Lawrence Block: The Burglar in the Rye

I shook my head. “Ray didn’t know about Henry,” I said, “beyond the fact that this dapper old guy was hanging around the shop a lot and even spelled me once or twice behind the counter. As far as Ray knew, there was only one set of letters, and it was written twenty years ago by some famous author he never heard of. I faked burning the letters, then sold photocopies to two people and gave the originals to a third. So I couldn’t tell him I’d paid out thirty thousand dollars to Henry. It would only have confused him.”

“So instead you gave the other thirty thousand to him? And wound up with nothing?”

“I never expected anything,” I pointed out. “ Alice flimflammed me, telling me we were doing this big favor for Gulliver Fairborn, but it turned out to be true. I did manage to do him a big favor.”

“So you’ve got a nice warm fuzzy feeling in the pit of your stomach,” she said. “And outside of that you’ve got zilch.”

“Well,” I said, “not exactly zilch.”

“How come?”

“Ray only knew about one set of letters,” I said, “so it would have confused him even further to bring up the second set. I gave him half of the ten grand I got from Alice and Eddington and Sotheby’s, and I didn’t deduct anything for expenses, not even the cost of making copies. He got exactly five thousand dollars, and he seemed very happy with it, and I figure that’s about as even as Steven has to get.”

“So you wound up with…”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” I said, “which is not the biggest possible payoff for the kind of high-risk work I put in, but it’s a far cry from zilch. I have to sell a lot of books to net twenty-five large.”

“I have to wash a lot of dogs. It’s not a fortune, but you’re right, it’s way more than zilch. You know what? It’s the same amount Isis got.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “One more thing we’ve got in common.”

“Mel Tormé, start warming up your tonsils. Bern, you’ve got something else.”

“I do?”

“The letters.”

“What letters?”

“The real letters, Bern. The original originals, the ones Karen Kassenmeier stole from Anthea Landau and Carl Pillsbury took from Karen Kassenmeier’s purse and gave to Alice Cottrell and you stole from her apartment and pretended to burn but didn’t.”

“Oh,” I said. “Those letters.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“You’ve got them, don’t you? Nobody else does, and they didn’t go in the fire.”

“Henry thinks they did. He doesn’t know you typed up a dummy set for me to burn.”

“And you kept them.” She grinned. “Another souvenir, Bern? Like the Mondrian in your apartment, that everybody assumes is a fake, but you and I know is the real deal? Like the copy of The Big Sleep in your personal library, the one Raymond Chandler inscribed to Dashiell Hammett, that nobody can ever know exists?”

“They’d be in that class,” I said. “I couldn’t sell them, couldn’t even show them to anybody. But I could have the pleasure of possession, the same as I have with the book and the painting. But I couldn’t do it.”

“What do you mean, Bern?”

“I don’t suppose there’s any way Henry would ever find out,” I said, “and I’ll probably never see him again, but I’d know, and it would bother me. He thought those letters were destroyed, and he’d be unhappy to know that they weren’t. He’d feel betrayed.” I frowned. “If he’s never going to find out, does it still constitute betrayal? I don’t know. All I can say is it bothered me. If I had a working fireplace I’d have burned them.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“I already did it. Did you know there are companies in New York that’ll rent you a shredder?”

“I’m not surprised. There are companies in New York that’ll rent you an elephant. You rented a shredder?”

“They delivered it yesterday,” I said, “and last night I fed it the Fairborn-Landau letters a sheet at a time. One of Alice ’s fibs was that she shredded the letters and burned what came out of the shredder, but there was no need. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t have reconstituted those fragments. I bundled them up and dropped them down the compactor chute.”

“So the letters no longer exist.”

“Not in a readable form, no.”

“But you read them before you shredded them, right?”

“I was going to,” I said.

“And?”

“And I decided against it,” I said. “I decided it would be a violation of privacy.”

“You violate people’s privacy all the time,” she said. “ Bern, you break into their houses and go through their drawers and closets, and when you find something you like you take it home with you. Reading some old letters seems pretty minor by comparison.”

“I know,” I said, “but this is Gulliver Fairborn, Carolyn. This is the man who wrote Nobody’s Baby. ”

“And that book changed your life.”

“It did,” I said. “And I figured I owed him something.”

A Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, LAWRENCE BLOCKis a four-time winner of the Edgar® and Shamus awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany, and Japan. He also received the British Crime Writers’ Association’s prestigious Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in crime writing. The author of more than fifty books and numerous short stories, he is a devout New Yorker and enthusiastic world traveler. Readers can visit his website at www.lawrenceblock.com .

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