“Is there anything in particular that you’re looking for?” she asked without seeming to raise her head.
It was at the moment of her question that someone else came in the shop, announced by the bell, a tall stoop-shouldered, white-haired man, elegantly dressed.
The man walked up to the desk and asked for something in a confidential voice. He couldn’t have helped more had we worked out the details of his entrance in advance.
“I’ve seen it around somewhere,” the woman said doubtfully. “That’s one of those items that’s never around for long.”
She wrote something down on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk to him.
My back shielding me from view, I slipped the copy of my father’s book from shelf to jacket pocket while appearing to be absorbed in another book altogether.
I trembled with excitement, literally trembled. It was always that way the first few minutes I had taken something. Once I got out of the store with it, the excitement tended to pale, the stolen article without satisfaction in itself. The woman was staring at me, seemed knowing, her pursed lips tasting that knowledge. It was only suspicion I warned myself. She couldn’t have seen me pocket the book. Still, there might have been something in my manner that gave me away, a guilty look, something of the kind. I smiled at her, made that effort, said I thought she had one of the nicest bookstores in London.
“Do you really?” she asked in a somewhat supercilious voice.
I nodded, turned to go, took an uneasy step toward the door, persuaded myself of my innocence. My first step was less authoritative than usual, seemed unsure of its ultimate destination.
I turned back once again, “Do you have a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?” I asked.
“Not at the moment,” she said. “Is there really such a work?”
I had my hand on the door handle.
Someone — I assumed the woman — was coming up behind me, was a step or two behind. The trick was not to panic, to behave in an ordinary way, to concern myself with the details of opening the door and stepping outside.
I had the idea of taking off her glasses, as the hero of an old-fashioned movie might do, and kissing her on the mouth.
“How you take my breath away!” she might say.
It turned out to be the man behind me, the expensively dressed white-haired man, which was not the relief I expected it to be. After I stepped out, I held the door for him which he acknowledged with an unintelligible mumble.
I went around the next corner before reaching in my jacket pocket to claim my prize. My hand was trembling again, in the throes of some self-contained desire. The tips of my fingers were close to numb.
I had been uncharacteristically careless, had stuffed the book in the pocket with the gun, making the bulge even more ostentatious than it had been.
The man who had come out of the store behind me (and had gone, I thought, in the opposite direction) was coming up the street toward me. I turned my back to him and shoved my hands in my pockets, holding the book in one of them.
He came up to me and said Hello, asked if I was an American. I didn’t deny it, though I didn’t affirm it either. “Do I look like an American?”
“I heard you say something in the shop,” he said, “but I recognized you as an American even before that. Incidentally, I wouldn’t go back to that shop if I were you.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Not if I were in your booties, young man.”
He seemed too well-dressed to be a policeman, but I supposed he could be a judge or the head of Scotland Yard retired, some direct or indirect representative of the processes of retribution. I was trying to think of something to say that would justify my taking the book.
“What are you doing in London?” he asked.
It was not a question I knew how to answer. “Passing through,” I said.
“Yes, that’s a good answer. When I was in the states, not so long ago in point of fact, I thought of my time there in the very same choice of language.” He rubbed his large hands together as if the circulation had stopped. “A bit chilly, isn’it? Rain in the air, I should guess. Summer in London is the season that never quite arrives. Why don’t we go inside to continue our chat if you have no objection. I have a flat not five minutes from here or we could go to a restaurant and have some lunch.”
“I don’t know,” I said, not sure whether I had any real choice in the matter.
My tenuous refusal caused him no apparent dismay. “Another time, shall we?” he said, taking a card from his wallet. He appeared to study the text for a few minutes before handing it over, holding it away from me for the longest possible time. “If you want someone to talk to,” he said, “there’s no stigma in being lonely — feel free to call me. Is that agreeable?”
I shrugged modestly, an indicaton that I didn’t really understand the language he was speaking. Anything that got me away at the moment was agreeable. I half-turned to go, though waited for him to dismiss me, a good boy despite opposing evidence.
He took something from his pocket and held it in his hand so I couldn’t see it. “You won’t do anything foolish like that again, will you?” he said.
A shrug was the only assurance I had to offer. My eyes pleaded innocent to his veiled charge.
“I’d like you to make me that promise,” he said. “Will you do that?”
“I promise I won’t do anything foolish,” I said in an inexpressive voice, squirming, feeling the gun in my pocket next to the book.
He laughed the way some people clear their throats. “You have renounced foolishness, have you?” he said.
I affected sincerity, which was not to say I was insincere, said unblinkingly that I had given him the promise he had asked me for.
“I don’t believe you mean it,” he said as if he thought my disingenuousness amusing. “Is that unfair?” His hand was in his pocket, clutching real or imaginary handcuffs.
“Who’s talking about fairness?” I said, an involuntary quip, which produced a second laugh, less grudging than the first. I was warming to my audience.
We walked two blocks together, though I wasn’t sure who was going in whose direction, during which time he gave me a lecture on what I assumed to be the disadvantages of shop-lifting. Yet he was so oblique in his approach I couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t alluding to something else altogether.
All of the time we walked — his purposes as obscure to me as his conversation — I wanted nothing more than to get away from him.
“I have to go,” I suddenly blurted out.
“Which way?” he asked.
There was of course no place at which I was expected, though I gave him a story about being interviewed for a job as an usher at a West End theater.
“What time do you have to be there?” he asked.
Thinking that it was about ten thirty, I said without hesitation that I had to be at the theater at eleven o’clock.
He laughed, put his arm on my shoulder. “You’ve already missed that appointment. Come, let’s go into a restaurant and have some lunch. It might be I know the chap you’re supposed to meet and can arrange another appointment for you.” He led me, his hand on my back steering me along, to an Italian restaurant called Mama Lucia. I went with him merely because it was easier than resisting. The truth was I was hungry (I hadn’t eaten breakfast and perhaps not even dinner the night before) and the old gentleman seemed to have more money than he knew how to spend.
When the menu came I had difficulty locating something I wanted. I professed to have no appetite.