“For what?”

“For the job we are proposing. If you say no, then we’ll simply go away and toss the file on you. We’ll never divulge any of our information.”

“What’s the job?”

Elaine took a small bite and chewed for a long time. After a sip of water, she said, “Back to the Fitzgerald manuscripts. We think they’re being hidden on Camino Island.”

“And who might be hiding them?”

“I need your assurance that what we discuss from this point on is extremely confidential. There’s a lot at stake here, and a loose word could cause irreparable damage, not just to our client, and not just to Princeton, but to the manuscripts themselves.”

“Who in hell might I tell about this?”

“Please, just give me your word.”

“Confidentiality requires trust. Why on earth should I trust you? Right now I find you and your company to be very suspicious.”

“I understand. But please hear the rest of the story.”

“Okay, I’m listening, but I’m not hungry anymore. You’d better talk fast.”

“Fair enough. You’ve been to the bookstore in downtown Santa Rosa, Bay Books. It’s owned by a man named Bruce Cable.”

Mercer shrugged and said, “I guess. I went there a few times with Tessa when I was a kid. Again, I haven’t been back to the island since she died and that was eleven years ago.”

“It’s a successful store, one of the best independents in the country. Cable is well known in the business and is quite the hustler. He’s connected and gets a lot of authors on their tours.”

“I was supposed to go there with October Rain, but that’s another story.”

“Right, well, Cable is also an aggressive collector of modern first editions. He trades a lot, and we suspect he makes serious money with that part of his business. He’s also known to deal in stolen books, one of the few in that rather dark business. Two months ago we picked up his trail after a tip from a source close to another collector. We think Cable has the Fitzgerald manuscripts, purchased for cash from a middleman who was desperate to get rid of them.”

“My appetite has really disappeared.”

“We can’t get near the guy. We’ve had people in the store for the past month, watching, snooping, taking secret photos and videos, but we’ve hit a brick wall. He has a large, handsome room on the main floor where he keeps shelves of rare books, primarily those of twentieth-century American authors, and he’ll gladly show these to a serious buyer. We’ve even tried to sell him a rare book, a signed and personalized copy of Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. Cable knew immediately that there are only a few copies in the world, including three in a college library in Missouri, one owned by a Faulkner scholar, and one still held by Faulkner’s descendants. The market price was somewhere in the forty-thousand-dollar range, and we offered it to Cable for twenty-five thousand. At first he seemed interested but then started asking a lot of questions about the book’s provenance. Really good questions. He eventually got cold feet and said no. By then he was overly cautious, and this raised even more suspicions. We’ve made little progress getting into his world and we need someone inside.”