The Burglar in the Library

by Lawrence Block

  “We’ve put you in Aunt Augusta’s Room,” he said. “I think you’ll be quite comfortable there.”

  “I’m sure we will,” Carolyn said. “But what about Aunt Augusta? Will she have to sleep in the hall?”

  He laughed richly, as if Carolyn had said something wonderfully amusing. “Oh, that’s just our way,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ve named all the sleeping rooms for friends and relatives, and of course we’d be delighted to put Aunt Augusta into her room if she were ever to come visit, but it’s not terribly likely. She’s in a nursing home in Harpenden, poor thing.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “But I do think she’d like the room if she ever saw it, and I hope you’ll be happy there yourselves. It’s Cissy’s particular favorite.”

  “Cissy?”

  “My wife. Christened Cecilia, but there’s nothing quite so enduring as a childhood nickname, is there? Your room’s up that staircase and along to the left, and you just keep going until you get to it. Will you want a hand with your luggage?”

  “We can manage.”

  “If you’re quite certain. I’d send Orris with you, but he seems to have slipped off somewhere.” His eyes narrowed. “I say, is that a cat in there?”

  It would have been difficult to deny, the animal in question having just announced himself with a meow like chalk on a blackboard. “He’s a Manx,” I said. “His name is Raffles.”

  “Of course it is,” he said. “And of course he’s a perfect gentleman about, ah, bathroom habits and that sort of thing.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’m sure he’ll be quite at home here,” he said smoothly, “and I’m sure we’ll be glad of his company.”

  “It’s nice that the rooms all have names,” Carolyn said. “It’s so much cozier than having a room with a number.”

  I was at the window, watching it snow. It seemed pretty serious about it.

  “More challenging, too,” she went on. “If they’d put us in Room 28, we’d have known to look for it between Room 27 and Room 29. But how would anybody know to look for Aunt Augusta between Uncle Roger and Cousin Beatrice?”

  “And directly across the hall from Vicar Andrews.”

  “That sounds a little scandalous, if you ask me. Maybe there’s rhyme and reason to it, but you’d need a copy of the family tree to sort it all out. This is a great room, though, Bern. Nice, huh? Beamed ceiling, fireplace, big window looking out at—what does it look out at, Bern?”

  “Snow,” I said. “Whatever happened to global warming?”

  “You only get that in the summer. Anyway, I don’t care how much it snows now that we’re inside. I’d rather look at snow than a fire escape and a row of garbage cans, which is all you can see from my window on Arbor Court. You know, Bern, all this room needs is one more thing and it would be perfect.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A second bed.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, this is a real beauty, a four-poster with a chintz canopy and all, and it looks really comfy.” She hopped onto it, kicked her shoes off, stretched out. “It’s even better than it looks,” she reported, “and if you were a beautiful woman I’d like nothing better than to share it with you. They made a mistake, huh? You told them twin beds, didn’t you?”

  “I must have.”

  “‘I must have.’ That’s a no, right?”

  “I meant to, Carolyn.”

  “You meant to.”

  I sighed. “When I made the reservation,” I said, “it was for me and Lettice, and I specified a double bed. As a matter of fact, I made a special point of specifying a double bed.”

  “I bet you did.”

  “And when I sent them a deposit, I put that in the note I enclosed along with the check.”

  “And then Lettice decided to get married instead.”

  “Right.”

  “And you brought me in off the bench.”

  “To save the game,” I said. “And I realized we would be happier with twin beds, and I started to make the call, and I felt like an idiot. ‘Hi, this is Bernie Rhodenbarr, that’s R-H-O, right, and I’ll be arriving as scheduled a week from Thursday, but I want twin beds instead of a double. Oh, and by the way, Ms. Runcible won’t be coming with me. But Ms. Kaiser will.’”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “I figured I’d wait until I could think of a graceful way to do it, and I’m still waiting. Look, we’ve been friends a long time, Carolyn. Neither of us is going to turn into a sex maniac in the middle of the night. We can share a bed platonically.”

  “I just wonder if we’ll get any sleep. This bed’s comfy, but it sags in the middle. We may keep rolling into each other.”

  “We’ll manage,” I insisted. “Anyway, we’ll probably be sleeping in shifts.”

  “I brought pajamas.”

  “I mean we’ll take turns. The middle of the night’s the best time for me to check out the library shelves.”

  “Won’t that be suspicious, Bern?”

  “Why? What else do you do when you have insomnia? You look for a good book to read.”

  “Preferably a signed first edition. So you figure you’ll be up nights?”

  “Most likely.”

  “So I’ll be all alone in a haunted house.”

  “What makes you think it’s haunted?”

  “If you were a ghost, Bern, would you pass up a place like this? The walls tilt, the floorboards creak, the windowpanes rattle every time the wind blows. You might as well hang out a sign—‘Ghost wanted—ideal working conditions.’”

  “Well, I didn’t see any sign like that.”

  “Of course not. The position’s been filled. I’ll be lying here awake and you’ll be downstairs looking for The Big Sleep. Bern, look at Raffles, he’s pacing back and forth like an expectant father. Open the bathroom door for him, will you?”

  I opened the door and looked straight at a batch of coat hangers.

  “Bern, don’t tell me.”

  “It’s an old-fashioned authentic country house,” I said.

  “Does that mean they don’t have bathrooms?”

  “Of course they have bathrooms.”

  “Where?”

  “In the hall.”

  “Gee,” she said, “I sure am glad we’re not in some impersonal modern resort, with numbered rooms and separate beds and level floors and rattle-free windows and private baths. I’m glad we don’t have to put up with that kind of soul-deadening experience.”

  I opened the hall door and followed Raffles through it. I came back to report that the bathroom was just down the hall, between Uncle Edmund and Aunt Petra. “And Raffles doesn’t seem to mind that it’s a communal john,” I added. “He found it perfectly suitable.”

  “How’s he going to get in there by himself, Bern? If the door’s closed, he won’t be able to turn the knob.”

  “If the door’s closed,” I said, “that means somebody else is in there, and he’ll have to wait his turn. If the john’s not occupied, you leave the door ajar. That’s how it works with communal bathrooms.”

  “What about this door?”

  “Huh?”

  “How’s he going to get out in the middle of the night,” she said, “if our door’s closed?”

  “Hell,” I said. “We should have brought a cat box.”

  “He’s trained to use the toilet, just like a person. You can’t go and untrain him.”

  “You’re right. I guess we’ll just have to leave the door open a crack.”

  “That’s great,” she said. “You’ll be downstairs, and ghosts’ll be dragging chains through the halls, and I’ll be lying in here in the dark with the door open, waiting for the young ’un to murder me in my bed. This gets better every minute.”

  “‘The young ’un.’ Orris? Why would he murder you in your bed?”

  “Because that’s where I’ll be,” she said, “unless I’m hiding under it.”

  “But what makes you think
he—”

  “‘Better to have him plowing driveways than locked away his whole life.’ What do you figure he did that made them lock him away?”

  “But that’s the point, Carolyn. They didn’t lock him away.”

  “It evidently crossed their minds,” she said, “and they decided against it. What do you figure gave them the notion?”

  “He’s evidently a little slow,” I said. “Maybe there was some sentiment in favor of institutionalizing him for that reason, but instead it was determined that he could lead a productive life outside.”

  “Plowing driveways, for instance.”

  “And being a general handyman.”

  “And lurking,” she said. “And drooling. And slipping into Aunt Augusta’s Room with an ax.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “when people are cranky, it’s because they’re hungry.”

  “And sometimes it’s because they need a drink, and sometimes it’s both.” She got out of bed, combed her hair with her fingertips, brushed some imaginary lint off her blazer. “C’mon,” she said. “What are we waiting for?”

  After all that, I was expecting dinner to be a disaster—translucent roast beef, say, and vegetables boiled into submission. The outlook improved, though, when we got to the bottom of the stairs and met a woman with feathery blond hair, plump chipmunk cheeks, and an air of radiant well-being. “The Rhodenbarrs,” she said, beaming, and who could presume to correct her? “I’m Cissy Eglantine, and I do hope you’re happy in Aunt Augusta’s Room. I think it’s quite the coziest, myself.”

  We assured her it was charming.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you like it,” she said. “Now we’re getting a late supper laid for you in the dining room, but I wonder if you might want to stop in the bar first? Nigel’s especially proud of his selection of single-malt Scotches, if you have any interest at all in that sort of thing.”

  We admitted to a sort of academic interest and hurried off to the bar. “The trouble with trying to compare different whiskies,” Carolyn said when we finally moved on to the dining room, “is that by the time you’re sipping the fourth one, it’s impossible to remember what the first one tasted like. So you have to go back and start over.”

  “And before long,” I said, “you have trouble remembering other things. Like your name.”

  “Well, nobody else remembers my name, so why should I? I just got here an hour ago and already I’ve been Ms. Runcible and Mrs. Rhodenbarr. I can’t wait to see what the future holds. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Something smells terrific.”

  And so it was. A rich and savory soup, a salad of romaine and Boston lettuce with walnuts and dill, and a thick slab of prime rib flanked with crisp little roasted potatoes. The waitress, a skittish country girl who might have been Orris’s sister (or his wife, or both), brought us mugs of brown ale without asking, and filled them up when we emptied them.

  Dessert was some sort of fruit cobbler, topped with what Carolyn said had to be clotted cream. “Look at this,” she said. “You could float a scone on it. You could float the Stone of Scone on it. Bern, forget everything I said.”

  “Starting when?”

  “Starting when we got here. You want to know something? I don’t give a rat’s ass if the place is haunted. If the ghost’s got any sense he won’t come anywhere near our room, anyway. He’ll hang out in the kitchen. Bern, this is one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life.”

  “You know what they say. Hunger’s the best sauce.”

  “I was hungry enough to eat my shoes,” she said, “I’ll admit it, but it was still an incredible meal. Can you believe it? The coffee’s good. I meant to order tea, because everybody knows the English can’t make a decent cup of coffee. But this is great. How do you explain that, Bern?”

  “Maybe they didn’t come straight here from England,” I suggested. “Maybe they stopped off in Seattle.”

  “That must be it,” she said, and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “Look at me, Bern. A couple of pops and a decent meal and I think I died and went to heaven. I’ll tell you something. I like it here. I’m glad we came.”

  CHAPTER

  Six

  After dinner we drifted from room to room, getting our bearings on the first floor of Cuttleford House. There was, God knows, an awful lot of it, and one room just sort of led to another. We started out in a sort of sitting room called the East Parlour, and I might have taken it for the library if I hadn’t already seen the Great Library in the brochure. The parlor had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. The other walls sported memorabilia—crossed spears, West African ceremonial masks, and the stuffed head of one of those crossword-puzzle animals. An oryx, say.

  There were more books on a breakfront, braced by a pair of bronze Abraham-Lincoln-seated-and-looking-pensive bookends, and there were revolving bookcases flanking the floral-patterned sofa.

  “There are books all over the place,” Carolyn murmured. “You saw the bookcase in our room, didn’t you?”

  “Uh-huh. It reminded me of my bargain table.”

  “No Big Sleep, huh?”

  “Just a large yawn. Mostly late-model paperbacks. Last year’s best-sellers. The kind of book you take along to a resort and leave behind when you go home.”

  “If you managed to finish it.”

  “Or even if you didn’t,” I said.

  We broke off to get into conversation with Colonel Edward Blount-Buller, a florid-faced gentleman in moleskin trousers and a tweed Norfolk jacket. We’d been introduced to him in the bar before dinner, and he’d evidently lingered there amidst the single-malt Scotches. Now he was moved to discourse upon the inherent nobility of the hunting trophy on the opposite wall.

  “It’s the horns, don’t you know.” We must have looked puzzled. “The horns, the horns,” he said. “The long graceful tapering horns. What would he be without them, eh?” He held up a finger, its knuckle knobby with arthritis. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Be a bloody nanny goat.”

  “I’d rather be a live nanny goat,” Carolyn said, “than have some jerk shoot me and stick my head on his wall.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, you’re a woman, eh?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “No slight intended, I assure you. But the gentler sex has a more practical nature, takes short views. Better to munch grass and give milk than to take a bullet, eh?”

  “If those are the choices,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to spend a long time thinking it over.”

  “Without his horns,” the colonel said, “our springbok would have gone on grazing until age made him easy prey to a lion or a dog pack. He’d have left his bones bleaching in the hot African sun. The world would have long since forgotten him.” He gestured at the mounted head. “Instead he lives on,” he announced, “countless years past his ordinary lifespan. It’s immortality of a sort, wot? Not quite the sort you or I might choose, but quite the best available to him.”

  “A springbok,” I said.

  “And a fine one, sir, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You’re sure it’s not an oryx?”

  “Hardly that.”

  “Or an ibex,” I suggested. “Or an okapi, or even a gnu.”

  “Fine beasts, all of them,” he said. “But our friend here is a springbok. You have my assurance of that.”

  In the Sitting Room, the walls were given over to framed Ape and Spy caricatures from the old Vanity Fair, with not a single stuffed head to be seen. There were books, though, filling a three-tiered set of glassed-in shelves and propped between a pair of sailing-ship bookends.

  I had a quick look at the books while Carolyn leafed through a year-old copy of Town & Country. When I dropped into the chair next to hers she closed the magazine and looked at me.

  “Better books,” I said. “Hardcover fiction, most of it between fifty and eighty years old. Some mysteries, all by authors that nobody reads nowadays. A l
ot of general fiction. James T. Farrell, one of the books in his Danny O’Neill tetralogy. And Mammonart, by Upton Sinclair.”

  “Are they valuable, Bern?”

  “They’re both important writers,” I said, “but they’re not very actively collected. And of course the dust jackets are long gone.”

  “What do you mean, ‘long gone’? For all you know they were there until five minutes ago.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I jumped to a conclusion, based on the fact that all but two or three of the books in the case are missing their jackets.”

  “Then it’s a good thing they’re inside, Bern. In this weather, they’d freeze their flyleaves off.” She pointed at the window. “Still coming down,” she said.

  “So it is.”

  “You hardly looked at those books, Bernie. You just scanned each shelf for a couple of seconds, and you knew what was there and what wasn’t.”

  “Well, I’m in the business,” I said. “When you look at books day in and day out, you develop a knack.”

  “Makes sense, Bern. I’m the same way with dogs.”

  “And it’s easier,” I said, “when you know what you’re looking for. There’s just one book I’m looking for, so I don’t have to take a careful inventory of everything else. As soon as I know I’m not looking at Raymond Chandler, I can go on and look at something else.”

  “Like a springbok,” she said. “If that’s what it was.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “You named a whole lot of other things, Bern. You didn’t want it to be a springbok. How’d you learn so much about African antelopes?”

  “All I know about them I learned from crossword puzzles,” I said, “and that’s why I didn’t think it was a springbok. It’s nine letters long, for God’s sake. When’s the last time you saw a springbok in a crossword puzzle?”