All the more reason to get to work.
A workman is as good as his tools, and so is a burglar. I picked up my ring of picks and probes and odd-shaped strips of metal and found room for them in a trouser pocket. My flashlight is the size and shape of a fountain pen, and I tucked it accordingly into the blazer’s inside breast pocket. I didn’t have to keep the flashlight hidden away-they sell them in hardware stores all over town, and it’s no crime to carry one. But it is definitely a crime to carry burglar’s tools, and the simple possession of a little collection like mine is enough to net its owner an extended vacation upstate, all expenses paid. So I keep them locked up, and stow the flashlight with them so I won’t forget it.
Same with the gloves. I used to wear rubber gloves, the kind you put on when washing dishes, and I’d cut the palms out for ventilation. But now they have these terrific disposable gloves of plastic film, light as a feather and cool as a gherkin, and you can buy a whole roll of them for pocket change. I tore off two gloves and put the rest back.
I secured the secret compartment, closed the closet, snatched up the attaché case, let myself out of the apartment, and locked all the locks. All of this takes longer to report than to perform; I was in my apartment by ten-thirty and out of it, dressed and equipped and back on the street, by a quarter to eleven.
There was a cab cruising by as I cleared the threshold, and I could have sprinted and whistled and caught it. But it was hardly the sort of night when cabs were likely to be in short supply. I took my time, walked to the curb at a measured pace, held up a hand, and beckoned to a taxi.
Guess who I got.
“What you shoulda done,” Max Fiddler said, “was tell me you had someplace else to go. I coulda waited. How’s your leg now? Not too bad, right?”
“Not too bad,” I agreed.
“It’s good luck, finding you again. I almost didn’t recognize you, all dressed up and everything. Whattaya got, if you don’t mind my asking? A date? My guess, it’s a business appointment.”
“Strictly business.”
“Well, you look very nice, you make a good appearance. We’ll take the Transverse, okay? Go right through the park.”
“Sounds good.”
“Minute I dropped you off,” he said, “I said to myself, Max, what the hell’s the matter with you, man’s got arthritis and you didn’t tell him where to go. Herbs!”
“Herbs?”
“You know about herbs? Chinese herbs, like from a Chinese herb doctor. This woman gets into my cab, using a cane, has me take her down to Chinatown. She’s not Chinese herself, but she tells me about this Chinese doctor she goes to. When she started with him she couldn’t walk!”
“That’s wonderful,” I said.
“Wait, I haven’t even told you yet!” And, even as we entered Central Park, he launched into a tale of miracle cures. A woman with horrible migraines-cured in a week! A man with high blood pressure-back to normal! Shingles, psoriasis, acne, warts-all of them cleared up! Hemorrhoids-cured without surgery! Chronic back pain-gone!
“For the back he uses the needles. The rest is all herbs. Twenty-eight bucks you pay for a visit and the herbs is free. Seven days a week he’s there, nine in the morning till seven at night…”
He himself had been cured of cataracts, he assured me, and now he saw better than he did when he was a boy. At a stoplight he took off his glasses and swung his head around, flashing his clear blue eyes at me. When we got to Seventy-sixth and Lexington he gave me a business card, Chinese on one side, English on the other. “I give out hundreds of these,” he said. “I send everybody I can to him. Believe me, I’m glad to do it!” On the bottom, he showed me, he’d added his own name, Max Fiddler, and his telephone number. “You get good results,” he said, “call me, tell me how it worked out. You’ll do that?”
“I will,” I said. “Definitely.” And I paid him and tipped him and limped over to the brownstone where Hugo Candlemas lived.
I’d met Hugo Candlemas for the first time the previous afternoon. I was in my usual spot behind the counter, seeing what Will Durant had to say about the Medes and the Persians, of whom I knew little aside from the sexual proclivities alluded to in a limerick of dubious ethnological validity. Candlemas was one of three customers crowding my aisles just then. He was browsing quietly in the poetry section, while a regular customer of mine, a doctor at St. Vincent ’s, searched the adjacent aisle for the out-of-print mysteries she went through like smallpox through the Plains Indians. My third guest was a superannuated flower child who’d spotted Raffles sunbathing in the window. She’d come in to ooh and ahh over him and ask his name, and now she was looking through a shelf of art books and setting some volumes aside. If she wound up buying all the ones she’d picked, the sale would pay for a whole lot of Meow Mix.
The doctor was the first to settle up, relieving me of a half-dozen Perry Masons. They were book club editions, a couple of them pretty shabby, but she was a reader, not a collector, and she gave me a twenty and got a little change back.
“Just a few years ago,” she said, “these were a buck apiece.”
“I can remember when you couldn’t give them away,” I said, “and now I can’t keep them in stock.”
“What do you figure it is, people with fond memories of the TV show? I came in the back door-I hated the TV show, but I started reading A. A. Fair and decided, gee, the guy can write, let’s see what he’s like under his own name. And it turns out they’re tough and fast-paced and sassy, not like the television crap at all.”
We had a nice conversation, the kind I’d had in mind when I bought the store, and then after she left, the flower matron, Maggie Mason by name, brought up her treasure trove and wrote out a check for $228.35, which is what those twelve books came to with tax. “I hope Raffles gets a commission on this,” she said. “I must have passed this store a hundred times, but it was seeing him that made me come in. He’s a wonderful cat.”
He is, but how could the ebullient Ms. Mason possibly know that? “Thank you,” I said. “He’s a hard worker, too.”
He hadn’t changed position since she came in, except to preen a little while she’d cooed at him. My irony was unintentional-he is a hard worker, maintaining Barnegat Books as a wholly rodent-free ecosystem-but it was lost on her anyway. She had, she assured me, the greatest respect for working cats. And off she went, bearing two shopping bags and a perfectly radiant smile.
She had barely cleared the threshold when my third customer approached, a faint smile on his face. “Raffles,” he said, “is a splendid name for that cat.”
“Thank you.”
“And appropriate, I’d say.”
What exactly did he mean by that? A. J. Raffles was a character in a book, and the cat was in a bookshop, but that fact alone made the name no more appropriate than Queequeg, say, or Arrow-smith. But A. J. Raffles was also a gentleman burglar, an amateur cracksman, while I was a cracksman myself, albeit a professional.
And how did this chap, white-haired, slight of build, thin as a stick, and very nattily if unseasonably turned out in a suit of brown herringbone tweed and a Tattersall vest-how did he happen to know all this?
Admittedly, it’s not the most closely held secret in the world. I have, after all, what they call a criminal record, and if it weren’t a matter of record they’d call it something else. I haven’t been convicted of anything in a long time, but every now and then I get arrested, and a couple of times in recent years I’ve had my name in the papers, and not as a seller of rare volumes.
I told myself, like Scarlett (another fine name for a cat), that I’d think about it later, and turned my attention to the book he placed on the counter. It was a small volume, bound in blue cloth, containing the selected poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-39). It had been part of the inventory when I bought the store. I had, at one time or another, read most of the poems in it-Praed was a virtuoso at meter and rhyme, if not terribly profound-and it was the sort of book I liked having around. No one had ever expressed any interest in it, and I’d thought I’d own it forever.