The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling

by Lawrence Block

  “Uh-huh. You know what I think?”

  “He’s a phony.”

  “He’s a phony who faked me out of my socks, that’s what he is. God, the more I think about it the phonier he sounds, and I let him con me into stealing the book with no money in front. All of a sudden his whole story is starting to come apart in my hands. All that happy horseshit about Haggard and Kipling, all that verse he quoted at me.”

  “You think he just made it all up?”

  “No, but—”

  “Leave me alone, Ubi. You don’t even like Jarlsberg.” Ubi was short for Ubiquitous, which was the Russian Blue’s name. Jarlsberg was the cheese we were munching. (Not the Burmese, in case you were wondering. The Burmese was named Archie.)

  To me she said, “Maybe the book doesn’t exist, Bernie.”

  “I had it in my hands, Carolyn.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “I was thinking that myself earlier, just spinning all sorts of mental wheels. Like it wasn’t a real book, it was hollowed out and all full of heroin or something like that.”

  “Yeah, that’s an idea.”

  “Except it’s a dumb idea, because I actually flipped through that book and read bits and pieces of it, and it’s real. It’s a genuine old printed book in less than sensational condition. I was even wondering if it could be a fake.”

  “A fake?”

  “Sure. Suppose Kipling destroyed every last copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow. Suppose there never was such a thing as a Rider Haggard copy to survive, or suppose there was but it disappeared forever.” She was nodding encouragingly. “Well,” I went on, “suppose someone sat down and faked a text. It’d be a job, writing that long a ballad, but Kipling’s not the hardest writer in the world to imitate. Some poet could knock it out between greeting-card assignments.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, you couldn’t sell it as an original manuscript because it would be too easily discredited. But if you had a printer set type—” I shook my head. “That’s where it breaks down. You could set type and run off one copy, and you could bind it and then distress it one way or another to give it some age, and you could even fake the inscription to H. Rider Haggard in a way that might pass inspection. But do you see the problem?”

  “It sounds complicated.”

  “Right. It’s too damned complicated and far too expensive. It’s like those caper movies where the crooks would have had to spend a million dollars to steal a hundred thousand, with all the elaborate preparations they go through and the equipment they use. Any crook who went through everything I described in order to produce a book you could sell for fifteen thousand dollars would have to be crazy.”

  “Maybe it’s worth a lot more than that. Fifteen thousand is just the price you and Whelkin worked out.”

  “That’s true. The fifteen-thousand figure doesn’t really mean anything, since I didn’t even get a smell of it, did I?” I sighed. Wistfully, I imagine. “No,” I said. “I know an old book when I look at it. I look at a few thousand of them every day, and old books are different from new ones, dammit. Paper’s different when it’s been around for fifty years. Sure, they could have used old paper, but it keeps not being worth the trouble. It’s a real book, Carolyn. I’m sure of it.”

  “Speaking of the old books you look at every day.”

  “What about them?”

  “Somebody’s watching your store. I was at my shop part of the time, I had to wash a dog and I couldn’t reach the owner to cancel. And there was somebody in a car across the street from your shop, and he was still there when I walked past a second time.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “No. I didn’t get the license number, either. I suppose I should have, huh?”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It was probably the police,” I said. “A stake-out.”

  “Oh.”

  “They’ve probably got my apartment staked out, too.”

  “Oh. That’s how they do it, huh?”

  “That’s how they do it on television. This cop I talked to earlier said they’d get me when I returned to my old haunts. I wanted to tell him I didn’t have any old haunts, but I suppose he meant the store and the apartment.”

  “Or this place.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, we’re friends. You come over here a lot. If they talk to enough people they’ll learn that, won’t they?”

  “I hope not,” I said, and the phone rang. We looked at each other, not very happily, and didn’t say a word until it stopped ringing.

  CHAPTER

  Eleven

  At six-fifteen I was sitting at the counter of the Red Flame at the corner of Seventieth and West End. I had a cup of coffee and a wedge of prune Danish in front of me and I wasn’t particularly interested in either. The other two customers, a teenaged couple in a back booth, were interested only in each other. The counterman wasn’t interested in anything; he stood beside the coffee urns chewing a mint-flavored toothpick and staring at the opposite wall, where a bas-relief showed a couple of olive-skinned youths chasing sheep over a Greek hillside. He shook his head from time to time, evidently wondering what the hell he was doing here.

  I kept glancing out the window and wondering much the same thing. From where I sat I could almost see my building a block uptown. I’d had a closer look earlier from the sidewalk, but I hadn’t been close enough then to tell if there were cops staked out in or around the place. Theoretically it shouldn’t matter, but theoretically bumblebees can’t fly, so how much faith can you place in theory?

  One of the teenagers giggled. The counterman yawned and scratched himself. I looked out the window for perhaps the forty-first time and saw Carolyn half a block away, heading south on West End with my small suitcase in one hand. I put some money on the counter and went out to meet her.

  She was radiant. “Piece of cake,” she said. “Nothing to it, Bern. This burglary number’s a cinch.”

  “Well, you had my keys, Carolyn.”

  “They helped, no question about it. Of course, I had to get the right key in the right lock.”

  “You didn’t have any trouble getting into the building?”

  She shook her head. “Mrs. Hesch was terrific. The doorman called her on the intercom and she said to send me right up, and then she met me at the elevator.”

  I’d called Mrs. Hesch earlier to arrange all this. She was a widow who had the apartment across the hall from me, and she seemed to think burglary was the sort of character defect that could be overlooked in a friend and neighbor.

  “She didn’t have to meet you,” I said.

  “Well, she wanted to make sure I found the right apartment. What she really wanted was a good look at me. She’s a little worried about you, Bern.”

  “Hell, I’m a little worried about me myself.”

  “She thought you were all respectable now, what with the bookstore and all. Then she heard about the Porlock murder on the news last night and she started to worry. But she’s positive you didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Good for her.”

  “I think she liked me. She wanted me to come in for coffee but I told her there wasn’t time.”

  “She makes good coffee.”

  “That’s what she said. She said you like her coffee a lot, and she sort of implied that what you need is somebody to make coffee for you on a fulltime basis. The message I got is that living on the West Side and burgling on the East Side is a sort of Robin Hood thing, but there’s a time in life when a young man should think about getting married and settling down.”

  “It’s nice the two of you hit it off.”

  “Well, we only talked for a couple of minutes. Then I went and burgled your apartment.” She hefted the suitcase. “I think I got everything. Burglar tools, pocket flashlight, all the things you mentioned. And shirts and socks and underwear. There was some cash in your shirt drawer.”

  “There was? I gue
ss there was. I usually keep a few dollars there.”

  “Thirty-eight dollars.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I took it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I don’t suppose thirty-eight dollars one way or the other is going to make a difference. But it can’t hurt to have it along.”

  She shrugged. “You said you always take cash,” she said. “So I took it.”

  “It’s a good principle. You know something? We’re never going to get a cab.”

  “Not when it’s raining. Can we get a subway? No, not across town. Isn’t there a bus that goes over Seventy-ninth Street?”

  “It’s not a good idea to take buses when you’re wanted for homicide. It’s awfully public.”

  “I suppose we’ll get a cab sooner or later.”

  I took the suitcase in one hand and her arm in the other. “The hell with that,” I said. “We’ll take a car.”

  The Pontiac was right where I’d left it. Sometimes the tow-truck division lets things slide for a while, and this time the Pontiac’s owner was the beneficiary of their lapse. I popped the door on the passenger’s side, let Carolyn in, and took a ticket from underneath the windshield wiper while she leaned across the seat to unlatch the door for me.

  “See?” someone said. “You got a ticket. Did I tell you you’d get a ticket?”

  I didn’t recognize the man at first. Then I saw the brindle boxer at the end of the leash he was holding.

  “Sooner or later,” he told me, “they’ll tow you away. Then what will you do?”

  “Get another car,” I said.

  He shook his head, tugged impatiently at the dog’s leash. “Come on, Max,” he said. “Some people, you can’t tell them a thing.”

  I got into the car, set about jumping the ignition. Carolyn watched the process fascinated, and it wasn’t until we pulled away from the curb that she asked who the man was and what he had wanted.

  “He wanted to be helpful,” I said, “but all in all he’s a pest. The dog’s all right, though. His name is Max. The dog, I mean.”

  “He looks okay,” she said, “but he’d probably be murder to wash.”

  I left the Pontiac in a bus stop around the corner from where we were going. Carolyn said it might get towed and I said I didn’t care if it did. I got tools and accessories from the suitcase, then left the case and the clothes it contained on the back seat of the Pontiac.

  “Suppose they tow the car,” she said, “and suppose they identify the clothing from laundry marks. Then they’ll know you were here, and—”

  “You’ve been watching too much television,” I said. “When they tow cars they take them over to that pier on the Hudson and wait for the owner to turn up. They don’t check the contents. You could have a dead body in the trunk and they’d never know.”

  “I wish you hadn’t said that,” she said.

  “There’s nothing in the trunk.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  We went around the corner. No one seemed to be keeping an eye on the elegant little brownstone. A woman stood in the bay window on the parlor floor, watering the plants with a long-spouted watering can. The can was gleaming copper, the plants were all a lush green, and the whole scene was one of upper-middle-class domestic tranquillity. Outside, watching this and getting rained on, I felt like a street urchin in a Victorian novel.

  I looked up. There were lighted windows on the third and fourth floors, but they didn’t tell me anything. The apartments that interested me were at the rear of the building.

  We entered the vestibule. “You don’t have to come,” I said.

  “Ring the bell, Bern.”

  “I’m serious. You could wait in the car.”

  “Wonderful. I can play it safe by sitting in a stolen car parked at a bus stop. Why don’t I just wait in the subway? I could cling to the third rail for security.”

  “What you could do is spend the next half-hour in the bar on the corner. Suppose we walk into an apartment full of cops?”

  “Ring the bell, Bernie.”

  “It’s just that I hate to see you walk into trouble.”

  “So do I, but let’s play the hand out as dealt, huh? I’ll be with the two of them so they can’t get cute while you’re downstairs. We worked it out before, Bern, and it made sense then and it still makes sense now. You want to know something? It’s probably dangerous for us to spend the next six hours arguing in the vestibule, if you’re so concerned with what’s dangerous and what’s not, so why don’t you ring their bell and get it over with?”

  First, though, I rang the bell marked Porlock. I poked it three times, waited half a minute, then gave it another healthy tickle. I didn’t really expect a response and I was happy not to get one. My finger moved from the Porlock bell to the one marked Blinn. I gave it a long and two shorts, and the answering buzzer sounded almost at once. I pushed the door and it opened.

  “Darn,” Carolyn said. I looked at her. “Well, I thought I’d get to watch you pick it,” she said. “That’s all.”

  We went up the stairs and stopped at the third floor long enough to peek at the door of 3-D. As I’d figured it, the cops had sealed it, and the door was really plastered with official-looking material. I could have opened it with a scout knife, but I couldn’t have done so without destroying the seals and making it obvious that I’d been there.

  Instead, we went up another flight. The door of 4-C was closed. Carolyn and I looked at each other. Then I reached out a hand and knocked.

  The door opened. Arthur Blinn stood with one hand on its knob and the other motioning us in. “Come on, come on,” he said urgently. “Don’t stand out there all night.” In his hurry to close the door he almost hit Carolyn with it, but he got it shut and fussed with the locks and bolts. “You can relax now, Gert,” he called out. “It’s only the burglar.”

  They made a cute couple. They were both about five-six, both as roly-poly as panda bears. Both had curly dark-brown hair, although he’d lost most of his in the front. She was wearing a forest-green pants suit in basic polyester. He wore the trousers and vest of a gray glen-plaid business suit. His white shirt was unbuttoned at the neck and his tie was loosened for comfort. She poured coffee and pushed Scottish shortbread at us. He told us, over and over again, what a relief it was to see us.

  “Because I told Gert, suppose it’s a setup? Suppose it’s the insurance company running a bluff? Because honestly, Mr. Rhodenbarr, who ever heard of such a thing? A burglar calls up, says hello, I’m you’re friendly neighborhood burglar, and if you cooperate with me a little I won’t rat to the insurance people and tell them your claim is lousy. I figured a burglar with troubles like you got, wanted for killing a woman and God knows what else, I figure you’re not going to knock yourself out shouting you never stole a coat or a watch.”

  “And what I figured,” Gert said, “is why would you be coming here, anyway? ‘He wants to get rid of witnesses,’ I told Artie. ‘Remember, he already killed once.’ ”

  “What I said is what did we ever witness? I told her, I said forget all that. Just hope it’s the burglar, I told her. All we need is some insurance snoop. You don’t care for the shortbread, young lady?”

  “It’s delicious,” Carolyn said. “And Bernie never killed anybody, Mrs. Blinn.”

  “Call me Gert, honey.”

  “He never killed anyone, Gert.”

  “I’m sure of it, honey. Meeting him, seeing the two of you, my mind’s a hundred percent at ease.”

  “He was framed, Gert. That’s why we’re here. To find out who really killed Madeleine Porlock.”

  “If we knew,” Arthur Blinn said, “believe me, we’d tell you. But what do we know?”

  “You lived in the same building with her. You must have known something about her.”

  The Blinns looked at each other and gave simultaneous little shrugs. “She wasn’t directly under us,” Gert explained. “So we wouldn’t know if she had loud parties or played music al
l night or anything like that.”

  “Like Mr. Mboka,” Artie said.

  “In 3-C,” Gert said. “He’s African, you see, and he works at the U.N. Somebody said he was a translator.”

  “Plays the drums,” Artie said.

  “We don’t know that, Artie. He either plays the drums or he plays recordings of drums.”

  “Same difference.”

  “But we haven’t spoken to him about it because we thought it might be religious and we didn’t want to interfere.”

  “Plus Gert here thinks he’s a cannibal and she’s afraid to speak to him.”

  “I don’t think he’s a cannibal,” Gert protested. “Who ever said I thought he was a cannibal?”

  I cleared my throat. “Maybe the two of you could talk to Carolyn about Miss Porlock,” I suggested. “And if I could, uh, be excused for a few moments.”

  “You want to use the bathroom?”

  “The fire escape.”

  Blinn furrowed his brow at me, then relaxed his features and nodded energetically. “Oh, right,” he said. “For a minute there I thought—But to hell with what I thought. The fire escape. Sure. Right through to the bedroom. But you know the way, don’t you? You were here yesterday. It’s spooky, you know? The idea of someone else being in your apartment. Of course, it’s not so spooky now that we know you, you and Carolyn here. But when we first found out about it, well, you can imagine.”

  “It must have been upsetting.”

  “That’s exactly what it was. Upsetting. Gert called the super about the pane of glass, but it’s like pulling teeth to get him to do anything around here. Generally he gets more responsive right before Christmas, so maybe we’ll get some action soon. Meanwhile I taped up a shirt cardboard so the wind and rain won’t come in.”

  “I’m sorry I had to break the window.”

  “Listen, these things happen.”

  I unlocked the window, raised it, stepped out onto the fire escape. The rain had stepped up a little and it was cold and windy out there. Behind me, Blinn drew the window shut again. He was reaching to lock it when I extended a finger and tapped on the glass. He caught himself, left the window unlocked, and smiled and shook his head at his absent-mindedness. He went off chuckling to himself while I headed down a flight of steel steps.