The Burglar in Short Order Page 10

  “When I sell somebody a book,” Bernie said, “I’m under no obligation to tell the buyer who owned it last.”

  “Sometimes you don’t have to,” Carolyn pointed out. “If there’s a book-plate. Or if it’s from a library.”

  “Any ex-library copy in this store,” he said icily, “is stamped WITHDRAWN.”

  I didn’t ask him where he kept the stamp. “Some people would argue that real estate’s a little different,” I said. “Nobody lives in a book.”

  “Oh?”

  “If you were going to buy a house,” I said, “or move into an apartment, wouldn’t you want to know if something horrible happened there?”

  “This is New York,” he said. “Something horrible’s happened everywhere.”

  “It’s true,” Carolyn said. “This store, for instance. Remember when we found the dead guy in the john?”

  “Edwin Turnquist. A guy named Jacobi killed him and left him there.”

  “And then we put him in a wheelchair and left him over by the river,” Carolyn recalled. “It was sort of like a granny-dumping, except he was already dead. And how about the carriage house on West 18th where Wanda Colcannon was murdered? Or Abel Crowe’s place on Riverside Drive, where the podiatrist killed him?”

  “Or East 67th Street, where J. Francis Flaxford was bludgeoned,” he said. “Or Gramercy Park, where Crystal Sheldrake was stabbed with one of her husband’s dental scalpels. Or the Nugents’ apartment on West End, where I found Luke Santangelo dead in the bathtub. Or Gordon Onderdonk’s apartment at the Charlemagne, or Hugo Candlemas’s floorthrough at 76th and Lex.”

  “Remember Walter Grabow, Bernie? Killed right in your apartment.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” he said. “But that’s the point, isn’t it? Even ordinary people like us can point to residences all over town where violent scenes have taken place.”

  “Like the argument I had with Randy Messinger at my place on Arbor Court,” she said. “We were yelling at the top of our lungs.” She shuddered at the memory. “But you’re right, and think of the other murder sites we know about. The hotel where Kim Dakkinen was chopped to bits with a machete in Eight Million Ways to Die. The Bethune Street apartment where Wendy Hanniford was knifed in The Sins of the Fathers. The house in Sunset Park where Kenan Khoury caught up with his wife’s killer.”

  “And what about the arena in Maspeth, where Matt and Mick Ballou faced off against Borden and Olga Stettner?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Those are all books about Matthew Scudder. They’re novels.”

  “So?”

  “They’re fiction,” I said. “Don’t you know the difference?”

  He shrugged. “Does anybody? Besides, this is New York. Everybody knows New York’s not about fact or fiction. New York’s about real estate. The facts don’t matter.”

  “Then what does?”

  Raffles the Cat leapt gracefully, demolishing a fictional mouse.

  “Three things,” my larcenous friend said. “Location, location and location.”

  Five Books Bernie has Read More Than Once

  I get to do a lot of reading on the job. (No, not the job that involves breaking and entering. I’m talking about my day job, selling pre-owned works of literature at Barnegat Books on East Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village.) Far too many of those diurnal hours are spent with only my cat for company, so I usually have a book at hand when I’m otherwise unoccupied behind the counter.

  Much of the time, it’s a book I’ve read before, and sometimes more than once. There’s a great comfort in settling down with a novel I know I’ll enjoy—because I’ve already done so. But not every book that’s a pleasure the first time around is going to wear well on a second visit.

  Here are five—now how did I come up with that number?—that never let me down:

  1. The Parker series, by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark. The University of Chicago Press has just reissued the complete series in trade paperback, and that’s a good thing, because my own copies have fallen apart from frequent rereading. Do I like Parker because he’s a thief? Well, I’m sure that’s part of his charm, but I just plain like the way Parker thinks and acts and reacts, and the way Richard Stark writes.

  Westlake wrote another wonderful series about a gang of criminals led by a remarkably hapless chap named John Dortmunder, and those are wonderful, too, but I don’t find myself returning to them the same way. The Parker books are self-contained, but it’s best to start with The Hunter (the basis for the great Lee Marvin film Point Blank) and read them in order. Of course, when you’re rereading, you’ve been here before—so you can feel free to skip around.

  2. Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French. Flanagan wrote three wonderful historical novels set in Ireland. This one takes place in 1798, when Ireland rose in revolt—in Wexford (“But the gold sun of freedom grew darkened at Ross / And it set by the Slaney’s red waves / And poor Wexford, stripped naked, hung high on the cross / With her heart pierced by traitors and slaves. / Glory-o Glory-o for the bold men who died / For the sake of long downtrodden man! / Glory-o to Mount Leinster’s own darlin’ and pride / Dauntless Kelly, the boy from Killane!”) and Dublin and in the West. (“So here’s to the gallant old West / Where hearts are the bravest and best / When Ireland lay broken in Wexford / Hurrah for the men of the West!”)

  I only like historical fiction when it’s wonderful, and this one is. As with the greatest tragedy, one keeps revisiting it in the hope that this time round it’ll have a happy ending. But, as Elaine Scudder observed of La Boheme, “She always dies. How many times have I seen that opera? Mimi dies every @#$%^!! time.” Parts Two and Three of the trilogy, The Tenants of Time and The End of the Hunt, are also great books, but not as easy to get into.

  3. The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis. There are books that are not mysteries, not genre fiction in any sense, yet they have a strong following among people who read mysteries. The late Carol Bremer of Murder Ink had a section of non-mysteries she recommended to readers. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe was one I recall finding there, and this wonderful novel was another.

  The heroine is a chess prodigy, and the drama’s conducted largely over a chessboard, and you don’t have to know a knight and a bishop from Adam’s off ox in order to find every page gripping and engrossing. I’ve read it several times and am about ready to read it again.

  4. John Sandford’s books about Lucas Davenport are a richer experience the second time around. They’re so riveting, so suspenseful, that my only interest the first time around is to see what happens next. So I tear through the book and love it, but I miss a lot—and the books are sufficiently textured to make a second look rewarding. I was well into the series before I could begin to tell Davenport’s fellow cops apart, or care which one of them was riding shotgun.

  A year or so ago I reread the whole series, starting with Rules of Prey, and the books were still riveting (especially the two about Clara Rinker, who can park her shoes under this burglar’s bed anytime she wants to). But they were richer, too, and I got a lot more out of them. During The Burglar on the Prowl I was reading the one about a disillusioned ex-vegetarian Congregationalist minister making his brutal way around Minnesota, slaughtering prominent vegans and organic farmers, butchering them, and eating their livers. Have you read that one yet? Carolyn liked the title, too: Lettuce Prey.

  5. Some of you have noticed that I don’t look a day older than I did at my debut 36 years ago in Burglars Can’t Be Choosers. That’s one of the joys of being a fictional character. You get to be the same age forever. (Unless the person chronicling your existence is the kind of killjoy who insists on aging you in real time. That’s what happened to Matthew Scudder, the poor bastard.) But not I, and not either of Agatha Christie’s brightest stars, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple.

  Poirot was an elderly retired Belgian detective in his (and Dame Agatha’s) debut in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, back in 1920; when his curtain came down wi
th Curtain in 1975, well, he wasn’t any younger, but he wasn’t any older either.

  And the same can be said for Miss Marple, who like Poirot starred in a long run of superbly crafted mysteries. I think I’ve read them all, and I’ve read many of them more than once, especially the Marples, because I find her continually interesting. I always found Poirot to be a stick festooned with mannerisms, and I find it astonishing that someone’s going to revive Poirot and write a new novel about him. Why, for the love of Dieu? Without Christie’s plotting, what would you have? Marple’s different, but even so, I don’t see much point in bringing her back. If you want to revive somebody, figure out a way to bring Agatha Christie back to life. Failing that, reread the books. There’s always a good supply of them at Barnegat Books.

  A Burglar’s Complaint

  So I took the subway to Union Square and walked a couple of blocks to a storefront on East Eleventh Street, where a tailless cat dozed in the window. Inside I found Bernie Rhodenbarr perched on a stool behind the counter, reading the latest Wallace Stroby novel.

  “It’s about Crissa Stone,” my favorite bookseller announced. “A professional thief. Sort of like Richard Stark’s Parker, but without a Y chromosome. I’ll tell you, it makes me miss the old days.”

  “When men were men?”

  “When it was possible for an enterprising individual to make money the old-fashioned way.”

  “By working for it?”

  He shook his head. “By stealing it. And I’m not talking about computer crime and identity theft and all of that sneaky cyber-stuff. I mean leaving one’s own house and letting oneself into somebody else’s. I mean breaking and entering—and then exiting, richer than when you entered. I mean picking locks and jimmying doors and outfoxing doormen and elevator operators.”

  “You mean burglary.”

  “Once,” he said, “it was a profession. A morally reprehensible one, I’ll grant you, but one with a set of standards and a code of ethics and a steep learning curve, designed to separate the sheep from the goats, the ribbon from the clerks, and the fool from his money. And what is it now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.”

  “A fool’s errand,” he said. “I have two trades, burglary and bookselling. That’s two sets of footprints in the sands of time, and I wouldn’t encourage any son of mine to follow in either of them.”

  “You don’t have a son,” I pointed out.

  “And a good thing,” he said, “because what kind of a role model would I be? Two careers, and both of them victims of the Twenty-first Century.”

  “Oh?”

  “Nobody buys books anymore,” he said. “For that I blame technology, whether you call it ebooks or the Internet.”

  “People still steal,” I said.

  “And get caught, because you can’t walk a block without getting your picture taken half a dozen times. There are security cameras everywhere, up and down every street and inside of most large buildings. Do you know what I did last Thursday?”

  “No idea.”

  “Well, you would,” he said, “if you looked at the right tapes. I went to an address in the East Sixties, where a supermodel whose name you would recognize uses a dresser drawer for what ought to be in a safe-deposit box.”

  “Jewelry?”

  “Her building’s a brownstone,” he said, “so there’s no doorman, no on-site security people. And she was in St. Croix, shooting a spread for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, so the house was empty.”

  “Except for her jewelry.”

  “And other valuables. I went there and I stood out in front of her building. I was close enough to see the lock on the front door, and I figured it would take me about thirty seconds to pick it. I waited while the sky darkened, and the programmed lights went on in some of the rooms.” He sighed. “I had a brown paper bag in my pocket.”

  “To hold the loot?”

  “To pull over my head. I’d already cut eye holes in the thing.”

  “So the cameras wouldn’t trip you up.”

  “But what good would it do? They’d check cameras on the street, and find images of me before I put the bag over my head. Or, even if I got out of a cab with my head already in the bag, there’d be footage from the day before, when I cased the site. So I walked home.”

  “You walked?”

  “Through Central Park. It’s a pleasant route, but there may have been security cameras in the trees, taking note of my presence. If so, there’s probably a picture of me taking the paper bag out of my pocket and dropping it in a trashcan.”

  “At least you didn’t litter.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” he said. “Not these days, in this city.” In the window, his cat stretched and yawned. “Smile, Raffles,” he told it. “For the camera.”

  The Burglar Takes a Cat

  Look, it wasn’t my idea.

  And it happened very quickly. One day back in early June Carolyn brought pastrami sandwiches and celery tonic to the bookstore, and I showed her a couple of books, an Ellen Glasgow novel and the collected letters of Evelyn Waugh. She took a look at the spines and made a sound somewhere between a tssst and a cluck. “You know what did that,” she said.

  “I have a haunting suspicion.”

  “Mice, Bern.”

  “That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.”

  “Rodents,” she said. “Vermin. You can throw those books right in the garbage.”

  “Maybe I should keep them. Maybe they’ll eat these and leave the others alone.”

  “Maybe you should leave a quarter under your pillow,” she said, “and the Tooth Fairy’ll come in the middle of the night and chew their heads off.”

  “That doesn’t seem very realistic, Carolyn.”

  “No,” she said. “It doesn’t. Bern, you wait right here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I won’t be long,” she said. “Don’t eat my sandwich.”

  “I won’t, but—”

  “And don’t leave it where the mice can get it, either.”

  “Mouse,” I said. “There’s no reason to assume there’s more than one.”

  “Bern,” she said, “take my word for it. There’s no such thing as one mouse.”

  I might have figured out what she was up to, but I opened the Waugh volume while I knocked off the rest of my own sandwich, and one letter led to another. I was still at it when the door opened and there she was, back again. She was holding one of those little cardboard satchels with air holes, the kind shaped like a New England salt box house.

  The sort of thing you carry cats in.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “Bern, give me a minute, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Bern, you’ve got mice. Your shop is infested with rodents. Do you know what that means?”

  “It doesn’t mean I’m going to be infested with cats.”

  “Not cats,” she said. “There’s no such thing as one mouse. There is such a thing as one cat. That’s all I’ve got in here, Bern. One cat.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “You came in here with one cat, and you can leave with one cat. It makes it easy to keep track that way.”

  “You can’t just live with the mice. They’ll do thousands of dollars worth of damage. They won’t sit back and settle down with one volume and read it from cover to cover, you know. No, it’s a bite here and a bite there, and before you know it you’re out of business.”

  “Don’t you think you’re overdoing it?”

  “No way. Bern, remember the Great Library at Alexandria? One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and then a single mouse got in there.”

  “I thought you said there was no such thing as a single mouse.”

  “Well, now there’s no such thing as the Great Library at Alexandria, and all because the pharaoh’s head librarian didn’t have the good sense to keep a cat.”

  “There are other ways to get ri
d of mice,” I said.

  “Name one.”

  “Poison.”

  “Bad idea, Bern.”

  “What’s so bad about it?”

  “Forget the cruelty aspect of it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s forgotten.”

  “Forget the horror of gobbling down something with Warfarin in it and having all your little blood vessels burst. Forget the hideous spectre of one of God’s own little warmblooded creatures dying a slow agonizing death from internal bleeding. Forget all that, Bern. If you possibly can.”

  “All forgotten. The memory tape’s a blank.”

  “Instead, focus on the idea of dozens of mice dying in the walls around you, where you can’t see them or get at them.”

  “Ah, well. Out of sight, out of mind. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “Nobody ever said it about dead mice. You’ll have a store with hundreds of them decomposing in the walls.”

  “Hundreds?”

  “God knows the actual number. The poisoned bait’s designed to draw them from all over the area. You could have mice scurrying here from miles around, mice from SoHo to Kips Bay, all of them coming here to die.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Maybe I’m exaggerating a tiny bit,” she allowed. “But all you need is one dead mouse in the wall and you’re gonna smell a rat, Bern.”

  “A mouse, you mean.”

  “You know what I mean. And maybe your customers won’t exactly cross the street to avoid walking past the store—”

  “Some of them do that already.”

  “—but they won’t be too happy spending time in a shop with a bad odor to it. They might drop in for a minute, but they won’t browse. No book lover wants to stand around smelling rotting mice.”

  “Traps,” I suggested.

  “Traps? You want to set mousetraps?”