The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart by Lawrence Block Page B

did.”
    “And?”
    “‘Oh, a great distance,’ she said, and then she changed the subject. What was I going to do,cross-examine her? And what real difference does it make where she lives?”
    “Especially since you’re never going to wind up there.”
    I sighed again. “The third or fourth date, I forget when, I suggested she might like to see my apartment. ‘Someday,’ she said. ‘But not tonight, Bear-naaard.’”
    “‘Bear-naaard.’”
    “That’s how she says it. You know something? I hate rejection.”
    “How unusual.”
    “I mean I really can’t stand it. She was very nice about it, but all the same I felt like an oaf for asking.”
    “So you never made another move?”
    “Of course I did, a few days later, and I got to feel like an oaf a second time. And then Saturday after the movies I said I hated to see the evening end, and we wound up going for a walk.”
    “And?”
    “We walked up Broadway as far as Eighty-sixth Street, and then we walked downtown again on the other side of the street, and we stopped here and there along the way for what you might call a heated embrace.”
    “Hugs and kisses?”
    “Hugs and kisses. And when we got to Columbus Circle we kissed again, and then she leaned back and looked into my eyes and told me to put her in a cab.”
    “And she didn’t want you to get into it with her?”
    “’Zis is not ze right time, Bear-naaard.’”
    “I didn’t realize her accent was that heavy.”
    “It is when she’s delirious with passion.”
    “And her passion propelled her—”
    “Straight into a cab.”
    “What do you figure, Bern? Is she a tease?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Or a freeloader, just stringing you along, taking you for all you’re worth.”
    “Then I can’t be worth very much,” I said. “She buys her own ticket and pays for her own cab.”
    “Who buys the coffee afterward?”
    “We take turns.”
    “How about the popcorn?”
    “I buy the popcorn.”
    “Well, there you go. She’s only in it for the popcorn. Maybe she’s a little bit married. Ever think of that?”
    “I thought of it right away,” I said. “Then I asked myself how a married woman could possibly sneak out for four hours every night.”
    “She could tell her husband she’s taking a course in Crockpot Macramé at the New School.”
    “Seven days a week?”
    “Who knows? Maybe she doesn’t have to tell him anything, maybe he works from seven to midnight hosting a talk show on an FM station. ‘All right, callers, the topic tonight is Wives Who Don’t Cheat and the Men They Don’t Cheat With. Let’s see those boards light up now!’” She frowned.“The thing is,” she said, “she’s doing things sort of ass-backward for a married woman. The ones I’ve been fool enough to get involved with just wanted to go to bed. The last thing they wanted was to go out in public, let alone do a little smooching on a street corner.”
    “I don’t think she’s married.”
    “Well, what’s her story?”
    “I don’t know. She doesn’t seem in any great rush to tell it. We had four or five dates before she got around to telling me where she came from.”
    “I remember. For a while the best you could do was narrow it down to Europe.”
    “It’s not as though I didn’t ask her. It’s not an impolite question, is it? ‘Where are you from?’ I mean, that’s not like asking to see her tax return or hear her sexual history, is it?”
    “Maybe it’s a sensitive subject in Anatruria.”
    “Maybe.”
    “You want to know something, Bern? I never heard of Anatruria.”
    “Well, don’t feel bad. Most people never heard of it. See, it never used to be a country, and it still isn’t. I heard of it, but that’s because I collected stamps when I was a kid.”
    “It never used to be a country, and it still isn’t, but they issued stamps?”
    “Around the end of the First World War,” I said. “When the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires broke up, a lot of countries