to fill the living room with chairs, and we’d barely finished before the early birds began to show up for their worms. They kept coming, by ones or twos or threes, and I took over the duties of our reluctant host, meeting them at the door and ushering them to their seats. Most of them just went where I pointed them and waited in patient silence, but now and then somebody wanted to know just what the hell was going on. I told them more would be revealed.

Barbara Creeley was there, and so was Lacey Kavinoky, and neither knew what to make of the other’s presence. GurlyGurl turned out to be every bit as attractive as Carolyn had said, and closer to Laura Ashley than L. L. Bean. She sat next to Carolyn on the love
seat, but had drawn a few inches away from her when Barbara arrived.

Ray showed up with a trio in tow, including William Johnson (the date-rape artist, not the safe-deposit boxholder) and a pair of police officers, out of uniform but unmistakable all the same. One was a woman, and you could still tell she was a cop. I don’t know what it is that gives them away. Maybe it’s the way they stare at people without the least embarrassment.

The pair split up, each electing to remain standing, one alongside the front door, the other in the archway separating the living and dining rooms, and stared hard at the rest of us. Meanwhile Ray took an armchair and put his feet on the matching ottoman, pointing Johnson to the straight-backed wooden chair on his left. Johnson looked all right—he’d had thirty-six hours to shake off the effects of the Rohypnol—but he walked carefully, rather like a man who’d been kicked in the groin.

Next through the door was Marisol Maris, living up to her name, with her sea-washed blue eyes and her sun-warmed brown skin. Wally Hemphill had brought her, on my instructions. There were a few people who might need a lawyer by the time the day was over, but she was the only one who deserved a good one, and he might as well be with her from the jump.

They chose the couch, with Wally on one end and Marisol in the middle, and the seat beside her was claimed in a heartbeat by the next person who entered. He was a wispy young man with a wispy blond beard, and you probably would have guessed he was a painter even if he hadn’t used his blue jeans as a drop cloth. He was Marisol’s first cousin, from the old neighborhood in Brooklyn, and you’ll know which side of the family he was on when I tell you his name, Karlis Shenk.

So far everybody had rung the bell, but the next person used the knocker. I got the door, and in came three men in suits. The first and third were young and muscular, and if they didn’t spend as much time in the gym as William Johnson, they still looked capable of holding their own in a shoving match. Their suits were bargain specials from Men’s Wearhouse, while the man in the middle’s had
been made to measure. He was well-groomed and clean-shaven, and he looked like a successful businessman, and I suppose that’s what he was. He was also Johnson’s uncle, and his name was Michael Quattrone. He looked around, and the seat he picked was one that gave him a good view of the room while presenting his back to the room’s sole unbroken wall. His two companions stayed on their feet, and posted themselves alongside the two standing cops.

They were followed moments later by two more men in suits, but the new arrivals looked like neither businessmen nor muscle. They had to be government employees, and they were, as I learned when one of them showed me his federal ID. He withdrew it before I could catch his name, and I never did learn it, so I can’t give it to you. His partner didn’t show me any ID, or much respect, either, and they both found seats and sat on them like wannabe models in posture class.

Next came a tall, wraithlike man with a precise black goatee and close-cropped black hair topped with a beret, also black, which he took off upon entering the house. His slacks and turtleneck were black, as were the carpet slippers on his feet. He might have been a monk of some particularly ascetic order, or perhaps a Greenwich Village bohemian left over from the 1950s, but then he wouldn’t have been accompanied by a pair of hoodlums. His name was Georgi Blinsky, and mothers in Brighton Beach invoked it to scare their children.

Blinsky looked around the room, but the only person he seemed to notice was Michael Quattrone, whom he acknowledged with a curt nod. Quattrone nodded back at him, and Blinsky found a chair and sat in it, while his two thugs posted themselves at the room’s two entrances, where they glared at Quattrone’s thugs and ignored the cops.

Next came Colby Riddle, who’d just wanted something to read. He used the lion’s head knocker, but very tentatively, and was equally tentative when it came to mounting the threshold and coming into the house. “I’m still not sure why I’m here,” he said. “But here I am.”

I picked out a chair for him, not wanting to confound him with
choices, and got back to the door in time to open it for Sigrid Hesselblad, who was wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans out at the knees and no makeup and no lipstick, and who looked drop-dead gorgeous.

Next up was a Mr. Grisek, a short and pudgy fellow dressed like a pre-Glasnost delegate to an Eastern Bloc conference on tractor maintenance. He was in fact a Latvian diplomat, and he had a one-person entourage, and that one person deserted him at the door, returning to sit behind the wheel of the limo parked across the street. Grisek didn’t seem to know anybody in the room, nor did they know him; he took a seat and waited for something to happen.

He got there at 2:05, and I decided I’d wait five more minutes and then get the show on the road. I don’t know if you’ve been counting, but I think that came to twenty-two, including me but not including the guy in the limo. I may be forgetting someone. It was a big room, but we were doing a pretty good job of filling it.

Ray was giving me a look, and people were squirming in their chairs, and it was time to get going or serve them drinks, or else I was liable to find myself facing a mutiny. I moved into position and cleared my throat, and right on cue the doorbell rang. It was Marty Gilmartin, looking splendid in a powder-blue cashmere jacket over pale gray flannel slacks. His shirt was open at the neck, and he was wearing an ascot, and was the rare sort of man who could do so without looking like a dork.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he murmured. “I had a cabdriver from hell, and he must have been trying to find his way home.” I told him he was just in time, and he found himself a seat. He must have noticed Marisol Maris, and he’d have had to have spotted Crandall Rountree Mapes, aka The Shitheel, but he gave no sign of it.

My throat was already clear, but I cleared it again and got everybody’s attention. There was any number of ways I could have started things off, but there’s a lot to be said for tradition, and sticking with the tried and true.

“Good afternoon,” I said. “I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here…”

O
nce upon a time,” I said, “there were three independent republics on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania was on the west, Estonia was on the east, and the one in the middle was Latvia. They came into independent existence at the end of the First World War, and disappeared again at the onset of the Second. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Soviet Union grabbed up the Baltics. Then, when Hitler went to war with Russia two years later, the Wehrmacht marched through the Baltics on their way to Stalingrad.”

The Latvians in my audience seemed to be paying the most attention to this little history lesson, and they were the ones who already knew it.

“When the Nazis retreated,” I went on, “the Red Army marched in again, and the Soviets established each former republic as a member state of the USSR. But the hunger for independence never died in those countries, as evidenced by the rapidity with which they broke free when the Soviet Union began to fall apart under Gorbachev.

“Almost half a century before that, when the war ended, partisan bands hid out in the forests of Latvia and launched periodic assaults upon the Soviet occupying forces. For over twenty years these
Latvian wasps went on stinging the Russian bear. They couldn’t turn the tide, they were just a handful of poorly armed idealists, but they knew all they had to do was survive. As long as they were out there in the woods, the spark of Latvian independence could never be entirely extinguished.”

I looked around. Marisol had tears in the corners of her blue eyes, and her cousin Karlis looked as though he might burst into applause. Mr. Grisek, the Latvian attaché in the bad suit, was paying close attention, but didn’t seem as emotional about it.

But the rest of my audience was growing restive, with here and there an eye glazing over. I tried to hurry it along.

“Of course the Russians did what they could to squelch the unrest and wipe out the partisan bands. They didn’t give it top priority. If it was enough for the partisans to keep the cauldron simmering, so it was enough for the Soviets to keep a lid on it. Different men had that assignment over the years, all of their efforts falling somewhere between failure and success. Then, sometime in the early Seventies, they gave the job to a man named Valentine Kukarov.

“Kukarov was a Russian, born in Tashkent around the time the Russian winter was stopping the Nazi advance in its tracks. He was around thirty when they sent him to Riga, and he’d already achieved a high rank in the KGB. He went after the Latvian partisans the way William Gorgas went after yellow fever mosquitoes in Panama. Anyone suspected of anti-Soviet activity was executed as an enemy of the state. Anyone who might have knowledge of such activity was interrogated, and the question-and-answer sessions often ended in death. He wasn’t there long before Latvians started calling him the Black Scourge of Riga, and the name stayed with him when his superiors shifted him to another assignment. He got a promotion, because he’d done what nobody else could do. He didn’t stifle the desire for independence, nobody could have done that, but he left the citizenry in no position to do anything about it. Hundreds of partisans had been killed, hundreds more were shipped to the Gulag, and thousands of ordinary Latvian citizens
were relocated to remote regions of the USSR, their places in Latvia taken by Russians more likely to be loyal subjects of the men in power.

“Somewhere along the way, Kukarov stopped being all that loyal himself. On an overseas assignment, he got turned by an American agent who got him to double. He went on for a few years playing both ends against the middle, until it was clear that his KGB bosses were catching on to him, whereupon he told his CIA control he wanted to defect.

“They told him lots of luck, but you’re on your own. It was one thing to co-opt the Black Scourge of Riga and make clandestine use of him, but it was quite another to welcome him into the land of the free and help him cram for his naturalization test.”

“Well, that’s the fucking government for you,” said Michael Quattrone.

A few heads turned at that, but when he didn’t say anything further they turned back to me.

“In 1987,” I said, “Kukarov came over on his own. He must have had his pick of fake passports, and an entry visa for the US wouldn’t have been hard for him to arrange. He’d already shaved his heavy black beard, and as soon as he got here he bought himself a blond wig, plucked his bushy black eyebrows, and dyed them to match the wig. He wasn’t worried that the KGB would stay up nights trying to find him. The only thing he had to worry about was the Latvian-American community, and he wasn’t greatly worried, because he’d been careful all his life about not having his picture taken. He was fairly sure nobody had a decent photo of him. They might have a description, but it no longer fit him, so what good would it do them?

“Then Latvia became independent. And, even worse from Kukarov’s point of view, the Soviet Union collapsed and access to secret KGB files was suddenly a lot easier to come by. And the KGB had several nice clear photographs of him. Of course he was a little older now, and he kept the eyebrows plucked and dyed, and shaved twice a day, and never went anywhere without the blond wig.

“Add in the fact that more Latvians were finding their way into
the country, either as immigrants or as embassy staff. It had been twenty years since the heyday of the Black Scourge of Riga, but that didn’t mean anybody was ready to forgive and forget. If someone who knew him when were to take a hard look at him and got to imagining him with dark hair and bushy eyebrows, well, that wouldn’t be so great. Where could he go, Australia? There were plenty of Latvians in Australia. And he was past fifty, and too old to start over somewhere new.

“He came up with a way out. Plastic surgery. And which eminent plastic surgeon do you think he picked?”

Mapes knew this was coming, he must have seen it coming a mile off, but he still winced a little. I was more interested in watching some other faces, only a few of which turned to look at the good doctor.

“The physician he chose,” I went on, “was a board-certified plastic surgeon with an excellent professional reputation. He did the usual run of nose jobs and facelifts and liposuction and tummy tucks, putting caviar on the table by making the well-to-do a little easier to look at. He also did a good deal of reconstructive surgery on burn victims and accident survivors and children born with facial birth defects. A lot of his work with kids was what lawyers would call
pro bono
. I don’t know if doctors would call it that or something else, but whatever you call it he didn’t get paid for it.”

I glanced over at Marty, who appeared surprised. Nobody, I’d have to tell him, can be a shitheel a hundred percent of the time. It’s too exhausting.

“Somewhere along the way,” I said, “this doctor became first acquainted and then involved with what we might call the criminal element. Maybe he found criminals fascinating. Many of us do. Or maybe he just saw a way to turn an extra dollar, a dollar to be paid in cash, and one he could thus forget to report when he filed his tax return.”

The two government men tried to keep straight faces, but they weren’t very good at it. I had their attention now, and it showed.

“He did some favors. Took out bullets and cleaned the wounds
without making a report, the way the law says you have to. Maybe he wrote out a few death certificates, putting down cardiac arrest as the cause of death. Well, it always is. If somebody cuts your throat or puts a bullet in the back of your head, you die when your heart stops beating. So he wasn’t exactly lying…

“Still, he was heroically overqualified for that sort of work, and it was only a question of time before someone made better use of his abilities. He became the man to see if you wanted to change your face to one the law wouldn’t recognize. The people who needed his services would pay big money, and they’d pay it in cash, and wouldn’t try to deduct it from their own taxes, either. And there was no hospital cutting into the pie, because he had to do the work in the privacy of his own office. That was generally safe enough with facial surgery, and if anything went wrong, well, he could just fill out the death certificate appropriately. But why should anything go wrong? Nothing ever did, and it wasn’t long before he’d paid off the mortgage on the big house in Riverdale and had a nice cash cushion in the bargain.”

That got some heads to turn. Whoever hadn’t already figured it out now knew that their host for the afternoon was the very doctor I was talking about.

So why not call him by name?

“One day,” I said, “Dr. Crandall R. Mapes had a visitor, referred by one of his associates in the world of organized crime. The man wore a blond wig and explained the steps he’d already taken to alter his appearance. But he still had the same face underneath it all, and he wanted a new one.

“Dr. Mapes agreed to take him as a patient, and the two settled on a price. Mapes took pictures, as he always did for every client, a group of shots showing the subject’s face from various angles. He studied the photographs at length, devised a plan, and, on the appointed day, performed the first of a series of surgeries upon the face of Valentine Kukarov.”

“You’re slandering me in my own home,” Mapes said, “in front of a roomful of witnesses.”

“They say it ain’t bragging if it’s true,” I told him, “and the same thing holds for slander.”

“You can’t prove any of this.” He got to his feet. “Allegations, nothing but allegations. I’m damned if I’m going to listen to allegations.” I don’t know if he was going for the front door or the dining room, but his body language was saying
See ya later, Allegator.

He didn’t get very far. Before he could take the first step, the two feds rose to their feet, while the two trios of cops and goons at the room’s two exits all but linked arms to block his flight. That gave him pause, and then Michael Quattrone said, “Sit down, Mapes,” and he sat.

“The operations,” I said, “were a success. Dr. Mapes gave Kukarov a new nose and refigured his jawline. He shaved his cheekbones to make him look less Slavic, and took ten to fifteen years off his appearance by lifting what had begun to droop, tightening the loose skin on the neck, and doing a little work around and under the eyes. He got rid of a scar at the side of Kukarov’s mouth. Nobody knew about it back in Latvia, he’d grown the beard to hide it, but it was a distinguishing mark in the American version of Kukarov, and Mapes got rid of it for him. He pitched the blond hairpiece, reworked the hairline with a combination of surgery and electrolysis, improved the eyebrows permanently with some more electrolysis, and taught his patient to dye his hair and eyebrows a light brown that was becoming enough while less attention-getting than what he’d had. Besides”—I glanced pointedly at Mapes, who glow-ered back from beneath his rug—“sooner or later someone recognizes even the best wig for what it is, and starts wondering what you’d look like without it.”

“So he fixed him up good,” Ray said. “Then what?”

“Then he took some more photographs,” I said, “and collected the balance of his fee, and sent the Black Scourge of Riga on his way.”

“Excuse me,” said Grisek, the man from the Latvian embassy. “Kukarov allowed him to retain these photographs?”

“Certainly not. He’d always been cautious to the point of paranoia on the subject of photos, and now that he had a new face he certainly didn’t want pictures of it floating around.”

“Ah.”

“Mapes insisted on taking the photos,” I said, “because he needed them for reference while the work was in progress. The surgeries took months, and he took more shots along the way to chart his progress. And he snapped a last batch upon completion as well, so that he and his patient could view them side by side, Before and After, and see just how substantive a change Mapes had worked in Kukarov’s appearance.”

“That’s standard,” Mapes said. “Everyone in the field does it.”

“That’s what you told Kukarov. And he let you do it because you assured him that, when your work was over, all copies of the photos would be destroyed.”

“The man insisted.”

“As other men had insisted before him. And you agreed, as you had agreed before. But you didn’t keep your word, did you? You held on to four photos, mug shots, really. Before and after, full-face and profile. Just as you kept of all your patients, legitimate and criminal.”

He winced a little at the last word, then rallied to tell me what a valuable, even essential, reference library the photos constituted.

“Pardon my Latvian,” I said, “but that’s a load of crap. You kept the pictures to feed your ego. You knew you shouldn’t have the pictures, so you didn’t keep them with the rest. Instead you Scotch-taped them to the pages of a book and stuck it on the shelf in your office. Maybe you got a kick out of it, having it right out in plain sight, where anybody could pick it up and page through it. But of course nobody did.
Principles of Organic Chemistry, Volume Two
. Sounds like a real page-turner, doesn’t it?”

“They were readily available for reference,” he said, “yet secreted so that no one would find them. You said it yourself, Rothenberg.” I didn’t correct him. The man was hopeless. “Even if you were searching the place, you’d never pick up that book. And no one would stumble on it by accident.”

“Suppose they’d read Volume One, and didn’t want to miss the sequel? Never mind. Let’s say the photos were safe there. But you didn’t just drool over them in private. Every once in a while you
couldn’t resist pulling the book down and showing off. Every now and then you just had to impress some sweet young thing by showing her the dangerous men whose faces you’d rearranged.”

“They didn’t know the men, they weren’t going to tell anybody, it was perfectly safe…”

His voice trailed off. Everyone was staring at him now, except for Marty, who was gazing thoughtfully at Marisol, and Marisol, who was examining her feet.

“If it was so damn safe,” I said, “how come we’re all here? How come four people are dead?” I sighed. “It might have been safe. Unethical, dishonest, illegal, but safe. Except you forgot one thing. You forgot the long arm of coincidence.”