Страница 21 из 41
“You think he just made it all up?”
“No, but-”
“Leave me alone, Ubi. You don’t even like Jarlsberg.” Ubi was short for Ubiquitous, which was the Russian Blue’s name. Jarlsberg was the cheese we were munching. (Not the Burmese, in case you were wondering. The Burmese was named Archie.)
To me she said, “Maybe the book doesn’t exist, Bernie.”
“I had it in my hands, Carolyn.”
“Oh, right.”
“I was thinking that myself earlier, just spi
“Yeah, that’s an idea.”
“Except it’s a dumb idea, because I actually flipped through that book and read bits and pieces of it, and it’s real. It’s a genuine old printed book in less than sensational condition. I was even wondering if it could be a fake.”
“A fake?”
“Sure. Suppose Kipling destroyed every last copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow. Suppose there never was such a thing as a Rider Haggard copy to survive, or suppose there was but it disappeared forever.” She was nodding encouragingly. “Well,” I went on, “suppose someone sat down and faked a text. It’d be a job, writing that long a ballad, but Kipling’s not the hardest writer in the world to imitate. Some poet could knock it out between greeting-card assignments.”
“Then what?”
“Well, you couldn’t sell it as an original manuscript because it would be too easily discredited. But if you had a printer set type-” I shook my head. “That’s where it breaks down. You could set type and run off one copy, and you could bind it and then distress it one way or another to give it some age, and you could even fake the inscription to H. Rider Haggard in a way that might pass inspection. But do you see the problem?”
“It sounds complicated.”
“Right. It’s too damned complicated and far too expensive. It’s like those caper movies where the crooks would have had to spend a million dollars to steal a hundred thousand, with all the elaborate preparations they go through and the equipment they use. Any crook who went through everything I described in order to produce a book you could sell for fifteen thousand dollars would have to be crazy.”
“Maybe it’s worth a lot more than that. Fifteen thousand is just the price you and Whelkin worked out.”
“That’s true. The fifteen-thousand figure doesn’t really mean anything, since I didn’t even get a smell of it, did I?” I sighed. Wistfully, I imagine. “No,” I said. “I know an old book when I look at it. I look at a few thousand of them every day, and old books are different from new ones, dammit. Paper’s different when it’s been around for fifty years. Sure, they could have used old paper, but it keeps not being worth the trouble. It’s a real book, Carolyn. I’m sure of it.”
“Speaking of the old books you look at every day.”
“What about them?”
“Somebody’s watching your store. I was at my shop part of the time, I had to wash a dog and I couldn’t reach the owner to cancel. And there was somebody in a car across the street from your shop, and he was still there when I walked past a second time.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“No. I didn’t get the license number, either. I suppose I should have, huh?”
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was probably the police,” I said. “A stake-out.”
“Oh.”
“They’ve probably got my apartment staked out, too.”
“Oh. That’s how they do it, huh?”
“That’s how they do it on television. This cop I talked to earlier said they’d get me when I returned to my old haunts. I wanted to tell him I didn’t have any old haunts, but I suppose he meant the store and the apartment.”
“Or this place.”
“Huh?”
“Well, we’re friends. You come over here a lot. If they talk to enough people they’ll learn that, won’t they?”
“I hope not,” I said, and the phone rang. We looked at each other, not very happily, and didn’t say a word until it stopped ringing.
CHAPTER Eleven
At six-fifteen I was sitting at the counter of the Red Flame at the corner of Seventieth and West End. I had a cup of coffee and a wedge of prune Danish in front of me and I wasn’t particularly interested in either. The other two customers, a teenaged couple in a back booth, were interested only in each other. The counterman wasn’t interested in anything; he stood beside the coffee urns chewing a mint-flavored toothpick and staring at the opposite wall, where a bas-relief showed a couple of olive-ski
I kept glancing out the window and wondering much the same thing. From where I sat I could almost see my building a block uptown. I’d had a closer look earlier from the sidewalk, but I hadn’t been close enough then to tell if there were cops staked out in or around the place. Theoretically it shouldn’t matter, but theoretically bumblebees can’t fly, so how much faith can you place in theory?
One of the teenagers giggled. The counterman yawned and scratched himself. I looked out the window for perhaps the forty-first time and saw Carolyn half a block away, heading south on West End with my small suitcase in one hand. I put some money on the counter and went out to meet her.
She was radiant. “Piece of cake,” she said. “Nothing to it, Bern. This burglary number’s a cinch.”
“Well, you had my keys, Carolyn.”
“They helped, no question about it. Of course, I had to get the right key in the right lock.”
“You didn’t have any trouble getting into the building?”
She shook her head. “Mrs. Hesch was terrific. The doorman called her on the intercom and she said to send me right up, and then she met me at the elevator.”
I’d called Mrs. Hesch earlier to arrange all this. She was a widow who had the apartment across the hall from me, and she seemed to think burglary was the sort of character defect that could be overlooked in a friend and neighbor.
“She didn’t have to meet you,” I said.
“Well, she wanted to make sure I found the right apartment. What she really wanted was a good look at me. She’s a little worried about you, Bern.”
“Hell, I’m a little worried about me myself.”
“She thought you were all respectable now, what with the bookstore and all. Then she heard about the Porlock murder on the news last night and she started to worry. But she’s positive you didn’t kill anybody.”
“Good for her.”
“I think she liked me. She wanted me to come in for coffee but I told her there wasn’t time.”
“She makes good coffee.”
“That’s what she said. She said you like her coffee a lot, and she sort of implied that what you need is somebody to make coffee for you on a fulltime basis. The message I got is that living on the West Side and burgling on the East Side is a sort of Robin Hood thing, but there’s a time in life when a young man should think about getting married and settling down.”
“It’s nice the two of you hit it off.”
“Well, we only talked for a couple of minutes. Then I went and burgled your apartment.” She hefted the suitcase. “I think I got everything. Burglar tools, pocket flashlight, all the things you mentioned. And shirts and socks and underwear. There was some cash in your shirt drawer.”
“There was? I guess there was. I usually keep a few dollars there.”
“Thirty-eight dollars.”
“If you say so.”
“I took it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I don’t suppose thirty-eight dollars one way or the other is going to make a difference. But it can’t hurt to have it along.”
She shrugged. “You said you always take cash,” she said. “So I took it.”
“It’s a good principle. You know something? We’re never going to get a cab.”
“Not when it’s raining. Can we get a subway? No, not across town. Isn’t there a bus that goes over Seventy-ninth Street?”