AMAZON BARNES & NOBLE APPLE SMASHWORDS
At the close of The Burglar in Short Order, Bernie Rhodenbarr makes it very clear that, even though he’s managed to stay the same age for the past fifty years, he’s no longer able to have the sort of adventures that won him a legion of readers. There are only two occupations he’s fit for, burglar and bookseller, and the the world has changed to make both of them obsolete. And if he was done doing what he does best, I was clearly done writing about him.
Shows what either of us knows. In October of 2022, it was my pleasure to publish The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, and both sales and reviews have exceeded expectations. The following opening selection should help you decide if you want to read what I strongly suspect will be Bernie’s genuinely last adventure.
Then again. what do I know?
Read on…
###
It was around a quarter to five on a Wednesday afternoon in October when I marked my place in the Fredric Brown paperback I’d spent much of the day reading. I tucked it in my back pocket, then went outside and retrieved my table of bargain books from the sidewalk. This was a good fifteen minutes earlier than usual, but when you’re the store owner you can do this sort of thing on a whim. That’s one of the nice things about being an independent antiquarian bookseller, and there are days when it seems like the only nice thing.
This was one of them.
I typically start to shut down for the day around five, and usually manage to clear the last customer from the premises by five-thirty. Then I do what tidying up needs to be done, freshen Raffles’s water dish and put some dry food in his bowl, draw the steel window gates shut, and lock up. The Bum Rap, where Carolyn and I have a standing appointment with a bottle of scotch, is just around the corner at Broadway and East Tenth Street. It’s a five-minute walk, and I generally cross the threshold within a few minutes of six o’clock.
I have to pass Carolyn’s establishment, the Poodle Factory, in order to get to the Bum Rap; it’s almost always closed when I do, and she’s almost always at our usual table by the time I arrive.
But not today, because I was out the door at Barnegat Books by twenty-eight minutes after five. (I don’t know why I checked the time, or why I still remember it. But I did and I do.) The Poodle Factory is two doors east of the bookshop, and Carolyn Kaiser was sweeping dog hair out the door when I got there.
“Bernie,” she said. “Oh, don’t tell me. You haven’t got time for a drink tonight.”
“Why would I tell you that?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Personally, I always have time for a drink, but something could have come up. A chance to examine and possibly buy a promising collection of books. The opportunity to have drinks and dinner with a personable and attractive woman.”
“You’re a personable and attractive woman,” I pointed out, “and I’m about to have drinks with you. I don’t know about dinner, but it’s certainly a possibility.”
“A woman,” she said, “with whom the possibility exists of a romantic encounter. You know what I mean, Bern.”
“At the moment,” I said, “you’re the only woman in my life.”
“Then I don’t know what it would be. A dental emergency?”
“A dental emergency?”
“Well, people have them, though mine are always on weekends. The last toothache I had hit me on a Friday an hour after my dentist went home to Mamaroneck, and all I could do was stay drunk until Monday morning.”
“The sacrifices we’re called upon to make.”
“Don’t I know it? But you’re not canceling our date, so why am I trying to figure out the reason?” She’d been running through her usual chores, and now she drew the door shut and turned the key in the lock. “Next stop,” she said, “the Bum Rap.”
“Not yet.”
“Oh?”
“That’s why I wanted to catch you before you got out the door,” I said. “There’s someplace I’d like to go first. It’s maybe four or five blocks from here, and I thought we could walk over there together.”
“Four or five blocks? I don’t see why not. It’s not like I’m wearing high heels.”
“No.”
“I mean, even when I was seeing that woman who tried to turn me into a lipstick lesbian, I never even thought about heels.”
Carolyn occasionally claims to be five-foot-two, although she’d have to be standing on something for that to be true. Or, say, wearing three-inch heels. She is, however, my best friend in the whole world, and I kept the thought to myself.
“There,” I said.
We’d walked the half block to Broadway, turned to the right and headed downtown. We passed Two Guys from Luang Prabang, the restaurant that had supplied the excellent Laotian food we’d lunched on a few hours earlier, and we passed the Bum Rap, and we walked another block to Ninth Street and turned left. Two more blocks and we were standing across the street from a very tall and very narrow building that was all steel and glass.
“Damn,” Carolyn said. “What’s that doing there?”
“Occupying space,” I said, “though not very much of it in terms of its footprint. Given the size of the lot, it ought to be seven stories tall, maybe twelve at the most.”
“I could count windows,” she said, “but looking straight up gives me an ice cream headache. How tall is it?”
“Forty-two stories.”
“I read something about buildings like this, Bern. They call them splinters.”
“I think it’s slivers.”
“Same difference. Either way they get under your skin. What the developers do, they buy a building, maybe two buildings, and evict all the rent-controlled tenants and knock everything down. What do you figure happened to the people who used to live here?”
“Maybe they’re at Bowl-Mor,” I said, “bowling a few frames and knocking back a couple of beers. Oh, wait a minute. They can’t be there, can they? Because the glass-and-steel people knocked down that building, too.”
Bowl-Mor, which it won’t surprise you to learn was a bowling alley, had been a going concern for years before I became the owner of Barnegat Books. It was part of the local landscape, and I passed it every morning when I walked the few blocks from the Union Square subway station to the bookstore. That changed a year or so ago when developers acquired the building that housed it and replaced it with an oversized office building designed to house software developers and others of their ilk.
That’s been standard operating procedure on the island of Manhattan ever since the Canarsie Indians sold the place for twenty-four dollars and walked away congratulating themselves on their cunning. Buildings come and go, but the move to create Silicon Alley ran into opposition from the strong Greenwich Village preservationist movement. While those blocks of University Place lie outside the official Greenwich Village Historic District, you could argue that they were very much a part of the Village, and more than sufficiently historic to remain untouched.
And so it was argued, by some very earnest and public-spirited people, and financial considerations tipped the scales, as they do most of the time. And that was the end of Bowl-Mor.
“It still bothers you,” Carolyn said. “I mean, I sort of get it, Bern, but when did you ever do more at Bowl-Mor than give it a nod as you walked on by?”
“We went bowling,” I said. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”
“I remember. It was fun.”
“Right.”
“At first I couldn’t keep the ball out of the gutter, but then I started to get the hang of it. I can even see where it could become a lesbian thing, like softball. And maybe it is, for all I know. In Cleveland, say.”
“If they have lesbians in Cleveland.”
“We are everywhere, my friend.” She sighed. “Bowling. You and I bowled once and we never went back.”
“But we could have.”
“And now we can’t.”
“Exactly. And many’s the time after lunch when I thought about letting the store stay closed for an hour while I bowled a couple of frames. And no, I never actually did this, but the point is I thought about it, and it was something I could have done.”
“Coulda woulda shoulda, and now you can’t, and here we are standing in front of a sliver or a splinter or whatever the hell it is. They kicked the tenants out and then they bought air rights from everybody on the block and built something that reaches halfway to the moon. I didn’t know there were any slivers in this part of town.”
“I think the Innisfree is the first.”
“Is that what they call it? Who lives here, Bern?”
“Hardly anybody.”
“They couldn’t sell the apartments?”
“Oh, they didn’t have any trouble selling them,” I told her. “They were all sold before the building was completed. But most of them are empty.”
She thought for a moment. “Foreign buyers,” she said.
“Mostly, yes.”
“Looking to launder money and have a secure investment in New York when things go to hell in Moscow or Minsk or Budapest or Istanbul, wherever they were playing King of the Hill. Oligarchs, Bern? Is that the word I’m looking for?”
“It’s a word you hear a lot these days,” I allowed, “but I don’t know the exact definition, or how many of the buyers fit it. I think there’s a better term.”
“Oh?”
“Rich bastards,” I said. “That pretty much covers it, and it’s not limited to foreigners. Because there’s at least one Innisfree resident who’s about as foreign as apple pie. He was born right here in the USA.”
“Who’s that?”
Something kept me from uttering the name. “If it wouldn’t give you an ice cream headache,” I said, “I’d suggest you tilt your head back and look up at the very top floor. Not that you could see much of anything from this angle, but if you could, and if you were equipped with Superman’s x-ray vision, you’d see something pretty remarkable.”
“A rich bastard?”
“That too,” I said, “if he happens to be home now. But you’d also see the Kloppmann Diamond.”
“The Kloppmann Diamond,” she said. “It’s here, Bern? On top of the Innisfree?”
“That would put it on the roof. But it’s a few feet down from there, in the penthouse.”
“I remember when the Museum of Natural History announced they were planning on selling it. They used a different word.”
“Deaccessioning. They made the difficult but essential decision to deaccession their most valuable gem.”
“I remember a lot of people got upset.”
“There was a flap,” I said. “You’d have thought the Louvre was putting the Mona Lisa on the auction block.”
“Smile and all. I remember somebody on New York One suggesting that Mike Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Bill Gates should each kick in an eight-figure sum, outbid all comers, and give the diamond back to the museum. But that idea never seemed to get anywhere.”
“Gee, I wonder why.”
“Maybe because the four billionaires had the same thought I did, which was that the museum would say ‘Thank you very much,’ and wait a few years and then put it up for sale again. But they went through with it and sold it?”
“At Sotheby’s,” I said. “The week before last.”
I raised my eyes forty-two stories, but I didn’t keep them there long. There was nothing to see, just glass and steel, and the sense of vertigo I experienced made even that a blur. I lowered my gaze, all the way down to street level, and noted once again the security cameras mounted on the front of the building, and on the smaller and far less prepossessing buildings on either side.
And, indeed, on almost every building on the block, which made this a block like any other block in the city I call home.
Carolyn was asking about the sale, and the hammer price, and the identity of the winning bidder. “And you said he’s an American, Bern?”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Like apple pie.”
“More like school shootings,” I said. “Or lynching.”
“As American as lynching. But who is he?”
Something kept me from supplying the name. “I’d say he was the worst man in the world,” I said, “but that covers a lot of ground, and there’s no end of predatory pedophiles and serial killers who might very well argue the point. But I get the feeling we’re going to get a glimpse of him right now.”
A gleaming silver limousine, long enough to accommodate an entire high school cheerleading squad on prom night, was pulling to a stop in front of the Innisfree.
A door opened. A man emerged, his pink head the size and shape of a bowling ball, and every bit as unencumbered with hair. He was wearing a suit he’d bought from the Big & Tall Shoppe, but he’d done some squats and pushups since his final fitting, and he looked as though he might burst out of it.
“Is that him, Bern? What’s a guy like that going to do with the Kloppmann Diamond? Wear it for a pinky ring?”
Another of the limo’s doors opened, and another man got out, and if he wasn’t a twin of the first hulk he was at the very least a brother from another mother. Same size, same gleaming skull, same suit that had failed to keep up with the hypertrophy of his massive upper body.
“There’s two of him,” Carolyn said. “You’d think one would be enough.”
“More than enough,” I agreed, “but neither one looks like the man who bought the Kloppmann. My guess is they’re his bodyguards, and the body they’re guarding is in the rear seat of the limo, waiting for one of them to open the door for him.”
That was what happened, but from our point of view it was anticlimactic, because one of the bodyguards opened the rearmost curbside door, and the limo blocked our view of the man who got out of it. He was halfway to the Innisfree’s entrance by the time it drove off, and we caught a glimpse of him from the back, flanked by his two guardians, even as the liveried ostiary made a show of throwing open the door for him.
In no time at all he was through it, and it had swung shut behind him. “So much for Orrin Vandenbrinck,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. I need a drink.”
2
By the time we got to the Bum Rap, someone was sitting at our usual table. Some two, I should say, the pair consisting of a man around forty with a tweed flat cap on his head and a woman who’d been badly served by her hairdresser, and whose expression showed that she was aware of this, and would not soon forgive or forget. And that’s all you have to know about them, because we never saw either of them again, and I only mention them because there they were, sitting at our table.
Not that it mattered, because one table at the Bum Rap is every bit as good as another. The only reason we sit at the same table each time is because it saves deciding where to sit. And if the table’s taken, as it sometimes is, we find another.
What’s important isn’t the table. It’s what’s on the jukebox, and what’s in one’s glass. Kris Kristofferson was on the jukebox, looking for his cleanest dirty shirt, and that’s always a plus, but I still needed a drink.
When we walked in, Maxine was delivering a glass of beer to a man on the far side of the room, but it didn’t take her long to get to our side. “Thank God you’re here,” Carolyn said. “I’ll have my usual scotch on the rocks, and Bernie’ll have the same, except he may want it with water. Or even soda.”
“Why don’t we ask him?” I suggested. “If we do, we might find out he doesn’t want scotch at all.”
I looked at the ceiling. It’s one of those old-fashioned stamped tin ceilings, and if you’re going to look at a ceiling you could do a lot worse, but I was just pretending to give the matter some consideration. “A martini,” I pronounced. “Very dry, very cold, and very soon.”
Carolyn: “Gin or vodka?”
“Gin,” Maxine said, “because if it was vodka you’d say ‘Vodka martini.’ But nobody says ‘gin martini.’ That’d be whatchamacallit.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, you know. Like baby puppy or crooked politician. There’s a word for it.”
“Redundant,” I said.
“There you go. Any particular kind of gin?”
I shook my head and she went off to fetch it, and brought it in a stemmed glass with an olive for garnish. “I figured straight up,” she said, “because if you wanted it on the rocks you’d have said so.”
“Good thinking.”
“Same thing if you wanted a twist instead of an olive. Like gin and straight up and olive are the default mode, you know?”
“Exactly,” I said, and she went away beaming, having set our respective drinks before us, and we raised our respective glasses but didn’t bother clinking them together, or trying to think of something to toast. Carolyn had a swig of scotch and I hesitated for perhaps a hemisemidemiquaver of a moment, then took a long drink of cold gin. I don’t know if it had been shaken or stirred, and why on earth would anyone care?
Carolyn was holding her breath, watching me, and let it out when she saw me swallow.
I asked her what was wrong.
“Wrong? We’re in the Bum Rap, winding down after a long day of washing dogs and selling books—”
“Mostly not selling books,” I said.
“Selling, not selling, whatever. We’re here, and there’s booze in our glasses and we’ve just transferred some of it to our tummies, and what’s that line you like about malt and Milton Berle?”
I had to unpack that one. “Not Milton Berle,” I said. “John Milton, the poet.”
“That’s who I meant, and what’s the line he wrote?”
“He wrote Paradise Lost,” I said, “among other things, but it was A. E. Housman who wrote the line you’re thinking of. ‘Malt can do more than Milton can / To Justify God’s Ways to man.’”
“That’s it. And whatever malt can do, Bern, scotch can do it quicker.” She took another sip. “I feel better already. How about you?”
“I feel fine,” I said, and drank some more of my martini. The last martini I could recall was one I’d had before lunch with Marty Gilmartin at his club, The Pretenders. That had been in the spring, I seemed to remember. Call it April, and now it was October, so that was what, six months?
Unless it was an earlier April, which seemed equally possible, in which case it was a year and a half. Either way, it seems fair to say it was a long time between martinis.
“I took a sip of my drink,” I said, “and you were the one who relaxed. Visibly.”
“So? We’re close, Bern. Like Corsican brothers. You take a drink and I relax.”
I looked at her.
“Okay,” she said. “What happened is you said you didn’t want scotch, and that worried me. I was afraid you were going to order Perrier instead, and we both know what that means.”
What it used to mean, back in the good and bad old days, was that I wanted to maintain a crystal clear head for an evening of breaking and entering. But I hadn’t done any of that since well before my last martini, whether it was six months or a year and a half ago.
I thought about it. “I walked you over to the Innisfree,” I said, “and told you about the Kloppmann Diamond, and pointed out Orrin Vandenbrinck—”
“And I could feel how much you wanted to steal it, Bern.”
“Well, sure,” I said. “I’m a born thief and I love to steal. It’s a character defect, I’ve never denied it, but it’s not a phase I’m going through. It’s part of who I am.”
“Right.”
“And the Kloppmann Diamond is about as good as it gets in the world of precious stones, and the man who owns it is one of the most contemptible human beings on the planet. And instead of stashing it in a vault, as anyone with half a brain would do, he’s announced to all the world that he’s keeping it in his apartment, an apartment that’s a very short walk from where we’re sitting right this minute.”
“Jesus, Bern. You still want to steal it, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. But it’s not going to happen. I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. Look, I haven’t picked a lock or climbed through a window in ages, and it’s not because I’ve reformed. I’ve been rendered obsolete.”
“Obsolete.”
“Well, what else would you call it? You saw the security cameras at the Innisfree. And you saw the ones we passed on our way here.”
“Only because you pointed them out to me, Bern. ‘Look, there’s another one! Smile, Carolyn—you’re on Candid Camera!’”
“And those were just the ones I spotted. There were probably just as many I never noticed. I understand the UK’s even worse, and that if a Londoner’s not inside a private dwelling he’s almost certain to be in front of a camera. And New York’s not far behind.”
“Commit a crime,” she said, “and the world is made of glass.”
“He didn’t know the half of it.”
“Who’s that, Bern?”
“Ralph Waldo Emerson,” I said. “That’s who you were just quoting. The world is made of glass, all right, and the glass is a camera lens. And it’s not just the cameras, either. You remember when that one manufacturer was crowing about his pickproof lock?”
She did. “And you bought one,” she said, “purely for research purposes, and you sat down with it, and how long did it take you to get through it? Two minutes?”
“A little longer than that, but the word pickproof turned out to be false advertising. But that was then. Now they’ve got electronic locks that I wouldn’t stand a chance against. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
I brought my glass to my lips, only to find that I’d somehow contrived to finish it. I looked up, caught Maxine’s eye right away, noted that Carolyn’s glass was as empty as my own, and made the circular motion one makes to indicate that we could do with another round.
While we waited for it, I expanded my rant. I had two vocations, I said, and that was the right term for them because they weren’t just how I made my living, they were each a genuine calling. Burglary and bookselling, not that far apart in the dictionary, and both of them proper Twentieth Century occupations that had withered and died in the new millennium.
People didn’t browse a bookshop anymore, unless they were looking for a preview of something they could subsequently order online. They weren’t crazy, it wasn’t part of a plot; the world had changed, and it was infinitely easier and more efficient, not to mention cheaper, to do your book hunting at your computer.
“That’s fine for everybody—except those of us who own bookshops. And I have to admit it’s even worked out well for some of my fellow booksellers; they set up web sites, list their entire inventory, and spend their days packing up books and filling orders. More often than not they close their stores, because why pay rent when you can work out of your house and stow your wares in a storage locker? Your whole operation is easier and less expensive to run, and you never have to talk to a customer.”
“I thought you liked talking to customers, Bern.”
That was something I’d had in mind when I bought Barnegat Books from old Mr. Litzauer—bright literate conversations with bright literate customers, and there’d been many of them over the years, some of them of the female persuasion. Now what I mostly get are the ones who can’t understand why I don’t want to buy their mother’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.
“And a modern up-to-date burglar,” I went on, “wouldn’t sit around bemoaning all the locks he could no longer pick. He’d give his burglar tools a decent burial and pay the kind of attention to computers that I paid to locks. He’d teach himself how to hack his way past filters and firewalls and into back doors and rabbit holes, and don’t ask me what those words mean, because if I knew more than a handful of buzzwords I’d be a rich man working ten days a year. I’d know the ins and outs of computer security, and I’d cobble up some ransomware and hold some city hostage. ‘Listen up, Portland. I just shut you down, your cops, your fire department, your hospitals, your schools. All your traffic lights are green in both directions and your motorists are playing the world’s wildest game of bumper cars. You’ve been cyber-poisoned, and if you want the antidote all you have to do is transfer a million dollars’ worth of some incomprehensible cryptocurrency into my numbered account.’”
“Which Portland, Bern? Maine or Oregon?”
“They can take turns,” I said. “But I never wanted to be that kind of a thief. I didn’t start letting myself into other people’s houses because I wanted to increase my net worth dramatically. If that’s what I wanted I’d have gone to work for Goldman Sachs. I get a thrill out of burglary, Carolyn. You want it to be profitable, same as I want to sell a book for more than I paid for it, but when you come right down to it the money’s just a way of keeping score.”
There was more to the rant, there always is, but it was nothing I hadn’t said before and nothing she hadn’t heard before, and eventually I’d let off enough steam to give it a rest. I looked at my glass and saw that the second martini had gone the way of the first.
“You want another, Bern? I’ll keep you company if you do.”
“I do,” I said, “and I don’t, and don’t is gonna win this one. A third martini would undo the good work of the first two.”
“You’d drink yourself sober? I’ve heard of that, but I’ve never seen it happen in real life.”
I shook my head. “You were right,” I said.
“I was? That’s good news. What was I right about?”
“The martini,” I said. “The first one. I ordered it because I figured it would hit me harder than my usual scotch and water.”
“And did it?”
“Of course,” I said. “And that’s what I wanted, partly because of the kind of day it had been, but also because so much of me wanted nothing more than to go back to that inexcusable waste of glass and steel and find a way into the penthouse.”
“You wanted the Kloppmann Diamond.”
“I wanted to take my best shot at it. And I knew I was being crazy, and I knew I had to keep myself from what would clearly be self-destructive behavior, and I wasn’t sure scotch would do it. I could have a glass of scotch, or even two of them, and walk away telling myself I was still clearheaded enough to risk life and limb at the Innisfree. I’d be wrong about that, but that’s what I’d tell myself, and I might be addled enough to think I was making sense.”
“But with one or two martinis—”
“It’d be a different story. And I’ve had my two martinis, and I have to say they’ve done the job. I’m not slurring my words, at least I don’t think I am—”
“You’re not, Bern.”
“—and I’m pretty sure I could walk a straight line, although I don’t know that I could pass a field sobriety test.”
“Since you don’t own a car,” she said, “you probably won’t have to.”
“All in all,” I said, “I feel the way a person would want to feel after drinking a pair of martinis. A little looser, a little less wired. But if I had a third martini—”
“You’d be drunk?”
“I’d be at risk of losing the certainty I feel right now that this is no night to return to a life of crime. The third martini could all too easily unlock the oh-what-the-hell factor.”
“Oh what the hell,” she said. “‘Oh what the hell, I know she’s straight, but why not put the moves on her anyway? Oh what the hell, so who cares if she’s married? How much of a problem could that possibly be?’”
“There you go.”
“There I’ve gone, Bern, all too often, and I’ve almost always regretted it. No third martini for you.”
“Absolutely not. I don’t even want one, truth to tell. In fact—”
“You want to call it a night.”
“I think so. I think I’ll treat myself to a cab, and I think I’ll get in bed with my book and read myself to sleep.”
“You were talking about the book at lunch,” she recalled. “Fredric Brown?”
I took it from my pocket.
“What Mad Universe. It’s science fiction? I’ve only read his mysteries. Night of the Jabberwock, The Wench is Dead.”
“Fine books.”
“The Awesome Clipjoint. No, that’s wrong.”
“Fabulous,” I said.
“Of course, The Fabulous Clipjoint. When did he write it, back in the Fifties?”
“1947.”
“Well, that was well before awesome. People who say awesome now wouldn’t be born for another thirty years. What’s it about, Bern? Colonies on Alpha Centauri? Space ships shooting at each other with lasers?”
“It’s about alternative universes,” I said, and explained as best I could after having had that second martini. “You remember Voltaire’s line in Candide? About this being the best of all possible worlds? Well, Brown’s premise in What Mad Universe is that all possible worlds exist, all possible universes, and you and I happen to be in this particular universe, sitting at a table in what some people would call a dive bar—”
“But for us it’s a home away from home.”
“Whatever. But if something gave us the right sort of nudge, we could be in a different universe. I’d still be me and you’d still be you, and the Bum Rap might still be here, but it would be a different universe and we’d be leading slightly different lives. You’d still have a Roosevelt dime in your pocket, but FDR would be facing in the opposite direction.”
“What difference would that make?”
“Maybe none.”
She thought it over, shook her head. “I get the feeling it’s too deep for me, Bern.”
“No, if you were to read the book it would make perfect sense to you, Carolyn. Or if I could explain it better, but that’ll have to wait until another day. All I want to do now is go home.”
“I could go home myself,” she said, “and eventually I probably will. But first I’ll head for the Cubby Hole, in the hope of finding some dishy dame who’s neither straight nor married. And, if this is really the best of all possible worlds, I might get lucky.”
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.
4
I stayed up long enough to finish the book, turned off my light, and woke up eight hours later with the sense of having slept through a full night’s worth of vivid dreams without remembering any of them. Whatever they may have been, they’d left me well rested, so I couldn’t see that I had any cause for complaint.
Shower, shave, etc. I put on my usual costume—chinos, a blue button-down shirt, and a navy blazer. I thought about a tie, as I occasionally do, and I decided against it, as I almost always do. It’s my store, as I’ve said, and in the spirit of our casual age I could wear jeans and a Mötley Crüe T-shirt, and a year or two ago I went through a month or two of doing just that.
But what I discovered was that when I went for casual comfort, people tended to relate to me as to a clerk earning hourly wages; when I wore the blazer, they assumed I owned the place. Since the pride of proprietorship was about the only thing I get out of Barnegat Books, I figured I’d dress accordingly.
I didn’t recognize the fellow behind the desk, but that’s not unusual. Our doormen come and go, often departing before I manage to learn their names. I wished this one a good morning, and he looked up from his Spanish-language newspaper and gave me an uncertain smile.
“No CCTV,” I said, pointing to the spot on the wall usually occupied by the monitor. “Did it break down again?”
The smile faded a degree or two, but his expression remained uncertain. There didn’t seem too much point in trying to prolong our conversation, such as it was, so I walked out into a perfectly satisfactory October morning.
I had my usual breakfast at the diner around the corner on Seventy-second Street, skipped a second cup of coffee, and entered the subway station at Seventy-second and Broadway, and that’s when I got the first clue that this was going to be an unusual day.
I couldn’t find my Metrocard.
I keep it in a compartment in my wallet, and I always put it back in the same place, because it’s something I use at least once and more often twice a day, so I don’t want to have to hunt for it. Reach into pocket, remove wallet, take card from usual spot, swipe it at the turnstile, and put it back—it doesn’t take long for this to become automatic, and I did it now as automatically as ever, except my Metrocard had unaccountably gone missing.
I’d used it last the previous morning, and would have used it again to return home, but for that second martini that had made advisable the small luxury of a taxi. I was sure I’d put it back after use, but I’d drawn my wallet from my pocket any number of times since then, and I might have been careless enough for something to slip out and disappear.
In the cab, say, when I’d fumbled for the right bills so I could be as generous as I wanted to be, without doing an imitation of drunken sailor.
These things happen, and a Metrocard with less than $20 of stored credit is a far less upsetting loss than my American Express card, say, or my driver’s license, both of which a quick search showed I still had. (On the other hand, if I had to lose something, why couldn’t it have been the card an earnest customer had pressed upon me, the overly elaborate business card of a psychic healer who was said to work wonders? For that matter, why hadn’t I ditched the card as soon as that particular customer was out the door?)
Never mind. There’s a clutch of vending machines where you can add additional funds to your Metrocard—or, if you’ve lost the thing, purchase a replacement. I looked for it, but they’d apparently moved it, and I couldn’t seem to find where they’d relocated it.
I went to the booth and told the attendant I needed a new Metrocard.
She smiled pleasantly. “A SubwayCard,” she said.
“A card to get on the subway,” I said, and made a swiping motion to get the point across. “A Metrocard.”
Another smile. “Where are you from? I hope you’re enjoying New York.”
“I’m from West End Avenue,” I said, “and I like it here just fine. But I’d really like to get downtown to open my store, and I lost my Metrocard and I need to replace it.”
Her expression changed. She’d been giving me the smile one offers to a hapless tourist, and now what I was getting was the tentative look extended to the ambulatory psychotic. I probably wasn’t dangerous, her expression suggested, but better safe than sorry.
“I’m sure many people call them that,” she said carefully, “but here’s what we have.” And she held up a wallet-sized plastic rectangle. It had the same black strip across its bottom that you’d find on a Metrocard, but instead of slanting blue letters on an orange background it sported white block caps on a forest green field, and what they spelled out was not Metrocard but SubwayCard.
I felt the way a pinball machine must feel when the player jostles it overmuch.
Tilt!
###
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