“I’m not interested in selling my books,” he said. “At least I don’t think I am, although I’m considering a move to the West Coast and I suppose I’d dispose of them rather than ship them. But I have things that have accumulated over the years, and perhaps I ought to have a floater policy to cover them in case of fire, and if I ever do want to sell, why, I ought to know whether my library’s worth a few hundred or a few thousand, oughtn’t I?”
I haven’t done many appraisals, but it’s work I enjoy. You can’t charge all that much, but the hourly return is greater than I get sitting behind the counter at the store, and sometimes the chance to appraise a library turns into the opportunity to purchase it. “Well, if it’s worth a thousand dollars,” a client may say, “what’ll you pay for it?” “I won’t pay a thousand,” I may counter, “so tell me what you’ll take for it.” Ah, the happy game of haggling.
I spent the next hour and a half with my legal pad and a pen, jotting numbers down and totting them up. I looked at all of the books on the open walnut shelves that flanked the fireplace, and in another room, a sort of study, I examined the contents of a bank of glassed-in mahogany shelves.
The library was an interesting one. Onderdonk had never specifically collected anything, simply allowing books to accumulate over the years, culling much of the chaff from time to time. There were some sets in leather-a nice Hawthorne, a Defoe, the inevitable Dickens. There were perhaps a dozen Limited Editions Club volumes, which command a nice price, and several dozen Heritage Press books, which retail for only eight or ten dollars but are very easy to turn over. He had some favorite authors in first editions-Evelyn Waugh, J.P. Marquand, John O’Hara, Wallace Stevens. Some Faulkner, some Hemingway, some early Sherwood Anderson. Fair history, including a nice set of Guizot’s France and Oman ’s seven-volume history of the Peninsular War. Not much science. No Lepidopterae.
He had cost himself money. Like so many non-collectors, he’d disposed of the dust jackets of most of his books, unwittingly chucking out the greater portion of their value in the process. There are any number of modern firsts worth, say, a hundred dollars with a dust jacket and ten or fifteen dollars without it. Onderdonk was astonished to learn this. Most people are.
He brought more coffee as I sat adding up a column of figures, and this time he’d brought along a bottle of Irish Mist. “I like a drop in my coffee,” he said. “Can I offer you some?”
It sounded yummy, but where would we be without standards? I sipped my coffee black and went on adding numbers. The figure I came up with was somewhere in excess of $5,400, and I read it off to him. “I was probably conservative,” I added. “I’m doing this on the spot, without consulting references, and I shaded things on the low side. You’d be safe rounding that figure off at six thousand.”
“And what would that figure represent?”
“Retail prices. Fair market value.”
“And if you were buying the books as a dealer, presuming of course that this type of material was something you were interested in-”
“I would be interested,” I allowed. “For this sort of material I could work on fifty percent.”
“So you could pay three thousand dollars?”
I shook my head. “I’d be going with the first figure I quoted you,” I said. “I could pay twenty-seven hundred. And that would include removal of the books at my expense, of course.”
“I see.” He sipped his own coffee, crossed one slim leg over the other. He was wearing well-cut gray flannel slacks and a houndstooth smoking jacket with leather buttons. His shoes might have been of sharkskin. They were certainly elegant, and showed off his small feet. “I wouldn’t care to sell now,” he said, “but if I do move, and it’s a possibility if not a probability, I’ll certainly give your offer consideration.”
“Books go up and down in value. The price might be higher or lower in a few months or a year.”
“I understand that. If I decide to dispose of the books the primary consideration would be convenience, not price. I suspect I’d find it simpler to accept your offer than to shop around.”
I looked over his shoulder at the Mondrian and wondered what it was worth. Ten or twenty or thirty times the fair market value of his library, at a guess. And his apartment was probably worth three or four times as much as the Mondrian, so a thousand dollars more or less for some old books probably wouldn’t weigh too heavily on his mind.
“I want to thank you,” he said, getting to his feet. “You told me your fee. Did you say two hundred dollars?”
“That’s right.”
He drew out a wallet, paused. “I hope you don’t object to cash,” he said.
“I never object to cash.”
“Some people don’t like to carry cash. I can understand that; these are perilous times.” He counted out four fifties, handed them to me. I took out my own wallet and gave them a home.
“If I could use your phone-”
“Certainly,” he said, and pointed me to the study. I dialed a number I’d dialed earlier, and once again I let it ring a dozen times, but somewhere around the fourth ring I chatted into the mouthpiece, as if someone were on the other end. I don’t know that Onderdonk was even within earshot of me, but if you’re going to do something you might as well do it right, and why call attention to myself by holding a ringing phone to my ear for an unusually long time?
Caught up in my performance, I suppose I let the phone ring more than a dozen times, but what matter? No one answered it, and I hung up and returned to the living room. “Well, thanks again for the business,” I told him, returning my legal pad to my attaché case. “If you do decide to add a floater to your insurance coverage, I can give you my appraisal in writing if they require it. And I can adjust the figure higher or lower for that purpose, as you prefer.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“And do let me know if you ever decide to get rid of the books.”
“I certainly will.”
He led me to the door, opened it for me, walked into the hall with me. The indicator showed the elevator to be on the ground floor. I let my finger hover over the button but avoided pressing it.
“I don’t want to keep you,” I said to Onderdonk.
“It’s no trouble,” he said. “But wait, is that my phone? I think it is. I’ll just say goodbye now, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”
We shook hands quickly and he hurried back inside his apartment. The door drew shut. I counted to ten, darted across the hall, yanked open the fire door and scampered down four flights of stairs.
CHAPTER Three
At the eleventh-floor landing, I paused long enough to catch my breath. This didn’t take long, perhaps because of all those half-hour romps in Riverside Park. Had I known running would be such a help in my career I might have taken it up years ago.
(How did four flights of stairs get me from Sixteen to Eleven? No thirteenth floor. But you knew that, didn’t you? Of course you did.)
The fire door was locked from the stairs side. Another security precaution; tenants (and anyone else) could go down and out in case of fire or elevator failure, but they could only leave the stairs at the lobby. They couldn’t get off at another floor.
Well, that was nice enough in theory, but an inch-wide strip of flexible steel did its work in nothing flat, and then I was easing the door open, making sure that the coast (or at least the hallway) was clear.
I traversed the hallway to 11-B. No light showed under the door, and when I pressed my ear against it I couldn’t hear a thing, not even the roar of the surf. I didn’t expect to hear anything since I’d just let the phone in 11-B ring twelve or twenty times, but burglary is chancy enough even when you don’t take chances. There was a bell, a flat mother-of-pearl button set flush against the doorjamb, and I rang it and heard it sound within. There was a knocker, an art nouveau affair in the shape of a coiled cobra, but I didn’t want to make noise in the hallway. I didn’t, indeed, want to spend an unnecessary extra second in that hallway, and with that in mind I bent to my task.