The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr)

  “ ‘St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come round, for something’s lost that must be found.’ ”

  “Just imagine how catchy that must be in German. And here’s another guess, because I was too lazy to look it up, but I’ll bet you a couple of pfennigs that findling is German for foundling, and the little old baby in Roda’s story turned up in a basket on the steps of the local church.”

  “Like Moses in the bulrushes,” she said, “unless Pharaoh’s daughter made up that part. Hey, wait a minute, Bern! Wasn’t Benjamin Button a foundling himself?”

  “In the movie,” I said. “Not in the story. The way Fitzgerald had it, he was the son of one Roger Button, who owned a wholesale hardware business.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe the people who made the movie read Roda Roda’s story, even if Fitzgerald didn’t. And you say Smith read it? Did he say if it was any good?”

  “He called it less than wonderful, but better than Fitzgerald’s.”

  “In other words, still mediocre enough to belong in his collection. If he doesn’t much care for either story, why the hell is he collecting them?”

  “He has his reasons,” I said, “that reason knows nothing of. With Roda, he couldn’t track down the original magazine appearance, but the following year it was included in a book called Die sieben Leidenschaften, and he owns a copy, as well as the manuscript from the files of the Viennese publisher, with the editor’s notations and Roda Roda’s own emendations.”

  “That must be a scarce item.”

  “Well, it’d have to be unique. It might even be expensive, if anybody much cared about Alexander Roda Roda.”

  “Still, a manuscript. What about Benjamin Button, Bern? I bet he’d like to have Fitzgerald’s original manuscript.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I guess something showed in my face. She said, “We’re gonna be a while, aren’t we, Bernie?” and raised her hand, making circles in the air until she caught Maxine’s eye. We were at the Bum Rap, where we tend to meet up after work, and Maxine has been bringing us drinks for enough years to have grown adept at picking up Carolyn’s signals. She raised her eyebrows in response, whereupon Carolyn held up two fingers. Maxine nodded, and another round was on its way. Scotch for both of us, Carolyn’s on the rocks, mine with soda.

  I told the story as Smith had told it to me. Princeton, Fitzgerald’s ivy-covered alma mater, was the repository of the author’s papers, where they’d served no end of scholars writing no end of doctoral theses on the man and his work. It took a letter of reference from someone with good academic credentials to get access to the papers, and Smith had found someone to write him a letter, and took a train to Princeton Junction and a taxi to the campus. He’d phoned ahead, and a graduate student with a nose ring and an attitude led him to a desk and got him started.

  They had two copies of the story, one from Collier’s files, the other from Scribner’s. There were galleys and page proofs, and a good deal of correspondence concerning the story. Fitzgerald’s Hollywood agent, a man named Swanson, was on hand with half a dozen terse notes.

  They’d allowed him to make photocopies of both manuscripts, and several of the letters.

  “No kidding,” Carolyn said. “I didn’t think they let you do that.”

  I’d said as much to Smith, and reported his reply: “ ‘If you expect a graduate student to enforce a rule like that, you really ought to pay her a living wage.’ ”

  “He bribed her, huh?”

  “I think it would be less judgmental to say he compensated her handsomely for the performance of a task that lay outside the bounds of her job description.”

  “So he’s got copies,” she said. “But the originals are still at Princeton.”

  “Where they shall remain.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was quite candid about it. He’d love to have either or both of them, but he recognizes that they’re where they ought to be. The university’s serious about its custodial role, and if he’s enough of a collector to desire the manuscripts, he’s sufficiently respectful of scholarship to feel that their collection ought to be preserved intact. And his Benjamin Button collection, including the Roda Roda material, will go to Princeton when he’s no longer around to enjoy it. He’s already added a codicil to his will to that effect.”

  “How old would you say he is, Bern?”

  “I don’t know. Forty-five? Fifty? Somewhere in there.”

  “So Princeton’ll have a while to wait.”

  “Well, you never know. But let’s hope so.”

  She picked up her drink, and when she set the glass down there was nothing left but a couple of melting ice cubes. She looked at my glass, which remained half-full or half-empty, depending on your state of mind, gave Maxine a wave and held up a single finger, then pointed that finger at herself.

  “Let’s hear the rest,” she said.

  Her third drink was mostly gone when she said, “I’ve been meaning to go to the Galtonbrook, Bern.”

  “You’ve never mentioned it.”

  “Well, it’s not at the top of the list. It’s somewhere on page three, along with Lose five pounds and Read Proust. But I’ve thought about it. Tell me his name again?”

  “Smith?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Galton.”

  “Martin Greer Galton.”

  “And he just ran around buying things?”

  “He didn’t have the kind of money William Randolph Hearst had,” I said, “and he didn’t employ a staff of agents to run all around Europe and buy everything they saw, but in his own small way he did what he could to turn a mansion on Fort Washington Avenue into an East Coast version of San Simeon. He bought whole estates, which meant that along with art and artifacts he picked up papers and manuscripts by the carton if not the carload, and he wound up with a fair amount of crap, but he also got enough decent stuff to found a museum.”

  “And one of the manuscripts—”

  “Is the original holograph version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

  “And I suppose Smith wants it.”

  “He does.”

  “Couldn’t he bribe some flunky to make him a copy?”

  “In this instance,” I said, “I’m afraid only the original will do.”

  “He’s seen it?”

  I shook my head. “Their archives are in the basement, and access is restricted to employees. He could probably pull some strings to get in, but then they’d know he’d been there, and he doesn’t want to look at the goddam thing. He wants to own it.”

  “That’s why he went to your shop.”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  “He didn’t just know your name. He knew your sideline.”

  “If that’s what it is. Sometimes it’s hard to say which is the sideline and which is the primary occupation. But yes, he was aware that of the several activities in which I’ve been known to engage, one is breaking and another is entering.”

  “You’ve never stolen from a museum.”

  “No.”

  “You won’t even buy a book if you suspect someone stole it from a library.”

  “No.”

  “So how is this different?”

  “All the manuscript’s doing,” I said, “is sitting there in the basement. I almost said ‘gathering dust,’ but it would have to be out in the open for the dust to get at it, and instead it’s in a box where nobody ever lays eyes on it. It’s listed and catalogued, because otherwise Smith wouldn’t know about it, but it’s got Fitzgerald’s original title on it so they don’t know what it is. They’ll very likely never know, because nobody there cares enough to find out. You know where that manuscript belongs? At Princeton, with the rest of the author’s papers, and the only way it’s going to get there is if my friend Smith gets hold of it and leaves it to them in his will.” I frowned. “What’s the matter, Carolyn? You’re sitting there looking like the wise old owl.”

  “The scotch may have something to do with it,” she allowed. “It brings
out my inner owl. But I’m sitting here listening, Bern, and if you haven’t already talked yourself into taking the job, I’d say you’re well on your way.”

  “I guess I’m going to do it. It’s either that or give the man back his five thousand dollars.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “I said it’s either that or—”

  “I know what you said, Bern. Are you telling me he paid you five thousand dollars?”

  “It’s an advance,” I said. “I get the rest on delivery.”

  “The rest amounting to—”

  “Another twenty-five.”

  “That adds up to thirty thousand dollars.”

  “You’re no slouch at math,” I said. “Not even after three drinks. I’ll have to give you that.”

  “Bern, what do you figure it’s worth?”

  “Thirty grand.”

  “Because that’s what he’s offering to pay for it? What about on the open market?”

  “What open market? It’s the lawful property of a non-profit institution. I suppose I could find out what other F. Scott Fitzgerald letters and manuscripts have brought in recent years, though I doubt there’s been much comparable that’s changed hands. But it wouldn’t tell me all that much about this particular case.”

  She picked up her glass, took a sip that was mostly melted ice. “Thirty thousand dollars,” she said, “is a lot of money.”

  “Just the other day,” I pointed out, “one of the big banks settled with the government over an alleged irregularity in their bond-trading division.”

  “I think I read something about that. Or maybe it was on the TV news.”

  “While refusing to admit any wrongdoing on their part, they paid over half a billion dollars.”

  “If they didn’t do anything wrong—”

  “Then why shell out all that money? You have to wonder. Now I’d say that’s a lot of money, but it’s a little less than ten percent of their annual profit.”

  “Okay, point taken. But for a man with a second-hand bookstore on East Eleventh Street—”

  “It’s a lot of money.”

  “But it’s got to be risky,” she said. “Swiping a manuscript from a museum isn’t like, um—”

  “Taking candy from a baby?”

  “Or from a candy store. Won’t they have security cameras?”

  “These days,” I said, “so will the candy store, and there’s probably a Nanny Cam keeping an eye on the baby’s lollipop. It’s a good thing I haven’t got a son.”

  “It is?”

  “I’ve got two ways to make a living,” I said, “and I couldn’t in good conscience encourage any child of mine to go into either one of them. We already talked about bookselling, and burglary’s even worse. The security cameras are everywhere, and that’s just the beginning. Some of the subspecialties have disappeared completely. A man used to be able to make a decent living as a hotel thief. It was always a high-anxiety trade, but it was exciting, and full of possibilities. You never knew what you were going to find on the other side of a door.”

  “There are still plenty of hotels, aren’t there?”

  “And every one of them that gets more than fifteen dollars a night for a room has those plastic key cards that you slip in a slot. How the hell are you supposed to pick an electronic lock?”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m not saying it can’t be done. You rent a room, then you go back when a different clerk’s on duty and tell him your key won’t work. They get deprogrammed all the time, and he’ll ask you your name and room number and reprogram it for you. ‘My name’s Victor Kotowitz, I’m in Room 417.’ A couple of clicks and you’re all set to go through Mr. K’s luggage.”

  “That’s pretty slick, Bern.”

  “And it works okay, unless the guy you approach happens to remember that Victor has a handlebar moustache and weighs three hundred pounds.”

  “Oops.”

  “The Galtonbrook will have real locks,” I said, “and a state-of-the-art burglar system wired into the local precinct. I think I’ll go up there tomorrow. Just to look it over from a distance and check out the neighborhood. Then a few days after that I’ll be ready to go inside.”

  “How will you get in?”

  “I’ll pay the five dollars,” I said, “just like everybody else. I’ll get my picture taken by their security cameras, but I won’t be doing anything suspicious. I’ll be just another citizen taking in the art, and checking them out while I’m at it.”

  “An unaccompanied citizen.”

  “Not if you’d like to keep me company.”

  Her eyes lit up. “I was your henchperson once before, Bern. Remember?”

  “Like it was yesterday. This’ll be a little different. We won’t be doing anything illegal.”

  “Sure we will,” she said. “I’ll be a part of a criminal conspiracy. That’ll give it an edge, even if all we’ll be doing is looking at paintings.”

  Over the next few days, I made a couple of preliminary visits to scout the terrain. Then on the Thursday Carolyn joined me and I finally set foot inside the place.

  I figured out which door led to the basement and noted its proximity to the restroom. I visited the restroom, examined the window. By the time we got out of there, I knew how I was going to pull it off.

  “Their security’s good,” I told Carolyn on our way downtown. “But it’s not perfect.”

  “You found a hole in it.”

  “I think so. A pinhole, but I think I’ll be able to widen it.”

  “It won’t be a job for two, will it? I didn’t think so. I played a small part, and that’s something. And I’ve been wanting to get to the museum for a long time.”

  “That reminds me,” I said.

  “What’s this, Bern?”

  “A present,” I said. “The Modern Library edition of Swann’s Way. Now that the Galtonbrook’s off your list, you can kick back and start reading Proust.”

  Time passed.

  It’ll do that, have you noticed? Some days crawl and some days fly, but they all have the same number of hours, and each of them comes from wherever days come from and goes wherever they go. The moving finger writes, and what do you get?

  Like the fellow who lifted sixteen tons, what I got was another day older. But instead of getting deeper in debt, I put Mr. Smith’s bounty to good use, paying what I owed and holding the rest in reserve. But first I passed along the bonus $5000 to Carolyn, who protested that all she did was keep me company on an innocent visit to an off-the-beaten-track museum.

  “And you even paid the five bucks admission charge,” she said.

  “True, but you used your own Metrocard on the subway. And you were a participant in a criminal conspiracy, as you pointed out earlier. An accessory to the fact, an accomplice.”

  “More of an accessory before the fact, Bernie. I did my accessorizing on Thursday, and it wasn’t until last night that the fact came along. You’d think I’d have to be more involved to wind up with five grand.”

  “Well . . .”

  “What?”

  “Well,” I said, “I was thinking. The Galtonbrook’s closed today. When they open up tomorrow, there’s only one thing that might make them the slightest bit suspicious.”

  “The fact that one of their treasures is missing?”

  “They’d never notice. But sooner or later somebody’ll jiggle the panel over the restroom window and discover it’s being held in place by duct tape.”

  I didn’t have to draw her a map. “But if you were to show up tomorrow morning, for a five-dollar admission charge you could visit the restroom and put the bolts back.” She grinned. “But you were there just yesterday, in your Mets cap and your parrot shirt. Wouldn’t it be safer if you had a trusty henchperson to run that little errand for you?”

  “I can supply the bolts,” I said, “and the screwdriver. All you’d need would be five minutes in the restroom.”

  “Any woman who spends less than five minutes in
a public restroom,” she said, “is a traitor to her sex.”

  “It won’t take any longer than that. And putting the bolts in will be quicker and easier than taking them out, because some of them didn’t really want to budge.”

  “So they’ll be glad to get back where they belong. Okay, Bern. You talked me into it. It sounds like fun, and it’ll give me something to do to earn the five thousand dollars. But even so the book would have been plenty.”

  “About that book,” she said a week or so later.

  “Swann’s Way?”

  “I started it a few nights ago.”

  “How are you enjoying it?”

  “I got in bed with it,” she said, “and I enjoyed the first two pages just fine, and then my alarm clock went off.”

  “You fell asleep.”

  “Well, I’d made the rounds, Henrietta’s and the Cubby Hole, so I wasn’t exactly reading with a clear head. But I went to bed sober the next night, and this time I was out cold halfway down the third page.”

  “So you were five pages in, and—”

  “No, just three. I wasn’t too clear on what I’d read the first night, so I started over from the beginning.”

  “I see.”

  “And the night after that I’d had a few drinks, so I didn’t even bother to try. But the night after that—”

  “That would be the fourth night.”

  “Whatever. That was the night I had dinner with my aunt Amelia. I told you about that, right?”

  “That would have been after you scared the crap out of Maxine. I have to admit it gave me a turn when you ordered Perrier. For a minute I thought you were planning to go out and break into somebody’s house.”

  “Amelia’s in AA,” she said, “and she always tells me it’s perfectly all right to drink when I’m with her, that it doesn’t bother her a bit.”

  “But you don’t believe her.”

  “I had a drink once when I was with her. It was a glass of Chardonnay, and I don’t think it did bother her, but it bothered the hell out of me.”