The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling - By Lawrence Block Page 0,63
bring on the market? A few hundred dollars apiece. They’d be legitimate rarities, and Kipling’s becoming something of a hot ticket again, but this particular work is not only a minor effort but distinctly inferior in the bargain. It has curiosity value rather than literary value. The books would still be worth hauling home from the printshop, but suppose they could be hawked one at a time as unique specimens? Suppose each one were furnished with a forged inscription in a fair approximation of Kipling’s handwriting? It’s hard to produce a new book and make it look old, but it’s not too tricky to scribble a new inscription in an old book. I’m sure there are ways to treat ink so that it looks fifty years old, with that iridescence some old inscriptions have.
“So my client did this. He autographed the books or had some artful forger do it for him, and then he began testing the waters, contacting important collectors, perhaps representing the book as stolen merchandise so the purchaser would keep his acquisition to himself. Because the minute anyone called a press conference or presented the book to a university library, the game was up. All the collectors he’d stung along the way would be screaming for their money back.”
“They couldn’t do anything about it, could they?” Carolyn wanted to know. “If he was a shady operator, they couldn’t exactly sue him.”
“True, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” She made a face and I regretted the choice of words. “At any rate,” I went on, “the inflated market for the remaining books would collapse in a flash. Instead of realizing several thousand dollars a copy, he’d have a trunkful of books he couldn’t give away. The high price absolutely depended on the books being one of a kind. When they were no longer unique, and when the holograph inscriptions proved to be forgeries, my client would have to find a new way to make a dishonest living.”
“He could always become a burglar,” the Maharajah suggested, smiling gently.
I shook my head. “No. That’s the one thing he damn well knew he couldn’t do, because when he needed a burglar he came to this very shop and hired one. He found out, undoubtedly through Madeleine Porlock, that Arkwright was planning to go public with his copy of Fort Bucklow. Maybe public’s the wrong word. Arkwright wasn’t about to ring up the Times and tell them what he had. But Arkwright was a businessman at least as much as he was a collector, and there was someone he was trying to do business with who had more of a genuine interest in Fort Bucklow than Arkwright himself, who had no special interest in Kipling or India or anti-Semitic literature or whatever this particular book might represent.”
Whelkin asked if I had someone specific in mind.
“A foreigner,” I said. “Because Arkwright was engaged in international commerce. A man with the wealth and power of an Indian prince.”
The Maharajah’s jaw stiffened. Atman Singh inclined his body a few degrees forward, prepared to leap to his master’s defense.
“Or an Arab oil sheikh,” I continued. “There’s a man named Najd al-Quhaddar who comes to mind. He lives in one of the Trucial States, I forget which one, and he pretty much owns the place. There was a piece about him not long ago in Contemporary Bibliophile. He’s supposed to have the best personal library east of Suez.”
“I know him,” the Maharajah said. “Perhaps the best library in the Middle East, although there is a gentleman in Alexandria who would almost certainly wish to dispute that assertion.” He smiled politely. “But surely not the best library east of Suez. There is at least one library on the Indian subcontinent which puts the Sheikh’s holdings to shame.”
Mother taught me never to argue with Maharajahs, so I nodded politely and went on. “Arkwright had a brilliant idea,” I told them. “He was trying to rig a deal with the Sheikh. Work up some sort of trade agreements, something like that. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow would be a perfect sweetener. Najd al-Quhaddar is a heavy supporter of the Palestinian terrorist organizations, a position that’s not exactly unheard of among the oil sheikhs, and here’s a unique specimen of anti-Semitic literature with a whole legend to go with it, establishing a great English writer as an enemy of world Jewry.
“There was only one problem. My client had already sold a book to the Sheikh.”