The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (6 page)

Wonderful.

He came in that morning with an empty tote bag, one that I recognized from the days when he’d brought it in loaded with books for me. It was loaded now when he walked out, and I had money in my cash register that I hadn’t had earlier, so why was I in a bad mood?

Carolyn asked me that very question a couple of hours later, when I showed up at the Poodle Factory after a stop at Two Guys. “That smells great,” she said, “and you look awful. What’s the matter, Bern?”

“Mowgli,” I said.

“You used to like him, Bern.”

“I still like him. I just can’t stand the sight of him.”

“He’s a regular customer now.”

“Exactly.”

“And he pays full price.”

“And then he marks everything up and sells it to somebody online, some yutz in Antwerp or Anaheim with a PayPal account and a thirst for literature. You know what I think he does? I think he checks my stock and lists everything that looks good to him, so he’s actually selling the books while they’re still mine.”

“But don’t his sales lists have photos along with the descriptions? I think you’re being paranoid, Bern.”

“Maybe.”

“I think he makes you feel guilty, because you know you ought to be selling books online yourself.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

“I know.”

“I want to run a bookshop,” I said. “The old-fashioned kind, where people come in looking for something to read, and collectors come in hunting for treasures, and we all have nice intellectual conversations.”

“And once in a while you’ll meet a girl there.”

“Once in a blue moon,” I said. “But if and when I do, there’s a good chance she’ll be able to read.”

“Some of the girls I meet at the Cubby Hole can read,” she said, “and some can’t, and I’m too shallow to care. This food is wonderful, Bern. Did you ask her what it is?”

“What good would that do? Look how long it took us to figure out
Juneau Lock
was
You no like
.”

“And even longer to convince her she was wrong.”

“And she still says it,” I said. “She gets a kick out of saying it. ‘Juneau Lock,’ and then she giggles.”

“She’s adorable when she giggles, isn’t she?”

“She’s cute, all right.”

“You should ask her out.”

“Me? Why don’t you ask her out?”

“I don’t think she likes girls.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because if she did, the long looks I’ve been giving her would cut right through the language barrier.”

“On the other hand, she does giggle at you.”

“She giggles at both of us, Bern. When a straight woman giggles at another woman it just means she thinks something’s funny. When she giggles at a man it means she likes him.”

I was unconvinced. When Two Guys opened in its present incarnation, it was just another Chinese take-out joint, with a predictable menu offering staples like General Tso’s Chicken and Beef with Orange Flavor and Cold Noodles with Sesame Sauce. Everything was well-prepared and tasty, but one day I noticed that they were getting a steady stream of Chinese customers, and the dishes they were taking home were nothing you’d find in General Tso’s mess kit.

“They’ve got special dishes for their countrymen,” I reported to Carolyn, “and I’d really like to give them a try, but when I ask what they are I can’t get anywhere.”

“Did she say anything?”

“Juneau Lock,” I said, “but that doesn’t make any sense. I don’t think they’ve got canals in Alaska, and even if they did—”

“Maybe it’s the name of the dish in Chinese. It just sounds to your untrained ear like Juneau Lock.”

“But how can it be the name of every dish? I point to this one and it’s Juneau Lock. I point to the one next to it and she tells me the same thing. Whatever it is, whatever any of them are, we don’t get to try them.”

Her face darkened. “We’ll see about that,” she said.

God knows what Carolyn told her the following day, and I’m just as glad not to have been a fly on the wall for that particular conversation. (And it was an immaculate kitchen, incidentally; a fly would not have lasted long on any of its well-scrubbed walls.) But whatever Carolyn said, she evidently made it clear that she wasn’t leaving without a portion of this and another of that, and her determination turned out to be the pry bar that jimmied the Juneau Lock.

And ever since then we’d been feasting daily on dishes without knowing their names or ingredients. One or the other of us would point, and the little darling would dish out the food. Now and then she’d demur—“Juneau Lock! Too spicy!” We’d insist, and carry the day. One time it was something of a Pyrrhic victory, when a stew of some generally overlooked animal organ was sufficiently fiery to glow in the dark. By the time we finished we must have glowed ourselves, with equal parts of satisfaction and cayenne poisoning, and were greeted with heightened respect on our return to Two Guys.

That marked the end of our trial period. We’d become regulars, and
Juneau Lock
was simply her name for whichever one of us showed up on any given day.

Good as it was, the Taiwanese food hadn’t been enough to lift my spirits after Mowgli’s visit had crushed them.

“Barnegat Books is in trouble,” I told Carolyn. “And I can’t blame it all on Mowgli. The world’s changing. Why come to my store? You can find any book in ten minutes without leaving your desk. If it’s an eBook, you can buy it for pocket change and get it delivered electronically in minutes. If it’s long out of print, you don’t have to rummage through a dozen antiquarian bookshops, as if there were that many of us left in the business. You just go on line, and you do a title search at abebooks.com, and next thing you know there’s a guy in Moline, Illinois, with an ex-library copy you can buy for a buck ninety-eight plus postage.”

“Can he make money that way?”

“Who, the guy in Moline? I suppose so, if he does enough volume. He’s probably working out of his house, so he hasn’t got any rent to pay.”

“Neither do you, Bern.”

Not since a venture to the other side of the law had enabled me to buy the building. “I don’t,” I agreed, “and it’s a good thing, because if I had to pay rent my receipts these days wouldn’t cover it. I can’t sell books anymore, and I can’t buy them, either. A good customer of mine died recently.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Bern.”

“A nice fellow, a retired Classics professor at NYU. He’d been dropping by for years, and even when he couldn’t find anything to buy we’d have a nice chat. You know, the kind of conversation you can have in an old-fashioned bookshop. And then I didn’t see him for a while, and one afternoon his wife called to tell me he’d passed away.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Well, evidently he’d been quite ill for some time, and when the end finally came it was a mercy. But she was calling because he’d told her that I was the person to turn to when the time came to sell his books. He’d assured her that I was a decent and knowledgeable dealer who’d give her a fair price.”

“That must have made you feel good.”

“It did, and the prospect of acquiring the man’s library was appealing. He’d bought a lot of good books from me, and I could imagine what he’d acquired from other sources over all those years. My store stock’s pretty thin these days, and you can’t sell what you haven’t got, so I was looking forward to adding his books to my shelves.”

“What happened?”

“I made an appointment,” I said, “and I showed up with a blank check in my wallet, and she was all apologies. Her grandson had come up with the brilliant idea of selling grandpa’s books individually on eBay. He’d list all the titles, and she could help him pack the books to ship to the successful bidders, and he’d schlep them to the post office. And they’d split the money.”

“And she thought this was a good idea?”

“I asked if I could see the books,” I said, “and she could hardly say no, and the library was what I’d hoped it would be. I told her it wouldn’t take me more than two hours to come up with a number, and that if she accepted my offer I’d write out a check on the spot and remove all of the books from the premises within a matter of days. And I pointed out that, while her grandson’s enterprise was admirable, it would take months if not years to sell the books online, with many of them remaining unsold forever.”

“And the shipping costs, Bern. And the bookkeeping, and the aggravation of customers returning books, and—”

“And all the rest of it. I told her all that.”

“And she didn’t believe you?”

“Oh, she believed me. But how could she change her mind now and disappoint her grandson?”

“Oh.”

“And what did she care about money, anyway? How important was it, compared to the pleasure of having her grandson come over every day after school?”

“The two of them working side by side, slipping books into padded mailers.”

“And attaching the wrong labels, so that they could have even more fun sorting it all out when the customers complained.”

She frowned. “Bern, this grandson’s a high school kid?”

“I think she said he was a junior at Stuyvesant.”

“How long do you figure he’s gonna feel like showing up at grandma’s house every day?”

“Well, I haven’t met the kid,” I said. “Maybe he’s convinced he’s the next generation’s Jeff Bezos, ready to launch his own version of Amazon. But maybe not, and when the novelty wears off he may lose his taste for online enterprise.”

“And she’ll still have a house full of books, so she’ll pick up the phone and give you a call.”

I shook my head. “She’ll pick up the phone,” I agreed, “but she’ll call somebody else. She’ll feel too embarrassed to call me, and she’ll tell herself she already bothered that nice Mr. Rhodenbarr enough. And that’ll be that.”

So I finished lunch and walked two doors west and opened up again, dragging my bargain table out to the street even as I wondered why I bothered. For that matter, why move the table inside when I closed for lunch? Why not leave it out there on the sidewalk? Anybody who stole a book would be doing me a favor.

Within the hour the man who called himself Mr. Smith showed up to make me an offer I could have refused. But why would I want to?