“Now why in the hell would they call it that? You want to try callin’ him, I’d say you’re shit out of luck, bein’ as there’s no number to call. He in the book business?”

“So he says.”

“An’ that’s his business card? No phone, no address? An’ on the strength of that you gave him a discount and didn’t charge him the tax?”

“I guess I’m a soft touch, Ray.”

“It’s good you’re closin’ early,” he said, “before you give away the store.”

Twenty minutes later I was standing in a gray-green corridor looking through a pane of glass at someone who couldn’t look back. “I hate this,” I said to Ray. “Remember? I told you I hated this.”

“You’re not gonna puke, are you, Bernie?”

“No,” I said firmly. “I’m not. Can we leave now?”

“You seen enough?”

“More than enough, thank you.”

“Well?”

“Well what? Oh, you mean-”

“Yeah. It’s him, right?”

I hesitated. “You know,” I said, “how many times did I actually set eyes on the man? Two, three times?”

“He was a customer of yours, Bernie.”

“Not a very frequent one. And you don’t really look at a person in a bookstore, at least I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

“Not really. What usually happens is we both wind up looking at the book we’re discussing. And if he’s paying by check I’ll look at the check, and at his ID, if I ask him for ID. Of course Candlemas paid me in cash, so I never had any reason to ask to see his driver’s license.”

“So instead you looked at his face, like you just did a minute ago, and that’s how you’re able to tell it’s him.”

“But did I really look at his face?” I frowned. “Sometimes we look without seeing, Ray. I looked at his clothes. I could swear he was a sharp dresser. But now all he’s wearing is a sheet, and I never saw him on his way to a toga party.”

“Bernie…”

“Think about the man you just met in my store. That was no more than half an hour ago, Ray, and you looked right at him, but did you really see him? If you had to do it, could you furnish a description of him?”

“Sure,” he said. “Name, Tignatz Rasmoolihan. Height, five foot two. Weight, a hundred an’ five. Color of hair, black. Color of eyes, green.”

“Really? He had green eyes?”

“Sure, matched his shirt. Probably why he picked it, the vain little bastard. Complexion, pale. Spots of rouge here an’ here, only it ain’t rouge, it’s natural. Shape of face, narrow.”

He went on, describing the clothes Rasmoulian was wearing down to an alligator belt with a silver buckle, which I certainly hadn’t noticed. I must have seen it but it didn’t register. “That’s amazing,” I said. “You barely looked at him and you got all that. You fluffed the name a little, but everything else was picture-perfect.”

“Well, I’m what you call a trained observer,” he said, clearly pleased. “I’ll screw up a name now an’ then, but I get the rest of it right most of the time.”

“Now that just shows you,” I said. “I’m the other way around. I guess I’m just more verbal than visual. I’ll get the names right every time, but the faces are another story.”

“I guess it comes from hangin’ around books all the time.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Instead of gettin’ out and mixin’ with people.”

“That must be it.”

“So?”

“How’s that, Ray?”

“So are you gonna ID this poor dead son of a bitch or what?”

“Just hypothetically,” I said. “Suppose I wasn’t a hundred percent certain.”

“Aw, Jesus, why’d you have to go an’ say a thing like that?”

“No, let me finish. I get the impression that my identifying the body is really nothing more than a formality.”

“That’s exactly what it is, Bernie.”

“You’ve probably already identified him from fingerprints and dental records. You just need somebody to eyeball the deceased and confirm what you already know.”

“So far we didn’t get any kind of a bounce from the prints or the dental records. But we sure as hell know who he is.”

“So it’s just a formality.”

“Didn’t I just say that, Bernie?”

I made up my mind. “All right,” I said. “It’s Candlemas.”

“Way to go, Bern. For the record, you’re formally identifying the man you just saw as Hugo Candlemas, right?”

If this had been a movie there’d have been an ominous chord right about now, so that you’d know the hero was about to put his foot in it. No, you’d want to cry. No, you fool, don’t do it!

But would he listen?

“Ray,” I said, “there’s no question in my mind.”

CHAPTER Ten

Ray dropped me at the subway and I was in my own apartment with time for a shower and shave before I headed for the Musette. I was there first so I bought two tickets and waited in the lobby.

I was still waiting when they opened the doors and started letting people take seats. I followed the crowd inside and threw my jacket over a pair of seats halfway down the aisle on the left, then went back to the guy taking tickets. He knew me by now, and why wouldn’t he? He’d been seeing me every night for the past two and a half weeks.

He said he hadn’t recognized me at first, that he wasn’t used to seeing me without my lady friend. That, I told him, was the problem. I gave him Ilona’s ticket and said she’d evidently been delayed en route. He assured me there would be no problem; he’d let her in and steer her toward where I was sitting.

I went and bought popcorn. What the hell, I hadn’t had anything to eat since that slice of pizza around noon. It felt strange, though, sitting there with no one next to me, dipping into the popcorn without risk of encountering another hand.

I glanced around the theater, surprised at what a large proportion of the audience looked familiar to me. I don’t know that there were many diehards like us who never missed a night, but a lot of people came more than once. I guess if you saw one Bogart picture you saw them all, or as many as you could.

If we ran to type, I couldn’t tell you what the type was. There were quite a few college kids, some with the serious look of film students, others just out for a good time. There were older West Siders, the intellectual-political-artsy crowd you see at the free afternoon concerts at Juilliard, and some of them had probably seen many of these films during their initial run. There were singles, gay and straight, and young marrieds, gay and straight, and people who looked rich enough to buy the theater, and people who looked as though they must have raised the price of admission by begging on the subway. It was a wonderfully varied crowd, drawn together by the enduring appeal of an actor who’d died more than thirty-five years ago, and I was happy to be a part of it.

But not as happy as I would have been if Ilona were sharing my popcorn.

The thought made the popcorn stick in my throat, but sometimes it tends to do that anyway. I told myself it was a little early to start wallowing in self-pity, that she’d be slipping into the seat beside me any minute now.

The seat was still empty when they brought the house lights down. I wasn’t surprised, not really. I fed myself another handful of popcorn and let myself get lost in the movie.

That’s what it was there for.

The first feature, Passage to Marseille, was made in 1944, not long after Casablanca and obviously inspired by it, although the credits said it was based on a book by Nordhoff and Hall. (You remember them, they wrote Mutiny on the Bounty.) Bogart plays a French journalist named Matrac who’s on Devil’s Island when the movie opens, framed for murder and serving a life sentence. He and four others escape, only to be picked up on the high seas by a French cargo ship. Of course the convicts want to go fight for France-has there ever been anyone as fiercely patriotic as a criminal in a Hollywood movie?-but France has just surrendered, and Sydney Greenstreet wants to turn the ship over to the Vichy government. His attempted mutiny is thwarted, and Bogart and his buddies join a Free French bomber squadron in England. His plane is the last to return from a mission, and after it lands his crewmates bring him off, dead.