“I can imagine.”

“I wonder if you can. I began to doubt my own soundness of mind. Had I disposed of the cards and somehow forgotten the episode? Because, you see, I’d planned to get rid of them.”

“Who was going to hold them for you?”

He looked puzzled. “No one, for heaven’s sake. I certainly wasn’t going to let anybody know what I was doing. And why would I want anyone to hold them, anyway? As soon as they were out of my house, I intended for them to disappear from the face of the planet. They’d wind up in an incinerator or a Dumpster, I suppose. I hadn’t worked out the details at that point.”

“And instead they vanished into thin air.”

“Someone had taken them,” he said, “but who and why? And what was I to do? Report them stolen? There was certainly not the slightest evidence of a burglary. My policy covers mysterious disappearance as well as theft, and no disappearance was ever more mysterious than this one, but did I dare report it? I was in a quandary. It seemed to me as though I still ought to try to make it look like a burglary, even though the cards were already out of the house.” He sighed. “And then we spent the evening with Edna’s awful brother, and he was crowing over his triumph in having bought a rare book for a fraction of its current value.”

“ ‘B’ Is for Burglar.”

“Exactly. All I heard was the last word. So burglary was very much on my mind, and we came home and the telephone rang, and it was you. Though of course I didn’t know who you were or what you did for a living. You didn’t mention your name—”

“Impolite of me.”

“—and if you had I’d have thought of you as Borden’s tenant, if indeed I chanced to recognize the name at all. I might have, because it’s an unusual name, Rhodenbarr. What’s the derivation?”

“It was my father’s.”

“Ah, I see.” He lifted his glass of brandy and admired in turn its color, its bouquet, and its taste. “As I was saying, I knew nothing about the identity of my late-night caller, but the opportunity seemed heaven-sent. Edna asked me what was so disturbing. I’m no actor, my membership here notwithstanding, but I had only to be myself. I rushed into the study, I unlocked the humidor, I ‘discovered’ the loss of its contents, and I called the police.”

“Who promptly traced the call.”

“I didn’t even know they could do that. In the movies and on television they’re forever trying to keep criminals on the phone while they trace the call. Now I gather computers keep a record of everything. They did indeed trace the call, and remarkably enough traced it to a known burglar, who turned out to be the very bookstore owner Borden had boasted of outwitting. Ironic, eh? But horribly inconvenient for you, and for that I apologize. Did they go so far as to arrest you?”

I nodded. “I spent a night in a cell.”

“No!”

“Not your fault,” I said. “Hazards of the game.”

“How sporting of you to see it that way. But you hadn’t done anything to deserve it, had you?”

“Well,” I said, “actually, when you come right down to it, that’s not entirely true.”

More coffee, more brandy. “When you called this morning,” Martin Gilmartin was saying, “I was utterly confounded.”

That had been my intention. I’d told him I had been fortunate enough to recover his cards, and wondered if he could let me know the name of his insurance company so that I could see about turning them in for a reward. Unless he thought there might be a mutually advantageous way to handle the matter between ourselves. There had been a strangled pause, then a remarkably graceful invitation to lunch.

“Then I gave it some thought,” he went on, “and my position seemed a little less dire. After all, suppose you did go to the insurance company. One of two things would happen. They might look at the cards, assess their value, compare them to the inventory I’d supplied when I arranged the coverage, and conclude that you were trying to pull a fast one. Either you’d already skimmed off the cream of the collection or you’d never taken it in the first place, but in any event they certainly would refuse to have any further dealings with you.”

“Possible.”

“Or they might have the cards appraised. They’re not worthless, after all. The Chalmers Mustard set is worth a couple of thousand, and there are some other Ted Williams items I held on to as well. Say the whole batch is worth ten thousand dollars. I don’t think it is, but we’ll use that as a figure. After they’ve run the numbers, they negotiate with you and arrange to acquire the cards. Then they present them to me. ‘Here you are, Mr. Gilmartin,’ they say. ‘We were ever so fortunate as to recover your collection intact. Have a nice day.’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ I reply, ‘but these are not my cards at all.’ ‘Our position is that they are, and that you misrepresented them when you applied for the policy, which we are accordingly canceling as of this moment. If you institute a lawsuit, we’ll respond by having you charged with misrepresentation and fraud, but do have a nice day.’ ”

“They might try that.”

“In which case I’d be stuck with a box of junk instead of a six-figure settlement. I could always bring suit, hoping they’d be willing to split the difference, but I might decide it wasn’t worth the trouble, not to mention the negative publicity.” He furrowed his brow, working it all out. “The best thing to do would be to pay you a finder’s fee. What did I just say the cards were worth? Ten thousand at the outside? Well, let’s double that. Twenty thousand dollars.”

I looked at him.

“No, I didn’t really think that would fly. I’m low on cash at the moment, and it would be a strain to pay you even that much. I’ll have cash when the insurance company pays up, but they can be sluggish when it comes to settling a claim. Besides, I’m going to need that money. If I hadn’t needed it I wouldn’t have put in a fraudulent claim in the first place. In a year’s time I ought to have more money than I’ll know what to do with. Now if you were willing to take a promissory note—”

“You know, I wish I could. But you’re not the only one with a cash-flow problem.”

“It’s the economy,” he said with feeling. “Everybody’s up against it. But may I say something?”

“Please.”

“This may sound like the brandy talking, and perhaps that’s exactly what it is, but I can’t dismiss the feeling that you and I have the opportunity to do ourselves and each other a great deal of good.”

“I know what you mean.”

“It’s ridiculous on the face of it, and yet—”

“I know.”

“Well,” he said. “That doesn’t change the situation of the moment. Perhaps it would help clarify things if you could tell me just what it is that you want.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “I want to keep my store.”

CHAPTER Eighteen

When I went out for lunch with Martin Gilmartin I left a little cardboard sign hanging in the door. Back at, it says, and there’s a clock face. I had set the hands at two-thirty, and when I got back there was a customer waiting. I had never seen her before, although she looked something like my eighth-grade civics teacher. As I was unlocking the door she made one of those throat-clearing sounds that generally gets rendered in print as “harrumph.” I looked at her and she pointed first at her wristwatch, then at my cardboard clock face.

“It’s three o’clock,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “That thing’s been running slow lately. I’m going to have to get it repaired.” I took the sign from the door, moved the big hand to the three and the little hand to the twelve. “There,” I said. “How’s that?”

For a minute there I thought she was going to send me to the principal’s office, but then Raffles rubbed against her ankle and charmed her, and by the time she left she’d picked out a couple of novels to go with the picture book of American folk rugs that had caught her eye in the window, and kept her waiting a half hour. It was a decent sale, and the first of several such. By the time I closed up again at six, I’d punched the old cash register a dozen times. Even better, I’d bought two big shopping bags full of paperbacks from an occasional customer who informed me he was moving to Australia. I took his count and made the deal without even looking at the books, and half of them turned out to be eminently collectible—Ace double volumes, Dell map-backs, and other goodies to gladden the heart of a paperback collector. There were half a dozen spicy novels from the sixties, too, and I knew a vest-pocket dealer in Wetumpka, Alabama, who’d pay me more for those than I’d shelled out for the lot.