In the night room Page 0,63

dried sweat.

While this unlikely collector was still dipping into his stash, he said, “Your first book was the best one you ever wrote. A Beast in View. Want to know the truth, it’s been downhill ever since.”

Underhill laughed, genuinely amused by the things people thought they ought to share with authors at signings.

“I’m glad you liked it,” he said, and began signing. Before him on the desk stood five copies of The Divided Man and six of Blood Orchid. The collector was stacking up a great many copies of A Beast in View. “But if you don’t like these other books, why did you buy so many of them?”

The man’s eyes seemed to retreat farther into his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t buy these four copies of your new one, is that what you’re saying?”

“No, I don’t have any problem with you buying my books. I’m all for it, believe me.”

“People do things for all kinds of reasons,” the man said. “And maybe other people don’t know enough to understand those reasons.”

“Hold on.” Tim stopped signing his name and looked up at the collector. At the side of his vision, the drenched girl stood up, collected her bags, and began to move toward him through the rows of empty chairs. Katherine Hyndman floated into view. “You’re not an ordinary collector, are you?” Tim said. “And you’re not a book dealer, either.”

“What’s it to you?”

“I think you’re part of a special breed,” Tim said. “I think you know about things other people don’t.”

The old man looked caught between pride and suspicion. “It doesn’t matter what I am.”

Katherine Hyndman and the girl who had come in from the rain stood about fifteen feet off to his right, conferring in front of the empty chairs.

“Have you ever found one?” Tim asked. “You must have, or you wouldn’t keep looking.”

The man shrugged. The narrow slits of his eyes shone.

“It’s like the Maltese falcon, isn’t it, except there are more than one of them. You’re obsessed. Getting your hands on one is all you care about. Jasper Kohle was pretending, but you’re the real thing.” For a moment, Tim felt a kind of exaltation.

“I never heard of Jasper Kohle, and you’re not supposed to talk about this. You’re not even supposed to know we exist. Because if you know that, then you know . . . what you know, I guess.” The old man was bending over the table, grabbing books, and stuffing them into his suitcase, signed and unsigned alike.

“Do you know where they come from?”

“Nobody talks about that, bub. But let me tell you something.” He bent closer to Underhill. He had tiger breath. “There are lots of contacts between here and there, right? Moments of passage. So every now and then, a book slips through.”

“Slips through,” Underhill said, taken with what seemed the lovely effortlessness of the process.

“Ever see a perfect thing? Ever hold one in your hand? Can you imagine how that feels? You want to talk about a rush, they don’t get any deeper than that.” His grin revealed sparse, rotting teeth. “I’m talking about perfection.”

Tim pulled his head back and noticed the girl with the white bags, standing exactly where Katherine Hyndman had left her. A chill tingle rippled across his skin.

“How many?” the old man said. “Three. That’s how many. I’ll get another before I’m done, too.” He slammed down the lid of the suitcase and slid its locks into place.

“But why do you have to buy so many books? Why go through trial and error?”

“Sometimes, you have to stare at perfection for a long, long time before you see it.” He leaned back over his suitcase, eyes shining, and gave Underhill a good look at the horror in his mouth. “But once you see it, it’s yours forever.”

Grinning, he pulled the suitcase off the table, stepped back, and saluted Underhill by tapping a finger against his forehead. Then he whirled around and set off for the escalator.

Underhill watched him go and realized that for a second he had forgotten all about the girl. She stood ten feet away, between her bags, her wrinkled skirt soaked through, her blouse still adhering to her skin. He saw that she was a woman, not a girl, a woman probably in her mid-thirties, though at first glance she appeared to be much younger. Her short hair had been ruffed by the towel. She was extraordinarily good-looking, he thought, though not in any ordinary way. With her slightness, her coltish, slightly androgynous air,