The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr)

by Lawrence Block

  He poured himself some more coffee. “I was seeing a psychiatrist,” he said, “but then I could no longer go to his office, and he felt he’d be enabling my phobia if he came to me, so that was the end of that. Not that he’d been doing me any good. I wondered, though, where it would all end. There was a period of a month or so when I couldn’t leave the building, but was still able to go downstairs for my mail.”

  “And then you couldn’t?”

  “They were good enough to bring it to me. And now of course Miss Miller goes down for it. I don’t leave the apartment. I don’t even step out into the hall, and when I do open the door, well, you’ve seen how quick I am to lock everything up again.”

  His eyes held mine. “One expert holds that the agoraphobe is an unindicted co-conspirator, that I could force myself to face my fears rather than accommodate them. That sounds good, doesn’t it? All I can say is it’s as useful as telling a depressive to cheer up. I’m just grateful my condition seems to have stabilized. I have the run of the entire apartment.”

  “That’s something.”

  “It is, because I’ve read of men and women who become incapable of leaving the bedroom, and eventually of leaving the bed. I don’t know what I would do if that happened to me.” He smiled. “I make it a point,” he said, “to pay a daily visit to every room in the apartment. Like an animal, staking out its territory. Thus far I haven’t felt the need to mark the perimeters with urine.”

  “That’s probably just as well.”

  “Yes, I’d say so.” He’d been leaning forward, and now he straightened up. “And now,” he said, “you surely would welcome a change of subject. And I do believe you’ve brought me a book. Do you suppose I could have a look at it?”

  I’d been a little concerned about the inscription. It had seemed to me like gilding the lily. The book was what he wanted, and would he want it any more ardently because the author had signed and inscribed it? Probably not, and suppose the signature looked phony to him? It was supposed to have been signed over a century ago, and to me it looked like yesterday’s work.

  He glanced at it, nodded in appreciation, and turned the page.

  The two dozen pages of plates got most of his attention. He studied them, frowned at them, smiled upon them, and even talked to them, mumbling about this piece or that one.

  “He did think the world of Revere,” he said, “as who does not? But he doesn’t give short shrift to my favorite, either.”

  I had a hunch I knew who that would be.

  “A man named Myers,” he said. “I doubt you’ve even heard of him.”

  Whereupon he told me everything I’d already learned about Myer Myers, and a bit more besides. I did a good job of appearing interested, and I didn’t need to show too much enthusiasm to make him happy.

  He told me, for example, that Myers had formed a partnership in 1756 with one Benjamin Halsted, and that the two were the first to devise a joint monogram as a hallmark for their wares. Other silversmiths who joined as partners used their individual marks, but Myers and Halsted linked their initials with an ampersand, and their mark was “H & M” in a rectangle.

  “I’ll show you,” he said, and took me to the glassed-in cabinet that had caught my eye earlier. Its various sections were fitted with locks, simple affairs one can pick with a hairpin, but he didn’t need a hairpin, having the appropriate one-size-fits-all key in his pocket. He used it to unfasten a mullioned cabinet door, picked up a six-inch bowl by its edges, and turned it to show me the hallmark. And there it was, all right, stamped into the bowl’s underside: a rectangle three-eights of an inch across, with an ampersand joining the team’s initials.

  “Their innovation,” he said reverently, as if Halsted and Myers had invented the wheel.

  “And the initials caught on,” I found myself saying. “They came into use again years later for the trains running underneath the Hudson River.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The H&M Tubes,” I said. “Oh, they call it the PATH train now, have done so for years. But there are places where you can still see the original logo. H&M.”

  “For Hudson and Manhattan,” he said.

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “But I’ve a feeling I’ll always think of it henceforth as Halsted and Myers.”

  And what was I doing, turning so playful?

  Well, hell, why not? I’d come here with the intention of leaving with one of Edwin Leopold’s silver spoons—if not this evening, then at a later visit facilitated by what I discovered here tonight. Perhaps, I’d thought, after I handed over the book and accepted my thousand dollars, I could find some spot in the building that would serve as a hiding place; then, while everybody slept, I could let myself into the apartment and raid the silver cabinet.

  Or perhaps I could do as I’d done at the Galtonbrook, building in a back-door entrance that I could use at another time. Or maybe—

  Never mind. I could go on in this vein, but why? All the possibilities were in fact impossible. The building was too well staffed, the closed-circuit TV cameras were everywhere, and any stratagem I might devise was doomed from the start. The locks, the alarm, the fact that at any hour of the day or night he’d be inside the apartment, it all added up to the certain knowledge that my buttoned-up and buttoned-down Mr. Smith was going to have to get along without his silver spoon.

  And the realization was oddly liberating. If I couldn’t steal from this charming eccentric, then I was free to relax and enjoy his company. I only regretted having given him a false name at the onset, and now whenever he called me Mr. Lederer, I had the urge to correct him. It’s Rhodenbarr, I longed to say, Bernie Rhodenbarr, and I have a store you can never visit, since it would be impossible to do so without leaving your house, but I can certainly supply you with books you might find interesting and look for any titles you may be seeking and—

  But how could I say all that without having to explain how Rhodenbarr had become Lederer in the first place? I couldn’t work out an approach that wouldn’t make me appear at least as eccentric as my host. So I let him go on calling me Mr. Lederer, and wondered what I’d do if he were to ask me whether people called me Philip or Phil.

  But we never got all the way to first names. He remained Mr. Leopold, and went on calling me Mr. Lederer.

  Which, as it turned out, was just as well.

  I was standing at the cabinet, looking through glass at four matched spoons with teardrop bowls. Could I ask for a closer look at them?

  “But I’ve kept you far too long,” Leopold said, and took my arm, and drew me away from the spoon with the button on the handle. “One thousand dollars. Do I remember correctly? Is that the price you mentioned?”

  “Yes. You called it a nice round sum.”

  “And so it is. Do you mind a check?”

  “Well—”

  “Then cash it is.” He drew an envelope from his breast pocket, took a mix of fifties and hundreds from it, and asked me to count them. I did, and confirmed the sum.

  “And now I have a question. How did you come to call me, Mr. Lederer?”

  “Well,” I said, “a book scout brought the book in, along with a dozen or so others he’d rescued from thrift shops. The rest were nothing special, but I understood you’d want the Culloden, and—”

  “That’s my question. How did you happen to know that?”

  How indeed? “I’m afraid I’m not free to say,” I told him.

  He nodded, as if I’d confirmed his suspicion. “Roundtree,” he said. “He’d know, and he’d be a natural for you to call. I’m just surprised he gave you my number instead of buying the book from you himself. It was young Geoff, wasn’t it?”

  ‘Sir, I really—”

  “Can’t say,” he finished for me. “And so you’ve said nothing, but I’ll regard that as confirmation enough, if you’ve no objection.” He smiled. “Geoffrey Roundtree, of the New-York Historical Society. It’s curious, isn’t it, the way they’re so attached to that hyphen? At th
e slightest provocation they’ll launch into their justification for retaining the hyphen, despite the fact that the city’s name has been hyphenated nowhere else for centuries. When you point out the illogic, they take shelter beneath the umbrella of tradition. The New-York Historical Society. They’re over on the other side of the park, you know, and a few blocks down. I used to be able to see their building from here.”

  I must have looked puzzled. What could have sprung up to block his view? No construction could have intervened, and what trees could have grown anywhere near tall enough?

  “From my terrace,” he said. “But of course I’m no longer able to set foot on it.”

  He went on, telling me how the hyphenated institution coveted his silver, and hoped he’d bequeath it to them upon his death. No doubt young Geoff would call him in a day or two, congratulating him on his acquisition of the Culloden book, and taking credit for steering it his way, all to curry favor. But they all wanted his silver. The New-York Historical Society, hyphen and all, and the Museum of the City of New York, properly unhyphenated, and as far as the Myer Myers pieces were concerned, the Jewish Museum. All fine institutions, certainly, with good people in their ranks, and—

  And I’d quit listening. A terrace? Did the apartment really have a terrace? He might not be able to set foot on it, but could I?

  I removed myself mentally from the apartment to the street below, sent myself across Fifth Avenue, and imagined the view from that vantage point. I couldn’t recall noticing a terrace, but what I did remember was that Leopold’s building was taller than the ones on either side. That meant I couldn’t reach his terrace from a neighboring roof.

  And could I get onto the building’s own roof, and clamber down from there onto the terrace? The clambering, I thought, would be the easy part; getting past locks and alarms and security cameras in order to get onto the roof would be extremely difficult, and probably impossible.

  And even if I somehow brought it off, clambering and all, I’d be on a terrace, and on the other side of a door that would be trebly locked and wired into that damned Kaltenborn alarm. So forget the terrace, and curse the bloody man for mentioning it at all.

  “—no hurry to add codicils to my will,” he was saying, as I pulled myself in from my imaginary perch on his terrace. “I am, after all, a comparatively young man, and in good health. Did I mention that I ran this morning?”

  “Five miles, I believe you said.”

  “On my treadmill, and one gets as good a workout that way as one could manage in the park. I’m healthy and youthful, and I have the same physical needs as any man. You may have been wondering about that.”

  I hadn’t, but now that he’d mentioned it, I wished he hadn’t, and recalled the way he’d twice taken hold of my arm. I hoped he wouldn’t do that again.

  “I’m a normal man with normal desires,” he said, conveniently answering a question I hadn’t asked. “I require a woman’s company from time to time, and my condition precludes my going out in search of it.”

  I was relieved. Not that he gave off a gay vibe, but I’d recently learned that I lived in a world in which two lesbians could follow a church wedding with sex-change surgery.

  “There are escort services,” he said. “You visit a website, you choose from an array of photos, you input your credit card data, and the young woman you’ve selected comes over and, well . . .”

  St. Robert’s your uncle, I thought.

  “And yet there was something unsavory about those transactions,” he said. I guess when you don’t get out much, you make the most of a captive audience. “And once Miss Miller came to work for me, it became awkward. I could hardly bring in some professional escort when my assistant was on the premises. You haven’t met Miss Miller.”

  “No.”

  “She lives here,” he said. “She takes courses at Hunter College, so this is quite convenient for her, and her hours are flexible. But when she’s not at school, or on an errand for me, she’s apt to be here. You can see my problem. Can you guess the solution?”

  I supposed I could, but I’d as soon he kept it to himself.

  “Miss Miller,” he said, “is studying American history and literature at the moment, but it’s not the only subject she’s pursued. One day I complained of sore muscles, and the next thing I knew I was stretched out on the sofa and she was giving me a massage. It turned out she was a skilled masseuse.”

  “How fortunate for you.”

  “The very next day I gave her some cash and had her purchase a folding massage table. Now every day after I’ve finished with the treadmill and the free weights, Miss Miller gives me a massage.” He smiled. “Are you familiar with the term Happy Ending?”

  “Every story should have one,” I said.

  “And every massage. It’s not really sexual, you know. It’s simply the manual relief of a physical urge. And yet I know I’d enjoy it less if Miss Miller were not such a physically attractive young woman.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “The massage begins with me in a prone position. And then she’ll have me roll over and lie on my back.”

  “Er.”

  “And it’s just a massage, you know. Until she strips to the waist. And it’s still a massage, but her touch, previously so firm, becomes so remarkably soft. And I look at her breasts, which are quite beautiful, and her tattoo, and, well, I’m sure you can imagine the rest.”

  Right.

  “Of all the dyke bars,” Carolyn Kaiser said, “in all the streets of New York, you walk into mine.”

  “They’re all yours,” I pointed out. “This is the fifth place I’ve been to, and it’s the same story everywhere I go.”

  “It’s still the same old story,” she said. “A fight for love and glory. We’re still in the movie, Bern, and the hopes and dreams of a couple of little people like you and me don’t amount to a hill of beans.” She looked at the glass she was holding, noted that it was empty, and frowned at it. “Bern, what’s the same old story?”

  “I walk in the door, and every eye turns toward me, and the tension’s so thick you could cut it with a knife.”

  “Or a silver spoon,” she suggested, “if you’d been born with one in your mouth.”

  “And I say, ‘Is Carolyn here? Carolyn Kaiser?’ and all the tension goes out of the room. ‘Oh, you just missed her,’ someone says. ‘Try the Duchess. Try Paula’s. Try Swing Rendezvous.’ ”

  “Those joints all closed years ago, Bern.”

  “Well, they’re the only ones left on my list. I’ve been everywhere else. Where are we now? Mytilene? I never even heard of this place, until a woman at the last place told me how to find it.”

  “Poor baby. And I’ll bet you’ve had a drink in every place you’ve been.”

  “I haven’t had a drink in any of them,” I said. “I had a cup of coffee and a Hungarian cookie on Fifth Avenue, and before that I had a Perrier at the Bum Rap.”

  “And that’s all?” She turned. “Sandy, this is my friend Bernie. He’s okay, except he’s in desperate need of a drink. So bring him what I’ve been having, and bring me—” She stopped, took a breath. “No,” she said. “Bring him a double scotch. Bring me a cup of black coffee.”

  I worked on my scotch. Carolyn worked on her coffee. All around us, women of varying ages with varying estrogen levels drank, talked, laughed, cried, danced, paired off, broke up, and drank some more.

  And I talked.

  By the time I stopped, my drink was gone and so was her coffee. “I feel a lot better,” I told her.

  “And I feel sober,” she said, “although a traffic cop might not see it that way. Bern, lots of people have tattoos.”

  “I know.”

  “If you look around this room, you’ll spot a whole lot of ink. Go ahead, take a look.”

  “They’ll think I’m staring at them.”

  “So? The worst thing that could happen is somebody’ll beat you up. That was a joke, Bern.”

  “Ha ha.”
r />   “Okay, so I’ll look around, because they’re used to me staring at them. Tons of tats, Bern.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “And that’s not counting the ones you can’t see. Like the little butterfly way up on the inside of Rosalie’s thigh, or Denise’s frog, and why anyone would want a frog there is beyond me, but—”

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it.”

  “Do you? Because the mere fact that your Mr. Leopold’s Queen of the Happy Ending has a tattoo doesn’t mean her first name is Chloe.”

  “But—”

  “She’s not the one, Bern. Of all the bookstores in all the streets of New York, she didn’t walk into yours. She probably doesn’t even own a Kindle, and if she ever heard of The Pit I bet she thinks Edgar Allan Poe wrote it.”

  “She’s studying American literature and history at Hunter.”

  “And massage at the House of the Rising Sun. What’s Miss Miller’s first name?”

  “It’s Chloe.”

  “Did he tell you this?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it would have been awkward. ‘My assistant gives me the most wonderful hand jobs.’ ‘Oh, really? What’s her first name?’ ”

  “Well, I can see where that might have been a little awkward.”

  “You think?”

  “But so what, Bern? You already wrote off the evening and you’re never going to see him again. What’s awkward gonna cost you? He won’t let you have any more Hungarian cookies?”

  “We’d finished the cookies by then.”

  “There you go. What was Hungarian about them, by the way?”

  “They came from a Hungarian bakery. I didn’t ask her name because I didn’t have to ask her name. I knew her name.”