The Burglar Who Collected Copernicus

Ray Kirschmann, the best cop money can buy, found his way between the piles of books and leaned on my counter. “Bern,” he said, “this Coppernickels thing’s got your fingerprints all over it.”

“Coppernickels?”

“Polish guy with a telescope. Said the earth revolves around the sun, which every kid in school knows, so what’s the big deal?”

“Copernicus,” I said. “I think he said it first.”

“Wrote a whole book about it, Bern. There’s 260 of ’em left in the whole world, and each one’s worth 400 grand. And somebody’s stealing ’em.”

“I read about it,” I said carefully. “Here’s something to think about, Ray. If you multiply it out, the world’s supply of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium is worth $94 million, and the distance between the earth and the sun is 93 million miles.”

“Bern—”

“Coincidence, Ray? I don’t think so.”

He gave me a look. “There’s seven books been stolen so far,” he said, “minimum. Swiped out of libraries and colleges all over the world. In Kiev the thief posed as a cop.”

“Imagine that,” I said.

“Bern,” he said, “when I fire up the old mental computer and punch in ‘old books’ and ‘grand larceny,’ what always comes up is Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

“Maybe you should upgrade,” I suggested. “Maybe it’s a software problem. Ray, why would anyone want to steal Copernicus? You couldn’t turn around and sell it. And, even if you did have a customer, some rich collector who’d keep it in his safe and never show it to anybody, one copy’s all he’d want. Nobody in his right mind would try to steal all of them.”

I don’t think I convinced him, but eventually he went off to enforce the law somewhere else. And the next person through the door was my new best friend, Evan Tanner. “You’re up early,” I said.

He gave me a look. Tanner hasn’t slept since a shard of North Korean shrapnel destroyed the sleep center of his brain. That would make him somewhere in his sixties, but he spent a quarter of a century in a frozen food locker and looks about forty.

“Copernicus,” he said heavily, and started going on about plano-terrestrialism and the globularist heresy. Tanner’s a member of the Flat Earth Society.

“Heliocentrism has to be stamped out,” he said. “A flat earth at the center of the Universe, that’s what we need if we’re going to feel comfortable about ourselves. Well, Rhodenbarr? Do you have the book?”