The Burglar in the Rye

  There was a mantelpiece above a fireplace that had long since been bricked up and plastered over, and that’s where I placed Paddington, where he could have a good look around and make sure that everything was all right. “I’d let you look out the window,” I told him, “but there’s nothing to see out there. Just a brick wall, and a window with the shade down. And maybe that’s a good idea, drawing the shade. What do you think?”

  He didn’t say. I drew the shade, tossed my small suitcase onto the bed, popped the catches, and opened it. I put my shirts and socks and underwear in the dresser, hung a pair of khakis in the tiny closet, closed the suitcase, and stood it against a wall.

  I looked at my watch. It was time I got out of there. I had a business to run.

  I said goodbye to the bear, who paid about as much attention as my cat does when I say goodbye to him. I pulled the door shut. That was enough to engage the snap lock, but I double-locked the door with my key before taking the elevator to the lobby.

  The pair of women had ended their conversation, or at least taken it somewhere else. The guy with the long face and high forehead and horn-rimmed shades had put down GQ and picked up a paperback. I walked over and dropped my key at the desk. It was an actual brass key, unlike the computerized plastic key cards the newer hotels use, and it had a heavy brass fob attached, designed to punish you for walking off with it by ripping a hole in your pocket. I was happy to leave it, glad of an excuse to pass the desk and have a quick look at the triple row of guest mailboxes.

  That purple envelope I’d found on the floor was in Box 602.

  I slapped down my key, gave the fellow with the too-black hair a nod and a smile, and watched a tall and elegant older gentleman enter the lobby from the street, looking as though he could have stepped out of the pages of the long-faced guy’s GQ. He was wearing a beautifully tailored sport jacket and slacks and escorting a much younger woman.

  Our eyes met. His widened in recognition. I couldn’t see mine, but they may have done the same. I recognized him, even as he clearly recognized me. And we did what gentlemen do when they encounter one another in a hotel lobby. We passed each other without a word.

  CHAPTER

  Two

  The business is Barnegat Books, an antiquarian bookstore on East Eleventh Street between University Place and Broadway. The Paddington is fourteen blocks north of my shop, and north-south blocks in Manhattan run twenty to the mile, and I’ll leave it to you to do the mathematics. I wanted to open up by two, as the sign on my door promised, but a few minutes one way or the other wouldn’t matter, and it was too nice a day for a cab or a subway. I’d come up by taxi, suitcase in tow, but I could walk back, and did.

  I cut through Madison Square, paying my respects to the statue of Chester Alan Arthur, twenty-first President of the United States and a man with even more first names than Jeffrey Peters. I walked down Broadway, trying to remember what I knew about Chester Alan Arthur, and once I got the store open and dragged the bargain table (“Your Choice 3 for $5”) out front, I browsed through my own stock until I found The Lives of the Presidents, by William Fortescue. It had been published in 1925, and only went as far as Warren Gamaliel Harding (one first name, one last name, and one that was essentially a toss-up). The book was evidently written with a teenage audience in mind, though I couldn’t think of too many teenagers who’d rush to turn off MTV and check out what Fortescue had to say about Franklin Pierce and Rutherford Birchard Hayes (who could boast, you’ll notice, not a single first name between them).

  Fortescue’s volume had had a long shelf life at Barnegat Books, having been part of the original stock when I bought the place from old Mr. Litzauer some years ago. I didn’t expect to sell it anytime soon either, but that didn’t mean it was destined for the bargain table. It was a worthy volume, the sort of book you liked to have around a bookshop, and this wasn’t the first time I had consulted it. I’d let Fortescue fill me in a few months ago on Zachary Taylor, although I can’t remember much of what I read, or why I’d been interested in the first place. Still, he’d come in handy then—Fortescue, I mean, not Taylor—and he was handy now.

  I kept the book on the counter and dipped into it during slow periods, of which there are an abundance in the life of an antiquarian bookman. I did have some traffic that afternoon, and I did do some buying and selling. A regular customer found some mysteries she hadn’t read, along with an out-of-print Fredric Brown she figured she must have read, but wouldn’t mind reading again. I’d had the same thought myself, and was sorry to see the book go before I had another crack at it, but that’s part of the game.

  A stout gentleman with a droopy mustache spent a lot of time browsing a six-volume half-leather edition of Oman’s History of Britain Before the Norman Conquest. I had it tagged at $125, and allowed I would probably take a little less than sticker price for the set, but not a great deal less.

  “I’ll be back,” he said finally, and left. And perhaps he would, but I wasn’t counting on it. Customers (or more accurately, noncustomers) use that as an exit line, handing it out to tradesmen the way men tell women, “I’ll call you.” Maybe they will, and then again maybe they won’t, and there’s no point sitting by the phone waiting.

  My next customer brought in a book from the bargain table, paid his two bucks for it, and asked if he could browse a bit. I told him to feel free, but that it was a dangerous pastime. You never knew when you’d find something you felt compelled to buy.

  “I’ll risk it,” he said, and disappeared into the stacks. He’d been around a couple of times in the course of the past week, looking quite presentable if the slightest bit down at the heels and smelling faintly and not disagreeably of whiskey. He was somewhere around sixty, about the same age as the man I’d seen at the Paddington, with a deep suntan and a carefully trimmed little beard and mustache. The beard was V-shaped and came to a precise point, and it was silver in hue, as were his eyebrows and the hair on his head, or at least as much of it as showed out from under his tan beret.

  This was the first time he’d bought anything, and I had a hunch he thought of the two dollars as an admission charge. Some people just like to hang out in bookstores—I did, before I bought one of my own—and Mr. Silver Beard struck me as a fellow who didn’t have anything much to do or anyplace to do it. He wasn’t homeless, he was too well groomed for that, but he looked to be biding his time.

  If he’d gone on biding it until six o’clock I’d have gotten him to give me a hand closing up. But he was long gone by then. The phone rang around five-thirty, and it was Alice Cottrell. “I’ve got a room,” I said. I didn’t mention the bear.

  “And tonight?”

  “If all goes well,” I said. “If not, the room’s mine for two more nights. But I figure the sooner the better.”

  And then we said the things a man and a woman will say when they’ve been rather more to each other than bookseller and customer. I dropped my voice to say them, and I kept it low even after Mr. Silver Beard had given me a wave and departed. She said goodbye after we’d done a reasonable amount of billing and cooing, and not too long after that I brought in the bargain table all by myself. That done, I put fresh water in Raffles’s water bowl, replenished the dry food in his dish, and made sure the bathroom door was open in case he needed to use the toilet. Then I locked up for the night and went over to the Bum Rap.

  The Bum Rap, where Carolyn Kaiser and I meet almost every evening for a Thank God It’s Over drink, is a neighborhood saloon with an eclectic juke box and a bartender who can’t make a gin and tonic without looking it up first in his Old Mr. Boston manual. We have our usual table, although it’s no big deal if it’s taken and we have to sit somewhere else. It was taken this evening, I noticed. There were two women sitting there. Then I looked again and saw that one of them was Carolyn.

  The other was Erica Darby, who’d come into Carolyn’s life recently in a big way. Erica did something at a cable TV company. I wasn’t too clear on what it was, but I wa
s sure it was important, and probably glamorous. You sensed that about Erica. She was smart and polished and great-looking, with long chestnut hair and bright blue eyes and a figure I had the good sense not to notice.

  “Hey, Bernie,” she said. “How’s the book biz?”

  “Leisurely,” I said.

  “That’s great,” she said. “When my business is leisurely, that means we’re about to be driven out of it.” She pushed back her chair, got to her feet. “Gotta run, kiddies.” She leaned over, kissed Carolyn on the mouth. “See ya.”

  She swept out. I sat down. Carolyn had a tall glass of ruby liquid in front of her, and I asked if it was cranberry juice.

  “Campari and soda. You wanna taste it, Bern?”

  “It seems to me I had it once,” I said, “and it seems to me once was enough. Anyway, it has alcohol in it, doesn’t it?”

  “They claim it does,” she said, “but you couldn’t prove it by me.”

  “Well, I’ll take their word for it,” I said, and motioned for Maxine. When she came over I ordered a Perrier.

  “You’re working tonight,” Carolyn said.

  “I checked in this afternoon.”

  “How’s your room?”

  “Small, but who cares? It’s just a place to put my bear.”

  “Huh?”

  I explained about the loaner bears the hotel furnished, and Carolyn raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure why I took the bear,” I went on. “Maybe I didn’t want it to feel rejected.”

  “That’s a good reason.”

  “Anyway, I get the deposit back when I check out.”

  “Unless you keep the bear.”

  “Why would I keep the bear?”

  “To keep it from feeling rejected,” she said, “and it would be a more serious rejection now, after all the two of you have been to each other. Bern, I know what your problem is.”

  “You do?”

  “Uh-huh. You’re too tense. You need to loosen up. I’d tell Maxine to bring you a scotch, but you wouldn’t drink it, would you?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not positive I’ll pull it off tonight,” I said, “but I’ve got a shot. I paid cash at the Paddington for three nights—”

  “Not to mention a bear, Bern.”

  “So don’t mention it. Anyway, if I can get in and out in one night I won’t complain. And I know the room number, so that’s taken care of.”

  “You’re staying in a room and you know the number? I guess you’re not losing your edge after all, Bern.”

  “I know Anthea Landau’s room number,” I said. “You knew that’s what I meant, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yeah.” She picked up her glass of Campari, made the face people don’t usually make until they’ve had a sip of the stuff, and put it down untasted. “So you’re sticking to Perrier,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “That’s what I figured,” she said, and waved a hand for the waitress’s attention. “Hey, Max,” she called out, “bring Bernie here a drink, will you? Rye whiskey, and you might as well make it a double.”

  “I just said…”

  “I heard you, Bern. And I get the message. Tonight’s a working night, and you don’t drink when you work. Aside from soda water and fruit juice and coffee and other things that don’t count. I know all that.”

  “Then why…”

  “I understand your no-alcohol policy,” she went on, “even if it does strike me as the least bit extreme. And I certainly wouldn’t do anything to sabotage it.”

  “But you just ordered me a drink.”

  “I did,” she said, “and I made it rye whiskey, because you seemed to enjoy it the other night. What do you know, here it comes. Thanks, Maxine, and why don’t you take this and pour it back in the Lavoris bottle?” She handed Maxine the unfinished Campari. “Here’s mud in your eye, Bern.”

  And she picked up my drink and drank it down. “It’s this deal I’ve got with Erica,” she explained. “She’s not much of a drinker herself, and she doesn’t really get it, you know? She ordered the Campari for me because it’s real easy to stop at one.”

  “There’s a recommendation. ‘Order a Campari—you’ll never want another.’”

  “The point is, she’s concerned about how much I drink.”

  “You don’t drink all that much.”

  “I know,” she said, “and if I ordered girly-girly drinks with fruit salad and little umbrellas, or if I put away a couple of bottles of chardonnay with dinner, why, she wouldn’t think twice about it. But because I happen to drink like a man, she’s all set to race off to an Al-Anon meeting and tell them all what a raging drunk I am.”

  “You’re occasionally drunk,” I allowed, “but you hardly ever rage.”

  “My point exactly. Anyway, she’s concerned that I celebrate a little too enthusiastically every time I get through one more day of dog washing. She wanted me to quit coming to the Bum Rap altogether. I told her that wasn’t negotiable. ‘Bernie’s my best friend in all the world, and I’m not going to force the man to drink alone. So get that right out of your pretty little head.’ And she really is pretty, Bern. Don’t you think?”

  “Very pretty.”

  “And what’s neat,” she said, tossing her head, “is she thinks I’m pretty. Isn’t that a hoot?”

  I think so, too, though it’s not something I tend to dwell on. Carolyn Kaiser is a couple of inches shorter than the five-two she claims to be, which leaves her not much taller than some of the dogs she grooms at the Poodle Factory just two doors down the street (or up the street, depending which way you’re headed) from Barnegat Books. We lunch together during the week, at her place or mine, and we unwind after work at the Bum Rap, and she is my best friend and occasional henchperson. If she didn’t happen to be a lesbian (or, by the same token, if I didn’t happen to be a guy) we’d probably have a romance, as people do, and it would run its course, as romances do, and that would be that. But this way we can be best friends forever, and I honestly think we will. (It got a little complicated once when we were both sleeping with the same girl, but we got over that with no damage done.)

  So yes, she’s pretty, with dark hair and a round face and big eyes, and sometimes I’ll compliment her on what she’s wearing, the way I might say something nice about a male friend’s necktie. But it doesn’t happen very often, because I don’t notice very often.

  “She’s right,” I said now. “In fact, there’s something different about you. You’re letting your hair grow, aren’t you?”

  “Everybody does, Bern. Between haircuts. It’s not like shaving. You don’t have to do it every day.”

  “It looks longer than usual,” I said. As long as I’ve known Carolyn she’s worn her hair Dutch-boy style, perhaps in unconscious tribute to the resourceful lad who saved Holland from flooding by putting his finger where it would do the most good. “The bangs are the same as always, but it’s longer in back.”

  “So I’m trying something a little different,” she said, “just to see how it looks.”

  “Well, it looks nice.”

  “That’s what Erica said. In fact it was her idea.”

  “It’s becoming,” I said. “It’s sort of…”

  “Finish the thought, Bern.”

  “It’s just different, that’s all.”

  “‘Softer, more feminine.’ That’s what you were gonna say, Bern. Right?”

  “Well…”

  “Pretty soon guys’ll be holding doors open for me, and I’ll be sipping Sambucca instead of Johnnie Walker Red, and I’ll lose my edge and turn into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Is that what you were going to say?”

  “Actually, I was going to say something about Chester Alan Arthur.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “To change the subject,” I said, “and because I saw his statue in Madison Square and spent the afternoon reading about him. He got the Vice-Presidential nomination in 1880 as a sop to Roscoe Conkling, the Republican boss of New York State. H
e was Garfield’s running mate, and—”

  “You don’t mean John Garfield, do you?”

  “No, or Brian, either. James Abram Garfield, and the ticket won, and Garfield was inaugurated in March, and—”

  “Not in January?”

  “No, it took them longer in those days. Garfield was inaugurated in March, and in June he met up with Charles Guiteau. ‘My name is Charles Guiteau, my name I’ll never deny.’ Remember that song?”

  “No, Bern, but I don’t remember a whole lot of songs from 1881.”

  “Some folksinger recorded it a few years ago. I thought you might have heard it.”

  “I must have been too busy listening to Anita O’Day and Billie Holiday. They didn’t play songs about Charles Guiteau in Paula’s or the Duchess. They might have in Swing Rendezvous, but that was before my time. Who was Charles Guiteau and why sing a song about him?”

  “He was a disappointed office-seeker. He shot Garfield because he couldn’t get a job, and a month later Garfield died.”

  “I guess dying took longer then, too.”

  “It didn’t take long for Guiteau. They hanged him, and Chester Alan Arthur was President of the United States of America. And Roscoe Conkling thought he had the keys to Fort Knox, but it didn’t work out that way. Arthur wound up pushing for the Civil Service System, which eliminated most of the federal patronage and left the bosses with fewer jobs to hand out.”

  “I guess that’s one way to cut down on disappointed office-seekers,” she said, “but you can’t win, can you? This way you’re up to your neck in disgruntled postal employees. What happened to Arthur? Was he considered a hero?”

  I shook my head. “Conkling was pissed off, and the party didn’t nominate him in ’84. They ran James G. Blaine instead, and Grover Cleveland beat him, and Chester Alan Arthur returned to the obscurity most people figure he richly deserved.”

  “But at least he got a statue in the park.”

  “So did Conkling,” I said. “The same park, but the other end of it. The two of them stare across Madison Square at each other. It seems to me they both look disappointed.”