Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Rye

“You’ve all told me what you want,” I said, “and now you want to know what I want.”

“Well?”

“What no one seems to care about,” I said, “is what Gulliver Fairborn might want.”

“He’s not here,” Moffett said, “so we can’t ask him. Get to the point, man.”

“In any event,” Harkness said, “he’s not an interested party.”

“Oh? It seems to me he’s the most interested party of all. He wrote the letters.”

“But they ceased belonging to him the minute he dropped them in the mail. He retains the copyright, but the actual letters are legally the property of the recipient.”

“I know.”

“Then what he wants or doesn’t want is immaterial.”

“Not to me,” I said. “I didn’t get into this mess for money. Believe me, there are easier ways to turn a dishonest dollar. I wanted to do something nice for a man who wrote a book that changed my life.”

“Get to the point, man.”

“All right,” I said. I had been moving closer to the fireplace. I looked up at Elvis, who looked back at me. It was silly, I know, but I got the feeling the King approved of what I was going to do.

So I reached over the top of the fire screen and slipped the letter on through. “There,” I said. “ Alice, you said you burned the letters. Well, let’s say you did. And let’s say that was the only one that escaped. Now it can join the others.”

They were a little slow off the mark, but once they got moving they didn’t waste time shoving me aside and yanking the screen out of the way. The letter they’d all just examined was on top of the dying fire, and as they watched it burst into flame.

It was a pretty sight, that sheet of purple paper burning brightly atop a heap of half-burned logs and glowing ashes. And as they stared at it they saw other scraps of purple paper, the charred remnants of all the other sheets that had been burning up while we’d been learning who killed their lawful owner.

“My God,” Victor Harkness said.

“An irreplaceable treasure,” Moffett said. “Unique material, and now it’s lost forever. You rotten son of a bitch.”

“You’ve just stolen something from future generations of scholars,” Lester Eddington said. “I hope you’re happy.”

“You’ve broken the law,” Harkness said. “We could press charges, you know, on behalf of the Landau estate. Criminal mischief, wanton destruction of property…”

“Laws were made to be broken,” I said, “and you might have trouble making those charges stick. But what choice did I have? How much choice did any of us have?”

Isis asked me what I meant.

“Well, we’re all obsessed, aren’t we? Alice is obsessed with her book, and Eddington’s obsessed with his studies. Moffett is obsessed with his collection. Harkness is obsessed with doing his job. And look at Erica Darby. She was obsessed with revenge. Look where that led.”

“And you, Bern?”

I looked at Carolyn, then at everybody else. “I may be a criminal,” I said, “but that doesn’t make me a bad person. It sounds corny, but I was obsessed with doing the right thing.”

Silence greeted this remark, a profound and all-embracing silence, and it held until I took the fireplace poker and stirred the ashes. Little scraps of purple paper that had managed to be incompletely consumed came into contact with glowing embers and at once were burning brightly, if briefly. The sight brought a gasp to some of the people watching. The scraps were too small to be worth saving, but it was still somehow shocking to see them disappear altogether.

“That’s it,” I said. “The party’s over. Unless you fellows want to stick around. How’s the room service here? Carl, can we call downstairs and order drinks?”

He shook his head.

“Then that’s it,” I said. “Thanks for coming, everybody. You’re free to go now.”

The three wise men, Harkness and Moffett and Eddington, left in a body; they’d been opponents a few minutes ago, but now they were drawn together for the moment by their mutual hatred of me. Carl Pillsbury hung around for a few minutes, trying to figure out some way to save his job. If he lost that, he demanded, what would he do for a place to live? Isis told him he could go someplace else and start over.

“And let your hair go gray,” she advised him. “You’d look terribly distingué.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Oh, there’s no question,” she said. “You’re an attractive man, but with gray hair you’d be irresistible.”

I guess he believed her. He was, after all, an actor. He brightened considerably, said goodbye to everybody, and went out the door.

Alice was next, pausing just long enough to assure me that I was a son of a bitch, no question about it, but she had to admire my dedication to my principles. “So that makes you a principled son of a bitch,” she said. “And who knows? Maybe you’ll wind up in my memoirs.”

She swept out with a flourish, and when she was gone I took the jewelry case out of my trouser pocket and lifted the top. Isis picked up the necklace, opened the catch, and refastened it around her throat. She got a compact from her purse and checked her reflection in the mirror, then called Carolyn over to show her.

“Beautiful,” Carolyn said.

“But you know,” Isis said, “I’m not sure I’d ever feel quite the same wearing them. Two women were killed, not over these jewels exactly, but around them. Do you know what I mean?”

“I guess so,” Carolyn said.

“So,” she said, and took the necklace off and returned it to the case. I closed the case, and she took it from me and handed it to Marty. “I hope Cynthia Considine enjoys them.”

“She’ll never look as lovely as you,” Marty said. “With or without rubies, my dear.”

“That’s sweet,” Isis said, waiting.

He didn’t keep her waiting long. He opened the jewelry case to see the rubies for himself-and who could blame him, after everything that had gone on already that evening? Then he put it in a pocket, and from another pocket he drew out a thick envelope and held it out to Isis.

She said, “Twenty?”

“Twenty-five,” he said. “I persuaded John to be a little more generous.”

“That’s so sweet,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek, then took the envelope and put it in her purse. “Diamonds are allegedly a girl’s best friend, and I suppose you could make a similar case for rubies, but in the uncertain life of an actress they both take a backseat to cash. One has to be practical, doesn’t one?”

“Absolutely.”

“But you’re not practical, Bernie. You’re a burglar, so you have a dark side, but your dark side has a light side of its own, doesn’t it? I suspected as much when I heard you took a bear to your room. A burglar with a teddy bear!”

“Well,” I said.

“And then you gave up a small fortune to do a favor for a man you never even met. You stole my rubies and gave them back, and you’re not making a dime on the deal, are you?”

“I’m not a very good businessman,” I admitted. “I don’t do all that well at the bookshop, either.”

“I think you do just fine,” she said warmly. “You’re quite the fellow, Bernie Rhodenbarr. Quite the fellow.”

And she shook my hand, and held it a little longer than you might have expected.

Some days later I was in the bookstore, tossing balls of paper-white, not purple-for Raffles. He looked bored with the enterprise, but kept up his end out of loyalty. Then the door opened, and it was Alice Cottrell.

“You really have them,” she said. “Or do you? This wasn’t just a ruse to get me down here, was it?”