“Why did he need Hoberman? If he was the woodchuck, he knew Weeks as well as Hoberman did. Why couldn’t he sneak you into the Boccaccio himself?”
“I’m not positive,” I said. “He may have been afraid of the reception he’d get from Weeks. Remember, Weeks had spread the story that Candlemas had sold out the Anatrurians. Candlemas knew he hadn’t, but he couldn’t afford to find out if Weeks really believed it. Either way, he might not get a warm reception from the mouse.”
“So he figured he’d be safer using Hoberman.”
“But not safe enough,” I said.
She had more questions and I had most of the answers. Then she started to order another round and I caught her hand on the way up. “No more for me,” I told her.
“Aw, come on, Bern,” she said. “It’s been weeks since we had drinks together after work, and on top of that it’s a holiday. Get in the spirit of it, why don’t you?”
“We’re supposed to remember the war dead,” I said, “not join them. Anyway, I’ve got somewhere to go.”
“Where’s that?”
“Guess,” I said.
In The Big Shot, Humphrey Bogart plays Duke Berne, a career criminal who’s trying to go straight because a fourth felony conviction will put him in prison for life. But he can’t stay away from it, and goes in on the planning of an armored-car heist. The head of the gang is a crooked lawyer, and the lawyer’s wife is Bogart’s old sweetheart. She won’t let Bogie risk his life, and keeps him from participating in the robbery by holding him in his room at gunpoint. A witness picks him out of a mug book anyway, which strikes me as questionable police work, but that’s my professional point of view showing.
The lawyer’s jealous, and screws up Bogie’s alibi, and he winds up going down for the count. There’s a prison break, and Bogie gets away, but one thing after another goes wrong, until finally Bogie hunts down the rat lawyer and kills him. He’s shot, though, and dies in the hospital.
That was the first picture, and I’d never seen it before. I got caught up in it, too, and maybe that was why I didn’t eat much of the popcorn, or it may have been because I’d been munching peanuts at the Bum Rap. Either way, I had more than half a barrel left at intermission. I had to use the john—beer’s like that—but I went and came back without hitting the refreshment counter.
I didn’t feel like seeing the guy with the goatee, or any of the other regulars I’d gotten to know by sight. I just felt like sitting alone in the dark and watching movies.
The second picture was The Big Sleep, and whoever put the program together had been having fun, combining two pictures with near-identical titles. But of course this was the classic, based on the Chandler novel with a screenplay by William Faulkner, starring Bogie and Bacall and featuring any number of good people, including Dorothy Malone and Elisha Cook, Jr. I won’t summarize it for you, partly because the plot’s impossible to keep straight, and partly because you must have seen it. If not, well, you will.
Ten minutes into the picture, at a moment when I was really immersed in what was happening on the screen, I heard the rustle of cloth and got a whiff of perfume, and then someone was settling into the seat beside me. A hand joined mine in the popcorn barrel, but it wasn’t groping for popcorn. It found my hand, and closed around it, and didn’t let go.
We both watched the screen, and neither of us said a word.
When the movie ended we were the last ones to leave the theater, still in our seats when the credits ended and the house lights came up. I guess neither of us wanted it to be over.
On the street she said, “I bought a ticket. And then the man told me to get my money back. He said you left a ticket for me.”
“He’s a nice man. He wouldn’t lie to you.”
“How did you know I would come?”
“I didn’t think you would,” I said. “I didn’t know if I would ever see you again, sweetheart. But I thought it was worth a chance.” I shrugged. “It was just a movie ticket, after all. It wasn’t an emerald.”
She squeezed my hand. “I would take you to my apartment, but it is not mine anymore.”
“I know. I was there.”
“So you will take me to yours.”
We walked, and neither of us spoke on the way. Inside, I offered to make drinks. She didn’t want one. I said I’d make coffee. She told me not to bother.
“This afternoon,” she said. “You said we went to the movies together, but that we were no more than friends.”
“Good friends,” I said.
“We went to bed together.”
“What are friends for?”
“Yet you did not let anyone know we went to bed together.”
“It must have slipped my mind.”
“It did not slip your mind,” she said with cool certainty, “nor will it ever slip from mine. I will never forget it, Bear-naard.”
“It made such an impression on you,” I said, “that you emptied out your apartment and moved right out of my life.”
“You know why.”
“Yes, I guess I do.”
“He is the hope of my people, Bear-naard. And he is my destiny, even as Anatrurian independence is my life. I came here to be with him, and to…to strengthen his commitment to our cause. To be a king, to have a throne, all that is nothing to him. But to lead his people, to fulfill the dreams of an entire nation, that stirs his blood.”
Play the song, I thought. Where the hell was Dooley Wilson when you needed him?
“And then you came along,” she said, and reached out a hand to touch my face, and smiled that smile that was sad and wise and rueful. “And I fell in love with you, Bear-naard.”
“And once we were together…”
“Once we were together we had to be apart. I could be with you once and keep you as a memory to warm me all my life, Bear-naard. But if I had been with you a second time I would have wanted to stay forever.”
“And yet you came here tonight.”
“Yes.”
“Where do you go from here, Ilona?”
“To Anatruria. We leave tomorrow. There’s a night flight from JFK.”
“And the two of you will be on it.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll miss you, sweetheart.”
“Oh, Bear-naard…”
A man could drown in those eyes. I said, “At least you won’t have Tsarnoff and Rasmoulian and Weeks getting in your way. They’ll be off playing hopscotch with the gnomes of Zurich, trying to find a way into a treasure your guy already gave up on.”
“The real treasure is the spirit of the Anatrurian people.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said. “But it’s a shame you don’t have much in the way of working capital.”
“It is true,” she said. “Mikhail says the same thing. He would like to raise funds first so we will have money on which to operate. But the time is now. We cannot afford to wait.”
“Hang on a minute,” I said. “Just wait here, okay?”
I left her on the couch in the living room and paid a quick visit to my bedroom closet. I came back with a cardboard file folder.
“Weeks had these,” I said. “He slipped them out of the portfolio along with the bearer shares, and I scooped them up this morning when I was in his apartment. I figured it was safe to take these because I don’t think he paid much attention to them. His whole orientation is politics and intrigue. As far as he’s concerned, these were just a propaganda device.”
She opened the folder, then nodded in recognition. “The Anatrurian postage stamps,” she said. “Of course. King Vlados received a complete set and passed them on to his son, and they have come down to Mikhail. They are pretty, aren’t they?”
“They’re gorgeous,” I said. “And this isn’t a set, it’s a set of full sheets.”
“Is that good?”
“They’re a questionable issue from a philatelic standpoint,” I said, “or else they’d be damn near priceless, considering their rarit
y. As it is, they’re still valuable. They’re unpriced in Scott, but Dolbeck prices provisional and fantasy issues, and the latest Dolbeck catalog has the full set at twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“So these stamps are worth over two thousand dollars? That is good.”
“If you’re selling,” I said, “you generally figure on netting two-thirds to three-fourths the Dolbeck value.”
“Two thousand, then. A little less.”
“Per set.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “That is very nice.”
“It’s nicer than you realize,” I said. “The stamps are printed fifty to a sheet, so you’re holding fifty sets. That’s somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars.”
She stared. “But…”
“Take it before I change my mind,” I said. “There’s a man at Kildorran and Partners who specializes in this kind of material. He’ll either buy it from you or arrange to sell it for you. He’s in London, on Great Portland Street, and his name and the firm’s address are written down on the inside of that folder you’re holding. I don’t know if you’ll get a hundred grand. It may be more, it may be less. But you’ll get a fair price.” I extended a forefinger, chucked her under the chin. “I don’t know how your flight’s routed tomorrow night, but if I were you I’d change things and take a day or two in London. You don’t want to wait too long with those things. You might make a mistake and use one to mail a letter.”
“Bear-naard, you could have kept these.”
“You think so?”
“But of course. No one knew you had them. No one even knew they were valuable.”
I shook my head. “It wouldn’t work, sweetheart. The hopes and dreams of a couple of little people like you and me don’t add up to a hill of beans next to the cause you and Michael are fighting for. Sure, I could use the money, but I don’t really need it. And if I ever do I’ll go out and steal it, because that’s the kind of man I am.”
“Oh, Bear-naard.”
“So pack them up and take them home with you,” I said. “And I think you’d better go now, Ilona.”
“But I thought…”
“I know what you thought, and I thought so too. But I went to bed with you once and lost you, and I don’t want to go through that again. One time is a good memory. Twice is heartbreak.”
“Bear-naard, I have tears in my eyes.”
“I’d kiss them away,” I said, “but I wouldn’t be able to stop. So long, sweetheart. I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll never forget you,” she said. “I’ll never forget Twenty-fifth Street.”
“Neither will I.” I took her arm, eased her out the door. “And why should you? We’ll always have Twenty-fifth Street.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-five
It was a full week before I got around to telling Carolyn about that final evening in Ilona’s company. I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to keep it from her. But it turned out to be a busy time for both of us. I kept my usual hours in the bookstore, and put in some overtime as well, riding the Long Island Rail Road to Massapequa one evening to appraise a library (for a fee; they didn’t want to sell anything), and spending another evening at a book auction, bidding on behalf of a customer who was shy about attending those things himself.
Carolyn had a busy schedule herself, with a kennel club show coming up that meant a lot of dogs for her to pretty up. And there were a lot of phone calls and visits back and forth when Djinn and Tracey got back together again, and Djinn accused Tracey of having an affair with Carolyn, which was what Djinn had done after a previous breakup. “Pure dyke-o-drama,” Carolyn called it, and eventually it blew over, but while it lasted there were lots of middle-of-the-night phone calls and phones slammed down and loud confrontations on street corners. When it finally cleared up, she plunged with relief into the new Sue Grafton novel she’d been saving.
So we had lunch five days a week and drinks after work, and then on Tuesday, a week and a day after Memorial Day, we were at the Bum Rap after work and Carolyn was telling a long and not terribly interesting story about a Bedlington terrier. “From the way he acted,” she said, “you’d have sworn he thought he was an Airedale.”
“No kidding,” I said.
She looked at me. “You don’t think that’s funny?”
“Yeah, it’s funny.”
“I can see you think it’s a scream. I thought it was funny.”
“Then why aren’t you laughing?” I said. “Never mind. Carolyn, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” And then I signaled Maxine for another round of drinks, because this was going to be thirsty work.
I told her the whole story and she listened all the way through without interrupting me, and when I was done she sat and stared at me with her mouth open.
“That’s amazing,” she said. “And you didn’t say a word about it for a week and a day. That’s even more amazing.”
“I just kept forgetting to bring it up,” I said. “You know what I think it was? I must have wanted a little time to digest it.”
“Makes sense. Bern, I’m amazed. I don’t want to work the word to death, but I am. I’ll tell you this, kiddo. It’s the most romantic story I ever heard in my life.”
“I guess it’s romantic.”
“What else could it be?”
“Stupid,” I said. “Real stupid.”
“You gave away a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Something like that.”
“To a woman you’ll probably never see again.”
“I might see her on a stamp,” I said. “If Anatruria makes the cut. But no, I’ll probably never see her again.”
“She didn’t even know about the stamps, did she? That you had them, or that they were worth anything.”
“Tsarnoff or Rasmoulian would have known what they were worth, or at least known they were worth plenty. Candlemas might have known—he had a collector’s orientation. The others didn’t think in those terms. And no, nobody knew I had them, least of all Ilona.”
“And you gave them to her.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you got to make the famous hill-of-beans speech.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Why’d you do it, Bern?”
“They needed the money,” I said. “I can always use money, but I can’t pretend I had a genuine need for a hundred thousand dollars. They needed it.”
“Hell, Bern, the hip dysplasia people need it, too, and it was all I could do to get twenty bucks out of you.”
“The stamps came from Anatruria,” I said.
“I thought they came from Hungary.”
“You know what I mean. They were issued in the cause of Anatrurian freedom, and if they were worth all that money after all those years, then the money belonged to the cause. If there is such a cause, or if there even is such a country.” That was confusing, and I stopped and took a sip of my drink and started over. “If she hadn’t shown up at the Musette,” I said, “I don’t know what I would have done. I meant to call the king and give him the stamps, and maybe I would have done it, but maybe not. I just don’t know.
“But the point is she did show up. I bought that extra seat, and I swear I wasn’t all that surprised when she wound up sitting in it.”
“And once she did…”
“I held her hand, fed her popcorn, took her home, gave her a fortune in rare stamps, and sent her on her way.”
“With the hill-of-beans speech echoing in her cute little ears.”
“Forget the hill-of-beans speech, will you?”
“Schweetheart, the hopes and dreams of a couple of little shitkickers like you and me don’t amount to a hill of beans when you pile ’em up next to the Anatrurian Alps, and—”
“Dammit, Carolyn.”
“I’m sorry. You know what happened to you, don’t you?”
“I think so.”
“All those movies.”
“That’s what I was going to say.”
<
br /> “You watched Bogart do the noble self-sacrificing thing one time too many, and when the opportunity came your way, you didn’t have a prayer. Poor Bernie. Everybody made something out of this business but you. Ray was the big winner. What did he wind up with, forty-eight grand?”
“He had to spread that around a little. The official story now is that Candlemas killed Hoberman, then went down to the Lower East Side to cop some dope.”
“Right, he was your typical junkie.”
“And got shot when the deal went sour. I would guess somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand dollars’ll wind up in Ray’s pocket.”
“And of course he insisted you take some of the money.”
“It must have slipped his mind.”
“Not fair, Bern. After all, you solved the whole case. He just stood there.”
“He doesn’t just stand. He looms.”
“Good for him. He gets the money, Ilona and the king get the stamps, and the three mouseketeers get the bearer shares and go chasing after the lost treasure of Anatruria. And what about you? You didn’t even get laid.”
“Maybe that was dumb, too,” I said. “But all she’s going to be for me is a memory, and I didn’t have to repeat the experience to be sure I’d remember it. I’m in no danger of forgetting.”
“No.”
I picked up my drink, held it to the light. “Anyway,” I said, “it’s not as though I wind up empty-handed.”
“How do you figure that, Bern?”
“I got the bone woodchuck from Candlemas’s apartment, remember?”
“Wow, Bern.”
“And when I stopped by Charlie Weeks’s place, the stamps weren’t all I swiped. I got the mouse carving Hoberman gave him.”
“Gee, you can just about retire when you sell those two little beauties, can’t you?”
“No, I think I’ll hang on to them as souvenirs. My real profit comes tomorrow night.”
“What happens tomorrow night?”
“A man named Sung-Yun Lee goes to see The Chink in the Armoire.”