Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who liked to Quote Kipling

“Ten thousand,” said the Maharajah.

“A healthy price, but she was dealing with a resourceful man in more ways than one. He had her tracked down and followed. She wore a wig to disguise herself when she came down for a close look at me. Maybe that was so I wouldn’t recognize her when she slipped me the doped coffee. Maybe it was because she knew she was being checked out herself. Whatever she had in mind, it didn’t work. The Maharajah’s man tagged her to this shop, and a little research turned up the fact that the new owner of Barnegat Books had a master’s degree in breaking and entering.”

I grinned. “Are you people following all this? There are wheels within wheels. The Maharajah wasn’t going to shell out ten grand for Fort Bucklow , not because he’d miss the money but for a very good reason. He knew for a fact that the book was a fake. For one thing, he’d heard about Najd ’s copy. And you had another reason, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you care to share it?”

“I own the original.” He smiled, glowing with the pride of ownership that they used to talk about in Cadillac ads. “ The genuine copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow , legitimately inscribed to Mr. H. Rider Haggard and removed from his library after his death. The copy which passed through the hands of Miss Unity Mitford and which may indeed have been in the possession of the Duke of Windsor. A copy, I must emphasize, which was delivered into my hands six years ago, long before this gentleman”-a brief nod at Whelkin-“happened on some undestroyed printer’s overstock, or whatever one wishes to call the cache of books from the Tunbridge Wells printshop.”

“So you wanted the phony copy?”

“I wanted to discredit it. I knew it was a counterfeit but I could not be certain in what way it had been fabricated. Was it a pure invention? Had someone happened on a manuscript and caused a spurious edition to be printed? Or was it what I now realize it to be, a genuine book with a faked inscription? I wished to determine just what it was and establish that Najd al-Quhaddar had a similarly bogus article, but I did not want to pay ten thousand dollars for the privilege, or I would be making myself the victim of a swindle.”

“So you tried to eliminate the middleman. You sent your friend here”-I smiled at Atman Singh, who did not smile back-“to collect the book from me as soon as I had it. And you instructed him to give me five hundred dollars. Why?”

“To compensate you. It seemed a fair return on your labor, considering that the book itself was of no value.”

“If you think that’s a fair price for what I went through, you’ve obviously never been a burglar. How did you know I had the book?”

“Miss Porlock informed me she would have it that evening. That indicated to me that you’d already retrieved it from its owner.”

Rudyard Whelkin shook his head. “Poor Maddy,” he said sadly. “I told her to hold onto the book. She’d have spiked an enormous sale of mine by what she did, but I guess she was restless. Wanted to pick up a bundle and get out of town.” He frowned. “But who killed her?”

“A man with a reason,” I said. “A man she double-crossed.”

“For God’s sake,” Whelkin said. “I wouldn’t kill anyone. And I certainly wouldn’t kill Madeleine.”

“Maybe not. But you’re not the only man she crossed. She did a job on everybody, when you stop to think about it. She drugged me and stole a book from me, but I certainly didn’t kill her. She was fixing to swindle the Maharajah, and he might well have felt a certain resentment when his agent came back from my shop with a worthless copy of Soldiers Three . But this wouldn’t leave him feeling betrayed because he didn’t expect anything more from the woman. Neither did I. We never had any reason to trust her in the first place, so how could we feel betrayed? There’s only one man she really betrayed.”

“And who might that be?”

“Him,” I said, and leveled a finger at Prescott Demarest.

Demarest looked bewildered. “This is insane,” he said levelly. “Utterly insane.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I’ve been wondering what I’m doing in this madhouse and now I find myself accused of murdering a woman I never even heard of before tonight. I came here to buy a book, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I read a newspaper advertisement and made a telephone call and came here prepared to spend substantial money to acquire an outstanding rarity. I’ve since heard some fascinating if hard-to-grasp story about genuine books with fake inscriptions, and some gory tales of double-crosses and swindles and murders, and now I find myself accused of homicide. I don’t want to buy your book, Mr. Rhodenbarr, whether it’s inscribed to Hitler or Haggard or Christ’s vicar on earth. Nor do I want to listen to any further rubbish of the sort I’ve heard here tonight. If you’ll excuse me…”

He started to rise from his chair. I held up a hand, not very threateningly, but it stopped him. I told him to sit down. Oddly enough, he sat.

“You’re Prescott Demarest,” I said.

“I thought we weren’t using names here tonight. Yes, I am Prescott Demarest, but-”

“Wrong,” I said. “You’re Jesse Arkwright. And you’re a murderer.”

“I watched you this afternoon,” I told him. “I saw you leave an office building on Pine Street. I’d never seen you before in my life but I knew there was something familiar about you. And then it came to me. Family resemblance.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the portraits in your library in Forest Hills. The two ancestors in the oval frames whose job it is to bless the pool table. I don’t know if you’re really a descendant of the guy who put the Spinning Jenny together, but I’m willing to believe the codgers on the wall are legitimate forebears of yours. You look just like them, especially around the jawline.”

I glanced at Whelkin. “You sold him a book,” I said. “Didn’t you ever meet him?”

“Maddy handled everything. She was the middleman.”

“Middleperson, I think you mean. I suppose you spoke to him on the telephone?”

“Briefly. I don’t recognize the voice.”

“And you?” I asked the Maharajah. “You phoned Mr. Arkwright this morning, didn’t you?”

“This could be the man whose voice I heard. I am unable to say one way or the other.”

“This is absurd,” Demarest said. Hell, let’s call him Arkwright. “A presumed resemblance to a pair of portraits, an uncertain identification of a voice supposedly heard over a telephone-”

“You forget. I saw you leave an office building on Pine Street. I called you there at a certain number, and the phone you answered was in the office of Tontine Trading Corp., and the owner of Tontine is a man named Jesse Arkwright. I don’t think you’re going to get very far insisting the whole thing’s a case of mistaken identity.”

He didn’t take much time to think it over. “All right,” he said. “I’m Arkwright. There’s no reason to continue the earlier charade. I received a call earlier today, apparently from this gentleman whom you call the Maharajah. He wanted to know if I still possessed a copy of Fort Bucklow .”

“I had seen the advertisement,” the Maharajah put in, “and I wondered at its legitimacy. When I was unable to obtain the book either from this store or from Miss Porlock, I thought it might remain in Mr. Arkwright’s possession. I called him before responding to the advertisement.”

“And he referred to the ad,” Arkwright went on. “I looked for myself. I called you on the spur of the moment. I thought I could poke around and find out what was going on. A book disappeared from my house in the middle of the night. I wanted to see if I could get it back. I also wanted to determine whether it was indeed the rarity I’d been led to believe it was. So I called you, and came here tonight to bid on the book if it came to that. But none of that makes me a killer.”