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Wednesday, April 2, 2008

The Book Thief

Posted by Chris in , , , , ,

Someone has been stealing books from our store. I mean, it happens all the time, but I’m not talking about high school kids trying to sneak mangas out in their backpack. Specifically, I’m talking about this one guy, who’s a pro. We’re talking making off with entire shelves. He may just be an evil genius.

At least that’s what we’re telling ourselves. Because it probably shouldn’t be so easy for someone who isn’t an evil genius to steal from us, especially when there are so many of us walking around the floor all the time.

The guy’s working with an M.O., which is how we were able to connect a number of robberies over the past few weeks to the same perp. I first noticed a couple Mondays ago when someone asked for a Milan Kundera book and I noticed that there were none there, even though our computer told us there were plenty. Someone had just walked up to his spot on the shelf and apparently just shoveled them all into his bag and split. Then a few days ago, I noticed that it looked like someone had done the same thing to Camus.

I mentioned this to Richard, who is one of my coworkers. He’s a great guy with kids about my age. If we were a detective team, he would be the jaded, world-weary vet who’s seen it all and I would be the naïve, brash young rookie (even though I’m way more jaded than he is, and age aside, he’s probably more youthful than me). I told him that I suspected the person who stole the Kundera had also been responsible for the Camus, since it was a similar robbery of two kind of similar authors. That reminded him of something that had happened the Monday before-he had shelved some Ginsburg in the poetry section just before his break, and by the time he had come back, they were all gone.

Well between the two of us, the wheels were really turning now. The same thing had happened to Kerouac not too long ago. We tried to think of another author who might be a target and the first person who came to mind was Kafka. Sure enough, we were almost completely out of him too. We had ourselves a repeat offender.

We spent the rest of the night coming up with a list of authors whose shelves had been raided recently. Here is our list:

  • Kundera
  • Camus
  • Kafka
  • Kerouac
  • Ginsburg
  • Burroughs
  • McEwan
  • Bukowski
  • Hesse
  • Bradbury
  • Heller
  • Henry Miller

Now, this is nothing more than a list of literary-type authors who have been burgled in bulk. But that’s not to say they were all stolen by the same person (Heller only made the list because a few copies of Catch-22 were missing, for example). The authors who we can solidly put in the category of this one person are Kundera, Camus, Kafka, Kerouac and Bukowski.

Unfortunately, all we had was this list. No one had gotten a glimpse of the person, or had any idea when any of the robberies took place (except for the Ginsburg robbery — that was late Monday afternoon/early Monday evening, though only one title was taken, and it’s poetry, which I why I don’t put it solidly in the “yes” column). It was up to us to be vigilant and use our imaginations to fill in some of the blanks.

I thought the best thing to do would be to come up with a sketch of what the suspect might look like. From the authors, we figured he was an intellectual type who sold the books to a street vendor around NYU or Columbia. Probably a nihilist, or perhaps simply a Marxist (for lack of a better word) who felt his robberies were an act of defiance against an absurd society and unknowable world. Here is an approximation of the sketch I drew up:

I think that captures it quite nicely. A coworker also drew something like this, which is a picture of the suspect if he were a pirate hacking at a cow with a machete.

I’m not sure why, but there it is. It might prove helpful.

Richard seemed to take the whole robbery thing personally, like it was his home being broken into over and over again. He started conducting surveillance, which consisted of little more than standing in an aisle near the middle of the alphabet and staring out at people. I asked him what the idea behind this was and he said it was to differentiate the customers who were there to shop from the ones who had something to hide and wanted nothing to do with him. Which was probably the first time I’ve ever seen the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in real life, because the act of observation may have tampered with the results: I don’t care if you’re a nun; you would not have wanted anything to do with a tall guy standing in the aisle a few feet away and just staring at you.

All this happened on Monday.

In the meantime, I started working up a psychological profile of the guy. I noticed that, of the robberies we could trace with complete certainty to this one suspect, they all shared a couple of things in common. Even moreso than style (Kafka and Camus and Kerouac all appeal to the same kind of people, it seems to me, but Kundera stuck out from the start), the authors all had a hard K sound in their name (in the case of Bukowski, it is not the first letter, but the k is certainly present). I knew that if I were to whip up any kind of legitimate psychoanalytical picture of this guy, I would have to start with the mother. I posited that the suspect’s mother’s name is something like Carol or Katherine or Kathy — or perhaps her friends simply call her Kay. Our suspect has some unresolved abandonment issues with his mother, and this is his way of evening the score: he “collects” her, controls her relationship with him, gathers these Kays and then sells them, as if to say “you see? I don’t need you. I have complete control of you, decide how much contact we are to have and then dispose of you when I am finished.” He repeats this cycle, trying to bring himself closer to his mother through the books, exert some control over their relationship and try (and fail) to convince himself that he does not need his mother after all. This small act is also his way of breaking with his mother, because he is unable to do so in real life because he needs her so desperately.

I thought it was a neat little theory. No one else seemed to go for it, though.

Anyway, that Monday, we were all extra vigilant, patrolling the aisles and whatnot. And then for two hours, with breaks and other things in the store that take us away from our floor, neither Richard nor I were in fiction (other people were covering, but no one with intimate knowledge of the investigation). And when I got back from my break at 5, I noticed that someone had stolen all of the Kunderas again.

So now we knew that the thief likes to work on Monday afternoons (remember, the day I noticed the first batch of Kundera stolen was a Monday, and that was also when Richard had noticed the missing Ginsburgs). I was practically giddy at the idea of catching this person in the act. Not out of any kind of pride or defensiveness towards the store. Just the thrill of the investigation, and the idea that this person thought he would just be able to keep getting away with it and keep getting away with it. I wanted to catch him bad.

Whereas I was unable to suppress a smile when I was telling people that we had been hit again, Richard didn’t take the news so well. He upped his surveillance of the aisles, trying to come up with a psychological profile of his own with a more rigorous, scientific method, perhaps.

A few hours later, I asked him if he had noticed any suspicious characters.

“There was one,” he said. “She had a bag and I started walking towards her and she jumped and turned away like she was putting something in it and she walked away very quickly and left the store.” She was an Asian girl with long black hair and a green messenger’s bag.

A beautiful female thief (I added “beautiful” in my own imagination, just let me have it)! This was something I hadn’t considered. Perhaps I would catch her and she would seduce me and cloud my investigatory instincts (me being the brash, naïve young rookie, after all) and she would dangle me over a vat of something (I may be conflating genres here, but being seduced and then dangled over a vat is a better fantasy — with the possibility of rescue, and all — than being seduced and then quickly shot in the back of the head and dumped in the river).

Richard also asked me if I remembered being held up at the info desk or somewhere in the back of the store by a needy customer who had a lot of strange requests. His thinking was while this was going on, the robber himself was stealing things. A team! Another exciting possibility. It didn’t seem right to me, though — even if the partner never converses with the robber while they’re in the store, they never want you to get a good look at their faces; and besides, this seemed like a lot more of an improvised grab-and-run operation. All I could think of was an old woman who barely spoke English looking for a mystery that — as far as I could tell — did not, in fact, exist. But she didn’t seem like the robbing type.

But then a few hours later, I was approached by a guy with long hair, wearing a shirt and tie, who looked like he had just dropped by from the office but smelled like he hadn’t showered in a week or two. He whipped out a Blackberry and I noticed as he scrolled through a message or two that his fingernails were very long and thick. He kept asking me to look up author after author, most of whom were not in our database.

Finally he asked about Coleridge.

“We don’t seem to have anything by him, but I’m sure he’s anthologized,” I said. “I might be able to search for a particular poem—”

“No that’s OK,” the guy said. “He took drugs, though, right?”

“I’m sorry?”

“He took drugs? I’m just looking for a lot of authors who wrote about drugs or took drugs, do you know anything about Coleridge?”

“I know he wrote Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

“But you don’t know if he took drugs?”

“No, sorry.”

With Richard’s theory in mind the whole time, I was sure I would find something stolen as soon as this guy left me alone. It wasn’t so, though. He wasn’t a thief; just one of our regular nuts.

So anyway, we have a pretty good idea by now about how this thief operates. Clearly he (or she, hopefully) has not been challenged at all and is completely confident in his (or her) thievery. He (or she) even comes back at the same time every week and pulls the same trick. So now all we have to do is cash in. Wait for our opportunity and pounce. If our calculations are correct, then we expect a visitor on Monday sometime between 3 and 5. I cannot wait.

I need to practice my flying tackles.

Chris Sartinsky is a writer for the Onion News Network and keeps a fine blog of his own. Read his previous 2.0somethings columns here.

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