The Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

  “And he assumed the photos were in it.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I might have looked to make sure, Bern.”

  “Even if a fast response would let you get something for thirteen hundred bucks that you’d been prepared to pay ten thousand for?”

  “That’s a point.”

  “Then he got gunned down, and somebody picked up the book.”

  “And there weren’t any photos in it.”

  “Of course not. They saw him come out of my store, and they had to assume he had the photos, because what else would he have gone there for? So they shot him and took what he was carrying, and it was nothing but a Joseph Conrad novel, and not even a first edition.”

  “So the Russians had the book.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? What do you mean, maybe?”

  “I think there was probably a Russian behind the wheel,” I said, “and another one firing the gun. But I think there was a third person in the car, and I think that person was Colby Riddle.”

  “In the murder car.”

  “That would be my guess. He looked at the book and knew right away what had happened. He took it home with him, or back to his office, and he paged through it and made absolutely sure there were no pictures in it. And then he took it to his friend Mapes’s office and let Mapes look, and commiserated with Mapes about the problems they were having. ‘Here,’ he told Mapes. ‘You might as well hang onto this goddamn thing. Call it a souvenir.’ ”

  “And Mapes took it home?”

  “And left it on the desk in his den, where I found it that very same night after I cleaned out his safe.”

  “And you brought it home.”

  “Which seemed like a mistake at the time,” I said, “but I couldn’t get over the surprise of finding it there. The last I’d seen of it, someone was snatching it out of a fat man’s dead hands for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom. And here it was, on Mapes’s desk.”

  “Wow. And he never knew it was gone?”

  “How would he know? It was just an old book, with nothing valuable about it. He could have thrown it out in the first place. He kept it, but that didn’t mean he was going to sit down and read it. He tossed it on his desk, and wouldn’t have noticed it was gone unless he went looking for it.”

  “But he could have noticed, Bern.”

  “I know,” I said, “and that worried me, but only a little. Because the last thing I did Monday night—although it was well into Tuesday morning by then—was drive out to Riverdale and let myself into his house for a second time.”

  “Through the milk chute.”

  “Don’t remind me. It went smoother this time. Maybe I lost a pound or two, or maybe I improved with practice. I took the book along, and I’d already fixed it up, taping the photos in place. I could have just dropped it on his desk, I suppose, but I didn’t want him paging idly through it, so I found a place on his shelf. The spine’s dark, you don’t notice it right away, but it would show up in a search. If he’d already missed it, well, that might have been tricky, but I knew I was in the clear when he came downstairs after showing his empty safe to the IRS boys. His reaction made it very clear he hadn’t had a clue the money was missing. That meant he hadn’t missed the book, because if he’d been aware that something had disappeared, the first thing he’d have done was check the safe to see if anything else was gone.”

  She took it all in, and asked a few more questions, and I did the best I could to answer them. Then she pointed out that Ray knew I’d had the photos. So how did he think they’d found their way into the book, and the book onto Mapes’s shelf?

  “Ray’s a practical man,” I said. “He’s not as stupid as you think he is.”

  “He couldn’t be, Bern, or he’d die because he forgot to breathe.”

  “He only thinks about things if he has to,” I said. “He knows I had the photos, and if he thought about it he’d wonder how they got where they did, and how I knew they were there, and, well, any number of things. But what he wanted me to do was pull a rabbit out of a hat, and I did, and he wasn’t about to ask who the rabbit’s father was, or how much I paid for the hat. Instead he concentrated on the fact that he’d brought in a fellow the press is calling the Date-Rape Bandit of Murray Hill, at the same time that he was solving a crime Major Cases had yanked out from under him.”

  “So he came out of it okay.”

  “Smelling like a rose.”

  “I could say something,” she said, “but it would reveal me as a mean-spirited human being, so I’ll keep it to myself. And you know what? I’m glad Ray came out of it okay. I mean, you and I did all right, didn’t we?”

  “My Get Out of Dodge fund is replenished. And I’ve got money in the bank, and I just yesterday got a line on a carpenter who’ll build me a hidey-hole every bit as good as the one Quattrone’s clowns wrecked.”

  “And you’ve got a girlfriend.”

  “Oddly enough, I do. And I don’t have to worry what she’ll think when she finds out I’m a burglar, because she already knows.”

  “And it doesn’t bother her?”

  “Sooner or later it will, and sooner or later the relationship’ll fall apart. But for the time being she’s okay with it.”

  “I’m happy for you, Bern. She’s really nice.”

  “So’s Lacey.”

  “Yeah,” she said, beaming. “We both did fine. I’ve got a safe-deposit box stuffed with money, plus I’ve got a really neat girlfriend who thinks I’m pretty neat myself.”

  “I gather LBD’s not a problem at this stage.”

  She blushed, something she doesn’t do often. LBD stands for Lesbian Bed Death, a name coined to describe the curiously sexless state of so many long-term lesbian relationships. It seems to me heterosexual couples have the same problem, but we don’t have a cute term for it. We just call it marriage.

  “I thought Marty and Marisol might get back together again,” she said, changing the subject deftly. “But I guess that’s a thing of the past, huh?”

  “They were both ready to move on. And they didn’t have trouble finding somewhere to move. Marisol’s seeing a lot of Wally these days.”

  “I guess it’s hard for a woman to resist someone who just saved her life.”

  “And hard for a guy to resist someone whose life he just saved, especially if she looks like Marisol. It’s got him over his hopeless crush on that Chinese waitress, so now he’s not spending all his time at that dopey teahouse.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And he’s keeping up his martial-arts training, which is also good. On the downside, he’s studying Latvian.”

  “Why? Marisol speaks perfect English.”

  “I know that,” I said, “and so does Wally. That’s just the way he is. Pardon my Latvian, but the other day he wished me Dauds laimis jaungada. That means Happy New Year.”

  “Really? When do Latvians celebrate New Year?”

  “January first, remarkably enough, so he was eight months early.”

  “Or four months late.”

  “Look, he’s happy. Meanwhile, Marty and Sigrid couldn’t be happier. He’s the married older man she always wanted, and she’s the hot gorgeous blonde everybody always wanted.”

  “Including me, Bern, but I’ve got my hands full just now. Is that why you invited them to Riverdale? Because you figured they’d be right for each other?”

  “Well, I had to have Sigrid there to back up Marisol’s date-rape story. And I thought Marty deserved a chance to see the shitheel get what was coming to him. But yeah, I sort of had it in mind that the two of them might hit it off.”

  “What a storybook ending,” she said, and sighed. Then she straightened up and leaned forward. “Bern, the photos. What happened to the photos?”

  “You saw them. In the copy of The Secret Agent.”

  “Right. What happened to them after Mapes and Johnson went off to Central Booking?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I s
ort of took them.”

  “Sort of? What do you mean, sort of?”

  “When no one was looking,” I said, “I picked it up. Otherwise it might have spent the next fifty years in an NYPD evidence locker.”

  “And you wanted it for a souvenir?”

  I shook my head. “I already gave it away.”

  “You gave it away. Wait a minute, let me guess. You gave it to the little man from the Latvian embassy.”

  “Mr. Grisek.”

  “So they’ll hunt down the Black Scourge of Riga after all.”

  “They’ll try. He seems to have pretty good survival instincts, but they’re highly motivated. So we’ll see.”

  “Wow,” she said, and leaned back in her chair and stretched like a cat. “Gee, look at the time. I guess we don’t need another round of drinks, do we? We had two already.”

  “Three.”

  “Really? Was it three?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “It’s funny how you can lose count. Three. You know what that means?”

  “No, but I’ll bet you’re about to tell me.”

  “It means we had two drinks,” she said, “and then we had a third.”

  “So?”

  “Two drinks, and then one drink.”

  “So?”

  “So that one drink seems incomplete, doesn’t it? Because you know my theory about how there’s no such thing as one drink.” She waved a hand, crooked a finger. “Maxine!”

  *The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

  * The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

  * The Burglar in the Library

  Stolen Goods (E-Book Extras)

  Editor’s Note: In the spirit of our beloved burglar, Bernie, this Romp of Rhodenbarria has been lifted from various sources—ranging from the BBC to The Author Himself (or, more precisely, from his delightful website, www.lawrenceblock.com…

  Bernie Rhodenbarr by Lawrence Block

  A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed

  Lawrence Block on New York

  “The Burglar Who Dropped in on Elvis” (Short Story)

  Bernie Rhodenbarr by

  Lawrence Block

  The Bernie Rhodenbarr series is as light as Matthew Scudder’s is dark. Bernie’s a bookseller by day, a burglar by night. Unlike Matt, who grows and ages, Bernie stays the same lighthearted, youthful fellow throughout. Just like his creator, come to think of it…Consequently, it’s less important to read the Burglar books in order. (I wrote them in order, but I didn’t have any choice.)

  Burglars Can’t Be Choosers (1977). Film rights were optioned by Warner Brothers, and the property is being developed for George Clooney, who would make an absolutely wonderful Bernie. HarperCollins published an e-book edition in 2004 as a companion to their e-book edition of Bernie’s latest, The Burglar on the Prowl.

  The Burglar in the Closet (1978). This was the source for much of the plot of Burglar, the 1987 movie starring Whoopi Goldberg as Bernice “Bernie” Rhodenbarr.

  The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (1979). Winner of the Nero Wolfe Award. This is the book that introduces Carolyn Kaiser as Bernie’s best friend and occasional henchperson, and the first one in which he has the bookstore.

  The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza (1980). Bernie walks off with a 1913 Liberty Nickel, one of five in existence.

  The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (1983). The Bernie book that featured the most interesting cover art, ‘round the world.

  The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (1994). The first new adventure for Bernie after an eleven-year layoff. Winner of the German Philip Marlowe Award. Ailurophiles will be pleased to note that this is the book in which Bernie meets Raffles the Cat.

  Bernie’s appeared in a few short stories. One of them, “The Burglar Who Dropped in on Elvis,” draws queries from time to time; it’s out on audio and readers wonder if it’s a novel they somehow missed. It first appeared in the collection Some Days You Get the Bear (1994). My e-book editor convinced me to allow him to reprint it in the “special features” section of the 2004 Burglar e-books. Sure, why not?

  The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (1995). Bernie goes to a Humphrey Bogart film festival and—surprise!—falls in love.

  The Burglar in the Library (1997). Bernie and Carolyn Kaiser leave New York and wind up snowed-in at a New England country inn. Think Agatha Christie stuck at Fawlty Towers.

  The Burglar in the Rye (1999). Suppose some woman had an affair in her youth with an extremely reclusive American writer. And suppose an ex-agent had arranged to sell off the letters the reclusive author had written to her. Of course nothing like that could ever happen in real life, but doesn’t it sound like a job for Bernie Rhodenbarr?

  And what’s next for our lad?

  The Burglar on the Prowl (2004). Bernie slinks into the twenty-first century and, appropriately, HarperCollins has an e-book edition publishing alongside the hardcover.

  —Lawrence Block

  A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed

  (Originally published on the op-ed page of Long Island Newsday.)

  So I walked over to Barnegat Books on East Eleventh Street for a word with my favorite bookseller, Bernie Rhodenbarr. He was behind the counter with his nose in a book while his cat lay in the window, soaking up the sun. The store’s sole customer was a young woman with multiple piercings who was reading a biography of St. Sebastian.

  “I understand the used-book business is hot these days,” I said. “;You must be making money hand over fist.”

  He gave me a look. “Every now and then,” he said, “somebody actually buys a book. It’s a good thing I don’t have to depend on this place to keep body and soul together.”

  He doesn’t have to pay rent, either, having bought the building with the profits from his other career as the last of the gentleman burglars. Seriously, I told him, lots of people were making big bucks selling books on the Internet. Couldn’t he do the same?

  “I could,” he agreed. “I could list my entire stock on eBay and spend my time wrapping books and shlepping them to the Post Office. I could close the store, because who needs a retail outlet when you’ve got a computer and a modem? But I didn’t open this store to get rich. I opened it so I could have a bookstore, and have fun running it, and occasionally meet girls. See, I’m not greedy.”

  “But you steal,” I pointed out.

  He frowned, and nodded toward St. Sebastian’s biggest fan. “Not to get rich,” he said. “Only enough to get by. I don’t want to get rich, see, because it would turn me into a greedy pig.”

  “You’re saying the rich are greedy?”

  “They don’t necessarily start out that way,” he said, “but that’s how it seems to work. Look at all the CEOs with their eight-figure salaries. The more you pay them, the more they want, and when the company goes down the tubes they float down on their golden parachute and look for another corporation to sink. Or look at baseball.”

  “Baseball?”

  “America’s pastime,” he said. “The players used to have off-season jobs so they could make ends meet. The owners were always rich guys, but they were in it for the sport. They didn’t expect to make money.”

  “And?”

  “And now the players average something like two million dollars a year, and the owners have watched their investments increase in value by a factor of five or ten, and everybody’s rich, so everybody’s greedy. And that’s why we’re going to have a strike this fall. Because they’re all pigs, and all they want is more.”

  “In other words,” I said, “success turns men to swine.”

  “And women,” he said. “Success is an equal-opportunity corrupter. And it seems to be inevitable nowadays. Nobody’s happy just running a business and making a living. Everybody wants to grow the business, and either franchise it or sell it to a huge corporation. Luckily, I’m safe. Nobody’s aching to franchise Barnegat Books, and no multinational corporation’s trying to buy me out.”

  “So you’ll go on se
lling books.”

  “Every now and then,” he said, as the young woman put St. Sebastian back on the shelf and walked away empty-handed. “I’ll tell you, it’s a good thing I’m a thief. It keeps me honest.”

  —Lawrence Block

  Lawrence Block on New York

  (In 2003, the BBC’s “The World Today” presented a series on writers and their “;beats.” On August 6 they caught up with one of New York City’s definitive novelists.)

  I think New York works superbly well as a setting in fiction. One reason so many writers have chosen it as a setting is that so many of us have lived at least part of our lives here. One reason that it works very well for readers, I believe, is that so many people, wherever they live, have at least a surface acquaintance with New York. Even if they haven’t been here, they’ve seen the iconography of the skyline in innumerable films; they’ve seen television programs set here; so there’s an immediate identification even for those who have not been here.

  New York’s certainly thought of as a dark setting for fiction; it’s also a setting for some of the lightest, most effervescent work—that of Damon Runyon, for example, and Guys and Dolls.

  New York is so rich and so varied that you can find the dark and the light here easily. I do two New York series myself, the Matt Scudder novels and the Bernie Rhodenbarr novels, and occasionally I get someone asking could Matt and Bernie ever meet in a single book and I say, No—because they live in two very different universes. They both live in a city named New York, but in one, Scudder’s, it’s a very dark place and in the other, Bernie’s, it’s a very light one.

  So many writers have written about the city and have done it so well that it’s almost impossible to develop a short list of favorites. The Library of America recently brought out a book called Writing New York, and the list of contributors was virtually a Who’s Who of American letters—from O. Henry and Damon Runyon; Ed McBain and Evan Hunter—two sides of the same coin. The volume reprints E.B. White’s brilliant essay “This Is New York.”