The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block

cat could take credit for those sales, because if I hadn’t had to feed him I wouldn’t have bothered opening up.
    And, like it or not, I was $8,350 ahead for having dropped in on the Nugents. And I could do what I wanted with the money and forget what I’d gone through to earn it, because that chapter was over forever and I was in the clear.
    Yeah, right. In your dreams, Bernie.

CHAPTER

Eight
    T rade picked up as the afternoon wore on, with a steady stream of people finding their way in and out of the shop. A number of them were just browsing, but I’m used to that; it is, after all, part of what a secondhand bookstore is all about. So is chitchat, and I got involved in a little of that, including a spirited discussion of what modern New York might have been like if the Dutch had retained their footing in the New World. My partner in that particular conversation was an elderly gentleman with a neat white beard and piercing blue eyes who had been browsing in the Old New York section, and damned if he didn’t wind up spending close to two hundred dollars before he left.
    As soon as he was out the door, a big man in a dark gray sharkskin suit drifted over to the counter and rested a meaty forearm on it. “Well, now,” he said. “I got to hand it to you, Bernie. This place is turnin’ into a regular literary saloon.”
    “Hello, Ray,” I said. “Always a pleasure.”
    “That was real interestin’,” he said. “What you an’ Santa Claus there were talkin’ about.”
    “Don’t you think he was a little thin for Santa?”
    “He’ll fill out, same as everybody else. An’ there’s plenty of time. How many shoppin’ days until Christmas?”
    “I can never keep track.”
    “How about burglin’ days, Bernie? How many of those between now an’ when Santa pops in through the skylight?”
    “Don’t you mean down the chimney?”
    “Whatever, Bernie. You’d be the expert on that, wouldn’t you?” He flashed a grin that made the sharkskin suit seem singularly appropriate. “But it makes you think, what you an’ the old guy were talkin’ about. We could be standin’ here, the both of us, an’ we could be talkin’ back an’ forth in Dutch.”
    “We could.”
    “All these books’d be in Dutch, huh? I couldn’t read a one of ’em. Of course, if I was talkin’ Dutch with you, I guess I’d be able to read it, too. I’d have to if I was studyin’ for the Sergeant’s Exam, say, because all the questions’d be in Dutch.” He frowned. “An’ instead of cabdrivers who can’t understand English, you’d get cabdrivers who couldn’t understand Dutch, an’ either way nine out of ten of ’em wouldn’t know how to get to Penn Station. Be a whole new ball game, wouldn’t it?”
    “It would.”
    “But it sure is interestin’, Bern. I was this close to hornin’ in on your conversation, but then I figured why louse up a sale for you? You’re a bookseller, you’re well on your way to becomin’ a literary saloon keeper, what do you need with a cop buttin’ in and crampin’ your style?”
    “What indeed?”
    He propped an elbow on the counter, placed his chin in his cupped hand. “You know, Bernie,” he said, “you were talkin’ a blue streak with Santa, an’ now it’s all you can do to hold up your end of the conversation. I see you got yourself a cat, stretched out in the window there tryin’ to get hisself a tan. He got your tongue or somethin’?”
    “No.”
    “Then how come I can’t get a thing out of you but yes, no, an’ maybe?”
    “I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe it’s because I’m trying to figure out what you’re doing here, Ray.”
    “Bern,” he said, looking hurt. “I thought we were friends.”
    “I suppose we are, but your friendly visits tend to have an ulterior motive.”
    He nodded. “‘Ulterior.’ I always liked that word. You never hear it without hearin’ ‘motive’ right after it. What’s it mean, anyway?”
    “I don’t know,” I