The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza by Lawrence Block Page A

he’ll make sure we get more than that if we have to wait for our money. Unless the coin turns out to be a counterfeit, in which case all bets are off.”
    “Is that a possibility?”
    “No. It’s a genuine coin. My prediction is that you and I will wind up dividing fifty thousand dollars.”
    “Jesus. And all we have to do is sit around and wait for it?”
    “Right. What was it the German officer used to say to POWs in the war movies? ‘My friend, for you ze var is over.’ I think I’ll celebrate the end of the war by opening the store for a couple of hours. You doing anything special tonight?”
    “I’ll probably bounce around the bars eventually. Why? Want to have dinner?”
    “Can’t. I’ve got a date.”
    “Anybody I know?”
    “Denise.”
    “The painter? The one who doesn’t shut up?”
    “She has a ready wit and a self-deprecatory sense of humor.”
    “If you say so, Bern.”
    “Do I criticize your taste in women?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Hardly ever,” I said. I got up. “I’m going to sell some books. I’ll call you later if I hear anything. Have a good time at the dyke bars.”
    “I intend to,” she said. “Give my love to Denise.”

CHAPTER
Eight
    D enise Raphaelson is long-legged and slender, although Carolyn insists on describing her as gawky and bony. Her hair is dark brown and curly and worn medium-long, her complexion fair with a dusting of unobtrusive freckles. Her blue-gray eyes are artist’s eyes, always measuring and assessing and seeing the world as a series of framed rectangles.
    There was no end of rectangles, albeit unframed, on the walls of Narrowback Gallery, where she lived and worked. It’s on the third floor of a loft building on West Broadway between Grand and Broome, and its name derived from the loft’s unusual shape, narrow at the back and wider at the front. Denise subsequently discovered that narrowback is a term of contempt applied by native Irish to those kinsmen of theirs who have emigrated to America. No one has yet satisfactorily explained the term to her, although speculation on the subject has sparked any number of drunken conversations at the Broome Street Bar.
    I looked at a couple of paintings she’d done since I was last at the loft, including the one she’d been working on that day. I exchanged a few sentences with Jared, her twelve-year-old genius son, and gave him the stack of paperback science fiction I’d been setting aside for him. (I don’t handle paperbacks in the store, wholesaling the ones that come in to a store that sells nothing else.) He seemed happy with what I’d brought, especially an early Chip Delaney novel that he’d been wanting to read, and we had the sort of stilted conversation one has with the precocious and overly hip child of a woman with whom one occasionally beds down.
    I’d gone home to shave and change clothes before trekking down to SoHo. I had my Weejuns on my feet again and was comfortably casual in Levi’s and a flannel shirt. Denise was wearing a lime turtleneck and a pair of those forty-dollar jeans with an over-the-hill debutante’s autograph on a rear pocket. Remember when clothes had their labels on the inside?
    We had a glass of wine each at the gallery, then moved on to an Ethiopian place in Tribeca where you bring your own wine and eat unpronounceable dishes at your peril. We brought a rosé to see if it really does go with anything, and it did, but not terribly well. Our dishes, hers made with chicken and mine with lamb,were identically sauced and hot enough to blister paint. They came with a disc of spongy bread the size of a small pizza, and we tore off hunks of this gooey muck and used it to scoop up mouthfuls of the hot stuff. In the name of ethnic authenticity, a whole lot of New Yorkers are relearning the table manners of messy children.
    When we got out of there—and not a moment too soon—we walked around for a while and wound up listening to a jazz trio on Wooster Street. We had a