"You scroundrels!" Qwilleran said. "I suppose you've been having a whale of a time, coming and going through the walls like a couple of apparitions." Koko stropped his jaw on the newel post, his tiny ivory tusks clicking against the ancient mahogany. "Want to go and have your teeth cleaned?" the man asked him. "After Christmas I'll take you to a cat dentist." Koko rubbed the back of his head on the newel post — an ingratiating gesture.

"Don't pretend innocence. You don't fool me for a minute." Qwilleran roughed up the sleek fur along the cat's fluid backbone. "What else have you been doing behind my back? What are you planning to do next?" That was Wednesday night. Thursday morning Qwilleran got his answer.

Just before daylight he turned in his bed and found his nose buried in fur. Yum Yum was sharing his pillow. Her fur smelled clean. Qwilleran's mind went back forty-odd years to a sunny backyard with laundry flapping on the clothesline. The clean wash smelled like sunshine and fresh air, and that was the fragrance of this small animal's coat.

From the kitchen came a familiar sound: "Yawwck!" It was Koko's good-morning yowl combined with a wake-up yawn, and it was followed by two thumps as the cat jumped down from refrigerator to counter to floor. When he walked into the living room, he stopped in the middle of the carpet and pushed his forelegs forward, his hind quarters skyward, in an elongated stretch. After that he stretched a hind leg — just the left one — very carefully. Then he approached the swan bed and ordered breakfast in clarion tones.

The man made no move to get out of bed but reached out a teasing hand. Koko sidestepped it and rubbed his brown mask against the corner of the bed. He crossed the room and rubbed the leg of the book cupboard. He walked to the Morris chair and stropped his jaw on its square corners.

"Just what do you think you're accomplishing?" Qwilleran asked.

Koko ambled to the pot-bellied stove and looked it over, then selected the latch of the ashpit door and ground his jaw against it. He scraped the left side of his jaw; he scraped the right side. And the shallow door clicked and swung ajar.

The door opened only a hair's-breadth, but Koko pried it farther with an inquisitive paw.

In a split second Qwilleran was out of bed and bending over the ashpit. It was full of papers — typewritten sheets — a stack of them two inches thick, neatly bound in gray folders. They had been typed on a machine with a loose E — a faulty letter that jumped above the line.

In the gray-white morning light of the day before the day before Christmas, Qwilleran started to read Andy's novel.

The questionable heroine of the story was a scatterbrained prattler who was planning to spike her alcoholic husband's highball with carbon tetrachloride in order to be free to marry another man of great sexual prowess.

He had read six chapters when a uniformed chauffeur and two truckers arrived to remove the roll-top desk, and after that it was time to shave and dress and go downtown. He put the manuscript back in the ashpit reluctantly.

At the Fluxion office Qwilleran's session with the man- aging editor lasted longer than either of them had anticipated. In fact, it stretched into a lengthy lunch date with some important executives in a private dining room at the Press Club, and when the newsman returned to Junktown in the late afternoon, he was jubilant.

His knee, much improved, permitted him to bolt up the front steps of the Cobb mansion two at a time, but when he let himself into the entrance hall, he slowed down. The Cobb Junkery was open, and Iris was there, moving in a daze, passing a dustrag over the arms of a Boston rocker.

"I didn't expect you so soon," he said.

"I thought I ought to open the shop," she replied in a dreary voice. "There might be some follow-up business after the Block Party, and goodness knows I need the money. Dennis — my son — came back with me." "We sold some merchandise for you yesterday," Qwilleran said. "I hated to let my desk go, but a woman was willing to pay seven hundred and fifty dollars for it." Iris exhibited more gratitude than surprise.

"And incidentally, were you saving any old radios for Hollis Prantz?" he asked.

"Old radios? No, we wouldn't have anything like that." That evening Qwilleran finished reading Andy's novel. It was just as he expected. The characters included a philandering husband, a voluptuous divorcee, a poor little rich girl operating a swanky antique shop incognito, and — in the later chapters — a retired schoolteacher who was naive to the point of stupidity. For good measure Andy had also introduced a gambling racketeer, a nymphet, a dope pusher, a sodomite, a crooked politician, and a retired cop who appeared to be the mouthpiece for the author's high-minded platitudes.

Why, Qwilleran asked himself, had Andy hidden his manuscript in the ashpit of a pot-bellied stove?

At one point his reading was interrupted by a knock on his door, and a clean-cut young man wearing a white shirt and bow tie introduced himself as Iris's son.

"My mother says you need a desk," he said. "If you'll give me an assist, we can bring the one from her apartment." "The apothecary desk? I don't want to deprive her — " "She says she doesn't need it." "How's your mother feeling?" "Rough! She took a pill and went to bed early." They carried the desk across the hall, and a chair to go with it — a Windsor with thick slab seat and delicate spindle back — and Qwilleran asked Dennis to help him hoist the Mackintosh coat of arms to the mantel, replacing the portrait of the sour-faced kill-joy.

Then Qwilleran plunged once more into Andy's novel. He had read worse books, but not many. Andy had no ear for dialogue and no compassion for his characters. What fascinated the newsman, however, was the narcotics operation.

One of the antique dealers in the story dispensed marijuana as well as mahogany sideboards and Meissen ewers.

Whenever a customer walked into his shop and asked for a Quimper teapot, he was actually in the market for "tea." After four hundred pages of jumping E's, Qwilleran's eyelids were heavy and his eyeballs were aching. He leaned his head back in the Morris chair and closed his eyes. Quimper teapots! He had never heard of a Quimper teapot, but there were many things he had not heard of before coming to Junktown: Sussex pigs… piggins, noggins and firkins… horse brasses.

Horse brasses! Qwilleran's moustache danced, and he reproved it with his knuckles. No one buys horse brasses any more, Mary had said. And yet — twice during his short stay in Junktown, he had heard a request for this useless brass ornament.

The first inquiry had been at the Bit 0 Junk shop, and Ben had been inclined to dismiss the customer curtly.

Yesterday the same inquiry was made at The Junkery. The two buildings were adjacent, and similar in design.

Qwilleran combed his moustache to subdue his excitement and devised a plan for the next morning. The twenty- fourth of December was going to be a busy day: the big party in the evening, another appointment with the managing editor in the afternoon, lunch with Arch Riker at the Press Club, and in the morning-a tactical maneuver that might fill in another blank in the Junktown puzzle.

The next day Qwilleran was waked before dawn by flashing lights. Koko was standing on the bed, rubbing his teeth with satisfaction on the wall switch and turning the lamps on and off.

The man got up, opened a can of corned beef for the cats, shaved and dressed. As soon as he thought the Dispatch Desk was open, he telephoned and asked them to send a messenger at eleven thirty — no later and no earlier.

"Send me the skinniest and shabbiest one you've got," he told the dispatch clerk. "Preferably one with a bad cold or an acute sinus infection." While waiting for the accomplice to arrive, Qwilleran moved his paper and pencils, clips and gluepot into the apothecary desk. In one of the drawers he found Iris Cobb's tape recorder and returned it to her.