Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Library

“By Raymond Chandler.”

“That’s the guy.”

“And you can’t read the words on the spine, but you can recognize it anyway?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is it a first edition, Bern? Is it inscribed? Can you tell that from here, too?”

“I don’t have magical powers,” I said. “What I do have is eyes that look at books all day long. I can identify hundreds of books, maybe thousands, on the basis of a quick glimpse from the other side of the room. I probably haven’t read it and I may not know the first thing about the contents, but I can tell you the title and author and who published it.”

“Who published The Big Sleep? ”

“Knopf in the U.S. and Hamish Hamilton in England. That’s the Knopf edition over there. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spotted it, because I don’t know what the British edition looks like. And it most likely would have been a copy of the American edition that Chandler brought east to give to Hammett.”

“He brought it for George Harmon Coxe, Bern. Remember? He gave it to Hammett on a whim.”

“At the time it was on a whim,” I said. “Now it’s on a shelf. We’re looking at it.”

“‘Here’s looking at you, Chandler.’”

“It’s a genuine piece of American literary history,” I said. “And we tracked it down, and there it is.”

“Assuming that’s the right copy.”

“A first of The Big Sleep ’s a rare book to begin with. If they’ve got any copy at all, it’s pretty sure to be the one Chandler gave to Hammett. It’s not like Anthony Adverse, with at least one copy in any old collection of books.” I drew a breath. “That’s the Hammett copy on the shelf. The Hammett association copy. When they write about it-no, that’s ridiculous.”

“What is?”

“I was thinking it might go down in bibliographic literature as ‘the Rhodenbarr copy.’ Silly, huh?”

“I don’t think it’s silly.”

“You don’t? Well, it won’t happen. Be nice, though.” I got to my feet. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll buy you a drink, and then I’m about ready to turn in. What’s the matter?”

“You’re just gonna leave it there?”

“I’m not going to wheel the library steps over there and climb up them in the middle of the night. Not with other people in the room.”

“Why not? You told me it was okay to look at the book. It’s a library, you said. It’s natural to look at books in a library. Well, it’s every bit as natural to take them off the shelf and start reading. Where does it say look but don’t touch?”

I shook my head. “Later. It’s not going anywhere.”

Let’s say you had this old tweed jacket.

It’s a fine old jacket, woven of wool from the thick fleeces of Highland sheep, crafted in a croft or crofted in a craft, something like that. If you look closely enough you’ll find threads of every color of the rainbow, with more hues and shades and tints and tones than in the biggest box of crayons Crayola ever made.

You bought it years ago, and even when it was new it looked old. Now it has leather patches on the elbows and leather piping on the cuffs, and by this time the leather itself is worn. And the pockets bulge from all the things you’ve stuffed into them over the years. And you’ve worn that jacket for long moonlit walks on the moors and spirited rambles in the fells. You’ve worn it on horseback, and your high-spirited dog has marked it with his muddy paws. It’s been rained on, and dampened by the mist. It’s soaked up the smoke from campfires in the open and peat fires in thatched cottages. And there’s sweat in it, too, honest human sweat. And human joy and human grief-and, if you look closely enough, you’ll be able to distinguish more hues and shades and tints and tones of emotion than there are crayons in the biggest box Crayola ever made.

And it’s soaked up music, too, the haunting screel of the bagpipes and the reedy piping of a tin flute, from glen to glen and o’er the mountainside. Toss in the lilt of an old ballad heard in a public house and stir in the murmur of a lullaby sung to a child. It’s all there, all absorbed by osmosis into the very warp and woof of the tweed.

Now you take that jacket and transmute it by some subtle alchemy involving a copper kettle and a copper coil. You distill the very essence of that jacket into a cask of liquid, and you age that liquid in a charred oaken barrel for longer than the lifetimes of the Old and Young Pretenders combined.

Then you pour it into a glass, and what you’ve got is Glen Drumnadrochit.

“Glen Drumnadrochit,” Carolyn said, echoing our host, Nigel Eglantine, who’d pronounced its name even as he poured it. “What do you think, Bernie?”

“Not bad,” I said.

“You want to make a ceremony of it,” Nigel said, “in order to get the full experience.” He picked up his own glass, a small brandy snifter like the ones he’d filled for us, and held it to the light. “First the color,” he said, and we copied his actions, holding our glasses to the light and dutifully noting the color. It was, I should report, generally Scotch-colored, though definitely on the dark side of the Scotch spectrum.

“Next is bouquet,” he announced, and held the glass so that it was cupped in his palm, moving his hand in a little circle and roiling the strong waters within the glass. Then he breathed in its aroma, and soon we were doing the same.

“And now taste. While holding a sip in the mouth, draw in breath through the nose. It strengthens and deepens the flavor.” Indeed it did. “And, finally, aftertaste,” he said, and tipped up his glass, and drank deep of the precious nectar. Ever a quick study, I copied his every action.

“I might have a little more of this one,” I said, setting down an empty glass. “Color, bouquet, taste, and aftertaste. I want to make sure I’ve got the drill down pat.”

He beamed. “Rather special, wouldn’t you say? The Drumnadrochit.”

“It’s remarkable,” I said, and topped up my glass.

We’d found him in the bar, where his role was more that of host than bartender. The bar at Cuttleford House ran on the honor system; you poured your own drink and made a note of it in the leather-bound ledger kept for that purpose. There seemed to me to be an inherent danger in the system; as the evening wore on, wouldn’t one become increasingly apt to forget to make an entry?

“Shocking weather,” he said, as I nursed the second wee snifter of Glen Drumnadrochit. “It’s still snowing, you know.”

“I was watching out the window,” Carolyn said. “It’s really beautiful.”

“Quite so. If all one has to do is look at it, it’s rather an admirable display of nature’s majesty and all that.” Color, bouquet, and flavor-and down the hatch, even as he reached for the bottle to top up his glass. He was putting it away at a good clip, was Nigel Eglantine, for all the ritual he made of appreciating it. There is, I suppose, a thin line between the connoisseur and the common drunk, even as there is a similarly fine distinction to be drawn between the gourmet and the glutton. Nigel wasn’t slurring his words or tripping over his shoelaces, nor was he telling the same story over and over. He seemed perfectly fine to me.

Still, the night was young.

“I couldn’t say how many times Orris has been out already,” he said. “Clearing the path with the snowblower, then shoveling snow from the footbridge and plowing the drive clear out to the road. I told him not to bother again until morning. No point.” He looked up. “Ah, good evening, Colonel.”

“Evening,” said Colonel Blount-Buller, who had just joined us. He made himself a drink and noted the act in the leather-bound ledger, a ritual he went through daily for half the year. “A long winter, eh? Snow’s got some depth to it, Eglantine. Good job you’ve got Orris. Had another couple due, didn’t you? Did they ever get here?”