The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr)

by Lawrence Block

  “You tell me. Doyle auctioned a Trent Barling a lot like this for something like twelve thousand. And it was smaller, nine by twelve, and this one has to be twelve by fifteen.”

  “If you say so.”

  “And that was four or five years ago, so if you want a ballpark figure—”

  “Twenty grand?”

  “Close enough. Of course you’d need two men and a van, and somebody to take it off your hands. So I think I’ll pass. No, if I was going to walk off with something it’d be the little Chinese gentleman.”

  “That ivory thing? It’s valuable?”

  “It could be,” I said. “The carving’s fine enough. But I don’t know orientalia, and most of it’s pretty reasonable, and I’d frankly be surprised if it’s worth more than a few hundred dollars. No, I’d take it because I like it.”

  “You’d take it and keep it.”

  “And put it on a shelf, and have to remind myself to dust it. But it’s nice. I wouldn’t mind having it around just to look at.”

  He was replacing the crime-scene tape, and paused. “You want it, Bernie? You could slip inside right now and put it in your pocket, and I bet I wouldn’t notice a thing.”

  “Um—”

  “You just did me a favor,” he said, “and it’s unofficial, plus I broke all those rules bringin’ you here in the first place. So the city can’t pay you a consultant’s fee, so why don’t you take a Chinaman’s chance and bring home a souvenir?”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, Ray.”

  “Hey, it’s not like it’s costing me anything.”

  “Even so, I appreciate it. But I think I’ll pass.”

  He finished reattaching the tape, slipped the padlock in place. “You sure, Bernie?”

  I said I was, and he snapped the padlock shut.

  Ten minutes later we were pulling up across the street from my apartment building. “You wouldn’t take the ivory doodad,” Ray said, “and now you won’t let me buy you dinner. Makes it hard to balance the books.”

  “I’m not hungry, Ray. And after last night I really want to make this an early one.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to owe you one, Bernie. You did me a favor, even if you don’t come up with anything. But if you get a brainstorm—”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Upstairs in my apartment, I spent ten minutes on the phone bringing Carolyn up to date and ten more in the shower, washing away of what had certainly felt a lot like burglary, even if I’d done it in Ray’s company.

  I put on khakis and a blazer, this one from Bloomingdale’s. (Would it have made a difference if Janine had known I owned more than one blazer? Probably not.) I made another phone call, and this time I had to check the number, because I had never dialed it before. It went straight to Voice Mail, and the message was generic, inviting me to leave a number.

  But I didn’t. Instead I got my tools from my hidey hole, stuck a pair of Pliofilm gloves in my hip pocket, and went out in the hall to ring for the elevator.

  But when it came I didn’t get in, and when the doors had shut I went over and knocked on Mrs. Hesch’s door. No response. I could hear her TV, but sometimes she dozed off in front of it, and I didn’t want to disturb her. I was about to turn when I heard the pitter patter of little old feet.

  “So?”

  “It’s Bernie,” I said.

  As far as I know, Mrs. Hesch is the only one in the building who knows I have a second career. It’s my good fortune that she’s not bothered by it. As far as she’s concerned, I live on the west side and prey exclusively upon the rich momsers on the east side, and what’s so bad about that? Besides, I’m useful to have around, especially when she locks herself out.

  “So,” she said again, drew the door open. “I don’t suppose you want to borrow a cup of chicken fat.”

  “No, but I’d like to look out your window.”

  “What’s out my window?”

  “I won’t know until I look.”

  “Ah,” she said, and stood aside. My own apartment is in the back, and Mrs. Hesch, across the hall from me, looks out on West End Avenue. And a moment later so did I, from her living room window.

  “So what do you see?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “This is good?”

  “It’s what I was hoping for,” I said. “And what I expected, because why would he hang around? I guess I was just being paranoid.”

  “What I always say,” she said, “is you never know, and a person can’t be too paranoid. You in a rush, Bernard? You got time for a piece of flanken?”

  “I wish,” I said. “But I’ve really got to go. Can I take a rain check?”

  “Who knows? Maybe I’ll eat it myself.”

  This time when the elevator came I boarded it, but Mrs. Hesch’s words rang in my head. I rode it down past the lobby to the basement and let myself out the rear service entrance, mounted the steps to the rear courtyard, and made my circuitous way out to the street.

  A person can’t be too paranoid.

  They’ve been doing a lot of work on the subways lately, in a heroic effort to bring a late nineteenth-century system into the twenty-first century. The long-awaited Second Avenue subway is a work in progress, and likely to remain so for the next thirty years, while the lines that actually exist are having more work done than an aging beauty queen.

  They’re thoughtful enough to do this work at night, and after ten o’clock some local trains stop running, and some express trains run on local tracks, and some people take taxis who’d otherwise save the money, while others wind up in Midwood when they were hoping for Parkchester.

  But it was just a little after nine when I got to the corner of Broadway and 72nd, so I had nothing to worry about. Not, that is, until I got off the One train at Sheridan Square.

  That put me a few minutes from Carolyn’s apartment on Arbor Court, but that’s not where I was going, nor did I look for her in any of her regular watering holes. Instead I headed for Testinudo’s, where Janine and I had dined so well, if at such expense. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and if I’d been a cat I’d be treating my owner to an ankle rub, but I wasn’t on my way to dinner, either.

  The house I was looking for was on the opposite side of the street from the restaurant, and twenty or thirty yards closer to Fifth Avenue. It was a brownstone, originally built to house a single family. Now it accommodated four in as many floor-through apartments, with the half-basement given over to a dealer in oriental antiques. The shop was closed for the night, but I took a moment to wonder what its proprietor would make of the little ivory gentleman I’d so admired on East 92nd Street.

  I walked past the brownstone and continued past Testinudo’s to University Place, where I chose a pizza parlor over a deli. I ordered a small pie with garlic, and the aroma (which was one of the reasons I’d picked it) wafted up out of my other reason, the unmistakable flat cardboard box.

  What’s less suspicious than a man bringing home a pizza?

  The brownstone’s entrance was half a flight up from the street. You didn’t need a key for the door to the vestibule, where four mailboxes were mounted on the wall to my left, each with a nameplate and a little button to push, so the occupant could confirm over the intercom that your presence was an agreeable prospect, and buzz you in.

  The third mailbox said Wattrous, and it was Melville Wattrous whose number I’d dialed before leaving my apartment. If Mr. Smith was to be believed, Melville and Cynthia Wattrous were chasing the midnight sun on a Seabourn cruise of northern waters. They’d be gone for another week, their yellow Lab was at a kennel that cost almost as much as their stateroom, and their third-floor apartment was vacant.

  But that hadn’t stopped me from making the phone call, and it didn’t stop me now from ringing the bell, and waiting a moment, and ringing it again. A friend, using their place during their absence, might have been instructed to let phone calls go to Voice Mail, but would he feel obliged to ignore the doorbell?
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  No answer. The lock was what you’d expect, and I couldn’t have opened it all that much faster if I’d had a key. I climbed two flights of stairs, one hand on the serpentine banister, the other gripping the pizza box. I hadn’t seen or heard anyone since I entered the vestibule, nor did anyone make an appearance now, so I’d probably wasted a few minutes and as many dollars on my camouflage, but one does like to do things right.

  The door to the apartment had a trio of locks, and they were all good ones. There was a Fox police lock, the kind you can’t force because it employs a stout steel bar braced against the door. You have to turn the lock to move it, but if you’ve got the tools and the talent you can manage that without a key.

  The other locks were a Rabson and a Poulard. The Rabson is a marvelous mechanism, and it’s no slur on its good reputation to say I can open any model they ever made in no time at all. I’ve devoted a lot of time to it, I’ve given it a lot of study, and I know their complete line as well as old Leo Rabson himself ever did.

  The Poulard is the one they advertise as pickproof. Well, most of the time it probably is.

  It took me some time, standing there in front of the Wattrous door and working on the Wattrous locks. I’d have preferred being on the top floor, where no one going up or down the stairs could see me, but you have to play the cards you’re dealt. I did hear a door open a flight below, and a brief conversation between the woman who lived there and the man who was going home to his family in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, and I held my breath while he went down the stairs and she went inside and closed the door, slamming it just a little harder than she needed to.

  Then I opened the last lock, picked up my pizza box, and went inside.

  According to my information, the Wattrouses had been gone for a little over a week. I could believe it. The most pervasive odor was the garlicky pizza smell I’d brought with me, but I could tell the air in that apartment had been there for a while, undisturbed by the opening of a window or door.

  I’d closed the door upon entering, of course, and turned one of the locks. I blinked my flashlight a couple of times, found my way to a table lamp, and turned it on. Whatever light slipped past the living room drapes had better be nice and steady. That’s less of an attention-getter than the dancing beam of a handheld flashlight.

  And it left my hands free. They were gloved by now, so I could handle objects with impunity, should I feel the need to do so. But first I sank into the reading chair and got my bearings.

  It was an oversized leather recliner, and I called it the reading chair because that was so obviously its raison d’etre. In another setting it could have played another role; plant it in front of a flat-screen TV amongst a patchwork of college pennants and football jerseys, and the only reading done within its embrace would be the ESPN news crawl at the bottom of the frame.

  But if Melville Wattrous even owned a television set, he must have confined it to the back bedroom. Built-in bookcases took all the wall space on either side of the living room fireplace. Books filled them from floor to ceiling, and the rest of the room held their overflow—on tabletops between bookends, in rotating bookcases serving as side tables, and, in the absence of suitable surfaces, stacked on the floor beside a table or next to a chair or simply piled in a corner.

  Was the fellow a customer of mine? He almost had to be, because how could a man with such a passion for books have lived five minutes from my shop without once crossing its threshold?

  Melville Wattrous. I couldn’t recall hearing the name before Mr. Smith spoke it just a few hours ago, and it was distinctive enough (unlike, say, Smith) to have earned shelf space in my mind. If he’d been my customer, he’d never introduced himself, never tendered a check in payment.

  Still, most of my business is cash, and most of my customers never have occasion to tell me their names. A framed photo might have settled the matter, but books took up the space where photos might have stood.

  I’ll tell you, it was hard to leave the embrace of that chair. I worked the lever to make it recline, and the footrest promptly ascended, taking my feet with it. My eyes closed of their own accord, and I felt all the tensions of the day draining out of me, and—

  No. If they included an owner’s manual with every set of burglar’s tools, one of the first tips it would give you would be that you stay awake throughout the commission of a burglary. One ought never to nod off in media res.

  I got up and went to work.

  If you want to hide a book, or even if you don’t, there’s no place like a bookcase. If you think a needle in a haystack’s likely to be elusive, imagine sifting through the thing looking for a piece of hay. And not just any piece of hay, mind you. A particular piece of hay, distinct from its fellows however much it may look quite like them . . .

  And it would have been easier, I have to say, if the object in question had not been a book among books, and I a bookman myself. Here I was, trying to work my way through the hundreds of volumes as quickly as possible, and feeling like a ten-year-old with ADD who’d skipped his morning dose of Ritalin. I couldn’t just dismiss a book from my consciousness when it failed to be the one I was seeking. I had to read each title and take note of each author and remember what I knew about the book and its author and recall if I’d ever handled that title, or other books by that author, and whether or not this particular volume might once have graced my shelves, and—

  Hell.

  What I longed to do, of course, was approach this library as if I’d been invited to appraise it. And that meant picking up and examining every book that caught my eye. Take this copy of Of Mice and Men, for example. It’s a first edition, and a glance at the copyright page tells us it’s a first printing. But is it the first state of the first printing? The press run was interrupted so that a change might be made in the text; in the first chapter, a sentence in the description of Lenny ends with the clause and his heavy hands were pendula. Perhaps an early reader or reviewer didn’t know that pendula is the plural of pendulum, perhaps Steinbeck himself had another look at the proofs and decided that the phrase was, well, at least as heavy-handed as Lenny himself. In any event, the phrase was duly expunged before the press resumed operations.

  Now John Steinbeck’s less highly regarded these days (though I don’t know why), and not that many people collect him, and for those who do, Of Mice and Men has never been a particularly difficult book. The early novels—Cup of Gold, To a God Unknown—are thin on the ground, and In Dubious Battle can be elusive, but Mice is all over the place, and you wouldn’t have to take out a second mortgage to secure a pristine first-state-first-printing specimen, with a nice dust jacket.

  And this copy didn’t even have a dust jacket, nice or otherwise, and in other respects was a long way from pristine. It had been put to the use for which it was intended—i.e., people had actually read it—and thus wouldn’t grade higher than, say, very good to fine.

  So why did I have to leaf through the first chapter searching for heavy hands?

  Not there. It wasn’t a first state. I put it back where I’d found it, which was precisely what I’d have done if poor Lenny’s hands had been as pendulous as anyone could possibly want them to be.

  Of making many books there is no end. It says so right there in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and you get the feeling the fellow sighed as he wrote the line. Well, do you think looking at books is any different?

  Did it take that long? I don’t suppose it did, not really. I kept getting distracted, and I kept pushing the distractions aside and scanning the titles of the books in front of me. I still had to give everything a glance, because while Wattrous (or perhaps Mrs. Wattrous) had tried to impose order upon the library, the organizational scheme kept breaking down.

  The book I was seeking was non-fiction, so when I hit a stretch of novels I thought I could speed ahead, but then I ran into Maeterlinck’s classic The Life of the Bee wedged between Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat. And The Life o
f the Ant, frequently mentioned in the same breath with The Life of the Bee, was one shelf down, bracketed by two early novels of William Faulkner. I’m sure Melville Wattrous would have said he knew where everything was and could lay hands on any volume at a moment’s notice, but right about then he was somewhere between Tromso and Longyearbyen, so I had to manage this on my own.

  And then there it was, the object of my quest, and I took it gently from its shelf. It was a small volume, just six inches tall and four inches wide, and bound in dark blue cloth, with the author and title stamped on the spine in small gold letters.

  I sat down with it and opened to the title page. Thomas Baird Culloden, I read. My Adventures with Colonial Silver. I turned the page and confirmed that it had been privately printed at the Lattimore Press in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1898.

  There were only two hundred pages, but it had been printed on coated stock and was a little over an inch thick. Consequently its removal had left an inch-wide gap in the wall of books, and I took a moment to search a stack on the floor for a same-size volume to take its place.

  I couldn’t think of anything else I needed to do. I’d had my gloves on throughout, so there were no prints to wipe, nor would I be giving anyone reason to look for them. It was time to take my book and go home.

  But how to carry it? I own a pair of chinos with cargo pockets, and it could have gone in one of those, but tonight’s chinos were dressier, and the pockets would strain at a rack-size paperback. I could slip the book under my waistband, letting my blazer cover it, but I didn’t want to do that, nor did I want to walk out with the bare book in my hand.

  Everybody has paper and plastic bags in their kitchen, and I chose a Gristede’s shopping bag. And while I was there I could hardly avoid remembering that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I opened the refrigerator, but of course they’d left it empty before departure.

  Rats.