The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart by Lawrence Block Page B
Authors: Lawrence Block
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, Crime, Detective and Mystery Stories, Mystery Fiction, New York (N.Y.), Library, Thieves, Rhodenbarr; Bernie (Fictitious character)
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coin, his wasn’t that sort of face. Something more recent….
Bingo.
I don’t think I said anything, but maybe my earsperked up, because Raffles leaped from his perch over in Philosophy & Religion and came out to see what was going on. “Not a coin,” I told him. “A stamp.”
That seemed to satisfy him; he did a set of stretching exercises and trotted off to the john. I found my way to Games & Hobbies, where there was a Scott’s world postage stamps catalog on the very bottom shelf, right where I’d last seen it. It was four years out of date but too useful a store reference to consign to the bargain table.
I carried it to the counter and flipped pages until I found the one I was looking for. I squinted at an illustration, then closed my eyes entirely and compared it to the picture in my memory.
Was it the same guy?
I thought it was, but it was hard to be sure. Postage stamps are illustrated in black and white in the catalog, and at less than half their actual size. Years ago there was a federal regulation in the United States requiring that an illustration of a postage stamp be broken by a horizontal white line, so that unscrupulous persons couldn’t cut them out of the book, paste them on envelopes, and defraud the government. Nowadays, when a ten-year-old can run off color Xeroxes of twenty-dollar bills that will make it past your average bank teller, that old rule has been discarded as obsolete, and it’s now legal to illustrate postage stamps as realistically as you wish, and to print actual-size photographs of U.S. currency.
The more recent stamp illustrations don’t have the white lines, but the catalog people haven’t troubled to rephotograph all the earlier issues, and the stamps I was looking at were of that sort, having been issued over seventy years ago. I tilted the book to get all I could from the light, and I squinted like the first runner-up in a gurning competition, and finally I went to my office in the back and looked through drawers until I found the magnifying glass.
Even with the glass, the results were not anything you’d want to go to court with. Of the series of fifteen stamps, the folks at Scott had chosen to illustrate only four. Three showed local scenes, including a church, a mountain, and a gypsy leading a dancing bear on a leash. In each of these, an unsmiling version of the man in Ilona’s photograph gazed at you from a circular inset in the upper right corner.
The fourth stamp shown was the 100-tschirin stamp. (The nation’s currency was based on the tschiro, and each tschiro was worth a hundred dikin. The cheapest stamp was a single dik. It’s remarkable how much you can learn from a postage stamp catalog, even an outdated one, and of how little value the information is.) The 100-tschirin stamp was the high value of the series, and it differed from its fellows in two respects. It was larger, about one and a half times their size, and it was vertical in format, taller than it was wide. And the portrait of Ilona’s buddy, instead of being confinedto a little porthole up in one corner, filled the entire stamp.
Hard to be sure. The reproduction, as I’ve said, left a lot to be desired. And I didn’t have the photograph with me, just my memory of the photo, glimpsed briefly in the dim and flickering light of a single candle. So I couldn’t swear to it, but it certainly looked to me as though this was the man.
Vlados I, the first—and so far the only—king of Anatruria.
For a minute there it looked like I was on to something.
My God, I thought, it all tied together. Ilona wasn’t just someone who wandered in to buy a book. It wasn’t sheer coincidence that, of all the bookstores in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine. It was all part of—
Part of what?
Not part of the abortive burglary, and not part of the death of Hugo Candlemas. Because what did Anatruria have to do with all that, or that with Anatruria? Nothing. Ilona had a photo of
Bingo.
I don’t think I said anything, but maybe my earsperked up, because Raffles leaped from his perch over in Philosophy & Religion and came out to see what was going on. “Not a coin,” I told him. “A stamp.”
That seemed to satisfy him; he did a set of stretching exercises and trotted off to the john. I found my way to Games & Hobbies, where there was a Scott’s world postage stamps catalog on the very bottom shelf, right where I’d last seen it. It was four years out of date but too useful a store reference to consign to the bargain table.
I carried it to the counter and flipped pages until I found the one I was looking for. I squinted at an illustration, then closed my eyes entirely and compared it to the picture in my memory.
Was it the same guy?
I thought it was, but it was hard to be sure. Postage stamps are illustrated in black and white in the catalog, and at less than half their actual size. Years ago there was a federal regulation in the United States requiring that an illustration of a postage stamp be broken by a horizontal white line, so that unscrupulous persons couldn’t cut them out of the book, paste them on envelopes, and defraud the government. Nowadays, when a ten-year-old can run off color Xeroxes of twenty-dollar bills that will make it past your average bank teller, that old rule has been discarded as obsolete, and it’s now legal to illustrate postage stamps as realistically as you wish, and to print actual-size photographs of U.S. currency.
The more recent stamp illustrations don’t have the white lines, but the catalog people haven’t troubled to rephotograph all the earlier issues, and the stamps I was looking at were of that sort, having been issued over seventy years ago. I tilted the book to get all I could from the light, and I squinted like the first runner-up in a gurning competition, and finally I went to my office in the back and looked through drawers until I found the magnifying glass.
Even with the glass, the results were not anything you’d want to go to court with. Of the series of fifteen stamps, the folks at Scott had chosen to illustrate only four. Three showed local scenes, including a church, a mountain, and a gypsy leading a dancing bear on a leash. In each of these, an unsmiling version of the man in Ilona’s photograph gazed at you from a circular inset in the upper right corner.
The fourth stamp shown was the 100-tschirin stamp. (The nation’s currency was based on the tschiro, and each tschiro was worth a hundred dikin. The cheapest stamp was a single dik. It’s remarkable how much you can learn from a postage stamp catalog, even an outdated one, and of how little value the information is.) The 100-tschirin stamp was the high value of the series, and it differed from its fellows in two respects. It was larger, about one and a half times their size, and it was vertical in format, taller than it was wide. And the portrait of Ilona’s buddy, instead of being confinedto a little porthole up in one corner, filled the entire stamp.
Hard to be sure. The reproduction, as I’ve said, left a lot to be desired. And I didn’t have the photograph with me, just my memory of the photo, glimpsed briefly in the dim and flickering light of a single candle. So I couldn’t swear to it, but it certainly looked to me as though this was the man.
Vlados I, the first—and so far the only—king of Anatruria.
For a minute there it looked like I was on to something.
My God, I thought, it all tied together. Ilona wasn’t just someone who wandered in to buy a book. It wasn’t sheer coincidence that, of all the bookstores in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine. It was all part of—
Part of what?
Not part of the abortive burglary, and not part of the death of Hugo Candlemas. Because what did Anatruria have to do with all that, or that with Anatruria? Nothing. Ilona had a photo of
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