The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,34

of colored paper, slipped a few hours into the past. I remembered eager hands and smooth skin and a warm mouth, and I wondered if there was any truth mixed in with the lies she’d told me.

There was that sweet magic between us, the physical magic and the mental magic, and I was tired enough to drop my guard and let her in. It would be easy, I thought, to let go a little bit more and fall in love with her.

And it wouldn’t be that dangerous, I decided. Not much worse than hang-gliding blindfolded. Safer on balance than swimming with an open wound in shark-infested waters, or playing catch with a bottle of nitroglycerine, or singing “Rule, Britannia” at Carney’s Emerald Lounge in Woodside.

I paid the check and overtipped, as lovers are wont to do. Then I walked over to Broadway and caught a train heading downtown.

Chapter Ten

I unlocked the steel gates, opened the door, scooped up the mail and tossed it on the counter, shlepped the bargain table outside and turned the sign in the window from Sorry…We’re CLOSED to OPEN…Come in! By the time I was perched on my stool behind the counter I had my first browser of the day. He was a round-shouldered gentleman in a Norfolk jacket and he was taking a mild interest in the shelves of General Fiction while I was taking about as much interest in the mail. There were a couple of bills, quite a few book catalogs, a postcard asking if I had the Derek Hudson biography of Lewis Carroll—I didn’t—and a government-franked message from some clown who hoped he could continue representing me in Congress. An understandable desire. Otherwise he’d have to start paying his own postage.

While the chap in the Norfolk jacket was paging through something by Charles Reade, a sallow young woman with teeth like a beaver bought a couple of things from the bargain table. The phone rang and it was someone wanting to know if I had anything by Jeffery Farnol. Now I’ve had thousands of phone calls and I swear no one ever asked me that before. I checked the shelves and was able to report that I had clean copies of Peregrine’s Progress and The Amateur Gentleman. My caller wondered about Beltane the Smith.

“Not unless he’s under the spreading chestnut tree,” I said. “But I’ll have a look.”

I agreed to put the other two titles aside, not that anyone else was likely to snatch them up meanwhile. I took them from the shelves, ducked into my back room, placed them on my desk where they could bask in the illumination of the portrait hanging over the desk (St. John of God, patron saint of booksellers), and came back to confront a tall and well-fed man in a dark suit that looked to have been very meticulously tailored for someone else.

“Well, well, well,” said Ray Kirschmann. “If it ain’t Miz Rhodenbarr’s son Bernard.”

“You sound surprised, Ray,” I said. “This is my store, this is where I work. I’m here all the time.”

“Which is why I came here lookin’ for you, Bern, but you were in back and it gave me a turn. I figured somebody snuck in and burgled you.”

I looked over his shoulder at the fellow in the Norfolk jacket. He’d gone on from Charles Reade to something else, but I couldn’t see what.

“Business pretty good, Bern?”

“I can’t complain.”

“It’s holdin’ up, huh? Except you were never a one for holdups, were you? Makin’ ends meet?”

“Well, there are good weeks and bad weeks.”

“But you get by.”

“I get by.”

“And you got the satisfaction of treadin’ the straight an’ narrow path between right an’ wrong. That’s gotta be worth somethin’.”

“Ray—”

“Peace of mind, that’s what you got. It’s worth a lot, peace of mind is.”

“Uh—”

I nodded in the direction of the browser, who had assumed the unmistakable stance of a dropper of eaves. Ray turned, regarded my customer, and pinched his own abundant chin between thumb and forefinger.

“Oh, I get your drift, Bern,” he said. “You’re worried this gentleman here’ll be taken aback to learn about your criminal past. Is that it?”

“Jesus, Ray.”

“Sir,” Ray announced, “you may not realize this, but you’re gonna have the privilege of buyin’ a book from a former notorious criminal. Bernie here was once the sort’d burgle you outta house an’ home, and now he’s a walking testimony to criminal rehabilitation. Yessir, I’ll tell you, all of us in the NYPD think the world of Bernie here. Say, mister, you’re welcome