The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (19 page)

I turned left when I hit the street and left again at University Place, heading uptown. I dropped the pizza box in the first trash can I came to and the gloves in the second. At Eleventh Street I considered walking half a block and leaving the book at my store. What better place to hide a book than a bookshop?

But did I really want to unlock my door at that hour? I had every right to do so, I was the store’s lawful sole proprietor, but would I enjoy proving as much to a suspicious patrolman? And he’d have the right to stop and frisk me, even if I was neither young nor black, and what would he make of the flashlight and burglar tools?

I had the Gristede’s bag in one hand. I held up the other one, and hailed a taxi.

“Music to my ears,” I told her, wondering what sense the words would make to her. Not that I was required to say anything. She was already dishing out whatever today’s treat might be, filling a couple of containers with something that smelled dangerously wonderful.

“Ver’ spicy,” she said, shaking her head in mock warning. “Juneau Lock spicy.”

“We love spicy.”

A smile lit up her face, and the whole room along with it. She was a slip of a girl, her face a perfect oval, her features as dainty and delicate as, well, a china doll. The shapeless smock she wore kept me from knowing what her figure was like, and it seemed to me that I was better off in my ignorance.

She was really adorable. Carolyn had assured me she wasn’t interested in girls, and that left boys, and if only we had a language in common I might have made an effort. But all I did was pay for the food, and we smiled and giggled at each other, and I walked out wondering how difficult it would be for me to learn Mandarin.

Or did she speak Taiwanese? There were people all over town advertising Mandarin lessons, but I couldn’t recall any listings in Craigslist offering to teach you how to ask directions in Taipei. But didn’t the Taiwanese all know how to speak Mandarin, the way the Scots all know how to speak English?

Maybe, come to think of it, just a little more comprehensibly than Scots speaking English . . .

“Juneau Lock,” Carolyn said. “And just in time, because I’m starving. I didn’t realize I was hungry until I got a whiff of the food. How come it always smells different, and yet it’s always recognizably Juneau Lock?”

“That’s one of life’s mysteries,” I said.

“And the list keeps getting longer, doesn’t it? Mmm, this does smell terrific.”

“Even better than pizza.”

“Is that what you were thinking of bringing today?”

“Never crossed my mind.”

“It can cross your mind,” she said, “just so long as it keeps right on walking. This is a much better idea than pizza. Not that there’s anything wrong with pizza, but there’s a time and a place for it.”

We ate for a few minutes in silence, too involved with the food to talk, and then she asked why I’d mentioned pizza at all.

“Because of last night,” I said. “You know what they tell people in National Parks? ‘Take only snapshots, leave only footprints.’ Last night I visited somebody a few blocks from here, and I don’t think I left any footprints, but I did leave the smell of pizza.”

“And you didn’t take snapshots,” she said, after I’d filled her in. “You took a book and you left an odor.”

“I prefer to think of it as an aroma.”

“By the time they get back, Bern, it’ll be too faint to notice. Or they’ll think it came in from the street. Especially with no other evidence that anyone was in there while they were gone. But even if you left a note on the kitchen table, ‘Thanks for your hospitality, I had a great time in your apartment,’ would they be able to tell they’d been burgled?”

“Only if he missed the book,” I said.

“You think it’s one of his favorites? Is Colonial silver a big passion for Mel?”

I hadn’t seen any silver, Colonial or otherwise. “I’m not sure he ever read it. His book-buying habits are all over the map. There’s a lot of fiction, along with a whole lot of history. He’s got Motley’s
Rise of the Dutch Republic
, Trevelyan’s three-volume
England Under Queen Anne
, Oman’s
Britain Before the Norman Conquest.
A fair number of biographies. Natural history—he’s got Archie Carr’s definitive work on the turtles and tortoises of North America, side by side with
The Burgess Bird Book for Children.
”

“I had that book when I was a kid! And the one about animals.”

“The companion volume, both of them by Thornton W. Burgess.”

“I remember the names of the characters, Bern. Jenny Wren, Jerry Muskrat.”

“Billy Mink.”

“Right, Billy Mink! I haven’t thought of Billy Mink in years. He was a mean little bastard, wasn’t he? I loved those books. I wonder whatever happened to them.”

“Your mother gave them to the rummage sale,” I said. “Like my comic books.”

“That must have been some rummage sale. A whole room full of childhood memories.”

We speculated on what else might be in that enormous room, and Carolyn guessed that the Burgess volume in Wattrous’s library was his own copy from childhood, one that his mother had failed to purge. I said that was likely, as he still had his Oz books, and that sent Carolyn into a long riff on Frank Baum’s fantasy world, and how she longed to go there.

“I got my hopes up,” she said, “every time the winds reached forty miles an hour. I kept bugging my parents to move us to a house in Kansas.”

“You’d stand a better chance in a trailer park,” I pointed out.

“I guess. Bern, the book you took, I forget the author’s name.”

“Culloden.”

“It’s real valuable?”

“What it is,” I said, “is extremely rare. It’s never been reprinted, and none of the rare-book sites on the Internet have a listing. A few university libraries have copies, and for all I know there’s one nobody knows about at the bottom of a box in the Galtonbrook basement.”

“Along with the last two movements of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony.”

“And the rest of
Kublai Khan
, and Dickens’ solution to
The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
I had a look at Culloden’s book. The writing’s hard to get through, but I guess there’s some good information there, if the fine points of American Colonial silver is what keeps you up nights. And there’s a whole section of plates illustrating noteworthy examples from the author’s own collection. Which must have been something, before it was dispersed after his death in 1901.”

“That wasn’t too long after he published his book.”

“Just three years. You asked if the book was valuable. The answer’s got to be yes, but it’s hard to put a value on it. There’s virtually no supply, but how much demand is there? It might sit on my bargain table for days without anybody giving it a second glance. Or two people who wanted it could show up at the same auction and bid the price up into four or five figures. But it’s not going to wind up on my bargain table, or on the auction block, either.”

“I guess Mr. Smith will give it a good home.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “What would he want with it?”

An hour later I was back at Barnegat Books, looking at the sheet of paper on which I’d practiced my penmanship. I wadded it up, and the sound the paper made got Raffles’ attention. I gave it a toss, and he pursued it and pounced.

If he’d been a dog he’d have brought it back, and I could have tossed it again. But he’s a cat, and he did what cats do. He batted it around a few times, decided it was dead, recognized it as inedible, and left it there, returning to the sunny spot in the window.

I picked it up myself and dropped it in the wastebasket. Then I returned to my perch behind the counter and picked up the phone. When a woman told me I’d reached Edwin Leopold’s residence, I asked to speak with Mr. Leopold. She asked for a name, and I had one ready and gave it to her.

The phone clicked, and I was on Hold, our world’s version of Limbo. At least there was no music, just silence, and it only lasted for a matter of seconds before she clicked back to ask what my call was in reference to.

“I’m a bookman,” I said. “I’ve just acquired an item that I believe might interest Mr. Leopold.”

“One moment, please.”
Click!

It was a longer moment than the first one, but then there was another click, followed by a man’s voice, speaking slowly in the Old New York accent you don’t hear much anymore, resonant with culture and good manners. It drew me back into that Childe Hassam painting of Central Park in winter, and carriage rides, and dinners at Delmonico’s.

“This is Edwin Leopold,” he said. “I’m afraid I didn’t get your name.”

“It’s Philip Lederer,” I said, “although there’s no reason you should know it, Mr. Leopold. I’m taking the liberty of calling you because I’ve come into the possession of a book I’ve reason to believe might interest you.”

“So Miss Miller said. I’m not a book collector, sir, although I do have a small and highly specialized library. But why don’t you tell me the name of this volume.”

“It’s Culloden’s work on Colonial silver,” I said. “That would be Thomas Baird Culloden, and—”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “You actually have a copy in hand?”

“It’s in front of me right now.”

“
Adventures With Colonial Silver
. No, I’ve got that wrong.
My Adventures With Colonial Silver.
There’s a copy in the library of Trinity College in Hartford. Culloden’s alma mater, he presented them with a copy and they seem to have kept it. They wouldn’t be persuaded either to sell it to me or to have it photocopied. They said I’d be welcome to examine it on their premises. Well, that of course was out of the question. Your copy is sound, Mr. Lederer?”

“Easily very fine. There’s no dust jacket, but—”

“I wouldn’t think there was one, would you? A private printing for private distribution? No need for a wrapper to prevent its getting shopworn if it was never to see the inside of a shop. The pages are all there?”

“Yes.”

“And the plates? Collotype plates, and there should be 24 pages of them.”

“They’re all here.” I drew a breath. “And there’s an inscription.”

“Always unfortunate,” he said, “but nothing one can’t live with.
Happy Christmas to Celestine from Aunt Mary
—something along those lines, I would suppose.”

“
To Hester R. Longbranch,
” I read, “
to whose illustrious ancestor all of us owe so much.
And it’s signed with his initials, T.B.C. I can only assume they’re his initials, and that it’s in his hand, although I can’t verify the latter.”

“It would have to be,” he said. “Hester R. Longbranch. The middle initial stands for Revere, her illustrious ancestor. Who else but Culloden could have written that inscription? He was honoring one of our greatest patriots, and surely Colonial America’s foremost silversmith. There’s another for whom I have a special affection, but one cannot deny Paul Revere’s greater prominence.”

“I don’t know anything about silver,” I said. “He’s certainly the one I’ve heard of. One if by land and all that.”

“ ‘Ready to ride and spread the alarm, To every Middlesex village and farm.’ Have you placed a price on your book, Mr. Lederer?”