My next customer brought in a book from the bargain table, paid his two bucks for it, and asked if he could browse a bit. I told him to feel free, but that it was a dangerous pastime. You never knew when you’d find something you felt compelled to buy.

“I’ll risk it,” he said, and disappeared into the stacks. He’d been around a couple of times in the course of the past week, looking quite presentable if the slightest bit down at the heels and smelling faintly and not disagreeably of whiskey. He was somewhere around sixty, about the same age as the man I’d seen at the Paddington, with a deep suntan and a carefully trimmed little beard and mustache. The beard was V-shaped and came to a precise point, and it was silver in hue, as were his eyebrows and the hair on his head, or at least as much of it as showed out from under his tan beret.

This was the first time he’d bought anything, and I had a hunch he thought of the two dollars as an admission charge. Some people just like to hang out in bookstores-I did, before I bought one of my own-and Mr. Silver Beard struck me as a fellow who didn’t have anything much to do or anyplace to do it. He wasn’t homeless, he was too well groomed for that, but he looked to be biding his time.

If he’d gone on biding it until six o’clock I’d have gotten him to give me a hand closing up. But he was long gone by then. The phone rang around five-thirty, and it was Alice Cottrell. “I’ve got a room,” I said. I didn’t mention the bear.

“And tonight?”

“If all goes well,” I said. “If not, the room’s mine for two more nights. But I figure the sooner the better.”

And then we said the things a man and a woman will say when they’ve been rather more to each other than bookseller and customer. I dropped my voice to say them, and I kept it low even after Mr. Silver Beard had given me a wave and departed. She said goodbye after we’d done a reasonable amount of billing and cooing, and not too long after that I brought in the bargain table all by myself. That done, I put fresh water in Raffles’s water bowl, replenished the dry food in his dish, and made sure the bathroom door was open in case he needed to use the toilet. Then I locked up for the night and went over to the Bum Rap.