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almost told this girl."
"You should have told me, Hirsh. Really."
"I should worry your pretty head with total disaster?"
She looked at me. "Did you see anything?"
"Nothing at all. Did you always do it that way?"
"Always," she said. "With him and the other clients too. Just like that.
Except it's more fun with the others."
Meyer said, "Do either of you remember a distraction? Did anybody yell fire,
drop anything, fall off a chair?"
They remembered nothing like that. They had been buoyed by a fragile hope. It
seeped away. Hirsh went from looking sixty-two to looking ninety-two. Meyer
was somber. The girl bit her thumb knuckle and blinked rapidly. So we all got
out of there. We went back to the shop. Jane Lawson looked at us with anxious
query when we all walked in. Hirsh and Mary Alice shook their heads no. Jane
looked bitterly depressed. An old man with hair like Brillo sat erect on a
stool, using gold tongs with great deftness as, one by one, he examined stamps
and replaced them in the stock book in front of him. "Fedderman," he said,
"everything here is perfectly ordinary, quite tiresome, exceedingly
unremarkable."
"Colonel, if I had looked through them, I would have known that, right?"
"Yes, but "
"And then if I told you I had not looked through them, I would be lying.
Right? Believe me, that book is exactly the way I found it, in one of the
cartons. If it's tiresome, I'm sorry."
"Huh!" said the Colonel.
"What?" asked Fedderman.
"Nothing. Nothing at all."
"Wait. You put this one back crooked. Let me help you. What do you know? Look,
Mary Alice. A nice double surcharge on Canada C3. Doesn't that go pretty
good?"
"Like about seventy dollars in Scott, Mr. Fedderman.''
"See, Colonel? In the middle of all this junk, a nice little error. Let me
see. Original gum. Never hinged. Nice centering. To you, Colonel, only forty
dollars."
"Forty!"
"I know," said Mary Alice. "That surprises me too, sir. It ought to be
fifty-five at least."
"Well & put it aside, dear girl," said the colonel.
They meshed smoothly and well, did Fedderman and Mary Alice. She went behind
the counter. Meyer and I went back to Fedderman's office with him and closed
the door.
"Now what?" Fedderman asked out of the depths of his despair.
"One thing I know," Meyer said. "The impossible doesn't ever happen. Only
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possible things happen."
"To me the impossible happens," said Fedderman.
"If it isn't you and it isn't Sprenger," Meyer said, "then it has to be Mary
Alice."
"Impossible!"
"So we are comparing two impossible things, and it being Mary Alice is not
quite as impossible as what happened."
"Maybe I follow you," Hirsh said. "My head hurts. I hurt all over. I'm coming
down. I should be in bed with a pill."
"Did she bring that same purse," I asked Fedderman.
"Purse?"
"The one she had today is like a picnic basket made of straw painted white.
Did she have the same purse the last time?"
"Yes. No. How should I know? There are five clients. What difference does it
make?"
"I wish I knew if it made any difference. That junk you saw in the Sprenger
collection. Could it have come out of your stock here in the store?"
"What I saw? Some of it, maybe. Very little. I didn't have long enough to
study it, you understand. A dealer has a good memory for defective pieces. No,
I'd say probably none of it from my stock, or I would have recognized one
piece anyway. Besides, it was higher catalog value than what I stock here."
I remembered Meyer's interesting thought. "Hirsh," I asked, "suppose whoever
switched the goods has sold the Sprenger items to the trade. Could you
identify them?"
He thought, nodded, and gave me a show-and-tell answer. Once again the
projection viewer came out. He put a slide box in place and in the darkened
office clicked through a half-dozen slides and stopped at a block of four blue
stamps imprinted "Graf Zeppelin" across the top. They were a
two-dollar-and-sixty-cent denomination.
"This is one I picked up for Sprenger. It was in a Mozian auction catalog last
year. It is absolutely superb, and I had to go to fourteen hundred for it. I
take an Ektachrome-X transparency of everything I put in an investment
account. I use a medical Nikon, and I keep it right here on this mount.
Built-in flash. Now you see where the perforations cross in the middle of the
block, those little holes? They make a certain pattern. Distinctive. Maybe
unique? Not quite. Now look out at the corners. See this top left corner? That
paper between the perforations, right on the comer, is so long, it looks as if
maybe there was a pulled perforation on the stamp that was up here, in the
original sheet. Okay, add that corner to the pattern in the middle, and it is
unique. Any dealer could look at this slide, go through a couple dozen blocks
and pick this one out with no trouble. Individual stamps would be a lot
harder, especially perforated. Imperforate, usually they are cut so the
margins are something you can recognize. Of course, postally used stuff, old
stuff, the cancellation is unique."
As he put his toys away, I said, "Could you get prints made from the slides of
the most valuable items and circulate them to your friends in the trade?"
"A waste of time and money. These days, believe me, there are more stamp
collections being ripped off than ever in history. Information comes in all
the time. Watch for this, watch for that. Hoodlums come in here to the store,
and they tell me their uncle left them some stamps in an album, do I want to
take a look, maybe buy them? I say I've got all the stock I want. They'll find
people who'll buy. But not me. I don't need the grief. After fifty years in
the business, I should be a fence? Am I going to look at the stamps the
hoodlum brings in and call a cop? Who needs a gasoline bomb through the front
door?"
"Then there's no way?" Meyer asked.
Fedderman sighed. "If all that stuff goes back into circulation, a lot of
those pieces have to find their way into the auction houses. Every catalog,
there are pictures of the best pieces. Like if there are two thousand lots
listed in the catalog, there could be a hundred photographs of the best items.
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One day last week I sat in here, I went through a couple dozen catalogs to try
to spot any item from the Sprenger account. H. R. Harmer, Harmer, Rooke and
Company, Schiff, Herst, Mozian, Siegel, Apfelbaum. Nothing."
"Oh," said Meyer, his disappointment obvious.
"I think I am going home to bed, the way I feel," Fedderman said. "What are
you fellows going to do now?"
I said, "I am going to get Mary Alice to help me."
"How do you mean?" Hirsh asked.
"If she knows more than she's told us, the only thing she can do is play along
with me."
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