The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

1

It was around a quarter to five on a Wednesday afternoon in October when I marked my place in the Fredric Brown paperback I’d spent much of the day reading. I tucked it in my back pocket, then went outside and retrieved my table of bargain books from the sidewalk. This was a good fifteen minutes earlier than usual, but when you’re the store owner you can do this sort of thing on a whim. That’s one of the nice things about being an independent antiquarian bookseller, and there are days when it seems like the only nice thing.

This was one of them.

I typically start to shut down for the day around five, and usually manage to clear the last customer from the premises by five-thirty. Then I do what tidying up needs to be done, freshen Raffles’s water dish and put some dry food in his bowl, draw the steel window gates shut, and lock up. The Bum Rap, where Carolyn and I have a standing appointment with a bottle of scotch, is just around the corner at Broadway and East Tenth Street. It’s a five-minute walk, and I generally cross the threshold within a few minutes of six o’clock.

I have to pass Carolyn’s establishment, the Poodle Factory, in order to get to the Bum Rap; it’s almost always closed when I do, and she’s almost always at our usual table by the time I arrive.

But not today, because I was out the door at Barnegat Books by twenty-eight minutes after five. (I don’t know why I checked the time, or why I still remember it. But I did and I do.) The Poodle Factory is two doors east of the bookshop, and Carolyn Kaiser was sweeping dog hair out the door when I got there.

“Bernie,” she said. “Oh, don’t tell me. You haven’t got time for a drink tonight.”

“Why would I tell you that?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Personally, I always have time for a drink, but something could have come up. A chance to examine and possibly buy a promising collection of books. The opportunity to have drinks and dinner with a personable and attractive woman.”

“You’re a personable and attractive woman,” I pointed out, “and I’m about to have drinks with you. I don’t know about dinner, but it’s certainly a possibility.”

“A woman,” she said, “with whom the possibility exists of a romantic encounter. You know what I mean, Bern.”

“At the moment,” I said, “you’re the only woman in my life.”

“Then I don’t know what it would be. A dental emergency?”

“A dental emergency?”

“Well, people have them, though mine are always on weekends. The last toothache I had hit me on a Friday an hour after my dentist went home to Mamaroneck, and all I could do was stay drunk until Monday morning.”

“The sacrifices we’re called upon to make.”

“Don’t I know it? But you’re not canceling our date, so why am I trying to figure out the reason?” She’d been running through her usual chores, and now she drew the door shut and turned the key in the lock. “Next stop,” she said, “the Bum Rap.”

“Not yet.”

“Oh?”

“That’s why I wanted to catch you before you got out the door,” I said. “There’s someplace I’d like to go first. It’s maybe four or five blocks from here, and I thought we could walk over there together.”

“Four or five blocks? I don’t see why not. It’s not like I’m wearing high heels.”

“No.”

“I mean, even when I was seeing that woman who tried to turn me into a lipstick lesbian, I never even thought about heels.”

Carolyn occasionally claims to be five-foot-two, although she’d have to be standing on something for that to be true. Or, say, wearing three-inch heels. She is, however, my best friend in the whole world, and I kept the thought to myself.

“There,” I said.

We’d walked the half block to Broadway, turned to the right and headed downtown. We passed Two Guys from Luang Prabang, the restaurant that had supplied the excellent Laotian food we’d lunched on a few hours earlier, and we passed the Bum Rap, and we walked another block to Ninth Street and turned left. Two more blocks and we were standing across the street from a very tall and very narrow building that was all steel and glass.

“Damn,” Carolyn said. “What’s that doing there?”

“Occupying space,” I said, “though not very much of it in terms of its footprint. Given the size of the lot, it ought to be seven stories tall, maybe twelve at the most.”

“I could count windows,” she said, “but looking straight up gives me an ice cream headache. How tall is it?”

“Forty-two stories.”

“I read something about buildings like this, Bern. They call them splinters.”

“I think it’s slivers.”

“Same difference. Either way they get under your skin. What the developers do, they buy a building, maybe two buildings, and evict all the rent-controlled tenants and knock everything down. What do you figure happened to the people who used to live here?”

“Maybe they’re at Bowl-Mor,” I said, “bowling a few frames and knocking back a couple of beers. Oh, wait a minute. They can’t be there, can they? Because the glass-and-steel people knocked down that building, too.”

Bowl-Mor, which it won’t surprise you to learn was a bowling alley, had been a going concern for years before I became the owner of Barnegat Books. It was part of the local landscape, and I passed it every morning when I walked the few blocks from the Union Square subway station to the bookstore. That changed a year or so ago when developers acquired the building that housed it and replaced it with an oversized office building designed to house software developers and others of their ilk.

That’s been standard operating procedure on the island of Manhattan ever since the Canarsie Indians sold the place for twenty-four dollars and walked away congratulating themselves on their cunning. Buildings come and go, but the move to create Silicon Alley ran into opposition from the strong Greenwich Village preservationist movement. While those blocks of University Place lie outside the official Greenwich Village Historic District, you could argue that they were very much a part of the Village, and more than sufficiently historic to remain untouched.

And so it was argued, by some very earnest and public-spirited people, and financial considerations tipped the scales, as they do most of the time. And that was the end of Bowl-Mor.

“It still bothers you,” Carolyn said. “I mean, I sort of get it, Bern, but when did you ever do more at Bowl-Mor than give it a nod as you walked on by?”

“We went bowling,” I said. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”

“I remember. It was fun.”

“Right.”

“At first I couldn’t keep the ball out of the gutter, but then I started to get the hang of it. I can even see where it could become a lesbian thing, like softball. And maybe it is, for all I know. In Cleveland, say.”

“If they have lesbians in Cleveland.”

“We are everywhere, my friend.” She sighed. “Bowling. You and I bowled once and we never went back.”

“But we could have.”

“And now we can’t.”

“Exactly. And many’s the time after lunch when I thought about letting the store stay closed for an hour while I bowled a couple of frames. And no, I never actually did this, but the point is I thought about it, and it was something I could have done.”

“Coulda woulda shoulda, and now you can’t, and here we are standing in front of a sliver or a splinter or whatever the hell it is. They kicked the tenants out and then they bought air rights from everybody on the block and built something that reaches halfway to the moon. I didn’t know there were any slivers in this part of town.”

“I think the Innisfree is the first.”

“Is that what they call it? Who lives here, Bern?”

“Hardly anybody.”

“They couldn’t sell the apartments?”

“Oh, they didn’t have any trouble selling them,” I told her. “They were all sold before the building was completed. But most of them are empty.”

She thought for a moment. “Foreign buyers,” she said.

“Mostly, yes.”

“Looking to launder money and have a secure investment in New York when things go to hell in Moscow or Minsk or Budapest or Istanbul, wherever they were playing King of the Hill. Oligarchs, Bern? Is that the word I’m looking for?”

“It’s a word you hear a lot these days,” I allowed, “but I don’t know the exact definition, or how many of the buyers fit it. I think there’s a better term.”

“Oh?”

“Rich bastards,” I said. “That pretty much covers it, and it’s not limited to foreigners. Because there’s at least one Innisfree resident who’s about as foreign as apple pie. He was born right here in the USA.”

“Who’s that?”

Something kept me from uttering the name. “If it wouldn’t give you an ice cream headache,” I said, “I’d suggest you tilt your head back and look up at the very top floor. Not that you could see much of anything from this angle, but if you could, and if you were equipped with Superman’s x-ray vision, you’d see something pretty remarkable.”

“A rich bastard?”

“That too,” I said, “if he happens to be home now. But you’d also see the Kloppmann Diamond.”

“The Kloppmann Diamond,” she said. “It’s here, Bern? On top of the Innisfree?”

“That would put it on the roof. But it’s a few feet down from there, in the penthouse.”

“I remember when the Museum of Natural History announced they were planning on selling it. They used a different word.”

“Deaccessioning. They made the difficult but essential decision to deaccession their most valuable gem.”

“I remember a lot of people got upset.”

“There was a flap,” I said. “You’d have thought the Louvre was putting the Mona Lisa on the auction block.”

“Smile and all. I remember somebody on New York One suggesting that Mike Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Bill Gates should each kick in an eight-figure sum, outbid all comers, and give the diamond back to the museum. But that idea never seemed to get anywhere.”

“Gee, I wonder why.”

“Maybe because the four billionaires had the same thought I did, which was that the museum would say ‘Thank you very much,’ and wait a few years and then put it up for sale again. But they went through with it and sold it?”

“At Sotheby’s,” I said. “The week before last.”

I raised my eyes forty-two stories, but I didn’t keep them there long. There was nothing to see, just glass and steel, and the sense of vertigo I experienced made even that a blur. I lowered my gaze, all the way down to street level, and noted once again the security cameras mounted on the front of the building, and on the smaller and far less prepossessing buildings on either side.

And, indeed, on almost every building on the block, which made this a block like any other block in the city I call home.

Carolyn was asking about the sale, and the hammer price, and the identity of the winning bidder. “And you said he’s an American, Bern?”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“Like apple pie.”

“More like school shootings,” I said. “Or lynching.”

“As American as lynching. But who is he?”

Something kept me from supplying the name. “I’d say he was the worst man in the world,” I said, “but that covers a lot of ground, and there’s no end of predatory pedophiles and serial killers who might very well argue the point. But I get the feeling we’re going to get a glimpse of him right now.”

A gleaming silver limousine, long enough to accommodate an entire high school cheerleading squad on prom night, was pulling to a stop in front of the Innisfree.

A door opened. A man emerged, his pink head the size and shape of a bowling ball, and every bit as unencumbered with hair. He was wearing a suit he’d bought from the Big & Tall Shoppe, but he’d done some squats and pushups since his final fitting, and he looked as though he might burst out of it.

“Is that him, Bern? What’s a guy like that going to do with the Kloppmann Diamond? Wear it for a pinky ring?”

Another of the limo’s doors opened, and another man got out, and if he wasn’t a twin of the first hulk he was at the very least a brother from another mother. Same size, same gleaming skull, same suit that had failed to keep up with the hypertrophy of his massive upper body.

“There’s two of him,” Carolyn said. “You’d think one would be enough.”

“More than enough,” I agreed, “but neither one looks like the man who bought the Kloppmann. My guess is they’re his bodyguards, and the body they’re guarding is in the rear seat of the limo, waiting for one of them to open the door for him.”

That was what happened, but from our point of view it was anticlimactic, because one of the bodyguards opened the rearmost curbside door, and the limo blocked our view of the man who got out of it. He was halfway to the Innisfree’s entrance by the time it drove off, and we caught a glimpse of him from the back, flanked by his two guardians, even as the liveried ostiary made a show of throwing open the door for him.

In no time at all he was through it, and it had swung shut behind him. “So much for Orrin Vandenbrinck,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. I need a drink.”