The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) Read Online Free PDF Page A

“That wouldn’t have meant much to me otherwise,” I said. “I’d have been looking for TCCOBB.”
    “As far as I know,” he said, “ A Life Lived Backward appears on this manuscript and nowhere else. Princeton has his collected papers, you know. Eighty-nine archival boxes and around a dozen oversize containers. They’ve got the typed manuscript of the story. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, that’s the title it bears. That was its title when it first appeared in Collier’s Magazine in May of 1922, and when it was included in his Tales of the Jazz Age later that same year.”
    “How did you come to know—”
    “The original title? A letter to a young woman, her own identity lost over the years. ‘I worked up a story around that idea I mentioned. I think it came out well. I called it A Life Lived Backward as I needed to call it something, but when I type it up I’ll call it something else. It’ll have to have a better title before I dare show it to anyone.’ ”
    “He wrote it out in longhand and then typed it up.”
    “And this is clearly a first draft,” he said. “You can see that, can’t you? The handwriting changes periodically, suggesting it was written over a period of several days, if not longer. He started out with blue-black ink, and halfway through it’s black, and then toward the end it changes back again.”
    “There aren’t many corrections.”
    “No, just words crossed out here and there when he changed his mind and started a sentence over. The typed manuscript is full of corrections, words crossed out and other words inked in, whole handwritten sentences crawling up the margins. My guess is that he simply copied this draft verbatim, or had a typist do it for him, and then went to work on it. Tweaking, polishing.” He raised his eyes from the manuscript to me. “But the only way to know that for certain would require another trip to Princeton, so that I could compare these pages with their typescript. And I don’t think I care enough to bother. It’s not Hamlet , you know.”
    “Um—”
    “What we have here,” he declared, “is a decidedly minor work by a writer with an overblown reputation. But I haven’t bought it to read it, have I? No more than the chap who paid a seven-figure sum for a stamp from British Guiana did so in hopes of mailing a letter.”
    “Actually,” I pointed out, “you haven’t bought it at all.”
    “By God, I haven’t, have I? I hope you don’t mind a check.”
    “Um—”
    “Just a little joke,” he said, and opened his briefcase.

    I haven’t described him, have I? Or told you his name.
    The name he’d supplied, on his initial visit to my bookshop, was Smith, and it was clear he didn’t expect me to believe it was his by birth or court order. “If pressed,” he’d said, “I could probably come up with a first name as well, and even a middle initial, but how would that serve your interests or my own? Smith will do.”
    He was a couple of inches shorter than I and a few pounds heavier. His medium brown hair, neither long nor short, was showing gray at the temples. His mouth was small, his lips narrow, his teeth even. His eyes were a washed-out blue, their expression hard to read behind his horn-rimmed eyeglasses.
    He’d worn a three-piece suit on his first visit, dark gray with a chalk stripe, and his tie, or as much of it as showed above his vest, was an unornamented blue. His white shirt had a button-down collar.
    This time around he was less formally dressed, in tailored jeans and a Norfolk jacket of rust-brown tweed. There was a flat brass disc sewn to his lapel, and I seemed to recall a similar ornament on his suit. Today’s shirt was a deep blue, and open at the throat. Again, a button-down collar.

    He handed me a letter-size envelope. It had a satisfying heft to it.
    “Ten,” he said.
    I took it, and he handed me another that might have been its twin.
    “Ten.”
    The third envelope was thinner, and felt