The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,1

two spots you have to press, then slid the panel you have to slide, and the compartment revealed its secrets. They weren’t many. The space runs to about three cubic feet, so it’s large enough to stow just about anything I steal until such time as I’m able to dispose of it. But I hadn’t stolen anything in months, and what I’d last lifted had long since been distributed to a couple of chaps who’d had more use for it than I.

What can I say? I steal things. Cash, ideally, but that’s harder and harder to find in this age of credit cards and twenty-four-hour automatic teller machines. There are still people who keep large quantities of real money around, but they typically keep other things on hand as well, such as wholesale quantities of illegal drugs, not to mention assault rifles and attack-trained pit bulls. They lead their lives and I lead mine, and if the twain never get around to meeting, that’s fine with me.

The articles I take tend to be the proverbial good things that come in small packages. Jewelry, naturally. Objets d’art—jade carvings, pre-Columbian effigies, Lalique glass. Collectibles—stamps, coins, and once, in recent memory, baseball cards. Now and then a painting. Once—and never again, please God—a fur coat.

I steal from the rich, and for no better reason than Robin Hood did: the poor, God love ’em, have nothing worth taking. And the valuable little items I carry off are, you will note, not the sort of thing anybody needs in order to keep body and soul together. I don’t steal pacemakers or iron lungs. No family is left homeless after a visit of mine. I don’t take the furniture or the TV set (although I have been known to roll up a small rug and take it for a walk). In short, I lift the things you can live without, and which you have very likely insured, like as not for more than they’re worth.

So what? What I do is still rotten and reprehensible, and I know it. I’ve tried to give it up, and I can’t, and deep down inside I don’t want to. Because it’s who I am and what I do.

It’s not the only thing I am or do. I’m also a bookseller, the sole proprietor of Barnegat Books, an antiquarian bookstore on East Eleventh Street, between Broadway and University Place. On my passport, which you’ll find in the back of my sock drawer (which is stupid, because, trust me, that’s the first place a burglar would look), my occupation is listed as bookseller. The passport has my name, Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr, and my address on West End Avenue, and a photo which can be safely described as unflattering.

There’s a better photo in the other passport, the one in the hidey-hole at the back of the closet. It says my name is William Lee Thompson, that I’m a businessman, and that I live at 504 Phillips Street, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. It looks authentic, and well it might; the passport office issued it, same as the other one. I got it myself, using a birth certificate that was equally authentic, but, alas, not mine.

I’ve never used the Thompson passport. I’ve had it for seven years, and in three more years it will expire, and even if I still haven’t used it I’ll probably renew it when the time comes. It doesn’t bother me that I haven’t had occasion to use it, any more than it would bother a fighter pilot that he hasn’t had occasion to use his parachute. The passport’s there if I need it.

I wasn’t likely to need it tonight, so I left it right where it was. I also left my stash of cash, which I didn’t expect to need either. The last time I counted it was down to around five thousand dollars, which is lower than I like it. Ideally I ought to maintain an emergency cash reserve of twenty-five thousand dollars, and I periodically boost it to that level, but then I find myself dipping into it for one thing or another, and before I know it I’m scraping bottom.

All the more reason to get to work.

A workman is as good as his tools, and so is a burglar. I picked up my ring of picks and probes and odd-shaped strips of metal and found room for them in a trouser pocket. My flashlight is the size and shape of a fountain pen, and I tucked it