The Burglar in the Rye (8 page)

She used the pen name Melissa Manwaring. The Manwaring came from
Nobody’s Baby,
of course, and Melissa just seemed to go well with it. She quit her bookstore job when she was halfway through with the second book. Later on she began writing Regency romances for another publisher, with period dialogue and dastardly male characters, and her pen name for these was Virginia Furlong. She changed cities every couple of years, and friends and lovers a little more frequently than that, and she turned out a book often enough that money was never a problem, but not so often that she had to worry about burning out.

Every now and then, say eight or ten times in twenty years, she’d get a purple envelope in the mail with her
current address typed on it. And a letter inside from Gulliver Fairborn.

“He wouldn’t have needed to hire detectives,” she said. “I wasn’t hiding from the world the way he was. Each time I moved I sent a change-of-address to the post office. I never paid extra for an unlisted telephone number. Still, he had to make an effort to find me.”

The first letter showed up a few months after Melissa Manwaring’s first novel hit the bookstores. Maybe the pen name caught his eye. In any event, he’d spotted her style right away, and took the time to read the book through and comment on it. That was flattering. He included a return address—General Delivery, Joplin, Missouri, with a false name to address it to. She dashed off a long letter, tore it up, wrote a short one, and sent it off—and heard nothing further, until two years later and a thousand miles away when another purple envelope turned up, this one postmarked Augusta, Maine.

And so it went. She got a letter from him shortly after she was married, and another, two years later, shortly after her divorce. They both kept moving around the country, and occasionally out of it. Their paths never crossed, but she never went more than a couple of years without hearing from him. The purple envelopes always took her by surprise, and she would take them up with a mixture of excitement and dread. He remained, she had to admit, the most important man in her life. Sometimes she cursed him for it, but it was true.

And now, just weeks ago, she’d heard from him after a silence of almost three years.

“Here in New York?”

But no, she’d been living in Charlottesville, Virginia, had moved there in the spring, subletting an apartment a short walk from the University of Virginia campus.
She got to share a rose garden with the building’s three other tenants, and she took his letter out to the garden and read it there, on a warm afternoon with a scented breeze blowing.

He was very agitated. That was unusual, as his letters were typically laid-back. What, he wanted to know, had she done with the letters he had sent her? Had she destroyed them? Would she please do so, either that or return them to him?

She wrote back at once, saying that she had kept all of his letters from the very beginning. She traveled light, she kept little, she didn’t even have copies of all of her own books, but she still owned the copy of
Nobody’s Baby
he’d inscribed to her, and she still had his letters. And she wanted to keep them. Why on earth did he want her to destroy them?

For answer he sent her—by return mail!—a photocopy of an article that had run in the
New York Times.
Anthea Landau, his erstwhile agent, had made arrangements with Sotheby’s for the sale of all the letters he’d sent her over the years.

He’d called the woman up, outraged, and had made the tactical error of letting phrases like “bloodsucker” and “money-grubbing vampire” and “ten percent of my soul” creep into his conversation. Landau hung up on him and wouldn’t pick up the phone when he called back. He wrote her a letter, arguing his case more diplomatically, stressing that his letters had been written for her eyes only and that it was important to him that he get them back. He offered to pay for them, and invited her to set a price. She wouldn’t have to pay a commission, he said, or report the sale to the IRS, and she would be doing the right thing, too.

She never responded. He wrote a second letter, and
had no sooner dropped it in the mail than he realized she could add these letters to the auction. The idea infuriated him, and he didn’t write again.

“And there was nothing he could do,” I told Carolyn. “The law’s very clear when it comes to letters. They belong to the recipient. If I send you a letter, it’s yours. You can keep it, you can tear it up, you can sell it to somebody else.”

“First I’d have to find someone who wanted it, Bern.”

“Well, if I was Gully Fairborn, you wouldn’t have a lot of trouble. He’s an important writer, and he’s such a man of mystery that his letters are particularly desirable. So you could sell them if you wanted. About the only thing you couldn’t do is publish them.”

“Why not, if they belong to me?”

“The letters as physical property belong to the recipient. As literary property, title remains with the sender. He owns the copyright.”

“Wait a minute. I know Fairborn’s a couple of beads off plumb, Bern, but don’t tell me he sent his letters to the Library of Congress to have them copyrighted.”

“He doesn’t have to. Anything you write is automatically protected by copyright, whether or not you register it in Washington. Fairborn retains the copyright to his letters, and he can keep them from being published. In fact he did just that a couple of years ago.”

“Anthea Landau tried to publish his letters?”

“No, but there was a fellow who wrote a biography of Fairborn—an unauthorized biography, obviously. There were a few people around who’d received purple envelopes over the years, and some of them were willing to let the writer read them. He was going to quote
at length from them in his book, until Fairborn went to court and put a stop to it.”

“The guy couldn’t even quote excerpts from the letters?”

“The court ruled that he could report on their contents, because that was a matter of fact, but he couldn’t quote without infringing on Fairborn’s copyright. He could paraphrase, but not in great detail, and the upshot of it all was that he couldn’t write the book he’d set out to write, and the one he wound up with wasn’t one too many people wanted to read.”

She thought about it. “If nobody can publish his letters,” she said, “what does Fairborn care who owns them? What difference does it make to him if they sit in Anthea Landau’s files or in some collector’s library? If they can’t be published…”

“But they can. Sort of.”

“You just said…”

“I know what I said. You couldn’t quote them in a book, or even paraphrase them in great detail. But you could quote from them and give a detailed description of their contents in an auction catalog.”

“How come?”

“Because you’ve got a right to furnish a description of goods offered for sale. And you’ve also got a right to show the goods to prospective buyers, so anyone who wanted could turn up at Sotheby’s the week before the auction and read through Fairborn’s letters. And the press could report on their contents.”

“Would they bother?”

“With all the mystery surrounding Fairborn, and with all the interest in the letters? I think they might. They’d certainly cover the sale and report on the selling price.”

“More publicity for Fairborn.”

“And he’s the one author in America who doesn’t want it. He makes B. Traven look like a media slut, and now his private correspondence is up for grabs to the highest bidder. And sooner or later it’ll be published in full.”

“When the copyright runs out?”

“When Fairborn dies. It’ll still be protected, but his heirs would have to go to court, and who knows if they’ll bother? Even if they do, the courts are less impressed with the need to protect a man’s privacy when he’s not around to notice one way or the other. The only way Fairborn can be positive those letters won’t be published is if he gets hold of them and burns them.”

“So why doesn’t he go to the auction and buy them himself?”

“He’s not one to show his face in public.”

“Why not, if nobody knows what he looks like? But he wouldn’t have to show up in person. He could deputize someone to bid for him. A lawyer, say.”

“He could do that,” I allowed. “If he could afford it.”

“How much money are we talking about, Bern?”

I shrugged. “I couldn’t even tell Alice how much her inscribed first of
Nobody’s Baby
is worth. I couldn’t begin to guess what a hundred letters would bring.”

“A hundred letters?”

“Well, she was his agent for four or five books. Some of the letters are probably cut-and-dried—here’s the manuscript, where’s the check?—but there are probably longer letters that shed light on his creative process and provide personal glimpses of the man behind the books.”

“Ballpark it for me, Bern.”

“I really can’t,” I said. “I haven’t seen the letters and I don’t know just how revealing they’ll turn out to be.
And I’ve got no way of knowing who might show up the day of the sale. I’m sure there’ll be a couple of university libraries bidding. If the right private collectors come around, and if their pockets are deep enough, the prices could go through the roof. And don’t ask me how far through the roof, or even where the roof’s located, because I don’t know. I can’t imagine they’ll bring less than ten thousand dollars, or more than a million, but that doesn’t really narrow it down.”

“And Fairborn’s not rich?”

“Not as rich as you’d think.
Nobody’s Baby
made a lot of money, and still earns steady royalties, but none of his books since then have amounted to much in sales. He keeps trying new things and won’t write the same book twice, or even the same kind of book. He always gets published, because how can you not publish Gulliver Fairborn? But his recent books haven’t made money, for him or his publishers.”

“Are the new books any good, Bern?”

“I’ve read most of them,” I said, “although I’ve missed a few along the way. And they’re not bad, and they may even be better novels than
Nobody’s Baby.
They’re certainly more mature work. But they don’t grab you the way that first book did. According to Alice, Fairborn doesn’t care how the books sell, or if they sell. He barely cares if they’re published, just so he can get up each morning and write what he wants to write.”

“He could make money if he wanted to, couldn’t he?”

“Sure. He could write
Nobody’s Toddler
or
Nobody’s Adolescent.
He could go on tour with it and give readings on college campuses. Or he could sit back and sell film rights to
Nobody’s Baby,
which he’s always refused to consider. There are lots of things he could do, but not if he wants to live his life in peace and privacy.”

“So he can’t buy the letters back.”

“He tried to, remember? Landau didn’t even answer his letter. And he can’t afford to pay what they’ll bring at auction.”

“I get the picture,” she said. “And I guess that’s where you come into it, huh, Bern?”

“It’s really a shame,” I’d told Alice. “You would think lawyers could do something, wouldn’t you? I guess the best he can do is hope the letters wind up with someone who’ll keep the public away from him.”

“There would still be the auction catalog.”

“True.”

“And the newspaper stories.”

“It’ll blow over eventually,” I said, “but so will a tornado, and your trailer park never looks the same afterward. There ought to be something somebody can do.”

“Perhaps there is.”

“Oh?”

“If someone were a burglar,” she said, not looking at me, “one could get hold of the letters before they got into Sotheby’s hands, let alone into their catalog. Isn’t that the sort of thing a skilled and resourceful burglar could do?”

“I suppose I should have seen it coming,” I told Carolyn. “I bought the bookstore thinking that it might be a good place to meet girls, and every once in a while it is. People do wander in, and some of them are female, and some of them are attractive. And it’s natural enough to fall into conversation, about books if nothing else, and sometimes it’s a conversation that can be continued over drinks and even dinner.”

“And once in a while it’s not over until Mel Tormé sings.”

“Once in a while,” I agreed. “Once in a great while. But I should have seen it coming all the same. I mean, it’s not as if I was irresistible that afternoon. All I could talk about was the candiru. That’s some icebreaker.”

“Well, it gets your attention.”

“She’s living in Virginia when she hears from Fairborn,” I said, “and a couple of weeks later she walks into my store, picks a fifth printing of his book off the shelf, and asks what an inscribed first edition would be worth. She’d owned the book for twenty years. Don’t you think she’d have a better idea of its value than I would?”

“It was a way to start a conversation, Bern, and a better one than the candiru. It was a coincidence, her needing a burglar and you happening to be one, but the thing about coincidences is they happen. Look at Erica.”

“I’d better not,” I said. “I looked at Mindy Sea Gull, and I got bawled out for it.”

“I’m talking about coincidence,” she said. “Erica came into my life when I just happened to be in the mood for romance and open to the possibility of a relationship. Wouldn’t you call that a coincidence?”

“Not really.”

“No? Why the hell not?”

“You’re generally in the mood for romance,” I said, “and whenever you see somebody cute, you’re ready to start picking out drapes together.”

“Our eyes met across a crowded room, Bern. How often does that happen?”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “It was a remarkable coincidence, and it means the two of you are made for each other. But it wasn’t a coincidence with Alice. She’d
managed to learn about me, and maybe that’s not as hard to do as I’d like to think. Sit down at a computer, punch in
books
and
burglar,
and whose name is going to pop up?”

“It’s true you’ve had your name in the papers a few times.”

“That’s the trouble with getting arrested,” I said. “All the publicity. If Fairborn wants to find out what invasion of privacy is all about, let him stick up a liquor store. ‘No mug shots, please. I never allow photographs.’ Lots of luck, Gully.”