Lawrence Block: The Burglar in the Rye

“Speaking of which…”

He nodded and started reaching into pockets and coming out with envelopes.

“Well, well, well,” Ray Kirschmann said. “If my eyes was sore I swear you’d be a sight for ’em. Good to see you, Bern.”

“Always a pleasure, Ray.”

“So how’d it go? You see them people?”

“I did.”

“An’ you did a little business?”

“That too.”

“What I wish,” he said, “is I coulda been there to see the looks on their faces when they saw their pipe dreams go up in smoke. Why are you lookin’ at me like that, Bern?”

“Pipe dreams always go up in smoke,” I said. “Never mind. It was something to see, I’ll grant you that.”

“You show ’em a letter on purple paper, you burn it, they see you burned a shitload of other purple paper, an’ what are they gonna think? But all you did was get some purple paper an’ burn it, along with one real letter to make it look good.”

“It seems to have worked,” I allowed.

“Then you sold ’em,” he said. “An’ we’re partners, right?”

“Even Steven,” I said, and handed him an envelope.

At six o’clock Henry helped me with the bargain table. I hung the CLOSED sign in the window and turned the lock, and the two of us went in the back room and sat down. I sighed, thinking what a long and busy day it had been, and how I could use a drink right about now. And Henry-I’ll go on calling him that, if it’s all the same to you-Henry drew a silver flask from the breast pocket of his jacket. I found a couple of glasses that were as clean as they needed to be, and he poured us a pair of straight shots.

I drank mine down and said no to a refill. “All done,” I said. “And I have to say it went well.”

“Thanks to you, Bernie.”

“No, thanks to you,” I said. “Typing out fifty phony letters and signing them, then starting over again and typing out fifty completely different letters and signing those.”

“It was fun.”

“All the same, it must have been work.”

“That was part of the fun. It was a challenge, I’ll grant you that. But it was so much easier than writing a novel. There was no plot, there was no continuity, there was no requirement but that the letters sound like me, and what could be easier than that?”

“I suppose.”

“I had the most fun with that awful Alice, knowing that she’d be paying money for copies of letters that would only blacken her reputation. ‘Dear Anthea, I’m having no end of aggravation with an annoying little poseur named Alice Cottrell, of whom you may have heard, due to the appalling bad judgment of The New Yorker. She manages the neat trick of being at once precocious and retarded, while having the adhesive properties of a barnacle. She’s so pathetic one hates to hurt her, but so whining and physically unappealing one would like to gas her.’ Let’s see her paraphrase that for her fucking memoir.”

“I made sure it was in the batch I had photocopied.”

“Good.”

“And you don’t mind that all these people have letters of yours? Eddington? Moffett? And whoever buys the ones Sotheby’s will be offering?”

He shook his head. “Let them enjoy themselves,” he said. “They won’t be looking over my shoulder and reading my private thoughts. They’ll be enthralled by some fiction I spun out for the specific purpose of enthralling ’em. They’ll be all wrapped up in an epistolary novel and they won’t even know it.”

“You’re getting a kick out of the whole thing, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t had this much fun in years,” he said, and treated himself to another short one. “I’ve had trouble writing lately, you know. I think this happy chore may have broken right through my writer’s block. I can’t wait to get back to work.”

“That’s great.”

“It is,” he said, “and the only sad part is parting. Sweet sorrow, according to Shakespeare, and I’d say he nailed that one good. I’m all checked out of the Paddington, Bernie, and I’ve got a plane to catch. I consider you a genuine friend, but you know the kind of life I lead. The odds are we’ll never cross paths again.”

“You never know.”

“True enough. And maybe I’ll drop a line.”

“I’ll look for a purple envelope,” I said. “And burn it as soon as I finish reading it. But you’re forgetting something.”

“What?”

I handed him an envelope. “Put it someplace safe,” I said. “There’s thirty thousand dollars in there.”

“That’s too much.”

“Our deal was fifty-fifty, remember? I got two thousand from Alice, three thousand from Eddington, five thousand from Victor Harkness, and fifty thousand dollars from Hilliard Moffett of Bellingham, Washington. That adds up to sixty thousand bucks, and half of that is thirty, and that’s what you get.”

“You took all the risk, Bernie.”

“And you did all the work, and a deal’s a deal, and you can use the dough. So put it someplace safe and watch out for pickpockets.”

“Idon’t know, Bern,” Carolyn said. “I’m confused.”

“Well, there’s a lot of that going around,” I said. “I think I might have picked up a touch of it myself.”

“I know it’s ‘Feed a cold and starve a fever,’ or else it’s the other way around, but neither one of them applies here. What do you do with confusion?”

“You could always try drowning it.”

“Now that’s an idea,” she said, and waved desperately for Maxine, who sometimes took a long time to get our order. “Hi, Max,” she said, when the dear girl showed up. “Let me have a double scotch, and don’t even think about bringing any of that mouthwash to this table. Bern, what about you? You still drinking rye?”

“I think I’ve had my last taste of rye for a while,” I said. “Scotch for me too, Maxine.”

“Henry went home, huh, Bern?”

“Henry hasn’t really got a home,” I said, “so how could he go there? But yes, he’s moved on. I saw him for the first time without his silver beard. Well, unless you count the times I saw him in the Paddington lobby, when he was just an anonymous gent reading a magazine. This afternoon he went into the john at the store and came out clean-shaven, with his beard all wrapped up in tissue paper. He said he’d grow a real one if only it would come in that color.”

“He could always dye it.”

We talked about Carl, and how people said they could always tell a dye job, the same as they could always tell when a guy was wearing a toupee. But all that meant, we agreed, was that you could tell a bad dye job, or an obvious toupee. And we asked each other why it was that it was all right for a woman to dye her hair, or get a little surgical help hiding time’s ravages, but that it was somehow Not The Thing for a man to do so.

“Or makeup,” I said. “Speaking of which, I see you’re not wearing any. And I like your haircut.”

“It’s the way I always wear it, Bern. I’ve been wearing it this way as long as we’ve known each other.”

“Until recently,” I said.

“That was a phase I was going through,” she said, “and I’m through it, and the hell with it. My fingernails don’t look short to me now. They just look like my fingernails.”

“And I like your shirt,” I said. “What is it, L. L. Bean?”

“So?”

“Their stuff holds up,” I said, “and plaid’s always in style, isn’t it?”

She gave me a look. “I know I look dykier than usual,” she said, “and I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’m reacting, okay? Overcompensating. I’ll get over it. Meanwhile, Bern, I’m still confused, and I’m not talking wardrobe.”