The Burglar Who Strove to Go Straight

After he’d left I tucked his forty dollars into my wallet, where it promptly became my forty dollars. I marked the Steinbeck down to fifteen dollars before shelving it and its companions. While doing this I spotted a few errant volumes and put them back where they belonged.

Browsers came and went. I made a few sales from the bargain table, then moved a Heritage Club edition of Virgil’s Eclogues (boxed, the box water-damaged, slight rubbing on spine, price $8.50). The woman who bought the Virgil was a little shopworn herself, with a blocky figure and a lot of curly orange hair. I’d seen her before but this was the first time she’d bought anything, so things were looking up.

I watched her carry Virgil home, then settled in behind the counter with a Grosset & Dunlap reprint of Soldiers Three. I’d been working my way through my limited stock of Kipling lately. Some of the books were ones I’d read years ago, but I was reading Soldiers Three for the first time and really enjoying my acquaintance with Ortheris and Learoyd and Mulvaney when the little bells above my door tinkled to announce a visitor.

I looked up to see a man in a blue uniform lumbering across the floor toward me. He had a broad, open, honest face, but in my new trade one learned quickly not to judge a book by its cover. My visitor was Ray Kirschmann, the best cop money could buy, and money could buy him seven days a week.

“Hey, Bern,” he said, and propped an elbow on the counter. “Read any good books lately?”

“Hello, Ray.”

“Watcha readin’?” I showed him. “Garbage,” he said. “A whole store full of books, you oughta read somethin’ decent.”

“What’s decent?”

“Oh, Joseph Wambaugh, Ed McBain. Somebody who tells it straight.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“How’s business?”

“Not too bad, Ray.”

“You just sit here, buy books, sell books, and you make a livin’. Right?”

“It’s the American way.”

“Uh-huh. Quite a switch for you, isn’t it?”

“Well, I like working days, Ray.”

“A whole career change, I mean. Burglar to bookseller. You know what that sounds like? A title. You could write a book about it. From Burglar to Bookseller. Mind a question, Bernie?”

And what if I did? “No,” I said.

“What the hell do you know about books?”

“Well, I was always a big reader.”

“In the jug, you mean.”

“Even on the outside, all the way back to childhood. You know what Emily Dickinson said. ‘There is no frigate like a book.’”

“Frig it is right. You didn’t just run around buyin’ books and then open up a store.”

“The store was already here. I was a customer over the years, and I knew the owner and he wanted to sell out and go to Florida.”

“And right now he’s soakin’ up the rays.”

“As a matter of fact, I heard he opened up another store in St. Petersburg. Couldn’t take the inactivity.”

“Well, good for him. How’d you happen to come up with the scratch to buy this place, Bernie?”

“I came into a few dollars.”

“Uh-huh. A relative died, somethin’ like that.”

“Something like that.”

“Right. What I figure, you dropped out of sight for a month or so during the winter. January, wasn’t it?”

“And part of February.”

“I figure you were down in Florida doin’ what you do best, and you hit it pretty good and walked with a short ton of jewelry. I figure you wound up with a big piece of change and decided Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s boy Bernard oughta fix hisself up with a decent front.”

“That’s what you figure, Ray?”

“Uh-huh.”

I thought for a minute. “It wasn’t Florida,” I said.

“Nassau, then. St. Thomas. What the hell.”

“Actually, it was California. Orange County.”

“Same difference.”

“And it wasn’t jewels. It was a coin collection.”

“You always went for them things.”

“Well, they’re a terrific investment.”

“Not with you on the loose they aren’t. You made out like a bandit on the coins, huh?”

“Let’s say I came out ahead.”

“And bought this place.”

“That’s right. Mr. Litzauer didn’t want a fortune for it. He set a fair price for the inventory and threw in the fixtures and the good will.”

“Barnegat Books. Where’d you get the name?”

“I kept it. I didn’t want to have to spring for a new sign. Litzauer had a summer place at Barnegat Light on the Jersey shore. There’s a lighthouse on the sign.”

“I didn’t notice. You could call it Burglar Books. ‘These books are a steal’—there’s your slogan. Get it?”

“I’m sure I will sooner or later.”

“Hey, are you gettin’ steamed? I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. It’s a nice front, Bern. It really is.”

“It’s not a front. It’s what I do.”

“Huh?”

“It’s what I do for a living, Ray, and it’s all I do for a living. I’m in the book business.”

“Sure you are.”

“I’m serious about this.”

“Serious. Right.”

“I am.”

“Uh-huh. Listen, the reason I dropped in, I was thinkin’ about you just the other day. What it was, my wife was gettin’ on my back. You ever been married?”

“No.”

“You’re so busy gettin’ settled, maybe marriage is the next step. Nothin’ like it for settlin’ a man. What she wanted, here it’s October already and she’s expectin’ a long winter. You never met my wife, did you?”

“I talked to her on the phone once.”

“‘The leaves are turnin’ early, Ray. That means a cold winter.’ That’s what she tells me. If the trees don’t turn until late, then that means a cold winter.”

“She likes it cold?”

“What she likes is if it’s cold and she’s warm. What she’s drivin’ at is a fur coat.”

“Oh.”

“She goes about five-six, wears a size-sixteen dress. Sometimes she diets down to a twelve, sometimes she packs in the pasta and gets up to an eighteen. Fur coats, I don’t figure they got to fit like gloves anyway, right?”

“I don’t know much about them.”

“What she wants is mink. No wild furs or endangered species because she’s a fanatic on the subject. Minks, see, they grow the little bastards on these ranches, so there’s none of that sufferin’ in traps, and the animal’s not endangered or any of that stuff. All that they do is they gas ’em and skin ’em out.”

“How nice for the minks. It must be like going to the dentist.”

“Far as the color, I’d say she’s not gonna be too fussy. Just so it’s one of your up-to-date colors. Your platinum, your champagne. Not the old dark-brown shades.”

I nodded, conjuring up an image of Mrs. Kirschmann draped in fur. I didn’t know what she looked like, so I allowed myself to picture a sort of stout Edith Bunker.

“Oh,” I said suddenly. “There’s a reason you’re telling me this.”

“Well, I was thinkin’, Bern.”

“I’m out of the business, Ray.”

“What I was thinkin’, you might run into a coat in the course of things, know what I mean? I was thinkin’ that you and me, we go back a ways, we been through a lot, the two of us, and—”

“I’m not a burglar anymore, Ray.”

“I wasn’t countin’ on a freebie, Bernie. Just a bargain.”

“I don’t steal anymore, Ray.”

“I hear you talkin’, Bern.”

“I’m not as young as I used to be. Nobody ever is but these days I’m starting to feel it. When you’re young nothing scares you. When you get older everything does. I don’t ever want to go inside again, Ray. I don’t like prisons.”

“These days they’re country clubs.”

“Then they changed a whole hell of a lot in the past few years, because I swear I never cared for them myself. You meet a better class of people on the D train.”

“Guy like you, you could get a nice job in the prison library.”

“They still lock you in at night.”

“So you’re straight, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I been here how long? All that time you haven’t had a single person walk in the store.”

“Maybe the uniform keeps ’em away, Ray.”

“Maybe business ain’t what it might be. You been in the business how long, Bern? Six months?”

“Closer to seven.”

“Bet you don’t even make the rent.”

“I do all right.” I marked my place in Soldiers Three, closed the book, put it on the shelf behind the counter. “I made a forty-dollar profit from one customer earlier this afternoon and I swear it was easier than stealing.”

“Is that a fact. You’re a guy made twenty grand in an hour and a half when things fell right.”

“And went to jail when they didn’t.”

“Forty bucks. I can see where that’d really have you turning handsprings.”

“There’s a difference between honest money and the other kind.”

“Yeah, and the difference comes to somethin’ like $19,960. This here, Bern, this is nickels and dimes. Let’s be honest. You can’t live on this.”

“I never stole that much, Ray. I never lived that high. I got a small apartment on the Upper West Side, I stay out of night clubs, I do my own wash in the machines in the basement. The store’s steady. You want to give me a hand with this?”

He helped me drag the bargain table in from the sidewalk. He said, “Look at this. A cop and a burglar both doin’ physical work. Somebody should take a picture. What do you get for these? Forty cents, three for a buck? And that’s keepin’ you in shirts and socks, huh?”

“I’m a careful shopper.”

“Look, Bern, if there’s some reason you don’t wanna help me out on this coat thing—”

“Cops,” I said.

“What about cops?”

“A guy rehabilitates himself and you refuse to believe it. You talk yourselves hoarse telling me to go straight—”

“When the hell did I ever tell you to go straight? You’re a first-class burglar. Why would I tell you to change?”

He let go of it while I filled a shopping bag with hardcover mysteries and began shutting down for the night. He told me about his partner, a clean-cut and soft-spoken young fellow with a fondness for horses and a wee amphetamine habit.

“All he does is lose and bitch about it,” Ray complained, “until this past week when he starts pickin’ the ponies with X-ray vision. Now all he does is win, and I swear I liked him better when he was losin’.”

“His luck can’t last forever, Ray.”

“That’s what I been tellin’ myself. What’s that, steel gates across the windows? You don’t take chances, do you?”

I drew the gates shut, locked them. “Well, they were already here,” I said stiffly. “Seems silly not to use them.”

“No sense makin’ it easy for another burglar, huh? No honor among thieves, isn’t that what they say? What happens if you forget the key, huh, Bern?”

He didn’t get an answer, nor do I suppose he expected one. He chuckled instead and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I guess you’d just call a locksmith,” he said. “You couldn’t pick the lock, not bein’ a burglar anymore. All you are is a guy who sells books.”