I put away my burglar’s tools, too, and my stethoscope. I hung up my tie and jacket, kicked off my sneakers, and threw everything else into the hamper. I had a shower which nobody could have called premature, then jumped into bed and fell asleep.
The phone woke me. It was Patience, my poetry therapist, calling to see if I was feeling better.
Oh, right, the food poisoning. “I’m still a little rocky,” I said.
“You were sleeping, weren’t you? I’m sorry I woke you. I tried you at the store, and when there wasn’t any answer I was concerned. Have you seen a doctor?”
Had I? I couldn’t remember what Carolyn had told her.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m feeling a lot better.”
“But you said you were still a little rocky.”
“I’d say the crisis has passed,” I said. “And as far as waking me is concerned, I’m glad you did. I should have been up hours ago.” That seemed safe to say, if it was late enough for her to have tried me at the store. What time was it, anyway? God, eleven-fifteen. I should have been up hours ago.
“As a matter of fact,” I went on, “I really have to get moving. But it’s good you called, because I wanted to apologize for last night. I hated to cancel at the last minute like that.”
“I’m just relieved you’re all right.”
“Could we reschedule, Patience? Are you free for dinner this evening?”
“This evening? Are you sure you’re well enough, Bernie?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s one of those twenty-four-hour food-poisoning things. I still feel the slightest bit rocky because it’s only been about twenty-three hours, but an hour from now I’ll be ready to wrestle alligators.”
“Is the timing really that precise?”
“You can generally set your watch by it,” I said. “I had the same thing two or three years ago, I got it from a brown rice knish from the health food store. Thought I was going to die, and then twenty-four hours later I was whistling show tunes. How about dinner tonight?”
“I have a client coming at seven,” she said, “so I should be through by eight, but the session might run over. He’s in the middle of a very tricky sonnet sequence and I hate to rush him. It’s not like Freudian analysis, where you hurry them out the door after fifty minutes. I’d hate to risk stifling somebody’s creativity.”
“I know what you mean.”
“So do you want to come here? Come at eight, and if we’re not through you can sit in the waiting room and read a magazine. I’ll definitely be ready by eight-thirty, and that’s not too late, is it?”
“No, it’s fine.”
“We’ll eat someplace in the neighborhood,” she said. “No burritos, though.”
“Please,” I said. “Don’t even say the B word.”
It wasn’t going to be my day to find out how I liked Count Chocula. I was in too much of a hurry. I shaved, dressed, and got out of there, not even pausing to trade nods with my doorman. I legged it over to Broadway and caught the subway. I would have taken a cab but at that hour the subway figured to be quicker, even with a change of trains at Times Square and a three-block walk from Fourteenth Street.
Why the hurry?
I usually open at ten, but it’s not as though I generally have a mob of impatient bibliophiles banging on the steel gates. I have a standing lunch date with Carolyn, but I could have called to tell her I’d be late, or to go ahead and eat without me. I’d been up all night, and a hell of a night it had been. Why didn’t I just spend the rest of the day in bed?
Good question.
I unfastened the big padlock, opened the steel security gates. I unlocked the several locks on my door, went in, flicked on the lights. Before I’d managed to take two steps inside the shop, the ravenous little bastard was rubbing himself against my pants leg.
“All right,” I said. “Cut the crap, will you? I’m here.”
He said what he always says. “Miaow,” he said.
CHAPTER Six
Look, it wasn’t my idea.
And it happened very quickly. One day back in early June, Carolyn brought pastrami sandwiches and celery tonic to the bookstore, and I showed her a couple of books, an Ellen Glasgow novel and the collected letters of Evelyn Waugh. She took a look at the spines and made a sound somewhere between a tssst and a cluck. “You know what did that,” she said.
“I have a haunting suspicion.”
“Mice, Bern.”
“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.”
“Rodents,” she said. “Vermin. You can throw those books right in the garbage.”
“Maybe I should keep them. Maybe they’ll eat these and leave the others alone.”
“Maybe you should leave a quarter under your pillow,” she said, “and the Tooth Fairy’ll come in the middle of the night and chew their heads off.”
“That doesn’t seem very realistic, Carolyn.”
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. Bern, you wait right here.”
“Where are you going?”
“I won’t be long,” she said. “Don’t eat my sandwich.”
“I won’t, but—”
“And don’t leave it where the mice can get it, either.”
“Mouse,” I said. “There’s no reason to assume there’s more than one.”
“Bern,” she said, “take my word for it. There’s no such thing as one mouse.”
I might have figured out what she was up to, but I opened the Waugh volume while I knocked off the rest of my own sandwich, and one letter led to another. I was still at it when the door opened and there she was, back again. She was holding one of those little cardboard satchels with air holes, the kind shaped like a New England saltbox house.
The sort of thing you carry cats in.
“Oh, no,” I said.
“Bern, give me a minute, huh?”
“No.”
“Bern, you’ve got mice. Your shop is infested with rodents. Do you know what that means?”
“It doesn’t mean I’m going to be infested with cats.”
“Not cats,” she said. “There’s no such thing as one mouse. There is such a thing as one cat. That’s all I’ve got in here, Bern. One cat.”
“That’s good,” I said. “You came in here with one cat, and you can leave with one cat. It makes it easy to keep track that way.”
“You can’t just live with the mice. They’ll do thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. They won’t sit back and settle down with one volume and read it from cover to cover, you know. No, it’s a bite here and a bite there, and before you know it you’re out of business.”
“Don’t you think you’re overdoing it?”
“No way. Bern, remember the Great Library at Alexandria? One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and then a single mouse got in there.”
“I thought you said there was no such thing as a single mouse.”
“Well, now there’s no such thing as the Great Library at Alexandria, and all because the pharaoh’s head librarian didn’t have the good sense to keep a cat.”
“There are other ways to get rid of mice,” I said.
“Name one.”
“Poison.”
“Bad idea, Bern.”
“What’s so bad about it?”
“Forget the cruelty aspect of it.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s forgotten.”
“Forget the horror of gobbling down something with Warfarin in it and having all your little blood vessels burst. Forget the hideous specter of one of God’s own little warm-blooded creatures dying a slow agonizing death from internal bleeding. Forget all that, Bern. If you possibly can.”