“No!”
Trebizond shrugged. “Well, really,” he said. “What use are you? What are you good for besides being killed? Can you do anything besides steal, sir?”
“I can make license plates.”
“Hardly a valuable talent.”
“I know,” said the burglar sadly. “I’ve often wondered why the state bothered to teach me such a pointless trade. There’s not even much call for counterfeit license plates, and they’ve got a monopoly on making the legitimate ones. What else can I do? I must be able to do something. I could shine your shoes, I could polish your car—”
“What do you do when you’re not stealing?”
“Hang around,” said the burglar. “Go out with ladies. Feed my fish, when they’re not all over my rug. Drive my car when I’m not mangling its fenders. Play a few games of chess, drink a can or two of beer, make myself a sandwich—”
“Are you any good?”
“At making sandwiches?”
“At chess.”
“I’m not bad.”
“I’m serious about this.”
“I believe you are,” the burglar said. “I’m not your average woodpusher, if that’s what you want to know. I know the openings and I have a good sense of space. I don’t have the patience for tournament play, but at the chess club downtown I win more games than I lose.”
“You play at the club downtown?”
“Of course. I can’t burgle seven nights a week, you know. Who could stand the pressure?”
“Then you can be of use to me,” Trebizond said.
“You want to learn the game?”
“I know the game. I want you to play chess with me for an hour until my wife gets home. I’m bored, there’s nothing in the house to read, I’ve never cared much for television, and it’s hard for me to find an interesting opponent at the chess table.”
“So you’ll spare my life in order to play chess with me.”
“That’s right.”
“Let me get this straight,” the burglar said. “There’s no catch to this, is there? I don’t get shot if I lose the game or anything tricky like that, I hope.”
“Certainly not. Chess is a game that ought to be above gimmickry.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said the burglar. He sighed a long sigh. “If I didn’t play chess,” he said, “you wouldn’t have shot me, would you?”
“It’s a question that occupies the mind, isn’t it?”
“It is,” said the burglar.
They played in the front room. The burglar drew the white pieces in the first game, opened King’s Pawn, and played what turned out to be a reasonably imaginative version of the Ruy Lopez. At the sixteenth move Trebizond forced the exchange of knight for rook, and not too long afterward the burglar resigned.
In the second game the burglar played the black pieces and offered the Sicilian Defense. He played a variation that Trebizond wasn’t familiar with. The game stayed remarkably even until in the end game the burglar succeeded in developing a passed pawn. When it was clear that he would be able to queen it, Trebizond tipped over his king, resigning.
“Nice game,” the burglar offered.
“You play well.”
“Thank you.”
“Seems a pity that—”
His voice trailed off. The burglar shot him an inquiring look. “That I’m wasting myself as a common criminal? Is that what you were going to say?”
“Let it go,” Trebizond said. “It doesn’t matter.”
They began setting up the pieces for the third game when a key slipped into a lock. The lock turned, the door opened, and Melissa Trebizond stepped into the foyer and through it to the living room.
Both men got to their feet. Mrs. Trebizond advanced, a vacant smile on her pretty face. “You found a new friend to play chess with. I’m happy for you.”
Trebizond set his jaw. From his back pocket he drew the burglar’s pry bar. It had an even nicer heft than he had thought “Melissa,” he said, “I’ve no need to waste time with a recital of your sins. No doubt you know precisely why you deserve this.”
She stared at him, obviously not having understood a word he had said to her, whereupon Archer Trebizond brought the pry bar down on the top of her skull. The first blow sent her to her knees. Quickly he struck her three more times, wielding the metal bar with all his strength, then turned to look into the wide eyes of the burglar.
“You’ve killed her,” the burglar said.
“Nonsense,” said Trebizond, taking the bright revolver from his pocket once again.
“Isn’t she dead?”
“I hope and pray she is,” Trebizond said, “but I haven’t killed her. You’ve killed her.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The police will understand,” Trebizond said, and shot the burglar in the shoulder. Then he fired again, more satisfactorily this time, and the burglar sank to the floor with a hole in his heart.
Trebizond scooped the chess pieces into their box, swept up the board, and set about the business of arranging things. He suppressed an urge to whistle. He was, he decided, quite pleased with himself. Nothing was ever entirely useless, not to a man of resources. If fate sent you a lemon, you made lemonade.
A Blow for Freedom
The gun was smaller than Elliott remembered. At Kennedy, waiting for his bag to come up on the carousel, he’d been irritated with himself for buying the damned thing. For years now, ever since Pan Am had stranded him in Milan with the clothes he was wearing, he’d made an absolute point of never checking luggage. He’d flown to Miami with his favorite carry-on bag; returning, he’d checked the same bag, all because it now contained a Smith & Wesson revolver and a box of fifty .38-caliber shells.
At least he hadn’t had to take a train. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he’d told Huebner, after they’d bought the gun together. “I’ll have to take the train back, won’t I? I can’t get on the plane with a gun in my pocket.”
“It’s not recommended,” Huebner had said. “But all you have to do is check your bag with the gun and shells in it.”
“Isn’t there a regulation against it?”
“Probably. There’s rules against everything. All I know is, I do it all the time, and I never heard of anyone getting into any trouble over it. They scope the checked bags, or at least they’re supposed to, but they’re looking for bombs. There’s nothing very dangerous about a gun locked away in the baggage compartment.”
“Couldn’t the shells explode?”
“In a fire, possibly. If the plane goes down in flames, the bullets may go off and put a hole in the side of your suitcase.”
“I guess I’m being silly.”
“Well, you’re a New Yorker. You don’t know a whole lot about guns.”
“No.” He’d hesitated. “Maybe I should have bought one of those plastic ones.”
“The Glock?” Huebner smiled. “It’s a nice weapon, and it’s probably the one I’ll buy next. But you couldn’t carry it on a plane.”
“But I thought—”
“You thought it would fool the scanners and metal detectors at airport security. It won’t. That’s hardly the point of it, a big gun like that. No, they replaced a lot of the metal with high-impact plastic to reduce the weight. It’s supposed to lessen recoil slightly, too, but I don’t know if it does. Personally, I like the looks of it. But it’ll show up fine on a scanner if you put it in a carry-on bag, and it’ll set off alarms if you walk it through a metal detector.” He snorted. “Of course, that didn’t keep some idiots from introducing bills banning it in the United States. Nobody in politics likes to let a fact stand in the way of a grandstand play.”
His bag was one of the last ones up. Waiting for it, he worried that there was going to be trouble about the gun. When it came, he had to resist the urge to open the bag immediately and make sure the gun was still there. The bag felt light, and he decided some baggage handler had detected it and appropriated it for his own use.