at preserving cardboard rectangles from insect damage. I kept the most valuable cards in acetate sleeves. The rest were loose.” He raised a hand, and a waiter hurried over to pour us more coffee. “I would take twenty or fifty or a hundred cards at a time from the box. After I’d sold them, I would stop at another card store and buy late-date commons to replace what I’d sold. Or earlier material in very poor condition, like that unfortunate Rabbit Maranville specimen you brought along.”
“So the humidor stayed full.”
“That’s right. I took a few dozen cards from the box in the morning, and I put back that many or more at night. Nowadays, you know, a full set includes a card for every player in the major leagues. It hasn’t always been like that. The 1933 DeLong set had only twenty-four cards in total. The key to it’s the Lou Gehrig card. It’s worth a little more than the other twenty-three cards combined.”
“Did you have one?”
“In VG. In the Goudey set of the same year there were two hundred forty cards, but substantially fewer than two hundred forty different players. The most popular athletes had more than one card. Gehrig had two, and Babe Ruth had four different cards. I owned three of the four Babe Ruth cards, and one day last summer I sold them for a total of twenty-eight thousand dollars. I replaced the Babe with Zane Smith, Kevin McReynolds, and Bucky Pizzarelli.” He shook his head. “Babe Ruth started out with the Boston Red Sox, you may recall. He was the best pitcher in baseball, but you couldn’t keep a hitter like the Babe on the bench three days out of four, so they had him play the outfield. And the owner of the Red Sox sold him outright to New York. He wanted the money so he could back a Broadway show. Yankee Stadium became the House That Ruth Built, and the Boston fans never forgave that damn fool of an owner, and who could blame them? But I think I know how he may have felt, selling the Babe three times over and filling his slot with the likes of Zane Smith, Kevin McReynolds, and Bucky Pizzarelli.”
“And did you use the money to back a Broadway show?”
He smiled at the very thought. “That would be rather like trading the family cow for some magic beans, wouldn’t it? No, the stage is many things to me, but not a commercial arena. My wife and I believe in patronage, and I suppose you could say that we err on the side of generosity in our support of the theater. Sometimes our contribution takes the form of an investment, but it’s made without much hope of return.”
“I see.”
“So I gradually sold off my holdings,” he said, “deliberately replacing the wheat with chaff and constructing a sort of Potemkin Village of worthless cards in my humidor. Everything good was gone.”
“Except Ted Williams.”
“You spotted those, did you?” His eyes twinkled. “Couldn’t trade Ted Williams. The Red Sox fans would hang me in effigy.”
“That’s not why you kept them.”
“No, of course not. They were identifiable. The set’s scarce, all out of proportion to the price it would bring. And you know my brother-in-law.”
“He’s my landlord.”
“And presumably you know of his passion for the Splendid Splinter. If I sold those cards, there was a fair chance they’d wind up in the hands of a dealer who’d offer them to Borden. One thinks of baseball cards as interchangeable, but Borden’s seen my Williams cards enough to recognize them. At the very least, he’d buy the set and then want to compare it to mine. When I couldn’t produce them, he’d know I’d sold them. Which is to say he’d know I’d been forced to sell them in order to raise cash.”
“Which is what you didn’t want to get around.”
“Precisely. Easier and safer all around to hang on to the Ted Williams material. But I sold off everything else of value. And, as I’ve said, what I’d done was entirely within my rights. It was secretive, but one’s allowed to have secrets.”
“And then?”
“Then I got a telephone call in the middle of the night,” he said. “I’d spent an evening with my brother-in-law, always an exhausting experience—”
“I can imagine.”
“—and you called, and it was late and I was tired, and something made me go directly to my study and lift the lid of my humidor. And the cards were gone.”
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t