The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTERS

  1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

  6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

  11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

  16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

  21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

  26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

  31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

  36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

  41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

  46. 47.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS

  Copyright © 2013, Lawrence Block

  All rights reserved. Except for the use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means is forbidden without the express permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and settings are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, names, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-9910684-0-1

  Cover Art by Emanuel Schongut:

  The Watercolour Illustrations of Emanual Schongut

  Cover and Interior Design by JW Manus

  A Lawrence Block Production

  THE BURGLAR

  WHO

  COUNTED THE SPOONS

  LAWRENCE BLOCK

  A Lawrence Block Production

  BOSWELL: I added that [this] person maintained that there was no distinction between virtue and vice.

  JOHNSON: Why, Sir, if the fellow does not think as he speaks, he is lying; and I see not what honour he can propose to himself from having the character of a liar. But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

  Around 11:15 on a Tuesday morning in May, I was perched on my stool behind the counter at Barnegat Books. I was reading Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart, even as I was keeping a lazy eye on a slender young woman in jeans and sandals. Her khaki shirt had those little tabs to secure the sleeves when you rolled them up, and a scant inch of tattoo peeked out from under one rolled-up sleeve. I couldn’t make out the image, there wasn’t enough showing, and I didn’t bother to guess, or to speculate on what hidden parts of her anatomy might sport further tattoos. I was paying more attention to the capacious tote bag hanging from her shoulder, and the Frank Norris novel that had engaged her interest.

  For I shall consider my cat, Geoffrey, I read, and looked over to the window to consider my own cat, Raffles. There’s a portion of the window ledge that the sun manages to find on clear days, and that’s his favorite spot, rain or shine. Sometimes he stretches, in the manner of his tribe, and sometimes his paws move as he dreams of mice. At the moment he was doing nothing, as far as I could tell.

  My customer, on the other hand, had fetched a cell phone from her tote bag. She’d put the book down, and her thumbs were busy. At length she returned the phone to her bag and, beaming, brought Frank Norris to the counter.

  “I’ve been looking all over for this,” she said, triumphantly. “And I’ve had a terrible time, because I couldn’t remember the title or the author.”

  “I can see how that might complicate things for you.”

  “But when I saw the book,” she said, brandishing the object in question, “it, like, rang a bell.”

  “Ah.”

  “And I looked through it, and this is it.”

  “The very volume you’ve been seeking.”

  “Yeah, isn’t that awesome? And you know what’s even better?”

  “What?”

  “It’s on Kindle. Isn’t that fantastic? I mean, here’s a book more than a hundred years old, and it’s not like it was Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick, you know?”

  Eat your heart out, Frank Norris.

  “Like, they’re popular, so you’d expect to be able to get them in eBooks. But The Pit? Frank Norris? And yet I Googled it and there it was, and a couple of clicks and I own it.”

  “Just like that,” I said.

  “Isn’t it great? And you know what it cost?”

  “Probably less than the book you’re holding.”

  She checked the penciled price on the inside cover. “Fifteen dollars. Which is fair enough, I mean it’s like a hundred years old and a hardcover book and all. But you want to know what I just paid?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Two ninety-nine.”

  “Awesome,” I said.

  Carolyn Kaiser, who washes dogs two doors down the street at the Poodle Factory, is my best friend and, more often than not, my lunch companion. Whoever’s turn it is picks up food at a nearby restaurant and brings it to the other’s place of business. It was her turn, and an hour after the girl with the peekaboo tattoo left poor old Frank Norris on my counter, Carolyn breezed in and began dishing out dejeuner a deux.

  “Juneau Lock?”

  “Juneau Lock,” she agreed.

  “I wonder what it is.”

  She took a bite, chewed, swallowed, and considered the matter. “I couldn’t even guess the animal,” she said. “Let alone what part of the animal.”

  “It could be almost anything.”

  “I know.”

  “Whatever this dish is,” I said, “I don’t think we’ve had it before.”

  “It’s always different,” she said, “and it’s always sensational.”

  “Or even awesome,” I said, and told her about Frank Norris and the girl with the tattoo.

  “Maybe it was a dragon.”

  “The tattoo? Or our lunch?”

  “Either one. She used your bookshop to figure out what book she wanted, and then she bought the eBook from Amazon and bragged about what a deal she got.”

  “It didn’t come off like bragging,” I said. “She was letting me be a part of her triumph.”

  “And rubbing your nose in it, Bern. And you don’t even seem all that upset.”

  “I don’t?” I thought about it. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’m not. She was so innocent about it, you know? ‘Isn’t it great how I saved myself twelve bucks?’ ” I shrugged. “At least I got the book back. I was afraid she was going to steal it.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” she said, “she did. But if you’re cool with it, I don’t see why I should be pissed off on your behalf. This is great food, Bern.”

  “The best.”

  “Two Guys From Taichung. I wonder if I’m pronouncing it correctly.”

  “I’m pretty sure you got the first three words right.”

  “The first three words,” she said, “never change.”

  The restaurant, on the corner of Broadway and East Eleventh Street, across the street from the Bum Rap, has had the same sign for almost as long as I’ve had the bookshop. But it’s changed owners and ethnicities repeatedly over the years, and each new owner (or pair of owners) has painted over the last word on the sign. Two Guys From Tashkent gave way to Two Guys From Guayaquil, which in turn yielded to Two Guys From Phnom Penh. And so on.

  We began to take the closings for granted—it was evidently a hard-luck location—and whenever we started to lose our taste for the current cuisine, we could look forward to whatever would take its place. And, while we rarely went more than a few days without a lunch from Two Guys, there were plenty of alternatives—the deli, the pizza place, the diner.

  Then Two Guys From Kandahar threw in the towel, and Two Guys From Taichung opened up shop, and everything changed.

  “I’ll be closing early,” I told Carolyn.

  “Today’s the day, huh?”

  “And tonight’s the night. I thought I might get back downtown in time to meet you at the B
um Rap, but where’s the sense in that?”

  “Especially since you’d be drinking Perrier. Bern? You want me to tag along?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure? Because it’d be no problem for me to close early. I’ve got a Borzoi to blow dry, and his owner’s picking him up at three, and even if she runs late I can be out of there by three-thirty. I could keep you company.”

  “You were with me on the reconnaissance mission.”

  “Casing the joint,” she said with relish. “Nothing to it. Piece of cake.”

  “I think it’s better if I solo this time around.”

  “I could watch your back.”

  “I don’t want to give their security cameras a second look at you. Once is fine but twice is suspicious.”

  “I could wear a disguise.”

  “No, I’ll be disguised,” I said. “And a key part of my disguise is that this time around I won’t be accompanied by a diminutive woman with a lesbian haircut.”

  “I guess diminutive sounds better than short,” she said. “And it’s not exactly a lesbian haircut, but I take your point. So how about if I hang out down the block? No? Okay, Bern, but I’ll have my cell with me. If you need me—”

  “I’ll call. But that’s not likely. I’ll just steal the book and go home.”

  “Check Amazon first,” she said. “See if it’s on Kindle. Maybe you can save yourself a trip.”

  Martin Greer Galton had ceased troubling his fellow man in 1964, when a cerebral aneurysm achieved what most of his acquaintances and business associates would have dearly loved to have had a hand in. After thirty-plus years as a latter-day robber baron and almost as many as a fiercely acquisitive retiree, the old man clapped both hands to his head, made a sound like a peevish crow, and collapsed to the floor. He landed in the middle of the immense Aubusson carpet in the Great Room of Galtonbrook Hall, the pile of marble that had been his home and would be his memorial.

  Galtonbrook Hall loomed less than half a mile from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and an ambulance got there in minutes, but they didn’t have to rush. Martin Greer Galton, born March 7, 1881, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, was almost certainly dead by the time he hit the floor.

  Now, fifty years later, his house lived on. He’d devoted the first half of his life to making money and the second half to spending it, collecting art and artifacts in great profusion, and building Galtonbrook Hall to house himself for his lifetime and his treasures for all eternity.

  That at least was the plan, and he’d funded the enterprise sufficiently to see it carried out. What had been a home was now a museum, open to the public six days a week. Out-of-towners rarely found their way to the Galtonbrook; it didn’t get star treatment in the guidebooks, and it was miles from midtown, miles from the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile. As a result it was rarely crowded.

  You had to know about it and you had to have a reason to go there, and if you were in the neighborhood you’d probably wind up at the Cloisters instead. “We’ll go to the Galtonbrook the next time,” you’d tell yourself, but you wouldn’t.

  Neither Carolyn nor I had been there until our visit five days earlier, on a Thursday afternoon. We’d stood in front of a portrait of a man in a plumed hat, and its brass label identified it as the work of Rembrandt. The guidebook I’d consulted had its doubts, and repeated an old observation: Rembrandt painted two hundred portraits, of which three hundred are in Europe and four hundred in the United States of America.

  “So it’s a fake,” she said.

  “If it is,” I said, “we only know as much because the guidebook told us so. We could go look at the Rembrandts in the Metropolitan, and we’d know they’re genuine, but we’d only know that because of where they’re hanging. And we’d have paid twenty-five dollars apiece to look at them, instead of the five dollars they charge here, and we’d have people bumping into us and breathing down our necks.”

  “I hate when that happens. This is a beautiful painting, Bernie. You look at the guy’s face and you get a whole sense of the person.”

  “You do.”

  “He must have been a closet case, don’t you think?”

  “Because of the plumed hat?”

  “No, just the impression he gives off. Though I don’t know how reliable my gaydar is, especially when we’re a couple of centuries away. But the point is I’m getting a lot out of looking at the painting, so who cares if it’s really by Rembrandt?”

  “Well, I don’t,” I said. “Why should I? It’s not as if I was planning on stealing it.”

  That was Thursday, and now it was Tuesday, and while it was overcast the rain was supposed to hold off until after midnight. It would rain all day Wednesday, according to the weather guy on Channel Seven, with what they called the exclusive Acu-Weather Forecast, although I’ve never been able to figure out what’s exclusive about something available to everybody with a television set.

  Never mind. The Galtonbrook closed on Wednesdays, so I wouldn’t be going then rain or shine. And I liked the idea of paying a visit the day before a closed day. They’d be unlikely to miss what I intended to take. Their Rembrandt, genuine or not, was safe, and so was everything else hanging on a wall or poised on a plinth.

  Even so, I didn’t see how a buffer day after my visit could do any harm.

  So I’d left my apartment that morning with felonious intentions, and one trouser pocket contained a little ring of small steel implements that the law regards as burglar’s tools, the mere possession of which is a crime. It’s no crime to carry a plastic grocery bag from D’Agostino’s, or for that bag to contain a baseball cap and a sport shirt and a pair of sunglasses, but they had roles to play in the crime I was planning to commit.

  It was around three when I brought my bargain table inside, gave Raffles fresh water, and locked up and left. I was carrying the plastic bag again, and of course the burglar’s tools had never left the burglar’s pocket.

  Barnegat Books is on East Eleventh Street between University Place and Broadway, and the Galtonbrook is on Fort Washington Avenue, in Washington Heights or Inwood, depending on which realtor is hustling you. The best way to get there is by helicopter, and you could probably land one on the museum’s flat roof, but I took the L train across Fourteenth Street and the A train uptown to 190th Street.

  That put me three blocks from the museum, and I walked a block in the wrong direction looking for a place to change. Telephone booths worked for Clark Kent, but when’s the last time you saw one? When the counterman in a Dominican bodega said the bathroom was for customers only, I dug out a dollar and helped myself to a copy of El Diário. He rolled his eyes—they all learn that the minute their planes touch down at JFK—and pointed to a door along the rear wall.

  I’d gone to work that morning wearing pressed khakis and a T-shirt from the Gap, originally black but laundered over the years to an agreeable dark gray. The shirt I’d brought along was Hawaiian in style, although I’d guess that this particular specimen had made the trip from a sweatshop in Bangladesh without getting anywhere near Waikiki. There were parrots on it, and you could almost make out what they were saying.

  The bathroom was tiny, but roomier than a phone booth. I put the parrot shirt on over my T-shirt. It wasn’t exactly a disguise, in that anyone who knew me would recognize me right away. “Why, there’s Bernie Rhodenbarr,” such a person would remark. “But what on earth is he doing in that frightful shirt?”

  But I hadn’t chosen the shirt in the hope of deluding an acquaintance, and didn’t expect to encounter one in the first place. The parrots were for the benefit of strangers. The shirt would catch the eye, and they’d notice it instead of paying attention to the sartorially-challenged chap who was wearing it.

  I put on the sunglasses and the baseball cap—blue, with the Mets logo in orange—and I left the bodega without glancing at the proprietor. If he was rolling his eyes again, I didn’t have to know about it. I was still carrying the D’Ag bag, but all it held n
ow was my El Diário, and I’d already gotten my dollar’s worth of use out of it. I headed back the way I’d come, dropping the paper in a trash can en route to the Galtonbrook.

  I recognized the woman who took my five dollars, and for a moment I expected her to recognize me. “Oh, it’s you again. Love your shirt, but what happened to your little friend with the lesbian haircut?” But all she did was thank me and give me a receipt.

  I walked around, pausing for another long look at the putative Rembrandt. The museum was even less crowded than Carolyn and I had found it, but I began to get the feeling that the handful of visitors were taking undue notice of me. The shirt was supposed to draw the eye, but not to hold it. A glance, a shrug, and a glance in another direction—that was what I’d had in mind.

  Maybe it wasn’t the shirt. Was I wearing a Mets cap in Yankee territory? Even if I was, that might draw a hostile stare in the street or the schoolyard, but not in this temple of culture.

  Oh, hell. The sunglasses. It wasn’t even a sunny day, but that was beside the point, because what kind of clueless clown wears sunglasses in a museum? No wonder Rembrandt’s sneering subject looked more somber than I remembered.

  If the shirt was for people to notice, the cap and the shades were for the benefit of the security cameras. They’d help conceal my face, so that I’d look anonymous and unidentifiable to anyone reviewing the tapes. But if they drew all this attention before the fact . . .

  To my left, a woman of a certain age kept her eyes on the portrait, and I could feel her determination not to look at me. If there’s one thing every New Yorker learns early on, it’s not to make eye contact with a lunatic, and that can be especially challenging when you can’t see the lunatic’s eyes, because his madness has led him to conceal them behind dark glasses.

  Retinitis pigmentosa, I thought. I’ll say that’s what I’ve got, it’s genetic, it makes you abnormally light-sensitive, and eventually it’ll lead to blindness, so I want to see every Rembrandt I can in the time that’s left to me, and—