The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr)

by Lawrence Block

  “I couldn’t make it out.”

  “It’s over two centuries old, and while it hardly circulated like a coin, I’m afraid it sustained some wear over the years. Still, at close range it’s easy enough to make out the image and lettering. The central figure is an eagle, its wings spread, a star above its head, its breast bearing the shield of the United States. The surrounding legend proclaims ‘March the Fourth 1789 Memorable Era.’ ”

  “March 4, 1789 . . .”

  “The inauguration of our first president at the beginning of his first term. Did I describe these curiosities as campaign buttons? That’s true of the others, but Washington never campaigned. A memorable era indeed. Politics actually was kinder and gentler back then, albeit briefly, and the presidency was Washington’s for the taking. So mine is properly described as an inauguration button.”

  I said, “When I think of political buttons—”

  “You picture the sort they hand out today, all bright colors and photographs, with a loop of wire at the back enabling one to pin it in place. Pin-back buttons have predominated since McKinley’s first face-off with Bryan in 1896. But political clothing buttons lasted in a small way for another half century. I own a brass button with a bear on it. You can probably guess the candidate.”

  “A Teddy bear? Theodore Roosevelt?”

  “Quite right, but how about a possum?”

  “A possum. That was George Jones’s nickname, the country singer, but I don’t believe he ever ran for office.”

  “I might have voted for him if he did,” Smith said. “But the button’s for William Howard Taft, evidently known to some of his admirers as Billy Possum.”

  “He was? Do you happen to know why?”

  “No idea. I have a matched set of four clothing buttons from the 1932 election, bearing photos of Herbert and Marion Hoover and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. And there’s a clothing button from 1948 with Harry Truman’s photo, and—” He stopped in mid-sentence, frowned. “I’m telling you far more than you need to know. More than anyone needs to know.”

  “It’s interesting.”

  “Every passion is interesting to him who suffers from it. And one sometimes feels impelled to inflict it on others.”

  “Political campaign buttons you can sew on your clothes,” I said. “I never knew such things existed. Do you collect the other sort as well? With the pins?”

  “Pin-back buttons. Yes, of course, and they constitute the great bulk of my collection. I’m especially fond of third-party buttons. Debs is my favorite, Eugene Victor Debs. He was the standard bearer for the Socialist Party in four consecutive elections from 1900 through 1912. A man named Benson took over in 1916, but in 1920 Debs was back again. He was serving a prison term for opposing the war, and his campaign button reads ‘For President: Convict No. 9563.’ And just under a million voters chose him over Harding and Cox.”

  Something clicked.

  “Buttons,” I said.

  “Yes, and I can’t seem to stop nattering on about them, can I? I do apologize.”

  “Benjamin Button. Well, why else would you collect that particular story? You don’t think much of its author and you’re openly contemptuous of the story itself, but you paid me handsomely to spirit the manuscript out of a museum basement. And why? All because of the character’s surname. If Fitzgerald had called him Zachary Zipper, he’d be nothing to you.”

  “Or to Brad Pitt, I suspect. The name Benjamin Button does have a nice ring to it.”

  “What’s the matter with Zachary Zipper? Never mind. Are political buttons the only sort you collect? They’re not, are they?”

  He smiled. “I have all types of buttons, Mr. Rhodenbarr. If an article may be called a button, I’m apt to take an interest in it. Do you know of that curious subset of London Cockneys called the Pearlies? They favor clothing thoroughly festooned with pearl buttons; if those buttons were rhinestones, they could be Elvis impersonators. I own the costumes worn by the couple who reigned as King and Queen of the Pearlies in 1987.”

  “Was that a particularly good year for Pearlies?”

  “Vintage, I’d say. Do you like comedy albums, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

  “You mean like record albums?”

  “A curious phenomenon,” he said. “Pay the price and you can own in permanent form the routine you paid not a penny to watch George Carlin or Steve Martin perform on TV. So that you can repeat the experience over and over? I suppose people bought them to entertain visitors. It saves having to force conversation when you can treat your guests to somebody else’s wit and wisdom. I own one comedy album myself. Can you guess what it might be?”

  I had a hunch he’d tell me.

  “It’s by Bob Newhart. It was his first album, recorded during a live performance in Houston, and it went straight to the top of the Billboard chart when Warners released it in May of 1960. It’s still funny all these years later.”

  “I heard it years ago,” I said. “There was a bit about a warship with an odd name.”

  “The Cruise of the U.S.S. Codfish. And a routine where a marketing type is explaining to Abner Doubleday why baseball can’t possibly catch on with the American public. Do you remember the album’s title?”

  I didn’t.

  “Newhart wanted to call it The Most Celebrated New Comedian Since Attila the Hun, but the chaps at Warners had something they liked better. The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.”

  “That’s right. I remember now.”

  “It was such a great popular success that even now it’s not hard to find a copy. Mine’s a little special. It’s signed by Newhart, of course, but what makes it particularly desirable is that it’s inscribed to Jack Paar, who was hosting the Tonight Show at the time.”

  “You always wear shirts with button-down collars,” I realized. “Well, I’ve only met you three times, so I don’t know about ‘always,’ but—”

  “Always,” he said.

  “Buttons,” I said. “Why buttons?”

  “Ah, always the beautiful question. But not the one you should be asking at the moment.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “It’s a two-parter,” he said. “What on earth are apostle spoons? And how do they come into the picture?”

  You know what a spoon is, right?

  An apostle spoon is one with its handle terminating in the figure of one of the twelve apostles. Since relatively few photographs of the Last Supper survive, each likeness is rendered identifiable by the presence of a particular emblem linked to that apostle. An X-shaped cross for St. Andrew, a pilgrim’s staff for St. James the Greater, an axe for St. Matthew, a cup (the cup of sorrow) for St. John, and so on, all the way down to a bag of money for Judas Iscariot. St. Peter gets a sword or a key, or sometimes a fish. (St. James the Lesser gets a fuller’s bat on his spoon, but don’t ask me what a fuller’s bat looks like, or how James felt about being designated the lesser of two apostles.)

  Apostle spoons originated in Europe in the early 1400s, and were always a safe choice if you needed a present for a godchild. Just get a local silversmith to turn one out with the likeness of the child’s patron saint, and St. Robert’s your uncle.

  (Look, if you already know all this, skip ahead. It was all news to me. I kept interrupting Mr. Smith with questions, and a verbatim report of our conversation would take more space than I want to give it. I’m just summing it up here, but my feelings won’t be hurt if you choose not to read every precious word.)

  While an individual spoon might be made as an individual gift, they were more often produced in sets, sometimes of twelve but more often of thirteen. The thirteenth spoon, often larger than its fellows, was the Master, and depicted Jesus, with a cross and orb as his symbol. (There’s an early 16th Century set in the British Museum, with the thirteenth spoon showing the Virgin Mary.)

  Tableware was more important to folks back in the day, even if most of what they got to eat wasn’t all that tasty. Precious metal, generally silver but sometimes
gold, was how one kept one’s wealth—and showed it off at the same time. You couldn’t tuck away extra cash in a Roth IRA, or buy shares of Renaissance.com, and if you engaged someone to paint your portrait, it was so your descendants would know what you looked like, not in the hope that your likeness would appreciate in value.

  It would have been tacky to keep bags of coin lying around, and a temptation to servants. So you put your wealth on display in the form of bowls and plates and chargers—and in your forks and spoons, some of which might be piously ornamented with the images and emblems of holy men.

  If you were prosperous enough to own a set of apostle spoons, you’d very likely make special mention of them in your will. One Amy Brent did so in 1516, though I couldn’t tell you to whom she bequeathed them, or what’s become of them since. (If they wound up in the basement of the Galtonbrook, I never saw them.)

  Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kaufman and Hart of their day, mentioned such spoons in at least one of their plays, as did Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and a fellow named Shakespeare in Henry VIII. (Act Five, Scene Three. Bishop Cranmer tries to weasel out of serving as sponsor for young Elizabeth, claiming he can’t afford it. “You could spare your spoons,” Henry tells him.)

  More than you needed to know, huh? Well, look at it this way. If I had to hear it, and at greater length and with more detail than I’ve rendered it here, why should you get off easy?

  When I returned to my bookshop, my bargain table was where I’d left it. No one had walked off with it. Nor, as far as I could tell, had any of its contents gone astray.

  Books, I thought. Nobody even wants to steal them these days.

  In fact, I found, there was more on my table than there’d been when I left it there. A note, carefully block-printed on a small sheet of lined white paper, its three jagged holes indicating it had been torn from a notebook. WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS CLOSED?

  Well, I’m open now, I thought. And took the note into the shop with me.

  A day had passed since then, plus an hour or so. I was closed again, and sitting across the table from Carolyn.

  “Perrier,” she noted. “Well, that answers that question.”

  “What question?”

  “The one I don’t have to ask, because you already answered it. Question: What are you going to be doing tonight, Bern? Answer: Something criminal.”

  “Am I?” I thought for a moment. “Yes, I guess you’d have to say I am. On the one hand, I’m just visiting a gentleman at his invitation to sell him a book.”

  “But since you’re not the book’s lawful owner—”

  “Yeah, that’s what makes it criminal. Although you could argue that it’d still be criminal if I’d come by the book honestly.”

  “How do you figure that, Bern?”

  “Well, this man I’m visiting.”

  “Mr. Leopold.”

  “Edwin Leopold. He has something that Mr. Smith wants.”

  “And I suppose it would be too simple for Mr. Smith to buy it from him.”

  “It’s not for sale.”

  “And Smitty couldn’t just send you there, the way he sent you to the Galtonbrook?”

  “He didn’t think I could get in.”

  “Does he know whom he’s dealing with here? Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr, the man who could get into Fort Knox if he had to?”

  “I’m just as glad I don’t have to,” I said, “although your faith in me is heartening.” I took a sip of bubbly French water. “Edwin Leopold has one of the two penthouse apartments on the twenty-fourth floor of a brick building on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street.”

  “That’s almost directly across the street from the Metropolitan, Bern. He must have some view.”

  “I would think so.”

  “He could look down on the museum and all of Central Park. How tall are the buildings across from him on Central Park West? Could he see New Jersey?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “and I’m not sure why he would want to. But it’s good he has a terrific view, because that’s all he ever gets to see.”

  “Because he doesn’t leave his house.”

  “So I understand.”

  “You know, Bern, they’ve got wheelchairs these days that can just about make their way over a steeplechase course. And he’s got someone working for him, doesn’t he? The woman who answered his phone?”

  “Miss Miller.”

  “If he was going to send her to pick up the book, why couldn’t he get her to take him for a walk in the park?”

  “I don’t know that he can’t leave his house. I think it’s more that he chooses not to.”

  “Like Bartleby the scrivener?”

  “ ‘I would prefer not to.’ Yes, sort of like Bartleby.”

  “Or like Nero Wolfe. He never leaves his house on business, but it’s a different matter entirely if there’s an orchid show he wants to check out. And didn’t he go all the way to Montana in one book?”

  “Was it Montana? Yes, I believe it was. But I also believe that it’s different for Mr. Leopold.”

  “Business or pleasure, he stays put.”

  “Right.”

  “He’s got his silver, the same as Wolfe has his orchids, but if they had an annual silver show at Madison Square Garden—”

  “Our Mr. Leopold would pass it up.”

  “Well, then, it’s good he’s got his view, and a nice spacious apartment in a good building, and Miss Miller to take care of him. Is there a Mrs. Leopold?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Does he have kids who visit him regularly?”

  “Carolyn—”

  “This is all stuff you don’t know, huh?” She picked up her scotch, studied the melting ice cubes, took a drink. “I suppose if you never get out, I mean absolutely never, it would be a comfort to be fixated on something.”

  “In his case, early American silver.”

  “Including a spoon,” she said, “by one of the cops Ed McBain wrote about.”

  A little earlier:

  “Carolyn, have you ever heard of Myer Myers?”

  “Of course.”

  “You have?”

  “You’re surprised? Meyer Meyer, of the Eighty-seventh Precinct. There must have been fifty of the books, maybe more, and it seems to me he was in every single one of them, along with Steve Carella and Bert Kling and all the rest of those guys. Ed McBain wrote about them for fifty years.”

  “I’m talking about Myer Myers.”

  “Right,” she said, “only you’re getting the name wrong. There’s no S on the end of it. It’s Meyer Meyer.”

  “No, it’s—”

  “Please,” she said, “there’s no end of things where you know more than me, Bern, but this is one of those rare times when I’m right and you’re wrong, and I can prove it to you. Meyer Meyer was completely bald, right?”

  I just looked at her.

  “Not a hair on his head,” she went on. “And do you know why?”

  “Because of his father,” I said.

  “Exactly. His father thought it would be a great joke, giving him the same name for a first name as he had for a last name, and of course all the kids teased him, the way kids do.”

  “And that traumatized the kid,” I said, “and his hair fell out.”

  “Never to return. But do you remember what the kids used to chant at him?”

  “Yes.”

  “ ‘Meyer Meyer, Jew on fire.’ You know what that sounds like?”

  “ ‘Liar liar, pants on fire?’ ”

  “Exactly. That’s probably what gave the little bastards the idea. I mean, kids aren’t all that original. But if it was Meyer Meyers, the way you’re insisting it was, then it’d have been ‘Meyer Meyers, Jew on fires’, and what sense does that make?”

  “Rather little,” I said.

  “Well, there you go,” she said, and frowned. “We’re not talking about the same people.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “I’m talking about Meyer Me
yer, a fictional cop, and you’re talking about somebody else.”

  “Myer Myers.”

  “Who wasn’t fictional at all.”

  “He was a silversmith,” I said, “born in 1723 right here in old New York. And I’d never heard of him myself until Mr. Smith told me about him.”

  And earlier still, in a really lousy diner on University Place:

  “Myer Myers, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Without question the most prominent Jewish silversmith in the American colonies. In fact, his ritual and secular silver is the largest body of extant work by a Jewish silversmith from anywhere in Europe or America prior to the nineteenth century.

  “And a patriot. As you might imagine, wealthy Tories made up most of his customer base. Nevertheless, he supported the Revolution.

  “In 1776, that pivotal year, Myers moved his business and his family to Norwalk, Connecticut, thinking it would put him out of harm’s way. Three years later British troops burned the town. Myers lost his tools and his house, moved up the coast to Stratford, and didn’t get back to New York until 1783 when the war was over.”

  His business, I learned, was never what it had been. His more important customers tended to be rich people, and the rich are rather less likely to rally ’round the flag of revolution. The larger one’s fortune, the less inclined one seems to be to pledge it (along with one’s life and one’s sacred honor) to abstractions like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  Samuel Cornell was one such Tory. For Cornell and his wife Susannah Mabson, Myers had fashioned a dish ring and bottle stands, whatever those may be, that remain the only surviving Colonial examples thereof. Cornell had his property seized during the Revolution, and anyway by 1781 he had died, so Myers couldn’t expect anything from him in the way of future commissions.

  “But not every rich colonist remained loyal to King George,” Mr. Smith said. “The Livingston family was genuinely wealthy, and of staunchly republican sentiments. Among them was Henry Beekman Livingston.”