The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,25

one—”

“Next to the one with the yellow cover?”

“Right. Just to the right of the yellow book is one in a dust jacket, and you probably can’t read that title from here, and neither can I. But it’s The Big Sleep.”

“By Raymond Chandler.”

“That’s the guy.”

“And you can’t read the words on the spine, but you can recognize it anyway?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is it a first edition, Bern? Is it inscribed? Can you tell that from here, too?”

“I don’t have magical powers,” I said. “What I do have is eyes that look at books all day long. I can identify hundreds of books, maybe thousands, on the basis of a quick glimpse from the other side of the room. I probably haven’t read it and I may not know the first thing about the contents, but I can tell you the title and author and who published it.”

“Who published The Big Sleep?”

“Knopf in the U.S. and Hamish Hamilton in England. That’s the Knopf edition over there. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spotted it, because I don’t know what the British edition looks like. And it most likely would have been a copy of the American edition that Chandler brought east to give to Hammett.”

“He brought it for George Harmon Coxe, Bern. Remember? He gave it to Hammett on a whim.”

“At the time it was on a whim,” I said. “Now it’s on a shelf. We’re looking at it.”

“‘Here’s looking at you, Chandler.’”

“It’s a genuine piece of American literary history,” I said. “And we tracked it down, and there it is.”

“Assuming that’s the right copy.”

“A first of The Big Sleep’s a rare book to begin with. If they’ve got any copy at all, it’s pretty sure to be the one Chandler gave to Hammett. It’s not like Anthony Adverse, with at least one copy in any old collection of books.” I drew a breath. “That’s the Hammett copy on the shelf. The Hammett association copy. When they write about it—no, that’s ridiculous.”

“What is?”

“I was thinking it might go down in bibliographic literature as ‘the Rhodenbarr copy.’ Silly, huh?”

“I don’t think it’s silly.”

“You don’t? Well, it won’t happen. Be nice, though.” I got to my feet. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll buy you a drink, and then I’m about ready to turn in. What’s the matter?”

“You’re just gonna leave it there?”

“I’m not going to wheel the library steps over there and climb up them in the middle of the night. Not with other people in the room.”

“Why not? You told me it was okay to look at the book. It’s a library, you said. It’s natural to look at books in a library. Well, it’s every bit as natural to take them off the shelf and start reading. Where does it say look but don’t touch?”

I shook my head. “Later. It’s not going anywhere.”

CHAPTER

Eight

Let’s say you had this old tweed jacket.

It’s a fine old jacket, woven of wool from the thick fleeces of Highland sheep, crafted in a croft or crofted in a craft, something like that. If you look closely enough you’ll find threads of every color of the rainbow, with more hues and shades and tints and tones than in the biggest box of crayons Crayola ever made.

You bought it years ago, and even when it was new it looked old. Now it has leather patches on the elbows and leather piping on the cuffs, and by this time the leather itself is worn. And the pockets bulge from all the things you’ve stuffed into them over the years. And you’ve worn that jacket for long moonlit walks on the moors and spirited rambles in the fells. You’ve worn it on horseback, and your high-spirited dog has marked it with his muddy paws. It’s been rained on, and dampened by the mist. It’s soaked up the smoke from campfires in the open and peat fires in thatched cottages. And there’s sweat in it, too, honest human sweat. And human joy and human grief—and, if you look closely enough, you’ll be able to distinguish more hues and shades and tints and tones of emotion than there are crayons in the biggest box Crayola ever made.

And it’s soaked up music, too, the haunting screel of the bagpipes and the reedy piping of a tin flute, from glen to glen and o’er the mountainside. Toss in the lilt of an old ballad heard in a public house and stir in the murmur of a lullaby sung to a child. It’s all there, all absorbed by osmosis into the very