The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (20 page)

Tsarnoff and Rasmoulian still had their hats on, but Weeks took his off when he caught sight of Carolyn. His ever-watchful eyes scanned the room, and a smile spread on his face.

“Gregorius,” he said. “How nice to see you again. And Tiglath. Always a pleasure. I’d no idea you two gentlemen would be here.” As if we hadn’t discussed the two of them at great length. He smiled happily at Wilfred, who stared hard at him in return. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” he said. “Gregorius, won’t you introduce me to your young friend?”

Tsarnoff said, “Charles, this is Wilfred. Wilfred, this is Charles Weeks. Mark him well.”

Weeks did a double take. “‘Mark him well,’ eh? Whatever could you mean by that, Gregorius?” To Wilfred he said, “My pleasure, son,” and extended his hand. Wilfred just looked at the hand and made no move to take it.

“For Christ’s sake,” Weeks said, disgusted. “Shake hands like a man, you wretched toad-sucking little maggot. That’s better.” He wiped his hand on his pants leg and turned to me. “Weasel,” he said warmly. “Introduce me to these nice people.”

I made the introductions. Weeks bowed over Carolyn’s hand, brushing it with his lips, then shook hands with Mowgli and asked him if he’d really been raised by wolves. First raised, then lowered, Mowgli told him.

I said, “Have a seat, Charlie.”

“Why, thank you,” he said. “Yes, I think I will.” He took a moment to make his choice, finally selecting the chair two to the left of Tsarnoff, placing his hat on the chair that separated them. “Mowgli’s from Kipling’s
Jungle Book,
but of
course you would know that, wouldn’t you, Gregorius?” Tsarnoff rolled his eyes at the question. “Were your parents great Kipling fans, son? Or did you choose the name yourself?”

We weren’t to find out, because the door opened before Mowgli could answer. I knew who it was, I’d caught a glimpse of her as she’d crossed the sidewalk in front of the store, and I didn’t want to watch her come in. I wanted to watch them watching her, but I couldn’t help myself. When she was in a room, that’s where my eyes went.

And she did it again.

So I said it again, and out loud for a change. “Of all the bookstores in all the towns in all the world,” I said, “she walks into mine.”

O
f course she remembered the line. Her eyes brightened with recognition, and she smiled that smile of hers, the one that made her look like the Mona Lisa who swallowed the canary. “Bernard,” she said, except of course that wasn’t how she said it. “Bear-naard”—
that’s
how she said it.

I said, “It’s good to see you, Ilona. I’ve missed you.”

“Bear-naard.”

“Are you alone? I thought you’d be in company.”

“I wanted to come in alone first,” she said. “To make sure that…that the right people are here.”

“Look at these people,” I said. “Don’t they look right to you?”

Now I managed a look at the rest of them, and they were a sight to see. Charlie Weeks, already bareheaded, sprang to his feet and smiled his little
smile. Tsarnoff didn’t stand, but snatched off the black beret and held it with both hands in his lap. He looked at Ilona as if trying to decide the best way to prepare her for the table. Rasmoulian took his hat off, held it for a moment, then put it back on his head. His eyes were full of hopeless longing, and I knew just how he felt.

I couldn’t read Wilfred’s look. His hard little eyes took her in, sized her up, and didn’t show a thing.

God knows what Ilona thought looking at that crew, but she evidently found nothing to put her off stride. “I will be right back,” she said, and ducked out the door, returning moments later with Michael Todd in tow. He was wearing a gray sharkskin suit and, while he was bareheaded, his tie sported a dozen or more colorful hats floating on a red background.

“Michael,” she said (it came out as a sort of cross between Michael and Mikhail), “this is Bernard. Bernard, I would like you to meet—”

“But we have met,” Michael cut in. “Only the name was not Bernard. It was—” He searched his memory. “Bill! Bill Thomas!”

“Thompson,” I said, “but that’s still pretty impressive. I didn’t think you were paying any attention.”

“He came to the door,” he told her. “The other morning. He was collecting for a charity.” His eyes narrowed. “He
said
he was collecting for a charity.”

“The American Hip Dysplasia Association,” I said, “and that’s where your money went, so don’t worry about it. It’s a hell of a worthy cause, and if you’d like I’m sure Miss Kaiser would be happy to tell you more than you could possibly want to know about it.”

“But you are not Mr. Thompson? You are Mr. Bernard?”

“Mr. Rhodenbarr,” I said, “but you can call me Bernie. Why don’t you have a seat, Your—” I stopped myself. “And you too, Ilona. I thought a third person would be coming along with the two of you. Actually he was supposed to pick the two of you up, and I’m a little surprised that you happened to get here without him. I hate to start before he gets here, so perhaps we can—”

“Perhaps we can,” Ray Kirschmann said from the doorway. He shouldered his way into the store, cast a cold eye on the assembled company, and propped an elbow on a convenient bookshelf. He was wearing another costly if ill-fitting suit, and damned if he didn’t have a hat on, and a fedora at that. I happen to think all plainclothes policemen should wear hats, just like in the movies, but they mostly don’t in real life, and I couldn’t recall ever seeing Ray in a hat before. It looked good on him.

“What I am,” he said, “is I’m touched, Bernie. The idea you’d wait for me. You want to innerduce me to these folks?”

I went around the circle, naming names, and
then I got to Ray. “And this is Raymond Kirschmann,” I said, “of the New York Police Department.”

There were some interesting reactions. Charlie Weeks’s eyes brightened and his smile took up a little more of his face. Tsarnoff looked unhappy. Rasmoulian had an air of resignation; the introduction couldn’t have come as a surprise to him, since he’d already met Ray twice before, and even Ray’s presence was probably something less than a shock, given Ray’s propensity for turning up whenever Tiggy paid a visit to Barnegat Books.

Wilfred didn’t seem surprised, either, and I figured it was because he’d made Ray the minute he walked in. Wilfred struck me as the sort of fellow who could spot a cop a block away. On the other hand, I don’t suppose his face would have changed expression if I’d introduced Ray as a first vice president at Chase Manhattan, in charge of repairing broken automatic teller machines. Wilfred wasn’t much on changing expressions, or of showing one in the first place.

Anyway, the big reaction came from Ilona and Mike, who mumbled and stammered something to the effect that they’d thought Ray was affiliated not with the police at all but with the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“Now that’s innarestin’,” he allowed, “an’ I can see where you would get the impression, an’ maybe I even went an’ made a slip of the tongue,
sayin’ INS when I meant NYPD. It’s one batch of initials or another, an’ it coulda come out AFLCIO just as easy. But Bernie here is right, what I am is a cop, an’ just for form I prob’ly oughta read you all this here.” He held up a little wallet-size card and read, “‘You have the right to remain silent,’” and went all the way to the end, Mirandizing the hell out of everybody.

“I don’t understand,” Tsarnoff said. “Am I to take it, sir, that we have been placed under arrest?”

“Naw,” Ray said. “Why’d I wanna go an’ arrest anybody? I don’t see nobody breakin’ no laws. An’ even if I did, I ain’t in no hurry to make an arrest. You arrest somebody nowadays, you’re lookin’ at twelve, fifteen hours of paperwork by the time you’re done. Why, on my way in here I saw a young fellow take a book off of Bernie’s outside table, an’ do you think I was gonna arrest him for that?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“Of course not. So if anybody in this room should happen to be carryin’ a concealed weapon, with or without you got a permit for it, as long as it don’t see the light of day you got nothin’ to worry about. Or if there’s a person here with outstandin’ warrants, well, put your mind at rest. That ain’t what I’m here for.”

“And yet you read us our rights,” Tsarnoff persisted.

“That’s just a contingency procedure,” Charlie Weeks said. “Figure it out, Gregorius. From this
point on, anything anybody says is admissible as evidence. At least that’s the supposition. I don’t know what a lawyer would make of it, or a judge.”

“A lawyer would make a buck,” Ray said, “bein’ as they generally do. An’ nobody ever knows what a judge’ll make of anything. An’ the real reason I read the Miranda card is so we’ll all take this seriously, even though it ain’t official an’ I’m just here to see what my old friend Bernie’s gonna pull out of his hat. He’s done this before, an’ I got to admit he generally comes up with a rabbit.”

That was my cue, and I hopped to it. The line that came to me was
I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here,
and I’ll admit it’s one I’ve used to good effect in the past, but it didn’t really apply this time. They weren’t wondering. They knew, or at least thought they did.

“I want to thank you all for coming,” I said. “I know you’re all busy people, and I don’t want to take up too much of your time. So I’ll get right to it.”

I would have, too, but some clown picked that moment to stick his head in the door. “The sign says you’re closed,” he said, sounding peeved.

“We are,” I said. “There’s a private sale going on. We’ll be keeping our usual hours tomorrow.”

“But you got a table outside,” he said, “plus your door’s not locked.”

“I’ll fix that,” I said, and closed it in his face, and thumbed the catch to lock it. He gave me a look and turned away, and I turned back to my guests.

“Sorry,” I said. “Mowgli, if anybody else tries to come in—”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

“Thanks. Where was I?”

“You were getting right to it,” Charlie Weeks said.

“So I was,” I said, and found a bookcase to lean against. “I want to tell you a story, and I may have to jump around a little, because this story starts in a few different places at a few different times. It has its roots deep in the nineteenth century, when nationalist sentiments began to stir throughout the lands administered by the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires. One of those Balkan nationalisms precipitated the outbreak of the First World War, when a young Serb shot the Austrian archduke. By the time that war ended, self-determination of nations was a catchphrase throughout the western world. Independence movements flowered across Europe. Among the presumptive nations to declare their independence was the sovereign nation of Anatruria. It was designated as a kingdom, and its monarch was to be King Vlados the First.”

This couldn’t have been news to any of them, except for Ray and Mowgli, and possibly Wilfred. But they all paid close attention.

“The Anatrurians did what they could to add substance to their proclamation of sovereignty,” I went on. “An extensive series of stamps was printed at Budapest, and some were actually used postally within the borders of Anatruria. Some pattern coins were struck and distributed to friends of the new nation, although a general issue was never produced for circulation. There were a few medals issued as well, bearing the new king’s likeness and presented to some men who had been the mainstay of the independence movement.”

“Scarce as hen’s teeth, all of them,” Tsarnoff declared. “And about as eagerly sought in the collector market.”

“Anatrurian hopes were dashed at Versailles,” I went on, “when Wilson and Clemenceau remade the map of Europe. What would have been Anatruria was parceled up among Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. King Vlados and Queen Liliana lived out the remainder of their lives in exile, still serving as a rallying point for those who continued to believe in the Anatrurian cause. But the movement died down.”

“The flame flickered,” Ilona murmured. “But it was never extinguished.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but there was a time when it would have taken it a long time to bring a kettle to the boil. Then, during World War Two, the Anatrurian partisans had an active role.”

“They were opportunists,” Tsarnoff put in,
“switching allegiance as it served their interests. One day they’d be fighting side by side with Ante Pavelic’s Croatian Ustachi, murdering Serbs, and the next thing you knew they’d be on the Serbian side, sacking Croat villages. Were they for Hitler or against him? It depended when you asked the question.”

“They were for Anatruria,” Ilona said. “Every day, every week, every month of the year.”

“They were for themselves,” Tiglath Rasmoulian said. “As who is not?”

“When the war ended,” I went on, “national borders in that part of the world remained essentially unchanged, but governments were in upheaval. The Soviet Union’s span of influence quickly took in all of Eastern Europe, and Truman had to draw a line in the sand to keep Greece and Turkey this side of the Iron Curtain. Several American intelligence agencies, at least one of them an outgrowth of the wartime OSS, sought to even the balance in that strategically vital area of the world.” I frowned, annoyed at the tone I was taking. In spite of all the films I’d seen lately, I was managing to sound like an Edward R. Murrow voice-over for a documentary.

“Among the clandestine missions dispatched to the region”—damn, I was still doing it—“was a group of five American agents.”

I hesitated for an instant, and Charlie Weeks read my mind. “Oh, they were all Americans, all right. Hundred percent red-blooded nephews of
their Uncle Sam. No wretched refuse of your teeming shores in the Bob and Charlie Show, not on your life.”

“Five Americans,” I said quickly. “Robert Bateman and Robert Rennick. Charles Hoberman and Charles Wood. And Charles Weeks.”

“Charles Weeks?” Ray said. “This fellow here?”

“This fellow here,” said Charlie Weeks.

I told how, for convenience sake, the Roberts had become Bob and Rob respectively, the Charleses Cappy, Chuck, and Charlie. “And,” I said, “they all had animal names.”

Mowgli said, “Animal names? I’m sorry, Bernie, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I want to make sure I heard you right.”

“Animal names,” I said. “You heard me right. Code names, really. Bateman was the cat and Rennick was the rabbit.”

“Actually,” Weeks put in, “it was the other way around. Not that it matters much, at this late date.”

“I stand corrected. Cap Hoberman was the ram. Charlie Weeks was the mouse.”

“Squeak squeak,” said Charlie Weeks.

“And Chuck Wood’s totem, perhaps inevitably, was the woodchuck. His was the only one which was a play on words rather than a reference to some perceived personal characteristic, and I mention that because it’s relevant. I’m guessing now, but I’d say that Wood selected the name for himself.”

“Ha!” said Weeks. He looked up and to the left, reaching for the memory. “You know,” he said, “I think you’re right, weasel.”

Carolyn said, “Weasel?”

I let it pass. “Five Americans,” I said, “each with an animal for a code name, undercover in the Balkans. Working together and with partisans and dissidents of every description, all with the aim of destabilizing…Yugoslavia? Romania? Bulgaria?”

“Any one would do,” Weeks said dreamily. “Or all three. Be nice, wouldn’t it? Real feather in the collective cap for Hannibal’s Animals.” He winked at me. “Another name we had for ourselves. I didn’t tell you about that one, did I? After the old man in Adams-Morgan who was running us.
His
code name was Hannibal, don’t ask me why, and the name we made up for him was the elephant.” He put his fingertips together. “But don’t get me started, weasel. It’s your party, yours to tell the tale.”

I said, “One possible lever they found was the movement for Anatrurian independence. Causes don’t die out in that part of the world, they just go dormant for a generation or two. King Vlados was well up in his seventies, a widower living on the Costa de Nada with a succession of housekeepers, his social life the same endless round of drinks and cardplaying with other once-crowned heads that had been sustaining him for the past forty years.
He was a valuable symbol of Anatrurian greatness, but you couldn’t expect him to march in the van of a renewed patriotic movement. The last thing he was going to do was give up the Spanish sun for some back-room rallies in the Anatrurian hills.”