The more recent stamp illustrations don’t have the white lines, but the catalog people haven’t troubled to rephotograph all the earlier issues, and the stamps I was looking at were of that sort, having been issued over seventy years ago. I tilted the book to get all I could from the light, and I squinted like the first runner-up in a gurning competition, and finally I went to my office in the back and looked through drawers until I found the magnifying glass.

Even with the glass, the results were not anything you’d want to go to court with. Of the series of fifteen stamps, the folks at Scott had chosen to illustrate only four. Three showed local scenes, including a church, a mountain, and a gypsy leading a dancing bear on a leash. In each of these, an unsmiling version of the man in Ilona’s photograph gazed at you from a circular inset in the upper right corner.

The fourth stamp shown was the 100-tschirin stamp. (The nation’s currency was based on the tschiro, and each tschiro was worth a hundred dikin. The cheapest stamp was a single dik. It’s remarkable how much you can learn from a postage stamp catalog, even an outdated one, and of how little value the information is.) The 100-tschirin stamp was the high value of the series, and it differed from its fellows in two respects. It was larger, about one and a half times their size, and it was vertical in format, taller than it was wide. And the portrait of Ilona’s buddy, instead of being confined to a little porthole up in one corner, filled the entire stamp.

Hard to be sure. The reproduction, as I’ve said, left a lot to be desired. And I didn’t have the photograph with me, just my memory of the photo, glimpsed briefly in the dim and flickering light of a single candle. So I couldn’t swear to it, but it certainly looked to me as though this was the man.

Vlados I, the first-and so far the only-king of Anatruria.

For a minute there it looked like I was on to something.

My God, I thought, it all tied together. Ilona wasn’t just someone who wandered in to buy a book. It wasn’t sheer coincidence that, of all the bookstores in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine. It was all part of-

Part of what?

Not part of the abortive burglary, and not part of the death of Hugo Candlemas. Because what did Anatruria have to do with all that, or that with Anatruria? Nothing. Ilona had a photo of the erstwhile king of Anatruria in her room, just as she had a map on her wall with the country’s purported borders outlined thickly in red. And why not? She was an Anatrurian, and she might well be a patriotic one, though not without an ironic sense of the comic-opera aspect of it all.

Was there a coincidence? It seemed to me there had to be a coincidence, but I couldn’t spot it. What gave it all a touch of the dramatic, at least at first glance, was that it had taken me something like sixteen hours to figure out why the guy with the big smile looked faintly familiar. If I’d recognized him on the spot, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. “Oh, there’s King Vlados, I’d know him anywhere, even in the apartment of one of his loyal subjects.”

On the other hand, if I’d passed his photograph without the barest twinge of recognition, I would never have known who he was. Or, come to think of it, cared.

So if anything was remarkable (and it certainly seemed as though something ought to be) it was that I had subconsciously retained the image of Vlados in my mind from an earlier glance through the Scott catalog. But that, damn it to hell, wasn’t remarkable either, because I’d looked up Anatruria in that very volume a week or so ago, after Ilona had acknowledged it as her birthplace. That was why I’d been able to rattle off all that historical data so glibly, impressing the daylights out of Carolyn.

I used the magnifying glass and had another look at His Highness. He was better, I decided, at flashing smiles than at looking solemn. The smile might not have been appropriate for a serious philatelic occasion like this, but it gave him a leg up on the legion of royal twits who’ve left their faces on the stamps and coins of Europe. I wondered what might have been the source of his claim to the Anatrurian throne, and if he was related to the other kings and princelings. Most of them are descended one way or another from Queen Victoria, and are almost as much fun at parties as she was.

What about Vlados’s consort, she of the high-piled hair and the pathetic little foxes? The Scott people hadn’t provided a picture of her, but they were nice enough to tell me her name. According to the descriptive listing, she appeared twice in the series-alone on the 35-tschirin stamp, and with her husband on the 50-tschirin denomination. And her name was Queen Liliana.

Scott’s hadn’t priced the Anatrurian issues, noting at once that they were very rare and of dubious philatelic legitimacy; they had been printed to carry not the mail but a message, and, while postally used copies did in fact exist, these seemed to represent contrived cancellations affixed by postmasters sympathetic to the cause of Anatrurian independence.

So Scott knew they were valuable, but didn’t want to go on record with a price. There weren’t many specimens up for grabs, and then again there weren’t all that many hands out there grabbing. If the stamp collection I knocked over happened to contain a set of these gummed portraits of good King Vladdy, I could figure out how to unload them. It would take a little research-specialized catalogs, auction records, some library time spent closeted with back issues of Linn’s. I might not net as high a percentage of retail value as I would with more popular material, but I wouldn’t have any real trouble getting a decent price.

But that wasn’t my problem, because I didn’t have the stamps. I had an Anatrurian girlfriend, but Anatruria was out of business as a stamp-issuing enterprise half a century before she was born, and she might not even know her country had a postal history.

Might that not be something for us to talk about? I could lift the photo from its hallowed place on her footlocker and say, “Ah, King Vlados, and his lovely Queen Liliana! I’d recognize them anywhere.” Would that impress her? Would she be dazzled by my familiarity with her nation’s history, touched by my interest in her heritage?

Maybe. Or maybe she’d just raise her eyebrows the slightest bit and give me that look of skeptical amusement.

I reached for the phone and dialed her number again, with no more success than the other times I’d tried.

Then the little guy came in and stuck a gun in my face.

CHAPTER Nine

When I first saw him on his way through the door I thought he was a kid wearing his father’s clothes. He couldn’t have been more than five-three, and judging by the way he walked he already had lifts in his shoes. He had a very narrow face, as if it had gotten in the way when Mother Nature clapped her hands. His nose was long and narrow, his lips thin. His hair and eyebrows were black and his skin was very pale, almost translucent. There were patches of color on his cheeks, but they were more suggestive of consumption than radiant good health.

He was wearing a lime-green sport shirt with flowing collar points and he’d buttoned it all the way up to the neck. His pants were of high-gloss blue gabardine, and his shoes were wing-tip slip-ons of woven brown leather. He was wearing a hat, too, a straw panama with a feather in its band, and I think it must have been the hat that made him look like an overdressed child. It was the crowning touch, all right.

“Name your price,” he said.

I didn’t hesitate. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m afraid it’s not for sale.”

The first thing I thought-the only thing I thought-was that he was looking to buy my store. I didn’t delude myself that he’d made a study of Barnegat Books and concluded that it was a gold mine. On the contrary, I figured he saw it as the commercial real estate equivalent of a teardown; he’d buy me out so that he could take over my lease, sell my whole stock en bloc to Argosy or the Strand, and establish in Barnegat’s stead a Thai restaurant or a Korean nail shop, something that would be a great cultural asset to the neighborhood. I get offers like that all the time, strange as it may seem, and I don’t bother explaining that I own the building, and that consequently I’m the landlord as well as the tenant. For one thing, that part’s a secret; for another, it would simply invite further inquiry. I just tell them all the business is not for sale, and sooner or later they believe me and go away.