The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

24

There’s a dream I’ve had, with slight variations, for I don’t know how many years. I’m behind the counter at Barnegat Books, having some sort of conversation with some sort of customer, when I realize that I’m not wearing anything between my shoes and my shirt. No one can tell, only my upper body is visible, but how can I avoid exposing myself while fetching the appropriate book, or freshening my cat’s water dish, or doing whatever else I’m called upon to do in this particular version of the dream?

The answer, of course, is that I can’t, and what generally happens right around this stage is that I become aware on some level that I’m having that damned dream again. At which point the details of the dream begin to grow wispy and slip away, and I may try to get back into the dream to find out how the conversation will turn out, but that almost always turns out to be impossible, and what generally happens next is I open my eyes and let my day begin.

Not this time. I lay there, eyes securely shut, while the dream concluded its disappearing act, and I kept them shut while I let myself recall where I was and how I’d come to be there.

The dream was over. My night’s sleep was over. But what else had run its course?

Was I waking up in the same new universe in which I’d gone to sleep?

I was, I realized, afraid of what the answer might be. And, as long as I avoided opening my eyes, I wouldn’t have to know what it was.

It’s a stance one can only maintain for so long, and once I was out of the dream I don’t suppose it could have been more than a minute or two of eyes-wide-shut before I gave up and opened them.

The first thing I saw was one of the cats — Archie, the Burmese — sitting on Carolyn’s side of the bed and looking at me. God knows what he was thinking. “Don’t ask,” I told him, and looked around for his mistress, but what I found was the note she’d left on the coffee table:

She’d underlined “green-and-white SubwayCard” three times, lest I miss its significance, and signed the note with a little heart.

I checked my own wallet, just to make sure, and found my own SubwayCard.

Whew.

I had a bath, then put on New York One, which told me nothing I needed to know, and yesterday’s clothes, which passed the sniff test, albeit with not much room to spare. Tie? No tie? I put it on, knotted it, then loosened the knot and unfastened the collar button.

Casual Friday.

It was 10:30 when I got out the door. I could have used my SubwayCard but it was comfort enough to know it was there. I walked to work, pausing at a Sheridan Square food truck for a bagel and coffee. There was no hurry, not on such a beautiful autumn morning, and so it was getting on for eleven when I set about opening my store.

There were customers waiting. Just two of them, a man and a woman, and I got the feeling that they had met for the first time that morning, waiting for me to open up.

Raffles greeted me as he always did, rubbing himself against my ankles. “Nice try,” I told him, “but I happen to know you’ve been fed, and there’s fresh water in your water dish.” My customers contrived to deepen their new bond by joining in admiration of my cat, asking its name and, when it proved to be nongender-specific, whether it was a boy or a girl. They didn’t seek to know if he was a Manx, so I didn’t have to have that conversation again, but the woman did ask if she could pet him, and I told her it was okay with me if it was okay with Raffles. And apparently it was.

Twenty minutes later they left, each with a bag of books. He asked if there was a good place nearby for lunch, and I told him Two Guys From Dushanbe was great if you liked Tajik food.

“As in Tajikistan? I don’t believe I’ve ever had it.” To the woman: “Have you?”

She said she hadn’t. Would she like to join him? Why yes, yes she would.

Shortly before noon I called Carolyn. “I’ve got a store full of people,” I said, “and I suppose I could chase them out, but I walked to work and stopped along the way at a food truck, so I had a late breakfast, and—”

“You want to skip lunch.”

“If that’s not a problem.”

“I love our lunches,” she said, “but I’m not all that hungry myself. Maybe I’ll go bowling.”

“Seriously?”

“No, but it’s nice to know I could if I wanted to. I’ll see you in a few hours. Usual time? Usual place? Usual table?”

“You bet,” I said.

Intermittently I’d become aware of the envelope in my jacket pocket. At one point I felt warm enough to take off the jacket and hang it over the back of my stool, and when I returned from showing a young woman where the Anne Rice novels were shelved, I saw the envelope showing. Anyone could reach behind the counter and walk out of my shop sixteen thousand dollars to the good.

That’s more serious than having someone lift a book or two from my bargain table, and it’s even worse if you think of the sum as half the price of the Kloppmann Diamond.

I took the envelope into the back room. As I found a spot for it in a desk drawer, I remembered my handy set of picks and probes, still in my back pocket. The New York criminal code is quite specific, labeling possession of burglar’s tools a Class A misdemeanor, and you can do a year for it. I put my tools in the drawer with the envelope, and closed the drawer halfway, and changed my mind and returned the tools to my pocket.

Because you never know.

The high point of the afternoon was the reappearance of the winner of the Linda Fiorentino/Katherine Moennig look-alike contest, the woman who’d contrived to buy a book I hadn’t known I owned. Once again she’d managed to slip into the store unnoticed, and once again she presented herself at the counter, but this time she set down not a single pamphlet but a stack of six books.

I told her it was good to see her again, and she reminded me that she’d said she would be back.

I took the top book from the stack. “Ah, Donald Westlake,” I said.

“No, it says—”

“It says ‘Tucker Coe,’” I said, because this is the first edition, published under that pen name fifty years ago. You didn’t know Westlake was the author?”

She shook her head. Then why, I could but wonder, would she want the book? I’d priced it at $37.50, which seemed reasonable enough considering its very decent condition and the freshness of its dust wrapper, but if she didn’t have a collector’s interest in the author, didn’t in fact have much of a clue who the author was, what would make it worth her attention?

Oh.

“Westlake wrote five books as Tucker Coe,” I said. “They were all published by Random House between 1966 and 1972, during which time he published two dozen other titles as well, some under his own name, the others as Richard Stark.”

“He must have been a busy man.”

“A productive one, certainly.” I opened the book to the page that listed Tucker Coe’s other books. “Five books, of which this is the fourth, all of them chronicling the fictional career of one Mitchell Tobin, who left the NYPD under a cloud and wound up operating as a sort of de facto private detective, all the while spending his free time building a wall around his house, and you can make of that what you will. The first book was Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death, followed in due course by Murder Among Children and Wax Apple. Then this book, and a couple of years later he published the final volume, but it’s not listed here, because when this book came out he hadn’t written it yet. Still, I ought to be able to remember the name.”

“It’s all very interesting...”

“Don’t Lie to Me.”

She recoiled as if slapped, and the dark eyes looked as though they might burn a hole through her eyeglasses. “It is interesting,” she said, “and even if I were just saying so to be polite, I don’t think it would amount to an actual lie, and even if you’re an absolute stickler for the literal truth—”

“That’s the title.”

“The title?”

“Of the fifth and last book by Tucker Coe. Don’t Lie to Me.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest you were telling an untruth.”

“It’s all right. I understand.”

I reached for the rest of the books, sifted through them, jotted down their prices. Jade Dragon Mountain by Elsa Hart. The Song of the Jade Lily by Kirsty Manning. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Jade City by Fonda Lee. Jade: 5000 B.C. to 1912 A.D., A Guide for Collectors by Mircea Veleanu.

Fitting companions, to be sure, for Tucker Coe’s penultimate book, A Jade in Aries.

“A subtle pattern begins to emerge,” I said. “You do know that not all of these books are about jade? The Tucker Coe’s the only one I’ve read, and I don’t think the word jade appears anywhere but the cover and the title page.”

“That’s all right.”

I jotted down prices and added them up, and I showed her the total, which was just under $140, and suggested we round it down to $125. I took three fifties from her and counted out change.

“I have a special fondness for jade,” she said.

“I, um, figured as much.”

“If you find more books—”

“I’ll set them aside for you.”

She took the receipt I’d given her, picked up my pencil, and jotted down a number.

“Or if you were to come into possession of actual jade objects,” she said. “I know that’s unlikely, you traffic in books, not in art and antiquities. But one never knows.”

“Never,” I agreed, and fingered the slip of paper. “You should put down a name. As an aide-mémoire.”

She wrote something, folded the slip, passed it to me. “If your mémoire needs an assist, this should serve better than a name you’ve never heard.”

She headed for the door, and I saw Raffles look up from his spot at the window to note her passing. She had that sort of presence.

I unfolded the slip of paper. Along with the ten-digit number, she’d printed JADE in block capitals.

It was a few minutes after the usual time when I got to the Bum Rap, and Carolyn was already at our usual table. Her rocks glass held a couple of ice cubes bobbing in a familiar amber liquid.

“I figured it’d be okay to get back to scotch,” she said, “and I’m certainly in the mood for it, so I ordered this the minute I sat down. But I haven’t had any yet, in case you don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“I think it’s a splendid idea,” I told her, and caught Maxine’s eye immediately, and said I’d have the same as Carolyn was having, except with soda. She went off to fetch it, and Carolyn reached for her glass, then left it where it was.

“So we can toast something,” she explained. “We’ve got between now and when she gets back to figure out what to drink to.”

I was ready. When my drink came I raised my glass and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

We touched glasses, sipped. Her sip was more substantial than mine.

“This is just what I needed,” I said, “but I’d better go easy. You remember I told you about the guy who wants to pour me some Armagnac and sell me some books?”

“Vaguely. Wasn’t he a professor?”

“With leather elbow patches on his Norfolk jacket,” I said, “he could hardly be anything else. He called to make sure I hadn’t forgotten our engagement. And a good thing he did, because what with one thing and another, it had slipped my mind.”

“One thing and another,” she said. “This time yesterday—”

“We were sitting right here.”

“Drinking Perrier. That seems so long ago, Bern.”

“I know.”

“Like ages.”

“I know.” I laid my hand on top of hers. “Anyway, it all came back as soon as he started talking. I’m supposed to show up at his apartment on West Third at 8:30.”

“I can tell how much you’re looking forward to it.”

“I almost canceled,” I said. “But with the kind of business I did today, morning and afternoon, I don’t want to pass up a good chance to fill some of the empty spaces on my shelves.”

“Because everybody knows you can’t do business from an empty wagon. What? I just said—”

“I know what you said. It reminded me of my breakfast.”

“Huh?”

“Didn’t I tell you? On my way to work I grabbed coffee and a bagel from a food truck.”

“So?”

“It was at Sheridan Square.”

“Everybody has to be somewhere. So?”

“While I was standing there—”

“Eating your bagel, drinking your coffee—”

“—I looked across the square, and you know Two Boots? The pizza place?”

“What about it?”

“It’s gone.”

“Oh, yeah? Gee, I wonder when that happened. It’s too bad, they had great pizza, although finding good pizza in New York has never been all that hard to do.” She paused for breath, frowned. “Bern? Am I missing something?”

“Guess what’s where Two Boots used to be.”

“You’re kidding. No, you’re not kidding. The Duchess is back?”

“Like it never left,” I said.

“Were there people in it? Probably not at that hour.”

“I didn’t get close enough to tell. I saw it in the storefront where Two Boots used to be, and it registered, but just barely.”

“And you finished your breakfast and started walking. I don’t suppose your steps happened to take you to Greenwich Avenue.”

“I wound up on Tenth Street,” I said, “so I had to cross Greenwich Avenue. Why?”

“That’s where Paula’s used to be, but from Tenth and Greenwich you’d almost need binoculars to see it.”

“It didn’t even occur to me to look for it. I wasn’t thinking about the Duchess, I couldn’t tell you what was running through my mind, but then just before I got to the store I did make a point of looking for Bowl-Mor, and of course it was there, right where it was supposed to be, and that made me think of the Duchess, and that was the first time I realized the implications.”

“The implications?”

I nodded.

“Except for a period of a month or so,” she said, “when I steered clear of the place because there was somebody I didn’t want to run into, I was a regular at the Duchess. How many times do you figure I walked through those doors?”

“Probably quite a few.”

“And I can’t remember seeing a single implication, Bern.”

I picked up my glass, found it empty.

I said, “The Duchess was a regular part of your life.”

“Isn’t that what I just got through telling you?”

“But it was never a part of mine,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I never had a drink at the Duchess. In fact I don’t believe I ever set foot in the place.”

“Probably wise, Bern. There was a sign for a while, but not for long. They took it down because too many people didn’t get it.”

She paused to thank Maxine for delivering a second scotch on the rocks, one she’d ordered without my noticing. Maxine cocked an eye at my empty glass, then looked a question at me. I nodded, even as the thought crossed my mind that this was probably Not A Good Idea.

“The sign,” I prompted.

“Oh, right. ‘Y Don’t You Go Home?’ Except instead of spelling out the first word, W-H-Y, it was just the capital letter Y.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Hardly anybody did, which was why it wasn’t up there for more than a few days. What it meant was if you had a Y chromosome you weren’t welcome.”

“Subtle.”

“Way too subtle. But you get the point. No men.”

“I get the point,” I said. “And you still don’t get the implication?”

“I wouldn’t call that an implication, Bern. It was pretty much out there. If a man walked in, any man, gay or straight, drunk or sober, he got the opposite of a warm welcome.”

“The cold shoulder.”

“Or worse, if he put up a fuss.”

“So why would I want to make sure the Duchess was part of the best of all possible worlds? What would prompt me to blink it back into existence, along with Bowl-Mor and SubwayCards?”

“Oh.”

“That was the implication, and it strikes me as pretty clear-cut. I didn’t just bring you along for the ride, and I didn’t dream us into this universe all by myself.”

“I never read the book. I’ve read plenty of Fredric Brown, but not the book that got us here.”

“But you asked about it, remember? And I told you the premise, and you thought it was interesting.”

I let her think about it, and watched her thoughts register on her face on her face. “I got that we were in this together,” she said, “but it’s more than that. We did this together.”

“That’s how it looks to me.”

“Me too.” She put her hand on mine, and beamed across the table at me. “I’m proud of us, Bern.”

My second drink was about halfway gone when Carolyn reminded me what I’d had for breakfast. “A bagel and coffee, Bern. Just one bagel?”

“Just one,” I said. “But, you know, it was an everything bagel.”

“So it was all tricked out with poppy seeds and sesame seeds and onion and garlic.”

“And salt.”

“But it was still just a bagel. What have you had since then?”

“A very busy day,” I said.

“But no lunch. You didn’t grab a snack at the store?”

“I’m not that crazy about cat food.”

“So you’re drinking on an empty stomach.”

“I’m not sure of that. How long does it take to digest a bagel?”

She rolled her eyes. “At eight-thirty,” she pointed out, “you’re going to be seeing this professor, and you don’t want to wind up being the absent-minded one. And what is it he promised you? Some kind of brandy.”

“Armagnac. I think he said it was fifty years old.”

“So’s Martina Navratilova, but she’s still got it. I think we should get something to eat.”

“Where?”

“They’ve got food right here, don’t they?”

I looked at her. “You don’t remember,” I said.

“What don’t I remember?”

“The burrito,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and her nose wrinkled, confirming that now she did indeed remember.

“They don’t have a kitchen at the Bum Rap,” I said. “What they have is a microwave oven, and the only thing I remember them having was burritos, and I ordered one.”

“I remember.”

“And I ate it, so that it could sober me up. But all it did—”

“I remember.”

“—was make me fart.”

“I remember.”

“A Bum Wrap,” I said, “with a W. That’s what they called their burrito, and maybe they still do. I don’t think it would be a good idea to have another one.”

“Not now.”

“Not ever, in any world we happen to find ourselves.” I took a breath. “But you’re right.”

“I am?”

“I should get something to eat. I don’t think I want Tajik food just now. It’s delicious, but right about now my stomach might think it was a burrito.”

“We could go to Paula’s, Bern.”

“Last time I checked,” I said, “I had a Y chromosome.”

“Guys have always been welcome at Paula’s,” she said, “Unless they make trouble.”

“I’m rarely troublesome. Unless I’ve had a burrito.”

“There were guys who came there on a regular basis, and not to hit on lesbians. I guess they liked the atmosphere. And the food, because Paula always had a good kitchen. Nothing fancy, but the woman’s hamburger was world-class. Could you handle a hamburger?”

“Probably, if we tell them to hold the onion. And if the place even exists.”

“If I brought back the Duchess,” she said, “I wouldn’t forget Paula’s. I liked it better and spent lots more time there.”

I thought about it. “My appointment’s on West Third,” I said, “and what I think I’d like to do is eat at one of the Italian restaurants on Thompson Street. A nice simple pasta dish, say, and espresso or cappuccino until it’s time to walk around the corner and look at his books.”

She didn’t look enthusiastic.

“But there’s no reason why you can’t go to Paula’s.”

“You sure, Bern? I’d like to know if it’s there, and if it’s the way it used to be.”

And who knows, I thought but didn’t say. Maybe you’ll get lucky.