“Positive.”

“Do you keep tropical fish?” I shook my head. “Then how do you happen to know an arcane factoid like that?”

“I own a bookstore, and I pick books up and read them, and odd facts lodge in my mind.”

“Like the candiru in one’s urethra,” she said. “Which could arrive in a shipment of fish for the hobby market, and could wind up in someone’s aquarium or outdoor pool, and could get released into the wild. The water’s probably too cold for them up here, but suppose they were released in Florida?”

“I’m convinced,” I said. “I’ll never go swimming again, and I’ll steer clear of Florida forever. But where’s the danger for girls-or women either, for that matter? I realize you pee, although I understand you have to sit down to do it-”

“Not when we’re swimming.”

“But you don’t have penises, so what’s the problem?”

“You’re saying there’s nothing for the surgeon to cut off.”

“Right.”

“You should see your face. You don’t even like to talk about the surgeon, do you?”

“Not especially, no.”

“We don’t have penises,” she said, “but we do pee, and we do have urethras. And a toothpick fish could swim in there, and find a place he’d care to call home, and then what’s a girl to do? No point running to the surgeon. ‘Cut it off! Please, cut it off before my bladder bursts!’ ‘Sorry, can’t do that, as you haven’t got one.’”

“Oh.”

“You see what I mean?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Let’s never go to the surgeon.”

“All right.”

“And we won’t go to Jones Beach, either.”

“That’s all right, too.”

“And we won’t talk about this anymore.”

“That’s even better.”

There was the trace of a smile on her lips, an impish light in her brown eyes. You don’t expect a conversation centered on something as horrible as the candiru to be what you would call flirtatious, but ours was, just the same. It might not be evident in the words we spoke, but a transcript of our conversation wouldn’t include the sidelong glances and raised eyebrows, the subtle nuance of a stressed syllable here and a bit of body language there. It was a flirtation, and I didn’t want it to end.

“But we ought to talk about something,” I went on. “Forget my book. What about your book?”

“Actually,” she said, “this one’s your book as well. I took it off the shelf, and I haven’t bought it yet.”

“You can, of course. If you can’t bring yourself to part with it.”

She put it on the counter, and I recognized it right off. It was a hardcover copy of Nobody’s Baby, by Gulliver Fairborn.

“That just came in a month or so ago,” I said. “I’m not sure what it’s marked. Thirty dollars?”

“It’s marked thirty-five.”

“If you want it,” I said, “you could probably talk me down to thirty.”

“If I really worked at it.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s not a first, is it?”

“For thirty dollars, or even thirty-five? Not hardly.”

“But that’s a high price for a book that’s not a first, isn’t it? If I just wanted to read it, I could buy a paperback. It’s available in paperback, isn’t it?”

“Abundantly. It’s never been out of print since the day it was published.”

“How nice for Mr. Fairborn.”

“I don’t know how many copies it sells annually,” I said, “or what kind of royalty he gets, but I’d say it’s nice for him, all right. But he deserves it, don’t you think? It’s a wonderful book.”

“It changed my life.”

“A lot of people feel that way. I read it when I was seventeen, and I would have sworn at the time that it changed my life. And for all I know, maybe it did.”

“It changed mine,” she said flatly, and tapped the book with her forefinger. “No dust jacket,” she said.

“No.”

“And it still brings thirty-five dollars?”

“Well, it hasn’t yet,” I said, “but I live in hope. If it had a jacket, I’d remove it, and wait until a first comes in without one. Or sell it separately. The jacket’s worth two hundred dollars, maybe a little more. That’s the difference in price between a first with and without a jacket.”

“That much?”

“It would be more,” I said, “but for all the jackets from later printings like this one. The jacket’s identical, at least through the first ten printings or so. Then they started putting review quotes on the back. But what you want to know is why this book costs as much as it does, and that’s because it’s a later printing of the original edition, and that makes it collectible for someone who’d like to have a first but can’t afford one. After all, the only difference between this copy and a first edition is that this one doesn’t say ‘First Edition’ on the copyright page. Instead it says ‘Third Printing,’ or whatever it says.”

“‘Fifth printing,’ actually.”

I flipped to the page in question. “So it does. If you just want to read the book, well, Shakespeare and Company’s a few blocks down Broadway, and they’ve got the paperback for five ninety-nine. But if you want something closer to a first and don’t want to pay a fortune for it…”

“How large a fortune?”

“For a first edition of Nobody’s Baby? I had a copy show up shortly after I took over the shop. It came in with a load of stuff, and I thanked my lucky stars when I realized what it was. I priced it at two hundred dollars, which was much too low even then, and I sold it within the week to the first person who spotted it. He got a bargain.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“No, it doesn’t. What’s a first of Gulliver Fairborn’s first book worth? It depends on condition, of course, and the presence or absence of a jacket, and-”

“A very fine copy,” she said. “With an intact jacket, also in very fine condition.”

“The last catalog listing I saw was fifteen hundred dollars,” I said, “and that sounds about right. For a really nice copy in a really nice dust jacket.”

“And if it’s inscribed?”

“Signed by the author, you mean? Because an inscription that reads ‘To Timmy on his seventeenth birthday, with love from Aunt Nedra’ doesn’t add anything to the book’s value. Quite the reverse.”

“I’ll tell Aunt Nedra to keep her good wishes to herself.”

“Or write them very lightly in pencil,” I said. “Gulliver Fairborn’s signature is rare, which is a rarity itself in this age of mass public book-signings. But you won’t see Fairborn hawking signed copies on QVC, or jetting around the country with pen in hand. In fact you won’t see him at all, and I for one wouldn’t recognize him if I did. He’s never given an interview or allowed himself to be photographed. Nobody knows where he lives or what he looks like, and a few books ago you started hearing rumors that he’d died, and that the recent books were the work of a ghostwriter. V. C. Andrews, no doubt.”

“Not Elliott Roosevelt?”

“Always a possibility. Anyway, someone did a computerized textual analysis, the same kind that reporter did to prove Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors, and established that Fairborn was writing his own books. But he hasn’t been signing them.”

“Suppose he signed one.”

“Well, how sure could we be that he really did the signing? It’s not terribly difficult to scribble ‘Gulliver Fairborn’ on a flyleaf, especially when hardly anyone has seen an authentic signature.”

“Suppose the signature’s authentic,” she said. “And suppose it’s what I originally asked you about, not just a signed copy but an inscribed one.”

“Saying something about Timmy and his birthday?”

“Saying something like ‘To Tiny Alice – Rye can do more than Milt or Malt / To let us know it’s not our fault. Love always, Gully.’”

“Gully,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And I guess you’d be Tiny Alice.”

“You’re very quick.”

“Everybody tells me that. So your question’s not hypothetical. You’ve got the book, and you’re in a position to be sure of the signature.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me the inscription again.” She did, and I nodded. “He’s paraphrasing Housman, isn’t he? ‘Malt can do more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.’ A friend of mine used to recite that couplet just before he drank the fourth beer of the evening. Unfortunately he did it again with beers five through twelve, and one grew a little weary of it. ‘ Rye can do more than Milt or Malt’-why rye, do you suppose?”