The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (18 page)

The door to the apartment had a trio of locks, and they were all good ones. There was a Fox police lock, the kind you can’t force because it employs a stout steel bar braced against the door. You have to turn the lock to move it, but if you’ve got the tools and the talent you can manage that without a key.

The other locks were a Rabson and a Poulard. The Rabson is a marvelous mechanism, and it’s no slur on its good reputation to say I can open any model they ever made in no time at all. I’ve devoted a lot of time to it, I’ve given it a lot of study, and I know their complete line as well as old Leo Rabson himself ever did.

The Poulard is the one they advertise as pickproof. Well, most of the time it probably is.

It took me some time, standing there in front of the Wattrous door and working on the Wattrous locks. I’d have preferred being on the top floor, where no one going up or down the stairs could see me, but you have to play the cards you’re dealt. I did hear a door open a flight below, and a brief conversation between the woman who lived there and the man who was going home to his family in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, and I held my breath while he went down the stairs and she went inside and closed the door, slamming it just a little harder than she needed to.

Then I opened the last lock, picked up my pizza box, and went inside.

According to my information, the Wattrouses had been gone for a little over a week. I could believe it. The most pervasive odor was the garlicky pizza smell I’d brought with me, but I could tell the air in that apartment had been there for a while, undisturbed by the opening of a window or door.

I’d closed the door upon entering, of course, and turned one of the locks. I blinked my flashlight a couple of times, found my way to a table lamp, and turned it on. Whatever light slipped past the living room drapes had better be nice and steady. That’s less of an attention-getter than the dancing beam of a handheld flashlight.

And it left my hands free. They were gloved by now, so I could handle objects with impunity, should I feel the need to do so. But first I sank into the reading chair and got my bearings.

It was an oversized leather recliner, and I called it the reading chair because that was so obviously its
raison d’etre
. In another setting it could have played another role; plant it in front of a flat-screen TV amongst a patchwork of college pennants and football jerseys, and the only reading done within its embrace would be the ESPN news crawl at the bottom of the frame.

But if Melville Wattrous even owned a television set, he must have confined it to the back bedroom. Built-in bookcases took all the wall space on either side of the living room fireplace. Books filled them from floor to ceiling, and the rest of the room held their overflow—on tabletops between bookends, in rotating bookcases serving as side tables, and, in the absence of suitable surfaces, stacked on the floor beside a table or next to a chair or simply piled in a corner.

Was the fellow a customer of mine? He almost had to be, because how could a man with such a passion for books have lived five minutes from my shop without once crossing its threshold?

Melville Wattrous. I couldn’t recall hearing the name before Mr. Smith spoke it just a few hours ago, and it was distinctive enough (unlike, say, Smith) to have earned shelf space in my mind. If he’d been my customer, he’d never introduced himself, never tendered a check in payment.

Still, most of my business is cash, and most of my customers never have occasion to tell me their names. A framed photo might have settled the matter, but books took up the space where photos might have stood.

I’ll tell you, it was hard to leave the embrace of that chair. I worked the lever to make it recline, and the footrest promptly ascended, taking my feet with it. My eyes closed of their own accord, and I felt all the tensions of the day draining out of me, and—

No. If they included an owner’s manual with every set of burglar’s tools, one of the first tips it would give you would be that you stay awake throughout the commission of a burglary. One ought never to nod off
in media res.

I got up and went to work.

If you want to hide a book, or even if you don’t, there’s no place like a bookcase. If you think a needle in a haystack’s likely to be elusive, imagine sifting through the thing looking for a piece of hay. And not just any piece of hay, mind you. A particular piece of hay, distinct from its fellows however much it may look quite like them . . .

And it would have been easier, I have to say, if the object in question had not been a book among books, and I a bookman myself. Here I was, trying to work my way through the hundreds of volumes as quickly as possible, and feeling like a ten-year-old with ADD who’d skipped his morning dose of Ritalin. I couldn’t just dismiss a book from my consciousness when it failed to be the one I was seeking. I had to read each title and take note of each author and remember what I knew about the book and its author and recall if I’d ever handled that title, or other books by that author, and whether or not this particular volume might once have graced my shelves, and—

Hell.

What I longed to do, of course, was approach this library as if I’d been invited to appraise it. And that meant picking up and examining every book that caught my eye. Take this copy of
Of Mice and Men,
for example. It’s a first edition, and a glance at the copyright page tells us it’s a first printing. But is it the first
state
of the first printing? The press run was interrupted so that a change might be made in the text; in the first chapter, a sentence in the description of Lenny ends with the clause
and his heavy hands were pendula.
Perhaps an early reader or reviewer didn’t know that pendula is the plural of pendulum, perhaps Steinbeck himself had another look at the proofs and decided that the phrase was, well, at least as heavy-handed as Lenny himself. In any event, the phrase was duly expunged before the press resumed operations.

Now John Steinbeck’s less highly regarded these days (though I don’t know why), and not that many people collect him, and for those who do,
Of Mice and Men
has never been a particularly difficult book. The early novels—
Cup of Gold, To a God Unknown
—are thin on the ground, and
In Dubious Battle
can be elusive, but
Mice
is all over the place, and you wouldn’t have to take out a second mortgage to secure a pristine first-state-first-printing specimen, with a nice dust jacket.

And this copy didn’t even have a dust jacket, nice or otherwise, and in other respects was a long way from pristine. It had been put to the use for which it was intended—i.e., people had actually read it—and thus wouldn’t grade higher than, say, very good to fine.

So why did I have to leaf through the first chapter searching for heavy hands?

Not there. It wasn’t a first state. I put it back where I’d found it, which was precisely what I’d have done if poor Lenny’s hands had been as pendulous as anyone could possibly want them to be.

Of making many books there is no end.
It says so right there in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and you get the feeling the fellow sighed as he wrote the line. Well, do you think looking at books is any different?

Did it take that long? I don’t suppose it did, not really. I kept getting distracted, and I kept pushing the distractions aside and scanning the titles of the books in front of me. I still had to give everything a glance, because while Wattrous (or perhaps Mrs. Wattrous) had tried to impose order upon the library, the organizational scheme kept breaking down.

The book I was seeking was non-fiction, so when I hit a stretch of novels I thought I could speed ahead, but then I ran into Maeterlinck’s classic
The Life of the Bee
wedged between Evelyn Waugh’s
A Handful of Dust
and Michael Arlen’s
The Green Hat.
And
The Life of the Ant,
frequently mentioned in the same breath with
The Life of the Bee,
was one shelf down, bracketed by two early novels of William Faulkner. I’m sure Melville Wattrous would have said he knew where everything was and could lay hands on any volume at a moment’s notice, but right about then he was somewhere between Tromso and Longyearbyen, so I had to manage this on my own.

And then there it was, the object of my quest, and I took it gently from its shelf. It was a small volume, just six inches tall and four inches wide, and bound in dark blue cloth, with the author and title stamped on the spine in small gold letters.

I sat down with it and opened to the title page.
Thomas Baird Culloden,
I read.
My Adventures with Colonial Silver.
I turned the page and confirmed that it had been privately printed at the Lattimore Press in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1898.

There were only two hundred pages, but it had been printed on coated stock and was a little over an inch thick. Consequently its removal had left an inch-wide gap in the wall of books, and I took a moment to search a stack on the floor for a same-size volume to take its place.

I couldn’t think of anything else I needed to do. I’d had my gloves on throughout, so there were no prints to wipe, nor would I be giving anyone reason to look for them. It was time to take my book and go home.

But how to carry it? I own a pair of chinos with cargo pockets, and it could have gone in one of those, but tonight’s chinos were dressier, and the pockets would strain at a rack-size paperback. I could slip the book under my waistband, letting my blazer cover it, but I didn’t want to do that, nor did I want to walk out with the bare book in my hand.

Everybody has paper and plastic bags in their kitchen, and I chose a Gristede’s shopping bag. And while I was there I could hardly avoid remembering that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I opened the refrigerator, but of course they’d left it empty before departure.

Rats.

And then I remembered the pizza.

When I left, I was carrying T. B. Culloden’s book in the Gristede’s bag, and I had an empty pizza box under one arm. On my way out I set up the police lock’s steel bar, and took time to undo all my earlier work, turning each cylinder and locking all three locks. I went down the stairs, paused in the vestibule to transfer my gloves from my hands to my pockets, and went out into the night.