The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart Read Free Page A

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 theway 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 nightif 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