The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (5 page)

This time, after I’d removed and pocketed the two bolts and raised the restroom window, I used a length of duct tape as long as the window’s width to attach the top of the mesh panel to the window frame. Then I added another similar strip for added strength. I drew the panel back, wormed my way through the window, let the panel slip back into place, and closed the window.

I walked a block before I realized I was still wearing the gloves. I took them off and tucked them in a pocket. I walked another block, and then I turned a corner and walked a third block. All without a siren wailing, or a police whistle sounding, or the long arm of the law reaching out and taking hold of my elbow.

Whew.

So I make a point of opening at nine, but it’s a point that’s occasionally blunted, and it was getting on for 9:30 the next morning by the time I fed Raffles and gave him fresh water. If he’d been an ordinary member of his species, there’d have been a litter box to contend with, an unwelcome chore at any hour, and especially so at an early one. But all I had to do was go into my restroom and flush the commode, because Raffles has been schooled in the use of that wondrous contrivance, even as you and I.

I can’t take credit for training him. That was Carolyn’s doing, and he’d become letter-perfect at it weeks before she found a way to palm him off on me. Not that I’ve ever had cause to complain. He’s a good companion, and he earns his keep; old leather bindings and bookmaker’s glue are, well, catnip to mice, and all evidence of rodent damage ceased the day he took employment here.

For I shall consider my cat, Raffles,
I thought, and reached for my copy of
Jubilate Agno.
Christopher Smart, whose work it is, was an eighteenth-century English poet, a contemporary of Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. He was unquestionably talented, but he was also mad as a hatter, and given to fits of religious mania that led him to implore his fellows to join him in public prayer. “I’d as soon pray in the street with Kit Smart as anyone else in London,” Johnson allowed, but others were less tolerant, and Smart spent the better part of his mature years clapped in a cell in Bedlam, where he wrote a line of poetry every day. The ones about Geoffrey the Cat are clear enough, and rather touching, but some of the others can be hard to unravel.

Let Ross, House of Ross, rejoice with Obadiah, and the rankle-dankle fish with hands . . .

Well, how can you argue with that?

“
‘A Life Lived Backward,’
” said my first customer of the morning. He was holding the handwritten pages I’d taken from the Galtonbrook, and reading the words at the top of the first page. “That was his original title, you know.”

“I hadn’t known until you told me. And a good thing you did.”

“Oh?”

I pointed to the initials on the folder. “That wouldn’t have meant much to me otherwise,” I said. “I’d have been looking for TCCOBB.”

“As far as I know,” he said, “
A Life Lived Backward
appears on this manuscript and nowhere else. Princeton has his collected papers, you know. Eighty-nine archival boxes and around a dozen oversize containers. They’ve got the typed manuscript of the story.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,
that’s the title it bears. That was its title when it first appeared in
Collier’s Magazine
in May of 1922, and when it was included in his
Tales of the Jazz Age
later that same year.”

“How did you come to know—”

“The original title? A letter to a young woman, her own identity lost over the years. ‘I worked up a story around that idea I mentioned. I think it came out well. I called it
A Life Lived Backward
as I needed to call it something, but when I type it up I’ll call it something else. It’ll have to have a better title before I dare show it to anyone.’ ”

“He wrote it out in longhand and then typed it up.”

“And this is clearly a first draft,” he said. “You can see that, can’t you? The handwriting changes periodically, suggesting it was written over a period of several days, if not longer. He started out with blue-black ink, and halfway through it’s black, and then toward the end it changes back again.”

“There aren’t many corrections.”

“No, just words crossed out here and there when he changed his mind and started a sentence over. The typed manuscript is full of corrections, words crossed out and other words inked in, whole handwritten sentences crawling up the margins. My guess is that he simply copied this draft verbatim, or had a typist do it for him, and then went to work on it. Tweaking, polishing.” He raised his eyes from the manuscript to me. “But the only way to know that for certain would require another trip to Princeton, so that I could compare these pages with their typescript. And I don’t think I care enough to bother. It’s not
Hamlet
, you know.”

“Um—”

“What we have here,” he declared, “is a decidedly minor work by a writer with an overblown reputation. But I haven’t bought it to read it, have I? No more than the chap who paid a seven-figure sum for a stamp from British Guiana did so in hopes of mailing a letter.”

“Actually,” I pointed out, “you haven’t bought it at all.”

“By God, I haven’t, have I? I hope you don’t mind a check.”

“Um—”

“Just a little joke,” he said, and opened his briefcase.

I haven’t described him, have I? Or told you his name.

The name he’d supplied, on his initial visit to my bookshop, was Smith, and it was clear he didn’t expect me to believe it was his by birth or court order. “If pressed,” he’d said, “I could probably come up with a first name as well, and even a middle initial, but how would that serve your interests or my own? Smith will do.”

He was a couple of inches shorter than I and a few pounds heavier. His medium brown hair, neither long nor short, was showing gray at the temples. His mouth was small, his lips narrow, his teeth even. His eyes were a washed-out blue, their expression hard to read behind his horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

He’d worn a three-piece suit on his first visit, dark gray with a chalk stripe, and his tie, or as much of it as showed above his vest, was an unornamented blue. His white shirt had a button-down collar.

This time around he was less formally dressed, in tailored jeans and a Norfolk jacket of rust-brown tweed. There was a flat brass disc sewn to his lapel, and I seemed to recall a similar ornament on his suit. Today’s shirt was a deep blue, and open at the throat. Again, a button-down collar.

He handed me a letter-size envelope. It had a satisfying heft to it.

“Ten,” he said.

I took it, and he handed me another that might have been its twin.

“Ten.”

The third envelope was thinner, and felt lighter.

“And five.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’ll want to count them.”

I lifted the flap of the third envelope and established that it was full of bills, all of them evidently used hundreds. There was a thick wad of them, and I was willing to believe there were fifty of them, even as I was willing to believe the other envelopes held a hundred bills each, and that all of the bills were genuine.

I told him I’d count them later.

“You’ll want to add these to the count,” he said, and passed me a fourth envelope, which seemed to be the same thickness as the third. “Five more,” he said.

“Oh?”

“A bonus.”

“That’s very generous of you.”

“Do you think so? I wonder. It’s the same twenty percent I’d leave for a waitress, and I’d do so with no expectations. I’d probably never sit at her table again, and might not even return to that restaurant. Whereas in the present instance I have an ulterior motive.”

“Oh?”

“Indeed, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I expect to pay you another visit before too long. We’ll be doing more business, you and I.”

I’ve known Mowgli for years, although I didn’t know his real name any more than I knew Smith’s. The name (Mowgli, not Smith) comes from
The Jungle Book,
but don’t ask me whether Kipling made it up or came across it somewhere on the Indian subcontinent. However it found its way to my Mowgli, it seems to suit him. There’s a feral quality to him, partnered with a gentle nature.

Early in our acquaintance he brought books to me. I was at first reluctant to buy from him, thinking he might have lifted them from other shops, but came to know that he was a legitimate book scout, scooping up bargains at flea markets and urban yard sales and wholesaling them to dealers like me.

Then the Internet came along, and transformed Mowgli from supplier to customer. Or maybe he’d stayed essentially the same, and Barnegat Books had morphed into a bargain basement. He now had a website and an eBay store, and I never saw him without selling him six or ten or a dozen books. At first I’d give him a volume discount, but it didn’t take me long to stop that, and he didn’t seem to mind, paying the marked price without argument. He didn’t even balk at the sales tax, until the day he informed me that he had acquired a resale number, and was now tax-exempt.