Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Rye

“We will,” he said, “once we get you downtown. You can count on that, Bern.”

“When you do,” I said, “you won’t find anything, and that’s something you can count on. So what have you got? I was on the premises of a hotel in which I happened to be a registered guest. Where’s the crime in that?”

“You registered under a false name.”

“So? That’s only a crime if it’s done with the presumed intent to defraud the innkeeper. I paid cash in advance, Ray. If you’re planning to skip out on a hotel bill, you don’t generally pay it ahead of time. I’m in the clear on this.”

“You know,” he said, “you can really shovel the stuff out, Bernie. It’s a hell of a talent. If all we had was the report of a prowler, an’ if you’re really not carryin’ lockpicks an’ stolen goods on your person, I’d probably have to cut you loose. But there’s a dead woman in a room on the sixth floor, an’ it looks like she had help gettin’ that way, an’ you were spotted on Six, an’ what does that look like?”

“It looks like sheer coincidence to me,” I said. “Whatever happened, I had nothing to do with it. And now what I’d like to do is go home. You’ve got no reason to hold me, and I know my rights.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said. “You ought to by now. You’ve heard ’em enough times. But just in case your memory’s rusty, here’s how they go. You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand?”

“Ray, I-”

“Yeah, you understand. You have the right to an attorney. Do you understand? Yeah, you understand that, too…”

Isuppose I should begin at the beginning. It started the week before, on as perfect an autumn afternoon as anyone could wish for. New York had suffered through a long hot summer, capped with a truly brutal heat wave, and now the heat had broken with the arrival of some cool clean air from Canada, where it’s evidently a local specialty.

My shop’s air-conditioned, of course, so it’s not a bad place to be even on a hellishly hot day. But heat can dull a person’s enthusiasm for browsing in a bookstore, even if the store itself is comfortable enough, and business had been off for the last week or so.

The cool weather brought the browsers back. The store had people in it from the minute I opened up, and every once in a while someone actually bought a book. I was pleased when they did, but I can’t say I really minded if they didn’t, because in a sense I wasn’t really there at all. I was thousands of miles away, in the jungles of Venezuela with the intrepid Redmond O’Hanlon.

Specifically, I was reading about the candiru, the toothpick fish, a tiny catfish adapted for a parasitic life in the gills and cloaca of bigger fish. I’d read O’Hanlon’s earlier book, Into the Heart of Borneo, and when a copy of In Trouble Again turned up in a bag of books, I’d set it aside to read before shelving.

And I was reading it now, in what I thought was the companionable silence suited to a bookshop, when I felt a hand on my arm. I looked at the person attached to the hand. It was a woman-slim, dark-haired, late twenties-and her long oval face was a mask of concern.

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” she said, “but are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. She didn’t seem reassured, and I could understand why. Even I could tell that my voice lacked conviction.

“You seem…anxious,” she said. “Unnerved.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The sounds you were making.”

“I was making sounds? I hadn’t realized it. Like talking in one’s sleep, I suppose, except I wasn’t sleeping.”

“No.”

“I was caught up in my book, and maybe that amounts to more or less the same thing. What sort of sounds was I making?”

She cocked her head. She was, I saw, a very attractive woman, a few years older than I’d thought. Early thirties, say. She was dressed in tight jeans and a man’s white dress shirt, and her brown hair was drawn back in a ponytail, and thus at first glance she looked younger than her years.

“Troubled sounds,” she said.

“Troubled sounds?”

“I can’t think how else to describe them. ‘Arrrghhh,’ you said.”

“Arrrghhh?”

“Yes, but more like this: ‘Arrrghhh!’ As if you were trying to get the word out before you strangled.”

“Oh.”

“You said that two or three times. And once you said, ‘Oh my God!’ As if consumed with horror.”

“Well,” I said, “I remember thinking both those things, arrrghhh and Oh my God. But I had no idea I was saying them out loud.”

“I see.”

But I could tell she didn’t. She was still looking at me with clinical interest, and she was far too attractive for me to let her think there was something wrong with me. “Here,” I said, shoving O’Hanlon at her. “Here, where I’m pointing. Read this.”

“Read it?”

“Please.”

“Well, all right.” She cleared her throat. “‘In the Amazon, should you have too much to drink, say, and inadvertently urinate as you swim, any homeless candiru-’ Candiru?”

I nodded. I’d meant for her to read the paragraph to herself, not out loud, but I couldn’t think of a graceful way to tell her so. And she was a good reader, with volume and presence. My other customers, already alerted by the sounds I’d been making and our subsequent conversation, had stopped what they were doing in order to hear her out.

“‘Any homeless candiru’-I hope I’m pronouncing it correctly-‘attracted by the smell, will take you for a big fish and swim excitedly up your stream of uric acid, enter your urethra like a worm into its burrow, and, raising its gill covers, stick out a set of retrorse spines’…retrorse? ‘Nothing can be done. The pain apparently is spectacular. You must get to a hospital before your bladder bursts; you must ask a surgeon to cut off your penis.’”

She closed the book, looking troubled herself, and placed it on the counter between us. Even as she did so, all my other customers began drifting out of my store. One man actually cupped a hand over his groin. The others looked less defensive, but just as determined to get away from the very thought of such a thing.

“That’s awful,” she said.

“It doesn’t make one want to grab the next plane to the Amazon.”

“Or go into any river at all,” she said. “Or step into a bathtub.”

“It could put a person off water entirely,” I agreed. “I may quit drinking the stuff.”

“I don’t blame you. What does that word mean, anyway?”

“Uh…”

“Not ‘penis,’ silly. ‘A set of retrorse spines.’ What does ‘retrorse’ mean? It’s not a word I’ve ever seen before.”

“I think it’s like the barbs on a fishhook,” I said. “Meaning it can’t go back out the way it came in, because of the direction the spines are pointing.”

“That’s what I assumed, but the word’s a new one to me. The whole thought ties you up in knots, doesn’t it? You just now got a real arrrghhh look on your face.”

“Did I? I’m not surprised. It’s a pretty arrrghhh concept.”

“I’ll say. I suppose it’s every man’s worst nightmare. I wonder what it’s like for girls?”

“Girls?”

“Did I say something wrong? Do you prefer women?”

“To almost anything,” I said, “which is one reason I never want to meet a candiru. But I wasn’t being politically correct. Whatever you call them, girls or women, I wouldn’t think they’d have anything to fear from the candiru.”

“This one wouldn’t,” she said, “because she has no intention of placing herself on the same continent with the horrid thing. But girls swim, too, the same as men. And I hope it won’t shatter any illusions to tell you that sometimes we piddle in the pool.”