The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (22 page)

“Rather little,” I said.

“Well, there you go,” she said, and frowned. “We’re not talking about the same people.”

“No, we’re not.”

“I’m talking about Meyer Meyer, a fictional cop, and you’re talking about somebody else.”

“Myer Myers.”

“Who wasn’t fictional at all.”

“He was a silversmith,” I said, “born in 1723 right here in old New York. And I’d never heard of him myself until Mr. Smith told me about him.”

And earlier still, in a really lousy diner on University Place:

“Myer Myers, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Without question the most prominent Jewish silversmith in the American colonies. In fact, his ritual and secular silver is the largest body of extant work by a Jewish silversmith from anywhere in Europe or America prior to the nineteenth century.

“And a patriot. As you might imagine, wealthy Tories made up most of his customer base. Nevertheless, he supported the Revolution.

“In 1776, that pivotal year, Myers moved his business and his family to Norwalk, Connecticut, thinking it would put him out of harm’s way. Three years later British troops burned the town. Myers lost his tools and his house, moved up the coast to Stratford, and didn’t get back to New York until 1783 when the war was over.”

His business, I learned, was never what it had been. His more important customers tended to be rich people, and the rich are rather less likely to rally ’round the flag of revolution. The larger one’s fortune, the less inclined one seems to be to pledge it (along with one’s life and one’s sacred honor) to abstractions like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Samuel Cornell was one such Tory. For Cornell and his wife Susannah Mabson, Myers had fashioned a dish ring and bottle stands, whatever those may be, that remain the only surviving Colonial examples thereof. Cornell had his property seized during the Revolution, and anyway by 1781 he had died, so Myers couldn’t expect anything from him in the way of future commissions.

“But not every rich colonist remained loyal to King George,” Mr. Smith said. “The Livingston family was genuinely wealthy, and of staunchly republican sentiments. Among them was Henry Beekman Livingston.”

At the Bum Rap, Carolyn had finished one drink and started in on a second. I was still working on my first Perrier, and I’d just begun recounting what I’d learned about Livingston.

“I’ve heard of him, Bern. Dr. Livingston I. Presume, right? He got lost in Africa, and Stanley Kubrick found him.”

“That was David Livingstone, with an E on the end, and Henry Morton Stanley. And it was a century later.”

“Oh,” she said.

Henry Beekman Livingston, I went on, was born in 1748 and was thus twenty-eight years old when his kinsman Philip Livingston signed the Declaration of Independence. He’d married Sally Wells in 1774, and he celebrated the birth of their first child by joining the American Revolution. He held the rank of major, and commanded the New York Regiment from 1776 to 1779.

In 1783, two years after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Sally Livingston died. She’d borne four children, and left Henry to raise them alone. In 1793 he married Jane Patterson, and had four more children with her. He led a blameless life, as far as anyone can tell, and he spent his time writing poetry while he watched all those children grow up.

“Poetry? Was it any good, Bern?”

“He wrote mostly for his own amusement,” I said. “And he didn’t publish much of anything, but there’s one poem of his that received a fair amount of attention. A lot of people know it, and you’re one of them.”

“I know a poem of his? Bern, a minute ago I mixed him up with the guy who swam up the Congo and got lost. What makes you think I know his poetry?”

“I’ll quote the first two lines,” I said, “and you let me know if it rings a bell. ‘’Twas the night before Christmas / And all through the house.’ ”

“Bern, I know for a fact that was somebody else. He lived in Chelsea, and there’s a building there with a plaque on it, and I can come up with his name if you give me a minute.”

“I’m sure you can.”

“Moore,” she said. “That’s his name. One of them, anyway. Something Something Moore.”

“Clement Clarke Moore.”

“That’s the guy. He wrote
’Twas the Night Before Christmas,
except the actual title was something else.”

“
A Visit From St. Nicholas.
”

“There you go. He just about invented Christmas, if you stop and think about it. He was the one who named the reindeer. Of course he didn’t know about Rudolph, but he got all the others right.”

“All true,” I agreed. “Except it was actually Henry Beekman Livingston who wrote the poem. The names of the reindeer were those of the horses in Henry’s stable. Do you remember
Primary Colors,
the political novel published by Anonymous a while back?”

“Of course I do. I hope you’re not going to tell me Henry Livingston wrote that one, too. Because everybody knows who wrote it. Joe Klein wrote it.”

“And do you remember who outed Joe Klein?”

“Some guy who analyzed the text. It was pretty interesting the way he worked it out. But I don’t remember his name.”

“It was Donald Foster.”

“I’ll take your word for it, Bern.”

“And the same Donald Foster ran the same kind of textual analysis of
A Visit From St. Nicholas,
and guess what?”

“Henry Beekman Livingston wrote it?”

“It certainly looks that way. According to him there’s no way on earth Clement Clarke Moore could have written that poem.”

I told her some more—more than she needed to know, I have no doubt—about how Livingston made a habit of writing Christmas and New Year poems, and how this one was published anonymously in an upstate newspaper, and how Moore read it to his kids but later on was never able to show working drafts of it, explaining how it had all come to him word for word in a dream, and he just rushed to his desk and wrote it down in finished form, and—oh, never mind. Carolyn didn’t really need to hear the whole story, and neither do you.

“Bern,” she said, when I finally stopped talking, “this is all very interesting.”

“You honestly think so?”

“Up to a point,” she said, “I do. But here’s my question. What’s all of this got to do with apostle spoons and Myer Myers?”

“Livingston would be pretty interesting,” I said, “even if he hadn’t written the poem. He had a wide range of interests, a great intellectual curiosity, and a spirit of quiet adventure. He kept a low profile, so there’s a lot we don’t know about him, but among the things we do know is that he was acquainted with Myer Myers, both the person and the work. Relatives of his had commissioned work from Myers, and an inventory of his widow’s estate includes a pierced silver bowl that was almost certainly Myers’s work.

“And he knew what apostle spoons were. There’s a 1792 letter that survives from a neighbor in Poughkeepsie with the report of a visit from ‘Henry and Jane, she well recovered from her recent illness, and he so taken with the St. Jude spoon I felt moved to press it upon him, but he too much the gentleman to accept it, for which I remain quite glad, as it should pain me to part with it.’

“It wasn’t long after that social visit that Henry made a journey to New York that included a stop at Myer Myers’ shop. There he arranged an unusual commission—a set of fifteen silver spoons ‘fashioned in the manner employed for the depiction of the twelve apostles, but each showing rather a contemporary exemplar of civic virtue, selected to represent the thirteen original colonies.’ ”

“I thought you said fifteen spoons, Bern.”

“One for Vermont. It was part of New York when the colonies declared their independence, and it declared its own independence a year later in 1777, proclaiming itself the Vermont Republic and issuing its own coins. In 1791 New York recognized the secession, allowing Vermont to join the union as the fourteenth state. A year later, when Livingston ordered his spoons, he felt moved to include Vermont.”

“That’s fourteen.”

“Number fifteen was George Washington. He could have been on the Virginia spoon, but that would have meant leaving out Thomas Jefferson. Livingston’s reasoning was that Washington, first as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and now as President of the United States, ought to stand not for one state but for the nation as a whole.”

“So he got a spoon of his own. Just like Jesus.”

“I’m not sure Myer Myers would have put it that way,” I said, “or George Washington either, as far as that goes. I suppose Livingston must have decided who would represent each of the states, although he may have talked it over with Myers. A lot of them were men who had signed the Declaration of Independence, like Samuel Adams of Massachusetts and Maryland’s Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and of course Philip Livingston of New York. But Henry Livingston was a soldier, and he evidently admired military men, because he selected Nathanael Greene for Rhode Island and Francis Marion for South Carolina. Marion was known as the Swamp Fox, and his spoon showed him with a little fox at his feet, posed like Man’s Best Friend.”

“More like Man’s Slyest Friend,” she said.

“And for Vermont, well, there weren’t any signers from Vermont, and the choice was another military hero, Ethan Allen.”

“What did Myer Myers put at his feet, Bern? A love seat? A ladderback chair?”

“I don’t know. He captured Fort Ticonderoga, so maybe it was a pencil.”

“Myer Myers,” she said. “You know, when you first mentioned the name—”

“You thought for sure I meant the Ed McBain character.”

“Well, can you blame me? But it just this minute hit me, Bern. Myer Myers, right?”

“So?”

“And Roda Roda?”

“Oh.”

“It’s like we keep ducking into an echo chamber. I think I’ll go to the jukebox and play some Duran Duran. Or go home and watch reruns of
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
Or—”

“Stop.”

“Okay. You probably think I was going to mention Walla Walla, but it never entered my mind. Myer Myers made the spoons, right? All fifteen of them?”

I took out the Culloden book, opened it to Plate XVI.

“That’s George,” she said. “He’s probably the only one I’d have a chance of recognizing. What’s he holding?”

“I forget what it’s called, but it’s an instrument surveyors used. He did a lot of surveying, when he wasn’t busy crossing the Delaware.”

“A hatchet would be better, Bern. For chopping down cherry trees. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a spoon shaped like that.”

“Myers went retro,” I said. “The bowl like a teardrop, the long straight handle—he must have been inspired by the typical apostle spoons of a century or two earlier.”

“I like it,” she said. “I guess you’ll be looking at the original in a couple of hours.”

I shook my head. “Not unless I go a few blocks north of Leopold’s place to the Museum of the City of New York. That’s where George has been ever since a Livingston descendant died and left it to them.”

“I thought Mr. Leopold had the whole set.”

“Not even close. The Charles Carroll of Carrollton spoon wound up in the collection of the Baltimore Historical Society, and—”

“Bern, why do they always call the guy Charles Carroll of Carrollton?”

“I have no idea. Not that I haven’t often wondered myself. You could look it up.”

“I could,” she agreed, “but probably won’t. He’s in Baltimore, huh?”

“Well, his spoon is. I couldn’t tell you what became of the man himself. The other spoons are scattered, some in public collections, some in private hands. Two or three have vanished without a trace. Every so often manipulation sends the price of silver skyrocketing, and every time it does, a lot of collectible silver goes to the smelter. Gone, never to be seen again.”

“If there was ever a Judge Crater spoon, I bet that’s what happened to it.”

“Of the original fifteen,” I said, “our Mr. Leopold has four of them.”

“And you’re going to take them.”

“Only one,” I said. “The one with the button.”