The Burglar in the Rye

by Lawrence Block

  “Could you drive? Last I heard you were fourteen.”

  “I was seventeen by this point, but no, I hadn’t gotten around to learning. I was going to ask a neighbor to drive it to a dealer so I could sell it, but in the end I just left it there, along with just about everything else. I packed the suitcase I’d brought from Greenwich, and I took the black San Ildefonso pot, wrapping it in my clothes so it wouldn’t break. And it didn’t. I still have it.”

  “And you flew back to New York?”

  “Almost. I took a bus to the airport and got a boarding pass. Then when they called my flight I didn’t get on it. I just picked up my bag and walked out of the terminal. I suppose there was a way to cash in my ticket, but it just felt like too much of a hassle. I had enough money left for a ticket to San Francisco on Greyhound, and that’s where I went.”

  “With your clothes and your black bowl.”

  “I got a room in the Tenderloin. I put my clothes in the closet and I put the bowl on the dresser. I didn’t recite any poems.”

  “You were seventeen.”

  “I was seventeen. I was a published writer, and I’d spent three years with a famous novelist who’d given me daily lectures on writing, but I hadn’t written a word since I left Connecticut. And I was still a virgin.”

  Coltrane had finished, and what we were listening to now was Chet Baker.

  I said, “A virgin. Do you mean that metaphorically or…”

  “Literally. Virga intacta, or however it goes in Latin.”

  “He, uh, wasn’t interested?”

  “He was vitally interested. We had sex just about every day.”

  I thought about it. “He’d been to the Amazon,” I suggested, “and he went skinny-dipping and ran into a candiru.”

  She shook her head. “No surgery,” she said, “and no performance problems. He just wouldn’t put the usual protrusion into the usual orifice. He did all manner of other things, but the girl who went to San Francisco was still technically a virgin.”

  “How come?”

  “He never said. Gully wasn’t much on explaining himself. It may have had something to do with my age, or my being a virgin. Or he may have been the same with other women. He may have had a morbid fear of fathering children. Or it may just have been an experiment of his, or a stage he was going through. I tried not to ask questions I sensed he didn’t want to answer. He’d just get this disappointed look on his face, and he’d never answer anyway, so I learned not to ask.”

  “So it was something you didn’t talk about.”

  “One of many things we didn’t talk about. You get so you take it for granted. And there were plenty of other things we did talk about. And it’s not as though my sexual education was being neglected, because there were plenty of things we did.”

  And she commenced to tell me about some of them. She sat a little closer to me on the sofa, and she settled her head on my shoulder and she talked about the things she’d done twenty years ago with a man old enough to be her father.

  “Bernie? Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be right back,” I told her. “I want to put a record on. I hope you like Mel Tormé.”

  “Well,” I said a little later, “you’re not a virgin now.”

  “Silly. I stopped being a virgin my second week in San Francisco. And the only reason I lasted that long was that every cute guy I met turned out to be gay.”

  “Well, San Francisco.”

  She’d stayed in San Francisco for a year and a half, which was how long it took her to write a first draft of a novel. When she was done she set it aside for a week. Then she read it and decided it was terrible. She would have burned it in the fireplace, but she didn’t have a fireplace. Instead she tore it up, tore all the pages in half and then in half again, and let the garbage men take it away.

  She’d been supporting herself by waiting tables in a coffeehouse, but she was sick of that, and sick of San Francisco. She moved, San Ildefonso pot and all, to Portland, and then to Seattle. She found a room off Pioneer Square, got a job in a bookstore, and wrote a short story. She sent it to The New Yorker, and when it came back she sent it to Anthea Landau, the only agent she knew of. Fairborn had written to Landau occasionally and got occasional letters from her, sent to him at General Delivery in Santa Fe.

  “She sent the story back,” she said, “along with a letter saying it struck her as derivative and unconvincing, though skillfully crafted. And she said she was no longer representing Gulliver Fairborn, and I gathered that mentioning his name might have been a strategic error.”

  She reread the story and decided that the agent was right. She tore it up, and a day or two later she came home from the bookstore with a Harlequin romance in her purse. She read it that night, and another the next night, and five more over the weekend. Then she sat down at the typewriter and within a month she had a book written. She sent it directly to the publisher and they sent her a check and a contract.

  She used the pen name Melissa Manwaring. The Manwaring came from Nobody’s Baby, of course, and Melissa just seemed to go well with it. She quit her bookstore job when she was halfway through with the second book. Later on she began writing Regency romances for another publisher, with period dialogue and dastardly male characters, and her pen name for these was Virginia Furlong. She changed cities every couple of years, and friends and lovers a little more frequently than that, and she turned out a book often enough that money was never a problem, but not so often that she had to worry about burning out.

  Every now and then, say eight or ten times in twenty years, she’d get a purple envelope in the mail with her current address typed on it. And a letter inside from Gulliver Fairborn.

  “He wouldn’t have needed to hire detectives,” she said. “I wasn’t hiding from the world the way he was. Each time I moved I sent a change-of-address to the post office. I never paid extra for an unlisted telephone number. Still, he had to make an effort to find me.”

  The first letter showed up a few months after Melissa Manwaring’s first novel hit the bookstores. Maybe the pen name caught his eye. In any event, he’d spotted her style right away, and took the time to read the book through and comment on it. That was flattering. He included a return address—General Delivery, Joplin, Missouri, with a false name to address it to. She dashed off a long letter, tore it up, wrote a short one, and sent it off—and heard nothing further, until two years later and a thousand miles away when another purple envelope turned up, this one postmarked Augusta, Maine.

  And so it went. She got a letter from him shortly after she was married, and another, two years later, shortly after her divorce. They both kept moving around the country, and occasionally out of it. Their paths never crossed, but she never went more than a couple of years without hearing from him. The purple envelopes always took her by surprise, and she would take them up with a mixture of excitement and dread. He remained, she had to admit, the most important man in her life. Sometimes she cursed him for it, but it was true.

  And now, just weeks ago, she’d heard from him after a silence of almost three years.

  “Here in New York?”

  But no, she’d been living in Charlottesville, Virginia, had moved there in the spring, subletting an apartment a short walk from the University of Virginia campus. She got to share a rose garden with the building’s three other tenants, and she took his letter out to the garden and read it there, on a warm afternoon with a scented breeze blowing.

  He was very agitated. That was unusual, as his letters were typically laid-back. What, he wanted to know, had she done with the letters he had sent her? Had she destroyed them? Would she please do so, either that or return them to him?

  She wrote back at once, saying that she had kept all of his letters from the very beginning. She traveled light, she kept little, she didn’t even have copies of all of her own books, but she still owned the copy of Nobody’s Baby he’d inscribed to her, and she still had his letters. And she wanted to keep them. Why
on earth did he want her to destroy them?

  For answer he sent her—by return mail!—a photocopy of an article that had run in the New York Times. Anthea Landau, his erstwhile agent, had made arrangements with Sotheby’s for the sale of all the letters he’d sent her over the years.

  He’d called the woman up, outraged, and had made the tactical error of letting phrases like “bloodsucker” and “money-grubbing vampire” and “ten percent of my soul” creep into his conversation. Landau hung up on him and wouldn’t pick up the phone when he called back. He wrote her a letter, arguing his case more diplomatically, stressing that his letters had been written for her eyes only and that it was important to him that he get them back. He offered to pay for them, and invited her to set a price. She wouldn’t have to pay a commission, he said, or report the sale to the IRS, and she would be doing the right thing, too.

  She never responded. He wrote a second letter, and had no sooner dropped it in the mail than he realized she could add these letters to the auction. The idea infuriated him, and he didn’t write again.

  “And there was nothing he could do,” I told Carolyn. “The law’s very clear when it comes to letters. They belong to the recipient. If I send you a letter, it’s yours. You can keep it, you can tear it up, you can sell it to somebody else.”

  “First I’d have to find someone who wanted it, Bern.”

  “Well, if I was Gully Fairborn, you wouldn’t have a lot of trouble. He’s an important writer, and he’s such a man of mystery that his letters are particularly desirable. So you could sell them if you wanted. About the only thing you couldn’t do is publish them.”

  “Why not, if they belong to me?”

  “The letters as physical property belong to the recipient. As literary property, title remains with the sender. He owns the copyright.”

  “Wait a minute. I know Fairborn’s a couple of beads off plumb, Bern, but don’t tell me he sent his letters to the Library of Congress to have them copyrighted.”

  “He doesn’t have to. Anything you write is automatically protected by copyright, whether or not you register it in Washington. Fairborn retains the copyright to his letters, and he can keep them from being published. In fact he did just that a couple of years ago.”

  “Anthea Landau tried to publish his letters?”

  “No, but there was a fellow who wrote a biography of Fairborn—an unauthorized biography, obviously. There were a few people around who’d received purple envelopes over the years, and some of them were willing to let the writer read them. He was going to quote at length from them in his book, until Fairborn went to court and put a stop to it.”

  “The guy couldn’t even quote excerpts from the letters?”

  “The court ruled that he could report on their contents, because that was a matter of fact, but he couldn’t quote without infringing on Fairborn’s copyright. He could paraphrase, but not in great detail, and the upshot of it all was that he couldn’t write the book he’d set out to write, and the one he wound up with wasn’t one too many people wanted to read.”

  She thought about it. “If nobody can publish his letters,” she said, “what does Fairborn care who owns them? What difference does it make to him if they sit in Anthea Landau’s files or in some collector’s library? If they can’t be published…”

  “But they can. Sort of.”

  “You just said…”

  “I know what I said. You couldn’t quote them in a book, or even paraphrase them in great detail. But you could quote from them and give a detailed description of their contents in an auction catalog.”

  “How come?”

  “Because you’ve got a right to furnish a description of goods offered for sale. And you’ve also got a right to show the goods to prospective buyers, so anyone who wanted could turn up at Sotheby’s the week before the auction and read through Fairborn’s letters. And the press could report on their contents.”

  “Would they bother?”

  “With all the mystery surrounding Fairborn, and with all the interest in the letters? I think they might. They’d certainly cover the sale and report on the selling price.”

  “More publicity for Fairborn.”

  “And he’s the one author in America who doesn’t want it. He makes B. Traven look like a media slut, and now his private correspondence is up for grabs to the highest bidder. And sooner or later it’ll be published in full.”

  “When the copyright runs out?”

  “When Fairborn dies. It’ll still be protected, but his heirs would have to go to court, and who knows if they’ll bother? Even if they do, the courts are less impressed with the need to protect a man’s privacy when he’s not around to notice one way or the other. The only way Fairborn can be positive those letters won’t be published is if he gets hold of them and burns them.”

  “So why doesn’t he go to the auction and buy them himself?”

  “He’s not one to show his face in public.”

  “Why not, if nobody knows what he looks like? But he wouldn’t have to show up in person. He could deputize someone to bid for him. A lawyer, say.”

  “He could do that,” I allowed. “If he could afford it.”

  “How much money are we talking about, Bern?”

  I shrugged. “I couldn’t even tell Alice how much her inscribed first of Nobody’s Baby is worth. I couldn’t begin to guess what a hundred letters would bring.”

  “A hundred letters?”

  “Well, she was his agent for four or five books. Some of the letters are probably cut-and-dried—here’s the manuscript, where’s the check?—but there are probably longer letters that shed light on his creative process and provide personal glimpses of the man behind the books.”

  “Ballpark it for me, Bern.”

  “I really can’t,” I said. “I haven’t seen the letters and I don’t know just how revealing they’ll turn out to be. And I’ve got no way of knowing who might show up the day of the sale. I’m sure there’ll be a couple of university libraries bidding. If the right private collectors come around, and if their pockets are deep enough, the prices could go through the roof. And don’t ask me how far through the roof, or even where the roof’s located, because I don’t know. I can’t imagine they’ll bring less than ten thousand dollars, or more than a million, but that doesn’t really narrow it down.”

  “And Fairborn’s not rich?”

  “Not as rich as you’d think. Nobody’s Baby made a lot of money, and still earns steady royalties, but none of his books since then have amounted to much in sales. He keeps trying new things and won’t write the same book twice, or even the same kind of book. He always gets published, because how can you not publish Gulliver Fairborn? But his recent books haven’t made money, for him or his publishers.”

  “Are the new books any good, Bern?”

  “I’ve read most of them,” I said, “although I’ve missed a few along the way. And they’re not bad, and they may even be better novels than Nobody’s Baby. They’re certainly more mature work. But they don’t grab you the way that first book did. According to Alice, Fairborn doesn’t care how the books sell, or if they sell. He barely cares if they’re published, just so he can get up each morning and write what he wants to write.”

  “He could make money if he wanted to, couldn’t he?”

  “Sure. He could write Nobody’s Toddler or Nobody’s Adolescent. He could go on tour with it and give readings on college campuses. Or he could sit back and sell film rights to Nobody’s Baby, which he’s always refused to consider. There are lots of things he could do, but not if he wants to live his life in peace and privacy.”

  “So he can’t buy the letters back.”

  “He tried to, remember? Landau didn’t even answer his letter. And he can’t afford to pay what they’ll bring at auction.”

  “I get the picture,” she said. “And I guess that’s where you come into it, huh, Bern?”

  “It’s really a shame,” I’d told Alice. “You would
think lawyers could do something, wouldn’t you? I guess the best he can do is hope the letters wind up with someone who’ll keep the public away from him.”

  “There would still be the auction catalog.”

  “True.”

  “And the newspaper stories.”

  “It’ll blow over eventually,” I said, “but so will a tornado, and your trailer park never looks the same afterward. There ought to be something somebody can do.”

  “Perhaps there is.”

  “Oh?”

  “If someone were a burglar,” she said, not looking at me, “one could get hold of the letters before they got into Sotheby’s hands, let alone into their catalog. Isn’t that the sort of thing a skilled and resourceful burglar could do?”

  “I suppose I should have seen it coming,” I told Carolyn. “I bought the bookstore thinking that it might be a good place to meet girls, and every once in a while it is. People do wander in, and some of them are female, and some of them are attractive. And it’s natural enough to fall into conversation, about books if nothing else, and sometimes it’s a conversation that can be continued over drinks and even dinner.”

  “And once in a while it’s not over until Mel Tormé sings.”

  “Once in a while,” I agreed. “Once in a great while. But I should have seen it coming all the same. I mean, it’s not as if I was irresistible that afternoon. All I could talk about was the candiru. That’s some icebreaker.”

  “Well, it gets your attention.”

  “She’s living in Virginia when she hears from Fairborn,” I said, “and a couple of weeks later she walks into my store, picks a fifth printing of his book off the shelf, and asks what an inscribed first edition would be worth. She’d owned the book for twenty years. Don’t you think she’d have a better idea of its value than I would?”

  “It was a way to start a conversation, Bern, and a better one than the candiru. It was a coincidence, her needing a burglar and you happening to be one, but the thing about coincidences is they happen. Look at Erica.”