“It’s not literally worthless. The day after I stole it, a gentleman tried to take it from me at gunpoint. As luck would have it”-I smiled benignly at Atman Singh-“he selected the wrong book by mistake. But he tried to placate me by giving me five hundred dollars, and coincidentally enough, that’s a fair approximation of the book’s true value. It might even be worth a thousand to the right buyer and after the right sort of build-up, but it’s certainly not worth more than that.”
“Hey, c’mon, Bern.” It was Carolyn piping up from the crow’s nest. “I feel like I missed a few frames, and I was around for most of it. If it’s supposed to be worth a fortune, and it’s not a phony, why’s it only worth five hundred or a thousand?”
“Because it’s genuine,” I said. “But it’s not unique. Kipling had the book privately printed in 1923 in a small edition. That much was true. What wasn’t true was the appealing story about his incinerating every copy but one. There are quite a few copies in existence.”
“Interesting thought,” Prescott Demarest said. He was dressed as he’d been when Carolyn took his picture, but then I’d simply been able to see that he was wearing a dark suit. Now I could see that it was navy blue, with a muted stripe that had been invisible in the photograph. He straightened in my chair now. “So the book’s one of many,” he said. “How do you know that, Rhodenbarr?”
“How did I find it out?” It wasn’t quite the question he’d asked but it was one I felt like answering. “I stole a copy from Jesse Arkwright’s house Wednesday night. Thursday I delivered that copy to Madeleine Porlock’s apartment. I was drugged and the book was gone when I came to. Then last night I returned to the Porlock apartment”-gratifying, the way their eyes widened-“and found The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow in a shoe box in the closet.
“But it wasn’t the same copy. I figured it was possible that she could have stowed the book in the closet before admitting her killer to the apartment. But wouldn’t he look for the book before he left? Wouldn’t he have held the gun on her and made her deliver it before shooting her? He’d taken the trouble to scoop up five hundred dollars of my money before he left. Either he or Porlock took the money out of my back pocket, and if she took it, then he must have taken it from her himself, because it wasn’t there to be found.” The cops could have taken it, I thought, but why muddy the waters by suggesting that possibility?
“My copy was all neatly wrapped in brown paper,” I went on. “Now Madeleine Porlock might have unwrapped it before she hid it, just to make sure it wasn’t a reprint copy of Soldiers Three or something equally tacky.” I avoided Atman Singh’s eyes. “If so, what happened to the brown paper? I didn’t see it on the floor when I came to. Granted, I might not have noticed it or much else under the circumstances, but I looked carefully for that paper when I tossed the apartment last night, and it just plain wasn’t there. The killer wouldn’t have taken it and the police would have had no reason to disturb it, so what happened to it? Well, the answer’s clear enough now. It was still fastened around the book when the killer walked off with it. Madeleine Porlock most likely had the wrapped book in her hands when he shot her, and he took it as is.”
“That’s quite a conclusion,” Rudyard Whelkin said. “My boy, it would seem that your only clues were clues of omission. Rather like the dog that didn’t bark, eh? Five hundred missing dollars, a missing piece of brown paper. Rather thin ice, wouldn’t you say?”
“There’s something else.”
“Oh?”
I nodded. “It’s nothing you could call evidence. Pure subjective judgment. I sat up reading that book Wednesday night. I held it in my hands, I turned the pages. Last night I had my hands on it again and it wasn’t the same book. It was inscribed to H. Rider Haggard, same as the copy I stole from Arkwright, but there was something different about it. I once knew a man with a yard full of laying hens. He swore he could tell those birds apart. Well, I can tell books apart. Maybe one had some pages dog-eared or a differently shaped water stain-God knows what. They were different books. And, once I realized that, I had a chance to make sense of the whole business.”
“How?”
“Let’s say, just hypothetically, that someone turned up a carton of four or five dozen books in the storage room of a shuttered printshop in Tunbridge Wells.” I glanced at Whelkin. “Does that sound like a reasonable estimate?”
“It’s your hypothesis, my boy.”
“Call it fifty copies. The entire edition, or all that remains of it, outside of the legendary long-lost copy the author was supposed to have presented to H. Rider Haggard. Now what would those books bring on the market? A few hundred dollars apiece. They’d be legitimate rarities, and Kipling’s becoming something of a hot ticket again, but this particular work is not only a minor effort but distinctly inferior in the bargain. It has curiosity value rather than literary value. The books would still be worth hauling home from the printshop, but suppose they could be hawked one at a time as unique specimens? Suppose each one were furnished with a forged inscription in a fair approximation of Kipling’s handwriting? It’s hard to produce a new book and make it look old, but it’s not too tricky to scribble a new inscription in an old book. I’m sure there are ways to treat ink so that it looks fifty years old, with that iridescence some old inscriptions have.
“So my client did this. He autographed the books or had some artful forger do it for him, and then he began testing the waters, contacting important collectors, perhaps representing the book as stolen merchandise so the purchaser would keep his acquisition to himself. Because the minute anyone called a press conference or presented the book to a university library, the game was up. All the collectors he’d stung along the way would be screaming for their money back.”
“They couldn’t do anything about it, could they?” Carolyn wanted to know. “If he was a shady operator, they couldn’t exactly sue him.”
“True, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” She made a face and I regretted the choice of words. “At any rate,” I went on, “the inflated market for the remaining books would collapse in a flash. Instead of realizing several thousand dollars a copy, he’d have a trunkful of books he couldn’t give away. The high price absolutely depended on the books being one of a kind. When they were no longer unique, and when the holograph inscriptions proved to be forgeries, my client would have to find a new way to make a dishonest living.”
“He could always become a burglar,” the Maharajah suggested, smiling gently.
I shook my head. “No. That’s the one thing he damn well knew he couldn’t do, because when he needed a burglar he came to this very shop and hired one. He found out, undoubtedly through Madeleine Porlock, that Arkwright was planning to go public with his copy of Fort Bucklow. Maybe public’s the wrong word. Arkwright wasn’t about to ring up the Times and tell them what he had. But Arkwright was a businessman at least as much as he was a collector, and there was someone he was trying to do business with who had more of a genuine interest in Fort Bucklow than Arkwright himself, who had no special interest in Kipling or India or anti-Semitic literature or whatever this particular book might represent.”
Whelkin asked if I had someone specific in mind.
“A foreigner,” I said. “Because Arkwright was engaged in international commerce. A man with the wealth and power of an Indian prince.”
The Maharajah’s jaw stiffened. Atman Singh inclined his body a few degrees forward, prepared to leap to his master’s defense.
“Or an Arab oil sheikh,” I continued. “There’s a man named Najd al-Quhaddar who comes to mind. He lives in one of the Trucial States, I forget which one, and he pretty much owns the place. There was a piece about him not long ago in Contemporary Bibliophile. He’s supposed to have the best personal library east of Suez.”