The Burglar in Short Order

by Lawrence Block

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you got out.”

  “Right again.”

  “And you got the pictures.” She clapped her hands, giddy with glee. “I knew it,” she said. “I was a positive genius to think of you. Oh, they ought to give me a bonus, a raise, a promotion, oh, I bet I get a company Cadillac next year instead of a lousy Chevy, oh, I’m on a roll, Bernie, I swear I’m on a roll!”

  “That’s great.”

  “You’re limping,” she said. “Why are you limping? Because you’ve only got one shoe on, that’s why. What happened to your other shoe?”

  “I lost it on the roof.”

  “God,” she said. She got off the bed and began picking up her clothes from the floor and putting them on, following the trail back to the scotch bottle, which evidently had one drink left in it. “Ahhhh,” she said, putting it down empty. “You know, when I saw them race up the ladder I thought you were finished. How did you get away from them?”

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “I bet. And you managed to get down onto the second floor? And into his bedroom? What’s it like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Weren’t you in there?”

  “Not until it was pitch-dark. I hid in a hall closet and locked myself in. They gave the place a pretty thorough search but nobody had a key to the closet. I don’t think there is one, I locked it by picking it. I let myself out somewhere around two in the morning and found my way into the bedroom. There was enough light to keep from bumping into things but not enough to tell what it was I wasn’t bumping into. I just walked around pointing the camera and shooting.”

  She wanted more details, but I don’t think she paid very much attention to them. I was in the middle of a sentence when she picked up the phone and made a plane reservation to Miami.

  “They’ve got me on a ten-twenty flight,” she said. “I’ll get these right into the office and we’ll get a check out to you as soon as they’re developed. What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t think I want a check,” I said. “And I don’t want to give you the film without getting paid.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “You can trust us, for God’s sake.”

  “Why don’t you trust me instead?”

  “You mean pay you without seeing what we’re paying for? Bernie, you’re a burglar. How can I trust you?”

  “You’re the Weekly Galaxy,” I said. “Nobody can trust you.”

  “You’ve got a point,” she said.

  “We’ll get the film developed here,” I said. “I’m sure there are some good commercial photo labs in Memphis and that they can handle infrared film. First you’ll call your office and have them wire cash here or set up an interbank transfer, and as soon as you see what’s on the film you can hand over the money. You can even fax them one of the prints first to get approval, if you think that’ll make a difference.”

  “Oh, they’ll love that,” she said. “My boss loves it when I fax him stuff.”

  “And that’s what happened,” I told Carolyn. “The pictures came out really beautifully. I don’t know how Lucian Leeds turned up all those Egyptian pieces, but they looked great next to the 1940s Wurlitzer jukebox and the seven-foot statue of Mickey Mouse. I thought Holly was going to die of happiness when she realized the thing next to Mickey was a sarcophagus. She couldn’t decide which tack to take—that he’s mummified and they’re keeping him in it or he’s alive and really weird and uses it for a bed.”

  “Maybe they can have a reader poll. Call a nine hundred number and vote.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how loud helicopters are when you’re inside them. I just dropped the ladder and pulled it back in again. And tossed an extra sneaker on the roof.”

  “And wore its mate when you saw Holly.”

  “Yeah, I thought a little verisimilitude wouldn’t hurt. The chopper pilot dropped me back at the hangar and I caught a ride down to the house in Mississippi. I walked around the room Lucian had decorated for the occasion, admired everything, then turned out all the lights and took my pictures. They’ll be running the best ones in the Galaxy.”

  “And you got paid.”

  “Twenty-five grand, and everybody’s happy, and I didn’t cheat anybody or steal anything. The Galaxy got some great pictures that’ll sell a lot of copies of their horrible paper. The readers get a peek at a room no has ever seen before.”

  “And the folks at Graceland?”

  “They get a good security drill,” I said. “Holly created a peach of a diversion to hide my entering the building. What it hid, of course, was my not entering the building, and that fact should stay hidden forever. Most of the Graceland people have never seen Elvis’s bedroom, so they’ll think the photos are legit. The few who know better will just figure my pictures didn’t come out, or that they weren’t exciting enough, so the Galaxy decided to run fakes instead. Everybody with any sense figures the paper’s a fake anyway, so what difference does it make?”

  “Was Holly a fake?”

  “Not really. I’d say she’s an authentic specimen of what she is. Of course her little fantasy about a hot weekend watching the ducks blew away with the morning mist. All she wanted to do was get back to Florida and collect her bonus.”

  “So it’s just as well you got your bonus ahead of time. You’ll hear from her again the next time the Galaxy needs a burglar.”

  “Well, I’d do it again,” I said. “My mother was always hoping I’d go into journalism. I wouldn’t have waited so long if I’d known it would be so much fun.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, Bern.”

  “Come on. What is it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just you wish, you know, that you’d gone in there and got the real pictures. He could be in there, Bern. I mean, why else would they make such a big thing out of keeping people out of there? Did you ever stop to ask yourself that?”

  “Carolyn—”

  “I know,” she said. “You think I’m nuts. But there are a lot of people like me, Bern.”

  “It’s a good thing,” I told her. “Where would the Galaxy be without you?”

  The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke

  I was gearing up to poke the bell a second time when the door opened. I’d been expecting Karl Bellermann, and instead I found myself facing a woman with soft blond hair framing an otherwise severe, high-cheekboned face. She looked as if she’d been repeatedly disappointed in life but was damned if she would let it get to her.

  I gave my name and she nodded in recognition. “Yes, Mr. Rhodenbarr,” she said. “Karl is expecting you. I can’t disturb him now as he’s in the library with his books. If you’ll come into the sitting room I’ll bring you some coffee, and Karl will be with you in—” she consulted her watch “—in just twelve minutes.”

  In twelve minutes it would be noon, which was when Karl had told me to arrive. I’d taken a train from New York and a cab from the train station, and good connections had got me there twelve minutes early, and evidently I could damn well cool my heels for all twelve of those minutes.

  I was faintly miffed, but I wasn’t much surprised. Karl Bellermann, arguably the country’s leading collector of crime fiction, had taken a cue from one of the genre’s greatest creations, Rex Stout’s incomparable Nero Wolfe. Wolfe, an orchid fancier, spent an inviolate two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon with his plants, and would brook no disturbance at such times. Bellermann, no more flexible in real life than Wolfe was in fiction, scheduled even longer sessions with his books, and would neither greet visitors nor take phone calls while communing with them.

  The sitting room where the blond woman led me was nicely appointed, and the chair where she planted me was comfortable enough. The coffee she poured was superb, rich and dark and winy. I picked up the latest issue of Ellery Queen and was halfway through a new Peter Lovesey story and just finishing my second cup of coffee wh
en the door opened and Karl Bellermann strode in.

  “Bernie,” he said. “Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

  “Karl.”

  “So good of you to come. You had no trouble finding us?”

  “I took a taxi from the train station. The driver knew the house.”

  He laughed. “I’ll bet he did. And I’ll bet I know what he called it. ‘Bellermann’s Folly,’ yes?”

  “Well,” I said.

  “Please, don’t spare my feelings. That’s what all the local rustics call it. They hold in contempt that which they fail to understand. To their eyes, the architecture is overly ornate, and too much a mixture of styles, at once a Rhenish castle and an alpine chalet. And the library dwarfs the rest of the house, like the tail that wags the dog. Your driver is very likely a man who owns a single book, the Bible given to him for Confirmation and unopened ever since. That a man might choose to devote to his books the greater portion of his house—and, indeed, the greater portion of his life— could not fail to strike him as an instance of remarkable eccentricity.” His eyes twinkled. “Although he might phrase it differently.”

  Indeed he had. “The guy’s a nut case,” the driver had reported confidently. “One look at his house and you’ll see for yourself. He’s only eating with one chopstick.”

  A few minutes later I sat down to lunch with Karl Bellermann, and there were no chopsticks in evidence. He ate with a fork, and he was every bit as agile with it as the fictional orchid fancier. Our meal consisted of a crown loin of pork with roasted potatoes and braised cauliflower, and Bellermann put away a second helping of everything.

  I don’t know where he put it. He was a long lean gentleman in his mid-fifties, with a full head of iron-gray hair and a mustache a little darker than the hair on his head. He’d dressed rather elaborately for a day at home with his books—a tie, a vest, a Donegal tweed jacket—and I didn’t flatter myself that it was on my account. I had a feeling he chose a similar get-up seven days a week, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he put on a black tie every night for dinner.

  He carried most of the lunchtime conversation, talking about books he’d read, arguing the relative merits of Hammett and Chandler, musing on the likelihood that female private eyes in fiction had come to outnumber their real-life counterparts. I didn’t feel called upon to contribute much, and Mrs. Bellermann never uttered a word except to offer dessert (apfelküchen, lighter than air and sweeter than revenge) and coffee (the mixture as before but a fresh pot of it, and seemingly richer and darker and stronger and winier this time around). Karl and I both turned down a second piece of the cake and said yes to a second cup of coffee, and then Karl turned significantly to his wife and gave her a formal nod.

  “Thank you, Eva,” he said. And she rose, all but curtseyed, and left the room.

  “She leaves us to our brandy and cigars,” he said, “but it’s too early in the day for spirits, and no one smokes in Schloss Bellermann.”

  “Schloss Bellermann?”

  “A joke of mine. If the world calls it Bellermann’s Folly, why shouldn’t Bellermann call it his castle? Eh?”

  “Why not?”

  He looked at his watch. “But let me show you my library,” he said, “and then you can show me what you’ve brought me.”

  Diagonal mullions divided the library door into a few dozen diamond-shaped sections, each set with a mirrored pane of glass. The effect was unusual, and I asked if they were one-way mirrors.

  “Like the ones in police stations?” He raised an eyebrow. “Your past is showing, eh, Bernie? But no, it is even more of a trick than the police play on criminals. On the other side of the mirror—” he clicked a fingernail against a pane “—is solid steel an inch and a half thick. The library walls themselves are reinforced with steel sheeting. The exterior walls are concrete, reinforced with steel rods. And look at this lock.”

  It was a Poulard, its mechanism intricate beyond description, its key one that not a locksmith in ten thousand could duplicate.

  “Pickproof,” he said. “They guarantee it.”

  “So I understand.”

  He slipped the irreproducible key into the impregnable lock and opened the unbreachable door. Inside was a room two full stories tall, with a system of ladders leading to the upper levels. The library, as tall as the house itself, had an eighteen-foot ceiling paneled in light and dark wood in a sunburst pattern. Wall-to-wall carpet covered the floor, and oriental rugs in turn covered most of the broadloom. The walls, predictably enough, were given over to floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, with the shelves themselves devoted entirely to books. There were no paintings, no Chinese ginger jars, no bronze animals, no sets of armor, no cigar humidors, no framed photographs of family members, no hand-colored engravings of Victoria Falls, no hunting trophies, no Lalique figurines, no Limoges boxes. Nothing but books, sometimes embraced by bronze bookends, but mostly extending without interruption from one end of a section of shelving to the other.

  “Books,” he said reverently—and, I thought, unnecessarily. I own a bookstore, I can recognize books when I see them.

  “Books,” I affirmed.

  “I believe they are happy.”

  “Happy?”

  “You are surprised? Why should objects lack feelings, especially objects of such a sensitive nature as books? And, if a book can have feelings, these books ought to be happy. They are owned and tended by a man who cares deeply for them. And they are housed in a room perfectly designed for their safety and comfort.”

  “It certainly looks that way.”

  He nodded. “Two windows only, on the north wall, of course, so that no direct sunlight ever enters the room. Sunlight fades book spines, bleaches the ink of a dust jacket. It is a book’s enemy, and it cannot gain entry here.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “My store faces south, and the building across the street blocks some of the sunlight, but a little gets through. I have to make sure I don’t keep any of the better volumes where the light can get at them.”

  “You should paint the windows black,” he said, “or hang thick curtains. Or both.”

  “Well, I like to keep an eye on the street,” I said. “And my cat likes to sleep in the sunlit window.”

  He made a face. “A cat? In a room full of books?”

  “He’d be safe,” I said, “even in a room full of rocking chairs. He’s a Manx. And he’s an honest working cat. I used to have mice damaging the books, and that stopped the day he moved in.”

  “No mice can get in here,” Bellermann said, “and neither can cats, with their hair and their odor. Mold cannot attack my books, or mildew. You feel the air?”

  “The air?”

  “A constant sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit,” he said. “On the cool side, but perfect for my books. I put on a jacket and I am perfectly comfortable. And, as you can see, most of them are already wearing their jackets. Dust jackets! Ha ha!”

  “Ha ha,” I agreed.

  “The humidity is sixty per cent,” he went on. “It never varies. Too dry and the glue dries out. Too damp and the pages rot. Neither can happen here.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “I would say so. The air is filtered regularly, with not only air conditioning but special filters to remove pollutants that are truly microscopic. No book could ask for a safer or more comfortable environment.”

  I sniffed the air. It was cool, and neither too moist nor too dry, and as immaculate as modern science could make it. My nose wrinkled, and I picked up a whiff of something.

  “What about fire?” I wondered.

  “Steel walls, steel doors, triple-glazed windows with heat resistant bulletproof glass. Special insulation in the walls and ceiling and floor. The whole house could burn to the ground, Bernie, and this room and its contents would remain unaffected. It is one enormous fire-safe.”

  “But if the fire broke out in here . . .”

  “How? I don’t smoke, or play with matches. There are no cupboards holding piles
of oily rags, no bales of moldering hay to burst into spontaneous combustion.”

  “No, but—”

  “And even if there were a fire,” he said, “it would be extinguished almost before it had begun.” He gestured and I looked up and saw round metal gadgets spotted here and there in the walls and ceiling.

  I said, “A sprinkler system? Somebody tried to sell me one at the store once and I threw him out on his ear. Fire’s rough on books, but water’s sheer disaster. And those things are like smoke alarms, they can go off for no good reason, and then where are you? Karl, I can’t believe—”

  “Please,” he said, holding up a hand. “Do you take me for an idiot?”

  “No, but—”

  “Do you honestly think I would use water to forestall fire? Credit me with a little sense, my friend.”

  “I do, but—”

  “There will be no fire here, and no flood, either. A book in my library will be, ah, what is the expression? Snug as a slug in a rug.”

  “A bug,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A bug in a rug,” I said. “I think that’s the expression.”

  His response was a shrug, the sort you’d get, I suppose, from a slug in a rug. “But we have no time for language lessons,” he said. “From two to six I must be in the library with my books, and it is already one-fifty.”

  “You’re already in the library.”

  “Alone,” he said. “With only my books for company. So. What have you brought me?”

  I opened my briefcase, withdrew the padded mailer, reached into that like Little Jack Horner and brought forth a plum indeed. I looked up in time to catch an unguarded glimpse of Bellermann’s face, and it was a study. How often do you get to see a man salivate less than an hour after a big lunch?

  He extended his hands and I placed the book in them. “Fer-de-Lance,” he said reverently. “Nero Wolfe’s debut, the rarest and most desirable book in the entire canon. Hardly the best of the novels, I wouldn’t say. It took Stout several books fully to refine the character of Wolfe and to hone the narrative edge of Archie Goodwin. But the brilliance was present from the beginning, and the book is a prize.”