"Did I say that? I can't say I recall it."
"Well, I can. You asked if I had The Secret Agent only because you knew the answer would be yes. It was right in the middle of the section you always go to, and it's been there for years. If by some chance I'd sold it since your last visit, you'd just ask for something else. But I hadn't, and you didn't, and I set the book aside for you.
"Then you got in touch with Berzins. I had the photos, they were in a book called The Secret Agent, and all he had to do was pick them up and pay for them. You figured I'd hand him the book, and he'd look through it and throw a fit, and I'd ask him what the hell he expected for twelve lousy dollars, and he'd walk out knowing he'd had a shot at the photos, but now they were gone.
"But Valdi Berzins was a positive thinker, and Norman Vincent Peale would have been proud of him. It didn't even occur to him that he wasn't getting the photos when he bought the book. He knew others were after them, knew they might show up at my store at any moment, so he was quick to pay for his purchase and get out. When he asked the price I said 'Thirteen' and left out the worddollars, and he thought I left outhundred as well. Of course I might have meant thirteen thousand, but that was more than he had, so he thought positively and counted out thirteen hundred-dollar bills and took a hike."
"And they killed him," Grisek said mournfully. "They killed this good man."
" 'They,' " Sigrid said. "Does this 'they' have a name?"
"Not one that I can supply. At least two people were in a car that pulled up at the curb halfway down the block from my store. When Valdi Berzins walked out the door, the car shot forward. Berzins was gunned down, and either the gunman or another passenger snatched up the book he was carrying, still in the brown paper bag I'd put it in."
"That's how it musta happened," Ray said. "But you ain't tellin' us nothin' new, Bernie. Who was in the car an' what happened to the book?"
"I can answer the second part, and maybe the rest will become clear. What happened to the book? Well, one way or another, it wound up here."
Mapes shook his head. "Ridiculous."
"Oh? I wish I'd been with you when you opened the safe for the IRS boys. But no, I don't think that's where you'd keep it. It's a book, so you'd hide it with your other books. Have you got a den, Doc?"
He didn't answer right away. Then he asked me to tell him the book's title again, and I did, and he said he had a copy of The Secret Agent, that he'd owned it for years. He'd read it in college and still had it.
"I'll be doggoned," I said. "Another coincidence."
"And that's all it is, damn you. Maybe Riddle asked for that book because he knew I had a copy. There must be hundreds of copies of the book in New York."
"Enough so that I've never been able to sell mine," I said, "until someone came along and gave me thirteen hundred dollars for it. How much did you pay for your copy?"
"I've no idea. A couple of dollars."
"I think it was a little more than that. I think you paid a pile for it, but then you weren't buying the book. You were buying the photos."
I'd just given him an out, and he grabbed it. "I can prove you're wrong," he said, and hurried through the dining room to the den, and came back triumphantly, book in hand. "Here," he said. "Here's the damned book. And if you can find any photos in it-"
He riffled the pages and stopped in abject horror. Gently I took the book from his hand and flipped it open to show a mug shot of a blond man in profile, with a scar alongside his mouth. It was fastened to the page with Scotch tape, as were three more photos which I found and displayed.
"No," he cried. "No, that's impossible." He grabbed for the book, but I snatched it out of his reach. He stepped back, plunged a hand into his pocket, and the book wasn't the only thing he'd had in the den, because when his hand came out there was a gun in it. It wasn't a very big gun, but they're all huge when they're pointed at you.
This one wasn't pointed at me for long. "Youbastard, " he cried, and he could have meant me, God knows, but as he spoke the words he whirled toward Colby Riddle and fired the gun. "Son of a fuckingbitch, " he yelled, and pumped two bullets into Georgi Blinsky, and looked around for someone else to shoot.
The cops and goons all had their guns drawn, but we were all in a circle, and no one wanted to risk a shot because a miss could kill the wrong person. "You started this," he screamed, "you brainless spic whore!" and took careful aim at Marisol Maris.
Whereupon Wally Hemphill, marathoner turned martial artist, leapt from the sofa, whirled like a dervish, and delivered a spinning back kick that knocked the gun from his hand, following it with a move I couldn't follow that sent Mapes reeling across the room, right into the arms of a cop and two thugs. The thugs slapped him silly, the cop cuffed him, and Ray Kirschmann read him his rights. I hadn't paid attention to Miranda for a while, and noted that Mapes had a nice long list of rights. Somehow, though, I didn't think they were going to do him a whole lot of good.
Forty-One
Thanks, Maxine. You're a lifesaver, and don't ask me what flavor, it'll give me ideas. Bern, pick up your glass. Here's to crime."
"And punishment," I said, and we touched glasses and drank.
"Punishment," she said. "Well, sure, why not? For them that have it coming, that is."
We were in the Bum Rap, you will not be surprised to learn, on a Thursday evening just a week and a day after I'd gathered much of New York 's population into the living room of the house on Devonshire Close. It was not the first time Carolyn and I had sat down together since what a less original narrator might characterize as that fateful day, since we'd kept our standing lunch date more often than not. It wasn't even the first time we'd met for our after-work drinks date at the Bum Rap. But there'd been time constraints, or people around, on other evenings, and lunch wasn't right for the conversation we had to have. It was somehow necessary that there be glasses in our hands, and scotch in those glasses.
And this seemed like the time and place. Neither of us had anything to do for the next hour or so, nor was anyone likely to pull up a chair and horn in. And we had scotch at hand, and if it somehow disappeared, the faithful Maxine would see that it was replenished.
" Bern," Carolyn said, "there are a couple of things I'm not sure I understand."
"I'm not surprised. There are things I don't understand myself."
"A lot of things came out in Mapes's living room, and I was following along okay, but it was confusing. And then the way it ended, with the shooting and all, it seemed like some ends were left dangling."
"Like participles," I agreed. "No question about it."
"And then there were the things that came out that weren't true."
"Lies, we call them."
"Well, I wasn't going to say that. It seemed a little harsh."
"But accurate," I said. "There were basically three kinds of information dispensed that afternoon. Some of it was true, and some of it was guesswork, and some was utter fiction."
"That's what I thought, Bern. But now that it's over, I'd love to know the pure and simple truth."
"According to Oscar Wilde," I said, "the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Some of it we'll never know, because the only people who could tell us are dead. But I can certainly tell you what I know. Where do you want me to start?"
"With William Johnson," she said. "Billy the Nephew. Talk about your impossible coincidences. He didn't date-rape Marisol, did he?"