Enough Rope

Like a Thief in the Night

At 11:30 the television anchorman counseled her to stay tuned for the late show, a vintage Hitchcock film starring Cary Grant. For a moment she was tempted. Then she crossed the room and switched off the set.

There was a last cup of coffee in the pot. She poured it and stood at the window with it, a tall and slender woman, attractive, dressed in the suit and silk blouse she’d worn that day at the office. A woman who could look at once efficient and elegant, and who stood now sipping black coffee from a bone-china cup and gazing south and west.

Her apartment was on the twenty-second floor of a building located at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street, and her vista was quite spectacular. A midtown skyscraper blocked her view of the building where Tavistock Corp. did its business, but she fancied she could see right through it with x-ray vision.

The cleaning crew would be finishing up now, she knew, returning their mops and buckets to the cupboards and changing into street clothes, preparing to go off-shift at midnight. They would leave a couple of lights on in Tavistock’s seventeenth floor suite as well as elsewhere throughout the building. And the halls would remain lighted, and here and there in the building someone would be working all night, and—

She liked Hitchcock movies, especially the early ones, and she was in love with Cary Grant. But she also liked good clothes and bone-china cups and the view from her apartment and the comfortable, well-appointed apartment itself. And so she rinsed the cup in the sink and put on a coat and took the elevator to the lobby, where the florid-faced doorman made a great show of hailing her a cab.

There would be other nights, and other movies.

The taxi dropped her in front of an office building in the West Thirties. She pushed through the revolving door and her footsteps on the marble floor sounded impossibly loud to her. The security guard, seated at a small table by the bank of elevators, looked up from his magazine at her approach. She said, “Hello, Eddie,” and gave him a quick smile.

“Hey, how ya doin’,” he said, and she bent to sign herself in as his attention returned to his magazine. In the appropriate spaces she scribbled Elaine Halder, Tavistock, 1704, and, after a glance at her watch, 12:15.

She got into a waiting elevator and the doors closed without a sound.

She’d be alone up there, she thought. She’d glanced at the record sheet while signing it, and no one had signed in for Tavistock or any other office on seventeen.

Well, she wouldn’t be long.

When the elevator doors opened she stepped out and stood for a moment in the corridor, getting her bearings. She took a key from her purse and stared at it for a moment as if it were an artifact from some unfamiliar civilization. Then she turned and began walking the length of the freshly mopped corridor, hearing nothing but the echo of her boisterous footsteps.

1704. An oak door, a square of frosted glass, unmarked but for the suite number and the name of the company. She took another thoughtful glance at the key before fitting it carefully into the lock.

It turned easily. She pushed the door inward and stepped inside, letting the door swing shut behind her.

And gasped.

There was a man not a dozen yards from her.

“Hello,” he said.

He was standing beside a rosewood-topped desk, the center drawer of which was open, and there was a spark in his eyes and a tentative smile on his lips. He was wearing a gray suit patterned in a windowpane check. His shirt collar was buttoned down, his narrow tie neatly knotted. He was two or three years older than she, she supposed, and perhaps that many inches taller.

Her hand was pressed to her breast, as if to still a pounding heart. But her heart wasn’t really pounding. She managed a smile. “You startled me,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone would be here.”

“We’re even.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I wasn’t expecting company.”

He had nice white even teeth, she noticed. She was apt to notice teeth. And he had an open and friendly face, which was also something she was inclined to notice, and why was she suddenly thinking of Cary Grant? The movie she hadn’t seen, of course, that plus this Hollywood meet-cute opening, with the two of them encountering each other unexpectedly in this silent tomb of an office, and—

And he was wearing rubber gloves.

Her face must have registered something because he frowned, puzzled. Then he raised his hands and flexed his fingers. “Oh, these,” he said. “Would it help if I spoke of an eczema brought on by exposure to the night air?”

“There’s a lot of that going around.”

“I knew you’d understand.”

“You’re a prowler.”

“The word has the nastiest connotations,” he objected. “One imagines a lot of lurking in shrubbery. There’s no shrubbery here beyond the odd rubber plant and I wouldn’t lurk in it if there were.”

“A thief, then.”

“A thief, yes. More specifically, a burglar. I might have stripped the gloves off when you stuck your key in the lock but I’d been so busy listening to your footsteps and hoping they’d lead to another office that I quite forgot I was wearing these things. Not that it would have made much difference. Another minute and you’d have realized that you’ve never set eyes on me before, and at that point you’d have wondered what I was doing here.”

“What are you doing here?”

“My kid brother needs an operation.”

“I thought that might be it. Surgery for his eczema.”

He nodded. “Without it he’ll never play the trumpet again. May I be permitted an observation?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“I observe that you’re afraid of me.”

“And here I thought I was doing such a super job of hiding it.”

“You were, but I’m an incredibly perceptive human being. You’re afraid I’ll do something violent, that he who is capable of theft is equally capable of mayhem.”

“Are you?”

“Not even in fantasy. I’m your basic pacifist. When I was a kid my favorite book was Ferdinand the Bull.”

“I remember him. He didn’t want to fight. He just wanted to smell the flowers.”

“Can you blame him?” He smiled again, and the adverb that came to her was disarmingly. More like Alan Alda than Cary Grant, she decided. Well, that was all right. There was nothing wrong with Alan Alda.

“You’re afraid of me,” she said suddenly.

“How’d you figure that? A slight quiver in the old upper lip?”

“No. It just came to me. But why? What could I do to you?”

“You could call the, uh, cops.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“And I wouldn’t hurt you.”

“I know you wouldn’t.”

“Well,” he said, and sighed theatrically. “Aren’t you glad we got all that out of the way?”

She was, rather. It was good to know that neither of them had anything to fear from the other. As if in recognition of this change in their relationship she took off her coat and hung it on the pipe rack, where a checked topcoat was already hanging. His, she assumed. How readily he made himself at home!

She turned to find he was making himself further at home, rummaging deliberately in the drawers of the desk. What cheek, she thought, and felt herself beginning to smile.

She asked him what he was doing.

“Foraging,” he said, then drew himself up sharply. “This isn’t your desk, is it?”

“No.”

“Thank heaven for that.”

“What were you looking for, anyway?”

He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “You’d think I could come up with a decent story but I can’t. I’m looking for something to steal.”

“Nothing specific?”

“I like to keep an open mind. I didn’t come here to cart off the IBM Selectrics. But you’d be surprised how many people leave cash in their desks.”

“And you just take what you find?”

He hung his head. “I know,” he said. “It’s a moral failing. You don’t have to tell me.”

“Do people really leave cash in an unlocked desk drawer?”

“Sometimes. And sometimes they lock the drawers, but that doesn’t make them all that much harder to open.”

“You can pick locks?”

“A limited and eccentric talent,” he allowed, “but it’s all I know.”

“How did you get in here? I suppose you picked the office lock.”

“Hardly a great challenge.”

“But how did you get past Eddie?”

“Eddie? Oh, you must be talking about the chap in the lobby. He’s not quite as formidable as the Berlin Wall, you know. I got here around eight. They tend to be less suspicious at an earlier hour. I scrawled a name on the sheet and walked on by. Then I found an empty office that they’d already finished cleaning and curled up on the couch for a nap.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Have I ever lied to you in the past? The cleaning crew leaves at midnight. At about that time I let myself out of Mr. Higginbotham’s office — that’s where I’ve taken to napping, he’s a patent attorney with the most comfortable old leather couch. And then I make my rounds.”

She looked at him. “You’ve come to this building before.”

“I stop by every little once in a while.”

“You make it sound like a vending machine route.”

“There are similarities, aren’t there? I never looked at it that way.”

“And then you make your rounds. You break into offices—”

“I never break anything. Let’s say I let myself into offices.”

“And you steal money from desks—”

“Also jewelry, when I run across it. Anything valuable and portable. Sometimes there’s a safe. That saves a lot of looking around. You know right away that’s where they keep the good stuff.”

“And you can open safes?”

“Not every safe,” he said modestly, “and not every single time, but—” he switched to a Cockney accent “—I has the touch, mum.”

“And then what do you do? Wait until morning to leave?”

“What for? I’m well-dressed. I look respectable. Besides, security guards are posted to keep unauthorized persons out of a building, not to prevent them from leaving. It might be different if I tried rolling a Xerox machine through the lobby, but I don’t steal anything that won’t fit in my pockets or my attaché case. And I don’t wear my rubber gloves when I saunter past the guard. That wouldn’t do.”

“I don’t suppose it would. What do I call you?”

“ ‘That damned burglar,’ I suppose. That’s what everybody calls me. But you—” he extended a rubber-covered forefinger “—you may call me Bernie.”

“Bernie the Burglar.”

“And what shall I call you?”

“Elaine’ll do.”

“Elaine,” he said. “Elaine, Elaine. Not Elaine Halder, by any chance?”

“How did you—?”

“Elaine Halder,” he said. “And that explains what brings you to these offices in the middle of the night. You look startled. I can’t imagine why. ‘You know my methods, Watson.’ What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t be frightened, for God’s sake. Knowing your name doesn’t give me mystical powers over your destiny. I just have a good memory and your name stuck in it.” He crooked a thumb at a closed door on the far side of the room. “I’ve already been in the boss’s office. I saw your note on his desk. I’m afraid I’ll have to admit I read it. I’m a snoop. It’s a serious character defect, I know.”

“Like larceny.”

“Something along those lines. Let’s see now. Elaine Halder leaves the office, having placed on her boss’s desk a letter of resignation. Elaine Halder returns in the small hours of the morning. A subtle pattern begins to emerge, my dear.”

“Oh?”

“Of course. You’ve had second thoughts and you want to retrieve the letter before himself gets a chance to read it. Not a bad idea, given some of the choice things you had to say about him. Just let me open up for you, all right? I’m the tidy type and I locked up after I was through in there.”

“Did you find anything to steal?”

“Eighty-five bucks and a pair of gold cuff links.” He bent over the lock, probing its innards with a splinter of spring steel. “Nothing to write home about, but every little bit helps. I’m sure you have a key that fits this door — you had to in order to leave the resignation in the first place, didn’t you? But how many chances do I get to show off? Not that a lock like this one presents much of a challenge, not to the nimble digits of Bernie the Burglar, and — ah, there we are!”

“Extraordinary.”

“It’s so seldom I have an audience.”

He stood aside, held the door for her. On the threshold she was struck by the notion that there would be a dead body in the private office. George Tavistock himself, slumped over his desk with the figured hilt of a letter opener protruding from his back.

But of course there was no such thing. The office was devoid of clutter, let alone corpses, nor was there any sign that it had been lately burglarized.

A single sheet of paper lay on top of the desk blotter. She walked over, picked it up. Her eyes scanned its half dozen sentences as if she were reading them for the first time, then dropped to the elaborately styled signature, a far cry from the loose scrawl with which she’d signed the register in the lobby.

She read the note through again, then put it back where it had been.

“Not changing your mind again?”

She shook her head. “I never changed it in the first place. That’s not why I came back here tonight.”

“You couldn’t have dropped in just for the pleasure of my company.”

“I might have, if I’d known you were going to be here. No, I came back because—” She paused, drew a deliberate breath. “You might say I wanted to clean out my desk.”

“Didn’t you already do that? Isn’t your desk right across there? The one with your name plate on it? Forward of me, I know, but I already had a peek, and the drawers bore a striking resemblance to the cupboard of one Ms. Hubbard.”

“You went through my desk.”

He spread his hands apologetically. “I meant nothing personal,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t even know you.”

“That’s a point.”

“And searching an empty desk isn’t that great a violation of privacy, is it? Nothing to be seen beyond paper clips and rubber bands and the odd felt-tipped pen. So if you’ve come to clean out that lot—”

“I meant it metaphorically,” she explained. “There are things in this office that belong to me. Projects I worked on that I ought to have copies of to show to prospective employers.”

“And won’t Mr. Tavistock see to it that you get copies?”

She laughed sharply. “You don’t know the man,” she said.

“And thank God for that. I couldn’t rob someone I knew.”

“He would think I intended to divulge corporate secrets to the competition. The minute he reads my letter of resignation I’ll be persona non grata in this office. I probably won’t even be able to get into the building. I didn’t even realize any of this until I’d gotten home tonight, and I didn’t really know what to do, and then—”

“Then you decided to try a little burglary.”

“Hardly that.”

“Oh?”

“I have a key.”

“And I have a cunning little piece of spring steel, and they both perform the signal function of admitting us where we have no right to be.”

“But I work here!”

“Worked.”

“My resignation hasn’t been accepted yet. I’m still an employee.”

“Technically. Still, you’ve come like a thief in the night. You may have signed in downstairs and let yourself in with a key, and you’re not wearing gloves or padding around in crepe-soled shoes, but we’re not all that different, you and I, are we?”

She set her jaw. “I have a right to the fruits of my labor,” she said.

“And so have I, and heaven help the person whose property rights get in our way.”

She walked around him to the three-drawer filing cabinet to the right of Tavistock’s desk. It was locked.

She turned, but Bernie was already at her elbow. “Allow me,” he said, and in no time at all he had tickled the locking mechanism and was drawing the top drawer open.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Oh, don’t thank me,” he said. “Professional courtesy. No thanks required.”

She was busy for the next thirty minutes, selecting documents from the filing cabinet and from Tavistock’s desk, as well as a few items from the unlocked cabinets in the outer office. She ran everything through the Xerox copier and replaced the originals where she’d found them. While she was doing all this, her burglar friend worked his way through the office’s remaining desks. He was in no evident hurry, and it struck her that he was deliberately dawdling so as not to finish before her.

Now and then she would look up from what she was doing to observe him at his work. Once she caught him looking at her, and when their eyes met he winked and smiled, and she felt her cheeks burning.

He was attractive, certainly. And unquestionably likable, and in no way intimidating. Nor did he come across like a criminal. His speech was that of an educated person, he had an eye for clothes, his manners were impeccable—

What on earth was she thinking of?

By the time she had finished she had an inch-thick sheaf of paper in a manila file folder. She slipped her coat on, tucked the folder under her arm.

“You’re certainly neat,” he said. “A place for everything and everything right back in its place. I like that.”

“Well, you’re that way yourself, aren’t you? You even take the trouble to lock up after yourself.”

“It’s not that much trouble. And there’s a point to it. If one doesn’t leave a mess, sometimes it takes them weeks to realize they’ve been robbed. The longer it takes, the less chance anybody’ll figure out whodunit.”

“And here I thought you were just naturally neat.”

“As it happens I am, but it’s a professional asset. Of course your neatness has much the same purpose, doesn’t it? They’ll never know you’ve been here tonight, especially since you haven’t actually taken anything away with you. Just copies.”

“That’s right.”

“Speaking of which, would you care to put them in my attaché case? So that you aren’t noticed leaving the building with them in hand? I’ll grant you the chap downstairs wouldn’t notice an earthquake if it registered less than seven-point-four on the Richter scale, but it’s that seemingly pointless attention to detail that enables me to persist in my chosen occupation instead of making license plates and sewing mail sacks as a guest of the governor. Are you ready, Elaine? Or would you like to take one last look around for auld lang syne?”

“I’ve had my last look around. And I’m not much on auld lang syne.”

He held the door for her, switched off the overhead lights, drew the door shut. While she locked it with her key he stripped off his rubber gloves and put them in the attaché case where her papers reposed. Then, side by side, they walked the length of the corridor to the elevator. Her footsteps echoed. His, cushioned by his crepe soles, were quite soundless.

Hers stopped, too, when they reached the elevator, and they waited in silence. They had met, she thought, as thieves in the night, and now they were going to pass like ships in the night.

The elevator came, floated them down to the lobby. The lobby guard looked up at them, neither recognition nor interest showing in his eyes. She said, “Hi, Eddie. Everything going all right?”

“Hey, how ya doin’,” he said.

There were only three entries below hers on the register sheet, three persons who’d arrived after her. She signed herself out, listing the time after a glance at her watch: 1:56. She’d been upstairs for better than an hour and a half.

Outside, the wind had an edge to it. She turned to him, glanced at his attaché case, suddenly remembered the first school boy who’d carried her books. She could surely have carried her own books, just as she could have safely carried the folder of papers past Eagle-eye Eddie.

Still, it was not unpleasant to have one’s books carried.

“Well,” she began, “I’d better take my papers, and—”

“Where are you headed?”

“Seventy-sixth Street.”

“East or west?”

“East. But—”

“We’ll share a cab,” he said. “Compliments of petty cash.” And he was at the curb, a hand raised, and a cab appeared as if conjured up and then he was holding the door for her.

She got in.

“Seventy-sixth,” he told the driver. “And what?”

“Lexington,” she said.

“Lexington,” he said.

Her mind raced during the taxi ride. It was all over the place and she couldn’t keep up with it. She felt in turn like a schoolgirl, like a damsel in peril, like Grace Kelly in a Hitchcock film. When the cab reached her corner she indicated her building, and he leaned forward to relay the information to the driver.

“Would you like to come up for coffee?”

The line had run through her mind like a mantra in the course of the ride. Yet she couldn’t believe she was actually speaking the words.

“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that.”

She steeled herself as they approached her doorman, but the man was discretion personified. He didn’t even greet her by name, merely holding the door for her and her escort and wishing them a good night. Upstairs, she thought of demanding that Bernie open her door without the keys, but decided she didn’t want any demonstrations just then of her essential vulnerability. She unlocked the several locks herself.

“I’ll make coffee,” she said. “Or would you just as soon have a drink?”

“Sounds good.”

“Scotch? Or cognac?”

“Cognac.”

While she was pouring the drinks he walked around her living room, looking at the pictures on the walls and the books on the shelves. Guests did this sort of thing all the time, but this particular guest was a criminal, after all, and so she imagined him taking a burglar’s inventory of her possessions. That Chagall aquatint he was studying — she’d paid five hundred for it at auction and it was probably worth close to three times that by now.

Surely he’d have better luck foraging in her apartment than in a suite of deserted offices.

Surely he’d realize as much himself.

She handed him his brandy. “To criminal enterprise,” he said, and she raised her glass in response.

“I’ll give you those papers. Before I forget.”

“All right.”

He opened the attaché case, handed them over. She placed the folder on the LaVerne coffee table and carried her brandy across to the window. The deep carpet muffled her footsteps as effectively as if she’d been wearing crepe-soled shoes.

You have nothing to be afraid of, she told herself. And you’re not afraid, and—

“An impressive view,” he said, close behind her.

“Yes.”

“You could see your office from here. If that building weren’t in the way.”

“I was thinking that earlier.”

“Beautiful,” he said, softly, and then his arms were encircling her from behind and his lips were on the nape of her neck.

“ ‘Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat.’ ” His lips nuzzled her ear. “But you must hear that all the time.”

She smiled. “Oh, not so often,” she said. “Less often than you’d think.”

The sky was just growing light when he left. She lay alone for a few minutes, then went to lock up after him.

And laughed aloud when she found that he’d locked up after himself, without a key.

It was late but she didn’t think she’d ever been less tired. She put up a fresh pot of coffee, poured a cup when it was ready, and sat at the kitchen table reading through the papers she’d taken from the office. She wouldn’t have had half of them without Bernie’s assistance, she realized. She could never have opened the file cabinet in Tavistock’s office.

“Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable. Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat.”

She smiled.

A few minutes after nine, when she was sure Jennings Colliard would be at his desk, she dialed his private number.

“It’s Andrea,” she told him. “I succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. I’ve got copies of Tavistock’s complete marketing plan for fall and winter, along with a couple of dozen test and survey reports and a lot of other documents you’ll want a chance to analyze. And I put all the originals back where they came from, so nobody at Tavistock’ll ever know what happened.”

“Remarkable.”

“I thought you’d approve. Having a key to their office helped, and knowing the doorman’s name didn’t hurt any. Oh, and I also have some news that’s worth knowing. I don’t know if George Tavistock is in his office yet, but if so he’s reading a letter of resignation even as we speak. The Lily Maid of Astolat has had it.”

“What are you talking about, Andrea?”

“Elaine Halder. She cleaned out her desk and left him a note saying bye-bye. I thought you’d like to be the first kid on your block to know that.”

“And of course you’re right.”

“I’d come in now but I’m exhausted. Do you want to send a messenger over?”

“Right away. And you get some sleep.”

“I intend to.”

“You’ve done spectacularly well, Andrea. There will be something extra in your stocking.”

“I thought there might be,” she said.

She hung up the phone and stood once again at the window, looking out at the city, reviewing the night’s events. It had been quite perfect, she decided, and if there was the slightest flaw it was that she’d missed the Cary Grant movie.

But it would be on again soon. They ran it frequently. People evidently liked that sort of thing.

The Burglar Who Dropped In on Elvis

“I know who you are,” she said. “Your name is Bernie Rhodenbarr. You’re a burglar.”

I glanced around, glad that the store was empty save for the two of us. It often is, but I’m not usually glad about it.

“Was,” I said.

“Was?”

“Was. Past tense. I had a criminal past, and while I’d as soon keep it a secret I can’t deny it. But I’m an antiquarian bookseller now, Miss Uh—”

“Danahy,” she supplied. “Holly Danahy.”

“Miss Danahy. A dealer in the wisdom of the ages. The errors of my youth are to be regretted, even deplored, but they’re over and done with.”

She gazed thoughtfully at me. She was a lovely creature, slender, pert, bright of eye and inquisitive of nose, and she wore a tailored suit and flowing bow tie that made her look at once yieldingly feminine and as coolly competent as a Luger.

“I think you’re lying,” she said. “I certainly hope so. Because an antiquarian bookseller is no good at all to me. What I need is a burglar.”

“I wish I could help you.”

“You can.” She laid a cool-fingered hand on mine. “It’s almost closing time. Why don’t you lock up? I’ll buy you a drink and tell you how you can qualify for an all-expenses-paid trip to Memphis. And possibly a whole lot more.”

“You’re not trying to sell me a time-share in a thriving lakeside resort community, are you?”

“Not hardly.”

“Then what have I got to lose? The thing is, I usually have a drink after work with—”

“Carolyn Kaiser,” she cut in. “Your best friend, she washes dogs two doors down the street at the Poodle Factory. You can call her and cancel.”

My turn to gaze thoughtfully. “You seem to know a lot about me,” I said.

“Sweetie,” she said, “that’s my job.”

“I’m a reporter,” she said. “For the Weekly Galaxy. If you don’t know the paper, you must never get to the supermarket.”

“I know it,” I said. “But I have to admit I’m not what you’d call one of your regular readers.”

“Well, I should hope not, Bernie. Our readers move their lips when they think. Our readers write letters in crayon because they’re not allowed to have anything sharp. Our readers make the Enquirer’s readers look like Rhodes scholars. Our readers, face it, are D-U-M.”

“Then why would they want to know about me?”

“They wouldn’t, unless an extraterrestrial made you pregnant. That happen to you?”

“No, but Bigfoot ate my car.”

She shook her head. “We already did that story. Last August, I think it was. The car was an AMC Gremlin with a hundred and ninety-two thousand miles on it.”

“I suppose its time had come.”

“That’s what the owner said. He’s got a new BMW now, thanks to the Galaxy. He can’t spell it, but he can drive it like crazy.”

I looked at her over the brim of my glass. “If you don’t want to write about me,” I said, “what do you need me for?”

“Ah, Bernie,” she said. “Bernie the burglar. Sweetie pie, you’re my ticket to Elvis.”

“The best possible picture,” I told Carolyn, “would be a shot of Elvis in his coffin. The Galaxy loves shots like that but in this case it would be counterproductive in the long run, because it might kill their big story, the one they run month after month.”

“Which is that he’s still alive.”

“Right. Now the second-best possible picture, and better for their purposes overall, would be a shot of him alive, singing ‘Love Me Tender’ to a visitor from another planet. They get a chance at that picture every couple of days, and it’s always some Elvis impersonator. Do you know how many full-time professional Elvis Presley impersonators there are in America today?”

“No.”

“Neither do I, but I have a feeling Holly Danahy could probably supply a figure, and that it would be an impressive one. Anyway, the third-best possible picture, and the one she seems to want almost more than life itself, is a shot of the King’s bedroom.”

“At Graceland?”

“That’s the one. Six thousand people visit Graceland every day. Two million of them walked through it last year.”

“And none of them brought a camera?”

“Don’t ask me how many cameras they brought, or how many rolls of film they shot. Or how many souvenir ashtrays and paintings on black velvet they bought and took home with them. But how many of them got above the first floor?”

“How many?”

“None. Nobody gets to go upstairs at Graceland. The staff isn’t allowed up there, and people who’ve worked there for years have never set foot above the ground floor. And you can’t bribe your way up there, either, according to Holly, and she knows because she tried, and she had all the Galaxy’s resources to play with. Two million people a year go to Graceland, and they’d all love to know what it looks like upstairs, and the Weekly Galaxy would just love to show them.”

“Enter a burglar.”

“That’s it. That’s Holly’s masterstroke, the one designed to win her a bonus and a promotion. Enter an expert at illegal entry, i.e., a burglar. Le burglar, c’est moi. Name your price, she told me.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars. You know why? All I could think of was that it sounded like a job for Nick Velvet. You remember him, the thief in the Ed Hoch stories who’ll only steal worthless objects.” I sighed. “When I think of all the worthless objects I’ve stolen over the years, and never once has anyone offered to pay me a fee of twenty-five grand for my troubles. Anyway, that was the price that popped into my head, so I tried it out on her. And she didn’t even try to haggle.”

“I think Nick Velvet raised his rates,” Carolyn said. “I think his price went up in the last story or two.”

I shook my head. “You see what happens? You fall behind on your reading and it costs you money.”

Holly and I flew first class from JFK to Memphis. The meal was still airline food, but the seats were so comfortable and the stewardess so attentive that I kept forgetting this.

“At the Weekly Galaxy,” Holly said, sipping an after-dinner something-or-other, “everything’s first class. Except the paper itself, of course.”

We got our luggage, and a hotel courtesy car whisked us to the Howard Johnson’s on Elvis Presley Boulevard, where we had adjoining rooms reserved. I was just about unpacked when Holly knocked on the door separating the two rooms. I unlocked it for her and she came in carrying a bottle of scotch and a full ice bucket.

“I wanted to stay at the Peabody,” she said. “That’s the great old downtown hotel and it’s supposed to be wonderful, but here we’re only a couple of blocks from Graceland, and I thought it would be more convenient.”

“Makes sense,” I agreed.

“But I wanted to see the ducks,” she said. She explained that ducks were the symbol of the Peabody, or the mascot, or something. Every day the hotel’s guests could watch the hotel’s ducks waddle across the red carpet to the fountain in the middle of the lobby.

“Tell me something,” she said. “How does a guy like you get into a business like this?”

“Bookselling?”

“Get real, honey. How’d you get to be a burglar? Not for the edification of our readers, because they couldn’t care less. But to satisfy my own curiosity.”

I sipped a drink while I told her the story of my misspent life, or as much of it as I felt like telling. She heard me out and put away four stiff scotches in the process, but if they had any effect on her I couldn’t see it.

“And how about you?” I said after a while. “How did a nice girl like you—”

“Oh, Gawd,” she said. “We’ll save that for another evening, okay?” And then she was in my arms, smelling and feeling better than a body had a right to, and just as quickly she was out of them again and on her way to the door.

“You don’t have to go,” I said.

“Ah, but I do, Bernie. We’ve got a big day tomorrow. We’re going to see Elvis, remember?”

She took the scotch with her. I poured out what remained of my own drink, finished unpacking, took a shower. I got into bed, and after fifteen or twenty minutes I got up and tried the door between our two rooms, but she had locked it on her side. I went back to bed.

Our tour guide’s name was Stacy. She wore the standard Graceland uniform, a blue-and-white-striped shirt over navy chinos, and she looked like someone who’d been unable to decide whether to become a stewardess or a cheerleader. Cleverly, she’d chosen a job that combined both professions.

“There were generally a dozen guests crowded around this dining table,” she told us. “Dinner was served nightly between nine and ten p.m., and Elvis always sat right there at the head of the table. Not because he was head of the family but because it gave him the best view of the big color TV. Now that’s one of fourteen TV sets here at Graceland, so you know how much Elvis liked to watch TV.”

“Was that the regular china?” someone wanted to know.

“Yes, ma’am, and the name of the pattern is Buckingham. Isn’t it pretty?”

I could run down the whole tour for you, but what’s the point? Either you’ve been there yourself or you’re planning to go or you don’t care, and at the rate people are signing up for the tours, I don’t think there are many of you in the last group. Elvis was a good pool player, and his favorite game was rotation. Elvis ate his breakfast in the Jungle Room, off a cypress coffee table. Elvis’s own favorite singer was Dean Martin. Elvis liked peacocks, and at one time over a dozen of them roamed the grounds of Graceland. Then they started eating the paint off the cars, which Elvis liked even more than he liked peacocks, so he donated them to the Memphis Zoo. The peacocks, not the cars.

There was a gold rope across the mirrored staircase, and what looked like an electric eye a couple of stairs up. “We don’t allow tourists into the upstairs,” our guide chirped. “Remember, Graceland is a private home and Elvis’s aunt Miss Delta Biggs still lives here. Now I can tell you what’s upstairs. Elvis’s bedroom is located directly above the living room and music room. His office is also upstairs, and there’s Lisa Marie’s bedroom, and dressing rooms and bathrooms as well.”

“And does his aunt live up there?” someone asked.

“No, sir. She lives downstairs, through that door over to your left. None of us have ever been upstairs. Nobody goes there anymore.”

“I bet he’s up there now,” Holly said. “In a La-Z-Boy with his feet up, eating one of his famous peanut-butter and banana sandwiches and watching three television sets at once.”

“And listening to Dean Martin,” I said. “What do you really think?”

“What do I really think? I think he’s down in Paraguay playing three-handed pinochle with James Dean and Adolf Hitler. Did you know that Hitler masterminded Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands? We ran that story but it didn’t do as well as we hoped.”

“Your readers didn’t remember Hitler?”

“Hitler was no problem for them. But they didn’t know what the Falklands were. Seriously, where do I think Elvis is? I think he’s in the grave we just looked at, surrounded by his nearest and dearest. Unfortunately, ‘Elvis Still Dead’ is not a headline that sells papers.”

“I guess not.”

We were back in my room at the HoJo, eating a lunch Holly had ordered from room service. It reminded me of our in-flight meal the day before, luxurious but not terribly good.

“Well,” she said brightly, “have you figured out how we’re going to get in?”

“You saw the place,” I said. “They’ve got gates and guards and alarm systems everywhere. I don’t know what’s upstairs, but it’s a more closely guarded secret than Zsa Zsa Gabor’s true age.”

“That’d be easy to find out,” Holly said. “We could just hire somebody to marry her.”

“Graceland is impregnable,” I went on, hoping we could drop the analogy right there. “It’s almost as bad as Fort Knox.”

Her face fell. “I was sure you could find a way in.”

“Maybe I can.”

“But—”

“For one. Not for two. It’d be too risky for you, and you don’t have the skills for it. Could you shinny down a gutterspout?”

“If I had to.”

“Well, you won’t have to, because you won’t be going in.” I paused for thought. “You’d have a lot of work to do,” I said. “On the outside, coordinating things.”

“I can handle it.”

“And there would be expenses, plenty of them.”

“No problem.”

“I’d need a camera that can take pictures in full dark. I can’t risk a flash.”

“That’s easy. We can handle that.”

“I’ll need to rent a helicopter, and I’ll have to pay the pilot enough to guarantee his silence.”

“A cinch.”

“I’ll need a diversion. Something fairly dramatic.”

“I can create a diversion. With all the resources of the Galaxy at my disposal, I could divert a river.”

“That shouldn’t be necessary. But all of this is going to cost money.”

“Money,” she said, “is no object.”

“So you’re a friend of Carolyn’s,” Lucian Leeds said. “She’s wonderful, isn’t she? You know, she and I are the next-closest thing to blood kin.”

“Oh?”

“A former lover of hers and a former lover of mine were brother and sister. Well, sister and brother, actually. So that makes Carolyn my something-in-law, doesn’t it?”

“I guess it must.”

“Of course,” he said, “by the same token, I must be related to half the known world. Still, I’m real fond of our Carolyn. And if I can help you—”

I told him what I needed. Lucian Leeds was an interior decorator and a dealer in art and antiques. “Of course I’ve been to Graceland,” he said. “Probably a dozen times, because whenever a friend or relative visits that’s where one has to take them. It’s an experience that somehow never palls.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever been on the second floor.”

“No, nor have I been presented at court. Of the two, I suppose I’d prefer the second floor at Graceland. One can’t help wondering, can one?” He closed his eyes, concentrating. “My imagination is beginning to work,” he announced.

“Give it free rein.”

“I know just the house, too. It’s off Route 51 across the state line, just this side of Hernando, Mississippi. Oh, and I know someone with an Egyptian piece that would be perfect. How soon would everything have to be ready?”

“Tomorrow night?”

“Impossible. The day after tomorrow is barely possible. Just barely. I really ought to have a week to do it right.”

“Well, do it as right as you can.”

“I’ll need trucks and schleppers, of course. I’ll have rental charges to pay, of course, and I’ll have to give something to the old girl who owns the house. First I’ll have to sweet-talk her, but there’ll have to be something tangible in it for her as well, I’m afraid. But all of this is going to cost you money.”

That had a familiar ring to it. I almost got caught up in the rhythm of it and told him money was no object, but I managed to restrain myself. If money wasn’t the object, what was I doing in Memphis?

“Here’s the camera,” Holly said. “It’s all loaded with infrared film. No flash, and you can take pictures with it at the bottom of a coal mine.”

“That’s good,” I said, “because that’s probably where I’ll wind up if they catch me. We’ll do it the day after tomorrow. Today’s what, Wednesday? I’ll go in Friday.”

“I should be able to give you a terrific diversion.”

“I hope so,” I said. “I’ll probably need it.”

Thursday morning I found my helicopter pilot. “Yeah, I could do it,” he said. “Cost you two hundred dollars, though.”

“I’ll give you five hundred.”

He shook his head. “One thing I never do,” he said, “is get to haggling over prices. I said two hundred, and — wait a darn minute.”

“Take all the time you need.”

“You weren’t haggling me down,” he said. “You were haggling me up. I never heard tell of such a thing.”

“I’m willing to pay extra,” I said, “so that you’ll tell people the right story afterward. If anybody asks.”

“What do you want me to tell ’em?”

“That somebody you never met before in your life paid you to fly over Graceland, hover over the mansion, lower your rope ladder, raise the ladder, and then fly away.”

He thought about this for a full minute. “But that’s what you said you wanted me to do,” he said.

“I know.”

“So you’re fixing to pay me an extra three hundred dollars just to tell people the truth.”

“If anybody should ask.”

“You figure they will?”

“They might,” I said. “It would be best if you said it in such a way that they thought you were lying.”

“Nothing to it,” he said. “Nobody ever believes a word I say. I’m a pretty honest guy, but I guess I don’t look it.”

“You don’t,” I said. “That’s why I picked you.”

That night Holly and I dressed up and took a cab downtown to the Peabody. The restaurant there was named Dux, and they had canard aux cerises on the menu, but it seemed curiously sacrilegious to have it there. We both ordered the blackened redfish. She had two dry Rob Roys first, most of the dinner wine, and a Stinger afterward. I had a Bloody Mary for openers, and my after-dinner drink was a cup of coffee. I felt like a cheap date.

Afterward we went back to my room and she worked on the scotch while we discussed strategy. From time to time she would put her drink down and kiss me, but as soon as things threatened to get interesting she’d draw away and cross her legs and pick up her pencil and notepad and reach for her drink.

“You’re a tease,” I said.

“I am not,” she insisted. “But I want to, you know, save it.”

“For the wedding?”

“For the celebration. After we get the pictures, after we carry the day. You’ll be the conquering hero and I’ll throw roses at your feet.”

“Roses?”

“And myself. I figured we could take a suite at the Peabody and never leave the room except to see the ducks. You know, we never did see the ducks do their famous walk. Can’t you just picture them waddling across the red carpet and quacking their heads off?”

“Can’t you just picture what they go through cleaning that carpet?”

She pretended not to have heard me. “I’m glad we didn’t have duckling,” she said. “It would have seemed cannibalistic.” She fixed her eyes on me. She’d had enough booze to induce coma in a six-hundred-pound gorilla, but her eyes looked as clear as ever. “Actually,” she said, “I’m very strongly attracted to you, Bernie. But I want to wait. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“I could,” I said gravely, “if I knew I was coming back.”

“What do you mean?”

“It would be great to be the conquering hero,” I said, “and find you and the roses at my feet, but suppose I come home on my shield instead? I could get killed out there.”

“Are you serious?”

“Think of me as a kid who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, Holly. And you’re his girlfriend, asking him to wait until the war’s over. Holly, what if that kid doesn’t come home? What if he leaves his bones bleaching on some little hellhole in the South Pacific?”

“Oh my God,” she said. “I never thought of that.” She put down her pencil and notebook. “You’re right, dammit. I am a tease. I’m worse than that.” She uncrossed her legs. “I’m thoughtless and heartless. Oh, Bernie!”

“There, there,” I said.

Graceland closes every evening at six. At precisely five-thirty Friday afternoon, a girl named Moira Beth Calloway detached herself from her tour group. “I’m coming, Elvis!” she cried, and she lowered her head and ran full speed for the staircase. She was over the gold rope and on the sixth step before the first guard laid a hand on her.

Bells rang, sirens squealed, and all hell broke loose. “Elvis is calling me,” Moira Beth insisted, her eyes rolling wildly. “He needs me, he wants me, he loves me tender. Get your hands off me. Elvis! I’m coming, Elvis!”

I.D. in Moira Beth’s purse supplied her name and indicated that she was seventeen years old, and a student at Mount St. Joseph Academy in Millington, Tennessee. This was not strictly true, in that she was actually twenty-two years old, a member of Actors Equity, and a resident of Brooklyn Heights. Her name was not Moira Beth Calloway, either. It was (and still is) Rona Jellicoe. I think it may have been something else in the dim dark past before it became Rona Jellicoe, but who cares?

While a variety of people, many of them wearing navy chinos and blue-and-white-striped shirts, did what they could to calm down Moira Beth, a middle-aged couple in the Pool Room went into their act. “Air!” the man cried, clutching at his throat. “Air! I can’t breathe!” And he fell down, flailing at the wall, where Stacy had told us some 750 yards of pleated fabric had been installed.

“Help him,” cried his wife. “He can’t breathe! He’s dying! He needs air!” And she ran to the nearest window and heaved it open, setting off whatever alarms hadn’t already been shrieking over Moira Beth’s assault on the staircase.

Meanwhile, in the TV room, done in the exact shades of yellow and blue used in Cub Scout uniforms, a gray squirrel had raced across the rug and was now perched on top of the jukebox. “Look at that awful squirrel!” a woman was screaming. “Somebody get that squirrel! He’s gonna kill us all!”

Her fear would have been harder to credit if people had known that the poor rodent had entered Graceland in her handbag, and that she’d been able to release it without being seen because of the commotion in the other room. Her fear was contagious, though, and the people who caught it weren’t putting on an act.

In the Jungle Room, where Elvis’s Moody Blue album had actually been recorded, a woman fainted. She’d been hired to do just that, but other unpaid fainters were dropping like flies all over the mansion. And, while all of this activity was hitting its absolute peak, a helicopter made its noisy way through the sky over Graceland, hovering for several long minutes over the roof.

The security staff at Graceland couldn’t have been better. Almost immediately two men emerged from a shed carrying an extension ladder, and in no time at all they had it propped against the side of the building. One of them held it while the other scrambled up it to the roof.

By the time he got there, the helicopter was going pocketa-pocketa-pocketa, and disappearing off to the west. The security man raced around the roof but didn’t see anyone. Within the next ten minutes, two others joined him on the roof and searched it thoroughly. They found a tennis sneaker, but that was all they found.

At a quarter to five the next morning I let myself into my room at the Howard Johnson’s and knocked on the door to Holly’s room. There was no response. I knocked again, louder, then gave up and used the phone. I could hear it ringing in her room, but evidently she couldn’t.

So I used the skills God gave me and opened her door. She was sprawled out on the bed, with her clothes scattered where she had flung them. The trail of clothing began at the scotch bottle on top of the television set. The set was on, and some guy with a sport jacket and an Ipana smile was explaining how you could get cash advances on your credit cards and buy penny stocks, an enterprise that struck me as a lot riskier than burglarizing mansions by helicopter.

Holly didn’t want to wake up, but when I got past the veil of sleep she came to as if transistorized. One moment she was comatose and the next she was sitting up, eyes bright, an expectant look on her face. “Well?” she demanded.

“I shot the whole roll.”

“You got in.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you got out.”

“Right again.”

“And you got the pictures.” She clapped her hands, giddy with glee. “I knew it,” she said. “I was a positive genius to think of you. Oh, they ought to give me a bonus, a raise, a promotion, oh, I bet I get a company Cadillac next year instead of a lousy Chevy, oh, I’m on a roll, Bernie, I swear I’m on a roll!”

“That’s great.”

“You’re limping,” she said. “Why are you limping? Because you’ve only got one shoe on, that’s why. What happened to your other shoe?”

“I lost it on the roof.”

“God,” she said. She got off the bed and began picking up her clothes from the floor and putting them on, following the trail back to the scotch bottle, which evidently had one drink left in it. “Ahhhh,” she said, putting it down empty. “You know, when I saw them race up the ladder I thought you were finished. How did you get away from them?”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“I bet. And you managed to get down onto the second floor? And into his bedroom? What’s it like?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Weren’t you in there?”

“Not until it was pitch-dark. I hid in a hall closet and locked myself in. They gave the place a pretty thorough search but nobody had a key to the closet. I don’t think there is one, I locked it by picking it. I let myself out somewhere around two in the morning and found my way into the bedroom. There was enough light to keep from bumping into things but not enough to tell what it was I wasn’t bumping into. I just walked around pointing the camera and shooting.”

She wanted more details, but I don’t think she paid very much attention to them. I was in the middle of a sentence when she picked up the phone and made a plane reservation to Miami.

“They’ve got me on a ten-twenty flight,” she said. “I’ll get these right into the office and we’ll get a check out to you as soon as they’re developed. What’s the matter?”

“I don’t think I want a check,” I said. “And I don’t want to give you the film without getting paid.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You can trust us, for God’s sake.”

“Why don’t you trust me instead?”

“You mean pay you without seeing what we’re paying for? Bernie, you’re a burglar. How can I trust you?”

“You’re the Weekly Galaxy,” I said. “Nobody can trust you.”

“You’ve got a point,” she said.

“We’ll get the film developed here,” I said. “I’m sure there are some good commercial photo labs in Memphis and that they can handle infrared film. First you’ll call your office and have them wire cash here or set up an interbank transfer, and as soon as you see what’s on the film you can hand over the money. You can even fax them one of the prints first to get approval, if you think that’ll make a difference.”

“Oh, they’ll love that,” she said. “My boss loves it when I fax him stuff.”

“And that’s what happened,” I told Carolyn. “The pictures came out really beautifully. I don’t know how Lucian Leeds turned up all those Egyptian pieces, but they looked great next to the 1940s Wurlitzer jukebox and the seven-foot statue of Mickey Mouse. I thought Holly was going to die of happiness when she realized the thing next to Mickey was a sarcophagus. She couldn’t decide which tack to take — that he’s mummified and they’re keeping him in it or he’s alive and really weird and uses it for a bed.”

“Maybe they can have a reader poll. Call a nine hundred number and vote.”

“You wouldn’t believe how loud helicopters are when you’re inside them. I just dropped the ladder and pulled it back in again. And tossed an extra sneaker on the roof.”

“And wore its mate when you saw Holly.”

“Yeah, I thought a little verisimilitude wouldn’t hurt. The chopper pilot dropped me back at the hangar and I caught a ride down to the Burrell house in Mississippi, I walked around the room Lucian decorated for the occasion, admired everything, then turned out all the lights and took my pictures. They’ll be running the best ones in the Galaxy.”

“And you got paid.”

“Twenty-five grand, and everybody’s happy, and I didn’t cheat anybody or steal anything. The Galaxy got some great pictures that’ll sell a lot of copies of their horrible paper. The readers get a peek at a room no one has ever seen before.”

“And the folks at Graceland?”

“They get a good security drill,” I said. “Holly created a peach of a diversion to hide my entering the building. What it hid, of course, was my not entering the building, and that fact should stay hidden forever. Most of the Graceland people have never seen Elvis’s bedroom, so they’ll think the photos are legit. The few who know better will just figure my pictures didn’t come out, or that they weren’t exciting enough so the Galaxy decided to run fakes instead. Everybody with any sense figures the whole paper’s a fake anyway, so what difference does it make?”

“Was Holly a fake?”

“Not really. I’d say she’s an authentic specimen of what she is. Of course her little fantasy about a hot weekend watching the ducks blew away with the morning mist. All she wanted to do was get back to Florida and collect her bonus.”

“So it’s just as well you got your bonus ahead of time. You’ll hear from her again the next time the Galaxy needs a burglar.”

“Well, I’d do it again,” I said. “My mother was always hoping I’d go into journalism. I wouldn’t have waited so long if I’d known it would be so much fun.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, Bern.”

“Come on. What is it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I just wish, you know, that you’d gone in there and got the real pictures. He could be in there, Bern. I mean, why else would they make such a big thing out of keeping people out of there? Did you ever stop to ask yourself that?”

“Carolyn—”

“I know,” she said. “You think I’m nuts. But there are a lot of people like me, Bern.”

“It’s a good thing,” I told her. “Where would the Galaxy be without you?”

The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke (with Lynne Wood Block)

I was gearing up to poke the bell a second time when the door opened. I’d been expecting Karl Bellermann, and instead I found myself facing a woman with soft blonde hair framing an otherwise severe, high-cheekboned face. She looked as if she’d been repeatedly disappointed in life but was damned if she would let it get to her.

I gave my name and she nodded in recognition. “Yes, Mr. Rhodenbarr,” she said. “Karl is expecting you. I can’t disturb him now as he’s in the library with his books. If you’ll come into the sitting room I’ll bring you some coffee, and Karl will be with you in—” she consulted her watch “—in just twelve minutes.”

In twelve minutes it would be noon, which was when Karl had told me to arrive. I’d taken a train from New York and a cab from the train station, and good connections had got me there twelve minutes early, and evidently I could damn well cool my heels for all twelve of those minutes.

I was faintly miffed, but I wasn’t much surprised. Karl Bellermann, arguably the country’s leading collector of crime fiction, had taken a cue from one of the genre’s greatest creations, Rex Stout’s incomparable Nero Wolfe. Wolfe, an orchid fancier, spent an inviolate two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon with his plants, and would brook no disturbance at such times. Bellermann, no more flexible in real life than Wolfe was in fiction, scheduled even longer sessions with his books, and would neither greet visitors nor take phone calls while communing with them.

The sitting room where the blonde woman led me was nicely appointed, and the chair where she planted me was comfortable enough. The coffee she poured was superb, rich and dark and winy. I picked up the latest issue of Ellery Queen and was halfway through a new Peter Lovesey story and just finishing my second cup of coffee when the door opened and Karl Bellermann strode in.

“Bernie,” he said. “Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

“Karl.”

“So good of you to come. You had no trouble finding us?”

“I took a taxi from the train station. The driver knew the house.”

He laughed. “I’ll bet he did. And I’ll bet I know what he called it. ‘Bellermann’s Folly,’ yes?”

“Well,” I said.

“Please, don’t spare my feelings. That’s what all the local rustics call it. They hold in contempt that which they fail to understand. To their eyes, the architecture is overly ornate, and too much a mixture of styles, at once a Rhenish castle and an alpine chalet. And the library dwarfs the rest of the house, like the tail that wags the dog. Your driver is very likely a man who owns a single book, the Bible given to him for Confirmation and unopened ever since. That a man might choose to devote to his books the greater portion of his house — and, indeed, the greater portion of his life — could not fail to strike him as an instance of remarkable eccentricity.” His eyes twinkled. “Although he might phrase it differently.”

Indeed he had. “The guy’s a nut case,” the driver had reported confidently. “One look at his house and you’ll see for yourself. He’s only eating with one chopstick.”

A few minutes later I sat down to lunch with Karl Bellermann, and there were no chopsticks in evidence. He ate with a fork, and he was every bit as agile with it as the fictional orchid fancier. Our meal consisted of a crown loin of pork with roasted potatoes and braised cauliflower, and Bellermann put away a second helping of everything.

I don’t know where he put it. He was a long lean gentleman in his mid-fifties, with a full head of iron-gray hair and a mustache a little darker than the hair on his head. He’d dressed rather elaborately for a day at home with his books — a tie, a vest, a Donegal tweed jacket — and I didn’t flatter myself that it was on my account. I had a feeling he chose a similar get-up seven days a week, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he put on a black tie every night for dinner.

He carried most of the lunchtime conversation, talking about books he’d read, arguing the relative merits of Hammett and Chandler, musing on the likelihood that female private eyes in fiction had come to outnumber their real-life counterparts. I didn’t feel called upon to contribute much, and Mrs. Bellermann never uttered a word except to offer dessert (apfelküchen, lighter than air and sweeter than revenge) and coffee (the mixture as before but a fresh pot of it, and seemingly richer and darker and stronger and winier this time around). Karl and I both turned down a second piece of the cake and said yes to a second cup of coffee, and then Karl turned significantly to his wife and gave her a formal nod.

“Thank you, Eva,” he said. And she rose, all but curtseyed, and left the room.

“She leaves us to our brandy and cigars,” he said, “but it’s too early in the day for spirits, and no one smokes in Schloss Bellermann.”

“Schloss Bellermann?”

“A joke of mine. If the world calls it Bellermann’s Folly, why shouldn’t Bellermann call it his castle? Eh?”

“Why not?”

He looked at his watch. “But let me show you my library,” he said, “and then you can show me what you’ve brought me.”

Diagonal mullions divided the library door into a few dozen diamond-shaped sections, each set with a mirrored pane of glass. The effect was unusual, and I asked if they were one-way mirrors.

“Like the ones in police stations?” He raised an eyebrow. “Your past is showing, eh, Bernie? But no, it is even more of a trick than the police play on criminals. On the other side of the mirror—” he clicked a fingernail against a pane “—is solid steel an inch and a half thick. The library walls themselves are reinforced with steel sheeting. The exterior walls are concrete, reinforced with steel rods. And look at this lock.”

It was a Poulard, its mechanism intricate beyond description, its key one that not a locksmith in ten thousand could duplicate.

“Pickproof,” he said. “They guarantee it.”

“So I understand.”

He slipped the irreproducible key into the impregnable lock and opened the unbreachable door. Inside was a room two full stories tall, with a system of ladders leading to the upper levels. The library, as tall as the house itself, had an eighteen-foot ceiling paneled in light and dark wood in a sunburst pattern. Wall-to-wall carpet covered the floor, and oriental rugs in turn covered most of the broadloom. The walls, predictably enough, were given over to floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, with the shelves themselves devoted entirely to books. There were no paintings, no Chinese ginger jars, no bronze animals, no sets of armor, no cigar humidors, no framed photographs of family members, no hand-colored engravings of Victoria Falls, no hunting trophies, no Lalique figurines, no Limoges boxes. Nothing but books, sometimes embraced by bronze bookends, but mostly extending without interruption from one end of a section of shelving to the other.

“Books,” he said reverently — and, I thought, unnecessarily. I own a bookstore, I can recognize books when I see them.

“Books,” I affirmed.

“I believe they are happy.”

“Happy?”

“You are surprised? Why should objects lack feelings, especially objects of such a sensitive nature as books? And, if a book can have feelings, these books ought to be happy. They are owned and tended by a man who cares deeply for them. And they are housed in a room perfectly designed for their safety and comfort.”

“It certainly looks that way.”

He nodded. “Two windows only, on the north wall, of course, so that no direct sunlight ever enters the room. Sunlight fades book spines, bleaches the ink of a dust jacket. It is a book’s enemy, and it cannot gain entry here.”

“That’s good,” I said. “My store faces south, and the building across the street blocks some of the sunlight, but a little gets through. I have to make sure I don’t keep any of the better volumes where the light can get at them.”

“You should paint the windows black,” he said, “or hang thick curtains. Or both.”

“Well, I like to keep an eye on the street,” I said. “And my cat likes to sleep in the sunlit window.”

He made a face. “A cat? In a room full of books?”

“He’d be safe,” I said, “even in a room full of rocking chairs. He’s a Manx. And he’s an honest working cat. I used to have mice damaging the books, and that stopped the day he moved in.”

“No mice can get in here,” Bellermann said, “and neither can cats, with their hair and their odor. Mold cannot attack my books, or mildew. You feel the air?”

“The air?”

“A constant sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit,” he said. “On the cool side, but perfect for my books. I put on a jacket and I am perfectly comfortable. And, as you can see, most of them are already wearing their jackets. Dust jackets! Ha ha!”

“Ha ha,” I agreed.

“The humidity is sixty percent,” he went on. “It never varies. Too dry and the glue dries out. Too damp and the pages rot. Neither can happen here.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“I would say so. The air is filtered regularly, with not only air-conditioning but special filters to remove pollutants that are truly microscopic. No book could ask for a safer or more comfortable environment.”

I sniffed the air. It was cool, and neither too moist nor too dry, and as immaculate as modern science could make it. My nose wrinkled, and I picked up a whiff of something.

“What about fire?” I wondered.

“Steel walls, steel doors, triple-glazed windows with heat-resistant bulletproof glass. Special insulation in the walls and ceiling and floor. The whole house could burn to the ground, Bernie, and this room and its contents would remain unaffected. It is one enormous fire-safe.”

“But if the fire broke out in here...”

“How? I don’t smoke, or play with matches. There are no cupboards holding piles of oily rags, no bales of moldering hay to burst into spontaneous combustion.”

“No, but—”

“And even if there were a fire,” he said, “it would be extinguished almost before it had begun.” He gestured and I looked up and saw round metal gadgets spotted here and there in the walls and ceiling.

I said, “A sprinkler system? Somebody tried to sell me one at the store once and I threw him out on his ear. Fire’s rough on books, but water’s sheer disaster. And those things are like smoke alarms, they can go off for no good reason, and then where are you? Karl, I can’t believe—”

“Please,” he said, holding up a hand. “Do you take me for an idiot?”

“No, but—”

“Do you honestly think I would use water to forestall fire? Credit me with a little sense, my friend.”

“I do, but—”

“There will be no fire here, and no flood, either. A book in my library will be, ah, what is the expression? Snug as a slug in a rug.”

“A bug,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“A bug in a rug,” I said. “I think that’s the expression.”

His response was a shrug, the sort you’d get, I suppose, from a slug in a rug. “But we have no time for language lessons,” he said. “From two to six I must be in the library with my books, and it is already one-fifty.”

“You’re already in the library.”

“Alone,” he said. “With only my books for company. So. What have you brought me?”

I opened my briefcase, withdrew the padded mailer, reached into that like Little Jack Horner, and brought forth a plum indeed. I looked up in time to catch an unguarded glimpse of Bellermann’s face, and it was a study. How often do you get to see a man salivate less than an hour after a big lunch?

He extended his hands and I placed the book in them. “Fer-de-Lance,” he said reverently. “Nero Wolfe’s debut, the rarest and most desirable book in the entire canon. Hardly the best of the novels, I wouldn’t say. It took Stout several books fully to refine the character of Wolfe and to hone the narrative edge of Archie Goodwin. But the brilliance was present from the beginning, and the book is a prize.”

He turned the volume over in his hands, inspected the dust jacket fore and aft. “Of course I own a copy,” he said. “A first edition in dust wrapper. This dust wrapper is nicer than the one I have.”

“It’s pretty cherry,” I said.

“Pristine,” he allowed, “or very nearly so. Mine has a couple of chips and an unfortunate tear mended quite expertly with tape. This does look virtually perfect.”

“Yes.”

“But the jacket’s the least of it, is it not? This is a special copy.”

“It is.”

He opened it, and his large hands could not have been gentler had he been repotting orchids. He found the title page and read, “ ‘For Franklin Roosevelt, with the earnest hope of a brighter tomorrow. Best regards from Rex Todhunter Stout.’ ” He ran his forefinger over the inscription. “It’s Stout’s writing,” he announced. “He didn’t inscribe many books, but I have enough signed copies to know his hand. And this is the ultimate association copy, isn’t it?”

“You could say that.”

“I just did. Stout was a liberal Democrat, ultimately a World Federalist. FDR, like the present incumbent, was a great fan of detective stories. It always seems to be the Democratic presidents who relish a good mystery. Eisenhower preferred Westerns, Nixon liked history and biography, and I don’t know that Reagan read at all.”

He sighed and closed the book. “Mr. Gulbenkian must regret the loss of this copy,” he said.

“I suppose he must.”

“A year ago,” he said, “when I learned he’d been burglarized and some of his best volumes stolen, I wondered what sort of burglar could possibly know what books to take. And of course I thought of you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Tell me your price again, Bernie. Refresh my memory.”

I named a figure.

“It’s high,” he said.

“The book’s unique,” I pointed out.

“I know that. I know, too, that I can never show it off. I cannot tell anyone I have it. You and I alone will know that it is in my possession.”

“It’ll be our little secret, Karl.”

“Our little secret. I can’t even insure it. At least Gulbenkian was insured, eh? But he can never replace the book. Why didn’t you sell it back to him?”

“I might,” I said, “if you decide you don’t want it.”

“But of course I want it!” He might have said more but a glance at his watch reminded him of the time. “Two o’clock,” he said, motioning me toward the door. “Eva will have my afternoon coffee ready. And you will excuse me, I am sure, while I spend the afternoon with my books, including this latest specimen.”

“Be careful with it,” I said.

“Bernie! I’m not going to read it. I have plenty of reading copies, should I care to renew my acquaintance with Fer-de-Lance. I want to hold it, to be with it. And then at six o’clock we will conclude our business, and I will give you a dinner every bit as good as the lunch you just had. And then you can return to the city.”

He ushered me out, and moments later he disappeared into the library again, carrying a tray with coffee in one of those silver pots they used to give you on trains. There was a cup on the tray as well, and a sugar bowl and creamer, along with a plate of shortbread cookies. I stood in the hall and watched the library door swing shut, heard the lock turn and the bolt slide home. Then I turned, and there was Karl’s wife, Eva.

“I guess he’s really going to spend the next four hours in there,” I said.

“He always does.”

“I’d go for a drive,” I said, “but I don’t have a car. I suppose I could go for a walk. It’s a beautiful day, bright and sunny. Of course your husband doesn’t allow sunlight into the library, but I suppose he lets it go where it wants in the rest of the neighborhood.”

That drew a smile from her.

“If I’d thought ahead,” I said, “I’d have brought something to read. Not that there aren’t a few thousand books in the house, but they’re all locked away with Karl.”

“Not all of them,” she said. “My husband’s collection is limited to books published before 1975, along with the more recent work of a few of his very favorite authors. But he buys other contemporary crime novels as well, and keeps them here and there around the house. The bookcase in the guest room is well stocked.”

“That’s good news. As far as that goes, I was in the middle of a magazine story.”

“In Ellery Queen, wasn’t it? Come with me, Mr. Rhodenbarr, and I’ll—”

“Bernie.”

“Bernie,” she said, and colored slightly, those dangerous cheekbones turning from ivory to the pink you find inside a seashell. “I’ll show you where the guest room is, Bernie, and then I’ll bring you your magazine.”

The guest room was on the second floor, and its glassed-in bookcase was indeed jam-packed with recent crime fiction. I was just getting drawn into the opening of one of Jeremiah Healy’s Cuddy novels when Eva Bellermann knocked on the half-open door and came in with a tray quite like the one she’d brought her husband. Coffee in a silver pot, a gold-rimmed bone china cup and saucer, a matching plate holding shortbread cookies. And, keeping them company, the issue of EQMM I’d been reading earlier.

“This is awfully nice of you,” I said. “But you should have brought a second cup so you could join me.”

“I’ve had too much coffee already,” she said. “But I could keep you company for a few minutes if you don’t mind.”

“I’d like that.”

“So would I,” she said, skirting my chair and sitting on the edge of the narrow captain’s bed. “I don’t get much company. The people in the village keep their distance. And Karl has his books.”

“And he’s locked away with them...”

“Three hours in the morning and four in the afternoon. Then in the evening he deals with correspondence and returns phone calls. He’s retired, as you know, but he has investment decisions to make and business matters to deal with. And books, of course. He’s always buying more of them.” She sighed. “I’m afraid he doesn’t have much time left for me.”

“It must be difficult for you.”

“It’s lonely,” she said.

“I can imagine.”

“We have so little in common,” she said. “I sometimes wonder why he married me. The books are his whole life.”

“And they don’t interest you at all?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t the brain for it,” she said. “Clues and timetables and elaborate murder methods. It is like working a crossword puzzle without a pencil. Or worse — like assembling a jigsaw puzzle in the dark.”

“With gloves on,” I suggested.

“Oh, that’s funny!” She laughed more than the line warranted and laid a hand on my arm. “But I should not make jokes about the books. You are a bookseller yourself. Perhaps books are your whole life, too.”

“Not my whole life,” I said.

“Oh? What else interests you?”

“Beautiful women,” I said recklessly.

“Beautiful women?”

“Like you,” I said.

Believe me, I hadn’t planned on any of this. I’d figured on finishing the Lovesey story, then curling up with the Healy book until Karl Bellermann emerged from his lair, saw his shadow, and paid me a lot of money for the book he thought I had stolen.

In point of fact, the Fer-de-Lance I’d brought him was legitimately mine to sell — or very nearly so. I would never have entertained the notion of breaking into Nizar Gulbenkian’s fieldstone house in Riverdale. Gulbenkian was a friend as well as a valued customer, and I’d rushed to call him when I learned of his loss. I would keep an ear cocked and an eye open, I assured him, and I would let him know if any of his treasures turned up on the gray or black market.

“That’s kind of you, Bernie,” he’d said. “We will have to talk of this one day.”

And, months later, we talked — and I learned there had been no burglary. Gulbenkian had gouged his own front door with a chisel, looted his own well-insured library of its greatest treasures, and tucked them out of sight (if not out of mind) before reporting the offense — and pocketing the payoff from the insurance company.

He’d needed money, of course, and this had seemed a good way to get it without parting with his precious volumes. But now he needed more money, as one so often does, and he had a carton full of books he no longer legally owned and could not even show off to his friends, let alone display to the public. He couldn’t offer them for sale, either, but someone else could. Someone who might be presumed to have stolen them. Someone rather like me.

“It will be the simplest thing in the world for you, Bernie,” old Nizar said. “You won’t have to do any breaking or entering. You won’t even have to come to Riverdale. All you’ll do is sell the books, and I will gladly pay you ten percent of the proceeds.”

“Half,” I said.

We settled on a third, after protracted negotiations, and later over drinks he allowed that he’d have gone as high as forty percent, while I admitted I’d have taken twenty. He brought me the books, and I knew which one to offer first, and to whom.

The FDR Fer-de-Lance was the prize of the lot, and the most readily identifiable. Karl Bellermann was likely to pay the highest price for it, and to be most sanguine about its unorthodox provenance.

You hear it said of a man now and then that he’d rather steal a dollar than earn ten. (It’s been said, not entirely without justification, of me.) Karl Bellermann was a man who’d rather buy a stolen book for a thousand dollars than pay half that through legitimate channels. I’d sold him things in the past, some stolen, some not, and it was the volume with a dubious history that really got him going.

So, as far as he was concerned, I’d lifted Fer-de-Lance from its rightful owner, who would turn purple if he knew where it was. But I knew better — Gulbenkian would cheerfully pocket two-thirds of whatever I pried out of Bellermann, and would know exactly where the book had wound up and just how it got there.

In a sense, then, I was putting one over on Karl Bellermann, but that didn’t constitute a breach of my admittedly elastic moral code. It was something else entirely, though, to abuse the man’s hospitality by putting the moves on his gorgeous young wife.

Well, what can I say? Nobody’s perfect.

Afterward I lay back with my head on a pillow and tried to figure out what would make a man choose a leather chair and room full of books over a comfortable bed with a hot blonde in it. I marveled at the vagaries of human nature, and Eva stroked my chest and urged a cup of coffee on me.

It was great coffee, and no less welcome after our little interlude. The cookies were good, too. Eva took one, but passed on the coffee. If she drank it after lunchtime, she said, she had trouble sleeping nights.

“It never keeps me awake,” I said. “In fact, this stuff seems to be having just the opposite effect. The more I drink, the sleepier I get.”

“Maybe it is I who have made you sleepy.”

“Could be.”

She snuggled close, letting interesting parts of her body press against mine. “Perhaps we should close our eyes for a few minutes,” she said.

The next thing I knew she had a hand on my shoulder and was shaking me awake. “Bernie,” she said. “We fell asleep!”

“We did?”

“And look at the time! It is almost six o’clock. Karl will be coming out of the library any minute.”

“Uh-oh.”

She was out of bed, diving into her clothes. “I’ll go downstairs,” she said. “You can take your time dressing, as long as we are not together.” And, before I could say anything, she swept out of the room.

I had the urge to close my eyes and drift right off again. Instead I forced myself out of bed, took a quick shower to clear the cobwebs, then got dressed. I stood for a moment at the head of the stairs, listening for conversation and hoping I wouldn’t hear any voices raised in anger. I didn’t hear any voices, angry or otherwise, or anything else.

It’s quiet out there, I thought, like so many supporting characters in so many Westerns. And the thought came back, as it had from so many heroes in those same Westerns: Yeah... too quiet.

I descended the flight of stairs, turned a corner, and bumped into Eva. “He hasn’t come out,” she said. “Bernie, I’m worried.”

“Maybe he lost track of the time.”

“Never. He’s like a Swiss watch, and he has a Swiss watch and checks it constantly. He comes out every day at six on the dot. It is ten minutes past the hour and where is he?”

“Maybe he came out and—”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know. Drove into town to buy a paper.”

“He never does that. And the car is in the garage.”

“He could have gone for a walk.”

“He hates to walk. Bernie, he is still in there.”

“Well, I suppose he’s got the right. It’s his room and his books. If he wants to hang around—”

“I’m afraid something has happened to him. Bernie, I knocked on the door. I knocked loud. Perhaps you heard the sound upstairs?”

“No, but I probably wouldn’t. I was all the way upstairs, and I had the shower on for a while there. I take it he didn’t answer.”

“No.”

“Well, I gather it’s pretty well soundproofed in there. Maybe he didn’t hear you.”

“I have knocked before. And he has heard me before.”

“Maybe he heard you this time and decided to ignore you.” Why was I raising so many objections? Perhaps because I didn’t want to let myself think there was any great cause for alarm.

“Bernie,” she said, “what if he is ill? What if he has had a heart attack?”

“I suppose it’s possible, but—”

“I think I should call the police.”

I suppose it’s my special perspective, but I almost never think that’s a great idea. I wasn’t mad about it now, either, being in the possession of stolen property and a criminal record, not to mention the guilty conscience that I’d earned a couple of hours ago in the upstairs guest room.

“Not the police,” I said. “Not yet. First let’s make sure he’s not just taking a nap, or all caught up in his reading.”

“But how? The door is locked.”

“Isn’t there an extra key?”

“If there is, he’s never told me where he keeps it. He’s the only one with access to his precious books.”

“The window,” I said.

“It can’t be opened. It is this triple pane of bulletproof glass, and—”

“And you couldn’t budge it with a battering ram,” I said. “He told me all about it. You can still see through it, though, can’t you?”

“He’s in there,” I announced. “At least his feet are.”

“His feet?”

“There’s a big leather chair with its back to the window,” I said, “and he’s sitting in it. I can’t see the rest of him, but I can see his feet.”

“What are they doing?”

“They’re sticking out in front of the chair,” I said, “and they’re wearing shoes, and that’s about it. Feet aren’t terribly expressive, are they?”

I made a fist and reached up to bang on the window. I don’t know what I expected the feet to do in response, but they stayed right where they were.

“The police,” Eva said. “I’d better call them.”

“Not just yet,” I said.

The Poulard is a terrific lock, no question about it. State-of-the-art and all that. But I don’t know where they get off calling it pickproof. When I first came across the word in one of their ads I knew how Alexander felt when he heard about the Gordian knot. Pickproof, eh? We’ll see about that!

The lock on the library door put up a good fight, but I’d brought the little set of picks and probes I never leave home without, and I put them (and my God-given talent) to the task.

And opened the door.

“Bernie,” Eva said, gaping. “Where did you learn how to do that?”

“In the Boy Scouts,” I said. “They give you a merit badge for it if you apply yourself. Karl? Karl, are you all right?”

He was in his chair, and now we could see more than his well-shod feet. His hands were in his lap, holding a book by William Campbell Gault. His head was back, his eyes closed. He looked for all the world like a man who’d dozed off over a book.

We stood looking at him, and I took a moment to sniff the air. I’d smelled something on my first visit to this remarkable room, but I couldn’t catch a whiff of it now.

“Bernie—”

I looked down, scanned the floor, running my eyes over the maroon broadloom and the carpets that covered most of it. I dropped to one knee alongside one small Persian — a Tabriz, if I had to guess, but I know less than a good burglar should about the subject. I took a close look at this one and Eva asked me what I was doing.

“Just helping out,” I said. “Didn’t you drop a contact lens?”

“I don’t wear contact lenses.”

“My mistake,” I said, and got to my feet. I went over to the big leather chair and went through the formality of laying a hand on Karl Bellermann’s brow. It was predictably cool to the touch.

“Is he—”

I nodded. “You’d better call the cops,” I said.

Elmer Crittenden, the officer in charge, was a stocky fellow in a khaki windbreaker. He kept glancing warily at the walls of books, as if he feared being called upon to sit down and read them one after the other. My guess is that he’d had less experience with them than with dead bodies.

“Most likely turn out to be his heart,” he said of the deceased. “Usually is when they go like this. He complain any of chest pains? Shooting pains up and down his left arm? Any of that?”

Eva said he hadn’t.

“Might have had ’em without saying anything,” Crittenden said. “Or it could be he didn’t get any advance warning. Way he’s sitting and all, I’d say it was quick. Could be he closed his eyes for a little nap and died in his sleep.”

“Just so he didn’t suffer,” Eva said.

Crittenden lifted Karl’s eyelid, squinted, touched the corpse here and there. “What it almost looks like,” he said, “is that he was smothered, but I don’t suppose some great speckled bird flew in a window and held a pillow over his face. It’ll turn out to be a heart attack, unless I miss my guess.”

Could I just let it go? I looked at Crittenden, at Eva, at the sunburst pattern on the high ceiling up above, at the putative Tabriz carpet below. Then I looked at Karl, the consummate bibliophile, with FDR’s Fer-de-Lance on the table beside his chair. He was my customer, and he’d died within arm’s reach of the book I’d brought him. Should I let him requiescat in relative pace? Or did I have an active role to play?

“I think you were right,” I told Crittenden. “I think he was smothered.”

“What would make you say that, sir? You didn’t even get a good look at his eyeballs.”

“I’ll trust your eyeballs,” I said. “And I don’t think it was a great speckled bird that did it, either.”

“Oh?”

“It’s classic,” I said, “and it would have appealed to Karl, given his passion for crime fiction. If he had to die, he’d probably have wanted it to happen in a locked room. And not just any locked room, either, but one secured by a pickproof Poulard, with steel-lined walls and windows that don’t open.”

“He was locked up tighter than Fort Knox,” Crittenden said.

“He was,” I said. “And, all the same, he was murdered.”

“Smothered,” I said. “When the lab checks him out, tell them to look for halon gas. I think it’ll show up, but not unless they’re looking for it.”

“I never heard of it,” Crittenden said.

“Most people haven’t,” I said. “It was in the news a while ago when they installed it in subway toll booths. There’d been a few incendiary attacks on booth attendants — a spritz of something flammable and they got turned into crispy critters. The halon gas was there to smother a fire before it got started.”

“How’s it work?”

“It displaces the oxygen in the room,” I said. “I’m not enough of a scientist to know how it manages it, but the net effect is about the same as that great speckled bird you were talking about. The one with the pillows.”

“That’d be consistent with the physical evidence,” Crittenden said. “But how would you get this halon in here?”

“It was already here,” I said. I pointed to the jets on the walls and ceiling. “When I first saw them, I thought Bellermann had put in a conventional sprinkler system, and I couldn’t believe it. Water’s harder than fire on rare books, and a lot of libraries have been totaled when a sprinkler system went off by accident. I said something to that effect to Karl, and he just about bit my head off, making it clear he wouldn’t expose his precious treasures to water damage.

“So I got the picture. The jets were designed to deliver gas, not liquid, and it went without saying that the gas would be halon. I understand they’re equipping the better research libraries with it these days, although Karl’s the only person I know of who installed it in his personal library.”

Crittenden was halfway up a ladder, having a look at one of the outlets. “Just like a sprinkler head,” he said, “which is what I took it for. How’s it know when to go off? Heat sensor?”

“That’s right.”

“You said murder. That’d mean somebody set it off.”

“Yes.”

“By starting a fire in here? Be a neater trick than sending in the great speckled bird.”

“All you’d have to do,” I said, “is heat the sensor enough to trigger the response.”

“How?”

“When I was in here earlier,” I said, “I caught a whiff of smoke. It was faint, but it was absolutely there. I think that’s what made me ask Karl about fire in the first place.”

“And?”

“When Mrs. Bellermann and I came in and discovered the body, the smell was gone. But there was a discolored spot on the carpet that I’d noticed before, and I bent down for a closer look at it.” I pointed to the Tabriz (which, now that I think about it, may very well have been an Isfahan). “Right there,” I said.

Crittenden knelt where I pointed, rubbed two fingers on the spot, brought them to his nose. “Scorched,” he reported. “But just the least bit. Take a whole lot more than that to set off a sensor way up there.”

“I know. That was a test.”

“A test?”

“Of the murder method. How do you raise the temperature of a room you can’t enter? You can’t unlock the door and you can’t open the window. How can you get enough heat in to set off the gas?”

“How?”

I turned to Eva. “Tell him how you did it,” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You must be crazy.”

“You wouldn’t need a fire,” I said. “You wouldn’t even need a whole lot of heat. All you’d have to do is deliver enough heat directly to the sensor to trigger a response. If you could manage that in a highly localized fashion, you wouldn’t even raise the overall room temperature appreciably.”

“Keep talking,” Crittenden said.

I picked up an ivory-handled magnifier, one of several placed strategically around the room. “When I was a Boy Scout,” I said, “they didn’t really teach me how to open locks. But they were big on starting fires. Flint and steel, fire by friction — and that old standby, focusing the sun’s rays though a magnifying glass and delivering a concentrated pinpoint of intense heat onto something with a low kindling point.”

“The window,” Crittenden said.

I nodded. “It faces north,” I said, “so the sun never comes in on its own. But you can stand a few feet from the window and catch the sunlight with a mirror, and you can tilt the mirror so the light is reflected through your magnifying glass and on through the window. And you can beam it onto an object in the room.”

“The heat sensor, that’d be.”

“Eventually,” I said. “First, though, you’d want to make sure it would work. You couldn’t try it out ahead of time on the sensor, because you wouldn’t know it was working until you set it off. Until then, you couldn’t be sure the thickness of the window glass wasn’t disrupting the process. So you’d want to test it.”

“That explains the scorched rug, doesn’t it?” Crittenden stooped for another look at it, then glanced up at the window. “Soon as you saw a wisp of smoke or a trace of scorching, you’d know it was working. And you’d have an idea how long it would take to raise the temperature enough. If you could make it hot enough to scorch wool, you could set off a heat-sensitive alarm.”

“My God,” Eva cried, adjusting quickly to new realities. “I thought you must be crazy, but now I can see how it was done. But who could have done such a thing?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it would have to be somebody who lived here, somebody who was familiar with the library and knew about the halon, somebody who stood to gain financially by Karl Bellermann’s death. Somebody, say, who felt neglected by a husband who treated her like a housekeeper, somebody who might see poetic justice in killing him while he was locked away with his precious books.”

“You can’t mean me, Bernie.”

“Well, now that you mention it...”

“But I was with you! Karl was with us at lunch. Then he went into the library and I showed you to the guest room.”

“You showed me, all right.”

“And we were together,” she said, lowering her eyes modestly. “It shames me to say it with my husband tragically dead, but we were in bed together until almost six o’clock, when we came down here to discover the body. You can testify to that, can’t you, Bernie?”

“I can swear we went to bed together,” I said, “And I can swear that I was there until six, unless I went sleepwalking. But I was out cold, Eva.”

“So was I.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “You stayed away from the coffee, saying how it kept you awake. Well, it sure didn’t keep me awake. I think there was something in it to make me sleep, and that’s why you didn’t want any. I think there was more of the same in the pot you gave Karl to bring in here with him, so he’d be dozing peacefully while you set off the halon. You waited until I was asleep, went outside with a mirror and a magnifier, heated the sensor and set off the gas, and then came back to bed. The halon would do its work in minutes, and without warning even if Karl wasn’t sleeping all that soundly. Halon’s odorless and colorless, and the air-cleaning system would whisk it all away in less than an hour. But I think there’ll be traces in his system, along with traces of the same sedative they’ll find in the residue in both the coffee pots. And I think that’ll be enough to put you away.”

Crittenden thought so, too.

When I got back to the city there was a message on the machine to call Nizar Gulbenkian. It was late, but it sounded urgent.

“Bad news,” I told him. “I had the book just about sold. Then he locked himself in his library to commune with the ghosts of Rex Stout and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and next thing he knew they were all hanging out together.”

“You don’t mean he died?”

“His wife killed him,” I said, and I went on to tell him the whole story. “So that’s the bad news, though it’s not as bad for us as it is for the Bellermanns. I’ve got the book back, and I’m sure I can find a customer for it.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, Bernie, I’m sorry about Bellermann. He was a true bookman.”

“He was that, all right.”

“But otherwise your bad news is good news.”

“It is?”

“Yes. Because I changed my mind about the book.”

“You don’t want to sell it?”

“I can’t sell it,” he said. “It would be like tearing out my soul. And now, thank God, I don’t have to sell it.”

“Oh?”

“More good news,” he said. “A business transaction, a long shot with a handsome return. I won’t bore you with the details, but the outcome was very good indeed. If you’d been successful in selling the book, I’d now be begging you to buy it back.”

“I see.”

“Bernie,” he said, I’m a collector, as passionate about the pursuit as poor Bellermann. I don’t ever want to sell. I want to add to my holdings.” He let out a sigh, clearly pleased at the prospect. “So I’ll want the book back. But of course I’ll pay you your commission all the same.”

“I couldn’t accept it.”

“So you had all that work for nothing?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I guess Bellermann’s library will go on the auction block eventually,” I said. “Eva can’t inherit, but there’ll be some niece or nephew to wind up with a nice piece of change. And there’ll be some wonderful books in that sale.”

“There certainly will.”

“But a few of the most desirable items won’t be included,” I said, “because they somehow found their way into my briefcase, along with Fer-de-Lance.”

“You managed that, Bernie? With a dead body in the room, and a murderer in custody, and a cop right there on the scene?”

“Bellermann had shown me his choicest treasures,” I said, “so I knew just what to grab and where to find it. And Crittenden didn’t care what I did with the books. I told him I needed something to read on the train and he waited patiently while I picked out eight or ten volumes. Well, it’s a long train ride, and I guess he must think I’m a fast reader.”

“Bring them over,” he said. “Now.”

“Nizar, I’m bushed,” I said, “and you’re all the way up in Riverdale. First thing in the morning, okay? And while I’m there you can teach me how to tell a Tabriz from an Isfahan.”

“They’re not at all alike, Bernie. How could anyone confuse them?”

“You’ll clear it up for me tomorrow. Okay?”

“Well, all right,” he said. “But I hate to wait.”

Collectors! Don’t you just love them?