The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

3

I got lucky. I walked out the door, headed for the curb, held up a hand, and a cab stopped. I told the driver I wanted West End Avenue and Seventieth Street. Whatever he may have wanted, he was circumspect enough to keep it to himself.

Traffic was what you’d expect at that hour, but the gin had done a commendable job of editing my perceptions of the world. The horns some drivers honked didn’t sound all that angry, and indeed there was something melodious about them, something pleasantly harmonic in their interplay. If the trip took longer than it should have, well, might not one view its duration as serving a purpose, easing the transition between the social buzz of the Bum Rap and the virtual isolation of my apartment? Wasn’t it all part of the natural order of things in this, the best of all possible worlds?

Truth to tell, I may not have been a hundred percent awake in the back seat of that cab.

And, whatever purpose the ride did or didn’t serve, it transported me to my home; by the time I got there the gentle embrace of the martinis had largely dissipated, and I paid the driver and tipped him with the restrained generosity of a grateful but sober gentleman. My doorman was doing a crossword puzzle and paying no attention to the CCTV monitor; it showed what our four security cameras had to report, and a glance let me know he wasn’t missing anything. I wished him a pleasant evening, and I went up to my apartment.

If I’d still been at the full affect of the gin, I might have showed off and let myself in without using my key. Instead I opened the door in the conventional manner and thought about fixing myself something to eat.

A sandwich? No, a can of chili. As it cooked I stirred in some grated cheddar, then tarted it up with some hot sauce. I opened the fridge, considered a can of beer, chose a can of ginger ale instead, and drank it with my meal, even as I found my place and returned to Fredric Brown and What Mad Universe.

The best of all possible worlds?

Well, that covered a lot of ground. But, with a bowl of chili and a glass of ginger ale and a good book in hand, it wasn’t so bad, was it?

The day it followed upon, on the other hand, was a rat bastard.

Or was it? Lunch had been pleasant enough. It was my turn to host and Carolyn’s turn to bring the food, and she brought Laotian take-out from Two Guys from Luang Prabang. We weren’t sure what we were eating, but agreed it was tasty, and that the restaurant’s current incarnation was its best since Two Guys from Taichung.

“Juneau Lock,” she said, remembering. “Have you been in touch with her, Bern?”

She meant Katie Huang, who’d very deliberately mangled the English language during her shifts behind the counter at the Taiwanese version of Two Guys; then she’d shower and change and hurry uptown to Juilliard, where she was their most promising flautist. Juneau Lock was what she’d say when I’d point to a dish at Two Guys, and it was how she chose to pronounce You no like, but she’d sell it to me anyway, and we always liked it.

Eventually she’d dropped the act and she and I got to know each other, and we became as much of an item was we could, given the hectic nature of her schedule. And now the restaurant was just a memory, albeit a happy one, and she was in New York a little more frequently than Halley’s Comet, but not by much.

“She was in town in the early spring,” I remembered, “performing with a chamber orchestra at Weill Recital Hall. We managed to fit in coffee afterward, but then she had to go straight to the airport.”

“So there was no opportunity for, um, romance.”

“We managed a hug and a couple of kisses,” I said, “but when you’ve spent an hour or two watching a beautiful woman playing the flute—”

“I guess it raises your expectations,” she said, and I agreed that it did.

Aside from that interlude, the day had been like most of them lately. A man with a bright blue bowtie brought in three books he’d found on my bargain table and paid ten dollars for them. I always appreciate that out of proportion to the dollars involved, as he could have saved time and money by simply walking off with them. (And that, I’ve long suspected, is what most people do, and I can’t say it breaks my heart. If anything, it lightens the load when I bring the table inside at day’s end.)

He was my only pre-lunch cash customer, but he wasn’t the only person to cross my threshold. A young woman, thin as your average rail, planted herself in the self-help section and spent close to an hour reading a quick-weight-loss diet book that had topped the bestseller lists thirty years ago. I don’t know why she thought she needed it, but her need evidently stopped short of the commitment of ownership.

I lost track of her, and then looked up from my book when she cleared her throat to get my attention. “Your cat,” she said. “Is she a Manx?”

“He,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “He’s not the man he used to be, thanks to a vet’s intervention.”

“I couldn’t help noticing that he doesn’t have a tail.”

“It sticks out, doesn’t it? Or would, if he had one. I don’t know that he’s an actual Manx. He may have lost the tail in a roomful of rocking chairs, and I suppose that would make him a Manx manqué.”

I should tell you that I was not uttering these words for the first time. One develops a line of patter and trots it out when it seems appropriate. A bit of bubbly conversation can break the ice, and a break in the ice can leave a visitor feeling that the only sporting thing to do is buy a book. And even if it doesn’t, doesn’t a spot of chat make for a nicer day?

Not always. Her eyes glazed over, suggesting that perhaps manqué was not part of her working vocabulary, and she forced a smile and took her leave. The little bell attached to the door tinkled when she opened it, and tinkled again when it swung shut. I never even got to introduce Raffles by name.

And of course there were two or three people who came in, looked around for a few minutes, and then went on their way. One of them took a moment to jot down a couple of book titles, and I knew where that would lead. There’s a hand-lettered sign on my wall, Please wait until you have exited the premises before ordering the book from Amazon. I probably ought to take it down, if anything it’s likely to be counterproductive, but it’s an unobtrusive sign and not that many people notice it, and I have to admit I like having it there.

After lunch, I made my second sale of the day. It was a cash sale, and came in the form of five twenty-dollar bills, in return for which I handed my customer two dollars in change.

You’d think that would have pleased me, wouldn’t you?

You’d be wrong.

The customer was a young man named Mowgli, who’s been a frequent visitor to Barnegat Books for years. He was a high school kid when he first started showing up, although I don’t think his teachers ever got to see very much of him. In no time at all he found a niche for himself as a book scout, dropping in regularly with a tote bag full of volumes he’d acquired in jumble shops and rummage sales. He knew what was good and what wasn’t, and more often than not the books he brought to me were ones I was happy to put on my shelves. I’d name a price for the ones I wanted and he always took it without argument, and every transaction was a win for both of us.

Then eBay.

And, virtually overnight, Mowgli morphed from supplier to customer. There was a day when he came in with his tote bags and sold me a dozen books, and there was the day a week or so later when he came in with an empty tote bag that had a dozen books in it when he left. “There’s this thing I’ve been trying,” he said. “Selling books online. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, packing them up and standing in line at the post office, but what you’re doing is running an auction, and sometimes the bidders get carried away.”

He never sold me another book, and ever since then he’s dropped in every week or two to cherry-pick my stock. He never haggles, never asks for a discount, always pays whatever price I’ve marked on the flyleaf — and some of the books he’s bought from me are ones he sold me in the first place.

I shouldn’t resent this. He’s the same decent kid he’s always been, and just as it was profitable for me to buy books from him, so is it profitable now when he buys them from me. It should brighten my day to see his face in the doorway, but I have to force a smile at the sight of him.

“You ought to try this, Bernie,” he has told me more than once. “Just get some geeky kid to build you an eBay store and list all your stock. Instead of offering your books to the handful of people who happen to be walking down East Eleventh Street, you’re putting everything in the store in front of millions of eyeballs all over the world. Just the other day I sold a small-press edition of a Dawn Powell novel to a customer in Lesotho. I had to look it up. Lesotho, not Dawn Powell.”

“Right.”

“Lots of booksellers are doing this. They’re making money — plus they’re saving money on rent, because what do you need with an expensive street-level storefront when your customers never come anywhere near the store?”

And so on.

The thing is, I knew what he was saying was true. I’m by no means a computer whiz, but I know my way around the internet, and I could learn anything else I needed to know. I could hire someone to do the packing and shipping, and without too much effort I could probably increase my gross sales by a factor of ten. I’d keep the store where it is — the rent’s not a problem, since I own the building — and I’d be more proactive in seeking out accumulations and personal libraries to buy.

See, I’ve given this a lot of thought. I know what I’d do, and how I’d do it.

And I don’t want to.

Because what it comes down to is that I didn’t buy Barnegat Books in order to get into the mail-order business, or some Twenty-first Century cyber-equivalent thereof. I didn’t want to spend my days sitting at the computer. I wanted to spend them sitting behind the counter, having live real-time conversations about books with literate and personable men and women.

Never mind. I had a shower and I made myself a cup of chamomile tea, and by nine-thirty I was in bed with my book.

It was science fiction, of course, but it was also set in the arcane world of the genre and its readers; the protagonist edited a science-fiction magazine, and there was a sort of Inside Baseball element to the way 1950s SF fandom played a role in the story. I suppose that dated the book, but it didn’t seem to matter. Brown’s narration and dialogue flowed so smoothly that I had no trouble entering the book’s fictional reality and remaining there in comfort.

I would set the book down from time to time for a sip of tea, and I’d let my mind wander down some train of thought the book had inspired. Multiple alternative universes, as infinite in number as the stars — it was a lovely notion, and a fine premise for a novel, even though it was essentially preposterous.

I thought of the classic definition of a Unitarian: Someone who believes in one God at the most. Surely one universe was all anybody could ask for, and weren’t we lucky it had been provided for us?

The best of all possible worlds, I thought. And turned the page.