Deception Read online

‘That’s my pound!’ my mother hissed. ‘By golly, he’s got a nerve!’

  ‘What’s in the glass?’ I asked.

  ‘Whisky,’ my mother said. ‘Neat whisky.’

  The barman didn’t give him any change from the pound.

  ‘That must be a treble whisky,’ my mother said.

  ‘What’s a treble?’ I asked.

  ‘Three times the normal measure,’ she answered.

  The little man picked up the glass and put it to his lips. He tilted it gently. Then he tilted it higher … and higher … and higher … and very soon all the whisky had disappeared down his throat in one long pour.

  ‘That was a jolly expensive drink,’ I said.

  ‘It’s ridiculous!’ my mother said. ‘Fancy paying a pound for something you swallow in one go!’

  ‘It cost him more than a pound,’ I said. ‘It cost him a twenty-pound silk umbrella.’

  ‘So it did,’ my mother said. ‘He must be mad.’

  The little man was standing by the bar with the empty glass in his hand. He was smiling now, and a sort of golden glow of pleasure was spreading over his round pink face. I saw his tongue come out to lick the white moustache, as though searching for the last drop of that precious whisky.

  Slowly, he turned away from the bar and edged back through the crowd to where his hat and coat were hanging. He put on his hat. He put on his coat. Then, in a manner so superbly cool and casual that you hardly noticed anything at all, he lifted from the coat-rack one of the many wet umbrellas hanging there, and off he went.

  ‘Did you see that!’ my mother shrieked. ‘Did you see what he did!’

  ‘Ssshh!’ I whispered. ‘He’s coming out!’

  We lowered the umbrella to hide our faces, and peeped out from under it.

  Out he came. But he never looked in our direction. He opened his new umbrella over his head and scurried off down the road the way he had come.

  ‘So that’s his little game!’ my mother said.

  ‘Neat,’ I said. ‘Super.’

  We followed him back to the main street where we had first met him, and we watched him as he proceeded, with no trouble at all, to exchange his new umbrella for another pound note. This time it was with a tall thin fellow who didn’t even have a coat or hat. And as soon as the transaction was completed, our little man trotted off down the street and was lost in the crowd. But this time he went in the opposite direction.

  ‘You see how clever he is!’ my mother said. ‘He never goes to the same pub twice!’

  ‘He could go on doing this all night,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ my mother said. ‘Of course. But I’ll bet he prays like mad for rainy days.’

  The Bookseller

  First published in Playboy, January 1987

  If, in those days, you walked up from Trafalgar Square into Charing Cross Road, you would come in a few minutes to a shop on the right-hand side that had above the window the words WILLIAM BUGGAGE - RARE BOOKS.

  If you peered through the window itself you would see that the walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and if you then pushed open the door and went in, you would immediately be assailed by that subtle odour of old cardboard and tea leaves that pervades the interiors of every second-hand bookshop in London. Nearly always, you would find two or three customers in there, silent shadowy figures in overcoats and trilby hats rummaging among the sets of Jane Austen and Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot, hoping to find a first edition.

  No shop-keeper ever seemed to be hovering around to keep an eye on the customers, and if somebody actually wanted to pay for a book instead of pinching it and walking out, then he or she would have to push through a door at the back of the shop on which it said OFFICE – PAY HERE. If you went into the office you would find both Mr William Buggage and his assistant, Miss Muriel Tottle, seated at their respective desks and very much preoccupied.

  Mr Buggage would be sitting behind a valuable eighteenth-century mahogany partners-desk, and Miss Tottle, a few feet away, would be using a somewhat smaller but no less elegant piece of furniture, a Regency writing-table with a top of faded green leather. On Mr Buggage’s desk there would invariably be one copy of the day’s London Times, as well as the Daily Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian the Western Mail and the Glasgow Herald. There would also be a current edition of Who’s Who close at hand, fat and red and well thumbed. Miss Tottle’s writing-table would have on it an electric typewriter and a plain but very nice open box containing notepaper and envelopes, as well as a quantity of paper-clips and staplers and other secretarial paraphernalia.

  Now and again, but not very often, a customer would enter the office from the shop and would hand his chosen volume to Miss Tottle, who checked the price written in pencil on the fly-leaf and accepted the money, giving change when necessary from somewhere in the left-hand drawer of her writing-table. Mr Buggage never bothered even to glance up at those who came in and went out, and if one of them asked a question, it would be Miss Tottle who answered it.

  Neither Mr Buggage nor Miss Tottle appeared to be in the least concerned about what went on in the main shop. In point of fact, Mr Buggage took the view that if someone was going to steal a book, then good luck to him. He knew very well that there was not a single valuable first edition out there on the shelves. There might be a moderately rare volume of Galsworthy or an early Waugh that had come in with a job lot bought at auction, and there were certainly some good sets of Boswell and Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson and the rest, often very nicely bound in half or even whole calf. But those were not really the sort of things you could slip into your overcoat pocket. Even if a villain did walk out with half a dozen volumes, Mr Buggage wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. Why should he when he knew that the shop itself earned less money in a whole year than the back-room business grossed in a couple of days. It was what went on in the back room that counted.

  One morning in February when the weather was foul and sleet was slanting white and wet on to the window panes of the office, Mr Buggage and Miss Tottle were in their respective places as usual and each was engrossed, one might even say fascinated, by his and her own work. Mr Buggage, with a gold Parker pen poised above a notepad, was reading The Times and jotting things down as he went along. Every now and again, he would refer to Who’s Who and make more jottings.

  Miss Tottle, who had been opening the mail, was now examining some cheques and adding up totals.

  ‘Three today,’ she said.

  ‘What’s it come to?’ Mr Buggage asked, not looking up.

  ‘One thousand six hundred,’ Miss Tottle said.

  Mr Buggage said, ‘I don’t suppose we’ve ’eard anything yet from that bishop’s ’ouse in Chester, ’ave we?’

  ‘A bishop lives in a palace, Billy, not a house,’ Miss Tottle said.

  ‘I don’t give a sod where ’ee lives,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘But I get just a little bit uneasy when there’s no quick answer from somebody like that.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, the reply came this morning,’ Miss Tottle said.

  ‘Coughed up all right?’

  ‘The full amount.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘We never done a bishop before and I’m not sure it was any too clever.’

  ‘The cheque came from some solicitors.’

  Mr Buggage looked up sharply. ‘Was there a letter?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Read it.’

  Miss Tottle found the letter and began to read: ‘Dear Sir, With reference to your communication of the 4th Instant, we enclose herewith a cheque for £537 in full settlement. Yours faithfully, Smithson, Briggs and Ellis.’ Miss Tottle paused. ‘That seems all right, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s all right this time,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘But we don’t want no more solicitors and let’s not ’ave any more bishops either.’

  ‘I agree about bishops,’ Miss Tottle said. ‘But you’re not suddenly ruling out earls and lords and all that l