The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,3

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.

It was not without a pang that I rang up $5.41, made change of ten, and slipped my old friend Praed into a brown paper bag. “I’m kind of sorry to see that book go,” I admitted. “It was here when I bought the store.”

“It must be difficult,” he said. “Parting with cherished volumes.”

“It’s business,” I said. “If I’m not willing to sell them, I shouldn’t have them on