“I know. I was there.”

“So you will take me to yours.”

We walked, and neither of us spoke on the way. Inside, I offered to make drinks. She didn’t want one. I said I’d make coffee. She told me not to bother.

“This afternoon,” she said. “You said we went to the movies together, but that we were no more than friends.”

“Good friends,” I said.

“We went to bed together.”

“What are friends for?”

“Yet you did not let anyone know we went to bed together.”

“It must have slipped my mind.”

“It did not slip your mind,” she said with cool certainty, “nor will it ever slip from mine. I will never forget it, Bear-naard.”

“It made such an impression on you,” I said, “that you emptied out your apartment and moved right out of my life.”

“You know why.”

“Yes, I guess I do.”

“He is the hope of my people, Bear-naard. And he is my destiny, even as Anatrurian independence is my life. I came here to be with him, and to…to strengthen his commitment to our cause. To be a king, to have a throne, all that is nothing to him. But to lead his people, to fulfill the dreams of an entire nation, that stirs his blood.”

Play the song, I thought. Where the hell was Dooley Wilson when you needed him?

“And then you came along,” she said, and reached out a hand to touch my face, and smiled that smile that was sad and wise and rueful. “And I fell in love with you, Bear-naard.”

“And once we were together…”

“Once we were together we had to be apart. I could be with you once and keep you as a memory to warm me all my life, Bear-naard. But if I had been with you a second time I would have wanted to stay forever.”

“And yet you came here tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Where do you go from here, Ilona?”

“To Anatruria. We leave tomorrow. There’s a night flight from JFK.”

“And the two of you will be on it.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll miss you, sweetheart.”

“Oh, Bear-naard…”

A man could drown in those eyes. I said, “At least you won’t have Tsarnoff and Rasmoulian and Weeks getting in your way. They’ll be off playing hopscotch with the gnomes of Zurich, trying to find a way into a treasure your guy already gave up on.”

“The real treasure is the spirit of the Anatrurian people.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said. “But it’s a shame you don’t have much in the way of working capital.”

“It is true,” she said. “Mikhail says the same thing. He would like to raise funds first so we will have money on which to operate. But the time is now. We cannot afford to wait.”

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “Just wait here, okay?”

I left her on the couch in the living room and paid a quick visit to my bedroom closet. I came back with a cardboard file folder.

“Weeks had these,” I said. “He slipped them out of the portfolio along with the bearer shares, and I scooped them up this morning when I was in his apartment. I figured it was safe to take these because I don’t think he paid much attention to them. His whole orientation is politics and intrigue. As far as he’s concerned, these were just a propaganda device.”

She opened the folder, then nodded in recognition. “The Anatrurian postage stamps,” she said. “Of course. King Vlados received a complete set and passed them on to his son, and they have come down to Mikhail. They are pretty, aren’t they?”

“They’re gorgeous,” I said. “And this isn’t a set, it’s a set of full sheets.”

“Is that good?”

“They’re a questionable issue from a philatelic standpoint,” I said, “or else they’d be damn near priceless, considering their rarity. As it is, they’re still valuable. They’re unpriced in Scott, but Dolbeck prices provisional and fantasy issues, and the latest Dolbeck catalog has the full set at twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“So these stamps are worth over two thousand dollars? That is good.”

“If you’re selling,” I said, “you generally figure on netting two-thirds to three-fourths the Dolbeck value.”

“Two thousand, then. A little less.”

“Per set.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “That is very nice.”

“It’s nicer than you realize,” I said. “The stamps are printed fifty to a sheet, so you’re holding fifty sets. That’s somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars.”

She stared. “But…”

“Take it before I change my mind,” I said. “There’s a man at Kildorran and Partners who specializes in this kind of material. He’ll either buy it from you or arrange to sell it for you. He’s in London, on Great Portland Street, and his name and the firm’s address are written down on the inside of that folder you’re holding. I don’t know if you’ll get a hundred grand. It may be more, it may be less. But you’ll get a fair price.” I extended a forefinger, chucked her under the chin. “I don’t know how your flight’s routed tomorrow night, but if I were you I’d change things and take a day or two in London. You don’t want to wait too long with those things. You might make a mistake and use one to mail a letter.”

“Bear-naard, you could have kept these.”

“You think so?”

“But of course. No one knew you had them. No one even knew they were valuable.”

I shook my head. “It wouldn’t work, sweetheart. The hopes and dreams of a couple of little people like you and me don’t add up to a hill of beans next to the cause you and Michael are fighting for. Sure, I could use the money, but I don’t really need it. And if I ever do I’ll go out and steal it, because that’s the kind of man I am.”

“Oh, Bear-naard.”

“So pack them up and take them home with you,” I said. “And I think you’d better go now, Ilona.”

“But I thought…”

“I know what you thought, and I thought so too. But I went to bed with you once and lost you, and I don’t want to go through that again. One time is a good memory. Twice is heartbreak.”

“Bear-naard, I have tears in my eyes.”

“I’d kiss them away,” I said, “but I wouldn’t be able to stop. So long, sweetheart. I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll never forget you,” she said. “I’ll never forget Twenty-fifth Street.”

“Neither will I.” I took her arm, eased her out the door. “And why should you? We’ll always have Twenty-fifth Street.”

CHAPTER Twenty-five

It was a full week before I got around to telling Carolyn about that final evening in Ilona’s company. I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to keep it from her. But it turned out to be a busy time for both of us. I kept my usual hours in the bookstore, and put in some overtime as well, riding the Long Island Rail Road to Massapequa one evening to appraise a library (for a fee; they didn’t want to sell anything), and spending another evening at a book auction, bidding on behalf of a customer who was shy about attending those things himself.

Carolyn had a busy schedule herself, with a kennel club show coming up that meant a lot of dogs for her to pretty up. And there were a lot of phone calls and visits back and forth when Djinn and Tracey got back together again, and Djinn accused Tracey of having an affair with Carolyn, which was what Djinn had done after a previous breakup. “Pure dyke-o-drama,” Carolyn called it, and eventually it blew over, but while it lasted there were lots of middle-of-the-night phone calls and phones slammed down and loud confrontations on street corners. When it finally cleared up, she plunged with relief into the new Sue Grafton novel she’d been saving.

So we had lunch five days a week and drinks after work, and then on Tuesday, a week and a day after Memorial Day, we were at the Bum Rap after work and Carolyn was telling a long and not terribly interesting story about a Bedlington terrier. “From the way he acted,” she said, “you’d have sworn he thought he was an Airedale.”

“No kidding,” I said.

She looked at me. “You don’t think that’s funny?”