The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

2

By the time we got to the Bum Rap, someone was sitting at our usual table. Some two, I should say, the pair consisting of a man around forty with a tweed flat cap on his head and a woman who’d been badly served by her hairdresser, and whose expression showed that she was aware of this, and would not soon forgive or forget. And that’s all you have to know about them, because we never saw either of them again, and I only mention them because there they were, sitting at our table.

Not that it mattered, because one table at the Bum Rap is every bit as good as another. The only reason we sit at the same table each time is because it saves deciding where to sit. And if the table’s taken, as it sometimes is, we find another.

What’s important isn’t the table. It’s what’s on the jukebox, and what’s in one’s glass. Kris Kristofferson was on the jukebox, looking for his cleanest dirty shirt, and that’s always a plus, but I still needed a drink.

When we walked in, Maxine was delivering a glass of beer to a man on the far side of the room, but it didn’t take her long to get to our side. “Thank God you’re here,” Carolyn said. “I’ll have my usual scotch on the rocks, and Bernie’ll have the same, except he may want it with water. Or even soda.”

“Why don’t we ask him?” I suggested. “If we do, we might find out he doesn’t want scotch at all.”

I looked at the ceiling. It’s one of those old-fashioned stamped tin ceilings, and if you’re going to look at a ceiling you could do a lot worse, but I was just pretending to give the matter some consideration. “A martini,” I pronounced. “Very dry, very cold, and very soon.”

Carolyn: “Gin or vodka?”

“Gin,” Maxine said, “because if it was vodka you’d say ‘Vodka martini.’ But nobody says ‘gin martini.’ That’d be whatchamacallit.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, you know. Like baby puppy or crooked politician. There’s a word for it.”

“Redundant,” I said.

“There you go. Any particular kind of gin?”

I shook my head and she went off to fetch it, and brought it in a stemmed glass with an olive for garnish. “I figured straight up,” she said, “because if you wanted it on the rocks you’d have said so.”

“Good thinking.”

“Same thing if you wanted a twist instead of an olive. Like gin and straight up and olive are the default mode, you know?”

“Exactly,” I said, and she went away beaming, having set our respective drinks before us, and we raised our respective glasses but didn’t bother clinking them together, or trying to think of something to toast. Carolyn had a swig of scotch and I hesitated for perhaps a hemisemidemiquaver of a moment, then took a long drink of cold gin. I don’t know if it had been shaken or stirred, and why on earth would anyone care?

Carolyn was holding her breath, watching me, and let it out when she saw me swallow.

I asked her what was wrong.

“Wrong? We’re in the Bum Rap, winding down after a long day of washing dogs and selling books—”

“Mostly not selling books,” I said.

“Selling, not selling, whatever. We’re here, and there’s booze in our glasses and we’ve just transferred some of it to our tummies, and what’s that line you like about malt and Milton Berle?”

I had to unpack that one. “Not Milton Berle,” I said. “John Milton, the poet.”

“That’s who I meant, and what’s the line he wrote?”

“He wrote Paradise Lost,” I said, “among other things, but it was A. E. Housman who wrote the line you’re thinking of. ‘Malt can do more than Milton can / To Justify God’s Ways to man.’”

“That’s it. And whatever malt can do, Bern, scotch can do it quicker.” She took another sip. “I feel better already. How about you?”

“I feel fine,” I said, and drank some more of my martini. The last martini I could recall was one I’d had before lunch with Marty Gilmartin at his club, The Pretenders. That had been in the spring, I seemed to remember. Call it April, and now it was October, so that was what, six months?

Unless it was an earlier April, which seemed equally possible, in which case it was a year and a half. Either way, it seems fair to say it was a long time between martinis.

“I took a sip of my drink,” I said, “and you were the one who relaxed. Visibly.”

“So? We’re close, Bern. Like Corsican brothers. You take a drink and I relax.”

I looked at her.

“Okay,” she said. “What happened is you said you didn’t want scotch, and that worried me. I was afraid you were going to order Perrier instead, and we both know what that means.”

What it used to mean, back in the good and bad old days, was that I wanted to maintain a crystal clear head for an evening of breaking and entering. But I hadn’t done any of that since well before my last martini, whether it was six months or a year and a half ago.

I thought about it. “I walked you over to the Innisfree,” I said, “and told you about the Kloppmann Diamond, and pointed out Orrin Vandenbrinck—”

“And I could feel how much you wanted to steal it, Bern.”

“Well, sure,” I said. “I’m a born thief and I love to steal. It’s a character defect, I’ve never denied it, but it’s not a phase I’m going through. It’s part of who I am.”

“Right.”

“And the Kloppmann Diamond is about as good as it gets in the world of precious stones, and the man who owns it is one of the most contemptible human beings on the planet. And instead of stashing it in a vault, as anyone with half a brain would do, he’s announced to all the world that he’s keeping it in his apartment, an apartment that’s a very short walk from where we’re sitting right this minute.”

“Jesus, Bern. You still want to steal it, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. But it’s not going to happen. I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. Look, I haven’t picked a lock or climbed through a window in ages, and it’s not because I’ve reformed. I’ve been rendered obsolete.”

“Obsolete.”

“Well, what else would you call it? You saw the security cameras at the Innisfree. And you saw the ones we passed on our way here.”

“Only because you pointed them out to me, Bern. ‘Look, there’s another one! Smile, Carolyn — you’re on Candid Camera!’”

“And those were just the ones I spotted. There were probably just as many I never noticed. I understand the UK’s even worse, and that if a Londoner’s not inside a private dwelling he’s almost certain to be in front of a camera. And New York’s not far behind.”

“Commit a crime,” she said, “and the world is made of glass.”

“He didn’t know the half of it.”

“Who’s that, Bern?”

“Ralph Waldo Emerson,” I said. “That’s who you were just quoting. The world is made of glass, all right, and the glass is a camera lens. And it’s not just the cameras, either. You remember when that one manufacturer was crowing about his pickproof lock?”

She did. “And you bought one,” she said, “purely for research purposes, and you sat down with it, and how long did it take you to get through it? Two minutes?”

“A little longer than that, but the word pickproof turned out to be false advertising. But that was then. Now they’ve got electronic locks that I wouldn’t stand a chance against. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

I brought my glass to my lips, only to find that I’d somehow contrived to finish it. I looked up, caught Maxine’s eye right away, noted that Carolyn’s glass was as empty as my own, and made the circular motion one makes to indicate that we could do with another round.

While we waited for it, I expanded my rant. I had two vocations, I said, and that was the right term for them because they weren’t just how I made my living, they were each a genuine calling. Burglary and bookselling, not that far apart in the dictionary, and both of them proper Twentieth Century occupations that had withered and died in the new millennium.

People didn’t browse a bookshop anymore, unless they were looking for a preview of something they could subsequently order online. They weren’t crazy, it wasn’t part of a plot; the world had changed, and it was infinitely easier and more efficient, not to mention cheaper, to do your book hunting at your computer.

“That’s fine for everybody — except those of us who own bookshops. And I have to admit it’s even worked out well for some of my fellow booksellers; they set up web sites, list their entire inventory, and spend their days packing up books and filling orders. More often than not they close their stores, because why pay rent when you can work out of your house and stow your wares in a storage locker? Your whole operation is easier and less expensive to run, and you never have to talk to a customer.”

“I thought you liked talking to customers, Bern.”

That was something I’d had in mind when I bought Barnegat Books from old Mr. Litzauer — bright literate conversations with bright literate customers, and there’d been many of them over the years, some of them of the female persuasion. Now what I mostly get are the ones who can’t understand why I don’t want to buy their mother’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.

“And a modern up-to-date burglar,” I went on, “wouldn’t sit around bemoaning all the locks he could no longer pick. He’d give his burglar tools a decent burial and pay the kind of attention to computers that I paid to locks. He’d teach himself how to hack his way past filters and firewalls and into back doors and rabbit holes, and don’t ask me what those words mean, because if I knew more than a handful of buzzwords I’d be a rich man working ten days a year. I’d know the ins and outs of computer security, and I’d cobble up some ransomware and hold some city hostage. ‘Listen up, Portland. I just shut you down, your cops, your fire department, your hospitals, your schools. All your traffic lights are green in both directions and your motorists are playing the world’s wildest game of bumper cars. You’ve been cyber-poisoned, and if you want the antidote all you have to do is transfer a million dollars’ worth of some incomprehensible cryptocurrency into my numbered account.’”

“Which Portland, Bern? Maine or Oregon?”

“They can take turns,” I said. “But I never wanted to be that kind of a thief. I didn’t start letting myself into other people’s houses because I wanted to increase my net worth dramatically. If that’s what I wanted I’d have gone to work for Goldman Sachs. I get a thrill out of burglary, Carolyn. You want it to be profitable, same as I want to sell a book for more than I paid for it, but when you come right down to it the money’s just a way of keeping score.”

There was more to the rant, there always is, but it was nothing I hadn’t said before and nothing she hadn’t heard before, and eventually I’d let off enough steam to give it a rest. I looked at my glass and saw that the second martini had gone the way of the first.

“You want another, Bern? I’ll keep you company if you do.”

“I do,” I said, “and I don’t, and don’t is gonna win this one. A third martini would undo the good work of the first two.”

“You’d drink yourself sober? I’ve heard of that, but I’ve never seen it happen in real life.”

I shook my head. “You were right,” I said.

“I was? That’s good news. What was I right about?”

“The martini,” I said. “The first one. I ordered it because I figured it would hit me harder than my usual scotch and water.”

“And did it?”

“Of course,” I said. “And that’s what I wanted, partly because of the kind of day it had been, but also because so much of me wanted nothing more than to go back to that inexcusable waste of glass and steel and find a way into the penthouse.”

“You wanted the Kloppmann Diamond.”

“I wanted to take my best shot at it. And I knew I was being crazy, and I knew I had to keep myself from what would clearly be self-destructive behavior, and I wasn’t sure scotch would do it. I could have a glass of scotch, or even two of them, and walk away telling myself I was still clearheaded enough to risk life and limb at the Innisfree. I’d be wrong about that, but that’s what I’d tell myself, and I might be addled enough to think I was making sense.”

“But with one or two martinis—”

“It’d be a different story. And I’ve had my two martinis, and I have to say they’ve done the job. I’m not slurring my words, at least I don’t think I am—”

“You’re not, Bern.”

“—and I’m pretty sure I could walk a straight line, although I don’t know that I could pass a field sobriety test.”

“Since you don’t own a car,” she said, “you probably won’t have to.”

“All in all,” I said, “I feel the way a person would want to feel after drinking a pair of martinis. A little looser, a little less wired. But if I had a third martini—”

“You’d be drunk?”

“I’d be at risk of losing the certainty I feel right now that this is no night to return to a life of crime. The third martini could all too easily unlock the oh-what-the-hell factor.”

“Oh what the hell,” she said. “‘Oh what the hell, I know she’s straight, but why not put the moves on her anyway? Oh what the hell, so who cares if she’s married? How much of a problem could that possibly be?’”

“There you go.”

“There I’ve gone, Bern, all too often, and I’ve almost always regretted it. No third martini for you.”

“Absolutely not. I don’t even want one, truth to tell. In fact—”

“You want to call it a night.”

“I think so. I think I’ll treat myself to a cab, and I think I’ll get in bed with my book and read myself to sleep.”

“You were talking about the book at lunch,” she recalled. “Fredric Brown?”

I took it from my pocket.

“What Mad Universe. It’s science fiction? I’ve only read his mysteries. Night of the Jabberwock, The Wench is Dead.”

“Fine books.”

“The Awesome Clipjoint. No, that’s wrong.”

“Fabulous,” I said.

“Of course, The Fabulous Clipjoint. When did he write it, back in the Fifties?”

“1947.”

“Well, that was well before awesome. People who say awesome now wouldn’t be born for another thirty years. What’s it about, Bern? Colonies on Alpha Centauri? Space ships shooting at each other with lasers?”

“It’s about alternative universes,” I said, and explained as best I could after having had that second martini. “You remember Voltaire’s line in Candide? About this being the best of all possible worlds? Well, Brown’s premise in What Mad Universe is that all possible worlds exist, all possible universes, and you and I happen to be in this particular universe, sitting at a table in what some people would call a dive bar—”

“But for us it’s a home away from home.”

“Whatever. But if something gave us the right sort of nudge, we could be in a different universe. I’d still be me and you’d still be you, and the Bum Rap might still be here, but it would be a different universe and we’d be leading slightly different lives. You’d still have a Roosevelt dime in your pocket, but FDR would be facing in the opposite direction.”

“What difference would that make?”

“Maybe none.”

She thought it over, shook her head. “I get the feeling it’s too deep for me, Bern.”

“No, if you were to read the book it would make perfect sense to you, Carolyn. Or if I could explain it better, but that’ll have to wait until another day. All I want to do now is go home.”

“I could go home myself,” she said, “and eventually I probably will. But first I’ll head for the Cubby Hole, in the hope of finding some dishy dame who’s neither straight nor married. And, if this is really the best of all possible worlds, I might get lucky.”