The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling
Burglar
Who liked to
Quote
Kipling
LAWRENCE
BLOCK
for Cheryl Morrison
When from ’ouse to ’ouse you’re ’untin’ you must always work in pairs—
It ’alves the gain, but safer you will find—
For a single man gets bottled on them twisty-wisty stairs.
An’ a woman comes and clobs ’im from be’ind.
When you’ve turned ’em inside out, an’ it seems beyond a doubt
As if there weren’t enough to dust a flute
(
Cornet:
Toot! toot!)—
Before you sling your ’ook, at the ’ouse-tops take a look,
For it’s underneath the tiles they ’ide the loot.
(
Chorus.)
’Ow the loot!
Bloomin’ loot!
That’s the thing to make the boys git up an’ shoot!
It’s the same with dogs an’ men,
If you’d make ’em come again
Clap ’em forward with a Loo! loo! Lulu!
Loot!
Whoopee! Tear ’im, puppy! Loo! loo! Lulu!
Loot! loot! Loot!
—Rudyard Kipling
“Loot”
I suppose he must have been in his early twenties. …
After he’d left I tucked his forty dollars into my…
Halfway across the Queensboro Bridge, I happened…
I met J. Rudyard Whelkin on a slow midweek…
I don’t know what time I got into bed, but by…
I wanted to look him in the eyes but I couldn’t…
I was early, of course. My appointment with…
I got up quickly—too quickly—the blood rushed…
It was a long story, and she listened patiently…
It was one of those chatty morning programs that…
At six-fifteen I was sitting at the counter of the…
The Pontiac, untowed and unticketed, waited for…
I felt good about taking the car back. You don’t…
The Personal ads were on the penultimate page…
When he came to the phone I apologized for…
I cabbed uptown for the Pontiac. By the time I…
I called Ray Kirschmann from a sidewalk phone…
“I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned…
“I watched you this afternoon,” I told him. “I…
At a quarter to twelve Monday morning I hung…
I
suppose he must have been in his early twenties. It was hard to be sure of his age because there was so little of his face available for study. His red-brown beard began just below his eyes, which in turn lurked behind thick-lensed horn-rims. He wore a khaki army shirt, unbuttoned, and beneath it his T-shirt advertised the year’s fashionable beer, a South Dakota brand reputedly brewed with organic water. His pants were brown corduroy, his running shoes blue with a gold stripe. He was toting a Braniff Airlines flight bag in one ill-manicured hand and the Everyman’s Library edition of
The Poems of William Cowper
in the other.
He set the book down next to the cash register, reached into a pocket, found two quarters, and placed them on the counter alongside the book.
“Ah, poor Cowper,” I said, picking up the book. Its binding was shaky, which was why it had found its way to my bargain table. “My favorite’s ‘The Retired Cat.’ I’m pretty sure it’s in this edition.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot while I scanned the table of contents. “Here it is. Page one-fifty. You know the poem?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’ll love it. The bargain books are forty cents or three for a dollar, which is even more of a bargain. You just want the one?”
“That’s right.” He pushed the two quarters an inch or so closer to me. “Just the one.”
“Fine,” I said. I looked at his face. All I could really see was his brow, and it looked untroubled, and I would have to do something about that. “Forty cents for the Cowper, and three cents for the Governor in Albany, mustn’t forget him, and what does that come to?” I leaned over the counter and dazzled him with my pearly-whites. “I make it thirty-two dollars and seventy cents,” I said.
“Huh?”
“That copy of Byron. Full morocco, marbled endpapers, and I believe it’s marked fifteen dollars. The Wallace Stevens is a first edition and it’s a bargain at twelve. The novel you took was only three dollars or so, and I suppose you just wanted to read it because you couldn’t get anything much reselling it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I moved out from behind the counter, positioning myself between him and the door. He didn’t look as though he intended to sprint but he was wearing running shoes and you never can tell. Thieves are an unpredictable lot.
“In the flight bag,” I said. “I assume you’ll want to pay for what you took.”
“This?” He looked down at the flight bag as if astonished to find it dangling from his fingers. “This is just my gym stuff. You know—sweat socks, a towel, like that.”
“Suppose you open it.”
Perspiration was beading on his forehead but he was trying to tough it out. “You can’t make me,” he said. “You’ve got no authority.”
“I can call a policeman. He can’t make you open it, either, but he can walk you over to the station house and book you, and
then
he can open it, and do you really want that to happen? Open the bag.”
He opened the bag. It contained sweat socks, a towel, a pair of lemon-yellow gym shorts, and the three books I had mentioned along with a nice clean first edition of Steinbeck’s
The Wayward Bus,
complete with dust wrapper. It was marked $17.50, which seemed a teensy bit high.
“I didn’t get that here,” he said.
“You have a bill of sale for it?”
“No, but—”
I scribbled briefly, then gave him another smile. “Let’s call it fifty dollars even,” I said, “and let’s have it.”
“You’re charging me for the Steinbeck?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I had it with me when I came in.”
“Fifty dollars,” I said.
“Look, I don’t want to
buy
these books.” He rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “Oh God, why did I have to come in here in the first place? Look, I don’t want any trouble.”
“Neither do I.”
“And the last thing I want is to buy anything. Look, keep the books, keep the Steinbeck too, the hell with it. Just let me get out of here, huh?”
“I think you should buy the books.”
“I don’t have the money. I got fifty cents. Look, keep the fifty cents too, okay? Keep the shorts and the towel, keep the sweat socks, okay? Just let me get the hell out of here, okay?”
“You don’t have any money?”
“No, nothing. Just the fifty cents. Look—”
“Let’s see your wallet.”
“What are you—I don’t have a wallet.”
“Right hip pocket. Take it out and hand it to me.”
“I don’t believe this is happening.”
I snapped my fingers. “The wallet.”
It was a nice enough black pinseal billfold, complete with the telltale outline of a rolled condom to recall my own lost adolescence. There was almost a hundred dollars in the currency compartment. I counted out fifty dollars in fives and tens, replaced the rest, and returned the wallet to its owner.
“That’s my money,” he said.
“You just bought books with it,” I told him. “Want a receipt?”
“I don’t even want the books, dammit.” His eyes were watering behind the thick glasses. “What am I going to do with them, anyway?”
“I suppose reading them is out. What did you plan to do with them originally?”
He stared at his track shoes. “I was going to sell them.”
“To whom?”
“I don’t know. Some store.”
“How much were you going to get for them?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen, twenty dollars.”
“You’d wind up taking ten.”
“I suppose so.”
“Fine,” I said. I peeled off one of his tens and pressed it into his palm. “Sell them to me.”
“Huh?”
“Saves running from store to store. I can use good books, they’re the very sort of item I stock, so why not take the ten dollars from me?”
“This is crazy,” he said.
“Do you want the books or the money? It’s up to you.”
“I don’t want the books.”
“Do you want the money?”
“I guess so.”
I took the books from him and stacked them on the counter. “Then put it in your wallet,” I said, “before you lose it.”
“This is the craziest thing ever. You took fifty bucks from me for books I didn’t want and now you’re giving me ten back. I’m out forty dollars, for God’s sake.”
“Well, you bought high and sold low. Most people try to work it the other way around.”
“
I
should call a cop. I’m the one getting robbed.”
I packed his gym gear into the Braniff bag, zipped it shut, handed it to him. Then I extended a forefinger and chucked him under his hairy chin.
“A tip,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Get out of the business.”
He looked at me.
“Find another line of work. Quit lifting things. You’re not terribly good at it and I’m afraid you’re temperamentally unsuited to the life that goes with it. Are you in college?”
“I dropped out.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t relevant.”
“Few things are, but why don’t you see if you can’t get back in? Pick up a diploma and find some sort of career that suits you. You’re not cut out to be a professional thief.”
“A professional—” He rolled his eyes again. “Jesus, I ripped off a couple of books. Don’t make a life’s work out of it, huh?”
“Anybody who steals things for resale is a professional criminal,” I told him. “You just weren’t doing it in a very professional manner, that’s all. But I’m serious about this. Get out of the business.” I laid a hand lightly on his wrist. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but the thing is you’re too dumb to steal.”
A
fter he’d left I tucked his forty dollars into my wallet, where it promptly became
my
forty dollars. I marked the Steinbeck down to fifteen dollars before shelving it and its companions. While doing this I spotted a few errant volumes and put them back where they belonged.
Browsers came and went. I made a few sales from the bargain table, then moved a Heritage Club edition of Virgil’s
Eclogues
(boxed, the box water-damaged, slight rubbing on spine, price $8.50). The woman who bought the Virgil was a little shopworn herself, with a blocky figure and a lot of curly orange hair. I’d seen her before but this was the first time she’d bought anything, so things were looking up.
I watched her carry Virgil home, then settled in behind the counter with a Grosset & Dunlap reprint of
Soldiers Three.
I’d been working my way through my limited stock of Kipling lately. Some of the books were ones I’d read years ago, but I was reading
Soldiers Three
for the first time and really enjoying my acquaintance with Ortheris and Learoyd and Mulvaney when the little bells above my door tinkled to announce a visitor.
I looked up to see a man in a blue uniform lumbering across the floor toward me. He had a broad, open, honest face, but in my new trade one learned quickly not to judge a book by its cover. My visitor was Ray Kirschmann, the best cop money could buy, and money could buy him seven days a week.
“Hey, Bern,” he said, and propped an elbow on the counter. “Read any good books lately?”
“Hello, Ray.”
“Watcha readin’?” I showed him. “Garbage,” he said. “A whole store full of books, you oughta read somethin’ decent.”
“What’s decent?”
“Oh, Joseph Wambaugh, Ed McBain. Somebody who tells it straight.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“How’s business?”
“Not too bad, Ray.”
“You just sit here, buy books, sell books, and you make a livin’. Right?”
“It’s the American way.”
“Uh-huh. Quite a switch for you, isn’t it?”
“Well, I like working days, Ray.”
“A whole career change, I mean. Burglar to bookseller. You know what that sounds like? A title. You could write a book about it.
From Burglar to Bookseller.
Mind a question, Bernie?”
And what if I did? “No,” I said.
“What the hell do you know about books?”
“Well, I was always a big reader.”
“In the jug, you mean.”
“Even on the outside, all the way back to childhood. You know what Emily Dickinson said. ‘There is no frigate like a book.’ ”
“Frig it is right. You didn’t just run around buyin’ books and then open up a store.”
“The store was already here. I was a customer over the years, and I knew the owner and he wanted to sell out and go to Florida.”
“And right now he’s soakin’ up the rays.”
“As a matter of fact, I heard he opened up another store in St. Petersburg. Couldn’t take the inactivity.”
“Well, good for him. How’d you happen to come up with the scratch to buy this place, Bernie?”
“I came into a few dollars.”
“Uh-huh. A relative died, somethin’ like that.”
“Something like that.”
“Right. What I figure, you dropped out of sight for a month or so during the winter. January, wasn’t it?”
“And part of February.”
“I figure you were down in Florida doin’ what you do best, and you hit it pretty good and walked with a short ton of jewelry. I figure you wound up with a big piece of change and decided Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s boy Bernard oughta fix hisself up with a decent front.”
“That’s what you figure, Ray?”
“Uh-huh.”
I thought for a minute. “It wasn’t Florida,” I said.
“Nassau, then. St. Thomas. What the hell.”
“Actually, it was California. Orange County.”
“Same difference.”
“And it wasn’t jewels. It was a coin collection.”
“You always went for them things.”
“Well, they’re a terrific investment.”
“Not with you on the loose they aren’t. You made out like a bandit on the coins, huh?”
“Let’s say I came out ahead.”
“And bought this place.”
“That’s right. Mr. Litzauer didn’t want a fortune for it. He set a fair price for the inventory and threw in the fixtures and the good will.”
“Barnegat Books. Where’d you get the name?”
“I kept it. I didn’t want to have to spring for a new sign. Litzauer had a summer place at Barnegat Light on the Jersey shore. There’s a lighthouse on the sign.”
“I didn’t notice. You could call it Burglar Books. ‘These books are a steal’—there’s your slogan. Get it?”
“I’m sure I will sooner or later.”
“Hey, are you gettin’ steamed? I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. It’s a nice front, Bern. It really is.”
“It’s not a front. It’s what I do.”
“Huh?”
“It’s what I do for a living, Ray, and it’s
all
I do for a living. I’m in the book business.”
“Sure you are.”
“I’m serious about this.”
“Serious. Right.”
“I am.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, the reason I dropped in, I was thinkin’ about you just the other day. What it was, my wife was gettin’ on my back. You ever been married?”
“No.”
“You’re so busy gettin’ settled, maybe marriage is the next step. Nothin’ like it for settlin’ a man. What she wanted, here it’s October already and she’s expectin’ a long winter. You never met my wife, did you?”
“I talked to her on the phone once.”
“ ‘The leaves are turnin’ early, Ray. That means a cold winter.’ That’s what she tells me. If the trees don’t turn until late, then
that
means a cold winter.”
“She likes it cold?”
“What she likes is if it’s cold and she’s warm. What she’s drivin’ at is a fur coat.”
“Oh.”
“She goes about five-six, wears a size-sixteen dress. Sometimes she diets down to a twelve, sometimes she packs in the pasta and gets up to an eighteen. Fur coats, I don’t figure they got to fit like gloves anyway, right?”
“I don’t know much about them.”
“What she wants is mink. No wild furs or endangered species because she’s a fanatic on the subject. Minks, see, they grow the little bastards on these ranches, so there’s none of that sufferin’ in traps, and the animal’s not endangered or any of that stuff. All that they do is they gas ’em and skin ’em out.”
“How nice for the minks. It must be like going to the dentist.”
“Far as the color, I’d say she’s not gonna be too fussy. Just so it’s one of your up-to-date colors. Your platinum, your champagne. Not the old dark-brown shades.”
I nodded, conjuring up an image of Mrs. Kirschmann draped in fur. I didn’t know what she looked like, so I allowed myself to picture a sort of stout Edith Bunker.
“Oh,” I said suddenly. “There’s a reason you’re telling me this.”
“Well, I was thinkin’, Bern.”
“I’m out of the business, Ray.”
“What I was thinkin’, you might run into a coat in the course of things, know what I mean? I was thinkin’ that you and me, we go back a ways, we been through a lot, the two of us, and—”
“I’m not a burglar anymore, Ray.”
“I wasn’t countin’ on a freebie, Bernie. Just a bargain.”
“I don’t steal anymore, Ray.”
“I hear you talkin’, Bern.”
“I’m not as young as I used to be. Nobody ever is but these days I’m starting to feel it. When you’re young nothing scares you. When you get older everything does. I don’t ever want to go inside again, Ray. I don’t like prisons.”
“These days they’re country clubs.”
“Then they changed a whole hell of a lot in the past few years, because I swear I never cared for them myself. You meet a better class of people on the D train.”
“Guy like you, you could get a nice job in the prison library.”
“They still lock you in at night.”
“So you’re straight, right?”
“That’s right.”
“I been here how long? All that time you haven’t had a single person walk in the store.”
“Maybe the uniform keeps ’em away, Ray.”
“Maybe business ain’t what it might be. You been in the business how long, Bern? Six months?”
“Closer to seven.”
“Bet you don’t even make the rent.”
“I do all right.” I marked my place in
Soldiers Three,
closed the book, put it on the shelf behind the counter. “I made a forty-dollar profit from one customer earlier this afternoon and I swear it was easier than stealing.”
“Is that a fact. You’re a guy made twenty grand in an hour and a half when things fell right.”
“And went to jail when they didn’t.”
“Forty bucks. I can see where that’d really have you turning handsprings.”
“There’s a difference between honest money and the other kind.”
“Yeah, and the difference comes to somethin’ like $19,960. This here, Bern, this is nickels and dimes. Let’s be honest. You can’t live on this.”
“I never stole that much, Ray. I never lived that high. I got a small apartment on the Upper West Side, I stay out of night clubs, I do my own wash in the machines in the basement. The store’s steady. You want to give me a hand with this?”
He helped me drag the bargain table in from the sidewalk. He said, “Look at this. A cop and a burglar both doin’ physical work. Somebody should take a picture. What do you get for these? Forty cents, three for a buck? And that’s keepin’ you in shirts and socks, huh?”
“I’m a careful shopper.”
“Look, Bern, if there’s some reason you don’t wanna help me out on this coat thing—”
“Cops,” I said.
“What about cops?”
“A guy rehabilitates himself and you refuse to believe it. You talk yourselves hoarse telling me to go straight—”
“When the hell did I ever tell you to go straight? You’re a first-class burglar. Why would I tell you to change?”
He let go of it while I filled a shopping bag with hardcover mysteries and began shutting down for the night. He told me about his partner, a clean-cut and soft-spoken young fellow with a fondness for horses and a wee amphetamine habit.
“All he does is lose and bitch about it,” Ray complained, “until this past week when he starts pickin’ the ponies with x-ray vision. Now all he does is win, and I swear I liked him better when he was losin’.”
“His luck can’t last forever, Ray.”
“That’s what I been tellin’ myself. What’s that, steel gates across the windows? You don’t take chances, do you?”
I drew the gates shut, locked them. “Well, they were already here,” I said stiffly. “Seems silly not to use them.”
“No sense makin’ it easy for another burglar, huh? No honor among thieves, isn’t that what they say? What happens if you forget the key, huh, Bern?”
He didn’t get an answer, nor do I suppose he expected one. He chuckled instead and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I guess you’d just call a locksmith,” he said. “You couldn’t pick the lock, not bein’ a burglar anymore. All you are is a guy who sells books.”
Barnegat Books is on East Eleventh Street between Broadway and University Place. When I’d finished locking up I carried my shopping bag two doors east to a dog-grooming salon called the Poodle Factory. Carolyn Kaiser had a skittish Yorkie up on the grooming table and was buffing its little nails. She said, “Hey, is it that time already? Just let me finish with Prince Philip here and I’ll be ready to go. If I don’t get a drink in me soon I’ll start yipping like a chihuahua.”
I got comfortable on the pillow sofa while Carolyn put the final touches on the terrier’s pedicure and popped him back in his cage. During the course of this she complained at length about her lover’s misbehavior. Randy had come home late the previous night, drunk and disheveled and marginally disorderly, and Carolyn was sick of it.
“I think it’s time to end the relationship,” she told me, “but the question is how do I
feel
about ending the relationship? And the answer is I don’t
know
how I feel because I can’t get in
touch
with my feelings, and I figure if I can’t get in touch with them I might as well not feel them altogether, so let’s go someplace with a liquor license, because all I want to feel right now is better. And how was
your
day, Bernie?”
“A little long.”
“Yeah, you do look faintly tuckered. Let’s go, huh? I’m so sick of the smell of this place. I feel like I’m wearing Wet Dog perfume.”
We ducked around the corner to a rather tired saloon called the Bum Rap. The jukebox leaned toward country and western, and Barbara Mandrell was singing about adultery as we took stools at the long dark bar. Carolyn ordered a vodka martini on the rocks. I asked for club soda with lime and got a nod from the bartender and a puzzled stare from Carolyn.
“It’s October,” she said.
“So?”
“Lent’s in the spring.”
“Right.”
“Doctor’s orders or something? Giving the old liver a rest?”
“Just don’t feel like a drink tonight.”
“Fair enough. Well, here’s to crime. Hey, did I just say something wrong?”
So that got me onto the subject of Ray Kirschmann and his mink-loving wife, and it became Carolyn’s turn to make sympathetic noises. We’ve become good at playing that role for one another. She’s crowding thirty, with Dutch-cut dark-brown hair and remarkably clear blue eyes. She stands five-one in high heels and never wears them, and she’s built like a fire hydrant, which is dangerous in her line of work.
I met her around the time I took over the bookshop. I didn’t know Randy as well because I didn’t see as much of her; the Poodle Factory was a solo venture of Carolyn’s. Randy’s a stewardess, or was until she got grounded for biting a passenger. She’s taller and thinner than Carolyn, and a year or two younger, and faintly flighty. Randy and I are friends, I suppose, but Carolyn and I are soulmates.
My soulmate clucked sympathetically. “Cops are a pain,” she said. “Randy had an affair with a cop once. I ever tell you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“She had this phase she went through, three months or so of panic before she was ready to come out as a lesbian. I think it was some kind of denial mechanism. She slept with dozens of men. This one cop was impotent and she made fun of him and he held his gun to her head and she thought he was going to kill her. Which somebody ought to, and why the
hell
am I talking about her again, will you tell me that?”