“The cat uses the toilet,” Henry Walden said. “But of course you would know that. You’re probably the one who taught him.”
“The only thing I ever taught him is to play shortstop,” I said, and crumpled a sheet of paper into a ball, flinging it to Raffles’s left. If he was at shortstop, then the ball was headed straight for second base. He pounced on it, robbing me of a base hit.
“Like that,” I said, “but I don’t know how much teaching was involved. He’s responded like that from the very beginning. And I’ve gotten nowhere at teaching him to throw to first, and let’s not even talk about turning the double play.”
“He went right over to the bathroom door,” Walden said, “which I’d closed, not realizing that you left it open for him. He scratched at the door, and I got the idea and opened it, and he went right in and hopped up onto the seat, and used it just as if it were a litter box.”
“Did he flush?”
“Why, no.”
“He never does,” I said. “I’d have to say there’s a limit to what you can teach him. He won’t throw to first base and he won’t flush the toilet after himself. Other than that-” I crumpled paper, hurled it “-he’s not so bad.”
I went on throwing balls of paper to catdom’s Derek Jeter. I’d initiated the routine to hone Raffles’s mousing skills, but as it turned out his mere presence was enough to keep my shop a rodent-free environment. He didn’t actually have to do anything. Still, it wouldn’t do to let him lose his edge, and for my own part I was pleased to discover that throwing balls of paper for him to chase was something I could still do after three stout glasses of Kessler’s Maryland Rye.
There’d been some traffic in the shop, Henry told me, and he’d sold some books, collecting the marked price for each and remembering to charge the sales tax. He’d made out a slip for each sale, something I don’t always remember to do, and had the carbon copies clipped together and tucked away in a corner of the cash register.
A woman had come in with a shopping bag full of books, hoping to sell them, and Henry had persuaded her to leave the books so that I could appraise them at leisure. I took a quick gander at them and saw Mark Schorer’s biography of Sinclair Lewis, a first of James T. Farrell’s Gas-House McGinty, and a batch of boxed Heritage Press editions, never hard to find but always easy to sell.
“Yes, I can use these,” I told him. “I think the Farrell’s genuinely rare. I know I’ve never seen a copy. The only thing harder to find is someone who collects the man, but if I get stuck with it I can always read it.”
“They looked like good books,” he said. “I didn’t have the authority to make her an offer, but I didn’t want her to sell them to somebody else, either.”
I told him he’d done perfectly, and you’d have thought I scratched him behind the ear. He had a short list of phone messages, too, and I went over them. Carolyn had called to cancel our standing date for drinks. Something had come up. A man named Harkness, from Sotheby’s, had called and left a number. And a woman had called several times and had declined to give her name, or leave any message at all.
I said, “The same woman each time? And she didn’t say her name was Alice?”
“She never gave a name.”
“Hmmm. Did she sound as though her name might have been Alice?”
That confused him, and I could understand why. I had the feeling I wouldn’t have asked the question if I hadn’t had that third drink at The Pretenders. Three stiff drinks on an empty stomach-empty unless you count the pastrami sandwiches, and I figured they’d used up all their absorbency neutralizing the cream soda.
It was past closing time. Henry gave me a hand with the table, and I closed the window gates and changed Raffles’s water and did my other evening chores. Raffles had seen it before, but Henry stood around and watched, utterly absorbed, as if I was passing on the tricks of the bookselling trade with my every move.
I wanted to give him a few dollars, but he flat out refused to take money from me. It was a pleasant way to pass a couple of hours, he said, and who knew but that it might be good experience? He had to spend the rest of his life somewhere, and he could do worse than spend it in a bookshop.
“The best way to learn a business,” he said, “is to work for somebody who’s already in it. That’s how you learned, isn’t it? By helping out in somebody else’s store?”
“No, I just plunged in,” I said. I started walking, and he fell into step beside me. “I used to buy books from Mr. Litzauer, and he was talking about how he’d move to Florida in a heartbeat if he could just get a halfway decent price for his store, and I asked him what a halfway decent price amounted to in dollars and cents. He fumfered around a little, but then he came up with a figure and I said I’d buy the place.”
“Just like that?”
“I’d come into a few dollars, and I figured why not? Otherwise I’d only piss it away on food and shelter. So I just jumped in with both feet. I didn’t know zip about the business, and if I had I might have had the sense to stay out of it.”
“But you love it,” he said.
“Do I? I guess I do.” And we walked along, talking books and bookselling, and before I knew it my feet showed they had a mind of their own, and a lousy one at that. They took me right to the Bum Rap.
I figured the least I could do was buy the guy a drink. We went in, and I sat where I usually sit, and he sat in Carolyn’s chair, and when Maxine came over I asked Henry what he’d have. He asked me what I was having. I said I’d been drinking rye lately and figured I ought to stick with it, and he said that sounded good.
I didn’t need that drink, but if I’d had it and left I’d have been all right. But then, wouldn’t you know, Henry insisted on buying a round, and how was I supposed to refuse without offending him? There’s no logical justification for the third round, I’ll admit, but after the second round logic went out the window, if it had even strolled through the door in the first place.
It might have helped if I’d eaten something, but eating at the Bum Rap has never helped anybody but the makers of Alka-Seltzer. At one point Henry wanted to order a burrito, but I talked him out of it, and the next thing I remember was playing the jukebox. It’s always a bad sign when I decide to play the jukebox. I always pick the same records-Bunny Berigan’s “I Can’t Get Started” and Patsy Cline’s “Faded Love,” and there’s nothing wrong with either of those two, but it’s still a bad sign when I play them, because it means I’m drunk.
Some places get all huffy when their customers get drunk, as if they’d sold you the booze never for a moment suspecting you intended to drink it. But no, you actually went and swallowed the terrible stuff, and then you had the poor taste to let it affect you. Well, shame on you, buster, and kindly take your business somewhere else.
But they’re not like that at the Bum Rap. It’s acceptable to be drunk there, as long as you don’t disturb the other drunks. And I didn’t disturb them. There was a point when I led them in song, and that might have disturbed someone with a fine ear for music, but all of us Bum Rappers seemed to be having a good enough time.
I don’t have any clear memory of getting out of there, but all at once we were on the street, me and my new best friend. I rushed to the curb and hailed everything that came along-trucks, vans, off-duty cabs, and a bus. None of them stopped, curiously enough, but a cab did, finally, and I made Henry take it.
“I’ll get the next one,” I said. “Nothing to it.” And off he went, and I caught myself just as I was about to hail a blue-and-white police cruiser.
I kept my arm down, but even so it seemed to me that the two cops were looking at me as they sailed on by. “Bernie,” I said to myself, talking out loud and trying not to slur my words, “Bernie, old boy, you’re drunk as a lord, tight as a tick, high as a kite. You’ve got to get home before you get in trouble. Wait for a yellow car with a light on top. That’s the kind to wave at. It’s the only kind to wave at.”
I may have erred on the side of caution, because a cab or two got by me before I could get my hand up. But eventually I must have snagged one, because the next thing I knew I was riding in it. And I was tired, too, so much so that I could barely keep my eyes open.
I must have closed them. They were closed when I became aware of the cabdriver, to whom I had evidently bonded. “My frien’, my frien’,” he was saying, with a certain degree of urgency, and one of those accents that can cope with no more than one consonant at the end of a word. “My frien’, we are here. You wan’ to sleep, you mus’ go to your room.”
I didn’t see why he couldn’t leave me alone. But I sighed and opened my eyes. I leaned forward and squinted at the meter. It was hard to make out and I decided I was reading it wrong, because what I thought I saw was $3.60, and it generally costs me ten bucks plus a tip to get home, which is one reason the subway generally gets my business.
But this would have been a bad night for the subway.
I got out, leaned against the cab, got out my wallet, and found a ten and two singles. “Your meter’s wrong,” I said. “You ought to see about getting it fixed.”
He took the money, looked at the bills, then looked at me. I asked him if something was wrong. Wasn’t that enough money? Did he want more?
“Is plenny money,” he said. “You go in your house, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and looked around. “Where is it? Where are we?”
“Where you say.”
“Where I say?”
“Where you say to take you. We here, my frien’. You go to your bed, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and let go of the cab for a moment, and when I reached for it again it was gone. I got my balance, no easy task, and I turned around for a good look at my house, which I have to say didn’t look like my house at all.
Well, that might explain the low fare. The cabby, upset at having a fare sleeping in his cab, had just dropped me any old place-and I, willing to believe we’d gone all the way to the Upper West Side, had insisted on paying him accordingly.
But where the hell were we?
I straightened up and focused on the building in front of me, and either it was swaying or I was, and logic suggested the instability was mine. There was something written on the canopy, but how was I going to read it?
Definitely not my building, no matter what the driver said. And yet it did look familiar.
Was I intent on visiting a friend? This certainly wasn’t Carolyn’s place on Arbor Court, although the meter would have been about right. Some other girlfriend? I didn’t know where Alice Cottrell lived, we’d only been to my place, but maybe I’d given the driver some exgirlfriend’s address, out of force of habit. Well, force of nonhabit, since I didn’t have any old girlfriends I was in the habit of dropping in on. Force of rye whiskey, call it.
I walked up to the entrance, and it still looked familiar. I opened the door and went in, and the entranceway looked familiar, too. I looked past some chairs and couches to a fireplace, and I looked up over the fireplace, and I saw a little furry chap in a royal blue hat and a bright red jacket and boots the very color of the cab that had brought me here.
Oh.
I straightened up, and I walked a perfectly straight line over to the desk, where a round-shouldered man with the air of a defrocked accountant was reading one of Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories of the Napoleonic Wars.
“Jeffrey Peters,” I said. “Room 415. I’d like my key, please.”