“Yes. Thank you.”
“Come in back. Schnell.”
I followed him into the back room, which he unlocked with a keypad, carefully shielding it from me while he punched in the numbers. Inside was all the stuff that wasn’t up front, shelves crammed with watches, lockets, brooches, rings, pendants, chains. Rubies and emeralds flashed fire. I saw a tiara loaded with diamonds and pointed. “Are those real?”
“Ja, ja, real. But I don’t think you came here to buy. You came here to sell. You maybe noticed I didn’t ask to see your driver’s license.”
“That’s good, because I don’t have one.”
“I already know who you are. I saw your picture in the paper.”
“The Sun?”
“USA Today. You are nationwide, young Mr. Charles Reade. At least for this week. You saved old Bowditch’s life.”
I didn’t bother telling him it had been the dog, I was tired of that, I only wanted to do my business and get out. All the gold and jewels freaked me out a little, especially when compared to the barren shelves out front. I almost wished I’d brought the gun, because I was starting to feel not like Jack the Beanstalk Boy but Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. Heinrich was small and dumpy and undangerous, but what if he had a Long John Silver associate lurking somewhere? It wasn’t an entirely paranoid idea. I could tell myself that Mr. Bowditch had been doing business with Heinrich for years, but Mr. Bowditch himself had said he’d never done an exchange of this magnitude.
“Let’s see what you have,” he said. In a boys’ adventure novel he would have been a caricature of greed, rubbing his hands together and all but drooling, but he just sounded businesslike, maybe even a little bored. I didn’t trust that, and I didn’t trust him.
I set the backpack on the counter. There was a scale nearby, and it was indeed dig-i-tal. I unzipped the flap. I held it open and when he peered in I saw something change in his face: a tightening of the mouth and a momentary widening of the eyes.
“Mein Gott. Look at what you have been carrying on your bicycle.”
The scale had a Lucite trough hanging on chains. Heinrich put small handfuls of gold pellets into the trough until the scale read two pounds. He set them aside in a plastic container, then weighed another two. When he finished weighing the last two and adding them to the rest, there was still a small creek of gold in one of the folds at the bottom of the backpack. Mr. Bowditch had told me to go a little heavy, and I had done so.
“I think another quarter-pound left over, hein?” he said, peering in. “You sell it to me, I give you three thousand dollars, cash money. Bowditch doesn’t need to know. Call it a gratuity.”
Call it something he could hold over my head, I thought. I said thanks anyway and zipped the flap closed. “You have a check for me, right?”
“Yes.” The check was folded into the pocket of his old-guy sweater. It was from the PNC Bank of Chicago, Belmont Avenue branch, and made out to Howard Bowditch in the amount of seventy-four thousand dollars. The memo opposite Wilhelm Heinrich’s signature read Personal Services. It looked okay to me. I put it in my wallet and put the wallet in my left front pocket.
“He is a stubborn old man who refuses to move with the times,” Heinrich said. “Often in the past, when we have dealt with much smaller amounts, I have given him cash. On two occasions, checks. I told him, ‘Have you not heard of electronic deposit?’ And do you know what he said?”
I shook my head, but I could guess.
“He said ‘I haven’t heard of it and don’t want to hear of it.’ And now, for the first time, he sends a zwischen gehen—an emissary—because he has had an accident. I would have said he had no one in the world he could trust with such an errand. But here you are. A boy on a bicycle.”
“And here I go,” I said, and went to the door leading back to the as-yet empty store, where he might or might not stock the display cases later. I half-expected the door to be locked, but it wasn’t. I felt better once I was back where I could see daylight. Even so, the smell of elderly dust was unpleasant. Crypt-like.
“Does he even know what a computer is?” Heinrich asked, following me and shutting the door to the back room behind him. “I’m betting not.”
I had no plans to be drawn into a discussion of what Mr. Bowditch did or didn’t know, and just said it was nice to meet him. Which wasn’t true. I was relieved to see that no one had stolen my bike—leaving my house that morning, I’d been too preoccupied with other things to remember my bike lock.