The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

10

I had hauled my table inside and cleared the store of warm-blooded creatures other than myself and Raffles, and I was trying to settle on one of the two neckties I keep in my back room, when the phone rang. It was an NYU classics professor who’d bought a book from me that morning, and who’d talked about downsizing his library. He was closing in on retirement and looking forward to life on the North Carolina Outer Banks, where he’d been spending vacations for years.

“I’ll want to keep many of my books,” he’d said earlier, “but one of the joys of changing my status to Professor Emeritus is knowing I’ll never again feel the need to read anything by Livy or Tacitus or Herodotus or Thucydides or any of those household names. Oh, I’ll keep this—” I’d sold him Last Seen in Massilia, one of the later volumes of Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series “—and my other Roman mysteries, and most of the alternate histories, like Harry Turtledove’s Gunpowder Empire, and of course Roma Eterna, by that wonderful writer of speculative fiction—”

Et sic porro. We’d gone on to talk about the possibility of my buying those books that wouldn’t make the trip south, and now he was calling to say he wanted to carpe what he could of the diem before tempus commenced to fugit.

He wasn’t far away, in NYU-owned faculty housing on West Third Street, and if I could come this evening he could promise a 50-year-old Armagnac to lighten the task of appraising his books.

“A pleasant alternative to the omnipresent Cognac,” he said. “One grows jaded, if you know what I mean.”

“A phrase that came to mind,” I told Carolyn, “was Strike while the iron is hot, which would be Ferrum dum calet if the Romans ever said it, but I don’t believe they did. But won’t the iron still be on the warm side twenty-four hours from now?”

“Is that when you’ll be seeing him?”

“Tomorrow evening at eight-thirty, at his presumably book-lined apartment.”

“Tonight Perrier, tomorrow Armagnac. Will you wear that tie?”

When I got off the phone with the future Professor Emeritus, I’d decided on the tie with the scarlet and navy stripes.

“Why?” I fingered the knot. “Is there something wrong with it?”

“No, it looks fine.”

“I generally put on a tie when I go somewhere to make an offer on a library. It makes me look like a more serious person, and you don’t want to sell your books to someone who’s not approaching the whole enterprise with a certain degree of gravity.”

We were both glad to be at our usual table, not that there’d been anything wrong with the one we’d had the night before. Still, it was reassuring to find our table available, just as it was reassuring to note that Maxine was still Maxine.

“And I guess the same thing holds for burglary,” she said. “You wouldn’t want your jewelry stolen by someone with his shirt open at the collar.”

“I figure it’s easier to get past the desk at the Innisfree if I look like someone who belongs in the building.”

“I’m not sure that’s the right tie for a Russian oligarch,” she said, “but I get the point. And it gives me an opening, so I’ll ask the burning question. How come?”

“How come?”

“How come I didn’t even have to ask to get in on this?”

“Well,” I said, “I think you’re part of it.”

“Part of knocking off the Kloppmann Diamond?”

“Part of the universe.”

She frowned. “Bern, everything’s part of the universe. That’s what makes it universal.”

“Part of this universe,” I said. “The one we only arrived at this morning.”

“Well, how could I not be part of it? I’m here, aren’t I?”

I decided to back up and start over. “The first clue I got,” I said, “was the Metrocard/SubwayCard business. Everybody else swiped a SubwayCard and thought nothing of it. But not me.”

“Right.”

“And not you, either.”

“Bern, I walked to work. I can’t remember the last time I used my...”

Her words trailed off.

“Your what? Finish the sentence.”

“My Metrocard.”

“That’s what you still called it,” I said, “and that’s what you went looking for in your purse.”

“And found a SubwayCard instead.”

“So your awareness of things,” I said, “was still planted in the world we both went to sleep in last night. It’s like the two of us just got here this morning, and everybody else has been here all their lives.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s all new to me, the same as it is to you. You’re the one who read the Fredric Brown novel, and you’re the one who tilted God’s own pinball machine and sent us reeling into another universe, and that’s why Bowl-Mor’s where it’s supposed to be and the security cameras are all gone and Amazon’s just a river in South America. All those things, they’re all about you, Bern.”

“I know.”

“You’re bringing me along tonight,” she said, “and I’m excited about it and grateful for the opportunity, don’t get me wrong.”

“But?”

“But what you also did was bring me along into this different world. Bern, I was surprised to find a SubwayCard in my purse. But everybody else in the five boroughs said ‘Oh, right, there’s my SubwayCard, right where it’s supposed to be.’”

“Except for the people who take cabs.”

“Or Orrin Fucking Vandenbrinck, in his block-long limousine. How’d you manage it, Bern?”

I took a sip of French soda water. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have a clue how I made any of this happen.”

“Your unconscious mind, working its magic while you slept?”

“And doing it all without leaving any footprints. Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“Well, maybe whatever part of me made this happen, maybe it realized something. Maybe it knew that for this to be the best of all possible worlds, I needed for my best friend to see it the same way I did.”

“Because otherwise how could we really talk?”

“We couldn’t, not like this.”

“We’re a team, aren’t we, Bern?”

“I’d say we always have been.”

She straightened up, took a deep breath. “Orrin Vandenbrinck,” she said, “won’t know what hit him.”

I wasn’t a hundred percent convinced of the hopelessness of Vandenbrinck’s situation. But we did stand a chance, and that was all I asked. In a world of security cameras and pickproof locks, I hadn’t even been able to get in the game. Now at least I got my turn at bat.

In my apartment, I’d had a hidey-hole built into a bedroom wall for almost as long as I’d occupied the apartment. It was the work of a skilled carpenter with a comforting disregard for law and order, and it was commodious enough to keep just about anything safe from prying eyes. Money, jewelry, burglar’s tools — it had held them all, at one time or another, and if you didn’t know your way in you’d have to tear down the building to find it.

After one too many times when I’d been forced to make an inconvenient trip uptown, I’d tracked down my carpenter friend and found he still had both his skills and his lamentable but convenient antisocietal attitudes. He worked his magic, and so I came to have a second hiding place, a little smaller than the first, in Barnegat Books’ back room. I tricked it out with a second set of everything I needed to get safely in and out of your house, and visited it when the occasion arose.

It had done so that afternoon, and I’d moved a bookcase and hunkered down, poking here and pushing there, as if seeking to open one of those wooden puzzle boxes on offer in Chinatown novelty shops. I couldn’t really see what I was doing, but my hands remembered the routine, and found what I was looking for. Not without effort; the secret compartment was more crowded than I remembered. Still, there’d be room enough for a diamond, wouldn’t there? Even a large diamond?

I decided there would. And now I had a little ring of picks and probes in one rear pocket, while the other held two pairs of those blue rubber gloves every nurse in America puts on and takes off and throws out and replaces ten or twenty or thirty times a day. I’d call this a good policy, it’s brought staph infections way down, but I can’t help picturing a landfill somewhere that looks as though the local Smurfs have been molting.

“‘I shall arise now,’” I said, “‘and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.’”

“What’s that, Bern?”

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree. William Butler Yeats, and I looked it up in the Untermeyer anthology a few hours ago to refresh my memory, but that’s all that stayed with me. He’s going to plant rows of beans, I forget how many, and have a hive for the honeybee.”

“Is there such a place?”

“It’s an uninhabited island,” I said, “in the middle of a lake in Sligo, not far from where Yeats spent his childhood summers.”

“Clay and wattles, huh?”

“So he said. I think it was reading Thoreau that steered him in that direction, although I can’t remember coming across any wattles at Walden Pond. Are you ready? There’s no rush if you want to finish your drink.”

She looked at her glass, which was either half full or half empty, depending on how you see the world. “One good thing about drinking Perrier,” she said, getting to her feet, “and it may be the only good thing, Bern, is you don’t feel the need to finish it.”

Ten minutes later we were standing across the street from Orrin Vandenbrinck’s new home, doing our best to look unobtrusive.

“Apologies to Billy Yeats,” she said, “but I don’t see a whole lot of clay and wattles. Glass and steel, that’s what I see.”

What I didn’t see was any of the security cameras that I’d spotted the night before, when spotting them had taken no great effort. They’d stuck out like a little row of sore thumbs, so much so that it could only be intentional. The security camera you’re aware of doesn’t provide evidence that you committed a crime; it dissuades you from so doing in the first place.

And I’d assumed there was another layer of security, a couple of cameras I couldn’t see, in case I was too stupid or strong-willed to be dissuaded. If so, they could still be here, as invisible as ever.

But it certainly didn’t seem very likely.

“The penthouse takes up the entire top floor,” I reported. “It has its own express elevator, one that makes only two stops, the lobby and the penthouse. There are two other elevators in the building, but one of them’s for One to Twenty, and the other makes its first stop at Twenty and tops out at Forty-one.”

“How do you know all this, Bern?”

“Amazon and eBay may be gone,” I said, “but the rest of the internet hasn’t changed. A few minutes online and you can find out almost anything. You want to see a floor plan? Want to read specs?”

We had taken up our posts across the street so that we could watch people coming and going, but nobody was coming and nobody was going. A fellow who was either a doorman or an admiral in the Latvian navy was poised to open the door for people headed in or out, and had more time on his hands than the Maytag repairman.

“He won’t be a problem,” I told Carolyn. “He’ll be so thrilled at the opportunity to open the door that he won’t give us a second look. But there’ll be a concierge behind the front desk, and his job’s got to be every bit as boring as the doorman’s.”

“”How do we get past him, Bern?”

“We act as though we belong. Try to look prosperous.”

“In these clothes? I mean, I suppose I look all right—”

“You look terrific, Carolyn.”

“—and these days a lesbian haircut is suddenly an acceptable fashion statement, but my outfit is kind of down-market.”

“That’s because you’re rich enough not to care.”

“Yeah, right.”

“And if he stops us,” I said, “all he’s gonna do is deny us access. He’s not about to call the cops.”

“‘Officer, these two have no business in the building.’”

“You could say that about most of the tenants.”

“‘They’re just here for the clay and wattles.’”

“If we refuse to leave, then he might pick up the phone. But if we go quietly, we’ll be out the door in thirty seconds, and five minutes later he’ll have forgotten he ever saw us.”

She took this in, thought about it. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

The fellow behind the desk, also in the Latvian Navy but years too young for the Admiralty, was reading a book. I suppose it’s a professional thing, but I can’t see someone so disposed without wondering what’s got their attention. Under other circumstances I might have approached the desk for a look, or even asked him what he was reading.

Not tonight. I urged St. Dismas to keep him engrossed in whatever it was, and with Carolyn at my side I headed for the elevators. I wanted to look purposeful but unhurried, and I may or may not have made a good job of it, but my efforts weren’t enough to keep the young man from saying “Sir?”

I kept going, because I had every right and reason to be where I was, and my name wasn’t Sir anyway, and—

That might have worked, but when he repeated the word, just a little bit louder and with a little bit more conviction, I stopped in my tracks.

And turned toward the voice, and put a puzzled expression on my face even as I took a step or two in his direction. I counted to three, willed my expression to change from puzzlement to comprehension, and snapped my fingers to indicate that light had dawned.

“Ah then,” I said, and the TH of then may have verged on Z. “I haff not seen you before,” I said, aiming an index finger at him, “and zis means zat you haff not seen me before, eh? Eh?”

“Uh, I don’t—”

“You do not know me,” I said, “and how could you?” I smiled broadly as I continued to approach the desk. “I did not wish to take you away from your book. May I see what you are reading?”

Wish, what. My Ws could almost have been Vs.

He colored slightly, held up Blue Moon, the last Reacher novel before Lee Child brought his brother in as coauthor.

“Ah,” I said. “Is good?”

“Well, I haven’t gotten all that far, but—”

I stopped him with a hand, indicating that I was merely being polite and my question wasn’t one he need feel he had to answer. “Istvan Horvath,” I said. “Apartment 29-D. And you are?”

“Peter. Um, Peter—”

“Peter-Peter?”

“Peter Tompkins.”

“Pumpkins, yes?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Big smile. “Peter. Eater of pumpkins, yes?”

“Uh—?”

“Is a poem, yes? For children. ‘Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater.’ No?”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Peter pumpkin eater. I get that all the time.”

Oh, I’ll just bet you do, Pete. “Next time,” I said, “I will remember you, Peter-Peter. And you will remember me.”

“Of course,” he said. “Have a good evening, Mr. Horvath.”