“Fascinating. What about our other friend?”
“Artie thinks he saw them together once. And Gert says he’s got a familiar look about him.”
“I’ll borrow this one,” I said, picking one up. “See you when I see you.”
The Gresham’s lobby had changed some since Rudyard Whelkin had described it to me over the phone. Carolyn was gone and so was the shopping bag lady. There was a junkie nodding on a bench, but he didn’t look Eurasian to me. Perhaps he’d taken over when the Eurasian went off duty.
The phone Whelkin had used was in use now. An immense woman was talking on it. Too large for the booth, she was standing outside it and bellowing into the mouthpiece, telling someone that she had paid back the money, that she didn’t owe nothing to nobody. Her presumptive creditor was evidently hard to convince.
The little man behind the desk possessed a skin the sun had never seen. He had tiny blue eyes and a small and virtually lipless mouth. I showed him the picture I’d taken from Carolyn. He gave it a long and thoughtful took, and then he gave that same long and thoughtful look to me.
“So?” he said.
“Is he in?”
“No.”
“When did he leave?”
“Who remembers?”
“I’d like to leave him a message.”
He handed me a pad. I had my own pen. I wrote Please call as soon as possible and signed it R. Whelkin, not to be cute but because it was the only name I could think of other than my own. A cinch he wasn’t using it here, anyway.
I folded the slip, passed it to the clerk. He took it and gazed blankly at me. Neither of us moved. Behind me, the immense woman was announcing that she didn’t have to take that kind of language from nobody.
“You’ll want to put the message in his box,” I said.
“In a while.”
Now, I thought. So I can see what room he’s in.
“I better do it soon,” he went on, “before I forget who the message is for. You didn’t put his name on it, did you?”
“No.”
“Come to think of it, who is it for?”
“You got no call to call me that,” the large woman said firmly. “A name like that, I wouldn’t call a dog by a name like that. You watch what you call me.”
The desk clerk had wispy eyebrows. I don’t suppose they’d have been equal to their God-given task of keeping perspiration from dripping into his eyes, but it probably didn’t matter because he probably avoided ever working up a sweat. He had enough eyebrows to raise, though, and he raised them now. Eloquently.
I put a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. He gave me a key to Room 311. Fifteen minutes later, on my way out, I gave it back to him.
The large woman was still on the phone. “Talk about a snotass,” she was saying, “I’ll tell you who’s a snotass. You’re a snotass, if you want my opinion.”
Back in the Pontiac, back downtown again. God, was there no end to this? Back and forth, to and fro, hither and yon, pillar to post. Interminable.
The lot on Nassau Street was still unattended. A sign informed me it was illegal to leave a car there under such circumstances. It was not an illegality I could take too seriously at the moment. Violators, the sign assured me, would be towed at the owner’s expense. It was a risk I was prepared to run.
I found a phone, dialed WOrth 4-1114. I didn’t expect anyone to answer and nobody did.
I walked down to Pine Street and east to the building Prescott Demarest had emerged from hours earlier. (Hours? Weeks of subjective time.) Now only half as many windows showed lights as had done so earlier. I wished for a clipboard or a briefcase, something to make me look as though I belonged.
The lobby attendant was dozing over a newspaper but he snapped into consciousness as I entered the building. He was an older man with a tired face, probably eking out a pension. I walked toward him, then halted in mid-stride and let myself be overcome by a coughing fit. While it subsided I checked the building directory on the wall and picked out a likely firm for myself.
“Bless you,” the old man said.
“Thanks.”
“You want to watch that cough.”
“It’s the weather. Nice one day and nasty the next.”
He gave me a knowing nod. “It didn’t used to be like this,” he said. “Weather was always something you could count on, and now everything’s changed.”
I signed in. Name—Peter Johnson. Firm—Wickwire and McNally. Floor-17. At least I wasn’t calling myself Whelkin for lack of imagination. And Peter Johnson was nicely anonymous. If Wickwire and McNally was a sizable firm, they very likely had a Peter Johnson in their employ. Or a John Peterson, or something close.
I rode the elevator to the seventeenth floor. Not that he would have been likely to check the indicator, but why be sloppy? I scooted down three flights of stairs and searched the corridors until I found a door with Tontine Trading Corp. painted on its frosted glass. The office within was completely dark, as were all the other offices I’d passed. Saturday night is the loneliest night in the week, let me tell you.
It’s also the longest and I had places to go and people to see. I put my ear to the glass, rapped smartly on the wooden part of the door, listened carefully, then popped the lock with a strip of flexible steel in not much more time than it takes to tell about it.
Office locks are often like that, and why shouldn’t they be? There’s not much point in hanging a pickproof whizbang of a lock on a door with a window in it. All you get for your trouble is a lot of broken glass.
Besides, there was a man downstairs to keep people like me from walking off with the IBM Selectrics, and what else was there to steal? I certainly didn’t find anything. When I left the Tontine office—and walked up to 17 and rode down from there—I didn’t have anything with me that I hadn’t carried into the building.
The old man looked up from his paper. “Now that was quick,” he said.
“Like a bunny,” I agreed, and signed myself out.
CHAPTER
Eighteen
“I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here.”
Well, how often do you get to use a line like that? Here they all were, gathered together at Barnegat Books. When I bought the store from old Litzauer I’d had visions of little informal assemblies like this one. Sunday-afternoon poetry readings, say, with little glasses of medium-dry sherry and a tray of cucumber sandwiches handed round. Literary kaffee klatsches, with everybody smoking European cigarettes and arguing about what Ionesco really meant. I figured it would bring people around and garner the shop some useful word-of-mouth publicity. More to the point, it sounded like a great way to meet girls.
This evening’s convocation was not quite what I’d had in mind. No one was snarling in iambs or trochees. Kafka’s name had not come up. The store had already had more publicity than it needed. And I didn’t expect to meet any girls.
The only one on hand, Carolyn, was perched on the high stool I used for fetching the loftier volumes from the loftier shelves. She sat off to one side, while the rest of my guests were strung out in an irregular half-circle facing the sales counter. I myself was standing behind the counter; I didn’t have a chair to sit on because the one I usually kept behind the counter was occupied at the moment by Prescott Demarest.
See, my place was a bookstore, not a library. There weren’t enough chairs to go around. The Maharajah of Ranchipur had the best seat in the house, a swivel-based oak armchair from my office in back. Atman Singh, his spine like a ramrod, sat upon an upended wooden packing case that had held Rome Beauty apples sometime in the dim past before Mr. Litzauer used it to store surplus stock. Rudyard Whelkin had a folding chair Carolyn had brought over from the Poodle Factory.
I hadn’t introduced anyone to anyone else, nor had any of them seen fit to offer small talk about football or the weather or crime in the streets. They’d arrived not in a body but all within a fairly brief span of time, and they’d remained remarkably silen
t until I did my suppose-you’re-wondering number. Even then, all I got was a bunch of sharp stares.
“Actually,” I went on, “you all know why I summoned you here. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come. We’re here to discuss a book and a murder.”
A hush didn’t fall over the room. You can’t have everything.
“The murder,” I went on, “was that of Madeleine Porlock. She was shot the day before yesterday in her apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street. The killer shot her once in the forehead, using a .32-caliber automatic pistol. The gun was a Marley Devil Dog, and the killer left it at the scene of the crime. He also left me at the scene of the crime, unconscious, with the murder gun in my hand.”
The Maharajah frowned in thought. “You are saying you did not kill the woman.”
“I am indeed. I was there to deliver a book. I was supposed to get paid for the book. Instead I got drugged and framed, drugged by Miss Porlock and framed by the man who killed her. But”—I smiled brightly—“I still have the book.”
I also had their attention. While they watched, silent as stones, I reached under the counter and came up with The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow. I flipped it open at random and read:
“Old Eisenberg was a crafty cod
With the cunning of his breed,
And he ate a piece of honey cake
And he drank a glass of mead,
And he wiped his lips and his fingertips
While he swore a solemn oath
That if they should go by Fort Bucklow
They’d perish—not one but both.”
I closed the book. “Horrid last line,” I said. “Bad verse is when you can tell which line is there to rhyme with the other, and the whole book’s like that. But it didn’t become the object of our attention because of its literary merits. It’s unique, you see. One of a kind. A pearl beyond price, a published work of Kipling’s of which only one copy exists. And this is it, right here.”
I set the book on the counter. “At the time I agreed to steal this book,” I went on, “it was in the personal library of a gentleman named Jesse Arkwright. I was reliably informed that he had acquired it by private negotiation with the heirs of Lord Ponsonby, who withdrew it from a scheduled auction and sold it to him.” I fixed my gaze on Rudyard Whelkin. “There may have been a Lord Ponsonby,” I said. “There may still be a Lord Ponsonby. But that is not how Jesse Arkwright got his copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.”
Demarest asked how he’d got it.
“He bought it,” I said, “from the very man who engaged me to steal it back. The arrangements for the original sale were worked out by Madeleine Porlock.”
The Maharajah wanted to know how she came into it.
“She was Arkwright’s mistress,” I told him. “She was also a lifelong acquaintance of my client, who told her that he’d come into possession of an exceedingly desirable book. She in turn remarked that a friend of hers—one might almost say client—was a passionate collector with an enthusiasm for books. It only remained to bring buyer and seller together.”
“And the sale went through?” Demarest seemed puzzled. “Then why would the seller want to steal the book back? Just because of its value?”
“No,” I said. “Because of its lack of value.”
“Then it is counterfeit,” said the Maharajah.
“No. It’s quite genuine.”
“Then…”
“I wondered about that,” I said. “I tried to figure out a way that the book could be a phony. It could be done, of course. First you’d have to find someone to write thirty-two hundred lines of doggerel in a fair approximation of Kipling’s style. Then you’d have to find a printer to hand-set the thing, and he’d need a stock of fifty-year-old paper to run it off on. Maybe you could use fresh stock and fake it, but”—I tapped the book—“that wasn’t done here. I handle books every day and I know old paper. It looks and feels and smells different.
“But even if you had the paper, and if you could print the thing and have it bound and then distress it in a subtle fashion so that it looked well-preserved, how could you come out ahead on the deal? Maybe, if you found the absolutely right buyer, you could get a five-figure price for it. But you’d have about that much invested in the book by then, so where’s your profit?”
“If the book is genuine,” the Maharajah said, “how can it be worthless?”
“It’s not literally worthless. The day after I stole it, a gentleman tried to take it from me at gunpoint. As luck would have it”—I smiled benignly at Atman Singh—“he selected the wrong book by mistake. But he tried to placate me by giving me five hundred dollars, and coincidentally enough, that’s a fair approximation of the book’s true value. It might even be worth a thousand to the right buyer and after the right sort of build-up, but it’s certainly not worth more than that.”
“Hey, c’mon, Bern.” It was Carolyn piping up from the crow’s nest. “I feel like I missed a few frames, and I was around for most of it. If it’s supposed to be worth a fortune, and it’s not a phony, why’s it only worth five hundred or a thousand?”
“Because it’s genuine,” I said. “But it’s not unique. Kipling had the book privately printed in 1923 in a small edition. That much was true. What wasn’t true was the appealing story about his incinerating every copy but one. There are quite a few copies in existence.”
“Interesting thought,” Prescott Demarest said. He was dressed as he’d been when Carolyn took his picture, but then I’d simply been able to see that he was wearing a dark suit. Now I could see that it was navy blue, with a muted stripe that had been invisible in the photograph. He straightened in my chair now. “So the book’s one of many,” he said. “How do you know that, Rhodenbarr?”
“How did I find it out?” It wasn’t quite the question he’d asked but it was one I felt like answering. “I stole a copy from Jesse Arkwright’s house Wednesday night. Thursday I delivered that copy to Madeleine Porlock’s apartment. I was drugged and the book was gone when I came to. Then last night I returned to the Porlock apartment”—gratifying, the way their eyes widened—“and found The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow in a shoe box in the closet.
“But it wasn’t the same copy. I figured it was possible that she could have stowed the book in the closet before admitting her killer to the apartment. But wouldn’t he look for the book before he left? Wouldn’t he have held the gun on her and made her deliver it before shooting her? He’d taken the trouble to scoop up five hundred dollars of my money before he left. Either he or Porlock took the money out of my back pocket, and if she took it, then he must have taken it from her himself, because it wasn’t there to be found.” The cops could have taken it, I thought, but why muddy the waters by suggesting that possibility?
“My copy was all neatly wrapped in brown paper,” I went on. “Now Madeleine Porlock might have unwrapped it before she hid it, just to make sure it wasn’t a reprint copy of Soldiers Three or something equally tacky.” I avoided Atman Singh’s eyes. “If so, what happened to the brown paper? I didn’t see it on the floor when I came to. Granted, I might not have noticed it or much else under the circumstances, but I looked carefully for that paper when I tossed the apartment last night, and it just plain wasn’t there. The killer wouldn’t have taken it and the police would have had no reason to disturb it, so what happened to it? Well, the answer’s clear enough now. It was still fastened around the book when the killer walked off with it. Madeleine Porlock most likely had the wrapped book in her hands when he shot her, and he took it as is.”
“That’s quite a conclusion,” Rudyard Whelkin said. “My boy, it would seem that your only clues were clues of omission. Rather like the dog that didn’t bark, eh? Five hundred missing dollars, a missing piece of brown paper. Rather thin ice, wouldn’t you say?”
“There’s something else.”
“Oh?”
I nodded. “It’s nothing you could call evidence. Pure subjective judgment. I sat up reading that book Wednes
day night. I held it in my hands, I turned the pages. Last night I had my hands on it again and it wasn’t the same book. It was inscribed to H. Rider Haggard, same as the copy I stole from Arkwright, but there was something different about it. I once knew a man with a yard full of laying hens. He swore he could tell those birds apart. Well, I can tell books apart. Maybe one had some pages dog-eared or a differently shaped water stain—God knows what. They were different books. And, once I realized that, I had a chance to make sense of the whole business.”
“How?”
“Let’s say, just hypothetically, that someone turned up a carton of four or five dozen books in the storage room of a shuttered printshop in Tunbridge Wells.” I glanced at Whelkin. “Does that sound like a reasonable estimate?”
“It’s your hypothesis, my boy.”
“Call it fifty copies. The entire edition, or all that remains of it, outside of the legendary long-lost copy the author was supposed to have presented to H. Rider Haggard. Now what would those books bring on the market? A few hundred dollars apiece. They’d be legitimate rarities, and Kipling’s becoming something of a hot ticket again, but this particular work is not only a minor effort but distinctly inferior in the bargain. It has curiosity value rather than literary value. The books would still be worth hauling home from the printshop, but suppose they could be hawked one at a time as unique specimens? Suppose each one were furnished with a forged inscription in a fair approximation of Kipling’s handwriting? It’s hard to produce a new book and make it look old, but it’s not too tricky to scribble a new inscription in an old book. I’m sure there are ways to treat ink so that it looks fifty years old, with that iridescence some old inscriptions have.
“So my client did this. He autographed the books or had some artful forger do it for him, and then he began testing the waters, contacting important collectors, perhaps representing the book as stolen merchandise so the purchaser would keep his acquisition to himself. Because the minute anyone called a press conference or presented the book to a university library, the game was up. All the collectors he’d stung along the way would be screaming for their money back.”