The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (32 page)

I thanked him and ended the call, and Carolyn asked me what it all meant.

“It means I need your help,” I said. “I’ve got a meeting at six at the Bum Rap.”

“With the button man?”

I nodded.

“And you want me there?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Carolyn won’t be coming,” I said.

“She won’t?”

“As a matter of fact she may be along later,” I said, “but she won’t be joining me.”

Maxine’s face clouded. “You two okay?”

“We’re fine,” I said, “but I have a business meeting. A gentleman will be meeting me here in a few minutes.”

“Got it,” she said, and began to place the taller of the two glasses in front of me, but I waved it off.

“Perrier for you, huh?”

“Right.”

“And your friend?”

“He’ll have to let you know,” I said.

It means something to Carolyn when I pass up scotch for Perrier, but I don’t think Maxine attaches any significance to it beyond its demonstration of my charming eccentricity. She took the booze away and returned with the soda water, and when I raised it I was looking over the brim of my glass at my client. He was honoring the season in a blue and white seersucker suit, and carrying a slim briefcase.

When Maxine appeared, he asked me what I was drinking, raised an eyebrow, and told her what he’d like was a very dry martini, straight up, made with Gray Goose vodka and garnished with a lemon twist. That’s a little more specific than most drink orders at the Bum Rap, and I wasn’t sure what he’d get, but what showed up was the right color and served in a martini glass, and if it was Georgi instead of Gray Goose, I don’t think he noticed the difference.

Our business took hardly any time at all. He had a long look at the spoon, turned it over to examine the mark (MM in a narrow rectangle), ran his thumb over the low relief effigy of Gwinnett and the eponymous button, drew a breath and let it out in a soundless whistle.

“It looks just like him,” he said.

Button Gwinnett is depicted in the classic engraving of the signing, but the artist hadn’t been there for the event, and did his work long after the fact, often basing his likenesses on portraits. He may have had a look at a portrait of Gwinnett by one J. Chancelling, of whom little is known, including what the J. may have stood for. He was evidently a Charleston native, painted a few portraits in South Carolina and Georgia, and vanished.

And so did his portrait of Gwinnett, which had long since disappeared before the rarity of the man’s signature moved a lot of people to wonder what he looked like.

So how could my illustrious client say that Myer Myers had done well by his subject? Well, I once heard a woman make the very same observation about a painting of Jesus Christ. Perhaps his obsessive interest in the man had blessed my Button with a comparable mental image of that earlier Button.

Of course there was another explanation that I liked even better . . .

“Triumph,” he was saying, “is tragedy. I know how Alexander felt.”

“When Aaron Burr shot him?”

“Alexander the Great, when he looked around and realized there were no lands left to conquer. It is every collector’s fate, and it happens over and over and over.”

“You can’t have run out of things to collect.”

“No, hardly that. There are always more items to find and acquire. Buttons, for heaven’s sake. Human civilization has produced an essentially endless quantity, and one keeps finding new examples.”

“The one on your jacket—”

He touched it, a small brass disc with an American eagle as its central figure.

“A fairly recent acquisition,” he said. “I don’t know if you can make out the lettering. The top line is Harrison, the lower Morton.”

“The Log Cabin guy?”

“Tippecanoe’s grandson, Benjamin Harrison, who interrupted Grover Cleveland’s two terms by beating him in 1888, though without winning the popular vote. Levi P. Morton was his running mate.”

He told me more about Morton, who’d been an unsuccessful candidate for his party’s nomination in 1896. And, wouldn’t you know it, he had a lapel button from the fellow’s campaign. I said something encouraging, and he got back to Alexander the Great.

“The more you want something,” he said, “and the harder it is to get your hands on it, the greater the sense of accomplishment. But then you’ve achieved your goal, and for months or even years you’ve been in part defined by it.” He patted the pocket with the spoon. “I’m glad to have it. But I’m sorry I can no longer aspire to it. Want implies lack, doesn’t it? One can only want what one does not have. I can treasure the spoon, and I shall. But I can’t yearn for it, I can’t seek it, I can’t move heaven and earth to lay hands on it. And it’s hard not to suspect that I’ve lost as much as I’ve gained. If not more.”

“There must be other objects you want just as keenly. Gwinnett’s signature, for instance.”

He beamed.

“You already have it?”

“And not on some index card thrust upon him on his death bed, as you were going on about earlier. I was very fortunate several years ago. I won’t go into details, but a curator at a small museum in—well, never mind where. It was an institution that made inadequate provision for a gentleman’s retirement, and, ah, we came to a private arrangement. I treasure it, I cherish it. But I no longer have it to stalk through the corridors of space and time.”

He fell silent for a moment, and I kept him company. Then he straightened in his chair and put the briefcase on the table. It was full of envelopes, similar in size and shape to the others I’d received from him—and, come to think of it, to the ones I’d handed to Chloe Miller. I reached in, lifted the flap of one of the envelopes, and confirmed that Benjamin Franklin was once again well represented.

He told me I was welcome to count the money. “You know,” I said, “let me just examine one envelope.” I glanced quickly around the room. “But without an audience. I’ll take it to the men’s room. I won’t be long.”

“I’ll be right here,” he said.

A moment ago Carolyn had appeared in the doorway. Our eyes met, and she’d given me a nod and slipped outside again. I rose, holding that one envelope casually at my side, and headed for a door at the rear. The sign on it said
GENTLEMEN,
but I didn’t let that stop me.

I locked myself in a stall and took the time to count the envelope’s contents. It came to an even five thousand dollars; should the briefcase hold nine more just like it, then his count would be correct. But I didn’t know how many other envelopes there were, and I had a feeling it wasn’t going to matter much.

After I’d counted the bills a second time I waited a few minutes, and before I left I used the squalid little room for its intended purpose. It was likely to be a long night, and Perrier goes through one’s system so rapidly it barely has time to lose the bubbles.

When I got back to my table, Burton Barton V was gone. And so was the briefcase.

“He’s a real seersucker,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “I have to say it shows.”

Okay. No time to waste.

I bought a cell phone on Fourteenth Street, a burner that might have been the twin to my buttoned-down client’s. It came with a hundred minutes, and I couldn’t imagine that I’d use more than ten of them.

Then I went home and tended to my hidey hole, stowing $5000 where $20,000 had been that morning. I wondered idly why we’re not supposed to cry over spilled milk. What else is it good for? And then I set about provisioning myself for a night of felonious activity.

Tool kit. Disposable gloves. Flashlight. Duct tape.

And my own personal cell phone, its setting switched from Ring to Vibrate. And my new phone, the burner; nobody could call it on purpose, but wrong numbers are always a possibility, so it too was set on Vibrate.

Still okay. And still no time to waste.