The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart Read Free

I’ve had my name in the papers, and not as a seller of rare volumes.
    I told myself, like Scarlett (another fine name for a cat), that I’d think about it later, and turned my attention to the book he placed on the counter. It was a small volume, bound in blue cloth, containing the selected poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–39). It had been part of the inventory when I bought the store. I had, at one time or another, read most of the poems in it—Praed was a virtuoso at meter and rhyme, if not terribly profound—and it was the sort of book I liked having around. No one had ever expressed any interest in it, and I’d thought I’d own it forever.
    It was not without a pang that I rang up $5.41, made change of ten, and slipped my old friend Praed into a brown paper bag. “I’m kind of sorry to see that book go,” I admitted. “It was here when I bought the store.”
    “It must be difficult,” he said. “Parting with cherished volumes.”
    “It’s business,” I said. “If I’m not willing to sell them, I shouldn’t have them on the shelves.”
    “Even so,” he said, and sighed gently. He had a thin face, hollow in the cheeks, and a white mustache so perfect it looked to have been trimmed one hair at a time. “Mr. Rhodenbarr,” he said, his guileless blue eyes searching mine, “I just want to say two words to you. Abel Crowe.”
    If he hadn’t commented on the appropriateness of Raffles’s name, I might have heard those two words not as a name at all but as an adjective and a noun.
    “Abel Crowe,” I said. “I haven’t heard that name in years.”
    “He was a friend of mine, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”
    “And of mine, Mr.—?”
    “Candlemas, Hugo Candlemas.”
    “It’s a pleasure to meet a friend of Abel’s.”
    “It’s my pleasure, Mr. Rhodenbarr.” We shook hands, and his palm was dry and his grip firm. “I shan’t waste words, sir. I have a proposition to put to you, a matter that could be in our mutual interest. The risk is minimal, the potential reward substantial. But time is very much of the essence.” He glanced atthe open door. “If there were a way we could talk in private without fear of interruption…”
    Abel Crowe was a fence, the best one I ever knew, a man of unassailable probity in a business where hardly anyone knows the meaning of the word. Abel was also a concentration camp survivor with a sweet tooth the size of a mastodon’s and a passion for the writings of Baruch Spinoza. I did business with Abel whenever I had the chance, and never regretted it, until the day he was killed in his own Riverside Drive apartment by a man who—well, never mind. I’d been able to see to it that his killer didn’t get away with it, and there was some satisfaction in that, but it didn’t bring Abel back.
    And now I had a visitor who’d also been a friend of Abel’s, and who had a proposition for me.
    I closed the door, turned the lock, hung the BACK IN 5 MINUTES sign in the window, and led Hugo Candlemas to my office in back.

CHAPTER
Two
    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 beaverwhose tail seemed to have gone the way of all flesh.
    I