The Burglar in Short Order

by Lawrence Block

  He turned the volume over in his hands, inspected the dust jacket fore and aft. “Of course I own a copy,” he said. “A first edition in dust wrapper. This dust wrapper is nicer than the one I have.”

  “It’s pretty cherry,” I said.

  “Pristine,” he allowed, “or very nearly so. Mine has a couple of chips and an unfortunate tear mended quite expertly with tape. This does look virtually perfect.”

  “Yes.”

  “But the jacket’s the least of it, is it not? This is a special copy.”

  “It is.”

  He opened it, and his large hands could not have been gentler had he been repotting orchids. He found the title page and read, “‘For Franklin Roosevelt, with the earnest hope of a brighter tomorrow. Best regards from Rex Todhunter Stout.’” He ran his forefinger over the inscription. “It’s Stout’s writing,” he announced. “He didn’t inscribe many books, but I have enough signed copies to know his hand. And this is the ultimate association copy, isn’t it?”

  “You could say that.”

  “I just did. Stout was a liberal Democrat, ultimately a World Federalist. FDR, like the present incumbent, was a great fan of detective stories. It always seems to be the Democratic presidents who relish a good mystery. Eisenhower preferred Westerns, Nixon liked history and biography, and I don’t know that Reagan read at all.”

  He sighed and closed the book. “Mr. Gulbenkian must regret the loss of this copy,” he said.

  “I suppose he must.”

  “A year ago,” he said, “when I learned he’d been burglarized and some of his best volumes stolen, I wondered what sort of burglar could possibly know what books to take. And of course I thought of you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Tell me your price again, Bernie. Refresh my memory.”

  I named a figure.

  “It’s high,” he said.

  “The book’s unique,” I pointed out.

  “I know that. I know, too, that I can never show it off. I cannot tell anyone I have it. You and I alone will know that it is in my possession.”

  “It’ll be our little secret, Karl.”

  “Our little secret. I can’t even insure it. At least Gulbenkian was insured, eh? But he can never replace the book. Why didn’t you sell it back to him?”

  “I might,” I said, “if you decide you don’t want it.”

  “But of course I want it!” He might have said more but a glance at his watch reminded him of the time. “Two o’clock,” he said, motioning me toward the door. “Eva will have my afternoon coffee ready. And you will excuse me, I am sure, while I spend the afternoon with my books, including this latest specimen.”

  “Be careful with it,” I said.

  “Bernie! I’m not going to read it. I have plenty of reading copies, should I care to renew my acquaintance with Fer-de-Lance. I want to hold it, to be with it. And then at six o’clock we will conclude our business, and I will give you a dinner every bit as good as the lunch you just had. And then you can return to the city.”

  He ushered me out, and moments later he disappeared into the library again, carrying a tray with coffee in one of those silver pots they used to give you on trains. There was a cup on the tray as well, and a sugar bowl and creamer, along with a plate of shortbread cookies. I stood in the hall and watched the library door swing shut, heard the lock turn and the bolt slide home. Then I turned, and there was Karl’s wife, Eva.

  “I guess he’s really going to spend the next four hours in there,” I said.

  “He always does.”

  “I’d go for a drive,” I said, “but I don’t have a car. I suppose I could go for a walk. It’s a beautiful day, bright and sunny. Of course your husband doesn’t allow sunlight into the library, but I suppose he lets it go where it wants in the rest of the neighborhood.”

  That drew a smile from her.

  “If I’d thought ahead,” I said, “I’d have brought something to read. Not that there aren’t a few thousand books in the house, but they’re all locked away with Karl.”

  “Not all of them,” she said. “My husband’s collection is limited to books published before 1975, along with the more recent work of a few of his very favorite authors. But he buys other contemporary crime novels as well, and keeps them here and there around the house. The bookcase in the guest room is well stocked.”

  “That’s good news. As far as that goes, I was in the middle of a magazine story.”

  “In Ellery Queen, wasn’t it? Come with me, Mr. Rhodenbarr, and I’ll—”

  “Bernie.”

  “Bernie,” she said, and colored slightly, those dangerous cheekbones turning from ivory to the pink you find inside a seashell. “I’ll show you where the guest room is, Bernie, and then I’ll bring you your magazine.”

  The guest room was on the second floor, and its glassed-in bookcase was indeed jam-packed with recent crime fiction. I was just getting drawn into the opening of one of Jeremiah Healy’s Cuddy novels when Eva Bellermann knocked on the half-open door and came in with a tray quite like the one she’d brought her husband. Coffee in a silver pot, a gold-rimmed bone china cup and saucer, a matching plate holding shortbread cookies. And, keeping them company, the issue of EQMM I’d been reading earlier.

  “This is awfully nice of you,” I said. “But you should have brought a second cup so you could join me.”

  “I’ve had too much coffee already,” she said. “But I could keep you company for a few minutes if you don’t mind.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “So would I,” she said, skirting my chair and sitting on the edge of the narrow captain’s bed. “I don’t get much company. The people in the village keep their distance. And Karl has his books.”

  “And he’s locked away with them . . .”

  “Three hours in the morning and four in the afternoon. Then in the evening he deals with correspondence and returns phone calls. He’s retired, as you know, but he has investment decisions to make and business matters to deal with. And books, of course. He’s always buying more of them.” She sighed. “I’m afraid he doesn’t have much time left for me.”

  “It must be difficult for you.”

  “It’s lonely,” she said.

  “I can imagine.”

  “We have so little in common,” she said. “I sometimes wonder why he married me. The books are his whole life.”

  “And they don’t interest you at all?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t the brain for it,” she said. “Clues and timetables and elaborate murder methods. It is like working a crossword puzzle without a pencil. Or worse—like assembling a jigsaw puzzle in the dark.”

  “With gloves on,” I suggested.

  “Oh, that’s funny!” She laughed more than the line warranted and laid a hand on my arm. “But I should not make jokes about the books. You are a bookseller yourself. Perhaps books are your whole life, too.”

  “Not my whole life,” I said.

  “Oh? What else interests you?”

  “Beautiful women,” I said recklessly.

  “Beautiful women?”

  “Like you,” I said.

  Believe me, I hadn’t planned on any of this. I’d figured on finishing the Lovesey story, then curling up with the Healy book until Karl Bellermann emerged from his lair, saw his shadow, and paid me a lot of money for the book he thought I had stolen.

  In point of fact, the Fer-de-Lance I’d brought him was legitimately mine to sell—or very nearly so. I would never have entertained the notion of breaking into Nizar Gulbenkian’s fieldstone house in Riverdale. Gulbenkian was a friend as well as a valued customer, and I’d rushed to call him when I learned of his loss. I would keep an ear cocked and an eye open, I assured him, and I would let him know if any of his treasures turned up on the gray or black market.

  “That’s kind of you, Bernie,” he’d said. “We will have to talk of this one day.”

  And, months later, we talked—and I lear
ned there had been no burglary. Gulbenkian had gouged his own front door with a chisel, looted his own well-insured library of its greatest treasures, and tucked them out of sight (if not out of mind) before reporting the offense—and pocketing the payoff from the insurance company.

  He’d needed money, of course, and this had seemed a good way to get it without parting with his precious volumes. But now he needed more money, as one so often does, and he had a carton full of books he no longer legally owned and could not even show off to his friends, let alone display to the public. He couldn’t offer them for sale, either, but someone else could. Someone who might be presumed to have stolen them. Someone rather like me.

  “It will be the simplest thing in the world for you, Bernie,” old Nizar said. “You won’t have to do any breaking or entering. You won’t even have to come to Riverdale. All you’ll do is sell the books, and I will gladly pay you ten percent of the proceeds.”

  “Half,” I said.

  We settled on a third, after protracted negotiations, and later over drinks he allowed that he’d have gone as high as forty percent, while I admitted I’d have taken twenty. He brought me the books, and I knew which one to offer first, and to whom.

  The FDR Fer-de-Lance was the prize of the lot, and the most readily identifiable. Karl Bellermann was likely to pay the highest price for it, and to be most sanguine about its unorthodox provenance.

  You hear it said of a man now and then that he’d rather steal a dollar than earn ten. (It’s been said, not entirely without justification, of me.) Karl Bellermann was a man who’d rather buy a stolen book for a thousand dollars than pay half that through legitimate channels. I’d sold him things in the past, some stolen, some not, and it was the volume with a dubious history that really got him going.

  So, as far as he was concerned, I’d lifted Fer-de-Lance from its rightful owner, who would turn purple if he knew where it was. But I knew better— Gulbenkian would cheerfully pocket two-thirds of whatever I pried out of Bellermann, and would know exactly where the book had wound up and just how it got there.

  In a sense, then, I was putting one over on Karl Bellermann, but that didn’t constitute a breach of my admittedly elastic moral code. It was something else entirely, though, to abuse the man’s hospitality by putting the moves on his gorgeous young wife.

  Well, what can I say? Nobody’s perfect.

  Afterward I lay back with my head on a pillow and tried to figure out what would make a man choose a leather chair and a room full of books over a comfortable bed with a hot blonde in it. I marveled at the vagaries of human nature, and Eva stroked my chest and urged a cup of coffee on me.

  It was great coffee, and no less welcome after our little interlude. The cookies were good, too. Eva took one, but passed on the coffee. If she drank it after lunchtime, she said, she had trouble sleeping nights.

  “It never keeps me awake,” I said. “In fact, this stuff seems to be having just the opposite effect. The more I drink, the sleepier I get.”

  “Maybe it is I who have made you sleepy.”

  “Could be.”

  She snuggled close, letting interesting parts of her body press against mine. “Perhaps we should close our eyes for a few minutes,” she said.

  The next thing I knew she had a hand on my shoulder and was shaking me awake. “Bernie,” she said. “We fell asleep!”

  “We did?”

  “And look at the time! It is almost six o’clock. Karl will be coming out of the library any minute.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  She was out of bed, diving into her clothes. “I’ll go downstairs,” she said. “You can take your time dressing, as long as we are not together.” And, before I could say anything, she swept out of the room.

  I had the urge to close my eyes and drift right off again. Instead I forced myself out of bed, took a quick shower to clear the cobwebs, then got dressed. I stood for a moment at the head of the stairs, listening for conversation and hoping I wouldn’t hear any voices raised in anger. I didn’t hear any voices, angry or otherwise, or anything else.

  It’s quiet out there, I thought, like so many supporting characters in so many Westerns. And the thought came back, as it had from so many heroes in those same Westerns: Yeah . . . too quiet.

  I descended the flight of stairs, turned a corner and bumped into Eva. “He hasn’t come out,” she said. “Bernie, I’m worried.”

  “Maybe he lost track of the time.”

  “Never. He’s like a Swiss watch, and he has a Swiss watch and checks it constantly. He comes out every day at six on the dot. It is ten minutes past the hour and where is he?”

  “Maybe he came out and—”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know. Drove into town to buy a paper.”

  “He never does that. And the car is in the garage.”

  “He could have gone for a walk.”

  “He hates to walk. Bernie, he is still in there.”

  “Well, I suppose he’s got the right. It’s his room and his books. If he wants to hang around—”

  “I’m afraid something has happened to him. Bernie, I knocked on the door. I knocked loud. Perhaps you heard the sound upstairs?”

  “No, but I probably wouldn’t. I was all the way upstairs, and I had the shower on for a while there. I take it he didn’t answer.”

  “No.”

  “Well, I gather it’s pretty well soundproofed in there. Maybe he didn’t hear you.”

  “I have knocked before. And he has heard me before.”

  “Maybe he heard you this time and decided to ignore you.” Why was I raising so many objections? Perhaps because I didn’t want to let myself think there was any great cause for alarm.

  “Bernie,” she said, “what if he is ill? What if he has had a heart attack?”

  “I suppose it’s possible, but—”

  “I think I should call the police.”

  I suppose it’s my special perspective, but I almost never think that’s a great idea. I wasn’t mad about it now, either, being in the possession of stolen property and a criminal record, not to mention the guilty conscience that I’d earned a couple of hours ago in the upstairs guest room.

  “Not the police,” I said. “Not yet. First let’s make sure he’s not just taking a nap, or all caught up in his reading.”

  “But how? The door is locked.”

  “Isn’t there an extra key?”

  “If there is, he’s never told me where he keeps it. He’s the only one with access to his precious books.”

  “The window,” I said.

  “It can’t be opened. It is this triple pane of bulletproof glass, and—”

  “And you couldn’t budge it with a battering ram,” I said. “He told me all about it. You can still see through it, though, can’t you?”

  “He’s in there,” I announced. “At least his feet are.”

  “His feet?”

  “There’s a big leather chair with its back to the window,” I said, “and he’s sitting in it. I can’t see the rest of him, but I can see his feet.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “They’re sticking out in front of the chair,” I said, “and they’re wearing shoes, and that’s about it. Feet aren’t terribly expressive, are they?”

  I made a fist and reached up to bang on the window. I don’t know what I expected the feet to do in response, but they stayed right where they were.

  “The police,” Eva said. “I’d better call them.”

  “Not just yet,” I said.

  The Poulard is a terrific lock, no question about it. State-of-the-art and all that. But I don’t know where they get off calling it pickproof. When I first came across the word in one of their ads I knew how Alexander felt when he heard about the Gordian knot. Pickproof, eh? We’ll see about that!

  The lock on the library door put up a good fight, but I’d brought the little set of picks and probes I never leave home without, and I put them (and my God-given talent) to t
he task.

  And opened the door.

  “Bernie,” Eva said, gaping. “Where did you learn how to do that?”

  “In the Boy Scouts,” I said. “They give you a merit badge for it if you apply yourself. Karl? Karl, are you all right?”

  He was in his chair, and now we could see more than his well-shod feet. His hands were in his lap, holding a book by William Campbell Gault. His head was back, his eyes closed. He looked for all the world like a man who’d dozed off over a book.

  We stood looking at him, and I took a moment to sniff the air. I’d smelled something on my first visit to this remarkable room, but I couldn’t catch a whiff of it now.

  “Bernie—”

  I looked down, scanned the floor, running my eyes over the maroon broadloom and the carpets that covered most of it. I dropped to one knee alongside one small Persian—a Tabriz, if I had to guess, but I know less than a good burglar should about the subject. I took a close look at this one and Eva asked me what I was doing.

  “Just helping out,” I said. “Didn’t you drop a contact lens?”

  “I don’t wear contact lenses.”

  “My mistake,” I said, and got to my feet. I went over to the big leather chair and went through the formality of laying a hand on Karl Bellermann’s brow. It was predictably cool to the touch.

  “Is he—”

  I nodded. “You’d better call the cops,” I said.

  Elmer Crittenden, the officer in charge, was a stocky fellow in a khaki windbreaker. He kept glancing warily at the walls of books, as if he feared being called upon to sit down and read them one after the other. My guess is that he’d had less experience with them than with dead bodies.

  “Most likely turn out to be his heart,” he said of the deceased. “Usually is when they go like this. He complain any of chest pains? Shooting pains up and down his left arm? Any of that?”

  Eva said he hadn’t.

  “Might have had ’em without saying anything,” Crittenden said. “Or it could be he didn’t get any advance warning. Way he’s sitting and all, I’d say it was quick. Could be he closed his eyes for a little nap and died in his sleep.”