The Burglar in the Rye

CHAPTER Six

I suppose I should begin at the beginning. It started the week before, on as perfect an autumn afternoon as anyone could wish for. New York had suffered through a long hot summer, capped with a truly brutal heat wave, and now the heat had broken with the arrival of some cool clean air from Canada, where it’s evidently a local specialty.

My shop’s air-conditioned, of course, so it’s not a bad place to be even on a hellishly hot day. But heat can dull a person’s enthusiasm for browsing in a bookstore, even if the store itself is comfortable enough, and business had been off for the last week or so.

The cool weather brought the browsers back. The store had people in it from the minute I opened up, and every once in a while someone actually bought a book. I was pleased when they did, but I can’t say I really minded if they didn’t, because in a sense I wasn’t really there at all. I was thousands of miles away, in the jungles of Venezuela with the intrepid Redmond O’Hanlon.

Specifically, I was reading about the candiru, the toothpick fish, a tiny catfish adapted for a parasitic life in the gills and cloaca of bigger fish. I’d read O’Hanlon’s earlier book, Into the Heart of Borneo, and when a copy of In Trouble Again turned up in a bag of books, I’d set it aside to read before shelving.

And I was reading it now, in what I thought was the companionable silence suited to a bookshop, when I felt a hand on my arm. I looked at the person attached to the hand. It was a woman-slim, dark-haired, late twenties-and her long oval face was a mask of concern.

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” she said, “but are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. She didn’t seem reassured, and I could understand why. Even I could tell that my voice lacked conviction.

“You seem…anxious,” she said. “Unnerved.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The sounds you were making.”

“I was making sounds? I hadn’t realized it. Like talking in one’s sleep, I suppose, except I wasn’t sleeping.”

“No.”

“I was caught up in my book, and maybe that amounts to more or less the same thing. What sort of sounds was I making?”

She cocked her head. She was, I saw, a very attractive woman, a few years older than I’d thought. Early thirties, say. She was dressed in tight jeans and a man’s white dress shirt, and her brown hair was drawn back in a ponytail, and thus at first glance she looked younger than her years.

“Troubled sounds,” she said.

“Troubled sounds?”

“I can’t think how else to describe them. ‘Arrrghhh,’ you said.”

“Arrrghhh?”

“Yes, but more like this: ‘Arrrghhh!’ As if you were trying to get the word out before you strangled.”

“Oh.”

“You said that two or three times. And once you said, ‘Oh my God!’ As if consumed with horror.”

“Well,” I said, “I remember thinking both those things, arrrghhh and Oh my God. But I had no idea I was saying them out loud.”

“I see.”

But I could tell she didn’t. She was still looking at me with clinical interest, and she was far too attractive for me to let her think there was something wrong with me. “Here,” I said, shoving O’Hanlon at her. “Here, where I’m pointing. Read this.”

“Read it?”

“Please.”

“Well, all right.” She cleared her throat. “‘In the Amazon, should you have too much to drink, say, and inadvertently urinate as you swim, any homeless candiru-’ Candiru?”

I nodded. I’d meant for her to read the paragraph to herself, not out loud, but I couldn’t think of a graceful way to tell her so. And she was a good reader, with volume and presence. My other customers, already alerted by the sounds I’d been making and our subsequent conversation, had stopped what they were doing in order to hear her out.

“‘Any homeless candiru’-I hope I’m pronouncing it correctly-‘attracted by the smell, will take you for a big fish and swim excitedly up your stream of uric acid, enter your urethra like a worm into its burrow, and, raising its gill covers, stick out a set of retrorse spines’…retrorse? ‘Nothing can be done. The pain apparently is spectacular. You must get to a hospital before your bladder bursts; you must ask a surgeon to cut off your penis.’”

She closed the book, looking troubled herself, and placed it on the counter between us. Even as she did so, all my other customers began drifting out of my store. One man actually cupped a hand over his groin. The others looked less defensive, but just as determined to get away from the very thought of such a thing.

“That’s awful,” she said.

“It doesn’t make one want to grab the next plane to the Amazon.”

“Or go into any river at all,” she said. “Or step into a bathtub.”

“It could put a person off water entirely,” I agreed. “I may quit drinking the stuff.”

“I don’t blame you. What does that word mean, anyway?”

“Uh…”

“Not ‘penis,’ silly. ‘A set of retrorse spines.’ What does ‘retrorse’ mean? It’s not a word I’ve ever seen before.”

“I think it’s like the barbs on a fishhook,” I said. “Meaning it can’t go back out the way it came in, because of the direction the spines are pointing.”

“That’s what I assumed, but the word’s a new one to me. The whole thought ties you up in knots, doesn’t it? You just now got a real arrrghhh look on your face.”

“Did I? I’m not surprised. It’s a pretty arrrghhh concept.”

“I’ll say. I suppose it’s every man’s worst nightmare. I wonder what it’s like for girls?”

“Girls?”

“Did I say something wrong? Do you prefer women?”

“To almost anything,” I said, “which is one reason I never want to meet a candiru. But I wasn’t being politically correct. Whatever you call them, girls or women, I wouldn’t think they’d have anything to fear from the candiru.”

“This one wouldn’t,” she said, “because she has no intention of placing herself on the same continent with the horrid thing. But girls swim, too, the same as men. And I hope it won’t shatter any illusions to tell you that sometimes we piddle in the pool.”

“I’m shocked.”

“Well, welcome to the world, Mr… I don’t know your name. Is it Barnegat?”

“It’s Rhodenbarr. Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

“And is Bernie short for Barnegat?”

“It’s shorter than Barnegat,” I said, “but what it’s short for is Bernard. Barnegat Light is a place on the Jersey shore where Mr. Litzauer used to spend his vacations, so when he opened a bookstore he used the name.”

“And this is his store?”

“Not anymore. He sold it to me a few years ago.”

“And your name is Bernie Rhodenbarr, and mine is Alice Cottrell. Where were we?”

“You were welcoming me to the world, and telling me that you pee in the pool.”

“Never again,” she vowed. “I won’t even dip a toe in the pool, for fear that there might be a candiru in it. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen? I gather it’s some sort of fish.”

“The toothpick fish. It’s a kind of catfish, according to O’Hanlon.”

“People bring in fish from South America,” she said. “Tropical fish, for people to keep in their aquariums. Aquaria?”

“Whatever.”

“And it’s possible someone could fly in some candiru, mixed in with a shipment of neon tetras and opaline gouramis.”

“Gouramis come from Asia.”

“Neon tetras, then. Are you sure gouramis come from Asia?”

“Positive.”

“Do you keep tropical fish?” I shook my head. “Then how do you happen to know an arcane factoid like that?”

“I own a bookstore, and I pick books up and read them, and odd facts lodge in my mind.”

“Like the candiru in one’s urethra,” she said. “Which could arrive in a shipment of fish for the hobby market, and could wind up in someone’s aquarium or outdoor pool, and could get released into the wild. The water’s probably too cold for them up here, but suppose they were released in Florida?”

“I’m convinced,” I said. “I’ll never go swimming again, and I’ll steer clear of Florida forever. But where’s the danger for girls-or women either, for that matter? I realize you pee, although I understand you have to sit down to do it-”

“Not when we’re swimming.”

“But you don’t have penises, so what’s the problem?”

“You’re saying there’s nothing for the surgeon to cut off.”

“Right.”

“You should see your face. You don’t even like to talk about the surgeon, do you?”

“Not especially, no.”

“We don’t have penises,” she said, “but we do pee, and we do have urethras. And a toothpick fish could swim in there, and find a place he’d care to call home, and then what’s a girl to do? No point running to the surgeon. ‘Cut it off! Please, cut it off before my bladder bursts!’ ‘Sorry, can’t do that, as you haven’t got one.’”

“Oh.”

“You see what I mean?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Let’s never go to the surgeon.”

“All right.”

“And we won’t go to Jones Beach, either.”

“That’s all right, too.”

“And we won’t talk about this anymore.”

“That’s even better.”

There was the trace of a smile on her lips, an impish light in her brown eyes. You don’t expect a conversation centered on something as horrible as the candiru to be what you would call flirtatious, but ours was, just the same. It might not be evident in the words we spoke, but a transcript of our conversation wouldn’t include the sidelong glances and raised eyebrows, the subtle nuance of a stressed syllable here and a bit of body language there. It was a flirtation, and I didn’t want it to end.

“But we ought to talk about something,” I went on. “Forget my book. What about your book?”

“Actually,” she said, “this one’s your book as well. I took it off the shelf, and I haven’t bought it yet.”

“You can, of course. If you can’t bring yourself to part with it.”

She put it on the counter, and I recognized it right off. It was a hardcover copy of Nobody’s Baby, by Gulliver Fairborn.

“That just came in a month or so ago,” I said. “I’m not sure what it’s marked. Thirty dollars?”

“It’s marked thirty-five.”

“If you want it,” I said, “you could probably talk me down to thirty.”

“If I really worked at it.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s not a first, is it?”

“For thirty dollars, or even thirty-five? Not hardly.”

“But that’s a high price for a book that’s not a first, isn’t it? If I just wanted to read it, I could buy a paperback. It’s available in paperback, isn’t it?”

“Abundantly. It’s never been out of print since the day it was published.”

“How nice for Mr. Fairborn.”

“I don’t know how many copies it sells annually,” I said, “or what kind of royalty he gets, but I’d say it’s nice for him, all right. But he deserves it, don’t you think? It’s a wonderful book.”

“It changed my life.”

“A lot of people feel that way. I read it when I was seventeen, and I would have sworn at the time that it changed my life. And for all I know, maybe it did.”

“It changed mine,” she said flatly, and tapped the book with her forefinger. “No dust jacket,” she said.

“No.”

“And it still brings thirty-five dollars?”

“Well, it hasn’t yet,” I said, “but I live in hope. If it had a jacket, I’d remove it, and wait until a first comes in without one. Or sell it separately. The jacket’s worth two hundred dollars, maybe a little more. That’s the difference in price between a first with and without a jacket.”

“That much?”

“It would be more,” I said, “but for all the jackets from later printings like this one. The jacket’s identical, at least through the first ten printings or so. Then they started putting review quotes on the back. But what you want to know is why this book costs as much as it does, and that’s because it’s a later printing of the original edition, and that makes it collectible for someone who’d like to have a first but can’t afford one. After all, the only difference between this copy and a first edition is that this one doesn’t say ‘First Edition’ on the copyright page. Instead it says ‘Third Printing,’ or whatever it says.”

“‘Fifth printing,’ actually.”

I flipped to the page in question. “So it does. If you just want to read the book, well, Shakespeare and Company’s a few blocks down Broadway, and they’ve got the paperback for five ninety-nine. But if you want something closer to a first and don’t want to pay a fortune for it…”

“How large a fortune?”

“For a first edition of Nobody’s Baby? I had a copy show up shortly after I took over the shop. It came in with a load of stuff, and I thanked my lucky stars when I realized what it was. I priced it at two hundred dollars, which was much too low even then, and I sold it within the week to the first person who spotted it. He got a bargain.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“No, it doesn’t. What’s a first of Gulliver Fairborn’s first book worth? It depends on condition, of course, and the presence or absence of a jacket, and-”

“A very fine copy,” she said. “With an intact jacket, also in very fine condition.”

“The last catalog listing I saw was fifteen hundred dollars,” I said, “and that sounds about right. For a really nice copy in a really nice dust jacket.”

“And if it’s inscribed?”

“Signed by the author, you mean? Because an inscription that reads ‘To Timmy on his seventeenth birthday, with love from Aunt Nedra’ doesn’t add anything to the book’s value. Quite the reverse.”

“I’ll tell Aunt Nedra to keep her good wishes to herself.”

“Or write them very lightly in pencil,” I said. “Gulliver Fairborn’s signature is rare, which is a rarity itself in this age of mass public book-signings. But you won’t see Fairborn hawking signed copies on QVC, or jetting around the country with pen in hand. In fact you won’t see him at all, and I for one wouldn’t recognize him if I did. He’s never given an interview or allowed himself to be photographed. Nobody knows where he lives or what he looks like, and a few books ago you started hearing rumors that he’d died, and that the recent books were the work of a ghostwriter. V. C. Andrews, no doubt.”

“Not Elliott Roosevelt?”

“Always a possibility. Anyway, someone did a computerized textual analysis, the same kind that reporter did to prove Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors, and established that Fairborn was writing his own books. But he hasn’t been signing them.”

“Suppose he signed one.”

“Well, how sure could we be that he really did the signing? It’s not terribly difficult to scribble ‘Gulliver Fairborn’ on a flyleaf, especially when hardly anyone has seen an authentic signature.”

“Suppose the signature’s authentic,” she said. “And suppose it’s what I originally asked you about, not just a signed copy but an inscribed one.”

“Saying something about Timmy and his birthday?”

“Saying something like ‘To Tiny Alice – Rye can do more than Milt or Malt / To let us know it’s not our fault. Love always, Gully.’”

“Gully,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And I guess you’d be Tiny Alice.”

“You’re very quick.”

“Everybody tells me that. So your question’s not hypothetical. You’ve got the book, and you’re in a position to be sure of the signature.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me the inscription again.” She did, and I nodded. “He’s paraphrasing Housman, isn’t he? ‘Malt can do more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.’ A friend of mine used to recite that couplet just before he drank the fourth beer of the evening. Unfortunately he did it again with beers five through twelve, and one grew a little weary of it. ‘ Rye can do more than Milt or Malt’-why rye, do you suppose?”

“It’s all he drinks.”

“You’d think he could find something better to drink, wouldn’t you? What with Nobody’s Baby still in print after…how many years?”

She answered before I could consult the copyright page. “About forty. He was in his mid-twenties when he wrote it. He’s in his early sixties now.”

“If the computer analysis is right, and he’s still alive.”

“He’s alive.”

“And you…know him?”

“I used to.”

“And he inscribed a book to you. Well, as far as the value’s concerned, all I could do is guess. If the copy came into my hands, I’d call a few specialists and see what I could find out. I’d get the handwriting authenticated. And then I’d probably consign the book to an auction gallery and let it find its own price, which I’d be hard put to guess at. Over two thousand, certainly, and possibly as much as five. It would depend who wanted it and how avid they were.”

“And if you had a few of them bidding against each other.”

“Exactly. And it wouldn’t hurt if you were somebody famous. Alice Walker, say, or Alice Hoffman, or even Alice Roosevelt Longworth. That would make it an association copy, and would render it a little more special for a collector.”

“I see.”

“On the other hand, the inscription’s interesting in and of itself. How did he come to sign it? For that matter, how did you happen to meet him? And, uh…”

“What?”

“Well, this may be a stupid question, but are you sure the man who signed your book was who he claimed to be? Because if no photos of the man exist, and if nobody knows where he lives or what he looks like…”

She smiled a knowing smile. “Oh, it was Gully.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Well, I didn’t just run into him at a bookstore,” she said. “I lived with him for three years.”

“You lived with him?”

“For three years. Do you suppose that makes my book an association copy? Because you could say we had an association.”

“When did this happen?”

“Years ago,” she said. “I moved in twenty-three years ago, and-”

“But you would have been a child,” I said. “What did he do, adopt you?”

“I was fourteen.”

“You’re thirty-seven now? I’d have said early thirties.”

“And you’d have been sweet to say it. I’m thirty-seven, and I was fourteen when I met Gully Fairborn, and seventeen when we parted company.”

“And you were, uh…”

“We were.”

“No kidding,” I said. “How did you meet?”

“He wrote to me.”

“You wrote him and he wrote back? That’s remarkable in and of itself. For thirty-some years every sensitive seventeen-year-old in America has read Nobody’s Baby. Half of them write letters to Fairborn, and they never get an answer. He’s famous for never answering a letter.”

“I know.”

“But he answered yours? You must write a hell of a letter.”

“I do. But he wrote to me first.”

“Huh?”

“I was precocious,” she said.

“I can believe that,” I said. “But how would Gulliver Fairborn know of your precocity, or even of your existence? And what would move him to write you a letter?”

“He read something I wrote. And it wasn’t a letter.”

“Oh?”

“I read Nobody’s Baby,” she said, “but I wasn’t seventeen when I read it. I was thirteen.”

“Well, you already said you were precocious.”

“It makes an impression on most people, especially the ones who read it at an impressionable age. It certainly made an impression on me. There was a point when I was certain Gulliver Fairborn wrote the book with me in mind, and I thought of writing him a letter, but I didn’t do it.

“Instead, a couple of months later, I wrote an article. I handed it in for a school assignment and my teacher was over the moon about it. It’s not hard to understand why. The best anybody else managed was two or three ungrammatical pages, ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation,’ di dah di dah di dah. I turned in a closely reasoned seven-thousand-word essay full of half-baked philosophy and sophomoric soul-searching.”

“And your teacher sent it to Fairborn?”

“I’m sure that never occurred to her. She did something far more outrageous. She sent it to The New Yorker.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid I must. They accepted it, incredibly enough. I’d called it ‘How I Didn’t Spend My Summer Vacation,’ which made a kind of ironic sense, but only in context. They changed the title to ‘A Ninth-Grader Looks at the World.’”

“My God,” I said. “You’re Alice Cottrell.”

The essay was a sensation, and won the young author a good deal of attention. She had her fifteen minutes of fame, about which Edgar Lee Horvath had then only recently expounded, and was every op-ed writer’s flavor of the month. And then, just as the fuss was winding down, she got a letter in a purple envelope.

It was typed on paper of the same hue, and ran to three single-spaced pages. It began as a response to her essay, a sort of essay in reply, but by the middle of the second page it had wandered far afield and overflowed with its middle-aged author’s musings on life and the Universe.

She knew almost from the first sentence who its author was, but even so the signature left her breathless. Gulliver Fairborn, in beautiful flowing script, and, beneath it, an address on a rural route in Tesuque, New Mexico. She looked it up in the atlas, and it turned out to be just north of Santa Fe.

She wrote back, careful not to gush, and his response came by return mail. He was living for the time being, he told her, in a three-room cottage outside Tesuque, which in fact was a small Indian pueblo. His residence was an adobe shack, thrown up in an unplanned fashion. But it was cozy, he wrote, and weren’t the best things often ones that just happened on their own, without preplanning? He’d written Nobody’s Baby without an outline, without any real clue, really, of what he was doing or where it was going, and it had turned out better than he could have planned.

His letter just ended, without the invitation that seemed to be implicit in it. She wrote back immediately, telling him his little house sounded perfectly charming. If she ever were to see it, she wrote, she was sure it would look familiar to her, as if she had lived there in a dimly recalled past life.

This time his reply was a little longer in coming. The letter itself, barely filling a single page, made no reference to anything either of them had previously written. Instead, he reported on a neighbor of his, who had two mixed-breed dogs. They were inseparable, he noted, though their temperaments were quite different, with one of them considerably more venturesome than the other. When she finished the letter, she wasn’t even sure if the dogs existed, or if they were characters in some fiction crafted for the occasion, a little parable with its point unclear. This letter, like the others, was typed on purple paper, and came in a purple envelope. And it included an airline ticket from New York to Albuquerque.

Four days later she was on a plane. When it landed he was at the gate. Neither had seen a photograph of the other, but they recognized each other the instant their eyes met. He was tall and slender, darkly handsome. They waited for her suitcase to show up on the baggage carousel. She pointed it out, and he carried it to his car.

On the drive to Tesuque, he told her he’d foreseen all of this when he read her essay. “I knew I wanted you to come to me,” he said, “and I knew you would.”

The shack, overlooking an arroyo, was just as she’d pictured it, and every bit as comfortable as he’d claimed. They lived in it for the next three years.

“What I don’t get,” I said, “is where he got the nerve to write you, and where you got the nerve to accept. Did he know you were only fourteen years old?”

“He knew I was in the ninth grade in school. If I was much older than fourteen, I’d have to be retarded.”

“Didn’t it occur to him that your parents would try to find you? And that he might wind up facing criminal charges?”

“I don’t think any of that ever entered his mind,” she said. “Gully’s not reckless, but I don’t think he spends much time considering the consequences of his actions. He may not really believe that actions necessarily have consequences. You read Nobody’s Baby.”

“Yes.”

“So you know what he says about synchronicity. Anyway, he knew there wouldn’t be a problem. The same way he knew I would use the airline ticket.”

“And your parents?”

“They were a couple of old hippies,” she said. “My father was in Nepal at the time, staying stoned in Katmandu. My mom was back home in Greenwich, Connecticut, living on a trust fund and volunteering three days a week at that organization lobbying to legalize marijuana. NORML, though it and she were anything but.”

“So she didn’t object?”

“She drove me to the airport. Gully didn’t have a phone, but I called her a few days later from down the road and told her I would probably stay awhile. She thought that was cool.”

“And you were fourteen.”

“I used to say I had an old soul. I don’t know that I believe that, but I wasn’t your average fourteen-year-old, either. And I never felt as though I was in over my head. I was right where I belonged.”

She told me some of this at the bookstore, with Raffles purring on her lap and other customers staying away in droves, as if they somehow sensed they would be intruding. She told me more at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, where we went after I closed for the day, and where she asked the waiter if they had rye whiskey. He came back to report that they had Old Overholt, and she ordered a double shot with water back.

I said I’d have the same, but on the rocks with a splash of soda. I asked her if it was good that way. She said it was better straight up, and I changed the order-double rye, straight up, water back.

We had two rounds of drinks at the Cedar, then walked a couple of blocks to an Italian place I know that doesn’t look like much on the outside. The interior’s not too impressive either, but the food makes up for it. We ate osso buco and drank a bottle of Valpolicella, and the waiter brought us complimentary glasses of Strega with our espresso. The meal might have been better at a little trattoria in Florence, but I can’t imagine how.

She told me more while we ate and drank, and on the pavement outside the restaurant, in the wine-warmed cool of the evening, we gazed into one another’s eyes even as she and Fairborn had done in the Albuquerque airport, and she answered my question before I could ask it.

“Your place,” she said.

I held up a hand and a cab appeared. It was that kind of evening.