The fourth stamp shown was the 100-tschirin stamp. (The nation’s currency was based on the tschiro, and each tschiro was worth a hundred dikin. The cheapest stamp was a single dik. It’s remarkable how much you can learn from a postage stamp catalog, even an outdated one, and of how little value the information is.) The 100-tschirin stamp was the high value of the series, and it differed from its fellows in two respects. It was larger, about one and a half times their size, and it was vertical in format, taller than it was wide. And the portrait of Ilona’s buddy, instead of being confined to a little porthole up in one corner, filled the entire stamp.

Hard to be sure. The reproduction, as I’ve said, left a lot to be desired. And I didn’t have the photograph with me, just my memory of the photo, glimpsed briefly in the dim and flickering light of a single candle. So I couldn’t swear to it, but it certainly looked to me as though this was the man.

Vlados I, the first-and so far the only-king of Anatruria.

For a minute there it looked like I was on to something.

My God, I thought, it all tied together. Ilona wasn’t just someone who wandered in to buy a book. It wasn’t sheer coincidence that, of all the bookstores in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine. It was all part of-

Part of what?

Not part of the abortive burglary, and not part of the death of Hugo Candlemas. Because what did Anatruria have to do with all that, or that with Anatruria? Nothing. Ilona had a photo of the erstwhile king of Anatruria in her room, just as she had a map on her wall with the country’s purported borders outlined thickly in red. And why not? She was an Anatrurian, and she might well be a patriotic one, though not without an ironic sense of the comic-opera aspect of it all.

Was there a coincidence? It seemed to me there had to be a coincidence, but I couldn’t spot it. What gave it all a touch of the dramatic, at least at first glance, was that it had taken me something like sixteen hours to figure out why the guy with the big smile looked faintly familiar. If I’d recognized him on the spot, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. “Oh, there’s King Vlados, I’d know him anywhere, even in the apartment of one of his loyal subjects.”