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.
Not a bad afternoon at all, and it ended with a phone call from a woman who told me she’d had to put her mother in a nursing home, and would