Which is what happened around four-thirty. I was back in prehistory, sharing the heroine’s dismay that those Neanderthals just didn’t understand her, when the deliberate clearing of a throat just across the counter from me yanked me back to present time. I looked up from the primitive brutes on the page and into the swinish little eyes of Borden Stoppelgard.
“I suppose you want your change,” I said.
“What, from the day before yesterday? No, of course not. You offered it to me then and I didn’t take it. You think I’d make a special trip here for it?”
“Probably not,” I said. “Unless you had to be in the neighborhood anyway to evict some widows and orphans.”
“You’ve got me wrong, Rhodenbarr.”
“Oh?”
“All wrong. What kind of man evicts widows and orphans in September? Christmas Eve, that’s the time for it.”
“‘Hark, the City Marshals Sing.’”
“My favorite Christmas carol,” he said, with a hearty chuckle. He stepped closer to the counter. “As a matter of fact, I did make a special trip here this afternoon, but not to buy books. What I really want to do is apologize. We got off on the wrong foot the other day and it was my fault. I had the wrong idea about you.”
“You did?”
“It’s a constant hazard in my business, Rhodenbarr. I have to make snap judgments, and as a rule I’m pretty good at it. But nobody’s a hundred percent, and every once in a while I put my foot in it.”
“These things happen.”
“Here’s what I did,” he said. “I walked in here, I checked out the store, I checked you out, and I jumped to a conclusion. I said to myself, Here’s this poor sap busting his hump trying to clear twenty grand a year in a dead business. Be a good thing for him and everybody, I said to myself, when his lease is up and the laws of the marketplace put him out of his misery.”
“Economic euthanasia,” I suggested.
“That’s a good way of putting it. But here’s where I went wrong. I went strictly by appearances. And then I find out you’re not an earnest nebbish of a bookseller after all. What you really are is a burglar.”
“Uh, Mr. Stoppelgard—”
“Please,” he said. “Borden.”
“Uh.”
“And what shall I call you? Bernard?”
Call me a taxi, I thought. I said, “Well, uh, people generally call me Bernie.”
“Bernie,” he said. “Bernie. I like that.”
“Then I’ll keep it.”
“A burglar,” he said, pronouncing the phrase the way a grandmother in Miami Beach might say “a doctor” or “a lawyer” or “a specialist.” “This,” he said, with a dismissive wave around him, “this is not the run-down mess it appears to be. On the contrary, it’s a brilliantly executed false front. My congratulations, Bernie.”
“Well, thanks,” I said, “but—”
“The way I hear it, you’re not just a garden-variety burglar, either. It seems you’re something of a genius at what you do. The lock that can stop you hasn’t been invented yet, according to that policeman, and there was more than a little grudging admiration in his voice, I have to tell you.”
I was being buttered up. But why?
“So naturally you were upset at the thought of a rent increase. The store works for you because it’s a subsistence enterprise with a very low overhead. Once the rent jumps anywhere near market value, you can’t operate anywhere near the break-even point, not without changing your operation dramatically. The alternative is to shove money into the business from an outside source, and if you do that somebody’s going to want to know where the money came from. And that’s no good, is it?”
“No.”
“What you need,” he said, “is a renewal of your lease at the present rent for a substantial period of time. You don’t have any kids, do you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“ ‘Not that I know of.’ I’ll have to remember that one. No kids, then there’s nobody you’re going to have to leave the business to. You figure thirty more years is enough time to spend in the book business?”
“I would think that would be enough for anybody.”
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s the deal. I’ll renew your lease for thirty years at $875 a month. How does that sound to you?”
“Too good to be true. What’s the catch?”
“Baseball cards.”
“Baseball cards?”
“Better than coins and stamps. Better than French Impressionists. Better than Manhattan real estate, and a whole lot better than the New York Stock Exchange.”
“Even better than women mystery writers?”
“You know it. Oh, it’s volatile. You have to know what you’re doing. Buy garbage, and ten years from now all you’ve got is old garbage. Buy speculative stuff and you can make a killing or get killed, depending which way the wind blows. Say you had a big position in Bo Jackson rookie cards. Then he sustains what looks to be a career-ending injury. Where are you?”
“Where?”
“Up the well-known creek, Bernie, without the proverbial paddle. Bo’s got the charisma, but he needs five or ten years in the bigs to put up the kind of numbers that will make him a superstar in the card market. Or say you bought Nolan Ryan during what was supposed to be his last season. Instead he decides to hang around for one more year, and while he’s at it he throws another no-hitter. That wouldn’t hurt the value of your portfolio, would it?”
“I guess not.”
“Then there are the blue chips,” he said. “Safer than T-bonds and a whole lot more profitable. Babe Ruth. Mickey Mantle. Joe DiMaggio. Or my own personal favorite, Ted Williams.”
“You couldn’t have seen him play,” I said. “Unless you’re a lot older than you look.”
“No, he was before my time. But I don’t have to see him swing a bat. All I need to do is look at his numbers. He was the last man ever to hit over.400 in major league ball.” He followed this factoid with a blur of statistics—career batting and slugging averages, home runs, runs batted in, all the way to intentional walks. If you need to know this, check a baseball encyclopedia. “Teddy Baseball,” he said reverently. “The Splendid Splinter. We’ll never see his like again.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“He spent four years in the service, you know. During the Second World War. Think what it cost him.”
“Think what it cost England.”
“Four of the prime years of his playing career. Imagine what his numbers would look like if he’d been swinging away in Fenway Park all that time instead of serving his country. But it shows you the kind of a guy he was.”
“A patriot?”
“A sap. But that’s all water over the bridge, or under the dam, or wherever it goes.”
“Up the creek,” I suggested.
“Whatever. If he’d had those years, well…”
“I guess his cards would be worth more.”
“His cards are seriously underpriced,” he said flatly. “They go for a fraction of Mantle’s cards, and for my money Williams was twice the ballplayer. Mantle’s rookie card from the 1952 Topps set will cost you thirty thousand dollars in near-mint condition. All right, let’s look at the Splendid Splinter’s rookie card from the 1939 Play Ball set. Thirteen years older, and an infinitely scarcer set, and you can pick that card up in top condition for under five grand. But don’t get me started.”
“I won’t.”
“I collected baseball cards as a kid.”
“So did I, until my mother threw them out.”
“Mine knew better than to touch any of my possessions. Well, I grew up, I went into business, I put the cards away and forgot about them. Eventually I got married and we had a kid. Meanwhile my sister Edna got married.”