The Burglar in the Rye Read online

  The Burglar in the Rye

  LAWRENCE BLOCK

  this one’s for Joe Pittman

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER One

  The lobby was a bit the worse for wear. The…

  CHAPTER Two

  The business is Barnegat Books, an antiquarian bookstore on East…

  CHAPTER Three

  Since I’d missed lunch, you could say that I’d had…

  CHAPTER Four

  The Paddington had a single stairwell, and the fire door…

  CHAPTER Five

  I didn’t bide my time on the fire escape. I…

  CHAPTER Six

  I suppose I should begin at the beginning. It started…

  CHAPTER Seven

  “So this is rye,” Carolyn said. “It tastes a little…

  CHAPTER Eight

  Gulliver Fairborn would have hated it.

  CHAPTER Nine

  It was Ray Kirschmann, wearing a dark blue suit and…

  CHAPTER Ten

  “Whatever you’re doin’,” she growled, “keep doin’ it. Words of…

  CHAPTER Eleven

  “Kessler’s Maryland Rye Whiskey,” Martin Gilmartin pronounced, holding his glass…

  CHAPTER Twelve

  “The cat uses the toilet,” Henry Walden said. “But of…

  CHAPTER Thirteen

  I woke up eight hours later, well rested, glad to…

  CHAPTER Fourteen

  But by then I was standing in the bathtub, cowering…

  CHAPTER Fifteen

  Remarkably enough, I was open for business a few minutes…

  CHAPTER Sixteen

  In the time I was gone, Henry had made a…

  CHAPTER Seventeen

  “A dead woman,” I said.

  CHAPTER Eighteen

  It was getting on for nine that night by the…

  CHAPTER Nineteen

  Ray Kirschmann scratched his head. “I dunno,” he said. “Them’s…

  CHAPTER Twenty

  Isis Gauthier’s room was a lot nicer than mine. It…

  CHAPTER Twenty-one

  Everyone looked at Carl Pillsbury, and I have to hand…

  CHAPTER Twenty-two

  “Bernie,” she said, as if she’d just been stabbed in…

  CHAPTER Twenty-three

  I have to say the fresh air was welcome. Isis…

  CHAPTER Twenty-four

  Some days later I was in the bookstore, tossing balls…

  CHAPTER Twenty-five

  “I don’t know, Bern,” Carolyn said. “I’m confused.”

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Lawrence Block

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The author is pleased to acknowledge his gratitude to the crew and passengers of the clipper ship Star Flyer, where much of the writing of this book was done en route from Phuket to Athens.

  CHAPTER

  One

  The lobby was a bit the worse for wear. The large oriental carpet had seen better days, lots of them. The facing Lawson sofas sagged invitingly and, like the rest of the furniture, showed the effects of long use. They were in use now; two women sat in animated conversation, and, a few yards away, a man with a long oval face and a high forehead sat reading a copy of GQ. He wore sunglasses, which made him look dapper and sly. I don’t know how they made the magazine look. Dark, I suppose.

  While the lobby may have been the least bit down at the heels, the overall impression was not so much of shabbiness as of comfort. The glow of a fire in the fireplace, a welcome sight on a brisk October day, put everything in the best possible light. And, centered above the fireplace mantel, painted with such œil-tromping realism you wanted to reach out and pick him up and hug him, was the hotel’s namesake.

  He was a bear, of course, but not the sort whose predilection for sylvan defecation is as proverbial as the Holy Father’s Catholicism. This bear, one saw at a glance, had never been to the woods, let alone behaved irresponsibly there. He was wearing a little red jacket, and he had a floppy royal blue rain hat on his head, and his legs ended in a pair of Wellington boots the color of a canary, and every bit as cheerful. He was perched on a shelf between a battered Gladstone grip and a shopping bag from Harrods, and a stenciled sign overhead proclaimed, “Left Luggage,” and…

  But I don’t need to go on, do I? If you didn’t have such a bear yourself, surely you knew someone who did. For this was Paddington Bear himself, and who else should it be? Who better to grace the lobby of the legendary Paddington Hotel?

  And legendary was the word for it. The Paddington, seven stories of red brick and black ironwork, stands at the corner of Madison Avenue and East Twenty-fifth Street, across from Madison Square and not far from the site of Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden. (That was the second Madison Square Garden, as opposed to Garden #3, the one your father remembers at Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, or the current entry, Garden #4, above Penn Station. White’s Garden was an architectural masterpiece, but then so was the original Penn Station. Sic transit damn near everything.)

  But not the Paddington, which had gone up before the Garden and had lived to tell the tale. Built around the turn of the century, it had watched the neighborhood (and the city, and the world) reinvent itself continually over the years. For all that, the old hotel remained essentially the same. It had never been terribly grand, had always had more permanent residents than transient guests, and had from its earliest days drawn persons in the arts. Brass plaques flanking the entrance recorded some of the Paddington’s more prominent tenants, including the writers Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser and the Shakespearean actor Reginald French. John Steinbeck had spent a month there during a period of marital disharmony, and Robert Henri, the Ashcan School artist, had stayed at the Paddington before relocating a few blocks south and east at Gramercy Park.

  More recently, the hotel had drawn touring British rock stars, who seemed less inclined to destroy rooms here than in other American hotels, either out of respect for its traditions or from a sense that the damage they did might go unnoticed. Two of them had died on the premises, one murdered by a drifter he’d brought back to his room, the other more conventionally of a heroin overdose.

  Classical music was represented as well, by at least two of the permanent residents, and the occasional performer on tour. An octogenarian pianist, Alfred Hertel, whose annual Christmas concert at Carnegie Hall was always sold out, had occupied an apartment on the top floor for over forty years. At the opposite end of the same floor lived the aging diva Sonia Brigandi, whose legendary temperament survived the decline of her legendary soprano voice. Once in a while one or both of them would leave their doors open, and one would play what the other would sing, thrilling (or annoying) the other residents with something from Puccini or Verdi or Wagner.

  Other than that they didn’t speak. Rumors abounded—that they’d had an affair, that they’d been rivals for some other tenant’s affections. He was said to be gay, although he’d been married twice and had children and grandchildren. She had never married and was said to have had lovers of both sexes. And both of them were supposed to have slept with Edgar Lee Horvath, who’d never slept with anyone. Except for his bears, of course.

  It was Horvath, the founder of Pop Realism, who had painted the Paddington Bear over the lobby fireplace. He’d taken rooms in the hotel in the mid-sixties, shortly after the success of his first one-man show, and had lived there until his death in 1979. The painting had been a gift to the hotel, given early in his stay, and, with the sharp increase in value of Horvath’s works since his death, it was probably worth close to a million dollars. And there it was, hanging right
there in plain sight, in an essentially unguarded lobby.

  Of course a person would have to be crazy to steal it. Edgar Horvath had painted a whole series of teddy bears, from bedraggled early Stieff creations to contemporary plush creatures, and a teddy bear of one sort or another was invariably present in his portraits and landscapes and interiors. His desert landscapes, done during a brief stay in Taos, show bears sprawled at the foot of an enormous cactus, or straddling a fence rail, or propped up against an adobe wall.

  But, as far as anyone knew, he’d only painted Paddington once. And that painting hung famously in the hotel’s famously threadbare lobby. It was there for the taking, but so what? If you hooked that painting, how and to whom would you sell it?

  I knew all that. But old habits die hard, and I’ve never been able to look at something of great value without trying to figure out a way to rescue it from its rightful owner. The painting was in a massive frame of gilded wood, and I pondered the relative merits of cutting it out of its frame as opposed to lifting it, frame and all.

  I was busy contemplating grand larceny when the desk clerk asked if he could help me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was looking at the painting.”

  “Our mascot,” he said. He was a man about fifty, wearing a dark green silk shirt with a flowing collar and a string tie with a turquoise slide. His hair was Just for Men black, and his sideburns were longer than fashion would have them. He was clean-shaven, but he looked as though he ought to have a mustache, and as though it ought to be waxed.

  “Poor Eddie Horvath painted him,” he said. “Such a loss when he died, and so ironic.”

  “He died in a restaurant, didn’t he?”

  “Right around the corner. Eddie had the world’s worst diet, he lived on cheeseburgers and Coca-Cola and Hostess cupcakes. And then some doctor convinced him to change his ways, and overnight he became a health-food fanatic.”

  “And it didn’t agree with him?”

  “I didn’t notice any difference,” he said, “except that he became a bit of a bore on the subject, as converts will do in the early days of their conversion. I’m sure he’d have outgrown it, but he never had the chance. He died at the dinner table, choked to death on a piece of tofu.”

  “How awful.”

  “Awful enough to eat it,” he said. “Hideous to die of it. But Eddie’s painting linked us forever to Paddington Bear, to the point where people think we’re named for him.”

  “The hotel came first, didn’t it?”

  “By a good many years. Michael Bond’s book about the brave little bear in the Left Luggage isn’t much more than thirty years old, while we go back to the turn of the century. I can’t say for certain if we were named for Paddington Station or its immediate environs. The neighborhood’s not the best in London, I’m sorry to say, but it’s not the worst, either. Cheap hotels and Asian restaurants. The Welsh take rooms there, fresh off the trains that pull into Paddington Station. And there’s a tube stop there as well, but I can’t believe this hotel was named after a tube stop.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t.”

  “And I’m sure you’re terribly polite, letting me natter on this way. Now how may I help you?”

  The nattering had changed the way he sounded, I noted; talking about London had given him an English accent. I told him I had a reservation, and he asked my name.

  “Peter Jeffries,” I said.

  “Jeffries,” he said, thumbing a stack of cards. “I don’t seem to…oh, for heaven’s sake. Someone’s written it down as Jeffrey Peters.”

  I said it was a natural mistake, fairly certain as I spoke that the mistake was mine. I’d somehow managed to screw up my own alias. Inverting the first and last names was a natural consequence of picking an alias consisting of two first names, which in turn is something amateurs tend to do all the time. And that was more dismaying than the mistake itself. For what was I if not a professional? And where was I if I started behaving like an amateur?

  I filled out the card—an address in San Francisco, a departure date three days off—and said I’d be paying cash. Three nights at $155 a night plus tax, and a deposit for the phone, came to somewhere around $575. I counted out six hundreds and the fellow ran a finger over his upper lip, grooming the mustache he didn’t have, and asked me if I would be wanting a bear.

  “A bear?”

  He nodded at a trio of Paddington Bears, perched atop a filing cabinet and looking quite like the bear over the fireplace. “You may think this is all too cute for words,” he said, the English accent gone now, “and perhaps you’d be right. It started after Eddie’s painting brought the hotel a new burst of fame. He collected teddy bears, you know, and after he died his collection brought ridiculous prices at Sotheby’s. A Horvath Collection pedigree is for a bear what a few hours around Jackie O’s neck is for a string of cultured pearls.”

  “And these three bears were his?”

  “On, no, not at all. They’re ours, I’m afraid, purchased by the management from FAO Schwartz or Bears R Us. I don’t really know where we get them. Any guest who wants can have the company of a bear during his stay. There’s no charge.”

  “Really.”

  “You needn’t think it’s sheer altruism on our part. A surprising number of guests decide they’d rather take Paddington home with them than get their deposit back. Not everyone takes a bear upstairs in the first place, but of those who do, few want to give them up.”

  “I’ll take a bear,” I said recklessly.

  “And I’ll take a fifty-dollar deposit, cheerfully refunded on checkout, unless you want him to share your life forever.”

  I counted out a few more bills and he wrote out a receipt and handed over the key to Room 415, then scooped up the trio of Paddingtons and invited me to select one.

  They all looked the same to me, so I did what I do in such circumstances. I took the one on the left.

  “A good choice,” he said, the way the waiter does when you say you’ll have the rack of lamb with new potatoes. What, I often wonder, are the bad choices? If they’re so awful, what are they doing on the menu?

  “He’s a cute little fellow,” I started to say, and in midsentence the cute little fellow slipped out of my arms and landed on the floor. I bent over and came up with him in one hand and a purple envelope in the other. ANTHEA LANDAU, it said, in block capitals, and that was all it said. “This was on the floor,” I told the clerk. “I’m afraid I’ve stepped on it.”

  He curled his lip, then took a Kleenex from a box on the ledge behind the desk and wiped at the mark my shoe had left. “Someone must have left it on the counter,” he said, rubbing briskly, “and someone else must have knocked it off. No harm done.”

  “Paddington seems to have survived the experience.”

  “Oh, he’s a durable chap,” he said. “But I must say you surprised me. I didn’t really think you’d take a bear. I play a little game with myself, trying to guess who will and who won’t, and I ought to give it up because I’m not very good at it. Almost anyone’s apt to take a bear, or not to take a bear. Men on business trips are least likely to be bear people, but they’ll surprise you. There’s one gentleman from Chicago who’s here twice a month for four days at a time. He always has a bear and never takes the little fellow home. And he doesn’t seem to care if it’s the same bear every time. They’re not identical, you know. They vary in size, and in the color of their hats and coats and wellies. Most of the wellies are black, but the pair in the picture are yellow.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Tourists tend to take bears, and to want to keep them as souvenirs. Especially honeymoon couples. Except one couple—the woman wanted to take Paddington home, and the husband wanted his deposit back. I don’t have much hope for that marriage.”

  “Did they keep the bear?”

  “They did, and he’ll probably wind up fighting her for custody of it when they divorce. For most couples, though, it’s never a question. They want the bear. Europ
eans, except for the English, don’t generally take the bears in the first place. Japanese always take bears to their room, sometimes more than one. And they always pay for them and take them home.”

  “And take pictures of them,” I ventured.

  “Oh, you have no idea! Pictures of themselves, holding their bears. Pictures of me, with or without the bears. Pictures of them and their bears on the street in front of the hotel, and posed in front of poor Eddie’s painting, and in their rooms, and in front of the various rooms where some of our more famous guests lived or died. What do you suppose they do with all the pictures? When can they possibly find the time to look at them?”

  “Maybe there’s no film in the camera.”

  “Why, Mr. Peters!” he said. “What a devious mind you have.”

  He had no idea.

  Bear or no bear, Room 415 didn’t look like $155 a night plus tax. The maroon carpet was threadbare, the dresser top scarred here and there by neglected cigarettes, and the one window looked out on an airshaft. And, as any member of the Friars Club would be quick to tell you, the room was so small you had to go out to the hall to change your mind.

  But I hadn’t expected anything different. The Paddington was a great deal for its permanent residents, who paid less for a month in a spacious one-bedroom apartment than a transient paid for a week-long stay in a room like mine. There was, I suppose, a trade-off; the transients paid a premium to bask in the painter-writer-musician glamour of the place, and subsidized the artists who lived there year-round and provided the glamour.

  I wasn’t too sure how the little chap in the floppy blue hat fit into the equation. Charming or twee, as you prefer, it made good marketing sense, giving the hotel a human (well, ursine) face while constituting a small profit center in its own right. If half the guests took bears, and if half of those decided they couldn’t part with their bears, and if the per-bear markup was a conservative fifty percent, well, it would come to enough annually to pay the light bill, or a good chunk of it, anyway. Enough, at the very least, to make the operation cost-effective.