But did he have enough cash?

He didn’t want to check in front of an audience, and asked to use the bathroom, which wasn’t a bad idea anyway, after all the coffee he’d had with breakfast. He counted the bills in his wallet and found they came to just under eight hundred dollars, which would leave him with less than two after he bought the stamps.

And he really wanted them.

That was the trouble with stamp collecting. You never ran out of things to want. If he’d collected something else — rocks, say, or old Victrolas, or art — he’d run out of room sooner or later. His one-bedroom apartment was spacious enough by New York’s severe standards, but it wouldn’t take many paintings to fill the available wall space. With stamps, though, he had a set of ten large albums, occupying no more than five running feet of bookshelf space, and he could collect for the rest of his life and spend millions of dollars and never fill them.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t as though he couldn’t afford six hundred dollars for the Swedish reprints, not with the fee he was collecting for the job that had brought him to Des Moines. And McCue’s price was certainly fair. He’d be getting them for a third of catalog, and would have cheerfully paid close to full catalog value for them.

And did it matter if he wound up short of cash? He’d be out of Des Moines in a day or two, three at the most, and aside from buying the occasional newspaper and the odd cup of coffee, what did he need cash for, anyway? Fifty bucks to cover a cab home from the airport? That was about it.

He shifted six hundred dollars from his wallet to his breast pocket and went back to have another look at the stamps. No question, these babies were going home with him. “Suppose I pay cash?” he said. “That get me any kind of a discount?”

“Don’t see much cash anymore,” McCue said, and grinned. One side of his mouth went up while the rest stayed frozen. “Tell you what, we can skip the sales tax, long as you promise not to tell the governor.”