Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who liked to Quote Kipling

“My copy was all neatly wrapped in brown paper,” I went on. “Now Madeleine Porlock might have unwrapped it before she hid it, just to make sure it wasn’t a reprint copy of Soldiers Three or something equally tacky.” I avoided Atman Singh’s eyes. “If so, what happened to the brown paper? I didn’t see it on the floor when I came to. Granted, I might not have noticed it or much else under the circumstances, but I looked carefully for that paper when I tossed the apartment last night, and it just plain wasn’t there. The killer wouldn’t have taken it and the police would have had no reason to disturb it, so what happened to it? Well, the answer’s clear enough now. It was still fastened around the book when the killer walked off with it. Madeleine Porlock most likely had the wrapped book in her hands when he shot her, and he took it as is.”

“That’s quite a conclusion,” Rudyard Whelkin said. “My boy, it would seem that your only clues were clues of omission. Rather like the dog that didn’t bark, eh? Five hundred missing dollars, a missing piece of brown paper. Rather thin ice, wouldn’t you say?”

“There’s something else.”

“Oh?”

I nodded. “It’s nothing you could call evidence. Pure subjective judgment. I sat up reading that book Wednesday night. I held it in my hands, I turned the pages. Last night I had my hands on it again and it wasn’t the same book. It was inscribed to H. Rider Haggard, same as the copy I stole from Arkwright, but there was something different about it. I once knew a man with a yard full of laying hens. He swore he could tell those birds apart. Well, I can tell books apart. Maybe one had some pages dog-eared or a differently shaped water stain-God knows what. They were different books. And, once I realized that, I had a chance to make sense of the whole business.”

“How?”

“Let’s say, just hypothetically, that someone turned up a carton of four or five dozen books in the storage room of a shuttered printshop in Tunbridge Wells.” I glanced at Whelkin. “Does that sound like a reasonable estimate?”

“It’s your hypothesis, my boy.”

“Call it fifty copies. The entire edition, or all that remains of it, outside of the legendary long-lost copy the author was supposed to have presented to H. Rider Haggard. Now what would those books bring on the market? A few hundred dollars apiece. They’d be legitimate rarities, and Kipling’s becoming something of a hot ticket again, but this particular work is not only a minor effort but distinctly inferior in the bargain. It has curiosity value rather than literary value. The books would still be worth hauling home from the printshop, but suppose they could be hawked one at a time as unique specimens? Suppose each one were furnished with a forged inscription in a fair approximation of Kipling’s handwriting? It’s hard to produce a new book and make it look old, but it’s not too tricky to scribble a new inscription in an old book. I’m sure there are ways to treat ink so that it looks fifty years old, with that iridescence some old inscriptions have.

“So my client did this. He autographed the books or had some artful forger do it for him, and then he began testing the waters, contacting important collectors, perhaps representing the book as stolen merchandise so the purchaser would keep his acquisition to himself. Because the minute anyone called a press conference or presented the book to a university library, the game was up. All the collectors he’d stung along the way would be screaming for their money back.”

“They couldn’t do anything about it, could they?” Carolyn wanted to know. “If he was a shady operator, they couldn’t exactly sue him.”

“True, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” She made a face and I regretted the choice of words. “At any rate,” I went on, “the inflated market for the remaining books would collapse in a flash. Instead of realizing several thousand dollars a copy, he’d have a trunkful of books he couldn’t give away. The high price absolutely depended on the books being one of a kind. When they were no longer unique, and when the holograph inscriptions proved to be forgeries, my client would have to find a new way to make a dishonest living.”

“He could always become a burglar,” the Maharajah suggested, smiling gently.

I shook my head. “No. That’s the one thing he damn well knew he couldn’t do, because when he needed a burglar he came to this very shop and hired one. He found out, undoubtedly through Madeleine Porlock, that Arkwright was planning to go public with his copy of Fort Bucklow . Maybe public’s the wrong word. Arkwright wasn’t about to ring up the Times and tell them what he had. But Arkwright was a businessman at least as much as he was a collector, and there was someone he was trying to do business with who had more of a genuine interest in Fort Bucklow than Arkwright himself, who had no special interest in Kipling or India or anti-Semitic literature or whatever this particular book might represent.”

Whelkin asked if I had someone specific in mind.

“A foreigner,” I said. “Because Arkwright was engaged in international commerce. A man with the wealth and power of an Indian prince.”

The Maharajah’s jaw stiffened. Atman Singh inclined his body a few degrees forward, prepared to leap to his master’s defense.

“Or an Arab oil sheikh,” I continued. “There’s a man named Najd al-Quhaddar who comes to mind. He lives in one of the Trucial States, I forget which one, and he pretty much owns the place. There was a piece about him not long ago in Contemporary Bibliophile . He’s supposed to have the best personal library east of Suez.”

“I know him,” the Maharajah said. “Perhaps the best library in the Middle East, although there is a gentleman in Alexandria who would almost certainly wish to dispute that assertion.” He smiled politely. “But surely not the best library east of Suez. There is at least one library on the Indian subcontinent which puts the Sheikh’s holdings to shame.”

Mother taught me never to argue with Maharajahs, so I nodded politely and went on. “Arkwright had a brilliant idea,” I told them. “He was trying to rig a deal with the Sheikh. Work up some sort of trade agreements, something like that. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow would be a perfect sweetener. Najd al-Quhaddar is a heavy supporter of the Palestinian terrorist organizations, a position that’s not exactly unheard of among the oil sheikhs, and here’s a unique specimen of anti-Semitic literature with a whole legend to go with it, establishing a great English writer as an enemy of world Jewry.

“There was only one problem. My client had already sold a book to the Sheikh.”

I looked at Whelkin. His expression was hard to read.

“I didn’t read this in Contemporary Bibliophile ,” I went on. “The Sheikh was told when he bought the book that he had to keep it to himself, that it was stolen goods with no legitimate provenance. That was fine with him. There are collectors who find hot merchandise especially desirable. They get a kick out of the cloak-and-dagger aspects-and of course they figure they’re getting a bargain.

“If Arkwright showed his copy to Najd, the game was up and the fat was in the fire. First off, Arkwright would know he’d been screwed. More important, Najd would know-and Arab oil sheikhs can get all sorts of revenge without troubling to call an attorney. In some of those countries they still chop hands off pickpockets. Imagine what they’d come up with if they had a personal grudge against you.”

I stopped for breath. “My client had another reason to keep Arkwright from adding to the Sheikh’s library. He was negotiating another sale to Najd, and it was designed to net him a fortune. The last thing he wanted was for Arkwright to queer it.”