The boxer’s equally brindle owner, leash in one hand and wad of paper towel in the other, admonished me that I was risking a ticket or a tow. I couldn’t think of an answer so I walked off without giving him one.
“Crazy,” he told the dog. “They’re all crazy here, Max.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
In my own apartment, nibbling cheese and crunching Triscuits and sipping the special-occasion Scotch, I let go and enjoyed the glow that comes afterward on those too-rare occasions where everything goes like clockwork. All the tension, all the discomfort, all the anxiety-it was all bought and paid for by moments like this.
Earlier, stretched out on that lumpy day bed, I’d been unable to stop thinking of all the treasures the Arkwright house contained. The cash, the jewels, the stamps, the coins, the objets d’art. I’d had fantasies of backing a moving van onto the lawn and just stealing every damned thing, from the oriental rugs on the floors to the cut-crystal chandeliers overhead. That, I’d decided, was really the only way to do it. A person who wanted to be selective would have his problems. He wouldn’t know what to steal first.
And what did I have for my troubles?
I picked up the book, taking pains not to dribble Scotch on it, though someone had dribbled one thing or another on it over the years. It certainly didn’t look like such a much, and the leisurely inspection I could give it now was disclosing flaws I hadn’t spotted earlier. There was water damage on the front cover. Some of the pages had been foxed. The past half-century had not been gentle with the little volume, and no bookseller could conscientiously grade it higher than Very Good.
I flipped through it, read a stanza here and a stanza there. The author’s meter was unmistakable and he had never lost his dexterity at rhyming, but what I was reading looked like doggerel to me.
For this I’d passed up Krugerrands and Barber Proofs, Fabergé and Baccarat and Daum Nancy. For this I’d returned the pearl-and-ruby ring to its little velvet case.
Mr. Whelkin would be proud of me.
CHAPTER Four
I met J. Rudyard Whelkin on a slow midweek morning two weeks prior to my little venture in breaking and entering. The Yankees had just dropped the first two games of the Series, and the night before I’d watched a kid barely old enough to shave strike out Reggie Jackson with the bases loaded. This morning it was damp and drizzly, and it figured.
I hadn’t had any customers yet and I didn’t much care; I was settled in behind the counter with a paperback. I don’t stock paperbacks, and the ones that come in I wholesale to a guy on Third and Sixteenth who deals in nothing else.
Sometimes, though, I read them first. The one I was reading was one of Richard Stark’s books about Parker. Parker’s a professional thief, and every book runs pretty much to form-Parker puts together a string of crooks, he goes someplace like Spartanburg, South Carolina, to buy guns and a truck, he gets a dentist in Yankton Falls to put up front money for the operation, he and his buddies pull the job, and then something goes horribly wrong. If nothing went horribly wrong, all of the books would end around page 70 and by now Parker would own his own island in the Caribbean.
Last time I was inside, everybody was a big fan of Parker’s. My colleagues read everything they could get their hands on about him, even if they had to move their lips to get the job done. I swear there were grizzled cons in that joint who would walk around quoting passages at each other, especially parts where Parker maimed someone. One safecracker always quoted the part where Parker settled a score with an unworthy fellow laborer by breaking three important bones and leaving him in a swamp. It was the adjective that did it for him, the idea of deliberately breaking important bones.
I had just reached the part where Parker was putting in an urgent call to Handy McKay at his diner in Presque Isle, Maine, when the little bells above the door tinkled to announce I had company. I moved the paperback out of sight as my visitor approached the counter. After all, antiquarian booksellers have an image to protect. We’re not supposed to read trash.
He was a stout man, florid of face, jowly as a bulldog, with thinning mahogany hair combed straight back over a glossy salmon scalp. He wore a charcoal-brown herringbone tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, a tobacco-brown sweater vest, a tan oxford-cloth shirt with a button-down collar, a chocolate-brown knit tie. His trousers were fawn cavalry twill, his shoes brown wing tips. He had a long narrow nose, a graying guardsman’s mustache. His eyebrows were untamed tangles of briar; beneath them his eyes (brown, to match his outfit) were keen and cool and just a trifle bloodshot.
He asked if Mr. Litzauer was expected, and I explained about the change in ownership. “Ah,” he said. “No wonder he hasn’t been in touch. I’m a collector, you see, and he always lets me know when he runs across an item I might fancy.”
“What do you collect?”
“Victorian poets, for the most part, but I follow my taste, you know. I’m partial to artful rhymers. Thomas Hood. Algernon Charles Swinburne. William Mackworth Praed. Kipling, of course, is my keenest enthusiasm.”
I told him whatever I had was on the shelves. He went to look for himself and I got Parker out from beneath the counter and returned to vicarious crime. Two of Parker’s henchpersons were just getting ready to set up a doublecross when my tweedy customer presented himself once again at the counter, a small clothbound volume in hand. It contained the collected lyric poems of Austin Dobson and I had it priced at six or seven dollars, something like that. He paid in cash and I wrapped it for him.
“If you happen on anything you think I might like,” he said, “you might want to ring me up.”
He handed me his card. It bore his name, an address in the East Thirties, and a phone number with a MUrray Hill 8 exchange. The card conveyed no suggestion of what the man did for a living.
I looked from it to him. “You collect Kipling,” I said.
“Among others, yes.”
“Is there a family connection?”
He smiled broadly. “Because of the name, you mean? Natural guess, of course. But no, I’m no relative of Kipling’s. Rudyard’s not a family name, you see. It’s the name of a lake.”
“Oh?”
“In Staffordshire. Kipling’s parents first met on a picnic at Lake Rudyard. When in due course their son was born he was given the lake’s name as a middle name. His first name was Joseph, actually, although he never did use it and was known as Ruddy from earliest childhood.”
“And your first name-”
“Is James, as it happens, and I don’t use it either. James Rudyard Whelkin. I was eight years old when Kipling died and I remember the day very well. That was in 1936, just two days after George V preceded him to the grave. A day of mourning in our household, as you can well imagine. My father admired Kipling enormously. He’d have to have done, to name his only son after him, wouldn’t he? Because I was named for Kipling, of course, not for a lake in Staffordshire. ‘First the old king and now the Bard of Empire,’ my father said. ‘Mark my words, Ruddy. There’ll be war in Europe within the next two years.’ He was off by a year of course, and I don’t suppose Kipling’s demise had much to do with Hitler’s invading Poland, but it all linked up in the old fellow’s mind, you see.” He smiled fiercely and his great eyebrows shook. “Are you interested in Kipling, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”
“I read him when I was a kid.”
“You might try him again. He’s returning to fashion, you know, after altogether too many years of neglect. Have you had a look at Kim lately? Or The Light That Failed? Or-But reading must be a bit of a busman’s holiday for you, eh? Must grow sick and tired of the printed word by the end of a long day.”