The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr)

by Lawrence Block

  I hadn’t been looking for initials, but if I had, those would have been the right ones. A Life Lived—yes, that was it, and I drew out the folder and opened it to look at the first of forty-plus pages of unlined bond paper, originally white and now yellowing with age.

  The first page, and the others that followed, had been written on in blue-black ink. I’d seen this handwriting before, and while I could no more swear to its authenticity than I could confirm or deny Rembrandt’s responsibility for the portrait of the man in the plumed hat, it certainly looked okay to my untrained eye. And I had little reason to question it; far more scoundrels had tried to imitate Rembrandt’s brush strokes than ever felt called upon to imitate this chap’s penmanship.

  Not for the first time, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I turned the pages. Each but the first had a number at the bottom, and every number was present, all the way to the number 43 at the bottom of the final page, just below the words The End, written with an understandable flourish, and, beneath them, written larger and with much the same spirit, F. S. F.

  Indeed.

  I unbuttoned my shirt, slipped the folder inside, and buttoned it up again. I donned the blazer I’d taken off at the beginning of the hunt, turned off the lights that had allowed me to see what I was doing, and let my flashlight guide me up the stairs.

  I didn’t really want to take the time to lock the basement door, and would anyone be alarmed to find it open Thursday morning? I worked out all of that in my mind, and then I locked the door anyway.

  Just because.

  This time, after I’d removed and pocketed the two bolts and raised the restroom window, I used a length of duct tape as long as the window’s width to attach the top of the mesh panel to the window frame. Then I added another similar strip for added strength. I drew the panel back, wormed my way through the window, let the panel slip back into place, and closed the window.

  I walked a block before I realized I was still wearing the gloves. I took them off and tucked them in a pocket. I walked another block, and then I turned a corner and walked a third block. All without a siren wailing, or a police whistle sounding, or the long arm of the law reaching out and taking hold of my elbow.

  Whew.

  I generally open Barnegat Books at nine in the morning, less for my customers’ sake than for my cat. Their hunger for books rarely sends them to my door much before ten, while his for Meow Mix is such that he’ll rub himself against my ankles no matter how early the hour.

  So I make a point of opening at nine, but it’s a point that’s occasionally blunted, and it was getting on for 9:30 the next morning by the time I fed Raffles and gave him fresh water. If he’d been an ordinary member of his species, there’d have been a litter box to contend with, an unwelcome chore at any hour, and especially so at an early one. But all I had to do was go into my restroom and flush the commode, because Raffles has been schooled in the use of that wondrous contrivance, even as you and I.

  I can’t take credit for training him. That was Carolyn’s doing, and he’d become letter-perfect at it weeks before she found a way to palm him off on me. Not that I’ve ever had cause to complain. He’s a good companion, and he earns his keep; old leather bindings and bookmaker’s glue are, well, catnip to mice, and all evidence of rodent damage ceased the day he took employment here.

  For I shall consider my cat, Raffles, I thought, and reached for my copy of Jubilate Agno. Christopher Smart, whose work it is, was an eighteenth-century English poet, a contemporary of Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. He was unquestionably talented, but he was also mad as a hatter, and given to fits of religious mania that led him to implore his fellows to join him in public prayer. “I’d as soon pray in the street with Kit Smart as anyone else in London,” Johnson allowed, but others were less tolerant, and Smart spent the better part of his mature years clapped in a cell in Bedlam, where he wrote a line of poetry every day. The ones about Geoffrey the Cat are clear enough, and rather touching, but some of the others can be hard to unravel.

  Let Ross, House of Ross, rejoice with Obadiah, and the rankle-dankle fish with hands . . .

  Well, how can you argue with that?

  “‘A Life Lived Backward,’” said my first customer of the morning. He was holding the handwritten pages I’d taken from the Galtonbrook, and reading the words at the top of the first page. “That was his original title, you know.”

  “I hadn’t known until you told me. And a good thing you did.”

  “Oh?”

  I pointed to the initials on the folder. “That wouldn’t have meant much to me otherwise,” I said. “I’d have been looking for TCCOBB.”

  “As far as I know,” he said, “A Life Lived Backward appears on this manuscript and nowhere else. Princeton has his collected papers, you know. Eighty-nine archival boxes and around a dozen oversize containers. They’ve got the typed manuscript of the story. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, that’s the title it bears. That was its title when it first appeared in Collier’s Magazine in May of 1922, and when it was included in his Tales of the Jazz Age later that same year.”

  “How did you come to know—”

  “The original title? A letter to a young woman, her own identity lost over the years. ‘I worked up a story around that idea I mentioned. I think it came out well. I called it A Life Lived Backward as I needed to call it something, but when I type it up I’ll call it something else. It’ll have to have a better title before I dare show it to anyone.’ ”

  “He wrote it out in longhand and then typed it up.”

  “And this is clearly a first draft,” he said. “You can see that, can’t you? The handwriting changes periodically, suggesting it was written over a period of several days, if not longer. He started out with blue-black ink, and halfway through it’s black, and then toward the end it changes back again.”

  “There aren’t many corrections.”

  “No, just words crossed out here and there when he changed his mind and started a sentence over. The typed manuscript is full of corrections, words crossed out and other words inked in, whole handwritten sentences crawling up the margins. My guess is that he simply copied this draft verbatim, or had a typist do it for him, and then went to work on it. Tweaking, polishing.” He raised his eyes from the manuscript to me. “But the only way to know that for certain would require another trip to Princeton, so that I could compare these pages with their typescript. And I don’t think I care enough to bother. It’s not Hamlet, you know.”

  “Um—”

  “What we have here,” he declared, “is a decidedly minor work by a writer with an overblown reputation. But I haven’t bought it to read it, have I? No more than the chap who paid a seven-figure sum for a stamp from British Guiana did so in hopes of mailing a letter.”

  “Actually,” I pointed out, “you haven’t bought it at all.”

  “By God, I haven’t, have I? I hope you don’t mind a check.”

  “Um—”

  “Just a little joke,” he said, and opened his briefcase.

  I haven’t described him, have I? Or told you his name.

  The name he’d supplied, on his initial visit to my bookshop, was Smith, and it was clear he didn’t expect me to believe it was his by birth or court order. “If pressed,” he’d said, “I could probably come up with a first name as well, and even a middle initial, but how would that serve your interests or my own? Smith will do.”

  He was a couple of inches shorter than I and a few pounds heavier. His medium brown hair, neither long nor short, was showing gray at the temples. His mouth was small, his lips narrow, his teeth even. His eyes were a washed-out blue, their expression hard to read behind his horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

  He’d worn a three-piece suit on his first visit, dark gray with a chalk stripe, and his tie, or as much of it as showed above his vest, was an unornamented blue. His white shirt had a button-down collar.

  This time around he was less formally dressed, in
tailored jeans and a Norfolk jacket of rust-brown tweed. There was a flat brass disc sewn to his lapel, and I seemed to recall a similar ornament on his suit. Today’s shirt was a deep blue, and open at the throat. Again, a button-down collar.

  He handed me a letter-size envelope. It had a satisfying heft to it.

  “Ten,” he said.

  I took it, and he handed me another that might have been its twin.

  “Ten.”

  The third envelope was thinner, and felt lighter.

  “And five.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’ll want to count them.”

  I lifted the flap of the third envelope and established that it was full of bills, all of them evidently used hundreds. There was a thick wad of them, and I was willing to believe there were fifty of them, even as I was willing to believe the other envelopes held a hundred bills each, and that all of the bills were genuine.

  I told him I’d count them later.

  “You’ll want to add these to the count,” he said, and passed me a fourth envelope, which seemed to be the same thickness as the third. “Five more,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “A bonus.”

  “That’s very generous of you.”

  “Do you think so? I wonder. It’s the same twenty percent I’d leave for a waitress, and I’d do so with no expectations. I’d probably never sit at her table again, and might not even return to that restaurant. Whereas in the present instance I have an ulterior motive.”

  “Oh?”

  “Indeed, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I expect to pay you another visit before too long. We’ll be doing more business, you and I.”

  It was two weeks earlier when Mr. Smith first showed up, all dressed up in his three-piece suit. He turned up in mid-afternoon, and he was a long way from being the day’s first customer. That honor belonged to Mowgli.

  I’ve known Mowgli for years, although I didn’t know his real name any more than I knew Smith’s. The name (Mowgli, not Smith) comes from The Jungle Book, but don’t ask me whether Kipling made it up or came across it somewhere on the Indian subcontinent. However it found its way to my Mowgli, it seems to suit him. There’s a feral quality to him, partnered with a gentle nature.

  Early in our acquaintance he brought books to me. I was at first reluctant to buy from him, thinking he might have lifted them from other shops, but came to know that he was a legitimate book scout, scooping up bargains at flea markets and urban yard sales and wholesaling them to dealers like me.

  Then the Internet came along, and transformed Mowgli from supplier to customer. Or maybe he’d stayed essentially the same, and Barnegat Books had morphed into a bargain basement. He now had a website and an eBay store, and I never saw him without selling him six or ten or a dozen books. At first I’d give him a volume discount, but it didn’t take me long to stop that, and he didn’t seem to mind, paying the marked price without argument. He didn’t even balk at the sales tax, until the day he informed me that he had acquired a resale number, and was now tax-exempt.

  Wonderful.

  He came in that morning with an empty tote bag, one that I recognized from the days when he’d brought it in loaded with books for me. It was loaded now when he walked out, and I had money in my cash register that I hadn’t had earlier, so why was I in a bad mood?

  Carolyn asked me that very question a couple of hours later, when I showed up at the Poodle Factory after a stop at Two Guys. “That smells great,” she said, “and you look awful. What’s the matter, Bern?”

  “Mowgli,” I said.

  “You used to like him, Bern.”

  “I still like him. I just can’t stand the sight of him.”

  “He’s a regular customer now.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And he pays full price.”

  “And then he marks everything up and sells it to somebody online, some yutz in Antwerp or Anaheim with a PayPal account and a thirst for literature. You know what I think he does? I think he checks my stock and lists everything that looks good to him, so he’s actually selling the books while they’re still mine.”

  “But don’t his sales lists have photos along with the descriptions? I think you’re being paranoid, Bern.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I think he makes you feel guilty, because you know you ought to be selling books online yourself.”

  “I don’t want to do that.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to run a bookshop,” I said. “The old-fashioned kind, where people come in looking for something to read, and collectors come in hunting for treasures, and we all have nice intellectual conversations.”

  “And once in a while you’ll meet a girl there.”

  “Once in a blue moon,” I said. “But if and when I do, there’s a good chance she’ll be able to read.”

  “Some of the girls I meet at the Cubby Hole can read,” she said, “and some can’t, and I’m too shallow to care. This food is wonderful, Bern. Did you ask her what it is?”

  “What good would that do? Look how long it took us to figure out Juneau Lock was You no like.”

  “And even longer to convince her she was wrong.”

  “And she still says it,” I said. “She gets a kick out of saying it. ‘Juneau Lock,’ and then she giggles.”

  “She’s adorable when she giggles, isn’t she?”

  “She’s cute, all right.”

  “You should ask her out.”

  “Me? Why don’t you ask her out?”

  “I don’t think she likes girls.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because if she did, the long looks I’ve been giving her would cut right through the language barrier.”

  “On the other hand, she does giggle at you.”

  “She giggles at both of us, Bern. When a straight woman giggles at another woman it just means she thinks something’s funny. When she giggles at a man it means she likes him.”

  I was unconvinced. When Two Guys opened in its present incarnation, it was just another Chinese take-out joint, with a predictable menu offering staples like General Tso’s Chicken and Beef with Orange Flavor and Cold Noodles with Sesame Sauce. Everything was well-prepared and tasty, but one day I noticed that they were getting a steady stream of Chinese customers, and the dishes they were taking home were nothing you’d find in General Tso’s mess kit.

  “They’ve got special dishes for their countrymen,” I reported to Carolyn, “and I’d really like to give them a try, but when I ask what they are I can’t get anywhere.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “Juneau Lock,” I said, “but that doesn’t make any sense. I don’t think they’ve got canals in Alaska, and even if they did—”

  “Maybe it’s the name of the dish in Chinese. It just sounds to your untrained ear like Juneau Lock.”

  “But how can it be the name of every dish? I point to this one and it’s Juneau Lock. I point to the one next to it and she tells me the same thing. Whatever it is, whatever any of them are, we don’t get to try them.”

  Her face darkened. “We’ll see about that,” she said.

  God knows what Carolyn told her the following day, and I’m just as glad not to have been a fly on the wall for that particular conversation. (And it was an immaculate kitchen, incidentally; a fly would not have lasted long on any of its well-scrubbed walls.) But whatever Carolyn said, she evidently made it clear that she wasn’t leaving without a portion of this and another of that, and her determination turned out to be the pry bar that jimmied the Juneau Lock.

  And ever since then we’d been feasting daily on dishes without knowing their names or ingredients. One or the other of us would point, and the little darling would dish out the food. Now and then she’d demur—“Juneau Lock! Too spicy!” We’d insist, and carry the day. One time it was something of a Pyrrhic victory, when a stew of some generally overlooked animal organ was sufficiently fiery to glow in the dark. By the time we finished we must
have glowed ourselves, with equal parts of satisfaction and cayenne poisoning, and were greeted with heightened respect on our return to Two Guys.

  That marked the end of our trial period. We’d become regulars, and Juneau Lock was simply her name for whichever one of us showed up on any given day.

  Good as it was, the Taiwanese food hadn’t been enough to lift my spirits after Mowgli’s visit had crushed them.

  “Barnegat Books is in trouble,” I told Carolyn. “And I can’t blame it all on Mowgli. The world’s changing. Why come to my store? You can find any book in ten minutes without leaving your desk. If it’s an eBook, you can buy it for pocket change and get it delivered electronically in minutes. If it’s long out of print, you don’t have to rummage through a dozen antiquarian bookshops, as if there were that many of us left in the business. You just go on line, and you do a title search at abebooks.com, and next thing you know there’s a guy in Moline, Illinois, with an ex-library copy you can buy for a buck ninety-eight plus postage.”

  “Can he make money that way?”

  “Who, the guy in Moline? I suppose so, if he does enough volume. He’s probably working out of his house, so he hasn’t got any rent to pay.”

  “Neither do you, Bern.”

  Not since a venture to the other side of the law had enabled me to buy the building. “I don’t,” I agreed, “and it’s a good thing, because if I had to pay rent my receipts these days wouldn’t cover it. I can’t sell books anymore, and I can’t buy them, either. A good customer of mine died recently.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Bern.”

  “A nice fellow, a retired Classics professor at NYU. He’d been dropping by for years, and even when he couldn’t find anything to buy we’d have a nice chat. You know, the kind of conversation you can have in an old-fashioned bookshop. And then I didn’t see him for a while, and one afternoon his wife called to tell me he’d passed away.”