The Burglar in the Library

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s a riot.”

  From the library we went through another parlor, winding up in something called the Morning Room. Maybe it was situated to catch the morning sun, or maybe it was where you took your second cup of coffee after breakfast. (It wasn’t where you had breakfast. That’s what the Breakfast Room was for.)

  In the Morning Room we met Gordon Wolpert, a fiftyish fellow dressed all in brown. He was a widower, we learned, and he was on the seventh day of a ten-day stay. “But I might extend it,” he said. “It’s a spectacular house, and the kitchen is really quite remarkable. Did you arrive in time for dinner? Well, then you know what I mean. I’m putting on weight, and I can’t honestly say I give a damn. Maybe I’ll have my clothes let out and become a permanent resident, like the colonel.”

  “Colonel Buller-Blount? He lives here all the time?”

  “Blount-Buller, actually. And I guess it’s not accurate to call him a permanent guest. He stays here half the year.”

  “And spends the other half in England? I suppose it must have something to do with taxes.”

  “It has everything to do with taxes, but he doesn’t spend a minute in England. He told me he hasn’t been there in years. Hates the place.”

  “Really? He’s the most English person I ever met in my life.”

  Wolpert grinned. “With the possible exception of young Millicent,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it’s his Englishness that makes him stay away. He can’t stand what’s become of the country. He says they’ve ruined it.”

  “They?”

  “A sort of generic ‘they,’ from the sound of it. He wants the England he remembers from boyhood, and he has to come here to Cuttleford House for it.”

  Carolyn wanted to know where he spent the other six months.

  “Six months and a day, actually. In Florida. That way he doesn’t have to pay any state income tax, and I think there are other tax savings as well.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “A lot of New Yorkers do the same thing. Hey, wait a minute. Hasn’t he got it backwards?” She waved a hand at the window, on the other side of which the snow continued to fall. “It’s winter. What’s he doing up here?”

  “The colonel reverses the usual order of things,” Wolpert said. “He comes north during the fall foliage season and heads south in April. That way the old boy is always paying the low off-season rates.”

  “That’s the good news,” I said. “The bad news is he never gets decent weather.”

  “That’s the whole point.”

  “It is?”

  “Remember, he’s looking to recapture the rapture. Winter here reminds him of happy boyhood hours on the moors, chasing the wily grouse or whatever you do on the moors. And Florida in the summer puts him in mind of his years in Her Majesty’s Service, most of which seem to have been spent in one tropical hellhole or another.”

  “That’s perverse,” Carolyn said.

  “The English word for it is ‘eccentric,’” Wolpert said. “He’s got the worst of both worlds, but evidently it works for him. I suppose you could say that he’s like the proverbial fellow with one foot in a bucket of boiling water and the other in a bucket of ice water. On the average, he’s perfectly comfortable.”

  I wondered what kind of work Gordon Wolpert did that gave him the option of extending his stay. I might have asked, but that would only have invited the same question in return, and I hadn’t yet decided how to respond.

  So we talked about some of the other guests instead, and about Cuttleford House and its staff. Wolpert had met the Misses Dinmont and Hardesty, but he hadn’t had much chance to size them up. “The one looks as though she’d be trying to get everybody out on the Great Lawn for field hockey if it weren’t for the snow,” he said. “And the other has a Magic Mountain air about her, doesn’t she?”

  “Magic Mountain?” Carolyn said. “You mean the theme park?”

  “The Thomas Mann novel,” I said gently. “The one set at the sanitarium. Do you think Miss Dinmont has TB?”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” he said. “Not TB, I wouldn’t think, but most likely something else with initials. She just seems to me to have the air of somebody who came here to die.”

  I had that sentence echoing in my mind for a while, so I missed most of what he had to say about the Eglantines and the handful of people who worked for them—Orris, a pair of chambermaids, and the cook. We’d met Orris, for all that was worth, and hadn’t yet set eyes on the others, although the cook had made her wondrous presence known.

  “Nigel and Cissy Eglantine have made a good thing of this sprawling old pile,” he said. “I don’t know what he did before this, but he certainly has the knack for playing hotelier. I suppose you’ve seen his array of single-malt whiskies.”

  “He has quite a collection.”

  “I don’t know that you can label a Scotch ‘rare,’ but I gather some of them are the product of distilleries with extremely limited production. There are more varieties than you might imagine. I’d have thought it a confined area of expertise.” His eyes sought mine. “A small field indeed,” he said deliberately. “Nigel has developed quite a palate for them.”

  “Oh?”

  “Late in the evening,” he said carefully, “or at times of stress, there’s something about him that will remind you of Basil Fawlty. But most of the time he’s the perfect host.” He cocked his head. “Of course, he’s not the first person to make a show of appearing sober when he’s three sheets to the wind. Everybody does it. But it’s a sham, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose you could call it that,” I agreed.

  “And a petty sham at that,” he said, his eyes on mine. “You could call it that, couldn’t you? A petty sham?”

  I gave a noncommittal nod, and it seemed to me that he looked just the slightest bit disappointed.

  There were books in the Morning Room, too, and after Gordon Wolpert had left us I picked up one of them and turned its pages. “Frances and Richard Lockridge,” Carolyn read over my shoulder. “Writing about Pam and Jerry North. Maybe we’ll be like Mr. and Mrs. North, Bernie. Isn’t there a book where they go on a vacation?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “And while they’re off somewhere, there’s a murder. And they solve it.”

  “I should hope so,” I said, “or otherwise there’s no book.”

  “So maybe that’ll happen to us.”

  “Maybe what’ll happen to us?”

  “Maybe somebody’ll get killed, and we’ll solve it.”

  “No one will get killed,” I said. “There won’t be anything to solve.”

  “Why’s that, Bern?”

  “Because we’re on vacation.”

  “So were Mr. and Mrs. North, and then murder took a holiday.”

  “Well, this time around murder better take a siesta. I want to kick back and relax, and I want to eat three great meals a day and sleep eight hours a night, and then I want to go home with Raymond Chandler. I don’t want cops poring through my luggage, and that’s exactly what I’ll get if we wind up in the middle of a murder investigation. And why should that happen in the first place? We’re in a perfectly peaceful place with perfectly charming people.”

  “That’s how it starts, Bern.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Perfectly nice people, some of them slightly wacky, but all of them well-bred and well-spoken. Some of them may not be what they seem, and a couple of them have a dark secret in their past, and they’re isolated somewhere, and somebody gets killed. And then somebody says, ‘Oh, it must have been some passing tramp who did it, because otherwise it would have to have been one of us, and that’s plainly impossible because we’re all such nice people.’ But guess what, Bern?”

  “It’s really one of them?”

  “Every last time. And it’s not the butler, either.”

  “Well, that part’s right,” I said, “because that’s where Cuttleford’s i
mitation of an English country house begins to break down. There’s no butler.”

  “That doesn’t mean there won’t be a murder.”

  “Sure it does,” I said. I closed the Mr. and Mrs. North mystery—hardcover, no dust jacket, spine shaky, some pages dog-eared—and put it back where I’d found it. “I haven’t got time for a murder, not to commit and not to solve. I’m tired. I want to turn in soon and sleep until the snow melts.”

  “You can’t sleep, Bern.”

  “Want to bet?”

  “Even if you want to,” she said. “Remember? You’re going to be up all night. You’ve got a book to find.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “You’re giving up? Well, I’m disappointed, but I can’t honestly say I blame you. It’d be like looking for a needle in a haystack, except it wouldn’t.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “You do?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s the opposite of a needle in a haystack, isn’t it? It’s more like a needle in a needle stack. Not just any needle, but one particular needle in the midst of all the others.”

  “A needlestack,” I said thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’ve ever come across one.”

  “So? When’s the last time you saw a haystack?”

  “I’m sure I wrote it down,” I said, “but I don’t have my notebook with me. What’s the point?”

  “The point is every room is crawling with books, and the library alone has more volumes than you’ve got in your store, including the back room. So it may be an easy place to find something to read, but it’s an impossible place to find something specific, even if it’s there to start with, which it probably isn’t.” She took a deep breath. “So I can understand why you’re abandoning the hunt.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  “What else? I said you’ve got a book to find, and you said, ‘That’s what you think.’”

  “Right.”

  “Meaning you’re not going to bother looking.”

  “Meaning I don’t have to look.”

  She looked at me.

  “Meaning I already found it,” I said. “So why shouldn’t I treat myself to a good night’s sleep?”

  “The top shelf,” I said. “You see the section closest to the wall?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, it’s the section immediately to the right of it. See the one I mean?”

  “I think so,” she whispered. “I don’t want to look directly at it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to arouse suspicion, Bern.”

  “We’re in a library,” I said, as indeed we were, having gone there directly from the Morning Room. “Looking at books is a natural occupation in a room like this. And it’s a lot less suspicious to stare right at them than it is to glance furtively.”

  “Is that what I was doing? Glancing furtively?”

  “Well, it looked furtive to me. I don’t think it made any impression on anybody else because nobody else noticed.”

  Not that we were alone. The two guests we’d seen earlier were gone. The intense man with long dark hair who’d been writing letters (or ransom notes, or working out the square root of minus two, for all I knew) was nowhere to be seen, and the older woman (whom Gordon Wolpert had identified as a Mrs. Colibri, a widow of undetermined origin) had gone off as well, leaving The Eustace Diamonds on the table next to the couch. But two others had taken their place. Leona Savage, Millicent’s mother, was reading a Bruce Chatwin travel book and periodically consulting the globe, and a very fat man who’d been introduced to us earlier as Rufus Quilp was dozing in an armchair, with a book open on his ample lap.

  “All right,” Carolyn said. “The top row of shelves, the second section in from the fireplace wall. I’m looking right at it, Bern.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Books.”

  “Four or five books in from the left-hand edge of that section,” I said, “there’s an oversize volume, The Conrad Argosy. See it?”

  “I see a thick book that’s a lot taller than the others. I can’t read the title from here. Can you?”

  “No, but I recognize the book. I’ve had copies in the store. Now to the right of it there are three dark books, and then one with a sort of yellow cover, and next to that one—”

  “Next to the one with the yellow cover?”

  “Right. Just to the right of the yellow book is one in a dust jacket, and you probably can’t read that title from here, and neither can I. But it’s The Big Sleep.”

  “By Raymond Chandler.”

  “That’s the guy.”

  “And you can’t read the words on the spine, but you can recognize it anyway?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is it a first edition, Bern? Is it inscribed? Can you tell that from here, too?”

  “I don’t have magical powers,” I said. “What I do have is eyes that look at books all day long. I can identify hundreds of books, maybe thousands, on the basis of a quick glimpse from the other side of the room. I probably haven’t read it and I may not know the first thing about the contents, but I can tell you the title and author and who published it.”

  “Who published The Big Sleep?”

  “Knopf in the U.S. and Hamish Hamilton in England. That’s the Knopf edition over there. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spotted it, because I don’t know what the British edition looks like. And it most likely would have been a copy of the American edition that Chandler brought east to give to Hammett.”

  “He brought it for George Harmon Coxe, Bern. Remember? He gave it to Hammett on a whim.”

  “At the time it was on a whim,” I said. “Now it’s on a shelf. We’re looking at it.”

  “‘Here’s looking at you, Chandler.’”

  “It’s a genuine piece of American literary history,” I said. “And we tracked it down, and there it is.”

  “Assuming that’s the right copy.”

  “A first of The Big Sleep’s a rare book to begin with. If they’ve got any copy at all, it’s pretty sure to be the one Chandler gave to Hammett. It’s not like Anthony Adverse, with at least one copy in any old collection of books.” I drew a breath. “That’s the Hammett copy on the shelf. The Hammett association copy. When they write about it—no, that’s ridiculous.”

  “What is?”

  “I was thinking it might go down in bibliographic literature as ‘the Rhodenbarr copy.’ Silly, huh?”

  “I don’t think it’s silly.”

  “You don’t? Well, it won’t happen. Be nice, though.” I got to my feet. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll buy you a drink, and then I’m about ready to turn in. What’s the matter?”

  “You’re just gonna leave it there?”

  “I’m not going to wheel the library steps over there and climb up them in the middle of the night. Not with other people in the room.”

  “Why not? You told me it was okay to look at the book. It’s a library, you said. It’s natural to look at books in a library. Well, it’s every bit as natural to take them off the shelf and start reading. Where does it say look but don’t touch?”

  I shook my head. “Later. It’s not going anywhere.”

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  Let’s say you had this old tweed jacket.

  It’s a fine old jacket, woven of wool from the thick fleeces of Highland sheep, crafted in a croft or crofted in a craft, something like that. If you look closely enough you’ll find threads of every color of the rainbow, with more hues and shades and tints and tones than in the biggest box of crayons Crayola ever made.

  You bought it years ago, and even when it was new it looked old. Now it has leather patches on the elbows and leather piping on the cuffs, and by this time the leather itself is worn. And the pockets bulge from all the things you’ve stuffed into them over the years. And you’ve worn that jacket for long moonlit walks on the moors and spirited rambles in the fells. You’ve worn it on horseback,
and your high-spirited dog has marked it with his muddy paws. It’s been rained on, and dampened by the mist. It’s soaked up the smoke from campfires in the open and peat fires in thatched cottages. And there’s sweat in it, too, honest human sweat. And human joy and human grief—and, if you look closely enough, you’ll be able to distinguish more hues and shades and tints and tones of emotion than there are crayons in the biggest box Crayola ever made.

  And it’s soaked up music, too, the haunting screel of the bagpipes and the reedy piping of a tin flute, from glen to glen and o’er the mountainside. Toss in the lilt of an old ballad heard in a public house and stir in the murmur of a lullaby sung to a child. It’s all there, all absorbed by osmosis into the very warp and woof of the tweed.

  Now you take that jacket and transmute it by some subtle alchemy involving a copper kettle and a copper coil. You distill the very essence of that jacket into a cask of liquid, and you age that liquid in a charred oaken barrel for longer than the lifetimes of the Old and Young Pretenders combined.

  Then you pour it into a glass, and what you’ve got is Glen Drumnadrochit.

  “Glen Drumnadrochit,” Carolyn said, echoing our host, Nigel Eglantine, who’d pronounced its name even as he poured it. “What do you think, Bernie?”

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “You want to make a ceremony of it,” Nigel said, “in order to get the full experience.” He picked up his own glass, a small brandy snifter like the ones he’d filled for us, and held it to the light. “First the color,” he said, and we copied his actions, holding our glasses to the light and dutifully noting the color. It was, I should report, generally Scotch-colored, though definitely on the dark side of the Scotch spectrum.

  “Next is bouquet,” he announced, and held the glass so that it was cupped in his palm, moving his hand in a little circle and roiling the strong waters within the glass. Then he breathed in its aroma, and soon we were doing the same.

  “And now taste. While holding a sip in the mouth, draw in breath through the nose. It strengthens and deepens the flavor.” Indeed it did. “And, finally, aftertaste,” he said, and tipped up his glass, and drank deep of the precious nectar. Ever a quick study, I copied his every action.