Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

There’s another hidey-hole, similar in nature, where I keep my mad money. I even have a radio plugged into one of its receptacles, and the radio even works, running on batteries since its dummy cord is plugged into thin air. I’ve got a few thousand dollars there in untraceable fifties and hundreds, and it’ll do to bribe a cop or post a bond or, if things ever get that desperate, pay my way to Costa Rica. And I hope to God it never comes to that because I’d go nuts there. I mean who do I know in Costa Rica? What would I do if I got a craving for a bagel or a slice of pizza?

I never did get to sleep. I showered and shaved and put on clean clothes. I went out and had a bagel (but not a slice of pizza) and a plate of eggs and bacon and a lot of coffee at the Greek place a block from my door. I sipped the coffee and my mind, exhausted and overamped from too many hours awake and too much concentration on itty bitty squares of colored paper, slipped a few hours into the past. I remembered eager hands and smooth skin and a warm mouth, and I wondered if there was any truth mixed in with the lies she’d told me.

There was that sweet magic between us, the physical magic and the mental magic, and I was tired enough to drop my guard and let her in. It would be easy, I thought, to let go a little bit more and fall in love with her.

And it wouldn’t be that dangerous, I decided. Not much worse than hang-gliding blindfolded. Safer on balance than swimming with an open wound in shark-infested waters, or playing catch with a bottle of nitroglycerine, or singing “Rule, Britannia” at Carney’s Emerald Lounge in Woodside.

I paid the check and overtipped, as lovers are wont to do. Then I walked over to Broadway and caught a train heading downtown.

Iunlocked the steel gates, opened the door, scooped up the mail and tossed it on the counter, shlepped the bargain table outside and turned the sign in the window from Sorry…We’re CLOSED to OPEN…Come in! By the time I was perched on my stool behind the counter I had my first browser of the day. He was a round-shouldered gentleman in a Norfolk jacket and he was taking a mild interest in the shelves of General Fiction while I was taking about as much interest in the mail. There were a couple of bills, quite a few book catalogs, a postcard asking if I had the Derek Hudson biography of Lewis Carroll-I didn’t-and a government-franked message from some clown who hoped he could continue representing me in Congress. An understandable desire. Otherwise he’d have to start paying his own postage.

While the chap in the Norfolk jacket was paging through something by Charles Reade, a sallow young woman with teeth like a beaver bought a couple of things from the bargain table. The phone rang and it was someone wanting to know if I had anything by Jeffery Farnol. Now I’ve had thousands of phone calls and I swear no one ever asked me that before. I checked the shelves and was able to report that I had clean copies of Peregrine’s Progress and The Amateur Gentleman. My caller wondered about Beltane the Smith.

“Not unless he’s under the spreading chestnut tree,” I said. “But I’ll have a look.”

I agreed to put the other two titles aside, not that anyone else was likely to snatch them up meanwhile. I took them from the shelves, ducked into my back room, placed them on my desk where they could bask in the illumination of the portrait hanging over the desk (St. John of God, patron saint of booksellers), and came back to confront a tall and well-fed man in a dark suit that looked to have been very meticulously tailored for someone else.

“Well, well, well,” said Ray Kirschmann. “If it ain’t Miz Rhodenbarr’s son Bernard.”

“You sound surprised, Ray,” I said. “This is my store, this is where I work. I’m here all the time.”

“Which is why I came here lookin’ for you, Bern, but you were in back and it gave me a turn. I figured somebody snuck in and burgled you.”

I looked over his shoulder at the fellow in the Norfolk jacket. He’d gone on from Charles Reade to something else, but I couldn’t see what.

“Business pretty good, Bern?”

“I can’t complain.”

“It’s holdin’ up, huh? Except you were never a one for holdups, were you? Makin’ ends meet?”

“Well, there are good weeks and bad weeks.”

“But you get by.”

“I get by.”

“And you got the satisfaction of treadin’ the straight an’ narrow path between right an’ wrong. That’s gotta be worth somethin’.”

“Ray-”

“Peace of mind, that’s what you got. It’s worth a lot, peace of mind is.”

“Uh-”

I nodded in the direction of the browser, who had assumed the unmistakable stance of a dropper of eaves. Ray turned, regarded my customer, and pinched his own abundant chin between thumb and forefinger.

“Oh, I get your drift, Bern,” he said. “You’re worried this gentleman here’ll be taken aback to learn about your criminal past. Is that it?”

“Jesus, Ray.”

“Sir,” Ray announced, “you may not realize this, but you’re gonna have the privilege of buyin’ a book from a former notorious criminal. Bernie here was once the sort’d burgle you outta house an’ home, and now he’s a walking testimony to criminal rehabilitation. Yessir, I’ll tell you, all of us in the NYPD think the world of Bernie here. Say, mister, you’re welcome to hang around an’ browse. Last thing I want to do is chase you.”

But my customer was on his way, with the door swinging shut behind him.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Aw, he was a stiff anyway, Bern. Never woulda bought that book. Guys like him, treat the place like a library. How you gonna make a dime on a bum like that?”

“Ray-”

“ ’Sides, he looked shifty. Probably woulda stole the book if he had half the chance. An honest guy like yourself, you don’t realize how many crooked people there are in the world.”

I didn’t say anything. Why encourage him?

“Say, Bern,” he said, leaning a heavy forearm on my glass counter. “You’re around books all the time, you’re all the time readin’. What I want to do is read somethin’ to you. You got a minute?”

“Well, I-”

“Sure you do,” he said, and reached into his inside jacket pocket, and just then the door burst open and Carolyn exploded through it. “There you are,” she cried. “I called and you didn’t answer, and then I called and the line was busy, and then I-Oh, hi, Ray.”

“‘Oh, hi, Ray,’” he echoed. “Say it like you’re glad to see me, Carolyn. I’m not some dog that you gotta give me a bath.”

“I’m going to leave that line alone,” she said.

“Thank God,” I said.

“You called and he wasn’t here,” Ray said, “and then you called and the line was busy, and then you ran over here. So you got somethin’ to say to him.”

“So?”

“So say it.”

“It’ll keep,” she said.

“Then maybe you oughta run along, Carolyn. Go get your vacuum cleaner and suck the ticks off a bloodhound.”

“I could make you the same suggestion,” she said sweetly, “but without the vacuum cleaner. Why don’t you go solicit a bribe, Ray? I got business with Bernie.”

“So do I, sweetie. I was just lookin’ for a literary opinion from him. The hell, I don’t guess it’d hurt you to hear what I gotta read to him.”

He drew a little card from his pocket. “‘You have the right to remain silent,’” he intoned. “‘You have the right to consult an attorney. If you do not have legal counsel, you have the right to have counsel provided for you.’” There was more, and the wording wasn’t exactly the way I remembered it, but I’m not going to look it up and reproduce the whole thing here. If you’re interested, go throw a rock through a precinct house window. Somebody’ll come out and read it to you word for word.