“I’ll tell you this,” Ray said. “It’s irregular.”

“But expedient, surely.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, “but it’d get the job done.”

“Tiglath,” Charlie Weeks said, “how much dough have you got on you?”

“You mean money?”

“No, I’m thinking about starting a bakery. Yes, I mean money. You came here thinking you’d have a chance to bid on those bearer shares. How much did you bring?”

“Not so much. I am not a rich man, Charlie. Surely you know that.”

“Don’t dick around, Tiggy, it’s late in the game for that. What are you carrying?”

“Ten thousand.”

“That’s U.S. dollars, I hope. Not Anatrurian tschirin.”

“Dollars, of course.”

“What about you, Gregorius?”

“A little more than that,” Tsarnoff said. “But can you possibly be suggesting that I help raise bail money for the Assyrian? He wrote my name in blood!”

“Yeah, but credit where it’s due, Gregorius. He spelled it wrong. Do I think you should kick in? Yes, I do.” He frowned. “You know what else I think? I think there’s too many people in the room. We need a private conference, Gregorius. You and me and Tiggy and Officer Kirschmann here.”

“And Wilfred.”

“If you prefer, Gregorius.”

“An’ Bernie,” Ray said.

“And the weasel, to be sure.”

I steered everybody else to my office in the back. That didn’t seem fair to Ilona and Michael, but they didn’t seem to mind, Ilona smiling her ironic smile while the king looked as though he’d suffered a light concussion. Between them they were less irritated than Carolyn and Mowgli, who were unhappy to be missing the next act.

I left them admiring the portrait of St. John of God, the patron saint of booksellers, and got back in time to hear Weeks explaining that he had the bearer shares. “Michael’s a nice fellow,” he was saying, “but that family was never loaded with smarts. After I heard about the burglary attempt, I told him I wanted to check the portfolio. I haven’t given it back to him yet, and when I do the shares won’t be in it.”

Tsarnoff stroked his big chin. “Without the account number-”

“Without the number the shares are just paper, but who’s to say there’s no one alive who knows the number? For that matter, who’s to say you can’t create a hairline fissure in the rock-solid walls of the Swiss banking system? If the three of us threw in together…”

“You and I, sir? And the Assyrian?”

Weeks was smiling furiously. “Be like old times,” he said. “Wouldn’t it, now?”

“Well, now,” Ray said, and there was a knock on the door. I looked up, and the knock was repeated, louder. I gave a dismissing wave, but the large young man at the door refused to be dismissed. He knocked again.

I went to the door, cracked it a few inches. “We’re closed,” I said. “Private meeting, not open for business today. Come back tomorrow.”

He held up a book. “I just want to buy this,” he said. “It’s off that table there, fifty cents, three for a buck. Here’s a buck.”

I pushed the money back at him. “Please,” I said.

“But I want the book.”

“Take the book.”

“But-”

“It’s a special,” I said. “Today only. Take it, it’s free. Please. Goodbye.”

I closed the door, turned the lock. I turned back to the five of them and found they’d made their deal. Rasmoulian had taken off his trench coat and was hunting under his clothes for a money belt. Wilfred handed a manila envelope to his employer, who opened it and began counting hundred-dollar bills. Weeks drew a similar stack of bills from his pocket, removed a rubber band, licked his thumb, and began counting.

“I wish I knew why the hell I was doing this,” Weeks said. “I’ve got all the money I need. What the hell do you think it is, Gregorius?”

“You miss the action, sir.”

“I’m an old man. What do I need with action?” No one had an answer, and I don’t think he wanted one. He finished counting his bundle, collected bundles from the other two, weighed all three in his cupped hands. I gave him a shopping bag from behind the counter and he dropped all the money into it. A few hours ago that bag had contained books, the ones I’d bought from Mowgli for seventy-five dollars. Now it was full of hundred-dollar bills.

Four hundred of them, according to Weeks, who held it out toward Ray.

“I don’t know,” Ray said, and shot a quick glance my way. I moved my head about an inch to the left and an inch to the right. Ray registered this, widened his eyes. I met his eyes, then raised mine a few degrees toward the ceiling.

“Thing is,” he said, “there’s a lot’s gotta be done, a bunch of police personnel gotta be brought in on this. Seems to me forty grand’s gonna spread too thin to cover it all.”

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Charlie Weeks said. “I thought we had a deal.”

“Make it fifty an’ we got a deal.”

“That’s an outrage. We’d already agreed on a figure, for Christ’s sake.”

“Put it this way,” Ray said. “You got yourself a real good deal when that trooper stopped you out in Montana. But you ain’t in the Wild West this time around. This here’s New York.”

CHAPTER Twenty-four

“It doesn’t seem right,” Carolyn said. “Tiggy murdered both of those men. And he winds up getting away with it.”

It was around four-thirty and we were around the corner at the Bum Rap. Carolyn was staying in shape with a glass of Scotch on the rocks; I was getting back into shape gradually, nursing a beer.

“Mrs. Kirschmann needs a new fur coat,” I said.

“And she gets it, and Tiggy gets away clean. But when does justice get served?”

“Justice gets served last,” I said, “and usually winds up with leftovers. The fact of the matter is there would never have been enough evidence to convict Rasmoulian, even if he didn’t skip the country in advance of trial. He’d never wind up in prison, and this way at least he winds up out of the country, and so do the rest of them.”

“Tsarnoff and who else?”

“Wilfred, of course. Getting Wilfred and Rasmoulian out of the country means a saving of untold lives. They’re a pair of stone killers if I ever saw one.”

“And now they’ll be working together.”

“God help Europe,” I said. “But there’s always the chance that they’ll kill each other. Charlie Weeks is on his way out of the country, too. He’ll be catching the Concorde as soon as he makes arrangements to close his apartment at the Boccaccio. Between the three of them, they think they’ve got a chance of coming up with the Swiss account number and looting the long-lost treasury of Anatruria.”

“You figure they’ll get hold of the number?”

“They might.”

“And do you think there’s an Anatrurian treasury left for them to loot?”

“If they ever get that account number,” I said, “I think they’re in for the greatest disappointment since Geraldo broke into Al Capone’s vault. But what do I know? Maybe the cash is gone, depleted by banking fees over the past seventy years. Maybe the stuff in the safe-deposit box is nothing but czarist bonds and worthless certificates. On the other hand, maybe whoever gets in there will be sitting on a controlling interest in Royal Dutch Petroleum.”

She thought about it. “I think the important thing for those three is to be in the game,” she said. “It doesn’t really matter who wins the hand, or how much is in the pot.”

“I think you’re right,” I said. “Weeks even said as much. He wants to play.”

She picked up her drink, shook it so that the ice cubes clinked pleasantly. “ Bern,” she said, “I was really glad I could be around for most of it at the end there. I never met a king before.”

“I’m not sure you met one today.”

“Well, that’s as close as I expect to come. Mowgli was impressed, incidentally. He said he was seeing a whole new side of the book business today.” She sipped her drink. “ Bern,” she said, “there’s a few things I’m not too clear on.”