The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,72
a little more oafish. Either extreme might well have done the trick. It was this middle-of-the-road crap that caused all the trouble.
Well, as Emily D. would say, frigate. High time I sailed away from all this. I went over to the shelves and started looking at the books.
I stayed there in the library, reading, then went upstairs to Aunt Augusta’s Room and ran into Millicent Savage in the hallway. She’d won, she told me triumphantly. She was going to be allowed to remain in Uncle Roger’s Room. I told her I thought she should stay with her parents.
“Why?” she demanded. “So you can burglarize Uncle Roger?”
“What’s he got to steal besides a pipe and slippers?”
“And the pipe’s smelly,” she said, getting into the spirit of things. “And the slippers have holes in them.”
“Poor old Uncle Roger.”
“No, it’s Poor Miss McTavish! Gross old Uncle Roger.”
“I still think you should stay in your parents’ room,” I said.
“Why?”
“I just think it would be a good idea.”
She looked at me. “You think there’s going to be another murder,” she said, “but you won’t come right out and say so because you don’t want me to be scared. But if I’m not scared, I’ll want to go on staying in my own room.”
“It’s a poser,” I agreed.
“I think you’re right,” she said. “I think there’s going to be another killing. But I won’t be the victim.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I’m just a little kid,” she said. “Nobody’s going to bother killing me. You’re the one who should be scared.”
“Me?”
She nodded solemnly. “Somebody’s going to be murdered tonight,” she said, “and it might be you.”
An hour or so later I was in yet another sitting room. This one boasted no antelopes on the wall, just a couple of edged weapons. One of them had a wave-shaped blade about eight inches long, and I took it down from the wall to admire it. I couldn’t swear to it, but what it looked like to me was a Malayan kris, a frequent denizen of the very same crossword puzzles that welcomed the oryx and the zebu. I ran my thumb across the blade, decided it was sharp enough for headhunting, and hung it back on the wall.
I’d stopped at the bar first, where I’d poured myself a drink and made the appropriate notation in the book. I was making the drink last, just wetting my lips every few pages while I worked my way through Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful novel of journalists in Africa. There’s a passage fairly early on in which a dour newspaperman reminisces about once having made and launched a dugout canoe, whereupon the thing sank like a stone. I was a little vague on the details, but I remembered that I’d laughed for ten minutes the first time I read the book. I didn’t know when I’d be likely to hit it, and I was a little worried that it wouldn’t be as funny this time, and that I’d wind up wondering why I’d ever thought it was funny in the first place.
Better to be anxious about that than to worry about being bridged and mushroomed and cameled and pillowed to death. While I couldn’t be sure how my favorite passage would hold up, so far the book was an excellent choice. There were, to be sure, hundreds if not thousands of books on the shelves that I hadn’t read, but this was a night to be reading something I could count on. I wanted to escape, but on familiar paths.
I’d passed Raffles earlier in the upstairs hall, and you’d have thought I’d done something to offend him; he paid me no attention at all, and he’d have sailed on by with his tail held high if he’d had one. He turned up again after I’d been reading for half an hour, having undergone a personality transplant in the interim. He came over, rubbed against my ankle, draped himself over my feet, and purred with such energy that I felt the vibrations clear to my knees.
He was still in place, still revving his motor, when I heard footsteps and looked up at Carolyn. “You know,” I said, “I’ve got a good book to read and good whisky to drink and a comfortable chair to sit in. I’ve got a cat who has the decency to act as though he loves me, even though we know how unlikely that is. It’s not a bad life. I hope I don’t get killed.”