Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Rye

“What was in the letters, Henry?”

He smiled. “‘Henry.’ I guess you might as well go on calling me that. What was in the letters? I don’t even remember. Anthea was my agent, and it was a close author-agent relationship.”

“And you wanted the letters back.”

“I wanted them to disappear, to cease to exist.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want people pawing over them and finding little glimpses of me in them. It’s the same reason I live my life the way I do.”

“Yet people find you in everything you write.”

“They find the part I’m willing to show,” he said. He looked off into the distance. “It’s fiction,” he said, “and I get to make it the way I want it to be, with a clay factory relocated from Huntington to Peru, say, if that’s where I want it to be. I don’t care who reads my fiction, or what they think they find there.”

“I see.”

“Do you?” His eyes probed mine. “Say you’re having a conversation with somebody. You don’t mind if he can hear the sentences you’re speaking, do you?”

“If I minded, I wouldn’t say them in the first place.”

“Exactly. But suppose, while he was listening to you, he was also reading your mind. Picking up the unvoiced thoughts buzzing around in your brain. How would you like that?”

“I get it.”

“The fiction I write is my conversation with the world. My private life is private, an unspoken conversation with myself, and I don’t want any mind-readers eavesdropping on it.”

“So it doesn’t matter who gets the letters,” I said. “A collector or a scholar or a university library, or even Alice Cottrell. It’s the same invasion of privacy wherever the letters wind up.”

“Exactly.”

“Isis Gauthier,” I said.

“Don’t know a thing about her, except that she’s stunning and well-spoken.”

“Karen Kassenmeier.”

“Who’s she?”

“A dead thief,” I said. “How about the hotel clerks? The failed actor who dyes his hair, his name’s Carl, and the myopic accountant-type, whose name I never got.”

“I believe it’s Owen. And there’s at least one more clerk, a woman named Paula, with a big nose and a chin like Dick Tracy.”

We were still at the Bum Rap and my companion was still supporting the rye whiskey distillers of America, but I’d switched to Perrier.

“I didn’t really get to know any of the clerks,” he said. “Or anybody else at the hotel. I went there with some fantasy of talking Anthea into returning the letters, but I couldn’t even work out how to approach her. I couldn’t offer her the kind of money the letters would bring at auction, and I couldn’t threaten her, either. What could I do, sue her? Charge her with unethical conduct?”

“Stab her,” I suggested, “and take the letters by force.”

“Not my style. As a matter of fact, action of any sort’s not my style. And getting to the hotel was about as much action as I managed. Then I sat around the lobby, wearing a wig and sunglasses, and drinking enough rye whiskey to face the world each day.”

“I understand it can do more than Milt or malt.”

“‘To let us know it’s not our fault,’” he finished. “Where on earth did you come up with that? Did I blurt it out the other night?”

“ Alice quoted you.”

“Christ,” he said. “And she remembered after all these years?”

“You wrote it in the book you autographed for her.”

He snorted. “I never gave her a book. She already had one, she quoted it back at me endlessly, and I certainly never signed or inscribed a book for her. But the line itself is one I used to say rather often.” He took a breath. “Back to the Paddington. I sat around and I sipped, and that’s about all I did.”

“And you came to my store.”

“Yes. Alice turned up, and I recognized her even if she didn’t see through my disguise. And I followed her down here, and I found myself fascinated by your involvement in the process. You were a dealer in antiquarian books, but you also seemed to be something else. A burglar, as it turned out.”

“Well,” I said.

“And then other people kept coming to the shop, each of them with his own interest in the letters. So I kept coming, fascinated, wondering what would happen. You agreed to steal the letters, didn’t you? For Alice?”

“For you,” I said. “So that they could be returned to you.”

“That was her story. And did she say I would pay you?”

“She said you didn’t have much money.”

“God, that’s the truth, and the Hotel Paddington’s getting most of it. So what were you going to get out of it?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing? You were going to do it out of the goodness of your heart?”

“Well, see,” I said, “I figured I owed you something. You wrote Nobody’s Baby, and that book changed my life.”

“Henry,” I said. “Henry, I may have an idea.”

“About the letters? About getting hold of them?”

“I have some ideas about that, but this is something else. I thought-”

“About Anthea’s murder? And this other murder, the one that happened at your apartment?”

“More ideas,” I allowed, “but what I thought-”

“About the rubies you mentioned? I still don’t understand how the rubies fit into the whole thing.”

“Neither do I, exactly, though I have an idea or two. But this is a little different. It’s more about you being broke, and about a person being entitled to a decent return on his efforts. And I guess what it’s mostly about is the whole notion of what does and doesn’t constitute invasion of privacy.”

“Oh.”

“So let me run it by you,” I said, “and you tell me what you think…”

Ray Kirschmann scratched his head. “I dunno,” he said. “Them’s the famous letters people are gettin’ killed right an’ left over? They don’t look like much to me. He a fag?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You sure? ’cause what kind of regular guy writes all his letters on purple paper? If that ain’t fag stationery I don’t know what is.” He picked up a sheet. “Half the time he don’t even fill more than half the page, you notice that? And the typing’s terrible. Crossouts all over the place. A police officer turns in a report lookin’ like this, believe me, he’s gonna hear about it.”

“Well,” I said.

“An’ look at this, will you? He can’t spell for shit, an’ what he says don’t make sense. ‘In high dudgeon, Gully.’”

“What’s wrong with that, Ray?”

“He spelled ‘dungeon’ wrong. It don’t have a d in it, at least it didn’t last time I looked, an’ he left the n out. And dungeons ain’t high in the first place, Bern. They’re down in the basement.”

“I guess you’re not impressed.”

“I’m impressed that somebody’s gonna pay decent money for this crap,” he said. “That impresses me a whole lot. An’ I’ll be impressed six ways from Sunday if you wind up sortin’ out these two murders an’ I get to close the case. I don’t see how you’re gonna do it.”

“Maybe I’m not.”

“Maybe you’re not,” he agreed, “but you got some record for pullin’ rabbits outta hats. Just comin’ up with these is pretty good rabbit-pullin’. You gave me a phone number, I checked the reverse directory an’ gave you the address, an’ the next thing you know you got a stack of purple letters in your hand. I bet you just rang the doorbell an’ asked for them, didn’t you?”

“I said I was working my way through college. When you say that, people do what they can to help out.”