“Who indeed?”

“You’d have to consider your options and select the best course open to you. But, if only for your own protection, you’d want to run them through a Xerox machine, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s what burglars always do,” I said.

“Really?”

“We Xerox everything. Furs, jewelry, rare coins…”

He nodded, registering as new data what had been an attempt at levity. “Just let me have a set,” he urged. “I don’t have any money, that must be obvious, but I could manage a few dollars to cover the cost.”

“The cost?”

“Of making copies.”

“In other words,” I said, “you could pay me ten cents a page.”

“Well, perhaps a bit more than that. But what I can offer you is something far more important. You’ll be helping a scholar with his life’s work. And, of course, you’d be listed in the acknowledgments when the book was published.”

“Now you’re talking,” I said. “How often does a humble burglar get that sort of recognition? ‘Thanks to Bernard Rhodenbarr’-do you suppose you’d have room for my middle name?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“‘To Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr, for sharing with me useful documents stolen from the late Anthea Landau.’ Wouldn’t that make her proud?”

“Miss Landau?”

“My mother, to see her son get such recognition. Of course, the police might view it differently, but I suppose we could be a shade more circumspect in the wording. And who’s to say the statute of limitations on burglary won’t run out by the time you’re able to publish?”

He agreed it was possible, even likely, and gave me a card with his name on it, Lester Eddington, along with that of a college and a town in Pennsylvania, neither of which I’d ever heard of. I said as much and learned the town was in the western part of the state, near the Ohio border.

“You must be tired,” I said. “You had a long drive this morning.”

But he’d been in town since the weekend, staying at a hotel. Not the Paddington, by any chance? Nothing so good, he assured me, and named a hotel on Third Avenue which was indeed a step or two down from the Paddington, but not too many steps away from it. He’d come to town to talk to the folks at Sotheby’s on the slim chance they could be persuaded to copy the letters for him. And he’d hoped for an audience with Anthea Landau, either to see the letters or to interview her, a request she’d always refused in the past. And he had other leads to pursue as well.

“Well,” he said, straightening up. “I’ve taken up enough of your time. If it turns out that you have those letters…”

“I’ll keep you in mind.”

He’d have liked something a little firmer than that, but I guess he was used to disappointment. He nodded shortly and thrust his hand across the counter in a manner awkward enough to leave me wondering for a moment just what I was supposed to do with it.

I shook it, which was evidently what he’d had in mind. Then I gave it back to him and off he went.

The door had barely closed behind Eddington when the phone rang. It was Carolyn, offering to pick up lunch and bring it over. “I know today’s your turn,” she said, “but I also know you just opened up, so I thought I could take two turns in a row. Unless you had a late breakfast and want to skip lunch altogether.”

“I didn’t have any kind of a breakfast,” I said, “now that you mention it. I fed Raffles, which was the only way to get him out from underfoot. The poor guy was starving. So was I, and I still am, so I certainly don’t want to skip lunch.”

“That pig,” she said.

“What pig are we talking about?”

“Your pig of a cat, Bern. Did he eat his breakfast?”

“Every morsel.”

“Well, he’s two meals ahead of you. I fed him around nine-fifteen, before I opened up. I bet he didn’t say a word, did he?”

“He said ‘Meow.’ Does that count?”

“The animal’s a real con artist. Look, I’ll see you in a little while. What would you say to some pastrami sandwiches and a couple of bottles of cream soda?”

“Meow,” I said.

“That was really sweet of Marty,” she said. “Go figure, huh? You start out by stealing a man’s baseball cards, and he winds up getting you out of jail.”

“I didn’t steal his cards.”

“Well, he thought you did. My point is the relationship didn’t exactly get off on the right foot, and look at it now.”

“I’m seeing him in a couple of hours,” I said. “At his club.”

“I guess it’s been a while since you’ve seen him, huh?”

“Quite a while,” I said, and glanced at my watch. “Something like twenty-two hours.”

“Where did you-”

“At the Paddington,” I said. “Not last night, but earlier in the day. When I was on my way out of the place, he was on his way in.”

“What was he doing there?”

“He didn’t say,” I said, “because we didn’t speak. But my guess would be that he was committing adultery.”

“Is it that kind of a hotel, Bern?”

“The kind you commit adultery in? What other kind is there?”

“I mean is it crawling with hookers? Because I didn’t think it had that kind of reputation.”

“It doesn’t,” I said, “and it wasn’t, but you don’t need a hooker for adultery. All you need is a partner you’re not married to.”

“And he had one?”

“Right there on his arm. I got a good look at her, and she was worth looking at. But I don’t think she looked at me, or if she did she wasn’t paying attention. Because she didn’t recognize me.”

“She was someone you knew?”

“No.”

“Oh. For a minute there I thought…”

“Thought what?”

“That you were going to say it was Alice Cottrell.”

“Nope.”

“Not if you didn’t know her. But in that case why would you expect her to recognize you?”

“Not then,” I said. “Later.”

“Later?”

“When I met her in the sixth-floor hallway,” I said. “God knows I remembered her, even if she was dressed up like Paddington Bear this time around. And she remembered me later on in the lobby. ‘That’s him!’ she sang out, the little darling.”

“She’s the one you saw with Marty?”

“The very same,” I said, “and I’ve got to say I admire the man’s taste. Her name’s Isis Gauthier and she lives right there at the hotel.”

“And she turned you in to the cops, and Marty bailed you out.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What does it all have to do with the letters?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or the murder. Is it all connected?”

“Good question.”

“There’s nothing like pastrami, is there, Bern?”

“Nothing like it.”

“And I don’t know why cream soda goes with it. It doesn’t go with anything else.”

“You’re right about that.”

“ Bern, what happened last night?”

“I wish I knew,” I said, “because I was there when it happened, and I got scooped up in the net, and I’d be a lot happier if I knew what was going on.”

I went over it again, from my own arrival at the Paddington the previous evening to my departure a little while later, handcuffs on my wrists and Ray’s singular version of the Miranda warning ringing in my ears.

“My mother always told me to wear clean underwear,” I said. “In case I got hit by a car.”

“Mine told me the same thing, Bern, but she never said why. I just figured it was one of the things decent people did. Anyway, what good would it do? If you got hit by a car, wouldn’t your underwear get messed up along with everything else?”

“I never thought of that,” I admitted. “But I’ve taken her advice and put on clean underwear every morning, and in all these years I’ve never been hit by a car.”

“What a waste.”

“But what she should have said,” I went on, “is to wear clean underwear in case you get strip-searched by the cops.”

“Because that’s a lot more likely than getting mowed down by a Toyota?”

“It’s certainly worked out that way for me. The thing is, though, what would be really embarrassing is if you had dirty drawers when you were being strip-searched. I mean, it’s embarrassing enough with clean ones.”