“And of mine, Mr.-?”

“Candlemas, Hugo Candlemas.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet a friend of Abel’s.”

“It’s my pleasure, Mr. Rhodenbarr.” We shook hands, and his palm was dry and his grip firm. “I shan’t waste words, sir. I have a proposition to put to you, a matter that could be in our mutual interest. The risk is minimal, the potential reward substantial. But time is very much of the essence.” He glanced at the open door. “If there were a way we could talk in private without fear of interruption…”

Abel Crowe was a fence, the best one I ever knew, a man of unassailable probity in a business where hardly anyone knows the meaning of the word. Abel was also a concentration camp survivor with a sweet tooth the size of a mastodon’s and a passion for the writings of Baruch Spinoza. I did business with Abel whenever I had the chance, and never regretted it, until the day he was killed in his own Riverside Drive apartment by a man who-well, never mind. I’d been able to see to it that his killer didn’t get away with it, and there was some satisfaction in that, but it didn’t bring Abel back.

And now I had a visitor who’d also been a friend of Abel’s, and who had a proposition for me.

I closed the door, turned the lock, hung the BACK IN 5 MINUTES sign in the window, and led Hugo Candlemas to my office in back.

CHAPTER Two

Now, thirty-two hours later, I rang one of four bells in the vestibule of his brownstone. He buzzed me in and I climbed three flights of stairs. He was waiting for me at the top of the stairs and led me into his floor-through apartment. It was very tastefully appointed, with a wall of glassed-in bookshelves, a gem of an Aubusson carpet floating on the wall-to-wall broadloom, and furniture that managed to look both elegant and comfortable.

One deplorable effect of a lifetime of larceny is a tendency of mine to survey every room I walk into, eyes ever alert for something worth stealing.