The Burglar in the Rye

CHAPTER Ten

“Whatever you’re doin’,” she growled, “keep doin’ it. Words of advice from the founder of the Raymond Kirschmann Charm School.”

“You know Ray.”

“I do,” she said, “and I never cease to regret it. Daffodils don’t have any odor, Bern, so how are you gonna come out smelling like one? That rat.”

“Because of what he said about daffodils?”

“Because of what he said about me. He noticed, Bern. He doesn’t know what he noticed, but he noticed it all the same.”

“It’s the longer hair,” I said.

“That’s just part of it. It’s the clothes, too. Look at this blouse.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Could you wear it?”

“Well,” I said, “no, not really. But I’m a guy, Carolyn.”

“And it’s too feminine, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“It’s happening, Bern. I’m turning femme. Look at my nails, will you?”

“What’s the matter with them?”

“Just look at them.”

“So?”

“They look the same to you?”

“They’re trimmed short,” I said, “and there’s no polish on them, at least as far as I can see. Unless you’ve got some of that colorless polish on to protect them.” She shook her head. “Then as far as I can tell,” I said, “they’re the same.”

“Right.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem,” she said, “is inside.”

“Under the nails?”

“Under the skin, Bern. They’re the same as ever, but for the first time ever they don’t look right. To me, I mean. They look short.”

“They are short. Same as always.”

“Up to now,” she said, “they didn’t look short to me. They just looked right. Now I look at them, and they look too short. Unattractively short.”

“Oh.”

“Like they ought to be longer.”

“Oh.”

“Like my hair.”

“Oh.”

“You see what’s happening, Bern?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“It’s Erica,” she said. “She’s turning me into a Barbie Doll. What’s next, will you tell me that? Painted toenails? Pierced ears? Bern, you’ll be sleeping with a teddy and I’ll be sleeping in one. Rats.”

“Well, you still use strong language.”

“For now. Next thing you know I’ll be saying ‘Mice.’ Bern, I thought you didn’t take the letters.”

“I didn’t.”

“How’d you get your prints on the envelope?”

“That’s how I found out Landau’s room number. Remember? I pretended to find an envelope with her name on it…”

“And the clerk put it in her box. You just happened to pick a purple envelope?”

“I wanted something distinctive. I knew Fairborn always used purple envelopes, and, well…”

“What was in the envelope?”

“Just a piece of blank paper.”

“Purple paper?”

“What else?”

“What were you trying to do, give her a heart attack? She gets the letter, she thinks it’s from him, and then it’s blank. If I were her, I’d figure I just got a death threat from a man of few words.”

“What I sort of figured,” I said, “is she wouldn’t get the envelope until I’d gotten away with the letters, and then she’d think Fairborn was going nyah nyah nyah at her.”

“That’s what you figured, huh?”

“Well, sort of.”

“And this was on Perrier, right?”

“Carolyn…”

“So you really don’t know where they are?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“Did you talk to the woman who started the whole thing?”

“Alice Cottrell?” I reached for the phone. “I tried her earlier, but she didn’t answer… Still no answer.”

“I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to reach you.”

“So am I, now that you mention it. I’ll try her again later.”

“And your partnership with Ray…”

“Is a fifty-fifty deal,” I said. “Every bit as even as Steven. But we don’t have anything to sell, and the best offer so far is from a guy who’ll reimburse me for the cost of making photocopies. So there’s not going to be anything to divide. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless I’m wrong,” I said. “We’ll see. I wonder what Marty wants.”

I was still wondering after she headed back to the Poodle Factory, but I had a stream of visitors to keep me distracted. First through the door was Mary Mason, who I swear buys books from me as an excuse to visit my cat. She made her usual fuss over him, and as usual he took it as his due. Then he hopped onto a high shelf and curled up next to a boxed volume of the letters of Thomas Love Peacock, which I’m afraid I’ll own as long as I own the store. I sold Miss Mason reading copies of two or three mysteries-cozies, you’ll be astonished to learn-and while I was ringing the sale a man came in on crutches and wanted to know how to find Grace Church.

It’s just around the corner on Broadway, and a lot easier to get to than Lourdes. I pointed him in the right direction. He hobbled off, and in came my friend with the long face and the tan beret and the silver beard, smiling wistfully and smelling pleasantly of whiskey. He found his way to the poetry section and got down to the serious business of browsing.

A young woman in bib overalls wanted to know what time it was, and I told her, and a Senegalese, very tall and impossibly thin, wanted to sell me some Rolex watches and Prada handbags. They were, he assured me, genuine fakes, and represented an excellent business opportunity for me. I explained that I was running a bookshop, and consequently dealt exclusively in printed matter, and he went off shaking his head at my lack of enterprise and business acumen. I shook my own head, though I’m not sure what at, and tried Alice Cottrell’s number again. No answer.

I made another call, this one to Mowgli. He’s a Columbia dropout, a former druggie with just enough brain cells left to make a living as a book scout. I’ve bought quite a few books from him, and he’s bought a few from me, when he’s spotted something badly under-priced on my shelves. When he’s not otherwise occupied he’ll fill in for me behind the counter, and I was hoping he could do that today, while I met with Marty Gilmartin. But he didn’t answer, either.

I went back to Redmond O’Hanlon, hoping to be reminded that there were worse jungles than the one I lived in, and the next person to interrupt me was a fat fellow with an underslung jaw and a head of tightly curled brown hair. He looked like a bulldog with a permanent.

“Rhodenbarr,” he said, and shoved a card at me. Hilliard Moffett, it read. Collector. And beneath that was an address consisting of a post office box in Bellingham, Washington, along with phone and fax numbers and an e-mail address.

Collectors can drive you crazy. They’re all a little bit nuts, but the antiquarian book business wouldn’t exist without them, because they buy more books than anybody else. They buy books they’ve already read, and other books they never intend to read. They don’t really have time to read, anyway. They’re too busy poring over book catalogs and rummaging through thrift shops and yard sales and, yes, stores like mine.

I asked him what he collected. He leaned over the counter and lowered his voice to a confidential whisper.

“ Fairborn,” he said.

What a coincidence.

“I’m a completist,” he said, with an air that combined pride and resignation, as if he were at once claiming royal blood and admitting to hemophilia. “I want everything.”

“Well, I don’t have much,” I said. “A few books shelved alphabetically in the fiction section. I’ve got Nobody’s Baby, but it’s a fifth printing.”

“I have a first.”

“I thought you probably did.”

“And a tenth,” he said. “For the revised jacket. And I have fourteen paperbacks.”

“So you can give copies to friends?”

He gaped at the very idea. I don’t know which seemed outlandish to him-the idea of having friends, or the thought of giving books to them. Both, probably.

“Fourteen paperbacks,” I said. “Oh. One for each printing?”

“Hardly. There have been over sixty printings. What sort of fool would want to collect them all? What I want is a copy of each cover. There have been fourteen different covers among the sixty-plus printings.”

“So you have them all.”

“I have the first printing in which each appeared. Except in one instance. There was a new cover introduced on the twenty-first printing, but my copy is the twenty-second. I’ve not yet been able to get my hands on a twenty-first. It’s not rare, it’s certainly not valuable, but try to find one.”

“Well,” I said, “I wish I could help you out, but I only get paperbacks when I buy a whole library, and I wholesale them off right away.”

“I have my want list with specialists,” he said. “That’s not what I came here for.”

“Oh.”

“I just wanted you to understand the scope of my collection.”

“You’re a true completist.”

He nodded. “I have the foreign editions. Almost all of them. I have Nobody’s Baby in Macedonian. Not Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat’s common as dirt, but Macedonian. It’s not supposed to exist, none of the bibliographies list it, and I don’t believe the edition was ever authorized. It must have been pirated. But somebody translated the text, and somebody set type and printed it, and I have a copy. It may be the only copy this side of Skopje, but it exists and I’ve got it.”

“That’s impressive.”

“When I collect someone, Rhodenbarr, I go all out.”

“I can see that.”

“I don’t just collect the books. I collect the man.”

I pictured him with a great butterfly net, running over hill and dale in pursuit of a terrified Gulliver Fairborn.

“I have a copy of his high school yearbook,” he said. “There were eighty students in the graduating class, so how many yearbooks could they have printed? And how many do you suppose have survived? It wasn’t easy to find a classmate who still had his yearbook handy, and it was harder still to persuade him to sell it.”

“But you managed.”

“I did, and I can assure you I wouldn’t part with it, not for twenty times what it cost me. He was the only senior who didn’t have his picture included. There’s a blank space opposite his list of accomplishments and activities. He was a hall monitor his junior year, did you know that? He was in the Latin Honor Society, he played trombone in the school band. Did you know that?”

“I know the capital of South Dakota.”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“It’s not here,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s there.”

He gave me a look. “He was camera-shy even then,” he said, “the only senior class member unpictured. He signed this particular copy. Where the photo would have been, he wrote, ‘When you are old / And sitting still / Remember the fellow / Who wrote uphill.’ The handwriting slants.”

“Upward,” I guessed.

“And he signed his name in full. Gulliver Fairborn.”

“A signed photo,” I said. “Without the photo.”

“His photograph does appear in the book, however. Not in the senior listings, but in the group photos. He’s in the band photo, but he’s holding the trombone right in front of his face. On purpose, I’m sure.”

“What a kidder.”

“But he was also in the Latin Honor Society, as I may have mentioned, and they didn’t let him hide behind a copy of Caesar’s Commentaries. He’s in the last row, second from the left. He’s half hidden behind another student, and his face is shadowed, so you can’t really get much sense of what he looked like. But it’s nevertheless a genuine photograph of Gulliver Fairborn.”

“And you have it.”

“I have the yearbook. I’d like to get the original. The photographer’s long dead, and his files were dispersed years ago. The original’s lost, probably forever. But I do have an original photograph of Fairborn ’s boyhood home. The house itself was torn down over twenty years ago. I missed my chance.”

“To see it for yourself?”

“To buy it. The state took the property for an expressway extension, but I could have bought the house and moved it to another lot. Imagine housing the world’s foremost Gulliver Fairborn collection in the house he grew up in!” He sighed for what might have been. “Over twenty years ago. Even if I’d known about it, I’d have been hard put to afford it. Still, I’d have found a way.”

“You’re dedicated.”

“One has to be. And now I have the means, as well as the dedication. I want those letters.”

“If I had them,” I said, “what would you pay?”

“Name your price.”

“If I had a price,” I said, “it would be high.”

“Name it, Rhodenbarr.”

“The thing is, you’re not the only person who wants those letters.”

“But I’m the one who wants them the most. Get all the offers you want. Just give me the opportunity to top them. Or set a price yourself and give me the chance to meet it.” He leaned forward, his collector madness burning in his dark eyes. “But whatever you do, don’t sell those letters without giving me a crack at them.”

“The letters,” I said carefully, “are not physically in my possession at the moment.”

“Quite understandable.”

“But that’s not to say they won’t be.”

“And when they are…”

“I’ll want to contact you. But you’re in…” I looked at his card. “… Bellingham, Washington. That’s near Seattle?”

“It is but I’m not. I’m in New York.”

“I can see that.”

“I flew in the day before yesterday. I thought I might speak to this Landau and see if she’d entertain a preemptive offer as an alternative to public auction. Why wait for her money? Why pay a commission?”

“What did she say?”

“I never spoke to her. I went first to Sotheby’s, where I learned they had a signed agreement with the woman. They’d given her an advance and she’d agreed to turn over the entire Fairborn file within the month, so it could be cataloged for sale in January. I urged them to offer it as one lot. I’m sure the University of Texas would prefer it that way, and whatever other institutional bidders turn up.”

“And did they agree?”

“They hadn’t decided, and won’t until they see the material. My hunch is they’ll parcel it out. That means bidding lot by lot. I’ll do that if I have to, but I’d much rather write one enormous check and be done with it.”

Checks, I pointed out, could be a problem. Not for Sotheby’s, he said, but in the event of a private sale, entirely off the record, it would be a simple matter to handle the transaction in cash. He told me he was staying at the Mayflower, on Central Park West, and that he’d be there for the next week or so. There were some other dealers he had to see, booksellers and others, and he might get to a few museums and see a show or two. Gulliver Fairborn, while his great passion, was not his only interest.

We shook hands. I expected a sweaty palm, but his hands were dry, his grip firm. He wasn’t creepy after all. He was just a collector.

I picked up the phone and tried Alice Cottrell and Mowgli, neither of whom answered. I decided they must be having a late lunch together, and talking about me. I put down the phone and reached for O’Hanlon, but before I’d hacked my way through the first overgrown paragraph someone got my attention by clearing his throat. It was my friend with the long face and the silver beard.

“I couldn’t help overhearing,” he said.

“Neither could I.”

“Was that gentleman serious?”

“He’s a collector,” I said. “They’re like that.”

“Not all of them, surely.”

“He’s like the rest of them,” I said, “only more so.”

“This writer,” he said. “Gulliver Fairborn. It sounds as though he wants to…to possess the man. To stuff him and mount him on the wall.”

I nodded. “Properly preserved,” I said, “and perfectly displayed. It’s a passion or a mania, or maybe both, but whatever it is he’s got it. And you can see how it starts. He read a book and he liked it. Well, I read it myself.”

“So did I.”

“And I suppose I could say it changed my life.”

“Some books have changed my life,” he said, grooming his beard with his fingertips. “But then it was time to move on and lead my new life, not fill up the old one with memorabilia. I certainly didn’t come away from any of them with the urge to have a jar full of the author’s fingernail clippings.”

We drifted into a nice bookish conversation, of the sort I’d envisioned when I decided to buy the store. I told him my name, which he’d already overheard, and he gave me a card proclaiming him to be Henry Walden, from Peru, Indiana.

“But I don’t live there anymore,” he said. “I had a little factory, a family business with about twenty employees. We made modeling clay, and then a big toy company came along wanting to gobble us up.” He sighed. “I liked being in the clay business,” he said, “but they made us an offer my brother and sister couldn’t refuse.”

He was outvoted, so he gave in gracefully and took the money, but he didn’t want to go on living in the midst of two siblings he’d ceased to like and twenty out-of-work claymakers who’d ceased to like him. He’d always liked New York, and now he was staying at a hotel while he looked for an apartment and figured out what to do with the rest of his life.

“I’ve even thought-promise me you won’t laugh-of opening a bookstore.”

“I’d be the last person to laugh,” I said, “and I think it’s a great idea. Just remember the surefire way to wind up with a small fortune in the antiquarian book business.”

“What’s that?”

“Start with a large fortune,” I told him. “Meanwhile, do you want some hands-on experience? You can help me carry in the bargain table.”

“You’re closing?”

“I’m afraid I’ve got an appointment half a mile uptown, and I’ve enjoyed our chat so much I’m running late. So if you’d like to give me a hand-”

“I could shop-sit for you,” he offered. “God knows I’ve got nothing else to do. You wouldn’t want me to close up, but if you’ll be back at the end of the day…”

I took ten seconds to decide to leave him in charge. I could tell he was honest, but people have thought that of me, so how could I be sure? In less time than it would have taken to close up, I told him what to do and how to do it. “Anything else,” I said, “people with books to sell, people who want to argue about the price, tell ’em to wait for me. And if there’s anything I haven’t covered, ask Raffles.”

“Meow,” said Raffles.