The Burglar in the Rye

by Lawrence Block

  “I suppose I should stick with scotch,” I said, “since that’s what I’ve had so far, even if I haven’t had any of it for myself. Is that what you’re drinking?”

  “Actually,” he said, “this is rye.”

  “Oh?”

  “You got me to try it last night, and I ordered it today more or less automatically.”

  “And you liked it just as well today?”

  “It grows on you.”

  “You think it might turn out to be your regular tipple?”

  “It might at that.”

  I ordered rye for both of us, and raised mine when it came. “To books that change a person’s life,” I said, “for better or for worse. Why a clay factory, Henry?”

  “Come again?”

  “How’d the business get started in the first place? Do they dig a lot of clay around Peru, Indiana?”

  “They used to,” he said. “That’s how the business got started. Then, after it had been established for many years, the clay deposits were exhausted.”

  “I know how they feel.”

  “So we bought the raw clay down south,” he said, “and shipped it to Peru, where we did the processing and packaging.”

  “And shipped it all over America.”

  “All over the world. Wherever there are little children, and carpets for them to track it into.”

  I worked on my drink. We both fell silent for a long moment, and someone put a quarter in the jukebox and played a Patsy Cline record. It wasn’t “Faded Love,” but it was still terrific. Neither of us said a word until Patsy was done.

  Then I said, “Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana.”

  “He was for a fact.”

  “And there’s no clay there.”

  “Not anymore. The deposits—”

  “Are about as exhausted as they can get, because they were never there in the first place. There used to be considerable alluvial clay deposits quite a ways east of Peru, however, near a town called Huntington.”

  He thought this over. “You know quite a bit about clay,” he said, “for someone who’s not in the business himself.”

  “I went to a bookstore. Not my own, but the Barnes & Noble on Astor Place. I wanted to check the Mobil Travel Guide, and the only travel books I carry are the kind that warn you about the toothpick fish.”

  “What does a toothpick fish do?”

  “It embeds itself in the olive fish,” I said, “and the two of them float around inside a martini fish. Forget the toothpick fish, all right?”

  “All right.”

  “There’s a clay factory in Huntington,” I said, “and according to the Mobil Guide they offer free tours of it. Anybody who wants can just show up at the front door and they’ll give him a tour of the factory.”

  “There could be a clay factory in Huntington, too,” he said. “Why not? It’s less than fifty miles from Peru to Huntington.”

  “It looked farther than that on the map.”

  “Well, it’s not. They’re both on the same river, the Wabash. Couldn’t there be clay deposits near both towns?”

  “There could.”

  “And couldn’t there just as easily be a clay factory in Peru as in Huntington?”

  “I don’t see why there couldn’t,” I said, “but the fact is there isn’t. There’s Cole Porter’s birthplace, and there’s the circus museum, and there’s the locomotive monument commemorating the city’s railroad history. But there’s no clay factory.”

  “Maybe not,” he said, “but there could be.”

  “Have you been to Peru, Henry?”

  He nodded. “Pretty nice town. The locomotive monument’s pretty impressive.”

  “How about Huntington?”

  “It’s nice, too. I took the clay factory tour.”

  “I figured you might have. Is some big conglomerate buying up the clay factory?”

  “Jesus, I hope not.”

  “You just made that part up.”

  “Sure.”

  “And you moved the factory from Huntington to Peru…”

  “Well, it sounds better,” he said. “Huntington’s so damned generic. As a name for a town, I mean. Peru, now, that has some zing to it.”

  “Zing,” I said.

  “Peru’s a country. The Incas, the Andes, Machu Picchu. Exotic-sounding, and then you go from that to Indiana. Peru, Indiana. Plus there’s the fact Cole Porter was born there, which not everybody knows, but still, it’s a little extra flavoring. If a man’s going to have a clay factory, why not float it forty or fifty miles down the Wabash to Peru?”

  “Because it sounds better.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I guess Nobody’s Baby changed your life more than most people’s.”

  “I guess it did.”

  “Gulliver Fairborn,” I said.

  “Ridiculous name.”

  “Distinctive, though. More so than Henry Walden. Ray called you Henry Clay, but he tends to get names wrong.”

  “Not an uncommon failing.”

  “I wonder if that was in your mind when you picked the name. The story about the clay factory unconsciously led you to choose the name Henry. Or it could as easily have been the other way around.”

  “So many things could.”

  “Henry Walden. Henry for Henry David Thoreau? And that would lead straight to Walden Pond.”

  “Where, as far as I know, there are no alluvial clay deposits.” He picked up his drink and contemplated it. “The goddam scholars pull that crap all the time,” he said. “Pick apart every sentence a man writes, looking for hidden meanings. If they ever wrote anything themselves they’d know it doesn’t work that way. It’s hard enough to get any kind of meaning into the work, never mind a hidden one. What tipped you off? It couldn’t have been the location of the clay factory.”

  I shook my head. “You looked familiar.”

  “To you?”

  “Yes, but just vaguely, and I didn’t think about it much. But you looked familiar to other people, too. In fact one of them thought she recognized you and said hello to you.”

  “That stunning black girl.”

  “Isis Gauthier. You were standing with your chin in your hand, and she greeted you, and you dropped your hand and turned and she apologized for her mistake. Because once she saw your beard she knew you weren’t the man she thought you were.”

  “And that set you thinking?”

  “No, it takes more than that to set me thinking. But Ray had the same reaction. He thought he recognized you, and then he decided he didn’t. And that got me wondering why you’d looked familiar to me, and it was because I saw you the first time I walked into the lobby of the Paddington. You were sitting there reading a copy of GQ. It was you, except you didn’t have the beard or the beret. You were wearing sunglasses, weren’t you? And it seems to me you had a lot more hair.”

  “Henry Walden,” he said. “Master of disguise.”

  “I guess it’s no great trick to disguise a man nobody’s ever seen in the first place, a camera-shy fellow who’s elevated anonymity to the level of an art form. The beard-and-beret combination was perfect, because it made you a type, the distinguished older man taking the trouble to look artsy-bohemian. And the perfectly trimmed silver beard’s so eye-catching that it’s what registers the strongest when anybody looks at you. I saw the beard and I knew I’d never seen it before on anybody else, and that meant I hadn’t seen you before. But I had.”

  “I suppose I wanted you to know,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have spent so goddam much time hanging around the bookshop.”

  “You even bought books.”

  “You didn’t make much money off me.”

  “Not on the books you bought from me,” I said. “I’m talking about the books you bought from Pericles Book Shop and sold to me. The books you said some woman brought in. I was shelving them, and something made me look on page 151 of one of them. That’s where Stavros Vlachos pencils in his code cost. He’d marked that b
ook, and you know what? He’d marked all of them.”

  “I didn’t know about that.”

  “That’s why he does it there, instead of on the flyleaf like everybody else. I called him, and he remembered the sale and described the man who’d picked out the books and paid in cash. He told me what you paid, too, and you took a major loss on the deal, didn’t you?”

  He smiled. “You told me how to make a small fortune in the book business, remember?” He shrugged. “I was lurking in your shop under false pretenses, and I guess I felt I owed you something.”

  “How’d you get there the first time? You must have followed her.”

  “Her,” he said heavily. “I saw her at the hotel. I took a room there, that’s how come I got to sit around the lobby reading a magazine. I blew into town wearing a wig and sunglasses and checked in under a phony name. Not Gulliver Fairborn, and not Henry Walden, either. And I was just settling in when that wretched child showed up.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “She speaks well of you.”

  “Oh?”

  “She told me how you wrote to her in Virginia, upset at the prospect of your letters to Landau being auctioned off. She was on a mission to retrieve those letters and return them to you. According to her, she’s accomplished it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Half of it, anyway. I had a phone call from her while I was with Ray. She got the letters. Then she called you in Oregon—”

  “Oregon?”

  “You get around, don’t you? She called you, and I guess all you wanted now was assurance the letters were destroyed, because she fed them to a paper shredder and burned what it spat out. I wonder where she got it.”

  “Got what?”

  “The paper shredder. Did she bring it with her from Charlottesville? Do you suppose they have them at Kinko’s? And how much do they charge to use them?”

  He sighed. “It would be nice,” he said, “to run Tiny Alice through a shredder. Or a wood chipper, say. If she got her hands on those letters, then they haven’t been destroyed. And God knows they’re not going to be returned to me.”

  “She’s going to sell them?”

  “I don’t know what she’s going to do with them. Did she tell you about our liaison? The love affair of the century, starring Alice Cottrell as Lolita?”

  “Briefly.”

  “I’ll bet. What did she say?”

  I gave him an abridged version and he shook his head throughout. He kept shaking his head, and when I’d finished he took a sip of rye and let out a long sigh. “I did write to her,” he said. “There was something in that New Yorker piece of hers that struck a chord. And I received letter after letter in response. Her own situation was impossible, she wrote. She had to get away. Her father was molesting her almost daily and her mother was beating her with a wire coat hanger, that sort of thing. Eventually she wore me down. I told her she could come for a brief visit.”

  “And?”

  “And the next thing I knew she had arrived, and she was harder to get rid of than a summer cold.”

  “I understand she stayed for three years.”

  “More like six months.”

  “Oh.”

  “She had her own bed, but she’d wait until I fell asleep and then crawl into mine.”

  “She said she was a virgin.”

  “Maybe she was. I certainly did nothing to change her status, much as she tried to get me interested. She had more tricks than a White House intern, but so what? She was a scrawny little runt of a kid, and I’m not wired that way.” He shook his head. “She’s probably hoping there’s a letter or two where I confide in my agent about the exciting young woman who’s just come into my life.”

  “What was in the letters, Henry?”

  He smiled. “‘Henry.’ I guess you might as well go on calling me that. What was in the letters? I don’t even remember. Anthea was my agent, and it was a close author-agent relationship.”

  “And you wanted the letters back.”

  “I wanted them to disappear, to cease to exist.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want people pawing over them and finding little glimpses of me in them. It’s the same reason I live my life the way I do.”

  “Yet people find you in everything you write.”

  “They find the part I’m willing to show,” he said. He looked off into the distance. “It’s fiction,” he said, “and I get to make it the way I want it to be, with a clay factory relocated from Huntington to Peru, say, if that’s where I want it to be. I don’t care who reads my fiction, or what they think they find there.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?” His eyes probed mine. “Say you’re having a conversation with somebody. You don’t mind if he can hear the sentences you’re speaking, do you?”

  “If I minded, I wouldn’t say them in the first place.”

  “Exactly. But suppose, while he was listening to you, he was also reading your mind. Picking up the unvoiced thoughts buzzing around in your brain. How would you like that?”

  “I get it.”

  “The fiction I write is my conversation with the world. My private life is private, an unspoken conversation with myself, and I don’t want any mind-readers eavesdropping on it.”

  “So it doesn’t matter who gets the letters,” I said. “A collector or a scholar or a university library, or even Alice Cottrell. It’s the same invasion of privacy wherever the letters wind up.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Isis Gauthier,” I said.

  “Don’t know a thing about her, except that she’s stunning and well-spoken.”

  “Karen Kassenmeier.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “A dead thief,” I said. “How about the hotel clerks? The failed actor who dyes his hair, his name’s Carl, and the myopic accountant-type, whose name I never got.”

  “I believe it’s Owen. And there’s at least one more clerk, a woman named Paula, with a big nose and a chin like Dick Tracy.”

  We were still at the Bum Rap and my companion was still supporting the rye whiskey distillers of America, but I’d switched to Perrier.

  “I didn’t really get to know any of the clerks,” he said. “Or anybody else at the hotel. I went there with some fantasy of talking Anthea into returning the letters, but I couldn’t even work out how to approach her. I couldn’t offer her the kind of money the letters would bring at auction, and I couldn’t threaten her, either. What could I do, sue her? Charge her with unethical conduct?”

  “Stab her,” I suggested, “and take the letters by force.”

  “Not my style. As a matter of fact, action of any sort’s not my style. And getting to the hotel was about as much action as I managed. Then I sat around the lobby, wearing a wig and sunglasses, and drinking enough rye whiskey to face the world each day.”

  “I understand it can do more than Milt or malt.”

  “‘To let us know it’s not our fault,’” he finished. “Where on earth did you come up with that? Did I blurt it out the other night?”

  “Alice quoted you.”

  “Christ,” he said. “And she remembered after all these years?”

  “You wrote it in the book you autographed for her.”

  He snorted. “I never gave her a book. She already had one, she quoted it back at me endlessly, and I certainly never signed or inscribed a book for her. But the line itself is one I used to say rather often.” He took a breath. “Back to the Paddington. I sat around and I sipped, and that’s about all I did.”

  “And you came to my store.”

  “Yes. Alice turned up, and I recognized her even if she didn’t see through my disguise. And I followed her down here, and I found myself fascinated by your involvement in the process. You were a dealer in antiquarian books, but you also seemed to be something else. A burglar, as it turned out.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “And then other people kept coming to the shop, each of them with his
own interest in the letters. So I kept coming, fascinated, wondering what would happen. You agreed to steal the letters, didn’t you? For Alice?”

  “For you,” I said. “So that they could be returned to you.”

  “That was her story. And did she say I would pay you?”

  “She said you didn’t have much money.”

  “God, that’s the truth, and the Hotel Paddington’s getting most of it. So what were you going to get out of it?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing? You were going to do it out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “Well, see,” I said, “I figured I owed you something. You wrote Nobody’s Baby, and that book changed my life.”

  “Henry,” I said. “Henry, I may have an idea.”

  “About the letters? About getting hold of them?”

  “I have some ideas about that, but this is something else. I thought—”

  “About Anthea’s murder? And this other murder, the one that happened at your apartment?”

  “More ideas,” I allowed, “but what I thought—”

  “About the rubies you mentioned? I still don’t understand how the rubies fit into the whole thing.”

  “Neither do I, exactly, though I have an idea or two. But this is a little different. It’s more about you being broke, and about a person being entitled to a decent return on his efforts. And I guess what it’s mostly about is the whole notion of what does and doesn’t constitute invasion of privacy.”

  “Oh.”

  “So let me run it by you,” I said, “and you tell me what you think….”

  CHAPTER

  Nineteen

  Ray Kirschmann scratched his head. “I dunno,” he said. “Them’s the famous letters people are gettin’ killed right an’ left over? They don’t look like much to me. He a fag?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You sure? ’cause what kind of regular guy writes all his letters on purple paper? If that ain’t fag stationery I don’t know what is.” He picked up a sheet. “Half the time he don’t even fill more than half the page, you notice that? And the typing’s terrible. Crossouts all over the place. A police officer turns in a report lookin’ like this, believe me, he’s gonna hear about it.”