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

leaves. I hadn’t intended to have dessert but I decided the hell with it and ate a small piece of too-sweet baklava and sipped a thick cup of inky Turkish coffee. I thought about having a second cup but figured it would keep me awake for four years and I didn’t want that. So I paid the man with the moustache and walked to the shoeshine stand on the corner.
    My friend told me everything I’d always wanted to know about J. Francis Flaxford and his blue leather box. If anything, he told me more than I wanted to know without answering any of my more important questions.
    At one point I asked him his own name. He slid his soft brown eyes across my forehead and treated me to a look of infinite disappointment.
    “Now I could tell you a name,” he said, “but then what would you know that you don’t know now? Not too much chance that it would be a real name, is there?”
    “Not too much, no.”
    “So why should we make complications for ourselves? All you got to know is where and when to get the box, which we just went over, and how and where to give it to me so you can get the other four grand.”
    “You mean we’ll plan that in advance? I thought I’d just go about my business and one of these days you’d turn up breathing over my shoulder at the delicatessen. Or maybe you’d be in the basement laundry room when I went down to throw my socks in the dryer.”
    He sighed. “You’ll be inside Flaxford’s place nine, nine-thirty. You’ll be outta there by eleven, eleven-thirty the latest. Can’t take too long to take a box out of a desk. You’ll want to go home, have a drink, take a shower, change your clothes, that kind of thing.” And drop off burglar tools and such, along with whatever sundry swag I might happen to acquire. “So you take yourself some time, and then what you do, you go to a place nice and convenient to your apartment. There’s a baron Broadway and I think it’s Sixty-fourth Street, called Pandora’s. You know it?”
    “I’ve passed it.”
    “Nice quiet place. Get there, say, twelve-thirty and take a booth at the back. There’s no waitress so what you do is you get your drink at the bar and carry it back to your table.”
    “Sounds as though I’d better wear a suit.”
    “It’s private and it’s quiet and they leave you alone. You’ll get there at twelve-thirty and you might have to sit there half an hour.”
    “And then you’ll turn up around one?”
    “Right. Any problem, you wait until half past one and then you take the box and go home. But there won’t be no problems.”
    “Of course not,” I agreed. “But suppose someone tries to take the box away from me?”
    “Well, take cabs, for Chrissake. You don’t want to walk around at that hour. Oh, wait a minute.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “You think I’d knock you over for a lousy four thousand dollars? Why would I do that?”
    “Because it might be cheaper than paying me.”
    “Jesus,” he said. “Then how could I use you some other time? Look, carry some heat if it’s gonna make you feel better. Except all you do then is get nervous and shoot your own foot off. I swear you got nothing to worry about from me. You bring me the box and you get your four gees.”
    “Gees,” I said.
    “Huh?”
    “Thou, kay, gees. Grand.”
    “Huh?”
    “Four big ones.”
    “What’s the point?”
    “You’ve got so many nicknames for money, that’s all. You’re like a thesaurus of slang.”
    “Something wrong with the way I talk, Rhodenbarr?”
    “No,” I said. “Nothing. It’s just me. My nerves, I guess. I get all keyed up.”
    “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I just bet you do.”
     
    And now I sat up on Rod’s couch and looked at my watch. It was getting on for midnight. I’d gotten out of the Flaxford apartment with plenty of time to spare, but all the same it didn’t look as though I’d be in Pandora’s by twelve-thirty. My thousand dollars in front money was but a memory and the remaining four big