Lawrence Block: The Burglar in the Rye

There was a mantelpiece above a fireplace that had long since been bricked up and plastered over, and that’s where I placed Paddington, where he could have a good look around and make sure that everything was all right. “I’d let you look out the window,” I told him, “but there’s nothing to see out there. Just a brick wall, and a window with the shade down. And maybe that’s a good idea, drawing the shade. What do you think?”

He didn’t say. I drew the shade, tossed my small suitcase onto the bed, popped the catches, and opened it. I put my shirts and socks and underwear in the dresser, hung a pair of khakis in the tiny closet, closed the suitcase, and stood it against a wall.

I looked at my watch. It was time I got out of there. I had a business to run.

I said goodbye to the bear, who paid about as much attention as my cat does when I say goodbye to him. I pulled the door shut. That was enough to engage the snap lock, but I double-locked the door with my key before taking the elevator to the lobby.

The pair of women had ended their conversation, or at least taken it somewhere else. The guy with the long face and high forehead and horn-rimmed shades had put down GQ and picked up a paperback. I walked over and dropped my key at the desk. It was an actual brass key, unlike the computerized plastic key cards the newer hotels use, and it had a heavy brass fob attached, designed to punish you for walking off with it by ripping a hole in your pocket. I was happy to leave it, glad of an excuse to pass the desk and have a quick look at the triple row of guest mailboxes.

That purple envelope I’d found on the floor was in Box 602.

I slapped down my key, gave the fellow with the too-black hair a nod and a smile, and watched a tall and elegant older gentleman enter the lobby from the street, looking as though he could have stepped out of the pages of the long-faced guy’s GQ. He was wearing a beautifully tailored sport jacket and slacks and escorting a much younger woman.

Our eyes met. His widened in recognition. I couldn’t see mine, but they may have done the same. I recognized him, even as he clearly recognized me. And we did what gentlemen do when they encounter one another in a hotel lobby. We passed each other without a word.

The business is Barnegat Books, an antiquarian bookstore on East Eleventh Street between University Place and Broadway. The Paddington is fourteen blocks north of my shop, and north-south blocks in Manhattan run twenty to the mile, and I’ll leave it to you to do the mathematics. I wanted to open up by two, as the sign on my door promised, but a few minutes one way or the other wouldn’t matter, and it was too nice a day for a cab or a subway. I’d come up by taxi, suitcase in tow, but I could walk back, and did.

I cut through Madison Square, paying my respects to the statue of Chester Alan Arthur, twenty-first President of the United States and a man with even more first names than Jeffrey Peters. I walked down Broadway, trying to remember what I knew about Chester Alan Arthur, and once I got the store open and dragged the bargain table (“Your Choice 3 for $5”) out front, I browsed through my own stock until I found The Lives of the Presidents, by William Fortescue. It had been published in 1925, and only went as far as Warren Gamaliel Harding (one first name, one last name, and one that was essentially a toss-up). The book was evidently written with a teenage audience in mind, though I couldn’t think of too many teenagers who’d rush to turn off MTV and check out what Fortescue had to say about Franklin Pierce and Rutherford Birchard Hayes (who could boast, you’ll notice, not a single first name between them).

Fortescue’s volume had had a long shelf life at Barnegat Books, having been part of the original stock when I bought the place from old Mr. Litzauer some years ago. I didn’t expect to sell it anytime soon either, but that didn’t mean it was destined for the bargain table. It was a worthy volume, the sort of book you liked to have around a bookshop, and this wasn’t the first time I had consulted it. I’d let Fortescue fill me in a few months ago on Zachary Taylor, although I can’t remember much of what I read, or why I’d been interested in the first place. Still, he’d come in handy then-Fortescue, I mean, not Taylor-and he was handy now.

I kept the book on the counter and dipped into it during slow periods, of which there are an abundance in the life of an antiquarian bookman. I did have some traffic that afternoon, and I did do some buying and selling. A regular customer found some mysteries she hadn’t read, along with an out-of-print Fredric Brown she figured she must have read, but wouldn’t mind reading again. I’d had the same thought myself, and was sorry to see the book go before I had another crack at it, but that’s part of the game.

A stout gentleman with a droopy mustache spent a lot of time browsing a six-volume half-leather edition of Oman ’s History of Britain Before the Norman Conquest. I had it tagged at $125, and allowed I would probably take a little less than sticker price for the set, but not a great deal less.

“I’ll be back,” he said finally, and left. And perhaps he would, but I wasn’t counting on it. Customers (or more accurately, noncustomers) use that as an exit line, handing it out to tradesmen the way men tell women, “I’ll call you.” Maybe they will, and then again maybe they won’t, and there’s no point sitting by the phone waiting.

My next customer brought in a book from the bargain table, paid his two bucks for it, and asked if he could browse a bit. I told him to feel free, but that it was a dangerous pastime. You never knew when you’d find something you felt compelled to buy.

“I’ll risk it,” he said, and disappeared into the stacks. He’d been around a couple of times in the course of the past week, looking quite presentable if the slightest bit down at the heels and smelling faintly and not disagreeably of whiskey. He was somewhere around sixty, about the same age as the man I’d seen at the Paddington, with a deep suntan and a carefully trimmed little beard and mustache. The beard was V-shaped and came to a precise point, and it was silver in hue, as were his eyebrows and the hair on his head, or at least as much of it as showed out from under his tan beret.

This was the first time he’d bought anything, and I had a hunch he thought of the two dollars as an admission charge. Some people just like to hang out in bookstores-I did, before I bought one of my own-and Mr. Silver Beard struck me as a fellow who didn’t have anything much to do or anyplace to do it. He wasn’t homeless, he was too well groomed for that, but he looked to be biding his time.

If he’d gone on biding it until six o’clock I’d have gotten him to give me a hand closing up. But he was long gone by then. The phone rang around five-thirty, and it was Alice Cottrell. “I’ve got a room,” I said. I didn’t mention the bear.

“And tonight?”

“If all goes well,” I said. “If not, the room’s mine for two more nights. But I figure the sooner the better.”

And then we said the things a man and a woman will say when they’ve been rather more to each other than bookseller and customer. I dropped my voice to say them, and I kept it low even after Mr. Silver Beard had given me a wave and departed. She said goodbye after we’d done a reasonable amount of billing and cooing, and not too long after that I brought in the bargain table all by myself. That done, I put fresh water in Raffles’s water bowl, replenished the dry food in his dish, and made sure the bathroom door was open in case he needed to use the toilet. Then I locked up for the night and went over to the Bum Rap.