Burglars Can't Be Choosers by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

thought—”
    “Anyway, I don’t happen to have the name or address at the moment. I told you about my memory, didn’t I?”
    “Did you?”
    “I coulda sworn I did.”
    I shrugged. “It must have slipped my mind.”
     
    Later that night I spent some time wondering why I’d agreed to do the job. I decided I had two motives. The money was first, and it was certainly not trivial. The certainty of five thousand dollars, plus the security of having the job already cased, outweighedthe two-in-the-bush of setting up a job cold and then having to haggle with a fence.
    But there was more to it than money. Something about my shmoo-shaped friend suggested that it would be unwise to refuse him. It’s not that there was anything in particular I feared would happen to me if I told him to go roll his hoop. It just seemed unlikely to be a good idea.
    And then there was curiosity. Who the hell was he? If I didn’t know him, why did he seem so damned familiar? More important, how did he know about me? And what was his little game all about in the first place? If he was a pro, recognizing me as another pro, why were we circling each other like tropical birds in an involved mating ritual? I didn’t necessarily expect ever to learn the answers to all these questions, but I felt they might turn up if I saw the thing through, and I didn’t have any other work I was dying to do, and the money I had in reserve wouldn’t last forever, and…
    There’s a luncheonette I go to once or twice a month on Amsterdam Avenue between Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth. The owner is a Turk with an intimidating moustache and the food he serves is every bit as Turkish, if less intimidating. I was sitting at the counter two days after my first meeting with my new-found friend. I’d just finished polishing off an exceptional bowl of lentil soup,and while I waited for my stuffed grape leaves I glanced at a selection of meerschaum pipes in a glass case on the wall. The man with the moustache goes home to Turkey every spring and returns with a satchel full of pipes, which he insists are better than anything you can buy over the counter at Dunhill’s. I don’t smoke a pipe so I’m not really tempted, but whenever I eat there I look at the pipes and try to figure out if there’s a pipe smoker on earth I’m a close enough friend to so that I can buy him one of these beauties. There never is.
    “My old man used to smoke a meerschaum,” said a familiar voice beside me. “Only pipe he owned and he musta smoked it five, six times a day. Over the years the thing turned as black as the deuce of spades. He had this special glove he always wore when he smoked it. Just on the one hand, the hand he held the pipe in. He’d always sit in the same chair and just smoke that pipe real slow and easy. Had a special fitted case he kept it in when he wasn’t smoking it. Case was lined in blue velvet.”
    “You do turn up at odd times.”
    “Then one day it broke,” he went on. “I don’t know whether he dropped it or set it down hard or it just got too old or whatever the hell happened. My memory, you know.”
    “Like a sieve.”
    “The worst. What’s funny, the old man nevergot hisself a new pipe. Not a meerschaum, not a briar, not anything. Just quit the habit like it was no habit at all. When I think about it what I always come up with is he just never believed anything would happen to that pipe, and then when it did he realized that nothing on earth lasts forever, and if that was the case he figured the hell with it and he wouldn’t smoke anymore. And he didn’t.”
    “There’s a reason you’re telling me this story.”
    “No reason at all. Just that it came to mind looking at those pipes there. I don’t want to interrupt your meal, Rhodenbarr.”
    “One might say you’ve already done that.”
    “So I’ll be on the corner gettin’ my shoes shined. I don’t guess you’ll be too long, will you?”
    “I guess not.”
    He left. I ate my grape