“Why are we comparing descriptions of our obsessions, Bern?”

“I just had this dumb idea and I wanted to make sure it was a dumb idea.”

“You thought they were the same girl.”

“I said it was a dumb idea.”

“You’re just afraid to let yourself have romantic feelings, that’s all. You haven’t been involved with anybody that way in a long time.”

“I guess.”

“Years from now,” she said, “when you and Andrea are old and gray, nodding off together before the fire, you’ll look back on these days and laugh quietly together. And neither of you will have to ask the other why you’re laughing, because you’ll just know without a word’s being spoken.”

“Years from now,” I said, “you and I will be having coffee somewhere, and one of us will puke, and without a word’s being spoken the other’ll immediately think of this conversation.”

“And this lousy coffee,” said Carolyn.

When I got back to my shop the phone was ringing, but by the time I got inside it had stopped. I thought I’d just pulled the door shut, letting the springlock secure it, but evidently I’d taken the time to lock it with the key because now I had to unlock it with the key, and that gave my caller the extra few seconds needed to hang up before I could reach the phone. I said the things one says at such times, improbable observations on the ancestry, sexual practices and dietary habits of whoever it was, and then I bent down to pick a dollar bill off the floor. A scrap of paper beside it bore a penciled notation that the payment was for three books from the bargain table.

That happens sometimes. No one has yet been so honest as to include the extra pennies for sales tax, and if that ever happens I may find myself shamed out of crime altogether. I put the dollar in my pocket and settled in behind the counter.

The phone rang again. I said, “Barnegat Books, good morning,” and a man’s voice, gruff and unfamiliar, said, “I want the painting.”

“This is a bookstore,” I said.

“Let’s not play games. You have the Mondrian and I want it. I’ll pay you a fair price.”

“I’m sure you will,” I said, “because you sound like a fair guy, but there’s something you’re wrong about. I haven’t got what you’re looking for.”

“Suit yourself. Do yourself a favor, eh? Don’t sell it to anyone else without first offering it to me.”

“That sounds reasonable,” I said, “but I don’t know how to reach you. I don’t even know who you are.”

“But I know who you are,” he said. “And I know how to reach you.”

Had I been threatened? I was pondering the point when the phone clicked in my ear. I hung up and reviewed the conversation, searching for some clue of my caller’s identity. If there was one present, I couldn’t spot it. I guess I got a little bit lost in thought, because a moment or two down the line I looked up to see a woman approaching the counter and I hadn’t even heard the door open to let her into the store.

She was slender and birdlike, with large brown eyes and short brown hair, and I recognized her at once but couldn’t place her right away. She had a book in one hand, an oversized art book, and she placed the other hand on my counter and said, “Mr. Rhodenbarr? ‘ Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.’”

I’d heard the voice before. When? Over the phone? No.

“Ms. Smith of the Third Oregon,” I said. “That’s not Mary Carolyn Davies you’re quoting.”

“Indeed it’s not. It’s Edna St. Vincent Millay. The line came to mind when I looked at this.”

She placed the book on the counter. It was a survey volume covering modern art from the Impressionists to the current anarchy, and it was open now to a color plate which showed a geometrical abstract painting. Vertical and horizontal black bands divided an off-white canvas into squares and rectangles, several of which were painted in primary colors.

“The absolute beauty of pure geometry,” she said. “Or perhaps I mean the pure beauty of absolute geometry. Right angles and primary colors.”

“Mondrian, isn’t it?”

“Piet Mondrian. Do you know much about the man and his work, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

“I know he was Dutch.”

“Indeed he was. Born in 1872 in Amersfoort. He began, you may recall, as a painter of naturalistic landscapes. As he found his own style, as he grew artistically, his work became increasingly abstract. By 1917 he had joined with Theo van Doesburg and Bart van der Leck and others to found a movement called De Stijl. It was an article of faith for Mondrian that the right angle was everything, that vertical and horizontal lines intersected space in such a way as to make an important philosophical statement.”

There was more. She gave me the four-dollar lecture, declaiming it as fervently as she’d read about poor Smith a couple of days earlier. “Piet Mondrian held his first exhibition in America in 1926,” she told me. “Fourteen years later he moved here. He’d gone to Britain in 1939 to get away from the war. Then, when the Luftwaffe started bombing London, he came here. New York fascinated him, you know. The grid pattern of the streets, the right angles. That was the beginning of his boogie-woogie period. You look confused.”

“I didn’t know he was a musician.”

“He wasn’t. His painting style changed, you see. He was inspired by the traffic in the streets, the elevated railways, the yellow cabs, the red lights, the jazzy pulsebeat of Manhattan. You’re probably familiar with Broadway Boogie Woogie-that’s one of his most famous canvases. It’s in the Museum of Modern Art. There’s also Victory Boogie Woogie and, oh, several others.”

In several other museums, I thought, where they were welcome to remain.

“I see,” I said, which is something I very often say when I don’t.

“He died on February 1, 1944, just six weeks before his seventy-second birthday. I believe he died of pneumonia.”

“You certainly know a great deal about him.”

Her hands moved to adjust her hat, which didn’t really need adjusting. Her eyes aimed themselves at a spot just above and to the left of my shoulder. “When I was a little girl,” she said evenly, “we went to my grandmother’s and grandfather’s every Sunday for dinner. I lived with my parents in a house in White Plains, and we came into the city where my grandparents had a huge apartment on Riverside Drive, with enormous windows overlooking the Hudson. Piet Mondrian had stayed at that apartment upon arriving in New York in 1940. A painting of his, a gift to my grandparents, hung over the sideboard in the dining room.”

“I see.”

“We always had the same seating arrangement,” she said, and closed her big eyes. “I can picture that dinner table now. My grandfather at one end, my grandmother at the other near the door to the kitchen. My uncle and aunt and my younger cousin on one side of the table, and my mother and father and me on the other. All I had to do was gaze above my cousin’s head and I could look at the Mondrian. I had it to stare at almost every Sunday night for all of my childhood.”

“I see.”

“You’d think I’d have tuned it out as children so often do. After all, I’d never met the artist. He died before I was born. Nor was I generally responsive to art as a child. But that painting, it evidently spoke to me in a particular way.” She smiled at a memory. “When I was in art class, I always tried to produce geometrical abstracts. While the other children were drawing horses and trees, I was making black-and-white grids with squares of red and blue and yellow. My teachers didn’t know what to make of it, but I was trying to be another Mondrian.”

“Actually,” I said tentatively, “his paintings don’t look all that hard to do.”

“He thought of them first, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

“Well, there’s that, of course, but-”

“And his simplicity is deceptive. His proportions are quite perfect, you see.”