The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling

by Lawrence Block

  “They couldn’t do anything about it, could they?” Carolyn wanted to know. “If he was a shady operator, they couldn’t exactly sue him.”

  “True, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” She made a face and I regretted the choice of words. “At any rate,” I went on, “the inflated market for the remaining books would collapse in a flash. Instead of realizing several thousand dollars a copy, he’d have a trunkful of books he couldn’t give away. The high price absolutely depended on the books being one of a kind. When they were no longer unique, and when the holograph inscriptions proved to be forgeries, my client would have to find a new way to make a dishonest living.”

  “He could always become a burglar,” the Maharajah suggested, smiling gently.

  I shook my head. “No. That’s the one thing he damn well knew he couldn’t do, because when he needed a burglar he came to this very shop and hired one. He found out, undoubtedly through Madeleine Porlock, that Arkwright was planning to go public with his copy of Fort Bucklow. Maybe public’s the wrong word. Arkwright wasn’t about to ring up the Times and tell them what he had. But Arkwright was a businessman at least as much as he was a collector, and there was someone he was trying to do business with who had more of a genuine interest in Fort Bucklow than Arkwright himself, who had no special interest in Kipling or India or anti-Semitic literature or whatever this particular book might represent.”

  Whelkin asked if I had someone specific in mind.

  “A foreigner,” I said. “Because Arkwright was engaged in international commerce. A man with the wealth and power of an Indian prince.”

  The Maharajah’s jaw stiffened. Atman Singh inclined his body a few degrees forward, prepared to leap to his master’s defense.

  “Or an Arab oil sheikh,” I continued. “There’s a man named Najd al-Quhaddar who comes to mind. He lives in one of the Trucial States, I forget which one, and he pretty much owns the place. There was a piece about him not long ago in Contemporary Bibliophile. He’s supposed to have the best personal library east of Suez.”

  “I know him,” the Maharajah said. “Perhaps the best library in the Middle East, although there is a gentleman in Alexandria who would almost certainly wish to dispute that assertion.” He smiled politely. “But surely not the best library east of Suez. There is at least one library on the Indian subcontinent which puts the Sheikh’s holdings to shame.”

  Mother taught me never to argue with Maharajahs, so I nodded politely and went on. “Arkwright had a brilliant idea,” I told them. “He was trying to rig a deal with the Sheikh. Work up some sort of trade agreements, something like that. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow would be a perfect sweetener. Najd al-Quhaddar is a heavy supporter of the Palestinian terrorist organizations, a position that’s not exactly unheard of among the oil sheikhs, and here’s a unique specimen of anti-Semitic literature with a whole legend to go with it, establishing a great English writer as an enemy of world Jewry.

  “There was only one problem. My client had already sold a book to the Sheikh.”

  I looked at Whelkin. His expression was hard to read.

  “I didn’t read this in Contemporary Bibliophile,” I went on. “The Sheikh was told when he bought the book that he had to keep it to himself, that it was stolen goods with no legitimate provenance. That was fine with him. There are collectors who find hot merchandise especially desirable. They get a kick out of the cloak-and-dagger aspects—and of course they figure they’re getting a bargain.

  “If Arkwright showed his copy to Najd, the game was up and the fat was in the fire. First off, Arkwright would know he’d been screwed. More important, Najd would know—and Arab oil sheikhs can get all sorts of revenge without troubling to call an attorney. In some of those countries they still chop hands off pickpockets. Imagine what they’d come up with if they had a personal grudge against you.”

  I stopped for breath. “My client had another reason to keep Arkwright from adding to the Sheikh’s library. He was negotiating another sale to Najd, and it was designed to net him a fortune. The last thing he wanted was for Arkwright to queer it.”

  Carolyn said, “I’m lost, Bern. What was he going to sell him?”

  “The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.”

  “I thought he already did.”

  “He sold him the Rider Haggard copy. Now he was going to sell him something a little special.” I tapped the book on the counter. “He was going to offer him this copy,” I said.

  “Wait one moment,” Prescott Demarest said. “You have me utterly confused. That copy in front of you—it’s not the one you took from this man Arkwright’s home?”

  “No. That copy left Madeleine Porlock’s apartment in the possession of the man who killed her.”

  “Then the book in front of you is another copy which you found in her closet?”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid not,” I said ruefully. “You see, the copy from the shoe box in the closet was a second Rider Haggard copy, and how could my client possibly sell it to the Sheikh? He’d already done that once. No, this is a third copy, curiously enough, and I have to apologize for lying earlier when I told you this was the Porlock copy. Well, see, maybe I can just clear up the confusion by reading you the inscription on the flyleaf.”

  I opened the book, cleared my throat. God knows I had their attention now.

  “ ‘For Herr Adolf Hitler,’ ” I read, “ ‘whose recognition of the twin Damocletian swords of Mosaic Bolshevism and Hebraic International Finance have ignited a new torch in Germany which, with the Grace of God, will one day brighten all the globe. May your present trials prove no more than the anvil upon which the blade of Deliverance may be forged. With abiding good wishes and respect, Rudyard Kipling, Bateman’s, Burwash, Sussex, U.K., 1 April 1924.’ ”

  I closed the book. “The date’s significant,” I said. “I was looking at John Toland’s biography of Hitler before you gentlemen arrived. One of the fringe benefits of owning a bookstore. The date Kipling supposedly inscribed this book was the very day Hitler was sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison for his role in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. A matter of hours after the sentence was announced he was in his cell writing the title page of Mein Kampf. Meanwhile, Rudyard Kipling, moved by the future Führer’s plight, was inscribing a book to him. There’s some rubber stamping in ink on the inside front cover, too. It’s in German, but it seems to indicate that the book was admitted to Landsberg Prison in May of 1924. Then there are some marginal notes here and there, presumably in Hitler’s hand, and some underlining, and some German phrases scribbled on the inside back cover and the blank pages at the back of the book.”

  “Hitler might have had it in his cell with him,” Rudyard Whelkin said dreamily. “Took inspiration from it. Tried out ideas for Mein Kampf—that’s what those scribbles could indicate.”

  “And then what happened to the book?”

  “Why, that’s still a bit vague. Perhaps the Führer presented it to Unity Mitford and it found its way back to Britain with her. That’s not an unappealing little story. But all the details have yet to be worked out.”

  “And the price?”

  Whelkin raised his imposing eyebrows. “For Adolf Hitler’s personal copy of a work of which only one other copy exists? For a source book for Mein Kampf? Inscribed to Hitler and chock-full of his own invaluable notes and comments?”

  “How much money?”

  “Money,” Whelkin said. “What is money to someone like Najd al-Quhaddar? It flows in as fast as the oil flows out, more money than one knows what to do with. Fifty thousand dollars? One hundred thousand? A quarter of a million? I was just beginning to dangle the bait, you see. Just letting that Arab get the merest idea of what I had to offer. The ultimate negotiations would have to be positively Byzantine in their subtlety. How much would I have demanded? How much would he have paid? At what point would the bargain be struck?” He spread his hands. “Impossible to say, my boy. What is that phrase of Dr. Johnson’s? ‘Wealth b
eyond the dreams of avarice.’ Avarice is quite a dreamer, you know, so his words might be the slightest bit hyperbolic, but suffice it to say that the book would have brought a nice price. A very nice price.”

  “But not if Arkwright ruined the deal.”

  “No,” Whelkin said. “Not if Mr. Arkwright ruined the deal.”

  “How much did he pay you for his copy?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  “And the Sheikh? He’d already bought a copy with the Haggard inscription.”

  He nodded. “For a few thousand. I don’t remember the figure. Is it of great importance?”

  “Not really. How many other copies did you sell?”

  Whelkin sighed. “Three,” he said. “One to a gentleman in Fort Worth who is under the impression that it was surreptitiously removed from the Ashmolean at Oxford by a greedy sub-curator with gambling debts. He’ll never show it around. Another to a retired planter who lives in the West Indies now after making a packet in Malayan rubber. The third to a Rhodesian diehard who seemed more excited by the poem’s political stance than its collector value. The Texan paid the highest price—eighty-five hundred dollars, I believe. I was selling off the books one by one, you see, but it was a laborious proposition. One couldn’t advertise. Each sale called for extensive research and elaborate groundwork. My travel expenses were substantial. I was living reasonably well and covering my costs, but I wasn’t getting ahead of the game.”

  “The last copy you sold was to Arkwright?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know Madeleine Porlock?”

  “We were friends of long standing. We’d worked together now and again, over the years.”

  “Setting up swindles, do you mean?”

  “Commercial enterprises is a less loaded term, wouldn’t you say?”

  “How did a copy of Fort Bucklow get in her closet?”

  “It was her commission for placing a copy with Arkwright,” he said. “I needed cash. Normally I’d have given her a thousand dollars or so for arranging the sale. She was just as pleased to have the book. She expected to sell it eventually for a good sum. She knew, of course, not to do anything with it until I’d had my shot at the big money with Najd al-Quhaddar.”

  “Meanwhile, you needed Arkwright’s copy back.”

  “Yes.”

  “And offered me fifteen thou to fetch it for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was the fifteen thousand going to come from?”

  He avoided my eyes. “You’d have received it eventually, my boy. I simply didn’t have it at the moment, but once I was able to place the Hitler copy with the Sheikh I’d be in a position to afford generosity.”

  “You might have told me that in advance.”

  “And where would that have gotten me?”

  “Nowhere,” I said. “I’d have turned you down flat.”

  “And there you have it.” He sighed, folded his hands over his abdomen. “There you have it. Ethics are so often a function of circumstance. But I’d have settled with you in due course. You have my word on that.”

  Well, that was comforting. I exchanged glances with Carolyn, came out from behind the counter. “The situation became complicated,” I said, “because a gentleman from India happened to be in New York at the same time as all of this was going on. Some months ago he had heard rumors about the Kipling property recently acquired by a particular Arab Sheikh. Now he was contacted by a woman who told him that such a book existed, that it was presently in the possession of a man named Arkwright, that it would soon be in her possession and that she could be induced to part with it for the right price.

  “The woman, of course, was Madeleine Porlock. She learned somehow that the Maharajah was in town and evidently knew of his interest in Rudyard Kipling and his works. She had a copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, her commission for pushing a copy to Arkwright, and here was a chance to dispose of it. She offered the book to the Maharajah for—how much?”

  “Ten thousand,” said the Maharajah.

  “A healthy price, but she was dealing with a resourceful man in more ways than one. He had her tracked down and followed. She wore a wig to disguise herself when she came down for a close look at me. Maybe that was so I wouldn’t recognize her when she slipped me the doped coffee. Maybe it was because she knew she was being checked out herself. Whatever she had in mind, it didn’t work. The Maharajah’s man tagged her to this shop, and a little research turned up the fact that the new owner of Barnegat Books had a master’s degree in breaking and entering.”

  I grinned. “Are you people following all this? There are wheels within wheels. The Maharajah wasn’t going to shell out ten grand for Fort Bucklow, not because he’d miss the money but for a very good reason. He knew for a fact that the book was a fake. For one thing, he’d heard about Najd’s copy. And you had another reason, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you care to share it?”

  “I own the original.” He smiled, glowing with the pride of ownership that they used to talk about in Cadillac ads. “The genuine copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, legitimately inscribed to Mr. H. Rider Haggard and removed from his library after his death. The copy which passed through the hands of Miss Unity Mitford and which may indeed have been in the possession of the Duke of Windsor. A copy, I must emphasize, which was delivered into my hands six years ago, long before this gentleman”—a brief nod at Whelkin—“happened on some undestroyed printer’s overstock, or whatever one wishes to call the cache of books from the Tunbridge Wells printshop.”

  “So you wanted the phony copy?”

  “I wanted to discredit it. I knew it was a counterfeit but I could not be certain in what way it had been fabricated. Was it a pure invention? Had someone happened on a manuscript and caused a spurious edition to be printed? Or was it what I now realize it to be, a genuine book with a faked inscription? I wished to determine just what it was and establish that Najd al-Quhaddar had a similarly bogus article, but I did not want to pay ten thousand dollars for the privilege, or I would be making myself the victim of a swindle.”

  “So you tried to eliminate the middleman. You sent your friend here”—I smiled at Atman Singh, who did not smile back—“to collect the book from me as soon as I had it. And you instructed him to give me five hundred dollars. Why?”

  “To compensate you. It seemed a fair return on your labor, considering that the book itself was of no value.”

  “If you think that’s a fair price for what I went through, you’ve obviously never been a burglar. How did you know I had the book?”

  “Miss Porlock informed me she would have it that evening. That indicated to me that you’d already retrieved it from its owner.”

  Rudyard Whelkin shook his head. “Poor Maddy,” he said sadly. “I told her to hold onto the book. She’d have spiked an enormous sale of mine by what she did, but I guess she was restless. Wanted to pick up a bundle and get out of town.” He frowned. “But who killed her?”

  “A man with a reason,” I said. “A man she double-crossed.”

  “For God’s sake,” Whelkin said. “I wouldn’t kill anyone. And I certainly wouldn’t kill Madeleine.”

  “Maybe not. But you’re not the only man she crossed. She did a job on everybody, when you stop to think about it. She drugged me and stole a book from me, but I certainly didn’t kill her. She was fixing to swindle the Maharajah, and he might well have felt a certain resentment when his agent came back from my shop with a worthless copy of Soldiers Three. But this wouldn’t leave him feeling betrayed because he didn’t expect anything more from the woman. Neither did I. We never had any reason to trust her in the first place, so how could we feel betrayed? There’s only one man she really betrayed.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Him,” I said, and leveled a finger at Prescott Demarest.

  Demarest looked bewildered. “This is insane,” he said levelly. “Utterly insane.”<
br />
  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I’ve been wondering what I’m doing in this madhouse and now I find myself accused of murdering a woman I never even heard of before tonight. I came here to buy a book, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I read a newspaper advertisement and made a telephone call and came here prepared to spend substantial money to acquire an outstanding rarity. I’ve since heard some fascinating if hard-to-grasp story about genuine books with fake inscriptions, and some gory tales of double-crosses and swindles and murders, and now I find myself accused of homicide. I don’t want to buy your book, Mr. Rhodenbarr, whether it’s inscribed to Hitler or Haggard or Christ’s vicar on earth. Nor do I want to listen to any further rubbish of the sort I’ve heard here tonight. If you’ll excuse me…”

  He started to rise from his chair. I held up a hand, not very threateningly, but it stopped him. I told him to sit down. Oddly enough, he sat.

  “You’re Prescott Demarest,” I said.

  “I thought we weren’t using names here tonight. Yes, I am Prescott Demarest, but—”

  “Wrong,” I said. “You’re Jesse Arkwright. And you’re a murderer.”

  CHAPTER

  Nineteen

  “I watched you this afternoon,” I told him. “I saw you leave an office building on Pine Street. I’d never seen you before in my life but I knew there was something familiar about you. And then it came to me. Family resemblance.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about the portraits in your library in Forest Hills. The two ancestors in the oval frames whose job it is to bless the pool table. I don’t know if you’re really a descendant of the guy who put the Spinning Jenny together, but I’m willing to believe the codgers on the wall are legitimate forebears of yours. You look just like them, especially around the jawline.”