I rode the elevator to the seventeenth floor. Not that he would have been likely to check the indicator, but why be sloppy? I scooted down three flights of stairs and searched the corridors until I found a door with Tontine Trading Corp. painted on its frosted glass. The office within was completely dark, as were all the other offices I’d passed. Saturday night is the loneliest night in the week, let me tell you.
It’s also the longest and I had places to go and people to see. I put my ear to the glass, rapped smartly on the wooden part of the door, listened carefully, then popped the lock with a strip of flexible steel in not much more time than it takes to tell about it.
Office locks are often like that, and why shouldn’t they be? There’s not much point in hanging a pickproof whizbang of a lock on a door with a window in it. All you get for your trouble is a lot of broken glass.
Besides, there was a man downstairs to keep people like me from walking off with the IBM Selectrics, and what else was there to steal? I certainly didn’t find anything. When I left the Tontine office-and walked up to 17 and rode down from there-I didn’t have anything with me that I hadn’t carried into the building.
The old man looked up from his paper. “Now that was quick,” he said.
“Like a bunny,” I agreed, and signed myself out.
CHAPTER Eighteen
“I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here.”
Well, how often do you get to use a line like that? Here they all were, gathered together at Barnegat Books. When I bought the store from old Litzauer I’d had visions of little informal assemblies like this one. Sunday-afternoon poetry readings, say, with little glasses of medium-dry sherry and a tray of cucumber sandwiches handed round. Literary kaffee klatsches, with everybody smoking European cigarettes and arguing about what Ionesco really meant. I figured it would bring people around and garner the shop some useful word-of-mouth publicity. More to the point, it sounded like a great way to meet girls.
This evening’s convocation was not quite what I’d had in mind. No one was snarling in iambs or trochees. Kafka’s name had not come up. The store had already had more publicity than it needed. And I didn’t expect to meet any girls.
The only one on hand, Carolyn, was perched on the high stool I used for fetching the loftier volumes from the loftier shelves. She sat off to one side, while the rest of my guests were strung out in an irregular half-circle facing the sales counter. I myself was standing behind the counter; I didn’t have a chair to sit on because the one I usually kept behind the counter was occupied at the moment by Prescott Demarest.
See, my place was a bookstore, not a library. There weren’t enough chairs to go around. The Maharajah of Ranchipur had the best seat in the house, a swivel-based oak armchair from my office in back. Atman Singh, his spine like a ramrod, sat upon an upended wooden packing case that had held Rome Beauty apples sometime in the dim past before Mr. Litzauer used it to store surplus stock. Rudyard Whelkin had a folding chair Carolyn had brought over from the Poodle Factory.
I hadn’t introduced anyone to anyone else, nor had any of them seen fit to offer small talk about football or the weather or crime in the streets. They’d arrived not in a body but all within a fairly brief span of time, and they’d remained remarkably silent until I did my suppose-you’re-wondering number. Even then, all I got was a bunch of sharp stares.
“Actually,” I went on, “you all know why I summoned you here. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come. We’re here to discuss a book and a murder.”
A hush didn’t fall over the room. You can’t have everything.
“The murder,” I went on, “was that of Madeleine Porlock. She was shot the day before yesterday in her apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street. The killer shot her once in the forehead, using a.32-caliber automatic pistol. The gun was a Marley Devil Dog, and the killer left it at the scene of the crime. He also left me at the scene of the crime, unconscious, with the murder gun in my hand.”
The Maharajah frowned in thought. “You are saying you did not kill the woman.”
“I am indeed. I was there to deliver a book. I was supposed to get paid for the book. Instead I got drugged and framed, drugged by Miss Porlock and framed by the man who killed her. But”-I smiled brightly-“I still have the book.”
I also had their attention. While they watched, silent as stones, I reached under the counter and came up with The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow. I flipped it open at random and read:
“Old Eisenberg was a crafty cod
With the cunning of his breed,
And he ate a piece of honey cake
And he drank a glass of mead,
And he wiped his lips and his fingertips
While he swore a solemn oath
That if they should go by Fort Bucklow
They’d perish-not one but both.”
I closed the book. “Horrid last line,” I said. “Bad verse is when you can tell which line is there to rhyme with the other, and the whole book’s like that. But it didn’t become the object of our attention because of its literary merits. It’s unique, you see. One of a kind. A pearl beyond price, a published work of Kipling’s of which only one copy exists. And this is it, right here.”
I set the book on the counter. “At the time I agreed to steal this book,” I went on, “it was in the personal library of a gentleman named Jesse Arkwright. I was reliably informed that he had acquired it by private negotiation with the heirs of Lord Ponsonby, who withdrew it from a scheduled auction and sold it to him.” I fixed my gaze on Rudyard Whelkin. “There may have been a Lord Ponsonby,” I said. “There may still be a Lord Ponsonby. But that is not how Jesse Arkwright got his copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.”
Demarest asked how he’d got it.
“He bought it,” I said, “from the very man who engaged me to steal it back. The arrangements for the original sale were worked out by Madeleine Porlock.”
The Maharajah wanted to know how she came into it.
“She was Arkwright’s mistress,” I told him. “She was also a lifelong acquaintance of my client, who told her that he’d come into possession of an exceedingly desirable book. She in turn remarked that a friend of hers-one might almost say client-was a passionate collector with an enthusiasm for books. It only remained to bring buyer and seller together.”
“And the sale went through?” Demarest seemed puzzled. “Then why would the seller want to steal the book back? Just because of its value?”
“No,” I said. “Because of its lack of value.”
“Then it is counterfeit,” said the Maharajah.
“No. It’s quite genuine.”
“Then…”
“I wondered about that,” I said. “I tried to figure out a way that the book could be a phony. It could be done, of course. First you’d have to find someone to write thirty-two hundred lines of doggerel in a fair approximation of Kipling’s style. Then you’d have to find a printer to hand-set the thing, and he’d need a stock of fifty-year-old paper to run it off on. Maybe you could use fresh stock and fake it, but”-I tapped the book-“that wasn’t done here. I handle books every day and I know old paper. It looks and feels and smells different.
“But even if you had the paper, and if you could print the thing and have it bound and then distress it in a subtle fashion so that it looked well-preserved, how could you come out ahead on the deal? Maybe, if you found the absolutely right buyer, you could get a five-figure price for it. But you’d have about that much invested in the book by then, so where’s your profit?”
“If the book is genuine,” the Maharajah said, “how can it be worthless?”