But he might notice that it was gone. It might in fact be the first thing he checked upon returning to the apartment, and if it was missing he’d know immediately that he hadn’t misplaced it, that it hadn’t walked off of its own accord.

I thought of taking a couple of bills, figuring they wouldn’t be missed, but how much is too much? It’s more trouble making such nice distinctions than the cash warranted. Easier to leave the money where it was.

I hit paydirt in the den.

There was a bookcase there, but nothing like Onderdonk’s library. Some reference works, a shelf full of stamp catalogs, a few books on guns, and a cheap set of reprint editions of the novels of Zane Grey. Bargain-table stuff at Barnegat Books, forty cents each, three for a buck.

A glassed-in wall case held two shotguns and a rifle, their stocks elaborately tooled, their barrels agleam with menace. I suppose they were for shooting turkeys but they’d do in a pinch for shooting burglars and I didn’t like the looks of them.

Over the desk, an Audubon print of an American wild turkey hung in an antiqued frame. The real thing, stuffed and mounted and looking only a little forlorn, stood guard atop the bookcase. I suppose its friend J.C. shot it. First he’d have honked with one of the odd-looking wooden turkey lures he had on display, and then he’d have triggered the shotgun, and now the creature had achieved a sort of taxidermal immortality. Oh, well. People who break into houses, glass or otherwise, probably shouldn’t cast stones. Or aspersions, or whatever.

In any event, the turkeys and the guns and the books were beside the point. Along the back of the large desk, below the Audubon turkey, ranged a dozen dark green volumes a bit over a foot high and a couple of inches wide. They were Scott Specialty Stamp Albums, and they were just what the burglar ordered. British Asia, British Africa, British Europe, British America, British Oceania. France and French Colonies. Germany, German States and German Colonies. Benelux. South and Central America. Scandinavia. And, in an album which did not match its fellows, the United States.

I went through one album after another. Appling’s stamps were not affixed to the page with hinges but were encased individually in little plastic mounts designed for the purpose. (Hinging a mint stamp is as economically unsound as discarding a book’s dust jacket.) I could have removed the plastic mounts, and thought about it, but it was faster and simpler and subtler to tear whole pages from the loose-leaf binders, and that’s what I did.

I know a little about stamps. There’s a lot I don’t know, but I can skim through an album and make good spot decisions as to what to take and what to leave. In the Benelux album, for example-that’s Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, along with Belgian and Dutch colonies-I cleaned out all of the semi-postal issues (all complete, all mint, all readily salable) and most of the good nineteenth-century classics. I left the more highly specialized stuff, parcel post and postage due and such. In the British Empire albums I loaded up on the Victoria, Edward VII and George V issues. I didn’t take very many pages from the Latin American albums, having less knowledge of the material.

By the time I was done my attaché case was packed solid with album pages and the albums they’d come from were all back in order on the desk top, their bulk not visibly reduced. I don’t suppose I took one page in twenty, but the pages I took were the ones worth taking. I’m sure I missed the odd priceless rarity, and I’m sure I took the bad with the good, even as I do in life itself, but on balance I felt I’d done a first-rate job of winnowing.

I hadn’t a clue what the lot was worth. One of the U.S. pages included the twenty-four-cent inverted airmail, a bicolor with the plane appearing upside-down, and I forget the most recent auction record for that issue but I know it ran well into five figures. On the other hand, it would have to be fenced, sold to someone who’d be aware he was buying stolen goods and who’d accordingly expect a bargain. Most of the other material was quite anonymous in comparison, and would bring a much higher proportion of its fair market value.

So what did I have in my attaché case? A hundred thousand? It wasn’t impossible. And what could I net for it? Thirty, thirty-five thousand?

A fair ballpark figure. But it was no more than a guess and I might be miles off in either direction. In twenty-four hours’ time I’d know a good deal more. By then all of the stamps would be off their pages and out of their mounts, sorted by sets and tucked into little glassine envelopes, their prices checked in last year’s Scott catalog, which was the most recent copy to have turned up at the store. (I could buy the book new, but somehow it goes against the grain.) Then Appling’s pages and mounts would go down the incinerator, along with any stamps that might have markings rendering them specifically identifiable. In a day’s time, a box of stamps in glassine envelopes, all quite anonymous, would be my only link with the John Charles Appling collection. An indeterminate time after that, but surely not much more than a week, the stamps would have new owners and I’d have money in their stead.

And it might be months before Appling ever knew they were gone. It was likely that he’d detect their absence the first time he pulled out an album and paged through it, but it was by no means a sure thing. I’d left twenty times as much as I’d taken, in volume if not in value, and he might open a book, turn to a specific page, add a stamp, and never notice that other pages were missing.

It didn’t really matter. He wouldn’t notice the minute he walked into the house, and when he did notice he couldn’t say when the theft had taken place-it might have occurred before or after his Greenbrier jaunt. His insurance company would pay, or it wouldn’t, and he’d come out ahead or behind or dead even, and who cared? Not I. A batch of pieces of colored paper would have changed ownership, and so would a batch of pieces of green paper, and no one on God’s earth was going to miss a meal as a result of my night’s activities.

I’m not offering a moral defense of myself, you understand. Burglary is morally reprehensible and I’m aware of the fact. But I wasn’t stealing the pennies off a dead man’s eyes, or the bread from a child’s mouth, or objects of deep sentimental value. I’ll tell you, I love collectors. I can ransack their holdings with such little guilt.

The state, however, takes a sterner view of things. They draw no distinction between swiping a philatelist’s stamps and lifting a widow’s rent money. However good I get at rationalizing my pursuit, I still have to do what I can to stay out of jail.

Which meant getting the hell out of there. I turned off lights-there was a Tiffany lamp in the study, too, wouldn’t you know-and I made my way to the apartment’s front door. My stomach growled en route and I thought of checking the fridge and building myself a sandwich, figuring they’d no more miss a little food than a fortune in rare stamps. But Sing Sing and Attica are overflowing with chaps who stopped for a sandwich, and if I just got out of there I could buy myself a whole restaurant.

I squinted through the peephole, saw no one in the hallway, and put my ear to the door and heard no one in the hallway, either. I unlocked the door, eased it open, saw no one in the hallway, and let myself out. I picked the Poulard lock again, locking it this time so as to spare the manufacturer’s feelings. I did not reset the spurious burglar alarm cylinder, just gave it a wink and went on my way, pausing only to smudge whatever prints I might have left on the outside of the door. Then, attaché case in hand, I crossed to the fire door, opened it, passed through it, and let out a long breath as it swung quietly shut behind me.