The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (22 page)

“If this happened in Anatruria,” Ilona said, “you would know that the woodchuck was shot by a son of his victim, or perhaps a brother. Even a nephew.” She shrugged. “But you would not inquire too closely, because this would not be a police matter. It is merely blood avenging blood, and honor requires it.”

“There’s no honor here,” I said. “And a good thing, too. There was only one killer. He followed Hoberman when he left the Boccaccio, tagged him to the woodchuck’s apartment a few blocks away, and stabbed him right off. Then he abducted Candlemas, took him down to Pitt Street—”

“Pitt Street,” Mowgli said. “You’re down there, you might as well be dead.”

“—and killed him when he’d learned all he could from him. Or maybe he took him somewhere else, killed him after interrogating him, and took the dead body to Pitt Street.”

“Coals to Newcastle,” Mowgli said.

“Then someone was watching my building,” Michael said.

“No.”

“You mean this Hoberman was under surveillance all along?”

I shook my head. “The ram was visiting his old friend, the mouse. They hadn’t seen each other in years. And when the mouse told me about that visit, he made a real point of saying how the ram was in a hurry to get out of there.”

“Ah,” Charlie Weeks said. “You mean he was going to meet somebody on his way back to the woodchuck’s place.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not what I mean.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s not,” I said. “What I mean is that you wanted me to know that Hoberman was hardly in your apartment for any time at all. That way it wouldn’t occur to me that you had plenty of time to get him settled in with a cup of coffee and excuse yourself long enough to make a quick phone call.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you knew something was up. You didn’t know what, but you were the mouse and you smelled a rat. You couldn’t tag along with Hoberman. He’d be on guard. But you could call a confederate and stall Hoberman long enough for the man you called to post himself within line of sight of the Boccaccio’s front entrance. Whether or not he knew Hoberman by sight, you could supply a description that would make identification an easy matter.”

“Oh, weasel,” Charlie Weeks said. “I’m disappointed in you, coming up with a wild theory like that.”

“You deny it, then.”

“Of course I deny it. But I can’t deny the possibility that somebody followed Cappy home. It seems a little farfetched to me, but anything’s possible. Thing is, I don’t see how you’re going to guess who it was.”

“And if you had called someone, I’d just be guessing as to his identity, wouldn’t I?”

“Since I didn’t call anyone,” he said, “the question’s moot. But we can say that you’d just be taking a shot in the dark.”

“Wait a minute,” Carolyn said. “What about the dying message?”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “The dying message. Could Hoberman have left a clue to his killer? We know what his message was.” I walked over to my counter and reached behind it for the portable chalkboard I’d stowed there earlier. I propped it up where everybody could see it and chalked
CAPHOB
on it in nice big block caps. I let them take a good long look at it.

Then I said, “Cap hob. That’s what it looks like. That’s because we’re in America. If we were in Anatruria it would look entirely different.”

“Why’s that, Bernie?” Ray asked. “Have they got their heads screwed on upside down over there?”

“I could show you in the stamp catalog,” I said.
“The Anatrurians, like the Serbs and the Bulgarians, use the Cyrillic alphabet. This is an important matter of national identity over there, incidentally. The Croats and Romanians use the same alphabet we do, while the Greeks use the Greek alphabet.”

“It figures,” Mowgli said.

“The Cyrillic alphabet was named for St. Cyril, who spread its use throughout Eastern Europe, although he probably didn’t invent it. He did missionary work in the region with his brother, St. Methodius, but they didn’t name an alphabet after St. Methodius.”

“They named an acting technique,” Carolyn said. “After him and St. Stanislavski.”

“The Cyrillic alphabet is a lot like the Greek,” I said, “except that it’s got more letters. I think there’s something like forty of them, and some are identical in form to English letters while some look pretty weird to western eyes. There’s a backward N and an upside-down V and one or two that look like hen’s tracks. And some of the ones that look exactly like our own have different values.”

Carolyn said, “Values? What do you mean, Bern? Is that like how many points they’re worth in Scrabble?”

“It’s the sound they make.” I pointed to the blackboard. “It took me forever to think Cappy’s dying message might be in Cyrillic,” I said, “and for two reasons. For one, he was an American. Early on I didn’t know the case had an Anatrurian connection, or that he’d ever been east of Long Is
land. Besides, all six of the letters he wrote were good foursquare red-blooded American letters. But it so happens they’re all letters of the Cyrillic alphabet as well.”

“I do not know this alphabet,” Rasmoulian said carefully. “What do they spell in this alphabet?”

“The A and the O are the same in both alphabets,” I said. “The Cyrillic C has the value of our own S. The P is equivalent to our R, just like the rho in the Greek alphabet. The H looks like the Greek eta, but in Cyrillic it’s the equivalent of our N. And the Cyrillic B is the same as our V.”

In a proper chalk talk, I’d have printed a transliteration of the Cyrillic on the slate. Instead I gave them a few seconds to work it out for themselves.

Then I said, “Mr. Tsarnoff, I don’t know which alphabet Circassians favor, but certainly you’ve spent enough time in the former Soviet Union to be more familiar than the rest of us with Cyrillic. Perhaps you can tell us what message the gallant Hoberman left us.”

Tsarnoff stayed in his chair, but just barely. His face was florid and his eyes bulged; if Charlie Weeks wanted an animal name for him, you’d almost have to go with bullfrog.

“It is a lie,” he said.

“But what does it say?”

“S-A-R-N-O-V,” he said, pronouncing each letter separately and distinctly, as if pounding nails into a coffin. “That is what it says, and it is a lie.
It is not even my name. My name is Tsarnoff, sir, T-S-A-R-N-O-F-F, and that is not at all what you have written there, in Cyrillic or any other alphabet known to me.”

“And yet,” I said, “it strikes one as an extraordinary coincidence. I suppose you would pronounce it Sarnov, and—”

“That is not my name!”

“Tsue me,” I said. “It’s not that far off.”

“I never met your Captain Hoberman! Until this moment I never heard of him!”

“I’m not sure that last is true,” I said, “but we’ll let it go. The point you’re trying to make is that you didn’t kill Hoberman, and you can give it a rest, because I already know that.”

“You do?”

“Or course.”

“Then why did Hoberman write his name?” Ray asked.

“He didn’t,” I said. “He didn’t write a damn thing. That’s a dying message, whether you pronounce it Caphob or Sarnov, and Hoberman was doing the dying, and it was his blood that formed the letters and his forefinger that traced them. I don’t know if Hoberman even knew Cyrillic after so many years away from the region, but it certainly wasn’t second nature to him, and what he’d automatically turn to in his haste to name his killer before his life drained out of him.”

“Then who left the message?” Carolyn wanted to know. “Not what’s-his-name, the groundhog—”

“The woodchuck. No, of course not. The killer left the message as a diversionary tactic. He probably chose Cyrillic because he knew little about his victim beyond the fact that he was somehow connected to Balkan politics. He wrote what he did because he wanted to implicate you, Mr. Tsarnoff, and he misspelled your name because his familiarity with Cyrillic was tenuous. So what do we know about our killer? He is not Anatrurian, he did not know his victims from the days of the Bob and Charlie Show, and he has a murderous antipathy toward Mr. Tsarnoff.”

“Piece of cake,” said Ray Kirschmann. “Gotta be Tigbert Rotarian, don’t it? Only thing, if he’s in the rug business, why’s he want to ruin a good carpet like that?”

Rasmoulian was on his feet, his face whiter than ever, his patches of color livid now. He was protesting everything at once, insisting he was not in the rug trade, he had killed no one, and his name was not whatever Ray had just said it was.

“Whatever,” Ray said agreeably. “I’ll make sure I got the name right when we get down to Central Booking. Main thing’s did he do it or not, an’ I think you still got your touch, Bernie. Tigrid, you got the right to remain silent, but I already told you that, remember?”

Rasmoulian’s mouth was working but no sound was coming out of it. I thought he might go for a gun, but his hands stayed in sight, knotted up in little fists. He looked like a kid again, and you got
the sense that he might burst into tears, or stamp his foot.

The whole room was silent, waiting to see what he’d do. Then Carolyn said, “For God’s sake, Tiggy, tell ’em it was an accident.”

Jesus, I thought. What could have induced her to come out with a harebrained thing like that?

“It was an accident,” Tiglath Rasmoulian said.

I
t was unquestionably an accident, he explained. He had never meant to harm anyone. He was not a killer.

Yes, admittedly, he had been armed. He had outfitted himself that evening with a pistol and dagger as well, although it was never his intention to use either of them. But this was New York, after all, not Baghdad or Cairo, not Istanbul, not Casablanca. This was a dangerous city, and who would dream of walking its streets unarmed? And was this not even more to be expected if one was of diminished stature and slightly built? He was a small person, if not the dwarf that a certain hideously obese individual was wont to label him, and he could only feel safe if he carried something to offset the disadvantage at which his size placed him.

And yes, it was true, he had received a telephone
call from Mr. Weeks, with whom he had had occasional business dealings over the years. At Mr. Weeks’s request, he’d driven to the Boccaccio and parked across the street with the motor running. When Hoberman emerged from the building he watched him flag a cab and tailed him a short distance to what would be the murder scene. He entered the brownstone’s vestibule just as Hoberman was being buzzed in and caught the door before it closed, following his quarry upstairs to the fourth-floor apartment. But evidently his activities had not gone unnoticed; he was standing in the hallway, trying to hear what was going on inside and deliberating his next move, when the door opened suddenly and Hoberman grabbed him by the arm and yanked him inside.

He had no time to consider the matter. His response was automatic and unthinking; in an instant the dagger was free of its sheath and in his hand, and in another instant it was in Hoberman’s body. He did not know who the man was, nor had he any knowledge of the identity of the other man, the slender white-haired fellow in the suit and checkered vest. He did not know anything of the pursuit in which the two were engaged. All he knew was that he had just killed a man. Reflexively, of course, and in self-defense, to be sure, but the man was dead and Tiglath Rasmoulian was in trouble.

The white-haired man, the one they now seemed to be calling the woodchuck, was far too slow to
react. He just stood there, staring in shock, and before he could do anything Rasmoulian was holding a gun on him. He put him against a wall with his hands in the air while he went through the pockets of the man he’d killed until he came up with a wallet. He stuffed it in his own pocket to examine at leisure.

And, while he was kneeling by the unfortunate man’s body, yes, something came over him, some hostility to an old foe. He took hold of the poor man’s hand, dipped the forefinger in the blood, and wrote that foe’s name on a convenient surface, which happened to be the side panel of an attaché case. And if his Cyrillic was imperfect, well, he’d come close enough. It was a barbaric alphabet anyway.

Then came the tricky part. Down the stairs and all the way to where he’d parked the car, he covered Candlemas with one hand in his pocket gripping the pistol; he was ready to fire through his own coat if he had to, and it was a good coat, the very one he was wearing today. It was late and the streets were empty; he waited for an opportune moment, then forced Candlemas to climb into the trunk. He locked the trunk, got behind the wheel, and drove downtown.

And yes, he knew the streets of the Lower East Side, and knew he and his prisoner would be undisturbed in one of the abandoned buildings to be found down there. He had asked Candlemas many questions, and had obtained some answers,
but by no means managed to get the whole story. He knew that a bookstore proprietor had been engaged to steal some very valuable documents from an apartment in the building Hoberman had emerged from, and he got my name from Candlemas, and the name of the store. He knew there was an Anatrurian connection, and that was about all he knew.

He might have learned more, but there was another accident. Candlemas tricked him, pretending to cooperate fully, lulling him into inattention, then making a bid to escape. Once again Rasmoulian’s reflexes sprang unbidden into action, and Candlemas, trying to get away, was shot dead. A single bullet had snuffed out the man’s life.

Accidents, two of them. What else could you call what had occurred? It was tragic, he regretted it deeply, he was a man who had always deplored violence. Surely he could not be held accountable for the violence that had taken place in spite of all he had done to prevent it?

“Yeah, well, accidents’ll happen,” Ray said. “Guy who got stabbed, I looked at him lyin’ there and I knew I was lookin’ at one hell of an accident. You see a guy with four stab wounds in him, you know right off he’s been in a real bad accident.”

“My reflexes are good,” Rasmoulian said.

“I guess they are. Candlemas, now, down there on Pitt Street, was tryin’ to escape when he got hisself cut down. I got to say, though, he wasn’t very
good at it, because there were powder burns on his ear, so he couldn’t have escaped more than a foot or so from the gun that killed him. Guy like that, he better not set up shop givin’ people escape lessons.”

There was a stretch of silence, broken by Charlie Weeks, who leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs first. “There are accidents and accidents,” he said.

“Can’t argue with that,” Ray allowed.

“It was an accident, for instance, that I myself played an unwitting part in Cappy Hoberman’s death. I’m less inclined to regret Chuck Wood, considering the little stunt he pulled in Anatruria.”

I’d let that pass once, but enough was enough. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“I beg your pardon, weasel?”

“Let’s ease up on the ‘weasel’ routine,” I said. “You can call me Bernie. What I don’t think is that the woodchuck sold out the good guys in Anatruria.”

“Really? That’s what we all thought.”

“I think it was the mouse,” I said. “I think you must be proud of it, too, or you probably wouldn’t hang on to that letter of commendation from Dean Acheson.”

“Now how could you possibly know about that?” Weeks said. “If I had a letter like that I’d certainly keep it in a locked drawer, wouldn’t I? And you’ve never been in my apartment that I wasn’t constantly in the same room with you.”

“It’s puzzling, all right,” I said.

He seemed to shrink under the combined gaze of Ilona and Michael, melting away like the water-soaked Wicked Witch of the West. “It was a strategic decision made at a high level,” he said. “I had no part in the decision and no choice but to implement it.”

“And the good sense to see that it was the woodchuck who got blamed for it, and not the mouse.”

“It happened over forty years ago. I won’t apologize for it now, or explain the justification. I was a young man then. I’m an old man now. It’s done.”

“And the two men Rasmoulian killed?”

“I never thought that would happen,” he said. “I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Cappy Hoberman called up, came to see me on the flimsiest of pretexts, and was eager to be on his way almost immediately. It never occurred to me he was running interference for a burglar. I thought he wanted something, or was setting me up somehow. For all I knew he’d tumbled to the way it all went kerblooey in Anatruria, and he had some curious notion of revenge.” He shrugged. “The whole point is I didn’t know. I needed to call someone who could tag him and report back. And the redoubtable Assyrian tagged him a little more forcefully than any of us would have preferred.”

“It is unfair,” Ilona said.

“Life’s unfair, honey,” Charlie Weeks said. “Better get used to it.”

“It is unfair that you get away with this, while Tiglath Rasmoulian pays the penalty.”

“There should be no penalty,” Rasmoulian said. “An accident, an act of self-defense—”

“I got to tell you,” Ray Kirschmann said. “We got us a problem here.”

Another silence. Ray let it stretch for a bit, then broke it himself.

“Way I see it,” he said, “I got enough to arrest Mr. Ras—” He broke off, made a face. “What I’m gonna do is call you TR,” he told Rasmoulian, “which is your initials, and also stands for Teddy Roosevelt, who it just so happens was police commissioner of this fair city before he got to be president of the United States.”

“Thank you very much,” Rasmoulian said.

“I got enough to arrest TR,” Ray said, “an’ I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s enough to indict him. He confessed to a double homicide after bein’ Mirandized one or two times, dependin’ how you calculate it. So his confession ain’t admissible, since nobody wrote it down an’ got him to sign it, or had the presence of mind to tape it. But anybody here could testify that he confessed, same as a cellmate can rat out a defendant, sayin’ he confessed, except in this case it happens to be the truth. TR here did confess, an’ we all heard him.”

“So?”

He glared at me. “So I can arrest him, an’ as far as the trial’s concerned, well, who knows what’ll happen, because you never know. What I can
promise you, though, is he’ll get bail. Was a time nobody made bail on a murder charge, but now they do, an’ my guess is TR here’ll have to post something like a quarter mil max and he’s on the street. And once he’s on the street, citizen of the world that he is, all he’s gotta do is bail out, if you follow me.”

“Bail out?”

“Skip the country, forfeit the bond, and go about his business. And what’s even more of a shame is me and my fellow officers’ll be makin’ life hard for all the rest of you, even with TR here off the hook and out of the country. Takin’ testimony from Mr. Weeks, inquirin’ into the source of Mr. Sarnoff’s income—”

“Tsarnoff, officer.”

“Whatever. Makin’ sure everybody’s papers are legit. An’ of course there’ll be reporters crawlin’ up everybody’s ass, poppin’ flash bulbs at the king an’ queen of Anna Banana—”

“Anatruria.”

“Whatever. Be more important for you people to remember the name of the country, bein’ as they’ll probably wind up sendin’ you back to it. Not Mr. Weeks, though, on account of he’s an American citizen, an’ they’ll most likely want to keep him around so Congress can ask him some questions.”

He went on in this vein, probably longer than he had to. After all, these people were professionals.
They’d played the game before, in the Balkans and the Middle East.

Weeks said, “Officer…Kirschmann, is it?” He picked up his homburg, balanced it on his knee. “You know, I got a speeding ticket a couple of years ago in the state of Montana. They had to pass a speed limit there, and in order to qualify for federal highway funds it had to be a max of sixty-five on the interstates and fifty-five everywhere else.”

“That a fact,” Ray said.

“It is,” Charlie Weeks said. “Now, Montana’s too large and too sparsely settled for those limits to make any sense. And the federal government could make them pass that law, but they couldn’t regulate how they enforced it. So Montana assigned only four state troopers to speed limit enforcement, and you know how large the state is.”

“Prolly as big as Brooklyn and Manhattan put together.”

Weeks’s smile spread across his face. “Very nearly,” he said. “The federal government couldn’t establish penalties for violating the speeding laws, either, so Montana set the fine at five dollars per violation. If one of the state’s four traffic cops nails you for doing a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour in a fifty-five zone, it costs you five bucks.”

“Reasonable,” Ray said.

“Very reasonable, but here’s the point I’m trying to make. Just so no one’s grossly inconvenienced,
neither the motorist nor the arresting officer, the fine may be collected on the spot. You pull me over, I give you five dollars, and I go on my way.”

“An’ everybody’s happy,” Ray said.

“Exactly. And the state’s best interests are served. Admirable, wouldn’t you say?”

“In a manner of speakin’, yeah.”

“Officer,” Gregory Tsarnoff said, “if the Assyrian is only going to forfeit bond, perhaps he could post it directly, without going through the usual channels.”

“I’ll tell you this,” Ray said. “It’s irregular.”

“But expedient, surely.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, “but it’d get the job done.”

“Tiglath,” Charlie Weeks said, “how much dough have you got on you?”

“You mean money?”

“No, I’m thinking about starting a bakery. Yes, I mean money. You came here thinking you’d have a chance to bid on those bearer shares. How much did you bring?”

“Not so much. I am not a rich man, Charlie. Surely you know that.”

“Don’t dick around, Tiggy, it’s late in the game for that. What are you carrying?”

“Ten thousand.”

“That’s U.S. dollars, I hope. Not Anatrurian tschirin.”

“Dollars, of course.”

“What about you, Gregorius?”

“A little more than that,” Tsarnoff said. “But can you possibly be suggesting that I help raise bail money for the Assyrian? He wrote my name in blood!”

“Yeah, but credit where it’s due, Gregorius. He spelled it wrong. Do I think you should kick in? Yes, I do.” He frowned. “You know what else I think? I think there’s too many people in the room. We need a private conference, Gregorius. You and me and Tiggy and Officer Kirschmann here.”

“And Wilfred.”

“If you prefer, Gregorius.”

“An’ Bernie,” Ray said.

“And the weasel, to be sure.”

I steered everybody else to my office in the back. That didn’t seem fair to Ilona and Michael, but they didn’t seem to mind, Ilona smiling her ironic smile while the king looked as though he’d suffered a light concussion. Between them they were less irritated than Carolyn and Mowgli, who were unhappy to be missing the next act.

I left them admiring the portrait of St. John of God, the patron saint of booksellers, and got back in time to hear Weeks explaining that he had the bearer shares. “Michael’s a nice fellow,” he was saying, “but that family was never loaded with smarts. After I heard about the burglary attempt, I told him I wanted to check the portfolio. I haven’t given it back to him yet, and when I do the shares won’t be in it.”

Tsarnoff stroked his big chin. “Without the account number—”

“Without the number the shares are just paper, but who’s to say there’s no one alive who knows the number? For that matter, who’s to say you can’t create a hairline fissure in the rock-solid walls of the Swiss banking system? If the three of us threw in together…”