The Burglar in the Rye

by Lawrence Block

  “That’s it,” I said. “The party’s over. Unless you fellows want to stick around. How’s the room service here? Carl, can we call downstairs and order drinks?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then that’s it,” I said. “Thanks for coming, everybody. You’re free to go now.”

  The three wise men, Harkness and Moffett and Eddington, left in a body; they’d been opponents a few minutes ago, but now they were drawn together for the moment by their mutual hatred of me. Carl Pillsbury hung around for a few minutes, trying to figure out some way to save his job. If he lost that, he demanded, what would he do for a place to live? Isis told him he could go someplace else and start over.

  “And let your hair go gray,” she advised him. “You’d look terribly distingué.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Oh, there’s no question,” she said. “You’re an attractive man, but with gray hair you’d be irresistible.”

  I guess he believed her. He was, after all, an actor. He brightened considerably, said goodbye to everybody, and went out the door.

  Alice was next, pausing just long enough to assure me that I was a son of a bitch, no question about it, but she had to admire my dedication to my principles. “So that makes you a principled son of a bitch,” she said. “And who knows? Maybe you’ll wind up in my memoirs.”

  She swept out with a flourish, and when she was gone I took the jewelry case out of my trouser pocket and lifted the top. Isis picked up the necklace, opened the catch, and refastened it around her throat. She got a compact from her purse and checked her reflection in the mirror, then called Carolyn over to show her.

  “Beautiful,” Carolyn said.

  “But you know,” Isis said, “I’m not sure I’d ever feel quite the same wearing them. Two women were killed, not over these jewels exactly, but around them. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I guess so,” Carolyn said.

  “So,” she said, and took the necklace off and returned it to the case. I closed the case, and she took it from me and handed it to Marty. “I hope Cynthia Considine enjoys them.”

  “She’ll never look as lovely as you,” Marty said. “With or without rubies, my dear.”

  “That’s sweet,” Isis said, waiting.

  He didn’t keep her waiting long. He opened the jewelry case to see the rubies for himself—and who could blame him, after everything that had gone on already that evening? Then he put it in a pocket, and from another pocket he drew out a thick envelope and held it out to Isis.

  She said, “Twenty?”

  “Twenty-five,” he said. “I persuaded John to be a little more generous.”

  “That’s so sweet,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek, then took the envelope and put it in her purse. “Diamonds are allegedly a girl’s best friend, and I suppose you could make a similar case for rubies, but in the uncertain life of an actress they both take a backseat to cash. One has to be practical, doesn’t one?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But you’re not practical, Bernie. You’re a burglar, so you have a dark side, but your dark side has a light side of its own, doesn’t it? I suspected as much when I heard you took a bear to your room. A burglar with a teddy bear!”

  “Well,” I said.

  “And then you gave up a small fortune to do a favor for a man you never even met. You stole my rubies and gave them back, and you’re not making a dime on the deal, are you?”

  “I’m not a very good businessman,” I admitted. “I don’t do all that well at the bookshop, either.”

  “I think you do just fine,” she said warmly. “You’re quite the fellow, Bernie Rhodenbarr. Quite the fellow.”

  And she shook my hand, and held it a little longer than you might have expected.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-four

  Some days later I was in the bookstore, tossing balls of paper—white, not purple—for Raffles. He looked bored with the enterprise, but kept up his end out of loyalty. Then the door opened, and it was Alice Cottrell.

  “You really have them,” she said. “Or do you? This wasn’t just a ruse to get me down here, was it?”

  “Not at all,” I said, “but while we’re on the subject of ruses, suppose you show me the money.”

  “First show me yours, Bernie.”

  I shook my head. “Carl didn’t get the money first, and look what happened to him. All I’m getting is the same two grand you promised him, and until I have it in hand I’m not showing you a thing.”

  “I suppose I deserve that,” she said, and took a sheaf of bills from her purse. They were hundreds, and there were twenty of them. I know because I counted.

  I found a home for them in my wallet and drew a manila envelope from under the counter. It was not unlike the one that had been at various times in Karen Kassenmeier’s purse, in the closet of Room 303 at the Paddington, and in Alice’s own East Side apartment. I opened it and drew out a stack of papers similar to that original envelope’s contents. These were plain white paper, however, like the balls I’d been throwing for Raffles.

  She grabbed the stack, paged through it. “Here’s the last one you burned,” she said. “‘In high dudgeon, Gully.’ It sounds like a London suburb, doesn’t it? ‘Where do you live?’ ‘In High Dudgeon, just a stone’s throw from…’ from where?”

  “Boardham,” I suggested.

  “Perfect. You could say Gully Fairborn spends a lot of time in High Dudgeon. Bernie, I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “You paid me.”

  “You went through a lot for two thousand dollars. You know, that’s not all I promised Carl.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you really recognize my voice when you were hiding in the bathroom? I spoke very quietly, and I barely said a word.”

  “What I recognized didn’t involve a lot of words.”

  “You could probably hear those sounds again, you know.”

  “Oh?”

  “If you played your cards right.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said.

  “Have you got my number?”

  “You could say that,” I said.

  Within the hour the door opened again, and this time it was a gawky guy wearing a tweed jacket over a plaid shirt. It was Lester Eddington, and I didn’t ask him for cash in advance. I handed him an envelope a lot like the one I’d handed Alice Cottrell, and he smiled apologetically as he withdrew its contents and had a careful look at them.

  “One can’t be too careful,” he said. “I’d only had a look at one letter, and it was clearly authentic, but…” He frowned, nodded, clucked, and muttered to himself, looking up owlishly at last. “This is a gold mine,” he said. “It would have been absolutely tragic to have lost these.”

  “That’s why I made a copy first.”

  “And thank God you did,” he said fervently. “I shouldn’t say it, but I’m just as glad the originals are gone. I don’t need to worry about someone else using this material before I do.”

  “And you won’t use it in Fairborn’s lifetime.”

  “Absolutely not. I won’t publish a word until he’s not around to object. Or to bring suit.”

  This time he was the one who counted the money, and there was a little more of it—a mixture of fifties and hundreds running to a total of three thousand dollars. I thought how hard he must have worked for that money, and it made me consider giving it back to him. And I did what I always do with thoughts like that. I squelched it mercilessly.

  “You’ll be listed in the acknowledgments,” he said, “but I won’t specify what assistance you provided.”

  “Well,” I said, “you can’t be too careful.”

  Victor Harkness turned up in a suit and tie, and carrying a great-looking briefcase. It looked as though it cost the better part of a grand, but for all I knew it was a knockoff like the ones the Senegalese had tried to get me to carry. I mean, how can you tell?

  I had a customer—an older fellow with a b
eret and a silver beard—so I led Harkness to the back room and got a nine-by-twelve manila envelope from the file cabinet. He took a seat and opened the envelope, drawing out a few dozen sheets of purple paper.

  “Excellent,” he said.

  “There’s one missing,” I said. “The one I had to burn to convince the others that I’d destroyed the lot.”

  “The one about bocce and cappuccino?”

  “And high dudgeon,” I said. “Everything else is here.”

  “The firm is deeply grateful,” he said, “as am I. Our commission is the least of it. We’d announced that we were going to be offering these letters, and we’d look a little foolish if we were unable to do so.”

  “We wouldn’t want that.”

  “Certainly not. But there’s also the incalculable loss to literary history, and the dollars-and-cents loss to the worthy charities who are the beneficiaries of Anthea Landau’s estate. I’m only sorry they won’t know how much they owe a certain antiquarian bookseller.”

  “I’ll let the credit go,” I said.

  “And take the cash, eh?” He opened the briefcase, drew out a bank envelope. “Five thousand dollars, as agreed. I trust you’ll find this satisfactory.”

  A little after twelve I picked up lunch at the deli and took it over to the Poodle Factory, and a little after one I walked out the door and turned left instead of right. I took another left at the corner of Broadway and walked to a coffee shop two blocks uptown. Hilliard Moffett was waiting for me in a booth at the back. I slid in opposite him and laid—surprise—a manila envelope on the table.

  He’d already eaten, and all I wanted was a cup of coffee. While I waited for it to cool he examined the envelope’s contents with the care one would expect. He used a pocket magnifier and he took his time, and when he had concluded his examination he sat up straight in his seat and damn well glowed. He was a collector, and right in front of him was something to collect, and that was all it took to turn him positively radiant.

  “When you burned that letter,” he said, “my heart sank. And when you drew the screen aside and showed all the other letters, letters that had turned to ash while you were establishing that one miserable woman had murdered two equally miserable women, I thought I was going to die of heartbreak.”

  “I knew I was going to cause you some anguish,” I said, “but I didn’t know it would be that bad.”

  “But you didn’t burn them after all.”

  “I had to make it look that way,” I said, “or I’d never have been able to turn them over to you. Sotheby’s had a legitimate claim, and Victor Harkness wasn’t going to lie down and roll over just because you offered to scratch his stomach. But now that he’s convinced the letters are gone…”

  “He’ll never know otherwise,” Moffett vowed. “No one will know about these, no scholars will ever secure access to them. I’ll cherish them in private.”

  “You’ll have to.” I leaned forward, lowered my voice. “I heard a rumor,” I said, “that Sotheby’s will be offering a group of letters, allegedly from Fairborn to Landau.”

  His eyes bulged slightly. “These letters?”

  “Hardly. The same number, give or take a few, but different contents. Also on purple paper, and authentic-looking, but…”

  “You’re saying they’re fakes, Rhodenbarr?”

  “They’d have to be, wouldn’t they? I can’t say what I heard or where I heard it, but I gather they’re damned good fakes. You’ll want to look at them when they go on view, I would think.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You might even want to buy them,” I said. “Even if you’re sure they’re fakes, if the price is right. Because—”

  “Because then my ownership of the Fairborn-Landau correspondence becomes a matter of record, and I can display what I want when and where I want. Good thinking, Rhodenbarr. Good thinking indeed. I’m paying you a lot of money, but I have to say you earned it.”

  “Speaking of which…”

  He nodded and started reaching into pockets and coming out with envelopes.

  “Well, well, well,” Ray Kirschmann said. “If my eyes was sore I swear you’d be a sight for ’em. Good to see you, Bern.”

  “Always a pleasure, Ray.”

  “So how’d it go? You see them people?”

  “I did.”

  “An’ you did a little business?”

  “That too.”

  “What I wish,” he said, “is I coulda been there to see the looks on their faces when they saw their pipe dreams go up in smoke. Why are you lookin’ at me like that, Bern?”

  “Pipe dreams always go up in smoke,” I said. “Never mind. It was something to see, I’ll grant you that.”

  “You show ’em a letter on purple paper, you burn it, they see you burned a shitload of other purple paper, an’ what are they gonna think? But all you did was get some purple paper an’ burn it, along with one real letter to make it look good.”

  “It seems to have worked,” I allowed.

  “Then you sold ’em,” he said. “An’ we’re partners, right?”

  “Even Steven,” I said, and handed him an envelope.

  At six o’clock Henry helped me with the bargain table. I hung the CLOSED sign in the window and turned the lock, and the two of us went in the back room and sat down. I sighed, thinking what a long and busy day it had been, and how I could use a drink right about now. And Henry—I’ll go on calling him that, if it’s all the same to you—Henry drew a silver flask from the breast pocket of his jacket. I found a couple of glasses that were as clean as they needed to be, and he poured us a pair of straight shots.

  I drank mine down and said no to a refill. “All done,” I said. “And I have to say it went well.”

  “Thanks to you, Bernie.”

  “No, thanks to you,” I said. “Typing out fifty phony letters and signing them, then starting over again and typing out fifty completely different letters and signing those.”

  “It was fun.”

  “All the same, it must have been work.”

  “That was part of the fun. It was a challenge, I’ll grant you that. But it was so much easier than writing a novel. There was no plot, there was no continuity, there was no requirement but that the letters sound like me, and what could be easier than that?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I had the most fun with that awful Alice, knowing that she’d be paying money for copies of letters that would only blacken her reputation. ‘Dear Anthea, I’m having no end of aggravation with an annoying little poseur named Alice Cottrell, of whom you may have heard, due to the appalling bad judgment of The New Yorker. She manages the neat trick of being at once precocious and retarded, while having the adhesive properties of a barnacle. She’s so pathetic one hates to hurt her, but so whining and physically unappealing one would like to gas her.’ Let’s see her paraphrase that for her fucking memoir.”

  “I made sure it was in the batch I had photocopied.”

  “Good.”

  “And you don’t mind that all these people have letters of yours? Eddington? Moffett? And whoever buys the ones Sotheby’s will be offering?”

  He shook his head. “Let them enjoy themselves,” he said. “They won’t be looking over my shoulder and reading my private thoughts. They’ll be enthralled by some fiction I spun out for the specific purpose of enthralling ’em. They’ll be all wrapped up in an epistolary novel and they won’t even know it.”

  “You’re getting a kick out of the whole thing, aren’t you?”

  “I haven’t had this much fun in years,” he said, and treated himself to another short one. “I’ve had trouble writing lately, you know. I think this happy chore may have broken right through my writer’s block. I can’t wait to get back to work.”

  “That’s great.”

  “It is,” he said, “and the only sad part is parting. Sweet sorrow, according to Shakespeare, and I’d say he nailed that one good. I’m all checked out of the Paddington, Bernie,
and I’ve got a plane to catch. I consider you a genuine friend, but you know the kind of life I lead. The odds are we’ll never cross paths again.”

  “You never know.”

  “True enough. And maybe I’ll drop a line.”

  “I’ll look for a purple envelope,” I said. “And burn it as soon as I finish reading it. But you’re forgetting something.”

  “What?”

  I handed him an envelope. “Put it someplace safe,” I said. “There’s thirty thousand dollars in there.”

  “That’s too much.”

  “Our deal was fifty-fifty, remember? I got two thousand from Alice, three thousand from Eddington, five thousand from Victor Harkness, and fifty thousand dollars from Hilliard Moffett of Bellingham, Washington. That adds up to sixty thousand bucks, and half of that is thirty, and that’s what you get.”

  “You took all the risk, Bernie.”

  “And you did all the work, and a deal’s a deal, and you can use the dough. So put it someplace safe and watch out for pickpockets.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-five

  “I don’t know, Bern,” Carolyn said. “I’m confused.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of that going around,” I said. “I think I might have picked up a touch of it myself.”

  “I know it’s ‘Feed a cold and starve a fever,’ or else it’s the other way around, but neither one of them applies here. What do you do with confusion?”

  “You could always try drowning it.”

  “Now that’s an idea,” she said, and waved desperately for Maxine, who sometimes took a long time to get our order. “Hi, Max,” she said, when the dear girl showed up. “Let me have a double scotch, and don’t even think about bringing any of that mouthwash to this table. Bern, what about you? You still drinking rye?”