The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (2 page)

N
ow, thirty-two hours later, I rang one of four bells in the vestibule of his brownstone. He buzzed me in and I climbed three flights of stairs. He was waiting for me at the top of the stairs and led me into his floor-through apartment. It was very tastefully appointed, with a wall of glassed-in bookshelves, a gem of an Aubusson carpet floating on the wall-to-wall broadloom, and furniture that managed to look both elegant and comfortable.

One deplorable effect of a lifetime of larceny is a tendency of mine to survey every room I walk into, eyes ever alert for something worth stealing. It’s a form of window shopping, I guess. I wasn’t going to take anything of Candlemas’s—I’m a professional burglar, not a kleptomaniac—but I kept my eyes open just the same. I spotted a Chinese snuff bottle, skillfully carved from rose quartz, and a group of ivory netsuke, including a fat beaver
whose tail seemed to have gone the way of all flesh.

I admired the carpet, and Candlemas showed me around and pointed out a couple of others, including a Tibetan tiger rug, an old one. I said I was sorry to be late and he said I was right on time, that it was the third member of our party who was late, but that he should be arriving at any moment. I turned down a drink and accepted a cup of coffee, and was not surprised to find it rich and full-bodied and freshly brewed. He talked a little about Winthrop Mackworth Praed, and speculated on what he might have done if tuberculosis hadn’t shortened his life. He’d had a seat in the House of Commons; would he have gone further in politics and let poetry take a back seat? Or might he have grown disillusioned with political life, quit writing the topical partisan doggerel he’d turned to toward the end, and gone on to produce mature work to put his early verses in the shade?

We were batting that one around when the doorbell rang, and Candlemas crossed the room to buzz in the new arrival. We waited for him at the top of the stairs, and he turned out to be a thickset older fellow with a pug nose and a broad face. He had a drinker’s complexion and a smoker’s cough, but you could have been deaf and blind and still known how he got through the days. Unless you had a bad cold, say, and couldn’t smell the booze on his breath and the smoke in his hair and clothes. Even so you might have guessed from the
way he took the stairs, pausing on the landings to catch his breath, and still having to take his time on the final flight of steps.

“Captain Hoberman,” Candlemas greeted him, and shook his hand. “And this is—”

“Mr. Thompson,” I said quickly. “Bill Thompson.”

We shook hands warily. Hoberman was wearing a gray suit, a blue-and-tan striped tie, and brown shoes. The suit looked like what you used to see on third-level Soviet bureaucrats before perestroika. The only man I knew who could look that bad in a suit was a cop named Ray Kirschmann, and Ray’s suits were expensive and well-cut; they just looked to have been tailored for somebody else. Hoberman’s outfit was a cheap suit. It wouldn’t have looked good on anybody.

We went into Candlemas’s apartment and reviewed the plan. Captain Hoberman was expected within the hour on the twelfth floor of a high-security apartment building at Seventy-fourth and Park. He was my ticket into the building. Once he got me past the doorman, he’d go keep his appointment while I kept an appointment of my own four floors below.

“You will be alone,” he assured me, “and uninterrupted. Captain Hoberman, you will be how long on the twelfth floor? An hour?”

“Less than that.”

“And you, Mr. uh Thomas, will be in and out in twenty minutes, although you could take all night
if you wished. Should the two of you arrange to meet up and leave the building together? What do you think?”

I thought I should have skipped the whole thing and hopped into the first cab when I had the chance. Instead of riding off with a beautiful woman, I’d wound up learning more than I wanted to know about Chinese herbs. I’d spent the past two weeks watching Humphrey Bogart movies, and it seemed to have done something to my judgment.

“It sounds unnecessarily complicated,” I said. “It’s not all that hard to get out of a building, unless you’ve got a TV set under your arm or a dead body over your shoulder.”

It’s not that hard to get into a building, either, if you know what you’re doing. I’d said as much to Candlemas the previous day, suggesting that we could get along without Captain Hoberman. But he wasn’t having any. The captain was part of the package. I needed my captain about as much as Toni Tennille needed hers, and had as little chance of dumping him.

Hoberman paused at each landing on the way down the stairs, too, and when we got outside he took hold of the cast-iron railing while he got his bearings. “You tell me,” he said. “Where’s the best place to get a cab?”

“Let’s walk,” I said. “It’s only three blocks.”

“One of ’em’s crosstown.”

“Even so.”

He shrugged, lit a cigarette, and off we went. I counted that a victory, but changed my mind when he steamed on into the Wexford Castle, an Irish bar on Lexington Avenue. “Time for a quick one,” he announced, and ordered a double shot of vodka. The bartender, who looked like a man who’d seen everything but remembered none of it, poured from a bottle with a label showing a Russian wearing a fur hat and a fierce grin. I started to say that we were supposed to get to our destination by midnight, but before I had the sentence out the captain had downed his drink.

“Something for you?”

I shook my head.

“Then let’s get going,” he said. “Supposed to get there before midnight. That’s when the late shift comes on duty.”

We hit the street again, and the drink seemed to loosen him up. “Here’s a question for you,” he said. “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

“It’s a question, all right.”

“Known that fellow a long time, have you?”

Thirty-two hours, getting on for thirty-three. “Not too long,” I admitted.

“What do you make of this? When he told me about you, he didn’t use your actual name. He called you something else.”

“Oh?”

“I want to say Road and Track, but that’s not it.
Road and Car? Makes no sense. Roadieball?” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, but it sure wasn’t Thompson. Wasn’t even close.”

“Well, he’s getting on in years,” I said.

“Hardening of the brain,” he said. “That how you read it?”

“I don’t think it’s that extreme, but—”

“It’s enough to worry me,” he said, “and I don’t mind telling you that. There’s a whole lot at stake here, a whole lot of people’s hopes riding on this. But I don’t guess I have to tell you that, do I?”

“I guess not.”

“Talk too much anyway,” he said. “Always been my problem.” And he didn’t say another word until we got to the building.

It was a fortress, all right. The Boccaccio, one of the great Park Avenue apartment buildings, twenty-two stories tall, its sumptuous Art Deco lobby equipped with enough potted plants to start a jungle. There was a doorman out front and a concierge behind the desk, and damned if the elevator didn’t have an attendant, too. All three of them wore maroon livery with gold braid, and a pretty sight they were. They wore white gloves, too, which almost spoiled the effect, giving them the look of Walt Disney animals until you got used to it.

“Captain Hoberman,” Hoberman told the concierge. “I’m here to see Mr. Weeks.”

“Oh, yes, sir. Mr. Weeks is expecting you.” He
checked his book, made a little note in it, then looked up expectantly at me.

“And this is Mr. Thompson,” Hoberman said. “He’s with me.”

“Very good, sir.” Another little note in the book. Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a piece of cake getting in here on my own. Still—

The elevator attendant had been watching all this from across the lobby, and probably heard it, too; Hoberman had a booming voice, audible, I suppose, from stem to stern. When we approached he said, “Twelve, gentlemen?”

“Twelve-J,” Hoberman said. “Mr. Weeks.”

“Very good, sir.” And up we went, and out we popped on twelve. The attendant pointed us toward the J apartment and watched after us to make sure we found our way. When we got there Hoberman shot me a look and cocked a bushy eyebrow. The stairwell, my immediate goal, was just steps from where we stood, but the elevator was still within my view and the attendant was still doing his job. I stuck out a finger and poked the doorbell.

“But what will I say to Weeks?” Hoberman wondered. Softly, thanks be to God.

“Just introduce me,” I said. “I’ll take it from there.”

The door opened. Weeks turned out to be a short pudgy fellow with bright blue eyes. He was wearing a hat in the house, a black homburg, but
it was his hat and his house, so I guess he had the right. The rest of his outfit was less formal. A pair of suspenders with roosters on them held up the pants of a Brooks Brothers suit. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his tie was off and his expression was understandably puzzled.

“Cappy,” he said to Hoberman. “Good to see you. And this is—”

“Bill Thompson,” Hoberman said. And off to the side, and not a moment too soon, I heard the elevator door draw shut.

“I live in the building,” I said. “Ran into—” Cappy? No, better not “—this gentleman in the lobby, got so caught up in conversation I rode right on past my stop.” I laughed heartily. “Good to meet you, Mr. Weeks. Good evening, gentlemen.”

And I walked on down the hall, opened the fire door, and scampered down the stairs.

At least there were no cameras in the stairwells.

The Boccaccio was wired for closed-circuit TV. I’d seen the bank of monitors behind the concierge’s desk. One showed the laundry room, and others scanned the street in front, the passenger and service elevators, the service entrance around the corner on Seventy-fourth, and the parking spaces in the subbasement.

The building had stairwells at either end, so to include them in your closed-circuit surveillance you’d need two cameras on each floor, and an equal number of screens for the concierge to go
blind staring at. But there’s another way to do it: one or more of the screens can be set up to receive multiple channels, and whoever’s monitoring the operation can sit back with a remote control and channel-surf the hours away.

I didn’t think that was the setup they had here, but I couldn’t know until I was actually in the stairwell. I hadn’t been all that worried, though. I’d guessed stairwell surveillance was unlikely, and even if they had it I figured I could get around it.

See, when you’ve got that high a level of protection, you never have an incident. Nobody who doesn’t belong ever gets across the threshold in the first place, not even the guys from Chinese restaurants who want nothing more than to slip a menu under every door in Manhattan. With that much security, naturally you feel secure. And, when nothing bad ever happens, you stop paying close attention to your own security devices.

Look what happened at Chernobyl. They had a gauge with a warning device on it, and when the crunch came it didn’t fail, it worked the way it was supposed to. And some poor dimwit looked at it and decided it must be broken because it was giving an abnormal reading. So he ignored it.

This notwithstanding, I was just as glad to know I wasn’t going to wind up on
America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Four floors below I made sure the hall was clear, then walked the length of it to 8-B. I rang the door
bell. I’d been assured there would be nobody home, but Candlemas could be wrong about that, or he could have steered me accidentally to the wrong apartment. So I rang the doorbell, and when nothing happened I took the time to ring it again. Then I fished out my set of lockpicking tools and let myself in.

Nothing to it. If you’re looking for state-of-the-art locks, don’t look in a luxury building on Park Avenue. Look in the tenements and brownstones where there’s neither doorman nor concierge. That’s where you’ll find window gates and alarm systems and police locks. 8-B had two locks, a Segal and a Rabson, both of them standard pin-and-tumbler cylinders, solid and reliable and about as challenging as the crossword puzzle in
TV Guide.

I knocked off one lock, paused for breath, and knocked off the other one—and all in not much more time than it takes to tell about it. In a funny way, I was almost sorry it was so easy.

See, lockpicking is a skill, and on the list of technical accomplishments it ranks several steps below brain surgery. With proper instruction, anyone with minimal manual dexterity can learn the basics. I’d taught Carolyn, for example, and she’d become fairly good at opening simple locks, until she stopped practicing and got rusty.

But for me it’s different. I have a gift for it, and it’s more than a matter of technique. There’s something otherworldly about the whole enterprise,
some altered state I slip into when I’m breaking and entering. I can’t really describe it, and it would probably bore you if I could, but it’s Magic Time for me, it really is. That’s why I’m as good as I am at it, and it also helps explain why I can’t stay away from it.

When the second lock sighed and surrendered, I felt the way Casanova must have felt when the girl said yes—grateful for the conquest, but sorry he hadn’t had to work just a little bit harder for it. I sighed and surrendered my own self, turned the knob, stepped inside, and drew the door quickly shut.

It was dark as a coal mine during a power failure. I gave my eyes a minute to accustom themselves to the darkness, but it didn’t get a whole lot brighter. This was good news, actually. It meant the drapes were drawn and the apartment was light-tight, which in turn meant I could flick on all the lights I wanted. I didn’t have to skulk around in the darkness, bumping into things and cursing.

I used my flashlight first to make sure that all the drapes were drawn, and indeed they were. Then, with my gloves on, I flicked the nearest light switch and blinked at the glare. I put my flashlight back in my pocket and took a deep breath, giving myself a moment to relish that little shiver of pure delight that comes over me when I’ve let myself into some place in which I have no business being.