Puzzles of the Black Widowers (The Black Widowers #5)

It didn't take much to make Emmanuel Rubin indignant so that his beard (what there was of it) bristled. It didn't take much more to make him furious and have his eyes flash behind his thick-lensed spectacles.

He was somewhere between indignation and rage now, and the upstairs room at the Milano, where the Black Widowers met for their monthly banquets, rang with his voice.

"I get this fan letter from California," he said, "and after the usual bosh about how good my books are  - "

"Bosh is right," said Mario Gonzalo, staring complacently at the sketch he was making of the banquet guest, a sketch that seemed all eyebrows.

Rubin went right on with his sentence, not bothering to stop to demolish the other - unusual for him and indicative of the concentrated nature of his anger. " - he writes to me that if I'm ever on the Coast, I should drop in and he'll put me up."

"Kindly meant, I'm sure," said Roger Halsted, nibbling at a sausage roll - one of the hot appetizers that the inestimable Henry had put out this time as an accompaniment to the drinks.

"No one can be kind and stupid at the same time," said Rubin, inventing a cosmic law on the spot. "I wrote back and said, 'I am already on the Coast, thank you.' "

"Good Lord," said Thomas Trumbull, who had arrived three minutes before and had accepted a scotch and soda from Henry with his usual affectation of having just returned from Death Valley and being in the last extremity of thirst. "Is that what you're furious about? So what if Californians talk about their coast as though it were the only one in the world? It's just a way of speaking."

"As a matter of fact," said James Drake, who was born in Alaska, "the West Coasters, if you'll excuse that expression, are not the only offenders. As soon as an East Coaster has been in California for five minutes, he begins saying, 'Here on the Coast  - ' In the same way, you can get a guy from Ohio who has called his native land 'the United States' all his life, put him in Europe for five minutes, and he begins to talk about the 'States.'

Geoffrey Avalon, host of the banquet on this occasion, and noted for his annoying ability to see both sides of a question, said, "Provincialism is not the monopoly of anyone. There is the story of the two Boston dowagers who found themselves in Los Angeles early in October, with the temperature at one hundred and five degrees. Said one, "My goodness, Prudence, it is certainly hot here." Said the other, "What do you expect, Hepzibah? We are, after all, nearly three thousand miles from the ocean."

Avalon then took a sip of his drink in his usual grave way and said, "Tom, you haven't had a chance to meet my guest, Chester Dunhill. Chester, this is Tom Trumbull, who has some sort of sensitive job with the government. He's never specific about it."

Trumbull said, "Glad to meet you, Mr. Dunhill. If our doings here puzzle you, I must explain that it is customary for the Black Widowers to debate furiously over trifles."

Dunhill was a tall man with a thick head of white hair and eyebrows of a startling and bushy black. He said, in a booming bass voice, "We can survive catastrophes. It's the trifles that kill us."

Gonzalo looked startled and seemed about to say something, but Henry announced, with quiet finality, "Gentlemen, dinner is served."

Rubin did well with the ham and pea soup, and wreaked havoc on the broiled sole, and on the rather plain salad. He drew up short, however, at the individual pies handed out in all the pride of their crisp, golden crust.

"Henry," said Rubin in a slow rumble, "what exists under this crust?"

Henry said, "I fear, Mr. Rubin, that Mr. Avalon, in a British mood, has asked that we serve steak and kidney pie."

"Kidney? Kidney?" Rubin looked outraged. "That's liver squared. Jeff, I wouldn't have thought you capable of such a lapse in taste."

Avalon looked pained. He said, "Steak and kidney pie, properly prepared, is a great delicacy  - "

"For whom? Vultures?"

"For every one of us at this table. Why don't you try it, Manny?"

Rubin said intransigently. "Kidney tastes like urine." Gonzalo said, "So does your favorite brand of beer, Manny, but you guzzle it down."

"For God's sake," said Trumbull, "what kind of dinner conversation is this? Manny, if you can't eat what's set before you, then I'm sure Henry can get you scrambled eggs."

Rubin sneered and said, "I'll eat the steak," and sat sulkily through the main course, the treacle tart, the sardine-on-toast savory, and the strong tea. It made for a quiet dinner and, as Gonzalo pointed out in dumb show, Rubin did manage to eat the entire pie, kidney included.

Eventually, Avalon rang his spoon against the water glass and said, "Gentlemen, I call on Mario to grill our honored guest, my good friend, Chester Dunhill. I've explained the rules of the game to him and he is quite prepared to answer truthfully and completely."

Gonzalo said, "Mr. Dunhill, how do you justify your existence?"

Dunhill blinked, then said, "Well, I try to keep the past alive for the general public. Considering that we can't possibly order the present intelligently unless we learn the lessons of the past, I think I earn my place on Earth."

Gonzalo said, "How do you keep the past alive?"

"By writing about it. I suppose I could call myself a historian for the layman."

"Can you make a living from that?" asked Gonzalo.

Halsted put in at once, "Will Durant did, and Barbara Tuchman still does."

Dunhill smiled, with an air of diffidence that did not sit comfortably upon him. "I don't exactly put myself in their class. Still, I do make a living."

Avalon cleared his throat with vehemence. "May I interrupt? My friend, Charles, is being needlessly modest. In addition to his histories, he also writes historical novels for teenagers, mostly set in the Greece of the Peloponnesian War and the Rome of the Second Punic War. These are both critical and popular successes."

Gonzalo said, "Why those periods in particular, Mr. Dunhill?"

Dunhill said, "Both were periods of epic conflict between two nearly equally matched powers: Athens and Sparta in one case; Rome and Carthage in the other. Both wars are well documented; both were filled with great battles, with dramatic triumphs and disasters, with generals and politicians, some brilliant and some idiotic. Both periods, in short, are dead ringers for the period we're living in now. We can understand, sympathize, and see the lessons I try to make plain. What's more, we can't even draw an overall conclusion, because in one case the adversary we admire won out over the other, Rome defeating Carthage. In the other, the adversary we admire lost, Athens succumbing to Sparta. Of course, I've always had a personal soft spot in my heart for the Carthaginian general, Hannibal. He's one of three great generals in history who ended a loser without that in the least tarnishing his reputation."

Rubin said, "Napoleon was a second. Who was the third?"

"Robert E. Lee, of course," said Dunhill, his voice booming again.

Rubin looked discomfited but recovered and said, "I thought you were going to say Charles XII of Sweden, and that would have been wrong."

"That's right," said Dunhill, "it would have been wrong. Charles XII lacked prudence."

"How about generals who never lost?" asked Drake.

"There are quite a few of them," said Dunhill. "Genghis Khan, Cromwell, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Duke of Marlborough, and so on. Their reputations depend on the manner of their victories and the quality of their adversaries. At least two generals I can think of almost always lost but remained great considering what they did with what they had. There's George Washington, of course, and General Giap of North Vietnam."

Gonzalo said, "I suppose that in your history books and novels, you deal with the catastrophes that people survive. What are the trifles that can kill you?"

Everyone turned to look at Gonzalo, who grew restive under the communal stare. "What's wrong with the question? Mr. Dunhill said that catastrophes could be survived, but trifles kill you."

"Did I?" said Dunhill, frowning.

"Yes, you did. You said it to Tom Trumbull." He turned to Trumbull, who was nursing his brandy. "Tom, didn't he say that?"

Trumbull nodded. "You said that, Mr. Dunhill."

"Well, then," said Gonzalo. "What trifles did you have in mind?"

"Actually," put in Avalon, "every defeat suffered by a competent general might be blamed on some trifle. In fact, in War and Peace Tolstoy argued, in what I found to be tedious detail, the thesis that no general controls a battle, but that trivialities decide it all."

Gonzalo said, "Come on, Jeff, you're trying to get your guest off the hook, and that's unethical. I don't think Mr. Dunhill was thinking about big battles. I think he had something personal in mind. That's the way it sounded to me and that's what I want to know about."

Dunhill shook his head. "It was just a remark. We all make remarks."

Gonzalo said, "Remarks aren't made out of nothing. You must have had something in your mind."

Dunhill shook his head again.

Trumbull sighed and said, "It seemed to me, too, Mr. Dunhill, that when you made that remark something was tearing at you. Jeff said he explained the game to you. You've agreed to answer all questions and we agree, in return, to hold everything you say absolutely confidential. If you're willing to state flatly that the statement had no personal meaning to you then and that you spoke idly, we will have to accept that, but please don't say that unless it is the truth."

Avalon said, in a tone of deep discomfort, "I did tell you that this would all be confidential, Chet."

Dunhill said, with a touch of anger in his voice, "There's nothing involved here but a deep personal disappointment that I can hardly bear to think of, let alone discuss. The trouble is that it is a matter of no moment to anyone but me, and others will only laugh at the whole thing. It involves a ridiculous trifle that places all the blame squarely on me. That's the unbearable part. If I could blame it on the government, on Fate, on the Universe, it wouldn't be so  - " He stopped, broodingly.

"May we hear about it?" said Gonzalo stubbornly.

"I warn you," said Dunhill. "It's a long story of no interest whatever except to me."

"That's beside the point," said Gonzalo.

"Very well, but you asked for it. - During World War II, I was a young chap who missed actual army service (for a few years, anyway) because I was working for the Navy as a chemist. This was in Philadelphia. I was rather an unsocial creature in those days and my chief amusement lay in making my way out to the main branch of the Free Library and reading whatever I came across. And one of the things I came across was The Historians' History of the World in twenty-four volumes. It was published in 1902, with a second edition in 1907, with two supplementary volumes carrying things through World War I, and an index volume - twenty-seven altogether. Did any of you ever hear of it?"

There was silence. Dunhill went on, "I'm not surprised. To most people, it would be a deadly work. It was long out of print even at the time I came across it forty years ago, and now  - "

He shrugged, and went on. "The volumes are a cut-and-paste job. Sections from the Greek and Roman historians and from the modern historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were included in the proper order in a series of histories dealing with the various nations separately. Volumes three and four were on Greece; volumes five and six were on Rome; and so on. There is a great deal of overlapping, of course, but that just meant that the same events are described from the viewpoints of different historians, possibly of different nationalities.

"The general editor, Henry Smith Williams, filled in gaps with essays of his own. He was a humane person of liberal views and almost every time I read what I thought was a particularly telling passage, it proved to be one of his. You must understand that it was edited to read as connectedly as possible. There was just an occasional unobtrusive superscript which guided you to the end of the volume, where you found out that you were reading Gibbon or Prescott or Bury or Macaulay or Thucydides or whoever.

"The library had the set in double volumes and I picked them out one and by one and quickly found I could not bear to stop reading them for anything as dull as my daily work. I took them to the lab with me and read them during lunch or through a partially open desk while I had something boiling slowly under a reflex condenser. My memories of that entire period are vague except for those volumes.

"I had always been interested in history, but it was those volumes that converted that interest into an obsession. The volumes were all terribly old-fashioned, of course, for prior to the twentieth century, history was almost exclusively a matter of battles and court intrigue. Still, that was what I loved and my own histories are just as old-fashioned. I dwell very little on social and economic issues."

Rubin said, "The social and economic issues would make your histories more valuable."

"And more dull, perhaps," said Dunhill. "I don't omit such things altogether but I always remember I am writing for the general public, not for scholars. In any case, by the late 1950s, nearly ten years after I had held those library books in my hands for the last time, I abandoned chemistry and began to spend my full time on histories and historical novels."

Dunhill paused and seemed to brood awhile.

Drake chuckled as he stubbed out a cigarette. He said, "Unless you're telling the story with a total absence of art, which I cannot believe of a novelist, that Historians' History is going to turn up again."

Dunhill nodded vigorously. "You are quite correct. A few years ago, I made a new acquaintance, and my wife and I visited his house and had dinner there with several other couples. After dinner, I wandered over to his bookshelves and studied them - a bad habit that exasperates my wife but of which even she cannot cure me.

"And there, filling an entire shelf, was the Historians' History. I hadn't thought of it in years, had all but forgotten it. The instant I saw it, however, everything flooded back. The memory of reading those volumes at a terrible time in modern history, memories gilded and made more wonderful by the passage of years, were achingly sweet and intense.

"I was no longer the impecunious lad of decades ago. I am quite well off now and can afford to cater to my whims. I approached my host at once, therefore, and offered to buy his set. I couldn't believe that it had any attraction to anyone but myself and I was ready to pay far more than it was worth. Unfortunately, my host, for some reason he never explained, would not sell. He was quite emphatic about it.

"I tell you, gentlemen, if there were a million dollars on this table, and I knew I could take it without danger of detection, I would not touch it, out of a simple sense of honesty. But I actually thought of stealing those volumes that my friend would not sell me. It was only the thought of being caught if I tried breaking and entering that held me back. My sense of ethics simply shattered under the strain and I ended the new friendship rather than expose myself to the bitterness of seeing those volumes in someone else's possession.

"I began visiting such secondhand bookstores as I could reach, and calling those I could not reach, asking them if they had or could get a set of the volumes. I even advertised in the New York Times Book Review, in general magazines, and in periodicals of interest to history buffs. The longer I waited the more I was willing to pay if I had to. - And this brings me down to the present."

Halsted said, "I hope you're not going to tell us you drew a complete blank and that that's the end of the story."

Dunhill frowned at him, his eyebrows hunching low. He said bitterly, "How I wish I could tell you exactly that. I gave a box number in the advertisement and the booksellers all had my home address, but I got nothing in either case. Nothing. Nil. Zilch.

"One week ago, however, I picked up a letter at my publisher's. I see them once a week and they usually hold any letters for me that are written care of them. They're never important, and usually they're from people who nitpick some historical point I make, something that must be dealt with, but always depresses me.

"I was holding the letter in my hand as I left my publisher's and walked down the street to Grand Central. Idly, I glanced at the envelope and noted that it was addressed in pen and ink in a spidery hand, which I accepted as a bad sign. I decided it was from an elderly man who would raise some faint and querulous point concerning some pet theory of his. In a bad temper, I ripped open the envelope and removed the sheet of paper inside. At that point, I passed a garbage truck and tossed the envelope into its yawning maw, like a good citizen. But then I had to cross the street, which takes all one's concentration in Manhattan, and shoved the note into my pocket.

"I didn't remember it till I was in my commuter train and, taking out the note, I read it and a sudden rush of ecstasy filled me. - Here, I have the letter. Let me read it to you."

Dunhill unfolded a letter and read its crabbed handwriting aloud and with ease, as though he had memorized it.

Dear Mr. Dunhill,

I am a great fan of your books and I read your ad and would like to tell you that I have a complete set of "The Historians' History of the World" that I would be delighted to let you have. My father bought it for me when I was quite young and I enjoyed it greatly. It is still in very good shape and if you are willing to pay me a reasonable price plus all mailing costs, I would have it sent to you by insured express mail.

I would never dream of selling the set but I am quite old now and will be moving to a little place near my daughter's home, and there will be no room for the set there. I am a widower and I'm afraid I cannot live alone any longer. I just can't cope with the harsh winters.

It means having to live in a small town instead of in a sizable city. It also means giving up my apartment on the shore where, on clear evenings, I have often watched the sun set into the endless stretch of water so that I almost imagined I could hear it hiss.

Still, if I must give up these books, I can't think of anyone I'd rather give it up to than you. I hope you have many years of pleasure with it. Please let me hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

Ludovic Broadbottom

Rubin said, "Congratulations, Mr. Dunhill. Is everything arranged, or is that where the trivialities come in?"

Dunhill said grimly, "That is where the trivialities come in. Here, take this letter and look at it and tell me where to write."

Rubin took the letter, and glanced over the writing which filled one side of the sheet. He turned it over and looked at the totally blank other side. He said, "There's no return address on it."

"No, there isn't," said Dunhill indignantly. "Can you imagine the stupidity of people who don't put return addresses on their letters and then expect an answer?"

Avalon said, "People who don't put return addresses on their letters usually do put it on their envelopes - oh," he concluded, remembering.

"That's right," said Dunhill. "I threw the damned envelope away. There are your trifles. Here's a guy who reads an ad that clearly has a box number attached, yet he writes in care of my publisher instead. That not only means a delay of several days, but deprives me of the chance of knowing at once that the letter is important.

"Then I decide, of all things, to open the letter on the street and to discard the envelope into a handy garbage truck without really looking at it. If I had only just noted the name of the city and nothing more, I could have got his address from the city directory. There can't be more than one Ludovic Broadbottom in any one city. And to top it all off, he doesn't include his return address in the body of the letter. What's the result of all these trivialities? I have an offer of my Historians' History and I can't reach out and take it."

Gonzalo said, "Is there a bright side, Mr. Dunhill? Can you get other reference books for your histories and novels."

Dunhill said, with real anguish, "Get other books? I have other books. I have two large rooms crammed with historical reference material of the finest sort, to say nothing of the resources of the New York Public Library and of Columbia University. You don't get the point. I want a copy of Historians' History for myself for sentimental reasons, for what it's done for me, for what it's meant to me. And I have it, and can't get it."

For a moment, what was almost a child's whine entered his deep voice. He must have recognized that himself, if belatedly, for he threw himself back in his chair, took a deep breath, and said, "Pardon me, gentlemen, I don't mean to rail uselessly at Fate."

"Why not?" said Avalon. "We all do it from time to time. But look here, we usually see more than we think we do. You glanced at the envelope long enough to see that it was addressed to you and to note that it was an old man's handwriting  - "

"Yes," said Dunhill vehemently, "another trifle. The handwriting threw me off, too, and added to my conviction the letter was unimportant. If he had only typed my address on the envelope, I would surely have treated it with more respect."

"Yes," said Avalon, ploughing on, "but the point is that you must have glanced at the return address, too. If you concentrate quietly, you may remember something about it."

"No," said Dunhill hopelessly. "I've been trying for days. It's useless."

Trumbull said, "Why don't we work from what he says in his letter? He lives in a sizable city on the shore, and sees the sunset over the ocean. That means he's on the West Coast, or 'the Coast,' to quote Manny's fan. Here in New York, we can see sunrise out of the water, but never sunset into the water. Can we make a start with that?"

Dunhill seemed to have recovered his self-control. He said quietly, "Gentlemen, I have been a chemist, and I am a historian. I am used to the process of reasoning. Please note, however, that he talks of the harsh winters he experiences and that he can no longer endure. Neither Los Angeles nor San Francisco can possibly be considered as having harsh winters. No city on the West Coast can."

Gonzalo said, "Seattle is pretty damned rainy. I was there once, and you can believe me. That might sicken anyone."

"Then he would speak of rainy weather. No one speaks of harsh winters unless they mean cold and snow. That eliminates the West Coast, and Hawaii, too, but  - "

"Wait," said Rubin, "how do you know it was from the United States? The letter is written in English, but it could be from Canada, Scotland, Australia. For that matter, almost any educated, non-Anglophone foreigner can write in English these days."

Dunhill flushed. "Well, then, I did notice something about the envelope. It had an American stamp. I know because I save foreign stamps for a friend of mine and I automatically watch for one on all envelopes. Had there been a foreign stamp on the envelope I would have torn it off and discarded the rest. I think I would even have noticed a foreign postal-meter mark. - As I say, then, we can eliminate California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. That leaves Alaska."

"I wouldn't have thought of Alaska," muttered Gonzalo.

"I would," said Drake, smiling. "I was born there."

"In any case," said Dunhill, "the only town in Alaska that even an Alaskan would think of as sizable is Anchorage. It's on the coast but not on the open ocean. It's on Cook Inlet. The inlet is to the west of Anchorage, however, and perhaps you can see the sun set into it. Perhaps. I didn't take chances. I called the Anchorage phone exchange and the post office. There's no Ludovic Broadbottom in the city. In fact, just to play it safe, I called Juneau and Sitka. Juneau is on another inlet farther south, and Sitka has a population of less than ten thousand. But I called them - and nothing doing."

Halsted said thoughtfully, "If you're going to count cities on inlets, what about the East Coast? The ocean may be to the east, but there may be inlets to the west."

"I know," said Dunhill. "Florida has a long western coast and someone living on the shore in Tampa or Key West could watch the sunset on the water as the sun dives into the Gulf of Mexico. However, where would the harsh winters come in?

"There's a long peninsula that forms the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. The largest city on the western shore of that peninsula is Cambridge. It has a population of about eleven or twelve thousand, but from it you can watch the sunset on the water, since Chesapeake Bay is a broad stretch. So I called the town and drew a blank there, too.

"Besides, the only harsh winters on the East Coast would be from Philadelphia northward - New England particularly. Any city on the northeast coast, however, faces an ocean on the east or south. Even Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, which could face west to the ocean, faces south. Falmouth faces west but it is a small town. Absolutely no town that could conceivably be considered sizable has a western exposure to the ocean."

Gonzalo said, more to himself than to anyone else, "From Manhattan you can see the Sun tumble into the Hudson."

"No, you can't," said Drake. "It squats down on New Jersey."

Halsted rubbed his high, pinkish forehead and said, "You don't suppose your letter writer got his directions twisted, do you? Not long ago an American delegate to the United Nations invited any nation which was dissatisfied with American hospitality to leave. He said he would be delighted to wave farewell to them as they sailed off into the sunset. He didn't bother to explain how one can sail into the sunset from New York."

Dunhill snorted loudly. "I remember that incident. He was simply using a metaphor stupidly. Besides, we're not talking about any member of the present administration. We're talking about an average American of, presumably, average intelligence."

"Besides," pointed out Avalon, "a man can mistake east and west, but if he's describing solar motions there is no way in which he can confuse sunset and sunrise. No, we need a sizable city with the ocean to the west and with a harsh winter. I confess I can't think of one that fills the bill."

Gonzalo said, "How about American islands that aren't part of states? Puerto Rico, Guam. They would still use American stamps, wouldn't they?"

"Yes, they would," said Dunhill, "and they're all tropical islands, too. - Believe me, gentlemen, I'm at the end of my rope."

Halsted said, "You don't think this whole thing might be a gag, do you? Maybe Ludovic Broadbottom is a made-up name, and he deliberately sent you clues that lead nowhere. Maybe there was no return address on the envelope, either. Or a fake one."

Slowly, Dunhill said, "Why should anyone bother? I'm a harmless person and my request is harmless, too. What would be the point of a practical joke of this nature?"

"The confirmed practical joker," said Avalon, "doesn't have to have a point - except on top of his head, of course."

Halsted said, "Do you have any friends who are practical jokers?"

"Not that I know of," said Dunhill. "I select my friends with reasonable care."

Gonzalo said, "Maybe Henry has some idea." He turned in his seat and said, puzzled, "Where's Henry? He was here a moment ago, listening to us." He raised his voice. "Henry!"

Henry emerged from the cloakroom and said, imperturbably, "I am here, gentlemen. I was merely engaged in a small task. - Mr. Dunhill, I have Mr. Ludovic Broadbottom on the telephone. He is anxious to speak to you."

Dunhill's eyes bulged. He said in a choked voice, "Mr. Ludovic - Are you serious?"

"Quite," said Henry, with a bland smile. "Perhaps you had better not delay. And I might advise you to offer a generous sum. He's moving next week, and there will be no time to bargain."

Dunhill rose, appearing dazed, and vanished into the cloakroom toward the phone booth located there.

The Black Widowers sat in shocked silence for a few moments, and then Rubin said, "All right, Henry, what kind of magic did you use?"

Henry said, "No magic, gentlemen. It was Mr. Rubin who gave me the idea when he initiated the discussion of provincial attitudes toward coasts - the manner in which Americans on one coast sometimes forget, or ignore, the other.

"It seems to me that Americans on all three seacoasts the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Gulf, too, if you want to count that separately - tend altogether to ignore America's fourth coast, which is quite a long one, too."

"The fourth coast?" said Avalon, frowning.

"Of course," said Rubin, shaking his head in disgust.

"Yes, Mr. Rubin," said Henry. "I'm thinking of the Great Lakes. We don't think of it as a coastline but Mr. Broadbottom didn't refer to it as that. He spoke of the 'shore,' and the Great Lakes certainly have a shore. We very commonly speak of a lakeshore. And anyone living in a place on the shore of any one of the Great Lakes would perceive the same effect as would be obtained if one were overlooking an ocean. Those are large lakes, gentlemen.

"However, all the sizable cities on the lakeshores have their lakes to the east, south, or north. We can even include the Canadian cities, if we wish. Duluth has Lake Superior on the east. Milwaukee and Chicago have Lake Michigan on the east. Gary has Lake Michigan on the north. Detroit has Lake St. Clair on the east - tiny by Great Lake standards but large enough to give the effect of sunrise out of the water. Toledo has Lake Erie on the east. Cleveland and Erie have Lake Erie on the north, though Erie gets some western view. Hamilton has Lake Ontario on the east, while Toronto has that lake on the south and east, and Rochester has it on the north.

"The only really sizable city that looks west to a Great Lake is Buffalo, New York. It has Lake Erie to the west. From a proper location in Buffalo one can see the Sun set into Lake Erie - and Buffalo is notorious for its snowy winters. So I tried that first. I phoned Buffalo, obtained Mr. Broadbottom's number, called it, and he answered at once. He was quite concerned at not having heard from Mr. Dunhill. He is as anxious to sell as Mr. Dunhill  - "

At this point, Dunhill emerged from the cloakroom, his face alight with joy. "All arranged," he said. "I will pay five hundred dollars plus shipping costs and I hope to have it in just a matter of days."

He reached for his wallet before a horrified Avalon could stop him. "Henry, you deserve a ten percent finder's fee for this," Dunhill said. "How did you do it?"

Henry raised his hand in a gentle gesture of rejection.

"Mr. Dunhill," he said with quiet firmness, "as a member of the Black Widowers, I cannot accept a fee in connection with my club duties."

Dunhill hesitated, then replaced his wallet in his pocket. "But how did you do it, man?"

Henry said, "Just a matter of thinking of the Great Lakes as small oceans. It's not worth discussing. The important thing is that you'll have your books."

Afterword

Notice that Dunhill lusted for The Historians' History of the World. It was I that lusted for it. It was I who had read it as a youngster, taking it volume by volume from the public library, and it was I who noticed it in a friend's library. And it was I who would have stolen it if I had been able to think of a way. It was the only thing that I was ever tempted to steal.

However, my own story ended quite happily. I tried to find a copy that I could buy legitimately for money, and failed. My friend, however, managed to get another copy and presented it to me. After long persuasion, I managed to get him to accept a pittance in exchange. I still own the set and it is one of the apples of my eye.

But as a matter of conscience, I must make a confession to you. My friend's set was missing a volume. The set he presented to me was not. For a while I tried to persuade myself to offer him the volume he was missing - but I just could not make myself do it. How's that for being a mean bum?

This story first appeared in the January 1986 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.