“It doesn’t seem to have worked.”
“How’s that?”
“They couldn’t keep this one away from you.”
He grinned suddenly, showing clean if misaligned teeth. “I can get anything out of there,” he said. “Anything.”
“Really.”
“You name a book and I’ll lift it. I’ll tell you, I could bring you one of the stone lions if the price was right.”
“We’re a little crowded around here just now.”
He tapped Lepidopterae. “Sure you can’t use this? I could probably ease up a little on the price.”
“I don’t do much volume in natural history. But that’s beside the point. I honestly don’t buy library books.”
“That’s a shame. It’s the only kind I deal in.”
“A specialist.”
He nodded. “I’d never take anything from a dealer, an independent businessman struggling to make ends meet. And I’d never steal from a collector. But libraries-” He set his shoulders, and a muscle worked in his chest. “I was a graduate student for a long time,” he said. “When I wasn’t asleep I was in a library. Public libraries, university libraries. I spent ten months in London and never got out of the British Museum. I have a special relationship with libraries. A love-hate relationship, I guess you’d call it.”
“I see.”
He closed his attaché case, fastened its clasps. “They’ve got two Gutenberg Bibles in the library of the British Museum. If you ever read that one of them disappeared, you’ll know who got it.”
“Well,” I said, “whatever you do, don’t bring it here.”
A couple of hours later I was sipping Perrier and telling Carolyn Kaiser all about it. “All I could think of,” I said, “was that it looked like a job for Hal Johnson.”
“Who?”
“Hal Johnson. An ex-cop now employed by the library to chase down overdue books.”
“They’ve got an ex-cop doing that?”
“Not in real life,” I said. “Hal Johnson’s a character in a series of short stories by James Holding. He goes off on the trail of an overdue book and winds up involved in a more serious crime.”
“Which I suppose he solves.”
“Well, sure. He’s no dope. I’ll tell you, that book brought back memories. I used to collect butterflies when I was a kid.”
“You told me.”
“And sometimes we would find cocoons. I saw a picture of a cecropia moth and it reminded me. There were pussy willow bushes near the school I went to, and cecropia moths used to attach their cocoons to the branches. We would find the cocoons and put them in jars and try to let them hatch out.”
“What happened?”
“Generally nothing. I don’t think any of my cocoons ever hatched. Not every caterpillar gets to be a moth.”
“Not every frog gets to be a prince, either.”
“Isn’t that the truth.”
Carolyn finished her martini and caught the waitress’s eye for a refill. I still had plenty of Perrier. We were in the Bum Rap, a comfortably tacky gin joint at the corner of East Eleventh Street and Broadway, which made it just half a block from both Barnegat Books and the Poodle Factory, where Carolyn earns her living washing dogs. While her trade provides relatively little in the way of ego gratification, it’s more socially useful than looting libraries.
“Perrier,” Carolyn said.
“I like Perrier.”
“All it is, Bernie, is designer water. That’s all.”
“I guess.”
“Got a busy night planned?”
“I’ll go out for a run,” I said, “and then I may bounce around a bit.”
She started to say something but checked herself when the waitress approached with the fresh martini. The waitress was a dark-roots blonde in tight jeans and a hot-pink blouse, and Carolyn’s eyes followed her back to the bar. “Not bad,” she said.
“I thought you were in love.”
“With the waitress?”
“With the tax planner.”
“Oh, Alison.”
“The last I heard,” I said, “you were planning a tax together.”
“I’m planning attacks and she’s planning defenses. I went out with her last night. We went over to Jan Wallman’s on Cornelia Street and ate some kind of fish with some kind of sauce on it.”
“It must have been a memorable meal.”
“Well, I’ve got a rotten mind for details. We drank a lot of white wine and listened to Stephen Pender sing one romantic ballad after another, and then we went back to my place and settled in with some Drambuie and WNCN on the radio. She admired my Chagall and petted my cats. One of them, anyway. Archie sat on her lap and purred. Ubi wasn’t having any.
“What went wrong?”
“Well, see, she’s a political and economic lesbian.”
“What’s that?”
“She believes it’s politically essential to avoid sexual relations with men as part of her commitment to feminism, and all her career interaction is with women, but she doesn’t sleep with women because she’s not physically ready for that yet.”
“What does that leave? Chickens?”
“What it leaves is me climbing the walls. I kept plying her with booze and putting the moves on her, and all I got for my trouble was nowhere fast.”
“It’s good she doesn’t go out with men. They’d probably try to exploit her sexually.”
“Yeah, men are rotten that way. She had a bad marriage and she’s pretty steamed at men because of it. And she’s stuck with her ex-husband’s name because she’s established professionally under it, and it’s an easy name, too, Warren. Her own name is Armenian, which would be more useful if she were selling rugs instead of planning taxes. She doesn’t exactly plan taxes, Congress plans taxes. I guess she plans avoiding them.”
“I plan to avoid them myself.”
“Me too. If she weren’t so great looking I’d avoid her and say the hell with it, but I think I’ll give it one more try. Then I’ll say the hell with it.”
“You’re seeing her tonight?”
She shook her head. “Tonight I’ll hit the bars. A couple of drinks, a couple of laughs, and maybe I’ll get lucky. It’s been known to happen.”
“Be careful.”
She looked at me. “You be careful,” she said.
A couple of subway trains whisked me home, where I changed to nylon shorts and running shoes and ducked out for a quick half hour in Riverside Park. It was mid September, with the New York City Marathon a little over a month away, and the park was thick with runners. Some of them were of my stripe, the casual sort who knocked off three or four sluggish miles three or four times a week. Others were in marathon training, grinding out fifty or sixty or seventy miles a week, and for them it was Serious Business.
It was thus for Wally Hemphill, but he was following a program of alternate short and long runs, and the night’s agenda called for four miles so we wound up keeping each other company. Wallace Riley Hemphill was a recently divorced lawyer in his early thirties who didn’t look old enough to have been married in the first place. He’d grown up somewhere in eastern Long Island and was now living on Columbus Avenue and dating models and actresses and (puff puff) training for the Marathon. He had his own one-man practice with an office in the West Thirties, and as we ran he talked about a woman who’d asked him to represent her in a divorce action.
“And I went ahead and drew up papers,” he told me, “and it developed that this dizzy bitch wasn’t married in the first place. She wasn’t even living with anybody, didn’t even have a boyfriend. But she has a history of this. Every once in a while something snaps inside her and she finds an attorney and institutes divorce proceedings.”
I told him about my book thief who specialized in libraries. He was shocked. “Stealing from libraries? You mean there are people who would do that?”
“There are people to steal anything,” I said. “From anyplace.”