The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

32

“And then he let himself out, drew the door shut with the snaplock engaged, and fixed the window gates so they looked as though they were still doing their job. I can’t help it, I have to admire a guy like that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course you do, Bern. He remind you of anybody?”

“Not really. You see a lot of tweedy guys in the neighborhood. Academic types.”

“That’s it, eh?”

“I guess. I almost bought a Norfolk jacket once. I was looking at books at Housing Works and there it was.”

“On the shelf,” she said, “alphabetically positioned between The Naked and the Dead and Nostromo.”

“On a hanger, and in great shape.”

“Only worn once, Bern. It went back in the closet when he didn’t get tenure.”

“It was a little tight in the shoulders,” I remembered. “But even if it had fit like a glove I would have passed.”

“Because who needs a belted tweed glove?”

“I looked in the mirror, and what I saw was a guy looking ill at ease in somebody else’s jacket.”

“So you hung it back on the rack for Mr. Armagnac to find it?”

“I don’t think—”

“Neither do I. Bern, I’m with you, I have to admire the guy myself, and can’t you think who he reminds me of? Cleaning up after himself, even taking the trouble to put the tape dispenser where he found it? Bern, name a burglar who picks a lock to get in and picks it again after he’s out.”

“Oh.”

“His initials are B.R., if that helps.”

“Oh,” I said.

By the time we had this conversation, three days had gone wherever days go, and Barnegat Books, its gates and window glass restored and its yellow Crime Scene tape retired, was once again open for business.

And doing business, I’m pleased to report. The first customer, whose guilty pleasures ran to books that enumerated the many shades of gray, crossed the threshold just minutes after I’d finished feeding Raffles, and she didn’t leave empty-handed. A Stephen King fan came in even as the Gray Lady was on her way out, and all morning long I had my share of customer traffic. It stopped well short of gridlock, but that was fine with me, and a few minutes after noon I brought lunch to the Poodle Factory.

“Pad Thai,” Carolyn said.

“From Two Guys.”

She frowned. “They’re big on Thai food in Dushanbe?”

“Probably not.”

“But Two Guys—”

“From Chiang Mai, and don’t ask me what happened to the two guys from Tajikistan. The Big Chef in the sky swung his cleaver, and they were suddenly gone.”

“And another restaurant had taken their place.”

“In no time at all.”

“I don’t understand it, Bern.”

“There’s a lot I don’t understand,” I said. “And it’s beginning to dawn on me that all the things I don’t understand have a single common denominator.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s, you know, a mathematical term, and math was never my long suit, but it more or less means that there’s a unifying element...”

“Bern, I know what a common denominator is.”

“Oh.”

“What I don’t know is what this particular common denominator is.”

“Oh.”

“And what all the things are,” she said, “that you don’t understand.”

“Oh,” I said, for a third time. “Well, there’s the way Two Guys morphs from Tajik to Thai in an eye blink. There’s the way that young woman without a name bought up every book in the store with jade in the title, as a cute way of letting me know she wanted to get her hands on the Margate collection. And there’s the way Mason Dilbert, who never met me and probably never heard of me, contrived to wind up sitting at my desk with the same three bullets in him as that carbon copy of him with the same name.”

“Not quite the same name, Bern.”

“Mason Dilbert, Jason Philbert. Close enough.”

“And not the same bullets.”

“They might as well have been. They had the same effect on Mason as they’d had on Jason, and allowed the two of them to go on being a matched pair. It gets your attention, it’s so cute a development they could show it on Panda Cam, but—”

“But?”

“But it doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t, does it?” She lowered her eyes. “Bern,” she said, “I get it, and what I get is that I don’t get it. There’s plenty of things I don’t understand, starting with the fact that I’m a lesbian sleeping with my best friend.”

“Um.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Bern. I had a good time last night. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t strange. It felt perfectly natural, and it also felt perfectly strange, and if there’s a common denominator for all of this strangeness, I’d love to know what it is.”

“It’s this universe,” I said. “This best of all possible worlds. It doesn’t make sense.”

I wasn’t improvising. I’d been thinking along these lines all morning, and I was prepared to make a strong case.

But I stopped when the door opened and two men entered the Poodle Factory. One was very tall, and would have had to stoop to get in the door even if he hadn’t been wearing a turban. The other was short and slender and bareheaded, with generically Asian facial features. I’d never laid eyes on either of them before, and yet they both looked curiously familiar.

The tall one beamed and bowed. The short one moved busily around the room, his oval eyes seeking assurance that we were alone. Satisfied, he nodded to his companion.

Both men left.

“Bern—”

I held up a hand, and she didn’t say anything after having said my name. And neither did I, and the door opened once again, and I recognized the man who crossed the threshold.

He glanced at Carolyn, then fixed his eyes on me. “You’re Rhodenbarr,” he said.

I didn’t deny it.

“You know who I am,” he said.

I nodded.

“Then you probably know why I’m here. I paid a lot of money for that stone. Do you know why?”

I shook my head.

“Because I wanted it,” he said. “I still want it.”

“I don’t have it,” I said truthfully.

“I know that.”

“I never had it,” I said, rather less truthfully. “I never laid eyes on it, let alone a hand.”

“”No, of course you didn’t.” Orrin Vandenbrinck may have been many things, but Human Lie Detector was evidently not among them. “You’re a thief, but an admirably professional one. Why would you steal something you couldn’t possibly turn into money?”

Why indeed?

“Someone else stole it,” he said, “and killed one of my bodyguards in the process. Then he or someone else killed the other one. I’ve since replaced them.”

With two men, I thought, whom we’d just met. One tall and wearing a turban. The other short, and, um, not wearing a turban.

“But how can I replace the Kloppmann Diamond? The thing’s unique. It can’t be replaced.” His eyes held mine. “It can only be retrieved.”

“Retrieved,” I said.

“And that’s where you come in, Rhodenbarr. I want to hire you. I want you to find out who has the diamond, and I want you to steal it, and I want you to return it to me.”

“Just like that,” I said.

“Just like that. Believe me, you’ll be well paid.”

Well, that was a load off my mind.