The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling - By Lawrence Block Page 0,66

She offered the book to the Maharajah for—how much?”

“Ten thousand,” said the Maharajah.

“A healthy price, but she was dealing with a resourceful man in more ways than one. He had her tracked down and followed. She wore a wig to disguise herself when she came down for a close look at me. Maybe that was so I wouldn’t recognize her when she slipped me the doped coffee. Maybe it was because she knew she was being checked out herself. Whatever she had in mind, it didn’t work. The Maharajah’s man tagged her to this shop, and a little research turned up the fact that the new owner of Barnegat Books had a master’s degree in breaking and entering.”

I grinned. “Are you people following all this? There are wheels within wheels. The Maharajah wasn’t going to shell out ten grand for Fort Bucklow, not because he’d miss the money but for a very good reason. He knew for a fact that the book was a fake. For one thing, he’d heard about Najd’s copy. And you had another reason, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you care to share it?”

“I own the original.” He smiled, glowing with the pride of ownership that they used to talk about in Cadillac ads. “The genuine copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, legitimately inscribed to Mr. H. Rider Haggard and removed from his library after his death. The copy which passed through the hands of Miss Unity Mitford and which may indeed have been in the possession of the Duke of Windsor. A copy, I must emphasize, which was delivered into my hands six years ago, long before this gentleman”—a brief nod at Whelkin—“happened on some undestroyed printer’s overstock, or whatever one wishes to call the cache of books from the Tunbridge Wells printshop.”

“So you wanted the phony copy?”

“I wanted to discredit it. I knew it was a counterfeit but I could not be certain in what way it had been fabricated. Was it a pure invention? Had someone happened on a manuscript and caused a spurious edition to be printed? Or was it what I now realize it to be, a genuine book with a faked inscription? I wished to determine just what it was and establish that Najd al-Quhaddar had a similarly bogus article, but I did not want to pay ten thousand dollars for the privilege, or I would be making myself the victim of a swindle.”

“So you tried to eliminate the middleman. You sent your friend here”—I smiled at Atman Singh, who did not smile back—“to collect the book from me as soon as I had it. And you instructed him to give me five hundred dollars. Why?”

“To compensate you. It seemed a fair return on your labor, considering that the book itself was of no value.”

“If you think that’s a fair price for what I went through, you’ve obviously never been a burglar. How did you know I had the book?”

“Miss Porlock informed me she would have it that evening. That indicated to me that you’d already retrieved it from its owner.”

Rudyard Whelkin shook his head. “Poor Maddy,” he said sadly. “I told her to hold onto the book. She’d have spiked an enormous sale of mine by what she did, but I guess she was restless. Wanted to pick up a bundle and get out of town.” He frowned. “But who killed her?”

“A man with a reason,” I said. “A man she double-crossed.”

“For God’s sake,” Whelkin said. “I wouldn’t kill anyone. And I certainly wouldn’t kill Madeleine.”

“Maybe not. But you’re not the only man she crossed. She did a job on everybody, when you stop to think about it. She drugged me and stole a book from me, but I certainly didn’t kill her. She was fixing to swindle the Maharajah, and he might well have felt a certain resentment when his agent came back from my shop with a worthless copy of Soldiers Three. But this wouldn’t leave him feeling betrayed because he didn’t expect anything more from the woman. Neither did I. We never had any reason to trust her in the first place, so how could we feel betrayed? There’s only one man she really betrayed.”

“And who might that be?”

“Him,” I said, and leveled a finger at Prescott Demarest.

Demarest looked bewildered. “This is insane,” he said levelly. “Utterly insane.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I’ve been wondering what I’m doing in this madhouse and now I find myself accused of murdering a woman I never even heard of before tonight.