The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,30

for it. I figure I earned it.”

I chased the last bite of my sandwich with the last swallow of coffee and put the wrappings and the empty cup in the trash. Then I returned to watch Carolyn put the finishing touches on Alison Wanda’s coiffure. “You must be exhausted after a night like that,” she said. “I’m surprised you bothered to open up today.”

“Well, Patience called, and that woke me up. And I had to come down and feed Raffles.”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “When I saw you hadn’t opened, I used my set of keys and gave him food and fresh water.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know, eleven o’clock, something like that. Why?”

“Because he gave a damn good imitation of a cat on the brink of starvation when I opened up a little after twelve.”

“You fed him again?”

“Of course I fed him again. His dish was spotless and he was wearing a hole in my sock.”

“You’re not supposed to overfeed them, Bern.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I went back to Barnegat Books and opened up again. Raffles was rubbing against my ankle the minute my foot cleared the threshold.

“Yeah, right,” I told him. “In your dreams, pal.”

I hauled my bargain table outside and propped up the cardboard three-books-for-a-buck sign. Sometimes passersby lifted the odd volume, but at that price how much harm were they doing me? I’d have been more dismayed if one of them walked off with the sign.

I perched on my stool behind the counter and picked up my current book, Clan of the Cave Bear. (I’d read it once years ago, but if you don’t think books are worth reading more than once you’ve got no business running a used-book store.) I still hadn’t read the paper I’d bought when I got off the subway the night before, but neither had I brought it along when I left the apartment. That was just as well, because I didn’t much want to know what was happening in the world. I was a lot more comfortable reading about a Cro-Magnon child being brought up by a couple of Neanderthals, which wasn’t all that different from the way I remembered my own childhood.

Around two o’clock I made my first sale. It was only a buck but it broke the ice, and by three I’d rung up something like fifty dollars on the cash register. You don’t get rich that way, you don’t even break even that way, but at least I was selling books. And I suppose the cat could take credit for those sales, because if I hadn’t had to feed him I wouldn’t have bothered opening up.

And, like it or not, I was $8,350 ahead for having dropped in on the Nugents. And I could do what I wanted with the money and forget what I’d gone through to earn it, because that chapter was over forever and I was in the clear.

Yeah, right. In your dreams, Bernie.

CHAPTER

Eight

Trade picked up as the afternoon wore on, with a steady stream of people finding their way in and out of the shop. A number of them were just browsing, but I’m used to that; it is, after all, part of what a secondhand bookstore is all about. So is chitchat, and I got involved in a little of that, including a spirited discussion of what modern New York might have been like if the Dutch had retained their footing in the New World. My partner in that particular conversation was an elderly gentleman with a neat white beard and piercing blue eyes who had been browsing in the Old New York section, and damned if he didn’t wind up spending close to two hundred dollars before he left.

As soon as he was out the door, a big man in a dark gray sharkskin suit drifted over to the counter and rested a meaty forearm on it. “Well, now,” he said. “I got to hand it to you, Bernie. This place is turnin’ into a regular literary saloon.”

“Hello, Ray,” I said. “Always a pleasure.”

“That was real interestin’,” he said. “What you an’ Santa Claus there were talkin’ about.”

“Don’t you think he was a little thin for Santa?”

“He’ll fill out, same as everybody else. An’ there’s plenty of time. How many shoppin’ days until Christmas?”

“I can never keep track.”

“How about burglin’ days, Bernie? How many of those between now an’ when Santa pops in through the skylight?”

“Don’t you mean down the chimney?”

“Whatever, Bernie. You’d be the expert on that, wouldn’t you?”