Good question.

I unfastened the big padlock, opened the steel security gates. I unlocked the several locks on my door, went in, flicked on the lights. Before I’d managed to take two steps inside the shop, the ravenous little bastard was rubbing himself against my pants leg.

“All right,” I said. “Cut the crap, will you? I’m here.”

He said what he always says. “Miaow,” he said.

Look, it wasn’t my idea.

And it happened very quickly. One day back in early June, Carolyn brought pastrami sandwiches and celery tonic to the bookstore, and I showed her a couple of books, an Ellen Glasgow novel and the collected letters of Evelyn Waugh. She took a look at the spines and made a sound somewhere between a tssst and a cluck. “You know what did that,” she said.

“I have a haunting suspicion.”

“Mice, Bern.”

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.”

“Rodents,” she said. “Vermin. You can throw those books right in the garbage.”

“Maybe I should keep them. Maybe they’ll eat these and leave the others alone.”

“Maybe you should leave a quarter under your pillow,” she said, “and the Tooth Fairy’ll come in the middle of the night and chew their heads off.”

“That doesn’t seem very realistic, Carolyn.”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. Bern, you wait right here.”

“Where are you going?”

“I won’t be long,” she said. “Don’t eat my sandwich.”

“I won’t, but—”

“And don’t leave it where the mice can get it, either.”

“Mouse,” I said. “There’s no reason to assume there’s more than one.”

“Bern,” she said, “take my word for it. There’s no such thing as one mouse.”

I might have figured out what she was up to, but I opened the Waugh volume while I knocked off the rest of my own sandwich, and one letter led to another. I was still at it when the door opened and there she was, back again. She was holding one of those little cardboard satchels with air holes, the kind shaped like a New England saltbox house.

The sort of thing you carry cats in.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Bern, give me a minute, huh?”

“No.”

“Bern, you’ve got mice. Your shop is infested with rodents. Do you know what that means?”

“It doesn’t mean I’m going to be infested with cats.”

“Not cats,” she said. “There’s no such thing as one mouse. There is such a thing as one cat. That’s all I’ve got in here, Bern. One cat.”

“That’s good,” I said. “You came in here with one cat, and you can leave with one cat. It makes it easy to keep track that way.”

“You can’t just live with the mice. They’ll do thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. They won’t sit back and settle down with one volume and read it from cover to cover, you know. No, it’s a bite here and a bite there, and before you know it you’re out of business.”

“Don’t you think you’re overdoing it?”

“No way. Bern, remember the Great Library at Alexandria? One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and then a single mouse got in there.”

“I thought you said there was no such thing as a single mouse.”

“Well, now there’s no such thing as the Great Library at Alexandria, and all because the pharaoh’s head librarian didn’t have the good sense to keep a cat.”

“There are other ways to get rid of mice,” I said.

“Name one.”

“Poison.”

“Bad idea, Bern.”

“What’s so bad about it?”

“Forget the cruelty aspect of it.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s forgotten.”

“Forget the horror of gobbling down something with Warfarin in it and having all your little blood vessels burst. Forget the hideous specter of one of God’s own little warm-blooded creatures dying a slow agonizing death from internal bleeding. Forget all that, Bern. If you possibly can.”

“All forgotten. The memory tape’s a blank.”

“Instead, focus on the idea of dozens of mice dying in the walls around you, where you can’t see them or get at them.”

“Ah, well. Out of sight, out of mind. Isn’t that what they say?”

“Nobody ever said it about dead mice. You’ll have a store with hundreds of them decomposing in the walls.”

“Hundreds?”

“God knows the actual number. The poisoned bait’s designed to draw them from all over the area. You could have mice scurrying here from miles around, mice from SoHo to Kips Bay, all of them coming here to die.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Maybe I’m exaggerating a tiny bit,” she allowed. “But all you need is one dead mouse in the wall and you’re gonna smell a rat, Bern.”

“A mouse, you mean.”

“You know what I mean. And maybe your customers won’t exactly cross the street to avoid walking past the store—”

“Some of them do that already.”

“—but they won’t be too happy spending time in a shop with a bad odor to it. They might drop in for a minute, but they won’t browse. No book lover wants to stand around smelling rotting mice.”

“Traps,” I suggested.

“Traps? You want to set mousetraps?”

“The world will beat a path to my door.”

“What kind will you get, Bern? The kind with a powerful spring, that sooner or later you screw up while you’re setting it and it takes off the tip of your finger? The kind that breaks the mouse’s neck, and you open up the store and there’s this dead mouse with its neck broken, and you’ve got to deal with that first thing in the morning?”

“Maybe one of those new glue traps. Like a Roach Motel, but for mice.”

“Mice check in, but they can’t check out.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Great idea. There’s the poor little mousie with its feet caught, whining piteously for hours, maybe trying to gnaw off its own feet in a pathetic attempt to escape, like a fox in a leg-hold trap in one of those animal-rights commercials.”

“Carolyn—”

“It could happen. Who are you to say it couldn’t happen? Anyway, you come in and open the store and there’s the mouse, still alive, and then what do you do? Stomp on it? Get a gun and shoot it? Fill the sink and drown it?”

“Suppose I just drop it in the garbage, trap and all.”

“Now that’s humane,” she said. “Poor thing’s half-suffocated in the dark for days, and then the garbage men toss the bag into the hopper and it gets ground up into mouseburger. That’s terrific, Bern. While you’re at it, why not drop the trap into the incinerator? Why not burn the poor creature alive?”

I remembered something. “You can release the mice from glue traps,” I said. “You pour a little baby oil on their feet and it acts as a solvent for the glue. The mouse just runs off, none the worse for wear.”

“None the worse for wear?”

“Well—”

“Bern,” she said. “Don’t you realize what you’d be doing? You’d be releasing a psychotic mouse. Either it would find its way back into the store or it would get into one of the neighboring buildings, and who’s to say what it would do? Even if you let it go miles from here, even if you took it clear out to Flushing, you’d be unleashing a deranged rodent upon the unsuspecting public. Bern, forget traps. Forget poison. You don’t need any of that.” She tapped the side of the cat carrier. “You’ve got a friend,” she said.

“You’re not talking friends. You’re talking cats.”

“What have you got against cats?”

“I haven’t got anything against cats. I haven’t got anything against elk, either, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to keep one in the store so I’ll have a place to hang my hat.”

“I thought you liked cats.”

“They’re okay.”

“You’re always sweet to Archie and Ubi. I figured you were fond of them.”

“I am fond of them,” I said. “I think they’re fine in their place, and their place happens to be your apartment. Carolyn, believe me, I don’t want a pet. I’m not the type. If I can’t even keep a steady girlfriend, how can I keep a pet?”

“Pets are easier,” she said with feeling. “Believe me. Anyway, this cat’s not a pet.”