I made another call, this one to Mowgli. He’s a Columbia dropout, a former druggie with just enough brain cells left to make a living as a book scout. I’ve bought quite a few books from him, and he’s bought a few from me, when he’s spotted something badly under-priced on my shelves. When he’s not otherwise occupied he’ll fill in for me behind the counter, and I was hoping he could do that today, while I met with Marty Gilmartin. But he didn’t answer, either.

I went back to Redmond O’Hanlon, hoping to be reminded that there were worse jungles than the one I lived in, and the next person to interrupt me was a fat fellow with an underslung jaw and a head of tightly curled brown hair. He looked like a bulldog with a permanent.

“Rhodenbarr,” he said, and shoved a card at me. Hilliard Moffett, it read. Collector. And beneath that was an address consisting of a post office box in Bellingham, Washington, along with phone and fax numbers and an e-mail address.

Collectors can drive you crazy. They’re all a little bit nuts, but the antiquarian book business wouldn’t exist without them, because they buy more books than anybody else. They buy books they’ve already read, and other books they never intend to read. They don’t really have time to read, anyway. They’re too busy poring over book catalogs and rummaging through thrift shops and yard sales and, yes, stores like mine.

I asked him what he collected. He leaned over the counter and lowered his voice to a confidential whisper.

“ Fairborn,” he said.

What a coincidence.

“I’m a completist,” he said, with an air that combined pride and resignation, as if he were at once claiming royal blood and admitting to hemophilia. “I want everything.”

“Well, I don’t have much,” I said. “A few books shelved alphabetically in the fiction section. I’ve got Nobody’s Baby, but it’s a fifth printing.”

“I have a first.”

“I thought you probably did.”

“And a tenth,” he said. “For the revised jacket. And I have fourteen paperbacks.”

“So you can give copies to friends?”

He gaped at the very idea. I don’t know which seemed outlandish to him-the idea of having friends, or the thought of giving books to them. Both, probably.

“Fourteen paperbacks,” I said. “Oh. One for each printing?”

“Hardly. There have been over sixty printings. What sort of fool would want to collect them all? What I want is a copy of each cover. There have been fourteen different covers among the sixty-plus printings.”

“So you have them all.”

“I have the first printing in which each appeared. Except in one instance. There was a new cover introduced on the twenty-first printing, but my copy is the twenty-second. I’ve not yet been able to get my hands on a twenty-first. It’s not rare, it’s certainly not valuable, but try to find one.”

“Well,” I said, “I wish I could help you out, but I only get paperbacks when I buy a whole library, and I wholesale them off right away.”

“I have my want list with specialists,” he said. “That’s not what I came here for.”

“Oh.”

“I just wanted you to understand the scope of my collection.”

“You’re a true completist.”

He nodded. “I have the foreign editions. Almost all of them. I have Nobody’s Baby in Macedonian. Not Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat’s common as dirt, but Macedonian. It’s not supposed to exist, none of the bibliographies list it, and I don’t believe the edition was ever authorized. It must have been pirated. But somebody translated the text, and somebody set type and printed it, and I have a copy. It may be the only copy this side of Skopje, but it exists and I’ve got it.”

“That’s impressive.”

“When I collect someone, Rhodenbarr, I go all out.”

“I can see that.”

“I don’t just collect the books. I collect the man.”

I pictured him with a great butterfly net, running over hill and dale in pursuit of a terrified Gulliver Fairborn.

“I have a copy of his high school yearbook,” he said. “There were eighty students in the graduating class, so how many yearbooks could they have printed? And how many do you suppose have survived? It wasn’t easy to find a classmate who still had his yearbook handy, and it was harder still to persuade him to sell it.”

“But you managed.”

“I did, and I can assure you I wouldn’t part with it, not for twenty times what it cost me. He was the only senior who didn’t have his picture included. There’s a blank space opposite his list of accomplishments and activities. He was a hall monitor his junior year, did you know that? He was in the Latin Honor Society, he played trombone in the school band. Did you know that?”

“I know the capital of South Dakota.”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“It’s not here,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s there.”

He gave me a look. “He was camera-shy even then,” he said, “the only senior class member unpictured. He signed this particular copy. Where the photo would have been, he wrote, ‘When you are old / And sitting still / Remember the fellow / Who wrote uphill.’ The handwriting slants.”

“Upward,” I guessed.

“And he signed his name in full. Gulliver Fairborn.”

“A signed photo,” I said. “Without the photo.”

“His photograph does appear in the book, however. Not in the senior listings, but in the group photos. He’s in the band photo, but he’s holding the trombone right in front of his face. On purpose, I’m sure.”

“What a kidder.”

“But he was also in the Latin Honor Society, as I may have mentioned, and they didn’t let him hide behind a copy of Caesar’s Commentaries. He’s in the last row, second from the left. He’s half hidden behind another student, and his face is shadowed, so you can’t really get much sense of what he looked like. But it’s nevertheless a genuine photograph of Gulliver Fairborn.”

“And you have it.”

“I have the yearbook. I’d like to get the original. The photographer’s long dead, and his files were dispersed years ago. The original’s lost, probably forever. But I do have an original photograph of Fairborn ’s boyhood home. The house itself was torn down over twenty years ago. I missed my chance.”

“To see it for yourself?”

“To buy it. The state took the property for an expressway extension, but I could have bought the house and moved it to another lot. Imagine housing the world’s foremost Gulliver Fairborn collection in the house he grew up in!” He sighed for what might have been. “Over twenty years ago. Even if I’d known about it, I’d have been hard put to afford it. Still, I’d have found a way.”

“You’re dedicated.”

“One has to be. And now I have the means, as well as the dedication. I want those letters.”

“If I had them,” I said, “what would you pay?”

“Name your price.”

“If I had a price,” I said, “it would be high.”

“Name it, Rhodenbarr.”

“The thing is, you’re not the only person who wants those letters.”

“But I’m the one who wants them the most. Get all the offers you want. Just give me the opportunity to top them. Or set a price yourself and give me the chance to meet it.” He leaned forward, his collector madness burning in his dark eyes. “But whatever you do, don’t sell those letters without giving me a crack at them.”

“The letters,” I said carefully, “are not physically in my possession at the moment.”

“Quite understandable.”

“But that’s not to say they won’t be.”

“And when they are…”

“I’ll want to contact you. But you’re in…” I looked at his card. “… Bellingham, Washington. That’s near Seattle?”

“It is but I’m not. I’m in New York.”

“I can see that.”

“I flew in the day before yesterday. I thought I might speak to this Landau and see if she’d entertain a preemptive offer as an alternative to public auction. Why wait for her money? Why pay a commission?”

“What did she say?”