Читать книгу Booking In - Jack Batten - Страница 15

I spotted Biscuit the minute I stepped into the Daffodil Restaurant. That was tricky, picking out a guy in a crowded diner who was so short his head barely cleared the top of the table he and Maury were sitting at. Biscuit, maybe an inch or two under five feet, belonged to the little people. Not that the height seemed to be a drawback as far as he was concerned. Besides this positive attitude, Biscuit had plenty of other physical qualities that would be rated as attractive in a person of any size: a full head of thick grey hair, a tidy moustache, snappy clothes, and a pleasant all-around demeanour. He was also regarded among his contemporaries in the subculture as the slickest cracker of safes in the business, though, like Maury, he had retired from active cracking a couple of years earlier.

“What’s the stink you’re bringing in here, Crang?” Maury said. “The place all of a sudden smells like a dentist’s office.”

I ignored Maury’s hassling and greeted Biscuit. When we shook hands, my hand felt as if it were circling his twice. I sat down on Biscuit’s side of the table, plunking my Shoppers Drug Mart bag on the floor next to my seat.

“Seriously, Crang,” Maury said, “what’ve you got in the bag, a lifetime supply of Listerine?”

“If you really need to know,” I said, “it’s a bunch of dental aids for our current employer.”

“You’re talking about Fletcher’s crappy breath?”

“You know about that?”

“The guy lets out some air in my vicinity, it’s the same as an attack of poison gas like the Germans hit the Allies with in the First World War.”

“How come everybody notices Fletcher’s breath except me?”

“Yeah,” Maury said, “you’re supposed to be the guy that nothing gets past.”

“Nice to be together with you again, Crang,” Biscuit broke in. “Especially on an interesting professional engagement.”

“Maury’s briefed you about the bookstore theft?”

“Papers taken from the safe that has the digital lock, yes,” Biscuit said. “But I would describe what Maury gave me as more a field trip than a briefing.”

“Biscuit and I went to Fletcher’s place last night,” Maury said. “That’s what we need to talk about.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What hour last night? Was the store still open?”

“At 2:30 a.m,” Maury said. “And the place was empty, which was necessary for our little visit.”

“You might have given me advance notice about this expedition,” I said. “You guys broke in, right?”

“Not broke in, like you say,” Maury said. “When Biscuit’s involved in an operation, it’s smooth as silk.”

“A satisfying bit of work,” Biscuit said.

“You went in through the back door?” I said.

“We did,” Biscuit said. “Then I opened the safe.”

“Using the method where you give the safe a thump with the mallet?”

“I prefer a challenge, Crang,” Biscuit said. “So I worked the combination.”

“Under five minutes was all it took for Biscuit to get the right numbers lined up,” Maury said, reaching across the table to bump fists with Biscuit. “My man here’s the champ.”

The waiter arrived to take our orders. I asked for what I always ate at the Daffodil, a plain omelette and a Coors. The Daffodil was a clean, cheerful place, always busy, reliable with simple dishes but hardly daring in its cuisine. Maury regarded the Daffodil as a location close to sacred. It was here that members of the subculture had gathered in their halcyon days. They drank beer and plotted heists and scams in a bar that had once stood across the street, then retired to the Daffodil for a meal. Now the bar was gone, and so were most members of the old subculture, but the Daffodil lingered on.

“Reassure me, Maury,” I said. “You didn’t knock over a stack of books getting into or out of Fletcher’s store?”

“Even if we had, there wasn’t anybody in the architect’s office to wake up.”

“Nothing else went wrong?”

“Without a hitch, man,” Maury said, a big grin on his face.

“A delight in every regard,” Biscuit said. He was grinning too.

“What are you guys holding out on me?” I said. “You’re like a pair of kids with a secret the adults don’t know about.”

Maury looked at Biscuit, who nodded back at Maury.

“Listen,” I said, “I didn’t pay a twenty-five-buck cab fare just for an omelette. You said it was essential I get here.”

Maury leaned partway across the table. He said, “The safe wasn’t empty.”

“So?” I said. “Fletcher put some other client’s papers in there?”

“You don’t get it.”

“Which part don’t I get?”

Maury reached down to the seat beside him and lifted his black briefcase onto the table. Before he opened the briefcase, he took a pair of white gloves out of his pocket, the kind of gloves that hospital surgeons wear as part of their scrubs in an operating room. Maury pulled the gloves on, and only then, gloved up, did he slowly and deliberately pull the briefcase open and slide out a medium-sized file in a large brown envelope. He held the envel­ope in my direction, but when I reached for it, Biscuit handed me another pair of the white scrub gloves. I put them on.

“Why are we going super cautious with whatever surprise you guys have come up with?” I said.

“You’ll understand the reason in a moment, Crang,” Biscuit said.

Maury allowed me take the envelope from his hand.

“Have at it, Crang,” he said.

I realized what I was holding in my hands the minute I opened the papers inside the envelope. I wasn’t any kind of expert on Victorian typography, but the filigrees and drop shadows and other delicate touches on the papers told me I was looking at a forged version of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. This was a copy of the Reading Sonnets, real or faked. I took my time, turning the sheets with thoughtfulness and respect until I had examined all forty-four of the sonnets.

I looked up at Maury. “Whoever swiped what we assume are the forgeries of the sonnets put them back in the safe. And you guys reswiped them. Anything I’m leaving out?”

“Yeah,” Maury said, “who done it? Apart from us, I mean? Who planted these mothers back in the safe they got stolen from in the first place?”

Maury and Biscuit were still grinning like madmen.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Tell me who you guys are fingering as the guilty party.”

“You want to take a guess before we tell you our expert opinion?”

“It’s no guess,” I said. “From all the clues, it must be Charlie Watson.”

Maury’s face lost the grin. Biscuit kept his.

“You’re a sneaky son of a bitch, Crang,” Maury said. “How did you figure her?”

“The first thing Biscuit must have done at the store last night,” I said to Maury, “was examine the lock on the back door. I’m betting it showed no signs of ever being picked, just as you yourself figured out the other day.”

“Correct, Crang,” Biscuit said. “Which leads to the rest of your conclusions practically automatically.”

“You found the lock on the safe similarly pristine,” I said. “Ergo, as I think Sherlock Holmes probably never said, the thief who stole the forged sonnets and the Walter Hickey letters probably got into the store with a key and into the safe with the combination.”

“And as far as we know only two people fill the bill,” Maury said. “Namely Fletcher and this dame Charlie.”

“I pick Charlie,” I said to Maury. “If it was Fletcher who did it, he’d hardly be likely to hire you and me to hunt down the purloined papers.”

“Being as how we’re so frigging smart at this stuff,” Maury said.

“Done,” I said. “Charlie’s our lead suspect.”

Maury was drinking a beer and Biscuit had a Johnny Walker Black, which he took in very small sips. I raised my Coors, and the three of us toasted the previous night’s productive break-in.

“One problem,” I said. “Charlie’s got an alibi for the night of the original burglary.”

“Guilty parties always say they were nowhere near the scene of the crime,” Maury said.

“She was with her boyfriend at his place.”

“Who’s the boyfriend?”

“According to Charlie, she has to keep his identity confidential for a while.”

“What that probably means is we got another suspicious party.”

“We do. The boyfriend could be Charlie’s partner in both the original swipe job and in the replacement operation. It could be that both of them got cold feet and bailed out of the theft, at least as far as the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems are concerned.”

“How come they’d do that?” Maury said. “Give back the poems but not the letters about the Hickey guy and Norman Mailer?”

“Seems to be a case of selective cold feet.”

“Or else there were two separate safecrackers,” Biscuit said. “One for the poems and the other for the letters.”

“The way is open for several possibilities,” I said.

“That’s the kind of bullshit lawyers always say,” Maury said. “Their answer to every question includes something about ‘several possibilities.’”

“We got our work cut out for us,” I said.

“That’s another lawyer’s line.”

“What I say, Maury,” I said, “is we start following somebody around.”

“Now you’re talking, man,” Maury said.

“Starting with Charlie. That’s because we need to identify her boyfriend.”

“If you need more manpower for the tail than just you two guys, count me in,” Biscuit said.

“We already only got one vehicle,” Maury said to Biscuit. “Crang’s currently carless.”

“I recall a very elegant Mercedes of ancient vintage,” Biscuit said to me.

“Holes in the floor from winter salt, Biscuit. Thirty-one years, and it was RIP for the Mercedes.”

“You’re dependent on the TTC and shank’s mare?”

“What the hell’s shank’s mare?” Maury said.

“Poetic, don’t you think?” Biscuit said. “It’s ancient Scottish for legs.”

“I rent AutoShare in emergencies,” I said. “AutoShare, Zipcar, car2go. There’re probably eight or nine cars from those outfits parked in nice little spots within five minutes of my house.”

“I can just see us in one of them cars on a tail job,” Maury said. “The people in the car we’re following, they tell one another, hey, everywhere we look we keep seeing this car with big AutoShare decals on the side doors.”

“Unsubtle,” I said.

“So it’s agreed,” Maury said. “We’ll do the tail job in my car.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Just one thing,” Biscuit said. “What about these poems we got out of the safe last night? You want me to put them back?”

Still wearing the white gloves, I picked up the copy of the sonnets I’d taken from the brown envelope.

“Let me hold on to them for a few days,” I said.

“Keep doing what you’re doing with the white gloves,” Biscuit said. “Always put them on before you handle the papers.”

“To protect the documents?”

“And preserve them from your fingerprints.”

“Rule number one in burglary, never leave your prints behind,” Maury said.

“The thing about me hanging on to the documents for a while,” I said, “keeping Fletcher baffled about the poems’ whereabouts might stir something useful.”

I turned the pages to sonnet number 43. Then I read its first lines out loud, though not loud enough to reach an audience beyond our table.

“How do I love thee?” I read. “Let me count the ways./I love thee to the depth and breath and height/My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight.”

I stopped and put the pages down.

“Too bad I didn’t remember the lines the other day at Kensington Market,” I said to Maury. “Fletcher would have had to choke on his sneery crack.”

I read the rest of the sonnet to myself. It all came back to me.