The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

9

Lunch hour ran a little long that day, and we could have gone on talking clear through to sundown, but Carolyn had to put the finishing touches on a Dandie Dinmont whose owner had entered him in a show coming up in a few days in Trenton, New Jersey. “She thinks he’s a shoo-in for Best of Breed, probably because there won’t be all that many Dandie Dinmonts making the trip to Trenton. But what she’s got her heart set on is for Naughty Prince Andrew to get first place in the Terrier group.”

“Has he got a chance?”

“Well, he’s a nice-looking dog,” she said, “but what do I know? I just wash ’em.”

“And buff their nails,” I said, “and trim around their ears, and make them come out looking like they spent a week at Canyon Ranch.”

“I do what I can. And, if Prince makes his mama’s dream come true, I’ll get a nice bonus.”

So she had every reason to get back to work on the naughty prince, and for my part I wanted to be back in my bookshop. I’d never had a better morning there, surrounded by people who not only cared about books but were surprisingly eager to buy them, and who knew how long it would last? Maybe it was just a morning thing, maybe now that the sun had reached its zenith this new book boom would sink slowly in the west...

Not so. I walked out of the Poodle Factory, cast my eyes westward, and saw half a dozen people standing there, having conversations that I could only presume to be at once literate and literary, while they waited for me to open the store.

The Screaming Mimi was on the counter where I’d left it, but I barely got to look at it over the next several hours. Now and then I’d pick it up and read a paragraph or two, and then someone would come along and I’d mark my place and close the book.

But I did get to one of the elements I remembered from previous readings. There was a character named Godfrey, a thoughtful old drunk whom everybody called God, and a couple of pages in he let us in on a key principle of his personal philosophy. You could get anything, God contended, if you wanted it badly enough.

The whole novel, mystery and love story and all, stemmed from that notion.

I said as much to a woman who asked me what the book was about. “So the reason I can’t lose those ten pounds,” she said, “is because I don’t really want to?”

“Well—”

“In other words, let’s blame the victim? Is that what you’re getting at?”

There are questions no one should ever be fool enough to answer, like Do these jeans make my ass look fat? So I kept my mouth shut, but she went on waiting for my reply.

I said, “First of all, I’m not getting at anything. Fredric Brown came up with the line in a book he wrote in 1950, and who knows if he believed it himself? He put it in the mouth of one of his characters, but that doesn’t mean it was part of his own personal credo.”

She thought about this, nodded.

“And his point, or the character’s point, wouldn’t be that you don’t want to lose the weight. It’s that you don’t want to badly enough.”

“Like priorities.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You want to lose ten pounds, but you don’t want to walk around weak with hunger, and you don’t want to deplete your energy to the point where it affects your work and well-being.”

“That makes a certain amount of sense.”

“I’d say so. And you don’t want to deprive yourself of perfectly legitimate pleasure, and that makes sense, too.”

She was smiling now. “So I’m not a bad person,” she said, “just because I get the occasional yen for something gooey from Krispy Kreme.”

“Who doesn’t? And there’s another point, which I hesitate to bring up, but I think it’s relevant.”

“Oh?”

“It’s also purely subjective, just my own personal reaction to the evidence before me. I don’t know what makes you think you need to lose ten pounds, but you don’t.”

“Well,” she said, and colored a little, and averted her eyes. And, not long after, she bought eight books, and not one of them had anything to do with diets or weight loss. She told me her name was Gretchen Kimmel, and she asked me mine and repeated it as if to fix it in her mind. She paid with a credit card — and, like Mallory Eckhart a few hours before her, she jotted down her phone number in case I, um, needed it.

And would I? Well, who knew what I would or wouldn’t need or want in this unlikely world?

I added her to my phone’s list of contacts. If I wanted to — badly enough, that is — I could give her a call.

Long before I had a bookstore, I was caught up in the fantasy of owning one. I pictured myself chatting with well-read men and women, hosting Sunday afternoon poetry readings while off to one side a Juilliard student would be playing a Schubert violin sonata. There’d be Chilean Riesling to sip and cubes of Jarlsberg to nibble, and I’d be the affable host, with a jacket and tie, or even an ascot if I thought I could carry it off.

And, by the time the wine and cheese ran out and the customers drifted away, wouldn’t the host have bonded with some bright and charming young lady?

I always figured running a bookshop would be a good way to meet women. And once every third blue moon it actually was, but it was a rare day indeed when someone like Mallory Eckhart made a point of giving me her number, and I was flat-out gobsmacked when Gretchen Kimmel did the same.

Two in one day? Incredible. A third, obviously, would be out of the question.

I was thinking about this, even as I was having another go at The Screaming Mimi, when a hand appeared without so much as an ahem and held a pamphlet with a homemade look to it between my eyes and Fredric Brown’s words.

I looked up. The woman holding the pamphlet was tall and slender. Her dark hair looked as though she’d cut it herself after an apprenticeship with Vidal Sassoon, and her dark eyes behind wire-rimmed eyeglasses took the Hot Librarian look to a new level. Think Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction. Think Katherine Moennig as Lena, Ray Donovan’s assistant.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said.

I took the pamphlet from her and had a look at it. The title was there in two italic lines — Dr. Newton’s / Zoo — above a vaguely oriental drawing of what was either a mythical creature or a lioness drawn by someone whose knowledge of the beast was limited to verbal descriptions. Across the bottom, in smaller and more self-contained type, it said Bluett & Sons Ltd. And there were three Chinese characters at the upper right.

I paged through it, noted the photographs, some in color, some in black and white. It was the privately printed exhibition catalog of an obscure exhibition, the kind of item that could sit for years on a shelf until the one right buyer walked in and swooned over it. I wanted to buy it, but would I ever sell it?

I asked her how much she was asking for it.

Her eyes widened, her lips parted. I thought I’d have to repeat the question, but she said, “I don’t want to sell it.”

“Then why—”

“I want to buy it,” she said. “I found it in your Art & Antiques section, so I assumed it was for sale.”

I turned pages, nodded thoughtfully, while being careful to keep my thoughts to myself.

I had never seen the thing before in my life.

Once, years ago, a householder walked in on me while I was going through the drawers of his desk. He was holding a baseball bat, and he looked ready to swing for the fences.

“Thank God you’re here,” I said. “I was afraid — well, never mind, but I’m really glad you’re all right.”

I don’t remember where the conversation went from there, but I got out of there without being lined into center field or popped up behind third base, so I’d say that one belongs in the Wins column. The lesson here is that if you can’t improvise on short notice you’ve got no business being a burglar, and while the skill’s less essential in bookselling, it does come in handy.

“Dr. Isaac Newton,” I said, “and who ever would have guessed that the man who figured out gravity from the falling of an apple would have a passion for small jade carvings of animals?”

“Oh, is it that Isaac Newton?”

“In a word,” I said, “no.” I read, “‘In the finest tradition of scholarship Dr. Newton allowed us a free hand in selecting or rejecting pieces from his collection as we wished. He further kindly allowed us to add a small number of carvings from other sources and a few important loans to help make the catalogue and exhibition more complete.’ Now the exhibition was staged in London in 1981, and while Bluett & Sons identify him as the late Dr. Newton, his death must have been fairly recent. The Isaac Newton everybody knows was Sir Isaac, not Dr. Newton, and gravity had its way with him in 1727, so—”

“So he couldn’t have had that conversation with Mr. Bluett.”

“Or his sons.” I turned a page. “You know, this came in so long ago that it’s almost like seeing it for the first time. I priced it at fifty dollars. That’s lower than it should be.”

“Does that mean you want to raise it?”

“That wouldn’t be ethical. If you want it, I’m bound to honor the price I put on it.”

“I see.”

“But if you decide you don’t want it,” I said, “then I might adjust it upward.”

Before I’d finished the sentence, she’d laid a fifty-dollar bill on the counter. “I like jade,” she said. “Jade’s important to me. Keep that in mind. If you get hold of anything you think might interest me, just let me know.”

“How will I reach you?”

“I’m hard to get hold of. But I’ll check in with you from time to time. Just set aside anything you think I might like.”

She was gone, book in hand, before I could ask her name or her number.

It was getting on for four o’clock when I reached for the phone and called Carolyn. I told her I just wanted to make sure we were on for the Bum Rap.

“If it’s still there,” she said. “Yes, of course. I just told Naughty Prince Andrew’s mommy her good boy’s ready for his close-up, and she’ll be picking him up sometime in the next half hour. Even if she’s late, I’ll be in the usual place at the usual time.”

“As will I, but I might be a few minutes late. If you get there before I do—”

“You want your scotch on the table when you get there?”

“I don’t want any scotch on the table,” I said. “For either of us. We’ll both have Perrier this evening.”

Silence.

“Or, you know, order yourself a root beer or a Coke or a ginger ale. I don’t want to tell you what to drink.”

“You just want to tell me what not to drink. And I don’t think it’s because you’ve started worrying about the long-term possibility of liver damage. Bern, you’re gonna do it, aren’t you?”

“Well—”

“Correction: We’re gonna do it. Right?”

“Unless you don’t want to, but—”

“Are you kidding? I’ve always had to wheedle my way into keeping you company, and now that it’s actually your idea for me to come along, you think I’m going to develop cold feet? I’ll be there, and I’ll be sober as a judge, and not the one on Fox News.”

“Good,” I said. “And speaking of cold feet, wear comfortable shoes.”

A pause, and I could picture her rolling her eyes. “Bern,” she said, “I’m a dyke, remember? That’s the only kind I own.”