Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

It was a slow day at Barnegat Books, but then

Of course he didnt take my word for it.

At the eleventh-floor landing, I paused long enough to

The cat, I Said.

A sign on the counter said the suggested contribution was

Theres the answer, Carolyn said. Well destroy the painting.

I didnt keep Leona Tremaines quarter for very long. I

For a moment I thought Id made a horrible mistake.

Gosh, she said again some minutes later. Our clothing was

I unlocked the steel gates, opened the door, scooped up

What gives me the most trouble, Wally Hemphill said, is

She must have killed him, Carolyn said. Right?

When I got back to my shop the phone was

Dont fall in love with her, I told Carolyn. Shes

You can rent em for only fifty bucks a month,

Back at the store, I checked the premises for bodies

Hold this, Denise Raphaelson said. You know, I cant remember

It was somewhere around eleven when I left the Narrowback

I stood in a doorway on West End Avenue and

It was lunch hour when I hit the downtown financial

What you got in there? the child demanded. Fission poles?

Afterward, the hardest part was staying awake long enough for

Oh, great, I said. Everybodys here.

After a few urgent words to his wife, something about

This is a nice place, Carolyn said, and they make

I t was a slow day at Barnegat Books, but then most of them are. Antiquarian booksellers, after all, do not dream of retiring to the slow and simple life. They are already leading it.

This particular day had two high points, and as luck would have it they both came at once. A woman read me a poem and a man tried to sell me a book. The poem was Smith, of the Third Oregon, Dies, by Mary Carolyn Davies, and the woman who read it was a slender and fresh-faced creature with large long-lashed brown eyes and a way of cocking her head that she must have learned from a feathered friend. Her handssmall and well formed, unringed fingers, unpolished nailsheld a copy of Ms. Davies first book, Drums in Our Street, which the Macmillan Company had seen fit to publish in 1918. And she read to me.

Autumn in OregonIll never see

Those hills again, a blur of blue and rain

Across the old Willamette. Ill not stir

A pheasant as I walk, and hear it whirr

Above my head, an indolent, trusting thing.

Im rather an indolent, trusting thing myself, but all the same I cast a cold eye on the Philosophy & Religion section, where my most recent visitor had stationed himself. He was a hulking sort, late twenties or early thirties, wearing low Frye boots and button-fly Levis and a brown wide-wale corduroy jacket over a darker brown flannel shirt. Horn-rimmed glasses. Leather elbow patches on the jacket. A beard that had been carefully trimmed. A headful of lank brown hair that had not.

When all this silly dream is finished here,

The fellows will go home to where there fall

Rose petals over every street, and all

The year is like a friendly festival.

Something made me keep my eyes on him. Perhaps it was an air about him, a sense that he might at any moment commence slouching toward Bethlehem. Maybe it was just his attach case. At Brentanos and the Strand you have to check bags and briefcases, but my customers are allowed to keep them at hand, and sometimes their carryalls are heavier upon departure than arrival. The secondhand book trade is precarious at best and one hates to see ones stock walk out the door like that.

But I shall never watch those hedges drip

Color, not see the tall spar of a ship

In our old harbor.They say that I am dying,

Perhaps thats why it all comes back again:

Autumn in Oregon and pheasants flying

She let out a small appreciative sigh and closed the little book with a snap, then passed it to me and asked its price. I consulted the penciled notation on its flyleaf and the tax table thats taped to my counter. The last hike boosted the sales tax to 8 1?4 percent, and there are people who can figure out that sort of thing in their heads, but they probably cant pick locks. God gives us all different talents and we do what we can with them.

Twelve dollars, I announced, plus ninety-nine cents tax. She put a ten and three singles on the counter, and I put her book in a paper bag, fastened it with a bit of Scotch tape, and gave her a penny. Our hands touched for an instant when she took the coin from me, and there was a bit of a charge in the contact. Nothing overpowering, nothing to knock one off ones feet, but it was there, and she cocked her head and our eyes met for an instant. The author of a Regency romance would note that a silent understanding passed between us, but thats nonsense. All that passed between us was a penny.

My other customer was examining a buckram-bound quarto volume by Matthew Gilligan, S. J. The Catogrammatic vs. the Syncogrammatic, it was called, or was it the other way around? Id had the book ever since old Mr. Litzauer sold me the store, and if Id never dusted the shelves it would never have been picked up at all. If this chap was going to steal something, I thought, let him hook that one.

But he returned Father Gilligan to his shelf even as Mary Carolyn Davies went out the door with my demure little poetry lover. I watched her until she crossed my thresholdshe was wearing a suit and matching beret in plum or cranberry or whatever theyre calling it this year, and it was a good color for herand then I watched him as he approached my counter and rested one hand on it.

His expression, insofar as the beard showed it, was guarded. He asked me if I bought books, and his voice sounded rusty, as if he didnt get too many chances to use it.

I allowed that I did, if they were books I thought I could sell. He propped his attach case on the counter, worked its clasps, and opened it to reveal a single large volume, which he took up and presented to me. Lepidopterae was its title, Franois Duchardin was its author, and Old World butterflies and moths were its subject matter, discussed exhaustively (I can only presume) in its French text and illustrated spectacularly upon its color plates.

The frontispiece is missing, he told me, as I paged through the book. The other fifty-three plates are intact.

I nodded, my eyes on a page of swallowtail butterflies. When I was a boy I used to pursue such creatures with a homemade net, killing them in a mason jar, then spreading their wings and pinning them in cigar boxes. I must have had a reason for such curious behavior, but I cant begin to imagine what it might have been.

Print dealers break these up, he said, but this is such a desirable volume and in such good condition I thought it really ought to go to an antiquarian book dealer.

I nodded again, this time looking at moths. One was a cecropia. That and the luna are the only moths I know by name. I used to know others.

I closed the book, asked him what he wanted for it.

A hundred dollars, he said. Thats less than two dollars a plate. A print dealer would charge five or ten a plate, and hed get that easily from decorators.

Could be, I said. I ran my finger over the books top edge, where a rectangle enclosed the stamped words New York Public Library. I opened the book again, looking for a Withdrawn stamp. Libraries do divest themselves of books, just as museums deaccession some of their holdings, though Duchardins Lepidopterae hardly seemed a candidate for such treatment.