The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,111

the side where the sun was. ‘The photos have been thieved,’ he told me, ‘so I will make my deal with the thief. And perhaps he is less of a thief than the man he took them from.’ You know this book, The Power to Think Positive?”

“That’s The Power of Positive Thinking,” I said, “by Norman Vincent Peale. A great bestseller in its day. I’ve got two or three copies in the store, and I suppose I ought to put them on the bargain table, but I somehow feel I owe it to the author to think that someone’ll come along and pay full price for it.”

“Valdi Berzins was positively thinking, Mr. Rhodenbarr. He went to your bookstore with money to pay for the book. And instead he was killed.”

I said I saw it happen, and one of the women said it must have been awful for me, and I said it was worse for Berzins. “He came into the shop and said I must have something for him. And I didn’t know what he was talking about, and then I remembered Colby Riddle’s phone call, although I still didn’t know who’d been on the other end of the phone. I knew it wasn’t Berzins, the voice was wrong, but he seemed so confident I would know what he wanted, and that was all I could think of. I said the book’s title, and that seemed to make him happy, and he sure didn’t argue about the price. He paid me a hundred times what I asked him for, evidently assuming that I was leaving off the word hundred to save time. I realized this just in time to run outside after him and watch him get killed. If there hadn’t been a parked car in the way, I might have been killed along with him.”

“Who killed him?” Grisek demanded. “Who killed my friend Berzins?”

“That’s a good question. Here’s another. Why did he assume I’d know what book he wanted? And, when I mentioned the book by name, why did it make him happy?”

“You said The Secret Agent,” Carolyn said, “and that was him. He thought you were recognizing him for what he was.”

“That’s what I thought at first, but it doesn’t add up. It still doesn’t explain why he thought I’d have a book for him, or why he was happy with the one I handed him. He didn’t flip through it looking for pictures. He just paid for it and left. Colby, what made you ask for that particular book?”

“I’d been looking for a copy. It’s a book, and you’re a bookseller, and so—”

“You don’t much care for Conrad.”

“I don’t like his sea stories. I’m told The Secret Agent is the sort of book the man might have written if he’d never gone to sea. I thought it worth a try.”

“And worth a phone call.”

“Why not?”

“But I think you already got a phone call,” I said. “From a plastic surgeon.”

“Bernie,” he said, “you can’t be serious. I may look like a candidate for plastic surgery, but I’m afraid I lack the requisite vanity. Am I to assume the plastic surgeon in question is our host, Dr. Mapes? Why would you think I even know the man? How would we have met?”

“At school,” I said, “or on a bus, or in an Internet chat room, with both of you pretending to be lesbians. But if I had to guess, I’d say your dermatologist referred you. Maybe you had a suspicious mole on your face, in a spot that was sufficiently visible to warrant a plastic surgeon’s doing the work.”

“How could you possibly know something like that?”

“Just a wild guess. What I can’t figure out is how you knew Valdi Berzins.”

“I didn’t.”

“You must have. The two of you probably had a friend in common, some professor teaching a course called Latvian as a Second Language. One way or another, you knew both of them. And you called Mapes, or Mapes called you, and he let you know about these photos, and that he had a few hundred thousand dollars in a wall safe in his bedroom, and—”

“Hold it right there,” said one of the government men. They were both on their feet. One of them was holding a gun, while the other brandished a piece of paper. “I was wondering when you’d get around to the reason we’re here. A couple of hundred thousand dollars in undeclared cash, that sounds about right.” He whirled on Mapes. “Crandall Rountree Mapes? I’m