Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who liked to Quote Kipling

This evening’s convocation was not quite what I’d had in mind. No one was snarling in iambs or trochees. Kafka’s name had not come up. The store had already had more publicity than it needed. And I didn’t expect to meet any girls.

The only one on hand, Carolyn, was perched on the high stool I used for fetching the loftier volumes from the loftier shelves. She sat off to one side, while the rest of my guests were strung out in an irregular half-circle facing the sales counter. I myself was standing behind the counter; I didn’t have a chair to sit on because the one I usually kept behind the counter was occupied at the moment by Prescott Demarest.

See, my place was a bookstore, not a library. There weren’t enough chairs to go around. The Maharajah of Ranchipur had the best seat in the house, a swivel-based oak armchair from my office in back. Atman Singh, his spine like a ramrod, sat upon an upended wooden packing case that had held Rome Beauty apples sometime in the dim past before Mr. Litzauer used it to store surplus stock. Rudyard Whelkin had a folding chair Carolyn had brought over from the Poodle Factory.

I hadn’t introduced anyone to anyone else, nor had any of them seen fit to offer small talk about football or the weather or crime in the streets. They’d arrived not in a body but all within a fairly brief span of time, and they’d remained remarkably silent until I did my suppose-you’re-wondering number. Even then, all I got was a bunch of sharp stares.

“Actually,” I went on, “you all know why I summoned you here. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come. We’re here to discuss a book and a murder.”

A hush didn’t fall over the room. You can’t have everything.

“The murder,” I went on, “was that of Madeleine Porlock. She was shot the day before yesterday in her apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street. The killer shot her once in the forehead, using a.32-caliber automatic pistol. The gun was a Marley Devil Dog, and the killer left it at the scene of the crime. He also left me at the scene of the crime, unconscious, with the murder gun in my hand.”

The Maharajah frowned in thought. “You are saying you did not kill the woman.”

“I am indeed. I was there to deliver a book. I was supposed to get paid for the book. Instead I got drugged and framed, drugged by Miss Porlock and framed by the man who killed her. But”-I smiled brightly-“I still have the book.”

I also had their attention. While they watched, silent as stones, I reached under the counter and came up with The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow . I flipped it open at random and read:

“Old Eisenberg was a crafty cod

With the cunning of his breed,

And he ate a piece of honey cake

And he drank a glass of mead,

And he wiped his lips and his fingertips

While he swore a solemn oath

That if they should go by Fort Bucklow

They’d perish-not one but both.”

I closed the book. “Horrid last line,” I said. “Bad verse is when you can tell which line is there to rhyme with the other, and the whole book’s like that. But it didn’t become the object of our attention because of its literary merits. It’s unique, you see. One of a kind. A pearl beyond price, a published work of Kipling’s of which only one copy exists. And this is it, right here.”

I set the book on the counter. “At the time I agreed to steal this book,” I went on, “it was in the personal library of a gentleman named Jesse Arkwright. I was reliably informed that he had acquired it by private negotiation with the heirs of Lord Ponsonby, who withdrew it from a scheduled auction and sold it to him.” I fixed my gaze on Rudyard Whelkin. “There may have been a Lord Ponsonby,” I said. “There may still be a Lord Ponsonby. But that is not how Jesse Arkwright got his copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow .”

Demarest asked how he’d got it.

“He bought it,” I said, “from the very man who engaged me to steal it back. The arrangements for the original sale were worked out by Madeleine Porlock.”

The Maharajah wanted to know how she came into it.

“She was Arkwright’s mistress,” I told him. “She was also a lifelong acquaintance of my client, who told her that he’d come into possession of an exceedingly desirable book. She in turn remarked that a friend of hers-one might almost say client -was a passionate collector with an enthusiasm for books. It only remained to bring buyer and seller together.”

“And the sale went through?” Demarest seemed puzzled. “Then why would the seller want to steal the book back? Just because of its value?”

“No,” I said. “Because of its lack of value.”

“Then it is counterfeit,” said the Maharajah.

“No. It’s quite genuine.”

“Then…”

“I wondered about that,” I said. “I tried to figure out a way that the book could be a phony. It could be done, of course. First you’d have to find someone to write thirty-two hundred lines of doggerel in a fair approximation of Kipling’s style. Then you’d have to find a printer to hand-set the thing, and he’d need a stock of fifty-year-old paper to run it off on. Maybe you could use fresh stock and fake it, but”-I tapped the book-“that wasn’t done here. I handle books every day and I know old paper. It looks and feels and smells different.

“But even if you had the paper, and if you could print the thing and have it bound and then distress it in a subtle fashion so that it looked well-preserved, how could you come out ahead on the deal? Maybe, if you found the absolutely right buyer, you could get a five-figure price for it. But you’d have about that much invested in the book by then, so where’s your profit?”

“If the book is genuine,” the Maharajah said, “how can it be worthless?”

“It’s not literally worthless. The day after I stole it, a gentleman tried to take it from me at gunpoint. As luck would have it”-I smiled benignly at Atman Singh-“he selected the wrong book by mistake. But he tried to placate me by giving me five hundred dollars, and coincidentally enough, that’s a fair approximation of the book’s true value. It might even be worth a thousand to the right buyer and after the right sort of build-up, but it’s certainly not worth more than that.”

“Hey, c’mon, Bern.” It was Carolyn piping up from the crow’s nest. “I feel like I missed a few frames, and I was around for most of it. If it’s supposed to be worth a fortune, and it’s not a phony, why’s it only worth five hundred or a thousand?”

“Because it’s genuine,” I said. “But it’s not unique. Kipling had the book privately printed in 1923 in a small edition. That much was true. What wasn’t true was the appealing story about his incinerating every copy but one. There are quite a few copies in existence.”

“Interesting thought,” Prescott Demarest said. He was dressed as he’d been when Carolyn took his picture, but then I’d simply been able to see that he was wearing a dark suit. Now I could see that it was navy blue, with a muted stripe that had been invisible in the photograph. He straightened in my chair now. “So the book’s one of many,” he said. “How do you know that, Rhodenbarr?”

“How did I find it out?” It wasn’t quite the question he’d asked but it was one I felt like answering. “I stole a copy from Jesse Arkwright’s house Wednesday night. Thursday I delivered that copy to Madeleine Porlock’s apartment. I was drugged and the book was gone when I came to. Then last night I returned to the Porlock apartment”-gratifying, the way their eyes widened-“and found The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow in a shoe box in the closet.

“But it wasn’t the same copy. I figured it was possible that she could have stowed the book in the closet before admitting her killer to the apartment. But wouldn’t he look for the book before he left? Wouldn’t he have held the gun on her and made her deliver it before shooting her? He’d taken the trouble to scoop up five hundred dollars of my money before he left. Either he or Porlock took the money out of my back pocket, and if she took it, then he must have taken it from her himself, because it wasn’t there to be found.” The cops could have taken it, I thought, but why muddy the waters by suggesting that possibility?