The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,46
behind the ear. The little devil purred, and the fat man scratched him some more, and Raffles purred some more, and then trotted off and leapt onto an open spot in the cookbooks section, on the fourth shelf from the bottom. From there he gazed at us, and if he’d had a grandparent from Cheshire instead of the Isle of Man, I do believe he’d have been smiling.
“It would be nice to be able to have a cat,” the fat man reflected. “If I ever had a bookstore, I would definitely keep a cat in it. I think it was a very wise choice you made.”
“Thank you.”
“And now,” he said, “I believe you have something for me, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”
“I do?”
“I believe so.”
He smiled again, same as before, and I decided that maybe those were his teeth after all. I was sure he would choose his dentist with as much care as his tailor, and dentistry has come a long ways in recent years. With regular visits to a first-rate dentist, you can have a mouthful of teeth so perfect that anyone would guess they were false.
But what could I have for him?
Oh.
“The Secret Agent,” I said, and he beamed. I reached behind me, picked Conrad’s novel off the shelf. I started to hand it to him, and he started to reach for it, and I drew it back a few inches. “But that wasn’t you on the phone before, was it?” He hesitated, and I answered my own question. “He sent you to pick up the book for him.”
That got me the smile again, and a nod to go with it. I handed it to him and he looked it over, but in a curious fashion; he didn’t page through it, didn’t even glance at the title or copyright pages, but instead turned it over and over in his hands, as if to absorb the essence of it through his palms. I’ve seen collectors do something similar with first editions or fine bindings, but this was just a reading copy.
But he was picking it up for the man who’d called, and might not know much about books beyond the fact that a cat fit nicely into a bookstore. Maybe he thought this was what you did when somebody handed you a book.
“Yes,” he said with satisfaction. “How much do you want for it?”
“Same as I said on the phone. It’s marked twelve. With tax it comes to a little over thirteen, but we can round it off. Thirteen’ll be fine.”
“Thirteen,” he said. Something rather like amusement showed in his blue eyes. He turned to his left—toward Raffles, actually—and took a dark brown leather notecase from his breast pocket, standing so that his body screened its contents from my view. He counted out thirteen bills, or what he said was that number, pronouncing “Thirteen” with the same curious inflection as he returned the notecase to his pocket. He turned to face me again, folded the sheaf of bills in half, and palmed them discreetly to me.
Something made me want to count them, but I told myself not to be silly. The likelihood of his shorting me seemed remote, and did I really care if I got eleven or twelve dollars instead of thirteen? I matched his discretion pound for pound, taking the bills in hand and conveying them smoothly to a pocket. I wrote out a receipt, tucked it into the book and the book into a book-sized brown paper bag, and handed it to him.
“A great pleasure,” he said, smiling the broad smile again, and spun neatly around, walking right over to Raffles and scratching him one more time behind the ear. “A truly delightful pussy cat,” he said, while Raffles put everything he had into a full-throated purr.
Then the fat man spun once more on his heel and headed for the door.
Even as the bell was tinkling to announce his departure, I drew my hand out of my pocket. I looked down at what I was holding and saw he’d made a mistake, because the top bill was a hundred. Then I fanned the bills, and they were all hundreds.
I may be a thief, but my thieving pulls up short at the bookshop door. I don’t rob my customers, or permit them to rob themselves. He’d just forked over $1300 for a twelve-dollar book, and that’s more sales tax than anybody should have to pay, fiscal crisis or no fiscal crisis.