The Burglar on the Prowl by Lawrence Block Page B

her.”
    After the divorce he’d taken up martial arts, and you can make ofthat what you will. It didn’t stress his bum knee, and the skills he developed gave him increased self-confidence when dealing with some of his less savory clients, but the chief benefit, he assured me, was spiritual. “You’ve got to try it,” he told me. “It’ll change your life.”
    I’d tried running, though I never got to the marathon level, and I have to say it had changed my life. It made me feel better, and I stuck with it for a few years, and then I stopped, and that made me feel better all over again. When I’ve got more time, I told Wally, and he gave me the knowing smile of the spiritually advanced human being. “When you’re ready, Bernie,” he said gently. “You just let me know.”
    He showed up downtown at One Police Plaza, which is where Ray had taken me, and by late afternoon he had me out of there, and took me around the corner to a teahouse one flight up from a store that sold lacquered Chinese furniture. We sat at one of those low tables with a recess in the floor for your feet, and a little slip of a girl came over and taught us how to make tea. I’d never needed instructions in the past, I just dropped the tea bag in the cup and poured hot water on top of it, but this was a more elaborate procedure involving a pot full of water with a can of Sterno under it to keep it at the boiling point, and a whole system for making the tea in small batches which we were supposed to drink from these tiny china eyecups.
    “This is the real stuff,” Wally said, knocking back a quarter of an ounce of liquid the approximate color of tears. “Drink up, Bernie.”
    I did, and noted the extreme subtlety of the flavor. It tasted, I have to say, an awful lot like water.
    “Amazing, right? And there’s no place like it this side of Hong Kong.”
    “Really? You’d think there’d be a line halfway around the block.”
    “That’s the thing,” he said. “Nobody knows about it. Bernie, they’ve got nothing. That’s why they cut you loose without putting up much of a fight. I mean, what have they got? They can prove you were within a few blocks of the place around the time those people were being robbed and murdered. Well, so were several thousandother people. They can’t establish that you were in the building, let alone the penthouse apartment where the crime took place. I’ve got to wonder what Kirschmann was thinking of, hauling you in when he knew they couldn’t hold you. Unless…”
    “Unless what?”
    “Well, unless they turn something up searching your apartment.”
    “They’re searching my apartment?”
    “’Fraid so, Bernie. The fact that they had you in custody persuaded some tame judge they had grounds for a warrant, and they’re over there right now. You don’t look happy. Want to tell me what they’re likely to find?”
    “Nothing illegal,” I said. There’s a Mondrian on the wall, and it happens to be an original, but everyone assumes it’s a copy, and it’s been hanging there for years. * My burglar tools were back in my hiding place, along with both passports, and they could make a little trouble for me if they found them, but I didn’t think they would. They never have in the past.
    “Nothing from the break-in last night,” Wally said.
    “I wasn’t there, Wally.”
    “Just making sure. Nothing from, uh, any other place you might have been?”
    He hadn’t asked what I’d been doing in Murray Hill, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a good idea. Not a thing, I told him, and he seemed satisfied.
    “More tea, Bernie?”
    “Uh, sure.”
    “When I think of all the coffee I used to drink,” he said, “it’s enough to give me the jitters. Tea’s better for you, you know.”
    “It must be.”
    “It’s got these compounds in it, I forget what they’re called, but every day it seems they’re finding something new that they do, and that’s good for you. All I know is I find it