The Burglar on the Prowl Read online

  The big blonde knew her, and knew her drink. “Hi,” she said. “G and T?”

  “Heavy on the G,” the brunette said. “Just a splash of T.”

  “You got it. Little late for you, isn’t it?”

  I was watching out of the corner of my eye, so I didn’t actually see the brunette roll hers, but I think she probably did. “I didn’t think I was going to get here at all,” she said, “and I was starting to wonder if you did takeout.”

  “I don’t think the State Liquor Authority would go for that.”

  “I wonder if the time is right for a test case?” By now the gin and tonic was mixed and on the bar before her, and she took it up and put away more in one swallow than I’d managed in my five delicate sips. “Ahhhh,” she said, with real appreciation. “I needed that. Sigrid, back in the days before you decided on a career behind the stick—”

  “Hold it right there, huh? Being a bartender’s not a career, and I didn’t decide on it.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Of course not. Nobody does, not in New York. You decide on a career in the arts, and you wait tables to make ends meet, and it begins to dawn on you that bartenders make more money and don’t have to work as hard, plus they never get yelled at for dropping a whole tray of pasta dishes on a table full of people from Ridgeway, New Jersey—”

  “Did that happen to you?”

  “No, but it could have. So you go take the course at the American Bartenders School, which isn’t exactly rocket science, and you get a job when you graduate, and you mix martinis and screwdrivers, which isn’t exactly brain surgery, and you quit when the boss puts his hand up your skirt—”

  “Did that happen?”

  “No, but it could have. So you get another job, and you finally find a place where they treat you right, and one day you notice you haven’t been on an audition or a go-see in months, and for a while you feel guilty about it, and then you feel guilty that you don’t, and then that’s it, you’re a lifer, you’ll be mixing Salty Dogs and Harvey Wallbangers until the cows come home. But that doesn’t make it a career.”

  “Wow.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sigrid said. “Way too much information, huh?”

  “No, actually it was pretty interesting.” She drank some more of her gin and tonic, and I seized the moment to take a sip of my Laphroaig. It was definitely improving.

  “I don’t know what got me started,” Sigrid said. “Except it’s been a long night, and it didn’t help that there was a guy hitting on me about an hour ago.”

  “Oh, come on. That must happen to you all the time.”

  “It does, but most of them take no for an answer, and the rest generally take fuck you for an answer. This guy thought he was God’s gift, and he couldn’t believe I didn’t see it. Come to think of it, he’s been in here before, and—”

  “And what?”

  “And nothing.” She grinned. “My train of thought just pulled out of the station, and I wasn’t on it. You know, you were starting to ask me something, before I went into my rant.”

  “I was? Oh, right. I just wondered if you ever gave any thought to going into the law, and I guess you already answered that. You set out to be an actress.”

  “Actress and model, actually.”

  “Oh? I can’t believe you didn’t get modeling jobs.”

  “The camera likes you to be really thin, and so do the misogynists behind the cameras. I got work anyway, but nobody ever wanted to use me more than once. I had a bad attitude.”

  “Oh.”

  “I still do, but it’s okay for a bartender, especially if you’ve got the tits to go with it. But no, I never thought about becoming a lawyer. Why?”

  “Because tonight I was beginning to wish I hadn’t, either. Though this”—she raised her now-empty glass—“is definitely helping.”

  “Another? You got it. And how about you? You all right with the Laphroaig?”

  I said I was fine, and she went off to assemble another gin and tonic.

  “What did she just call your drink?”

  “Laphroaig,” I said.

  “That’s what it sounded like. Is it some kind of cordial?”

  “It’s scotch. It’s a single malt from the Isle of Islay.”

  “Is that near the Firth of Forth?”

  “It would have to be, don’t you think?”

  “I guess. Is it good?”

  “It’s getting there. I figure another three sips and it’ll be excellent.”

  She nodded judiciously. “It’s an acquired taste, and you haven’t quite acquired it yet.”

  “No.”

  “But you’re getting there.”

  “It improves with each sip.”

  “Thus the small sips,” she said. “If you were doing shots, you’d be blotto before you got anywhere close to liking it.”

  “That’s exactly right. What was so horrible about your evening?”

  “Just that I never thought I was going to get out of the damn office. I’m a lawyer. You probably figured that out.”

  “I took two and two,” I said, “and I put ’em together.”

  “I’m with this firm about ten blocks from here. Very convenient, walk to work, and most of the time the work’s fine, but every now and then you get one of those deals that has to close, if it goes past deadline everything’s screwed up and you have to start over, and sometimes it’s even worse than that, so we had one that had to close by midnight, and of course everything went wrong.”

  “Of course.”

  She reached and picked up the gin and tonic that had magically appeared in front of her. Sigrid, having noticed that the two of us had struck up a conversation, had set it down and moved off without a word. I don’t know if they teach that in American Bartenders School, but they should.

  “It was a transaction involving a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, and it could have been worse. We could have had to go to Shreveport for the closing. But since the buyer and seller both live within a few blocks of each other on the Upper East Side, we decided, hey, whatthehell, we’ll do it right here.”

  “And whom were you representing? The buyer or the seller?”

  “The lender. Like, who cares who gets the better of the deal, because our client’s just holding paper. Anyway, wheels are coming off left and right, and it has to close but it looks like it won’t, and on top of everything the paralegal I’m working with is a moron, because the one I like, the one who always gets everything right, has to leave the goddam office at six oh fucking clock to go on a date.” She held her glass aloft. “Pardon my Latvian, but I get carried away just thinking about it.”

  “Latvian?”

  “I got in the habit of not saying French. You know, like Freedom Fries?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Which is getting old now, but I like the way it sounds. ‘Pardon my Latvian.’ You take really small sips, don’t you? How was it that time?”

  “Almost delicious. I’d offer you a taste, but you’d hate it.”

  “Never mind then.” She looked at me, her brown eyes intent. “I’m Barbara,” she announced.

  “Bernie.”

  She thought about it. “Barbara Creeley.”

  “Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

  “I don’t know that name.”

  “You’re not alone. Millions of people don’t. Why, in China alone—”

  “And you don’t look familiar, either. I could swear I’ve never laid eyes on you before.”

  “You and all those folks in Shanghai.”

  “Unless I saw you in my peripheral vision or something. Do you come here often?”

  “No. What’s your sign?”

  “Yeah, I can’t believe I asked a question like that. ‘Do you come here often?’ And anyway that’s not how it feels.”

  “How what feels?”

  “The feeling,” she said. “I have this feeling that I really know you on some almost mystic level. More than that, I have the feeling that you really k
now me.” She frowned. “This is ridiculous. I didn’t think I was feeling the drinks, but evidently I am. I’m babbling away like an idiot.”

  “More like a brook.”

  “What a sweet thing to say! Bernie?”

  “Bernie.”

  “If you drink up I’ll buy you another La-whatchamacallit.”

  “Laphroaig,” I said. “But one’s plenty. Why don’t I buy you another of those instead?”

  “Thanks, but no. I’m not really much of a drinker, although you wouldn’t know it by the way I made the first one disappear.”

  “You needed it.”

  “I guess. I’m in here more nights than I’m not, but it’s rare for me to have more than two drinks. Although the other night…”

  “What?”

  “Well, it was weird. I had my usual two drinks, nothing fancy, plain old gin and tonic, and I think I must have had a blackout.”

  “Oh?”

  “I can’t even remember leaving the bar. I woke up with the worst hangover I ever had in my life. I mean, I don’t have hangovers. I don’t have blackouts, either. I think the only time I had one before was in my freshman year in college, when we played this version of Truth or Dare where you kept having to take a drink. God only knows what I drank that time, but it was a whole lot more than I had the other night.”

  “Ah, youth.”

  “I was young, all right. And I didn’t have a hangover, I woke up feeling fine, but I didn’t remember the last hour or so of the evening. But everybody told me I was perfectly fine, I didn’t do anything weird or outrageous.”

  “No harm done, then.”

  “But the night before last,” she said, and frowned. “You weren’t here that night, were you? Wednesday, it would have been.”

  “The only other time I’ve been here,” I said, “was earlier this evening. I stopped in after work and had one drink.”

  “Laphroaig?”

  “Pellegrino water. You can’t really develop a taste for it, but you don’t need one.”

  “You just drink it. And you liked it here and came back.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “After work, you said. What kind of work?”

  “I have a bookstore.”

  “Really? Are you Mr. Barnes or Mr. Noble?”

  “Well, nobody ever called me Mr. Noble. Actually I’d have to say I’m more like Mr. Strand. It’s a secondhand bookstore. But a whole lot smaller than the Strand.”

  “It sounds like fun. Half the lawyers I know would love to quit and open a used bookstore. The other half can’t read. Where is it? Right here in the neighborhood?”

  “Eleventh Street between Broadway and University.”

  “And you dropped in here after work?”

  She was wasted on real estate deals, I decided. She should have been taking depositions and cross-examining witnesses. I’d been in the neighborhood delivering a book to a good customer, I told her, and Parsifal’s had caught my eye.

  “And you popped in for a Pellegrino.”

  “For a Perrier, actually, but Pellegrino’s what they had.”

  “And you’re adaptable.” She put her hand on mine. It was just conversational, but I’ve noticed something. When a woman starts touching you, it is a Good Sign.

  “This is really strange,” she said. “See, I didn’t go home alone Wednesday night.”

  “You’re just saying that to shock me.”

  “Silly,” she said, and touched my hand again. “There’s no reason for you to be shocked, but I am, a little. Not at the idea of going home with somebody. I mean, if two grownups get a sort of mutual urge, what’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing that I can think of.”

  “But I don’t remember it, Bernie! I don’t know who the guy was or what happened, and that shocks me. In fact it scares me a little. Who the hell did I bring home? It could have been Mr. Goodbar.” She’d been looking down, and now she raised her eyes to mine. “It wasn’t you, was it?”

  “I wish.”

  “That’s the second really sweet thing you’ve said in, what, ten minutes? Bernie, I know it wasn’t you, there’s no way it could have been you, you’ve never even been here before. But why do I have the feeling we’ve been—”

  “Lovers?”

  “Well, intimate, emotionally if not physically. I had that feeling the minute I walked in here.”

  “Past lives,” I said. “Karmic ties.”

  “You think?”

  “What else could explain it?”

  “Do you feel the same way, Bernie?”

  Somehow I’d taken her hand, and I liked the way it felt in mine. There was something going on, and it had been so long that I didn’t recognize it at first.

  “This apartment you took someone home to,” I said. “Is it nearby?”

  “Right around the corner.”

  “I wonder,” I said, “if I’ll have the feeling I’ve been there before.”

  “Do you think it’s possible, Bernie?”

  “I think we should find out.”

  “I think you’re right,” she said. “I think we owe it to ourselves.”

  Twenty-Five

  If it’s all the same to you, or even if it’s not, I’ll omit details for the next half-hour or so. Suffice it to say that there are certain things which, unlike a taste for Laphroaig, don’t wear off and needn’t be reacquired. Things which, once learned, are never forgotten. Like falling off a bicycle, or drowning.

  “One thing’s certain,” she said. “It wasn’t you.”

  “What wasn’t me?”

  “Wednesday night. I mean, I knew it wasn’t, but now I really know.”

  “How’s that?”

  “If it had been you,” she said, “I’d have remembered.”

  “If it had been me,” I said, “I wouldn’t have waited until tonight to refresh your memory.”

  “It was the damnedest thing, Bernie. I woke up with a splitting headache, and of course I’d forgotten to set the alarm, so I had to rush to get to the office. I swallowed some aspirin and took a quick shower and was out the door without my usual cup of coffee. I hopped in a cab, hit the Starbucks across the street from my office, and was at my desk at nine o’clock.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “And I sat there wondering what had happened. I knew I’d been talking with somebody at the bar, but I couldn’t picture him or remember anything about him. And the next thing I remembered was waking up with a headache.”

  “So maybe you didn’t bring him home after all.”

  She shook her head. “I thought of that myself, but when I got home last night I could tell that someone had been here the night before. Whoever he was, he’d evidently made himself at home. It’s sort of creepy. I mean, he’d been in my things, and he’d moved stuff around.”

  “Creepy’s the word for it.”

  “My jewelry was arranged differently from the way I’d left it. But he must have just poked around, because he didn’t take anything. But you know what he did take?”

  “What?”

  “Well, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but he took my electric shaver.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy. I think he’s crazy. Why would he—”

  “I know, it’s strange, isn’t it? But I looked everywhere and I can’t find it, and it’s always in the same spot, on the shelf in the bathroom. A little Lady Remington, shaped to fit a dainty feminine hand. I mean, what kind of man would want something like that?”

  I took her dainty feminine hand in mine. “Not the kind who’d want to come home with you in the first place.”

  “Exactly. The only thing I could think of is he took it home for his girlfriend.”

  “Talk about creepy.”

  “Well, if he wanted a souvenir, wouldn’t he take something more intimate, like panties or a bra?”

  “That’s a point.”

  “He went through my purse, but he didn’t take any money. I actually had more money than I thought I
did. So he wasn’t your basic crook. Have you ever been robbed?”

  A couple of times, but rather than recount either of them I made one up. “A few years ago,” I said. “A burglar came in off the fire escape. He dragged my TV over to the window, but I guess he decided it was too heavy to carry and left it there. He took a combination radio and CD player that I’d just bought, along with the CD that was in it at the time, and which I had a hard time replacing.” It’s funny how a lie can build up a momentum all its own. I reined it in, and, if you’ll allow a change of metaphors, turned the wheel hard right. “He got a few dollars, too, whatever I had around the house. But the thing that bothered me, because there was no way I could replace it, is he took my high school ring.”

  “That’s really funny.”

  “It is? It didn’t seem funny at the time.”

  “No, funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. Because I can’t find my class ring.”

  “You’re kidding. You don’t think it was the same guy, do you?”

  We both laughed, and she said she wasn’t sure he’d taken it, that it might have disappeared a while ago. “Because he left a really good pair of earrings, and a watch, and a bracelet I never wear, but it’s gold, and there are all these gold coins on it. I mean, anyone who looked at it would know it was worth some money. And class rings, well, the gold is no better than ten karat, and the stone is glass.”

  “Sounds like the one I lost. If it brought ten bucks in a hock shop, the pawnbroker was generous. What color was it? Maybe he liked the way it went with your pink electric shaver.” I rolled onto my side, put a hand on her. “Barbara, those GTs have worn off by now, right? I mean, you’ll remember this in the morning?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “I was just thinking that maybe we should make sure.”

  “Oh,” she said, and reached for me. “Oh, my. What a lovely idea.”

  Afterward I got into my clothes while she lay in bed with her eyes closed. She’d taken her hair down when we’d walked in the door, just before she turned to come into my arms, and it was spread out on the pillow now the way it had been when I got my first look at her. She’d been naked then, too, but this time I didn’t feel the need to cover her with the sheet. Somehow it no longer felt invasive to enjoy the view.