Free The Scarlet Ruse by John D. MacDonald

to switch one? Fair guess? So six hundred single stamps, pairs, blocks and plate blocks all in mounts would take six thousand seconds, or one hundred minutes, or an hour and forty minutes. And if I could get very whippy and do it in five seconds, it would still take ten minutes less than an hour. Just exactly how am I going to do that sitting practically touching two men at a little table under a bright light? The goodies have to be right there in that book! Or the bank is crooked. Take your choice."
    "Would you be able to remember the arrangement, the way you put the items in the book?"
    "Sure."
    "And you could see well enough to-"
    "I'm not that blind. I found the Barbados page, and it was too full to take the ones we'd brought that day, even if I'd moved the items closer together. And I like to arrange the stamps on the pages. You know. Spaced to look nice. It doesn't matter to Sprenger. He wouldn't care if we put them in a cigar box, I guess. But they are nice, and they represent a lot of money, and it is sort of… a response to the quality and the money to arrange them nicely."
    "Do you think if you had your glasses on that day in the bank, you would have seen something was wrong?"
    "From what Hirsh said this morning I should hope so! Bad centering. Stains and toning and fading. But not in every case."
    "Why not?"
    "Well… take Barbados for example. Scott 53, the four-penny rose is worth about fifty dollars unused, for a real good one. But Scott 53b in the same condition is worth fifteen hundred dollars anyway. Know what the silly difference is? Well, 53 is perf fourteen on all sides, and 53b is perf twelve and a half on the sides."
    "What do those numbers mean?"
    "Like fourteen. Those little holes so you can tear the stamps apart, it means there are fourteen holes in a space two centimeters long. You use a gauge to measure, something with the different gauges all printed on it. So you couldn't look in the stock book and tell with the naked eye if you had the ordinary 1875 four-penny rose or the special one. The special one is worth so much more because there were so few of them printed."
    "And you certainly have one fantastic memory, Mary Alice."
    She laughed. "I'm showing off. My memory isn't so great. I remember that one because I found one. Hirsh bought a collection of Colonials. It was so neat and orderly and well-labeled and mounted that we sort of took for granted the collector had really studied them. Well, it was just sort of luck. I took an ordinary one we had in stock and put it beside the one in the collection because I wanted to see which one was really best, for a customer. And the perforations didn't look right. I used the one stamp to measure the other. After the customer left, I used a gauge. Then, on my own, I sent it off to the Philatelic Foundation in New York, with a fee in advance, and in six weeks it came back with the certification it was S3b. So I put it on Hirsh's desk as a surprise. He put it in Sprenger's investment collection, and he gave me a hundred-dollar bonus. It's really fun to find something like that, you know? Like mining for gold, I guess."
    Though I had no empathy for her excitement, I liked the expression on her face, the look of enthusiasm. To each his own. I wondered why some man hadn't made a lot of extra effort to keep hold of this girl. The special, bonus size. A lifelong supply of goodies. But she had warned me nicely about asking questions.
    I decided abruptly that I was going to take the lady at her own valuation. It is a process of logic, I guess. If she had the art, the style, the exquisite ability to project a total plausibility regardless of what stress I'd put on her, then she would not have spent five years in a funny little stamp store in Miami. Pretense requires vast expenditures of energy. That much guile would have sought better stalking-places.
    Besides, I liked the neat little creases at the corners of her mouth. I liked that tricky blue shade of her iris. I