The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (9 page)

If this had been a movie there’d have been an ominous chord right about now, so that you’d know the hero was about to put his foot in it. No, you’d want to cry. No, you fool, don’t do it!

But would he listen?

“Ray,” I said, “there’s no question in my mind.”

R
ay dropped me at the subway and I was in my own apartment with time for a shower and shave before I headed for the Musette. I was there first so I bought two tickets and waited in the lobby.

I was still waiting when they opened the doors and started letting people take seats. I followed the crowd inside and threw my jacket over a pair of seats halfway down the aisle on the left, then went back to the guy taking tickets. He knew me by now, and why wouldn’t he? He’d been seeing me every night for the past two and a half weeks.

He said he hadn’t recognized me at first, that he wasn’t used to seeing me without my lady friend. That, I told him, was the problem. I gave him Ilona’s ticket and said she’d evidently been delayed en route. He assured me there would be no problem; he’d let her in and steer her toward where I was sitting.

I went and bought popcorn. What the hell, I hadn’t had anything to eat since that slice of pizza around noon. It felt strange, though, sitting there with no one next to me, dipping into the popcorn without risk of encountering another hand.

I glanced around the theater, surprised at what a large proportion of the audience looked familiar to me. I don’t know that there were many diehards like us who never missed a night, but a lot of people came more than once. I guess if you saw one Bogart picture you saw them all, or as many as you could.

If we ran to type, I couldn’t tell you what the type was. There were quite a few college kids, some with the serious look of film students, others just out for a good time. There were older West Siders, the intellectual-political-artsy crowd you see at the free afternoon concerts at Juilliard, and some of them had probably seen many of these films during their initial run. There were singles, gay and straight, and young marrieds, gay and straight, and people who looked rich enough to buy the theater, and people who looked as though they must have raised the price of admission by begging on the subway. It was a wonderfully varied crowd, drawn together by the enduring appeal of an actor who’d died more than thirty-five years ago, and I was happy to be a part of it.

But not as happy as I would have been if Ilona were sharing my popcorn.

The thought made the popcorn stick in my
throat, but sometimes it tends to do that anyway. I told myself it was a little early to start wallowing in self-pity, that she’d be slipping into the seat beside me any minute now.

The seat was still empty when they brought the house lights down. I wasn’t surprised, not really. I fed myself another handful of popcorn and let myself get lost in the movie.

That’s what it was there for.

The first feature,
Passage to Marseille,
was made in 1944, not long after
Casablanca
and obviously inspired by it, although the credits said it was based on a book by Nordhoff and Hall. (You remember them, they wrote
Mutiny on the Bounty.
) Bogart plays a French journalist named Matrac who’s on Devil’s Island when the movie opens, framed for murder and serving a life sentence. He and four others escape, only to be picked up on the high seas by a French cargo ship. Of course the convicts want to go fight for France—has there ever been anyone as fiercely patriotic as a criminal in a Hollywood movie?—but France has just surrendered, and Sydney Greenstreet wants to turn the ship over to the Vichy government. His attempted mutiny is thwarted, and Bogart and his buddies join a Free French bomber squadron in England. His plane is the last to return from a mission, and after it lands his crewmates bring him off, dead.

Well, hell, he died for a good cause, and until
then he got to spend time with Claude Rains and Peter Lorre and Helmut Dantine and, well, all the usual suspects. It wasn’t the best film he ever made, but it was a quintessential Bogart role, the hard-bitten cynicism shielding the pure idealist, the beautiful loser coolly victorious in defeat.

A shame she had to miss it.

When the lights came up I checked with the usher and he shrugged and shook his head. I inquired at the box office, tried her number from a pay phone in the lobby. Nothing. On my way back into the theater the usher asked me if I wanted to cash in my unused ticket. I told him to hang on to it, that she might still turn up.

At the refreshment stand a tall guy with a goatee but no mustache said, “All by yourself tonight.”

I’d seen him and his dumpling of a girlfriend just about every night, but this was the first time either of us had spoken. “All alone,” I agreed. “She said she might have to work late. She might still turn up.”

We talked about the film we’d just seen, and about the one coming up. Then I went back to my seat and watched
Black Legion.

It’s an early one, released in 1937, with Bogart playing a member of the Ku Klux Klan, only they called it the Black Legion and the members wore black hoods sporting white skulls and crossbones. I’d seen it sometime within the past year on AMC, and it wasn’t that great then, and by the time the
picture got under way I knew Ilona wasn’t going to show up. It seemed to me that I’d known all along.

I felt like walking out, but I stayed where I was and got caught up in the film in spite of myself. The film had a neat twist. At the end, with Bogart arrested for murder, it turns out that the Legion was set up by the crime syndicate for commercial purposes. Maybe they had a stranglehold on the hood-and-sheet business. They want Bogart to plead self-defense, but for the sake of his wife’s reputation he turns state’s evidence instead, bringing down the whole Black Legion and saving the day for truth and justice.

Even so, he winds up with a life sentence. The poor son of a bitch, he must have had the worst lawyer since Patty Hearst.

Don’t ask me why, but I went across the street to make sure she wasn’t waiting for me over a cup of coffee. And of course she wasn’t. I scanned the room from the doorway, then left and went back to my place.

I called her number and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. I picked up what I’d come home for and went out again, taking the same combination of subways I take to work every morning but getting off a stop sooner than usual, at Broadway and Twenty-third. I just missed my crosstown bus and was all set to hail a cab, but what was my hurry?

I walked across Twenty-third Street and tried her
number one last time from a pay phone two blocks from her apartment. When my quarter came back I walked the rest of the way and stood on the sidewalk across the street from her building. Simple Pleasures, the ground-floor shop, was closed and dark. There were no lights in the fourth-floor windows, but that didn’t tell me anything. Her apartment was in the back of the building.

I put my hand in my pocket, felt the burglar’s tools I’d gone home for. It seemed to me that I had no moral right to enter Ilona’s apartment. I evidently didn’t have much in the way of moral fiber, either, but I’d known that for years.

I looked both ways and crossed the street—it’s a one-way street, but try telling that to the guys on bicycles delivering Chinese food—and then I looked both ways a second time and mounted the half-flight of steps to the vestibule of her building. I checked the buzzers for one marked
MARKOVA
and couldn’t find it, but there was only one top-floor buzzer with no name on it, and I decided that had to be hers. (This, incidentally, was faulty reasoning; Carolyn’s buzzer on Arbor Court is still marked
ARNOW
, the long-vanished tenant of record. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in New York more people have learned anonymity from Rent Control than ever discovered it in a 12-Step program.)

I leaned on the unmarked buzzer, and either it was hers or it rang in some other empty apartment, because it went unanswered.

The trouble with front doors is that they’re right out there in public view. A tenant, coming or going, can catch you in the act. A passerby can spot you from the street. The longer you spend mucking about with the lock, the more likely it is that this will happen.

On the flip side, the nice thing about front doors is they’re rarely very hard to open. They’re just spring locks—if they used deadbolts an upstairs tenant couldn’t buzz anyone in—and the locks see so much action that they become as loose and as yielding as, well, a very old practitioner of an ancient profession, let us say. This one at least had a protective lip so you couldn’t loid your way in with a credit card or strip of spring steel, but aside from that it had precious little going for it. About the only person it could be expected to keep out was a tenant who had lost his key.

Actually, I told myself, the threshold was not the Rubicon; I could cross it without committing myself. Even if I ran smack into Ilona herself in the hallway, I could explain I’d found the door ajar, or that another tenant had held it for me. The door to her apartment, now that was a different matter.

A few minutes later, I was standing in front of the door to her apartment.

No one responded to my knock, and no light showed under her door. The previous night I’d noticed that she only locked two of the three locks, and which way she’d turned the key in each of them. (I can’t help it, I notice things like that. To
each his own, I say; Ray Kirschmann had noticed the silver buckle on Tiglath Rasmoulian’s alligator belt.) I took out my picks and had at it. I worked rapidly—one doesn’t want to dawdle—but there was no need to rush. I opened one lock, I opened the other lock, and I was inside.

I hadn’t brought my gloves and wouldn’t have put them on if I had. I wasn’t worried about fingerprints, for God’s sake, but about making a fool of myself and destroying a relationship almost before it had begun. If I got away clean, no forensic evidence of my visit would harm me; if she caught me in the act, all the gloves in Gloversville wouldn’t help me.

I drew the door shut right away and stood unmoving in the pitch-dark room, not even troubling to breathe until I’d taken a moment to listen for any breathing other than my own. Then I took a breath, and then I reached for the light switch—I remembered where it was, too—and switched it on. The bare bulb overhead came on and I blinked at its glare, then looked around.

I felt like an archaeologist who’d just broken into an empty tomb.

T
he furniture was still there. The narrow bed nestled against the far wall, unmade, with the rickety night table at its head and the squat thrift-shop dresser nearby. I counted the same three chairs—two unmatched wooden card chairs, one at the little one-drawer desk and one at the foot of the bed, and one armchair with a broken spring, clumsily reupholstered some time back in metallic green velvet. And the rug was there, too, as ugly as ever.

Nothing besides remained, as Shelley said of Ozymandias. Gone were the plastic milk cartons and the books they’d housed. Gone was the brassbound footlocker and the shrine that had perched on top of it, candles and crystal and icons and animals and all. Gone was the stiff family snapshot of Ilona and her parents, gone too the framed photo of Vlados and Liliana. Gone from the wall was the map of Eastern Europe, gone from its nail the bird calendar.

Gone whatever the desk and dresser had contained; I checked their drawers and found them empty. Gone, except for three wire coat hangers and a grocery bag collection, whatever the closet might have held. Gone, lock, stock, and barrel. Gone, kit and caboodle. Gone.

The bed linen remained on the bed, the twisted sheets still holding her scent.

I walked over to the desk and picked up the phone. I got a dial tone, and if the phone had been equipped with a redial button I could have determined the last call she made before she disappeared. Instead I dialed my own number, which didn’t answer, and then dialed the store and wondered what Raffles would make of the ringing. I dialed Candlemas’s apartment on East Seventy-sixth and let it ring a few times, but there were no cops there this time around and no one answered.

I cradled the receiver and sat down in the hideous green chair, taking care to avoid the broken spring. It wasn’t terribly comfortable, but it would serve. I had some thinking to do, and this seemed like the time and place to do it.

Ordinarily I don’t like to hang around after I break into somebody’s home. It’s an unnecessary risk, and one I prefer to avoid. But I couldn’t think of a safer spot than where I was right now. I was like Mowgli, holed up in an abandoned building. No one lived here, and it took some imagination to believe that anyone ever had.

I could take my time. No one would be coming back.

I didn’t note the time when I let myself into Ilona’s place, but it was just past midnight when I left it. I walked over to Third Avenue to catch a cab headed uptown, and sprinted the last twenty yards to snag one cruising across the intersection.

“Running yet,” Max Fiddler said. “Can’t be the herbs. How could they work so fast? He makes miracles, this Chinaman, but even miracles take a little time to work. When did I see you, three, four nights ago?”

“Something like that.”

“No, it was two nights ago. I know it for a fact, because right after I dropped you off the second time I picked up the woman with the monkey. Where to?”

“Seventy-first and West End.”

“Right where I dropped you and then picked you up again. And then we took the Transverse and I dropped you at—gimme a minute—”

“Take all the time you want,” I said.

“—Seventy-sixth and Lexington,” he said triumphantly. “Am I right or am I right?”

“You’re right.”

“Some memory, eh?”

“I’m impressed.”

“Ginkgo.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Ginkgo biloba,” he said. “An herb! Comes
from the ginkgo trees, you see ’em around town, got a funny little leaf shaped like a fan. I take these pills, my Chinaman told me about them, you get ’em in any health food store. I used to have a memory like Swiss cheese, now I got a memory like a hawk.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“You want to test me on state capitals, names of the presidents, be my guest.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“Or New York streets, anywhere in the five boroughs. Or something else. Go ahead, try and stump me.”

“Well, here’s an easy one. Did I happen to leave my attaché case in your cab the other night?”

“No,” he said without hesitation. “You want to know how I remember? I got this picture in my mind, you’re limping away from the cab, the case is knocking against your leg with each step you take.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. And even more amazing, I thought, was that I had managed to forget for a moment there that I already knew where the attaché case was. Ray Kirschmann had shown it to me yesterday, with an incomprehensible six-letter word printed on its side in blood.

“Ginkgo,” he said. “I recommend it.”

“Maybe I’ll get some. Except it’s not my memory that bothers me so much as the feeling I get sometimes that I’m not thinking too clearly.”

“It’s good for that, too. Mental clarity!”

“That’s what I could use.”

“Also a ringing in the ears.”

“It gives it to you or gets rid of it?”

“Gets rid of it!”

“Well, that’s good to know,” I said, “although that’s not something I’ve had to worry about.”

“Yet.”

“Yet,” I agreed. “Tell me about the woman and the monkey.”

He told me about the woman and the monkey in considerable detail, but I don’t know that it constituted much of a testament to his memory, or to the efficacy of ginkgo biloba. I’ve never touched the stuff myself, and I expect to remember the whole episode long into my dotage. All I’ll say is this—the woman had a well-developed figure (“Cantaloupes!” Max Fiddler said), while the monkey was a scrawny specimen with a mean little sour apple of a face. And they both should have been ashamed of themselves.

The story of their courtship carried us all the way to my corner. He was reaching to throw the flag when I told him to wait a minute.

“You said New York streets,” I said. “Anywhere in the five boroughs, you said.”

“So?”

“How about Arbor Court?”

“Arbor Court,” he said. “There’s only one Arbor Court and it’s in Manhattan. Is that the one you mean?”

“That’s the one.”

“In the Village, right?”

“Right.”

“Child’s play,” he said. “I thought you’d give me something hard, like Broadway Alley or Pomander Walk, but the best you can do is Arbor Court. Do I know Arbor Court? Of course I know Arbor Court, and you could take away my ginkgo and I’d still know it.”

“You know how to get there from here?”

“Why wouldn’t I know? Over to Broadway, then down Columbus and Ninth Avenue and Hudson Street, and then you pick up Bleecker and take it until you swing right on Charles, and—”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”

He put a hand on the back of his seat, turned around, and looked at me. “You want to go there?”

“Why not?”

“You want me to wait, and you’ll go inside and get whatever you came here to get?”

“No,” I said, sinking back into my seat. “Let’s just go straight downtown.”

“To the Village. To Arbor Court.”

“Right.”

“You’re the boss,” he said, and pulled away from the curb. “Arbor Court, coming up. You know what I think? I think there’s a pattern developing here. Night before last I picked you up on Broadway and Sixty-seventh and brought you here, and ten minutes later I picked you up here and took
you somewhere else. Tonight I pick you up and bring you here, and this time you don’t even get out of the cab before we’re off to someplace else. Next time you know what? You’re going to be able to skip this intersection altogether.”

“You may be right.” It was going to be a long ride. “Say,” I said, “I was wondering. Have you ever had anything else happen in your cab like what happened with the woman and the monkey?”

It took three anecdotes to get us all the way to Carolyn’s place, and I’m not sure I believe the one with the two sailors and the little old lady. I suppose it’s possible, but it certainly strikes me as highly unlikely. Still, it passed the time.

The
ARNOW
bell went unanswered, and I didn’t let myself in. I could have, and wouldn’t have needed my tools, as Carolyn and I have keys to each other’s stores and apartments. But I figured it would be quicker to go looking for her, and I found her in the second place I tried, a bar called Henrietta Hudson’s. When I went in I got a whole batch of looks ranging from wary to hostile, and then Carolyn spotted me and called me by name and the other women relaxed, knowing it was safe to ignore me.

Carolyn was at the bar drinking Scotch and listening to a willowy woman with improbable red hair. Her name was Tracey and I’d met her before, along with her lover, Djinn, who could have posed as her twin except that her equally unconvincing
hair color was ash blond. You rarely saw one without the other, but they had evidently had a falling-out, which was why Tracey was knocking back shots of Jaegermeister and telling Carolyn her troubles, which seemed to be legion.

Carolyn introduced me, and Tracey was polite enough, but when it was clear that I wasn’t just passing through she turned gracefully away from Carolyn and joined a conversation on her other side. “Move down a little ways, Bern,” Carolyn suggested. “That’ll give us more room.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Am I interrupting something?”

“You are,” she said, “which means I owe you a big one. It’s all over between her and Djinn, and she’s about one drink away from inviting me to go home with her, and I’m about two drinks away from agreeing. Where are you going?”

“Home,” I said, “so you can have a chance to get on with your life.”

“Get back on your stool, Bern. The last thing I want is to go home with her.”

“Why? I think she’s gorgeous.”

“No argument there, Bern. She’s a beauty. So’s Djinn, and when they broke up forever a year ago last November it was Djinn who told me her troubles and went home with me, and within a week the two of them were back together again and it was months before Tracey would speak to me. They break up three times a year and they always get back together again. Who needs it? That’s not what I’m looking for these days, a quick little tum
ble in the feathers. I want something meaningful, something that might lead somewhere. Like you and Ilona might have, from the way you were talking this morning.” My face must have shown something, because hers darkened. “Uh-oh,” she said. “I stepped in it, didn’t I? If I stopped to think, I would have wondered what you were doing in a dyke bar at one in the morning. What happened to the course of true love? It’s not running smooth?”

“It’s not running,” I said. “Can we go somewhere and have a drink?”

“We’re in a bar, Bern. We can have a drink right here.”

“Someplace a little quieter.”

“The tables are quieter. You want to take a table?”

“Someplace really quiet,” I said, “and where I won’t be the only person in the room with a Y chromosome.”

“Let’s see. There’s Omphalos on Christopher Street. Everyone there’s got a Y chromosome.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not Slumgullion’s, that’s all college kids and noise. Oh, I know. There’s that place around the corner on Leroy Street. They don’t get a gay crowd or a straight crowd. Nobody goes there. It’s always dead.”

“It sounds perfect,” I said. “I hope we can get in.”

It was just us and the bartender. He gave us our drinks and left us alone, and I brought Carolyn up to date.

“That’s just so strange about Ilona,” she said. “The last you saw of her…”

“She was sleeping like a lamb.”

“And you never spoke to her afterward? No, you called and there was nobody home. And then you went there, and there was really nobody home. It’s hard to believe she moved out, Bern. Are you sure she wasn’t downstairs doing her laundry?”

“She took everything, Carolyn.”

“Well, maybe everything was dirty. You know how a person’ll put off doing the laundry, and the first thing you know there’s nothing to wear, so you do it all at once.”

“And she took the dry cleaning the same day,” I said. “And all her shoes to the shoemaker.”

“I guess it’s pretty farfetched, huh?”

“And her books to be rebound, and her pictures to be framed, and—”

“I get the point, Bern. It was a dumb idea.”

“All she left,” I said, “is a little Scotch tape residue on the wall, where the map was hanging. And her fingerprints, maybe, but for all I know she wiped the place down before she took off.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. I’ll ask you one. Why would she disappear like that?”

“I don’t know, Bern. Was it something you said?”

“Very funny.”

“You know what I mean. What was she like afterward?”

“Sad. But she said lovemaking always makes her sad.”

“Right away? I don’t get sad until the next morning, when I wake up and find out who I went home with.” She shuddered at a memory and chased it with a sip of Scotch. “If it always makes her sad,” she said, “maybe that explains why it took her two weeks to get around to it. But I still don’t get the disappearing act.”

“Neither do I.”

“Do you think she could have been abducted?”

“I thought of that. But if you were going to kidnap her, why pack up all her things?”

“That way she disappears without a trace.”

“What do you mean?”

“When’s the last day of the month, Tuesday? Wednesday whoever took her calls her landlord and tells him he can rent the place, because she’s not coming back. So he looks and everything’s gone but the furniture, and you said you thought that came with the place?”

“It didn’t look like anything she would have picked out for herself.”

“So she’s gone, bag and baggage, and he gets a new tenant in there and that’s it. Gone without a trace.”

“Why not just leave her stuff? Then no one would even know she was missing. I wouldn’t even have a clue she’d moved out if there’d been clothes in the closet and all the other stuff where it had been last night.”

“So that means she must have left voluntarily.”

“I would think so,” I said. “And she packed everything because she wanted to keep it. Maybe she was behind in her rent or skipping out on a lease, maybe that’s why she left so abruptly, but there has to be more to it than that. Why didn’t she call me? Even if she wasn’t going to meet me at the movies, why stand me up? Why not spend a quarter and clue me in?”