The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

by Lawrence Block

  “Yes.”

  “He returned to the States. He wrote letters, but they were more to me and my brother than to Mum. I’ve a younger brother, you see. Two years ago Grandfather wrote suggesting I might care to try living in America, and the suggestion came at just the right time. I quit my hateful job, said goodbye to my dreary young man, and boarded one of Freddie Laker’s DC-10s. And to make a long story short—do you know, when people say ‘To make a long story short,’ it’s already too late. In any event, I’ve been here ever since.”

  “In New York?”

  “In Brooklyn, actually. Do you know Cobble Hill?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I lived at first in a women’s residential hotel in Gramercy Park. Then I moved here. The job at which I work is not hateful, and the young man with whom I live is not at all dreary, and I’m hardly ever homesick, actually. I’m rambling all over the lot, aren’t I? Chalk it up to exhaustion, physical and emotional. And there’s a point to all this, actually.”

  “I felt sure there would be.”

  “How very trusting of you. The point is that Grandfather spoke of you, and not only as, oh, shall we say a business associate?”

  “I guess we shall.”

  “But also as a friend, don’t you see. And now he’s dead, as of course you know, and I shall miss him, and I think it’s quite horrid how he died and I hope they catch the person responsible, but in the meantime it rather falls to me to get everything in order. I don’t know what he would have wanted in the line of funeral arrangements because he never talked about the possibility of his own death, unless he left a letter of some sort, and if so it hasn’t come to light yet. And of course the police have the body at the morgue and I don’t know when they’re likely to release it. When they do I suspect I’ll manage some sort of private funeral without any ceremony, but in the meantime I think it would be fitting to have some sort of memorial service, don’t you?”

  “I guess that would be nice.”

  “I’ve arranged something, actually. There’ll be a service at the Church of the Redeemer on Henry Street between Congress and Amity Streets. That’s here in Cobble Hill. Do you know where it is?”

  “I’ll be able to find it.”

  “It’s the only church I could find that would allow a memorial service on a Sunday. We’ll be meeting there that afternoon at two-thirty. The service won’t be religious because Grandfather wasn’t a religious man. He did have a spiritual side, however. I don’t know if he ever showed that side to you.”

  “I know the sort of reading he did.”

  “Yes, all the great moral philosophers. I told them at the church that we’d conduct our own service. Clay, the chap I live with, is going to read something. He was quite fond of Grandfather. And I’ll probably read something myself, and I thought you might be able to take part in the service, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

  “Call me Bernie. Yes, I could probably find something to read. I’d like to do that.”

  “Or just say a few words, or both. As you choose.” She hesitated. “There’s another thing, actually. I saw Grandfather every few weeks and we were close in certain ways, but he didn’t mention many of his…business friends. I know you were a friend of his, and I know of one or two others in that category, but perhaps you’ll be able to think of some other persons who might properly come to the service.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Would you just go ahead and invite anyone you think ought to be invited? May I just leave that up to you?”

  “All right.”

  “I’ve already spoken to several of the people in his building, and one woman’s going to post a notice in the lobby. I suppose I should have made arrangements with a church in that neighborhood. Some of those people find it difficult to get around easily. But I’d already made plans with the Church of the Redeemer before I thought of it. I hope they won’t mind coming all the way out to Brooklyn.”

  “Perhaps it’ll be an adventure for them.”

  “I just hope the weather’s decent. The rain’s expected to have left off by then, but the weatherman doesn’t give guarantees, does he?”

  “Not as a general rule.”

  “No, more’s the pity. I’m sorry to have gone on so, Mr. Rhodenbarr, but—”

  “Bernie.”

  “Bernie. It’s late and I’m tired, perhaps more so than I’d realized. You will try to come? Sunday at two-thirty? And you’ll invite anyone you think of?”

  “Definitely,” I said. “And I’ll bring along something to read.”

  I wrote down the time and the address and the name of the church. Carolyn would want to come, of course. Anybody else?

  I got in bed and tried to think if I knew anyone who’d want to attend a memorial service for Abel. I wasn’t acquainted with many other burglars, having a longstanding preference for the company of law-abiding citizens, and I didn’t know who Abel’s friends were. Would Ray Kirschmann want to make the trip? I thought about it and decided that he might.

  My mind drifted around. So Abel had a granddaughter. How old was Jessica Garland likely to be? Her mum must have been born in 1936 or thereabouts, and if she had indeed married young and had Jessica early on, then twenty-four or twenty-five sounded like a reasonable ballpark figure. I didn’t have any trouble picturing Abel playing host to a young woman about that age, telling her charming lies about the old days in the Viennese coffeehouses, plying her with strudel and eclairs.

  And he’d never once mentioned her, the old fox.

  I was almost asleep when a thought nudged me back awake again. I got out of bed, looked up a number, made a phone call. It rang four times before a man answered it.

  I stayed as silent as if I’d called Dial-a-Prayer. I listened, and the man who’d answered said “Hello?” several times, querulously, while in the background music played and a dog interposed an occasional bark. Then he hung up—the man, I trust, rather than the dog—and I went back to bed.

  CHAPTER

  Sixteen

  One of the things I’d found time to do between late phone calls was set my alarm clock, and come morning it rang its fool head off. I got up and groped my way through a shower and a shave and the first cup of coffee, then turned on the radio and toasted a couple slices of whole-grain bread, buttered them, jammed them, ate them, drank some more coffee, drew the drapes and cocked an eye at the dawn.

  It looked promising, even to a cocked eye. To the east, dark clouds still obscured the newly risen sun. But the sky was clear in the west, and the winds generally blow from that direction, sweeping yesterday’s weather out over the Atlantic—which, in this case, was right where it belonged. The sky over the Hudson had a distinctly blue cast to it.

  I poured myself one more cup of coffee, settled in my most nearly comfortable chair with the phone and the phone book, glanced ruefully at Morton’s feet, and let my fingers do the walking.

  My first call was to the American Numismatic Society, located some four miles north of me at Broadway and 156th Street. I introduced myself as James Klavin of the New York Times and explained I was doing a piece on the 1913 V-Nickel. Could he tell me a few things about the coin? Was it true, for example, that only five specimens were known to exist? And did he happen to know where those specimens were located at the present time? Could he say when a specimen had last changed hands? And for what price?

  Almost everyone likes to cooperate with the press. Describe yourself as a reporter and you can ask no end of time-consuming and impertinent questions, and all people ask of you in return is that you spell their names right. The man I spoke with, a Mr. Skeffington, said he might be a moment and offered to ring me back. I said I’d hold, and I held for ten minutes, sipping coffee and wiggling my toes, while he scurried around doing my legwork for me.

  He came back in due course and told me more than I really needed to know, repeating a lot of what Abel had told us Tuesday night. There were indeed five specimens, four of them in public collections, one in private h
ands, and he was able to furnish me with the names of the four institutions and the private collector.

  He was less helpful on the subject of value. The A.N.S. is a high-minded outfit, more interested in scholarly matters like the varieties and the historical context of numismatics than such crass considerations as price. The most recent cash transaction of which Mr. Skeffington had a record was a sale Abel had mentioned—in 1976, for $130,000. According to Abel there’d been a sale since then for a substantially higher price.

  I called the four museums in turn. At the Smithsonian in Washington, the curator of coins and medals was a gentleman with a dry voice and a hyphenated surname. He confirmed that a 1913 V-Nickel was a part of the Smithsonian’s numismatic holdings, having been acquired as a gift of Mrs. R. Henry Norweb in 1978.

  “It’s on permanent display,” he informed me, “and it’s terribly popular. Tourists gawk at it and tell each other how beautiful it is. Now our coin is a frosty proof, but aside from that it looks like any Liberty Head Nickel, hardly an extraordinary item from the standpoint of numismatic design. You might care to argue that the Standing Liberty Quarter is beautiful, or the Saint-Gaudens high-relief twenty-dollar gold piece, but the Liberty Head Nickel? What makes this example beautiful? The date? Why, it’s the value, of course. The rarity, the legends. People ooh and ahh at diamonds, too, and couldn’t tell them from cut glass, not by looking at them. What exactly did you want to know about our coin?”

  “I just wanted to make sure it was still there.”

  A dry chuckle. “Oh, it’s still here. We haven’t had to spend it yet. Not much you can buy with a nickel nowadays, anyway, so I guess we’ll hang onto it for the present.”

  A woman at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts confirmed that a 1913 V-Nickel was one of the stars of the museum’s coin display and had been since its acquisition by bequest shortly after the Second World War. “It’s an extremely important numismatic item,” she said, sounding like catalog copy, “and we’re gratified to have it here in Boston.”

  An assistant curator at the Museum of Science and Industry was similarly gratified to have Nickel No. 3 in Cincinnati, where it had reposed since the mid-thirties: “We’ve deaccessioned a substantial portion of our coin holdings in the past few years,” he told me. “We’ve had budget problems, and the coins have increased so dramatically in value that they seemed to represent a disproportionate amount of our capital in relation to their display value. There’s been some pressure on us to eliminate coins altogether, as we did with our stamps, but then our philatelic collection was never more than third-rate. The 1913 Nickel’s the star of our show. We’ve no plans to let it go, not that they’ve told me about. It’s popular, you see, especially with the children. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s looking at it right now.”

  Nickel No. 4 had belonged to the Museum of the Baltimore Historical Society until a little over a year ago, I learned from a woman whose speech indicated an origin rather farther south than Baltimore. “It was our only important coin,” she said. “We’re really only interested in articles relating to the history of the city of Baltimore, but people tend to will their prize possessions to museums, and we in turn tend to accept what’s left to us. We had the nickel for years and years, and of course its value increased, and from time to time there was talk of consigning it to an auction or selling it privately to a fellow institution. Then a foundation in Philadelphia devoted exclusively to numismatics came to us offering to exchange the Copley portrait of Charles Carroll of Carrollton.” She went on to explain that Charles Carroll, born in Annapolis, had been a member of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a United States senator. I already knew who Copley was.

  “It was an offah we couldn’t refuse,” she said solemnly, and I pictured Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, holding a pistol to this Southern belle’s head, urging her to swap the nickel for the portrait.

  The place in Philadelphia called itself the Gallery of American and International Numismatics, and the man I spoke to gave his name as Milo Hracec, and spelled it for me. He was second in command, he explained; his boss was Howard Pitterman, which name he also spelled, and Pitterman had Saturdays off.

  Hracec confirmed that the gallery did indeed own a 1913 Nickel. “It is a part of our type set of United States coinage,” he said. “You know what a type set is? One example of each design. Type collecting has become popular as fewer hobbyists can afford to collect complete sets by date and mint mark. Of course that is not the foremost consideration here, because Mr. Ruslander has placed generous funds at the gallery’s disposal.”

  “Mr. Ruslander?”

  “Gordon Ruslander of the Liberty Bell Mint. You’re probably familiar with their sets of medals for collectors.”

  I was indeed. Like the Franklin Mint, also in Philadelphia, Liberty Bell specialized in series of contemporary medals which they peddled to collectors by subscription with the intimation that the little silver discs would someday increase in value. They’d always been a drug on the resale market, and on more than one occasion I’d left sets of the medals in their owners’ desks, writing them off as not worth stealing. Now, with the surge in the price of silver, the damned things had soared to more than triple their issue price in bullion value.

  Ruslander, I was told, had established the Gallery of American and International Numismatics three years previously, donating his own personal collection along with a hefty chunk of cash. And the U.S. type set, in which the 1913 V-Nickel reposed, was the gallery’s star attraction.

  “In a type set,” Hracec explained, “any coin of the type will do. But in the gallery’s collection, we strive for the rarest date and mint variety attainable for that type, instead of settling for a common and readily affordable example. In 1873–4, for instance, Liberty Seated Dimes were struck with arrows flanking the date. Uncirculated specimens of the Philadelphia and San Francisco issues range from six or seven hundred to perhaps a thousand or twelve hundred dollars. Our coin is one struck at Carson City, the 1873-CC, and our specimen is superior in quality to the one which sold at a Kagin auction seven years ago for twenty-seven thousand dollars.

  “Originally our V-Nickel slot was filled by a proof example of the 1885, the rarest date of the regular series. It’s worth perhaps a thousand dollars, a little more than twice the price of common proofs. There was some question as to whether we would even want to have the 1913, since it was not a regularly issued coin, but when we learned the Baltimore Historical Society might let theirs go, Mr. Ruslander wouldn’t rest until we had it. He happened to own a portrait by Copley that he knew they would want—”

  And I got to hear about Charles Carroll of Carrollton all over again. On and on it went, and when I was done with Mr. Hracec I had to call Stillwater, Oklahoma, where I spoke with a man named Dale Arnott. Mr. Arnott evidently owned a fair portion of Payne County and ran beef cattle on his land, moving them out of the way now and then to make room for an oil well. He had indeed owned the 1913 V-Nickel, having bought it in ’76 for $130,000, and his had been the one resold a year or two ago for $200,000.

  “I had my fun with it,” he said, “and I got a kick at coin conventions, hauling it out of a pocketful of change and tossing it to match folks for drinks. You’d like to die from the look on their faces. Way I looked at it, a nickel’s a nickel, so why not toss it heads or tails?”

  “Weren’t you worried you’d lower its value?”

  “Nope. It wasn’t in the best condition to start with, you see. Oh, it’s better than extra fine, but the proof surface isn’t what it was when they minted it. I guess the other four are in better shape. I saw the one in the Smithsonian Institution once and it was a perfect frosty proof with a mirrorlike field, and mine was nothing like that. So I had my pleasure owning it, and then a fellow offered me a handsome profit on it, and I told him if he’d up his price to an even two hundred thousand he could own himself a five-cent piece. I could give you his name but I don’t know as he
’d want me doing that.”

  I asked if the buyer still had the coin.

  “Less he sold it,” Arnott said. “You in the market yourself? I could call the gentleman and find out if he wants to sell.”

  “I’m just a reporter, Mr. Arnott.”

  “Well, I was thinking that it’s easy to be a reporter over the phone. I’ve been that in my time, and a Baptist minister and any number of lawyers. Now don’t let me offend you, sir. If you want to be a reporter that’s just what you are, and if you want to find out if the coin’s for sale—”

  “I just want to find out if he still owns it. I don’t care if it’s for sale or not.”

  “Then you give me a telephone number where you’ll be for an hour or so, and I’ll see what I can find out.”

  I gave him Carolyn’s.

  I made four more calls, to Washington, Boston, Cincinnati and Philadelphia. Then I called the A.N.S. again, and I called Coin World, the weekly newspaper in Sidney, Ohio. By the time I was finished my fingers had done so much walking I was beginning to worry about them. After all, my hands were unquestionably narrow—odd I hadn’t ever noticed this before. And there was no denying that my index fingers were substantially longer than my thumbs.

  The implications were clear enough. I had Morton’s Hand, and I knew only too well where that could lead. Pain in the palm. Wrist spurs. Forearm tendinitis. And, sooner or later, the dreaded Dialer’s Shoulder.

  I hung up and got the hell out of there.

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  I got to Carolyn’s house around noon. I sat there with a cat on my lap and a cup of coffee at my elbow and did what I could to bring my hostess up to date.

  I had my work cut out for me. There was a lot of water over the dam or under the bridge or wherever it goes these days, and my task wasn’t rendered easier by Carolyn’s headache. Another of those dreaded sugar hangovers, no doubt. Maybe the right pair of orthotics would solve everything.