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

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Well, evidently he’d been quite ill for some time, and when the end finally came it was a mercy. But she was calling because he’d told her that I was the person to turn to when the time came to sell his books. He’d assured her that I was a decent and knowledgeable dealer who’d give her a fair price.”

  “That must have made you feel good.”

  “It did, and the prospect of acquiring the man’s library was appealing. He’d bought a lot of good books from me, and I could imagine what he’d acquired from other sources over all those years. My store stock’s pretty thin these days, and you can’t sell what you haven’t got, so I was looking forward to adding his books to my shelves.”

  “What happened?”

  “I made an appointment,” I said, “and I showed up with a blank check in my wallet, and she was all apologies. Her grandson had come up with the brilliant idea of selling grandpa’s books individually on eBay. He’d list all the titles, and she could help him pack the books to ship to the successful bidders, and he’d schlep them to the post office. And they’d split the money.”

  “And she thought this was a good idea?”

  “I asked if I could see the books,” I said, “and she could hardly say no, and the library was what I’d hoped it would be. I told her it wouldn’t take me more than two hours to come up with a number, and that if she accepted my offer I’d write out a check on the spot and remove all of the books from the premises within a matter of days. And I pointed out that, while her grandson’s enterprise was admirable, it would take months if not years to sell the books online, with many of them remaining unsold forever.”

  “And the shipping costs, Bern. And the bookkeeping, and the aggravation of customers returning books, and—”

  “And all the rest of it. I told her all that.”

  “And she didn’t believe you?”

  “Oh, she believed me. But how could she change her mind now and disappoint her grandson?”

  “Oh.”

  “And what did she care about money, anyway? How important was it, compared to the pleasure of having her grandson come over every day after school?”

  “The two of them working side by side, slipping books into padded mailers.”

  “And attaching the wrong labels, so that they could have even more fun sorting it all out when the customers complained.”

  She frowned. “Bern, this grandson’s a high school kid?”

  “I think she said he was a junior at Stuyvesant.”

  “How long do you figure he’s gonna feel like showing up at grandma’s house every day?”

  “Well, I haven’t met the kid,” I said. “Maybe he’s convinced he’s the next generation’s Jeff Bezos, ready to launch his own version of Amazon. But maybe not, and when the novelty wears off he may lose his taste for online enterprise.”

  “And she’ll still have a house full of books, so she’ll pick up the phone and give you a call.”

  I shook my head. “She’ll pick up the phone,” I agreed, “but she’ll call somebody else. She’ll feel too embarrassed to call me, and she’ll tell herself she already bothered that nice Mr. Rhodenbarr enough. And that’ll be that.”

  So I finished lunch and walked two doors west and opened up again, dragging my bargain table out to the street even as I wondered why I bothered. For that matter, why move the table inside when I closed for lunch? Why not leave it out there on the sidewalk? Anybody who stole a book would be doing me a favor.

  Within the hour the man who called himself Mr. Smith showed up to make me an offer I could have refused. But why would I want to?

  “This book,” he said.

  I’d seen him come in, watched him find his way to Classic Fiction, then turned my attention to Jeffery Deaver, whose latest Lincoln Rhyme novel had turned up in a carton of recent thrillers. The paraplegic hero had just solved everything and saved everybody, but I was still forty-plus pages from the end. So I was bracing myself for the author’s trademark switcheroo, in which one of the good guys would turn out to be the ultimate bad guy. A thoroughly charming character would meet a horrible end, and there’d be a bad moment when I thought Amelia Sachs was dead, but it would turn out that Rhyme was one step ahead of the killer all along, and everything would work out well, and in plenty of time for the next book in the series.

  So I knew what was coming, and I knew too that Deaver would manage to surprise me. So the last thing I wanted now was to have my reading interrupted, and yet at the same time I welcomed the interruption, because that way the book would last longer.

  Oh, never mind.

  “Fitzgerald’s second collection of short fiction,” I said. “Tales of the Jazz Age, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922. A very nice copy, marred only by the signature on the flyleaf of the book’s erstwhile owner.”

  He looked, and read out the name: “Wilma Faulk.”

  “Had it been William Faulkner,” I said, “it would be an association copy, and thus command a premium. A man with a steady hand might find himself tempted. I should point out that it’s a first edition but not the first printing. I meant to include a penciled note to that effect.”

  “You did, just below Miss Faulk’s spidery signature. And you’re quite correct. I checked line six on page 232, and the word in question reads ‘and.’ It appears erroneously as ‘an’ in first printing copies.”

  “You’re a collector.”

  “In a small way.”

  “Then you know how elusive true first printing copies are these days. I’ve seen listings for close to a thousand dollars, and that’s when you can find them.”

  “Actually,” he said, “I own one.”

  “A first printing.”

  “Although I didn’t pay quite that dearly for it.”

  I pointed to the book he was holding. “If it’s the dust jacket that drew you,” I said, “it’s not an original. They’re genuinely impossible to find. This one’s a copy, produced in San Francisco by Mark Terry’s Facsimile Dust Jacket Printshop. The most recent owner, who acquired his copy many years after it left Miss Faulk’s tremulous hands, bought the Terry jacket knowing he could never afford an original. He said it looked just as good on his shelf.”

  “I’m sure it did,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I own an original dust jacket.”

  “You do.”

  “Yes.”

  Well, good for you, I thought, and what are you doing slumming in my store?

  “I have a first of This Side of Paradise,” I said. “Fitzgerald’s first novel, and not an easy book to find. I keep it in back, for safety’s sake. If you’d like a look at it—”

  He shook his head. “I’m not interested in Scott Fitzgerald,” he said.

  “You’re not interested in Fitzgerald.”

  “No, not really. There’s nothing like an early death from alcoholism to enhance a writer’s reputation. Stir in good looks and early success, season with a beautiful wife in the nuthouse, and the result is irresistible.”

  “Juneau Lock,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s nothing. I gather you don’t think The Great Gatsby is—”

  “The Great American novel? No, hardly that. The puzzle of Gatsby is how so many otherwise perceptive people can find so much to admire in it. Do you know why Jay Gatsby is such an enigma? It’s because Fitzgerald himself never had a clue who the fellow was. An arriviste, a parvenu, an upstart if you will, a man who made big money in a hurry and got his hands just a little dirty in the process. Hardly a rarity at the time, and there was a fellow in Boston with a similar story who got his son elected to the White House. Fitzgerald didn’t know what to make of Gatsby, and the literary establishment has responded by enshrining his bafflement. So no, I don’t think much of Gatsby, or your Mr. Fitzgerald.”

  I chose silence as preferable to stammering.

  “Besides the first edition copy, with its original dust jacket, I own as well an inexpensive hardcov
er reprint edition. It bears a different title, and that’s why I added it to my collection. Do you know the title?”

  I didn’t.

  “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Other Stories. Perhaps you’ve seen a copy.”

  “If I have, it was years ago.”

  “But you’ve read the title story?”

  I nodded. “But that was quite some time ago as well. I did see the Brad Pitt film when it came out.”

  The thin lips gave me a thin smile. “Fitzgerald’s agent sold development rights to a producer named Ray Stark,” he said, “who never did figure out how to make it filmable. He died in 2004, and the estate sold the rights to somebody else, and the movie released four years later retained the story’s title and premise and hardly anything else. It was an improvement on the original, but it would almost have had to be. You know where the premise came from?”

  I didn’t.

  “An observation of Mark Twain’s, that the best of life came at the beginning and the worst at the end. Thus Fitzgerald’s conceit that his protagonist should be born an old man who grows younger every year he lives. Fitzgerald was born in 1897, which put him in his early twenties when he wrote the story. Not surprisingly, it reflects the degree of insight and maturity you would expect of a stripling.”

  “You sound—”

  “Contemptuous of the story? Are you a collector, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

  “A collector?”

  “Of anything at all. Books, coins, stamps? Barbie dolls?”

  “No, none of those things. I collected books in a very small way before I bought the bookshop, but you can’t really collect something and deal in it at the same time, so my collection became part of my store stock. I have a wall of books at home, but just for reading and looking things up. They’re dust collectors themselves, but that’s not enough to make them a collection. Where did Barbie dolls come from?”

  “The Mattel Company, I believe. I just mentioned them as something some people collect, but you don’t and neither do I.”

  “A common bond.”

  “Indeed. I collect The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Mr. Rhodenbarr, and not because I’m an extravagant admirer of either that story or its author. Would it be enough to say I have my reasons?”

  “Of course.”

  “I own the books I’ve told you about, and quite a few others besides. The story has been widely anthologized over the years, and of course I haven’t attempted to amass all of them, but I’ve chosen a dozen or so volumes that struck my fancy. Some months before Scribner’s brought out Tales of the Jazz Age, Collier’s Magazine published it. I daresay there are fewer copies around of that issue of Collier’s than there are of the book, but there are also fewer collectors vying for them.”

  “I assume you have a copy.”

  “I own two,” he said. “I bought one in only good condition, with some damage to the front cover. The pages are all there and all undamaged, and James Montgomery Flagg’s illustration of Benjamin as an aged baby is both awful and wonderful. Those two words once had the same meaning, by the way.”

  “I know.”

  “Then I caught wind of a copy in pristine condition, essentially mint, and the price wasn’t that much more than I’d had to give for the one with the coffee stains on the cover. So I bought it, and that’s more copies than anybody needs, so I could probably turn around and sell it. But I wouldn’t get all that much for it, and it’s not as though I need the money.”

  “So why not keep it?”

  “Exactly my thought. It might be different for a collector of, say, steam locomotives. One might not have the room to keep duplicates on hand. But an old magazine doesn’t take up much space.”

  “I don’t suppose it does.”

  “With a highly specialized collection like mine, Mr. Rhodenbarr, space is not a likely problem. But can you guess what is?”

  It didn’t take much thought. “Finding something to buy,” I said.

  “You may not be a collector yourself, sir, but you have ample insight into the complaint. And of course you’re quite correct. I’m told that a shark must keep swimming forward all its life. If it stops, it dies. Do you suppose that’s true?”

  “I don’t know much about sharks.”

  “Had you heard that before? About their need to keep forever advancing? You hadn’t? In that case you now know one thing more about sharks than you did a moment ago. Except that this new kernel of information may not be accurate.”

  “Still, it’ll be something to drop into conversations.”

  “Yes, and hasn’t it already served me admirably in that respect? Still, the collector shares this aspect with the shark, along with a reputation for unthinking rapacity. For how can one maintain interest in a collection if one is no longer able to add to it? And when one’s collecting interest is centered upon a single short story, how can one continue to find new material to collect?”

  How indeed?

  “One finds oneself branching out,” he said. “Do you know Roda Roda?”

  “That’s a name I haven’t heard in years.”

  “You actually know it?”

  “If they’re still around. I’ll tell you, it takes me back to my boyhood days in Ohio. There was this big old weeping willow in the yard next to ours, and its roots would grow into our sewer line. So my mom would call the Roto-Rooter man, and their truck would come by, and they’d do something. Cut out the roots and open the sewer line, I guess, and our drains would stop backing up, at least until the willow tree gathered its strength for another assault.”

  I shook my head at the memory. I remembered the logo on their truck, even as their radio jingle forced itself upon me. “ ‘And away go troubles, down the drain,’ ” I said. “If only. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Roto-Rooter truck. I don’t suppose you get much call for them in New York.”

  The look on his face brought me back.

  “But I don’t suppose you’re talking about the Roto-Rooter man,” I said. “Are you?”

  “Alexander Roda Roda,” I told Carolyn. “He was born in 1872 in an unpronounceable town in Moravia, which is now a part of the Czech Republic, but back then it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family moved to Osijek—”

  “Speaking of unpronounceable towns.”

  “—which seems to be in Croatia now, but used to be in Slavonia. Don’t ask me what happened to Slavonia.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “His name was originally Sandor Friedrich Rosenfeld, but he changed it to Alexander Roda Roda. You’re probably wondering why.”

  “I’m sure the man had his reasons, Bern.”

  “Roda is the Croatian word for stork.”

  “See? I knew there was a good explanation.”

  “Storks nested in the chimney of his house in Osijek. I suppose he wanted to remember them.”

  “I guess there must have been two of them, and he wanted to make sure he remembered them both.”

  “He became a writer,” I said, “and published his first work when he was twenty years old. He wrote plays and stories and novels, but he wrote in German, and as far as I can tell nothing of his was ever published in English. In 1938 he emigrated to the States.”

  “He probably figured changing his name wouldn’t fool the Nazis.”

  “He could have tried writing in the language of his new home,” I said. “That’s what Arthur Koestler did after he wound up in London. But there’s no evidence that Roda Roda made the switch, and it’s possible he was done writing by then. He’d been at it for close to fifty years, and he died in 1945 in New York.”

  “A man named Roda Roda,” she said, “belongs in a city named New York, New York. I can see how he’d be tired of writing by the time he got here, but I guess that means there’s nothing of his that I might have read.”

  “Well, there’s Bummler, Schummler und Rossetummler,” I said. “I like the sound of it, although I realize it would probably lose something in translation. Bu
t that’s not how he got into the conversation.”

  “Oh?”

  “When he was 49, Roda Roda published a short story called Antonius de Padua Findling.”

  “Well, that explains everything, Bern.”

  “It does, actually. The story had the same premise as Fitzgerald’s, with a baby born old and growing younger with the passage of time, and Roda Roda published it a full year before The Curious Case of Benjamin Button appeared in Collier’s.”

  “You think Fitzgerald stole the idea?”

  “I’m sure he never heard of it, or of Roda Roda either. I think both men got more or less the same idea at more or less the same time, and each wrote his story and published it.”

  “You know what they say, Bern. Great minds work alike.”

  “And so do lesser ones. But that sort of thing happens a lot. Everybody knows Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” was the first true detective story.”

  “I bet you’re gonna tell me it wasn’t.”

  “Back in 1827 a guy beat Poe to the punch by several years. His name was Mauritz Christopher Hansen, and unfortunately he made the mistake of writing his story in Norwegian, so nobody paid any attention. He wrote a short novel, too, The Murder of Engineer Roolfsen, and nobody took much notice of that either.”

  “Outside of Norway.”

  “And look how much of the world is outside of Norway. Almost all of it. But back to Roda—”

  “Roda Roda, Bern. But I guess it’s okay to call him Roda for short.”

  “Mr. Smith got ahold of a copy of his story, and paid somebody to translate it for him.”

  (Mr. Smith indeed. “You have the advantage of me,” I’d said at one point. “You evidently know my name, as you’ve used it four times already. But I don’t know yours.” He’d nodded, as if to acknowledge the truth of my observation, thought for a moment, and said, “Smith. You may call me Smith.”)

  “And was Antonius the spitting image of Benjamin Button?”

  “I’m just guessing,” I said, “but I’d say the title refers to St. Anthony of Padua, the fellow you turn to when you can’t remember where you put your reading glasses.”