The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

39

“Talk about mixed emotions,” I told Carolyn. “I didn’t know whether to be glad to kiss it goodbye or sorry to see it go. It’s amazing it was there to begin with. I had one woman buy me out of Jeffrey Farnol and then there was Katrina, dropping hints by scooping up everything with jade in the title.”

“Katrina?”

“The closest she came to telling me her name,” I said, “was when she said it was Jade, which seemed unlikely. It turns out her first name was Katrina and her last name was Beckwith, and you’ll never guess where she worked.”

“If you tell me, Bern, I won’t have to.”

“The Ginseng Gallery,” I said, “on Lispenard Street.”

“Where Edgar Margate put his jade collection on exhibit.”

I started to say something, then broke it off when Maxine approached with our drinks. We were at the Bum Rap, you won’t be surprised to learn, and this was our second round, and there was scotch in both of our glasses.

“Okay,” she said. “You talk. I’ll listen.”

I said, “That’s where they met, Edgar Margate and Katrina Beckwith. She’d come to New York to be an actress, and wound up as a sort of utility infielder on Lispenard Street. Margate dropped in one afternoon to see if anything caught his eye, and that’s just what Katrina did. They had a meet-cute conversation out of a Nora Ephron screenplay, and he came back the next day and took her out to dinner, and she took him home to her apartment.

“Which doesn’t sound like a big deal, because married businessmen like Margate and sweet young things like Beckwith fall into each other’s arms all the time. Except Margate had been a faithful husband until he wound up in Beckwith’s bed, and while she’d led a reasonably active life herself, she’d never fallen for anybody the way she fell for Margate.

“He wanted to stay married, and she was fine with that, and he also wanted to take care of her, and she was fine with that part as well. Margate wanted to move her to a nicer apartment, and he wanted to be able to take her places and buy her things, and he wanted to do all this without slighting his wife and kids. And there’s a lot to be said for having your cake and eating it too, but it only works if you can afford to pay the baker.

“Or suppose you can find somebody else to cover the baker’s bill? Like, say, an insurance company?

“Margate had put together an exceptional collection of jade figurines over the years, and had in fact bought one or two of them from Mr. Ginseng — and no, that’s not the owner’s name, which I’ve only heard from Ray Kirschmann, and he said it differently every time, like he was reading it off the menu at Shung Lee Dynasty.

“Never mind.

“The jade collection was a valuable asset of Margate’s. He’d spent a fair amount of money on it, just under six figures. It was sort of covered by a rider on his homeowner’s policy, but he wasn’t really worried about theft and didn’t want to pay a ton in premiums, so if the collection disappeared he’d be lucky to get half of what he’d paid for it, and he might have to go to court to realize that much.

“But if Margate put his jade on display at Ginseng Gallery, it would be covered by their insurance. And he could declare an inflated value, and the gallery would sign off on his estimate, because the higher the value the more people would want to come to the gallery to look at it. And the premium wouldn’t bankrupt them, because the coverage they’d be paying for would be limited to the actual time the collection was in the gallery’s possession, which would be what, a couple of weeks? Maybe a month?

“It wasn’t difficult to arrange. The Edgar W. Margate jade collection went on display at Ginseng Gallery, officially valued for insurance purposes at an optimistic half million dollars. Its owner was already ahead of the game; the high valuation and the attendant publicity so positioned his collection that, if he had to sell it, he’d net two or three times what he could have expected a month ago.

“But why not grab the brass ring — or the jade bell-pull, if you prefer. Margate couldn’t steal his own collection, and Beckwith couldn’t steal it for him; they’d been circumspect about their affair, and there was no reason to think anyone at Ginseng Gallery knew about it, but they couldn’t afford to take chances, not with a sky-high insurance payout on the line. What they needed to stage was a professional burglary, and that called for a professional burglar.

“Fortunately, Katrina Beckwith knew just where to turn.”

“And that’s where you came in, Bern. Right?”

“It’s where I came in,” I acknowledged, “but not where she turned. She didn’t know me, not as a burglar and not even as a bookseller. The only burglar she knew was a courtly and well-mannered fellow named Byron Fleegler.”

“That’s an unusual name.”

“And it took me a while to learn it. He never supplied it, or an alias either. The vacant apartment he sent me to had been occupied by a professor named Rubisham, but that wasn’t our boy’s name. Neither were Norfolk or Armagnac.”

“He wore a belted Norfolk jacket,” she remembered. “And he was going to pour you a glass of very old Armagnac.”

“And this was supposed to happen when I met him to examine a library that didn’t exist in an apartment that wasn’t his. He was never a professor himself, although he’d played one once in an off-off-Broadway production of If Winter Comes. He was an actor, and he and Kristina ran into each other at auditions.”

“And they had a romance?”

I shook my head. “Byron’s gay.”

“So am I, Bern. But in that universe people don’t necessarily behave the way you’d expect them to.”

“Byron and Katrina were friends,” I said, “and that’s all. And in the course of their friendship he let her in on his secret.”

“He was a professor? No, because he wasn’t. Oh, he told her he was a burglar?”

“That’s how he made ends meet. He seemed both proud and ashamed of it, and she wasn’t entirely sure whether to believe him, but it stuck in her mind, and when she and Margate needed a burglar, she gave Byron a call and met him for a drink.”

“And he broke into the gallery and stole the Margate collection,” she said. “Except he didn’t.”

“He never got the chance,” I said. “I beat him to it.”

Not that I remembered it. When I woke up in that alternate universe, I had everything that another Bernie Rhodenbarr had had — an apartment, a bookstore, a tailless cat. What I didn’t possess were his memories. I might have a batch of jade carvings stowed in a secret compartment in my store’s back room, but I couldn’t have told you how they got there.

“I don’t know how Margate’s collection got my attention,” I said, “or why I thought it would be better off in my hands than in Mr. Margate’s. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know, and it hardly matters. Because, before Byron Fleegler got around to making his move, I evidently made mine.

“I wish I could remember it, because I was evidently impeccably professional about the whole thing. I got in and got out without drawing any attention or doing any damage. I took Margate’s jade and left everything else in the gallery untouched. It would have been the kind of memory that would warm a burglar’s heart in his old age, but all I can do is imagine it.

“And, ironically, I seem to have been the only person involved who didn’t know the break-in and theft was my doing. Ray Kirschmann knew in a heartbeat, and Fleegler evidently came to the same conclusion; when Katrina congratulated him on pulling off the burglary, he had to tell her it wasn’t him — but that he was pretty sure who deserved the blame.

“Or the credit. Margate was in a curious position. He was in line for an insurance payout that would amount to something like five or six times what he could have hoped to net from a Sotheby’s auction. He’d eat the cake and make a good meal of it, but the downside was he wouldn’t have it. And, remember, he really liked those carvings.

“Still, with half a million dollars he could find something else to collect. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a problem. Because whoever the man was who’d actually stolen the collection hadn’t done so in order to display them on his fireplace mantel. This opportunistic thief, this Rhodenbarr character, was evidently a pro. When he stole something, he wanted to turn it into cash.”

“Unless it’s the Mondrian painting he’s got hanging on his wall.”

I let that pass. “What, he had to wonder, was I going to do with his collection? It’s not like gold or jewelry, you can’t melt it down or break it up. If I wanted to sell it, where could I turn?”

“I don’t know, Bern. Abel Crowe?”

“Abel would have admired the figures,” I said, “and said complimentary things about the artisans who’d carved them, but he would have seen only one way to turn a profit on them, and he’d have probably suggested I cut out the middleman and do it myself.”

“Do what?”

“Sell them back to the insurance company. That’s tricky to negotiate, because an insurance company that deals with thieves is encouraging theft, and they all insist they’d never do that. But if you’re in the business, and your choice is to pay half a million to the original owner or a tenth of that to a burglar—”

“Is that what you’d get, Bern? Fifty thousand?”

“I’d probably have to use a go-between,” I said. “Probably an attorney, and not from a white-shoe firm. He’d have to be lucky to get fifty, and I’d be every bit as lucky to wind up with half of that. So call it twenty-five thousand dollars, and on the one hand you can say that’s not bad for one night’s work, but when you do the math you understand right away how come the insurance companies have those huge marble buildings in Hartford, and I live in a one-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue.

“And where would that leave Edgar Margate? Why, they’d tell him how lucky he was, that instead of having to settle for a cash payout he’d be getting his twenty-one carvings back.

“Once I made a deal with the insurers, he was screwed. But he had two other options, either of which might work. The simplest would be to buy the carvings directly from me. If Margate paid me, oh, say fifty thousand for everything, I’d net twice what I could expect from the insurance company, and he’d still have ninety percent of that half-million in his pocket.

“Enter Katrina, who came to my store and brought up the subject of jade without quite committing herself. I suppose her hints were pretty broad, but they sailed right over the head of the Bernie Rhodenbarr she encountered, because he wasn’t privy to the memories of the Bernie Rhodenbarr who’d committed the burglary.

“So all she managed to do was buy a lot of books, and Margate didn’t want to read about jade, he wanted to own it. Enter Katrina’s friend, Byron Fleeger—”

“Mr. Norfolk Jacket.”

“The very man. He’s still a burglar, so why not set a thief to rob a thief? He’s also an actor, and if he can find a way to guarantee my absence, maybe he can let himself into my bookstore and poke around until he finds the jade.”

She was nodding along, and then she stopped. “Bern,” she said, “it doesn’t make sense.”

“No kidding.”

“Why lure you away? You never stay open past six. All he had to do was turn up in the middle of the night.”

“I know. Maybe it was the actor in him, maybe he figured playing a fake professor would help him get an Equity card. But the whole thing’s nuts, because you have to remember it took place in an irrational universe.”

“Something you and I dreamed up.”

“Right.”

“Unwittingly.”

“Very much so. But he did what he meant to do, luring me to an empty apartment on West Third Street. Then he showed up at Barnegat Books, but two other men got there ahead of him. One of them got in by vandalizing my gates and forcing my door, and was sitting in my desk chair when a second man used a glass cutter to follow in his footsteps. And by the time Byron got there—”

“Bern, I’m having trouble following this.”

“Well, I should hope so.”

“Bern, I think I’m getting a headache.”

“I’ve already got one.”

She’d raised a hand, and I thought she was going to scribble, letting Maxine know we were ready for the check. But instead she made the circular motion to summon up more scotch.

I said, “Really? You think we can handle another round?”

“I think we need it,” she said, “whether we can handle it or not. What I know I can’t handle is any more information, not tonight. We’ll have one last round, and then I’m heading for the non-Euclidean intersection of West Twelfth Street and West Fourth Street.”

“The Cubby Hole?”

“And I’m not sure I can handle that, either,” she said, “but that’s where I’m going. What’s tomorrow?”

“If today’s Thursday—”

“Then tomorrow could be just about anything, couldn’t it?”

“I think the odds favor Friday.”

“Assuming we wake up in the same world we go to sleep in.”

“I’m pretty sure we will.”

“Well, don’t take any chances, okay? Go straight home. Don’t stop to bowl a few frames.”

“How could I? Bowl-Mor’s gone.”

“Well, don’t try to find a way. And don’t use your Metrocard, or whatever you’ve got in your wallet. Take a cab.”

“If I can get one.”

“You’ll get one. And Bern? When you go to bed, just do me a favor, okay? Don’t read anything.”