At a stoplight he took off his glasses and swung his head around, flashing his clear blue eyes at me. When we got to Seventy-sixth and Lexington he gave me a business card, Chinese on one side, English on the other. “I give out hundreds of these,” he said. “I send everybody I can to him. Believe me, I’m glad to do it!” On the bottom, he showed me, he’d added his own name, Max Fiddler, and his telephone number. “You get good results,” he said, “call me, tell me how it worked out. You’ll do that?”

“I will,” I said. “Definitely.” And I paid him and tipped him and limped over to the brownstone where Hugo Candlemas lived.

I’d met Hugo Candlemas for the first time the previous afternoon. I was in my usual spot behind the counter, seeing what Will Durant had to say about the Medes and the Persians, of whom I knew little aside from the sexual proclivities alluded to in a limerick of dubious ethnological validity. Candlemas was one of three customers crowding my aisles just then. He was browsing quietly in the poetry section, while a regular customer of mine, a doctor at St. Vincent ’s, searched the adjacent aisle for the out-of-print mysteries she went through like smallpox through the Plains Indians. My third guest was a superannuated flower child who’d spotted Raffles sunbathing in the window. She’d come in to ooh and ahh over him and ask his name, and now she was looking through a shelf of art books and setting some volumes aside. If she wound up buying all the ones she’d picked, the sale would pay for a whole lot of Meow Mix.

The doctor was the first to settle up, relieving me of a half-dozen Perry Masons. They were book club editions, a couple of them pretty shabby, but she was a reader, not a collector, and she gave me a twenty and got a little change back.

“Just a few years ago,” she said, “these were a buck apiece.”

“I can remember when you couldn’t give them away,” I said, “and now I can’t keep them in stock.”