The Burglar in the Library (7 page)

“I’m not tired, Mummy.”

“You’re never tired,” Mrs. Savage said, aggrieved. One sensed she was often tired herself, and that it was largely Millicent’s fault. She sighed, and became aware of our existence. “I hope she hasn’t been driving the two of you nuts,” she said. “She’s really a pretty good little kid, except when she decides she’s Mary, Queen of Scots.”

“Oh, Mummy.
Not
Mary, Queen of Scots.” She rolled her eyes. “Mummy, this is Bernie and Carolyn. They have Aunt Augusta’s Room.”

“That’s a nice room, isn’t it? It’s nice to meet you both. I’m Leona Savage. My husband Greg’s here somewhere, but don’t ask me where.”

We said we were pleased to meet her. “They’re very nice,” Millicent announced. “Carolyn’s a canine stylist. And you’ll never guess what Bernie does.”

“I’ll never guess what a canine stylist is, either, I’m afraid.”

“She grooms dogs, Mummy. Especially Yorkies, because there’s less to wash. And Bernie’s a burglar.”

“That was going to be our little secret,” I reminded her.

“Oh, Mummy wouldn’t tell anyone. Would you, Mummy?”

O
ur next stop was the library. I’d already seen a picture of it in the brochure, but you know what they say about the Grand Canyon. Nothing prepares you for it.

It was an enormous room, with built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves running the length of it and a wall of windows opposite. There was a fireplace at one end, with various savage-looking tribal weapons mounted above it and a bookcase on either side. At the room’s other end, a carved Jacobean table held magazines and newspapers; above it, a Mercator-projection map was mounted on the wall. It showed all of Britain’s crown colonies and dominions and protectorates in pink, and it dated from a time when the sun never set thereon.

A lectern displayed an opened copy of the
Oxford Universal Dictionary,
while another showed a National Geographic atlas some fifty years more recent than the map. A two-tiered bookcase on casters held an eleventh edition of the
Britannica.
Other tables and chairs and sofas were strategically positioned around the room, with good reading light wherever you might happen to sit. A vast oriental covered most of the wide-board pine floor, with area rugs and runners helping out where needed.

I just stood there and stared. I have been in a lot of magnificent rooms, including more than a few fine private libraries. Sometimes I have been present by invitation, and other times I have turned up on my own, without the owner’s permission and much to his chagrin. I have found it difficult to leave some of those rooms, wanting to extend my stay as long as I possibly could, but this was different.

I wanted to steal the whole room. I wanted to wrap it up in a magic carpet—perhaps the very one beneath my feet; it looked entirely capable of having magical properties—and whisk it back to New York, where I could install it with a snap of my fingers on the top floor, say, of an Art Deco apartment building on Central Park South. Drop-dead views of the park through that wall of windows, and a gentle north light that wouldn’t fade the carpet or the spines of the books…

I wouldn’t need anything else. No bedroom. I’d sleep sitting up in one of the chairs, nodding off over a leather-bound Victorian novel. No kitchen, either. I’d pick up something at the deli around the corner. A bathroom would be handy, though I could make do with one down the hall if I had to, even as we were doing this weekend.

Give me that room, though, and I could be perfectly happy.

I said as much to Carolyn, said it in a whisper to avoid disturbing the older woman reading Trollope on the green velvet sofa or the intense dark-haired gentleman scribbling away at the leather-topped writing desk. She was not surprised.

“Of course you could,” she said. “This room’s gotta be twice the size of your whole apartment. Forget my little rathole. You could just about lose my apartment in that fireplace.”

“It’s not just the size.”

“It’s pretty nice,” she agreed. “And look at all those books. You think one of them’s the one you’re looking for?”

“One at the most.”

“That was my line, Bern. When Millie asked how many beds we’ve got in Aunt Augusta’s Room.”

“You figure she likes being called Millie?”

“She probably hates it,” she said, “but she’s not here, and anyway I’m whispering. Bernie, don’t look now, but that man is staring at me. See?”

“How can I see? You just said not to look.”

“Well, you can look now. He’s not doing it anymore.”

“Then why look if there’s nothing to see?” I looked anyway, at the fellow at the writing desk. He looked as though he’d stepped out of a Brontë novel and might at any moment step out of Cuttleford House as well, flinging his scarf around his neck and striding across the moors. Except that he wasn’t wearing a scarf, and there weren’t any moors in the neighborhood.

“I think he was just staring off into space,” I said. “Trying to think of
le mot juste,
and you happened to be where his eyes landed.”

“I suppose so. Incidentally, are you out of your mind?”

“Probably. What makes you ask?”

“I was just wondering what possessed you to tell little Princess Margaret that you’re a burglar.”

“Not Princess Margaret.”

“Bern—”

“Lady Jane Grey,” I said. “Or Anne Boleyn.”

“Who cares? The point is—”

“I get the point.”

“So?”

“I almost slipped,” I said. “I almost let out what I really am.”

“What you really…”

“I almost said I was a bookseller.”

“But fortunately you caught yourself at the last minute and told her you were a burglar.”

“Right.”

“Am I missing something here?”

“Think about it,” I said.

She did, and after a long moment light dawned. “Oh,” she said.

“Right.”

“There’s a million books in the damn house,” she said, “and most of them are old, and some of them are sure to be rare. And if they knew there was a bookseller in their midst—”

“They’d be on guard,” I said. “At the very least.”

“Whereas knowing they’ve got a burglar on the premises gives them a nice cozy warm feeling.”

“I didn’t want to say ‘bookseller’,” I said, “and I had to do something quick, and I wanted to stay with the same initial.”

“Why? Monogrammed luggage?”

“My lips were already forming a B.”

“‘A butcher, a baker, a bindlestaff maker.’ All of them start with B, Bernie, and they all sound more innocent than ‘burglar.’”

“I know.”

“It’s a good thing her lips are sealed.”

“Yeah, right. She already told Mummy. But you don’t think Mummy believed it, do you?”

“She thought you were joking with the kid.”

“And so will anyone else she happens to tell. As far as that goes, do you really think Millicent thought I’d come here to steal the spoons? She assumed it was a gag and she was happy to go along with it. When anyone presses the point, I’ll let it be known that you and I work together at the Poodle Factory. What’s the matter?”

“Bern, don’t take this the wrong way, but I never had a partner and I never will.”

“It’s just a story to let out, Carolyn.”

“I mean it’s not much, the Poodle Factory, but it’s mine, you know?”

“So I’m your employee. Is that better?”

“A little bit. The thing is, what do you know about washing dogs? I’m the last person to compare it to rocket science, but it’s like any other trade. There’s a lot of information involved, and if you should happen to come up against a pet owner who’s familiar with what goes on at a dog-grooming salon, it might blow your cover.”

“I’m just helping out,” I said. “I lost my job, and now I’m helping you at the salon while I wait for something to open up in my own field.”

“And what’s that, Bern?”

“I’ll think of something, okay?”

“Hey, don’t bite my head off, Bernie.”

“Sorry.”

“You know what’s funny?”

“Hardly anything.”

“Bern—”

“What’s funny?”

“Well,” she said, “remember when you bought Barnegat Books from Mr. Litzauer? You were a big reader, and you always liked books, and you figured owning a bookstore would be a good front. You could pretend to be a bookseller while you went on breaking into houses.”

“So?”

“So now you’re pretending to be a burglar,” she said, “while you chase around after old books. Don’t you think that’s funny?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s a riot.”

From the library we went through another parlor, winding up in something called the Morning Room. Maybe it was situated to catch the morning sun, or maybe it was where you took your second cup of coffee after breakfast. (It wasn’t where you had breakfast. That’s what the Breakfast Room was for.)

In the Morning Room we met Gordon Wolpert, a fiftyish fellow dressed all in brown. He was a widower, we learned, and he was on the seventh day of a ten-day stay. “But I might extend it,” he said. “It’s a spectacular house, and the kitchen is really quite remarkable. Did you arrive in time for dinner? Well, then you know what I mean. I’m putting on weight, and I can’t honestly say I give
a damn. Maybe I’ll have my clothes let out and become a permanent resident, like the colonel.”

“Colonel Buller-Blount? He lives here all the time?”

“Blount-Buller, actually. And I guess it’s not accurate to call him a permanent guest. He stays here half the year.”

“And spends the other half in England? I suppose it must have something to do with taxes.”

“It has everything to do with taxes, but he doesn’t spend a minute in England. He told me he hasn’t been there in years. Hates the place.”

“Really? He’s the most English person I ever met in my life.”

Wolpert grinned. “With the possible exception of young Millicent,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it’s his Englishness that makes him stay away. He can’t stand what’s become of the country. He says they’ve ruined it.”

“They?”

“A sort of generic ‘they,’ from the sound of it. He wants the England he remembers from boyhood, and he has to come here to Cuttleford House for it.”

Carolyn wanted to know where he spent the other six months.

“Six months and a day, actually. In Florida. That way he doesn’t have to pay any state income tax, and I think there are other tax savings as well.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “A lot of New Yorkers do the same thing. Hey, wait a minute. Hasn’t he got it backwards?” She waved a hand at the window, on the other side of which the snow continued to fall. “It’s winter. What’s he doing up here?”

“The colonel reverses the usual order of things,” Wolpert said. “He comes north during the fall foliage season and heads south in April. That way the old boy is always paying the low off-season rates.”

“That’s the good news,” I said. “The bad news is he never gets decent weather.”

“That’s the whole point.”

“It is?”

“Remember, he’s looking to recapture the rapture. Winter here reminds him of happy boyhood hours on the moors, chasing the wily grouse or whatever you do on the moors. And Florida in the summer puts him in mind of his years in Her Majesty’s Service, most of which seem to have been spent in one tropical hellhole or another.”

“That’s perverse,” Carolyn said.

“The English word for it is ‘eccentric,’” Wolpert said. “He’s got the worst of both worlds, but evidently it works for him. I suppose you could say that he’s like the proverbial fellow with one foot in a bucket of boiling water and the other in a bucket of ice water. On the average, he’s perfectly comfortable.”

I wondered what kind of work Gordon Wolpert did that gave him the option of extending his stay. I might have asked, but that would only have invited the same question in return, and I hadn’t yet decided how to respond.

So we talked about some of the other guests instead, and about Cuttleford House and its staff. Wolpert had met the Misses Dinmont and Hardesty, but he hadn’t had much chance to size them
up. “The one looks as though she’d be trying to get everybody out on the Great Lawn for field hockey if it weren’t for the snow,” he said. “And the other has a
Magic Mountain
air about her, doesn’t she?”

“Magic Mountain?” Carolyn said. “You mean the theme park?”

“The Thomas Mann novel,” I said gently. “The one set at the sanitarium. Do you think Miss Dinmont has TB?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” he said. “Not TB, I wouldn’t think, but most likely something else with initials. She just seems to me to have the air of somebody who came here to die.”

I had that sentence echoing in my mind for a while, so I missed most of what he had to say about the Eglantines and the handful of people who worked for them—Orris, a pair of chambermaids, and the cook. We’d met Orris, for all that was worth, and hadn’t yet set eyes on the others, although the cook had made her wondrous presence known.

“Nigel and Cissy Eglantine have made a good thing of this sprawling old pile,” he said. “I don’t know what he did before this, but he certainly has the knack for playing hotelier. I suppose you’ve seen his array of single-malt whiskies.”

“He has quite a collection.”

“I don’t know that you can label a Scotch ‘rare,’ but I gather some of them are the product of distilleries with extremely limited production. There are more varieties than you might imagine. I’d have thought it a confined area of expertise.” His eyes sought mine. “A small field indeed,” he said
deliberately. “Nigel has developed quite a palate for them.”

“Oh?”

“Late in the evening,” he said carefully, “or at times of stress, there’s something about him that will remind you of Basil Fawlty. But most of the time he’s the perfect host.” He cocked his head. “Of course, he’s not the first person to make a show of appearing sober when he’s three sheets to the wind. Everybody does it. But it’s a sham, isn’t it?”

“I suppose you could call it that,” I agreed.

“And a petty sham at that,” he said, his eyes on mine. “You could call it that, couldn’t you? A petty sham?”

I gave a noncommittal nod, and it seemed to me that he looked just the slightest bit disappointed.

There were books in the Morning Room, too, and after Gordon Wolpert had left us I picked up one of them and turned its pages. “Frances and Richard Lockridge,” Carolyn read over my shoulder. “Writing about Pam and Jerry North. Maybe we’ll be like Mr. and Mrs. North, Bernie. Isn’t there a book where they go on a vacation?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“And while they’re off somewhere, there’s a murder. And they solve it.”

“I should hope so,” I said, “or otherwise there’s no book.”

“So maybe that’ll happen to us.”

“Maybe what’ll happen to us?”

“Maybe somebody’ll get killed, and we’ll solve it.”

“No one will get killed,” I said. “There won’t be anything to solve.”

“Why’s that, Bern?”

“Because we’re on vacation.”

“So were Mr. and Mrs. North, and then murder took a holiday.”

“Well, this time around murder better take a siesta. I want to kick back and relax, and I want to eat three great meals a day and sleep eight hours a night, and then I want to go home with Raymond Chandler. I don’t want cops poring through my luggage, and that’s exactly what I’ll get if we wind up in the middle of a murder investigation. And why should that happen in the first place? We’re in a perfectly peaceful place with perfectly charming people.”