Because, when you come right down to it, I’ve never been entirely certain that Raffles is a Manx. He doesn’t look a lot like any photos I’ve seen of Manx cats, nor does he have the breed’s characteristic hopping gait. What he looks like, really, is a garden-variety gray tabby who lost his tail in some unrecorded accident, and who has learned to live without it.

He’d learned, God knows, to live without any number of other things to which he was once presumably attached. Although he still seeks to sharpen them on the furniture, his claws are but a memory, surgically removed before Fate (and Carolyn Kaiser) brought him into my life. And, although he is in attitude and temperament an outstanding example of feline masculinity, two emblems of his maleness have, alas, had similar surgical alteration.

Since this last point makes breeding him out of the question, it renders his bloodlines largely academic. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a Manx, and a fine one in the bargain. How he got that way is no concern of mine.

“…Gulliver Fairborn,” my visitor was saying.

That got my attention, which he’d hitherto succeeded in losing. I looked up and there he was, eyes wide, waiting for me to answer a question of which I’d heard only the last two words. I tried to look blank, and I have to say it comes easy to me.

“Let me explain,” he said.

“Perhaps that would be best.”

“All I need,” he said, “are photocopies. Do whatever you want with the originals. It’s not the letters I’m interested in. It’s their contents, it’s knowing what they say.”

I could have told him the letters were as hard to trace as Raffles’s tail, but what was my hurry? He was a lot more interesting now than when he’d been discussing my cat. “I don’t think I got your name,” I said. “Mine is-”

“Rhodenbarr,” he said. “Did I pronounce it correctly?”

The place some people go wrong is the first syllable. The O is long, as in “Row, row, row your boat,” and that’s how he’d rendered it. “Either you got it right,” I said, “or my parents lied to me. And you are…”

“Lester Eddington.”

I waited for the name to ring a bell. When you own a bookstore, you recognize the names of thousands of authors. They are, after all, quite literally one’s stock in trade. I may not know anything about a writer, I may never have read a word he’s written, but I tend to know the titles of his books and what shelf to put them on.

I just knew this bird was a writer, but his name was new to me, and I found out why when he explained that he hadn’t published anything yet, except for articles in academic journals that I’d been lucky enough to miss. But this didn’t mean he hadn’t been writing. For almost twenty years he’d been hard at work on a book about a subject that had preoccupied him since he was-surprise!-seventeen years old.

“Gulliver Fairborn,” he said. “I read Nobody’s Baby and it changed my life.”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“But in my case it really did.”

“That’s the other thing that everybody says.”

“In college,” he said, “I wrote paper after paper on Gulliver Fairborn. You’d be surprised how many courses you can fit him into besides English Lit. ‘Changing Attitudes on Race in America as revealed in the works of Gulliver Fairborn’-that worked fine in freshman sociology. For art history, I discussed the novels as literary reflections of abstract expressionism. I had a little trouble in earth science, but everything else fell into place.”

He’d done a master’s thesis on Fairborn, of course, and expanded it for his doctorate. And he’d spent his life teaching at one college or another, always on the move, never getting tenure. Wherever he went, he taught a couple of sessions of freshman English, along with a seminar on Guess Who.

“But they don’t really want to study him,” he said. “They just want to sit around and talk about how great Nobody’s Baby is, and how it changed their lives. And, of course, what a ‘cool dude’ Fairborn must be, and how they’d love to call him up late at night and talk about Archer Manwaring and all, but how they can’t because he’s such a man of mystery. Do you realize how many books he’s written since then?”

I nodded. “I have some of them on the shelves.”

“Well, you would. You’re in the business. But the man has published a new book every three years, forever taking chances, constantly growing as a writer, and hardly anyone pays any attention. The kids don’t care. They don’t want to read the later work, and judging by the papers they turn in, most of them don’t get very far with it.”

“But you’ve read all the books.”

“I read everything he writes,” he said, “and everything written about him. He’s my life’s work, Mr. Rhodenbarr. When I’m done, I’ll have produced the definitive book on the life and work of Gulliver Fairborn.”

“And that’s why you want copies of the letters.”

“Of course. Anthea Landau was his first agent, the only one with whom he had a close relationship.”

“Not too close,” I said. “The way I heard it, they never met.”

“That’s probably true, although the letters may show otherwise. That’s only one of the questions they may answer. Did they meet? Were they more to each other than author and agent?” He sighed. “The answer to both of those questions is probably no. Still, she was as close to him as anyone. What did he confide in his letters? What did he say about the books he was working on? About his thoughts and feelings, about his inner and outer life? You see why I need those letters, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

“I see why you want them,” I said. “What I don’t see is what you can do with them. Fairborn went to court once to keep his letters from being quoted in print. What makes you think he won’t do it again?”

“I’m sure he will. But I can wait as long as I have to. He’s almost thirty years older than I am. I don’t drink or smoke.”

“Good for you,” I said. “How about cursing?”

“Oh, I’m not a goody-goody,” he said, about as convincingly as one President insisting he wasn’t a crook or another claiming he’d never inhaled. “But the vices I have aren’t the sort that compromise one’s health. I don’t know that Fairborn smokes, but I have it on good authority that he drinks.”

“ Rye whiskey,” I said.

“That’s what they say, and I gather he drinks quite a good deal of it. Oh, I hope he lives for years and years, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I hope he writes many more books and that I have the chance to read them all. But all men are mortal, even if some of them manage to create immortal work during their lifetime. And, while he could live another thirty years and I could get run over by a bus this afternoon…”

“The odds are you’ll outlive him.”

“That’s what any insurance actuary would tell you. I won’t even attempt to publish my book during his lifetime. Believe me, I can write with a freer hand if I don’t have to worry what he’d think of it. Once he’s no longer in the picture, I can publish as I please. For the time being, my only concern is making the book as accurate and as comprehensive as possible.” He smiled with all the warmth of an SS officer in a forties film. “And that is where you come in,” he said.

“Except it’s not.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t have the letters,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Not even a postcard. It’s true I’ve been charged with burglary in the past, and it’s also true I was arrested at Anthea Landau’s hotel last night. But I didn’t steal her letters.”

“His letters, you mean.”

“Whatever.”

“I suppose you would have to say that.”

“So would Pinocchio,” I said, “unless he wanted his nose to grow.”

“If you don’t have them, who does?”

It was a good question, and I wished I knew the answer myself. I told him as much, and his face took on a crafty look. “Suppose they come into your possession,” he said. “If they’re floating around they have to wind up somewhere, and who’s to say it won’t be with you?”