"Definitely! There's a Japanese screen with horses in color and gold that the horsey set in Lockmaster will swoon over! And there's a magnificent cloisonn‚ vase, two feet high, that I'd love to have myself. Then - hidden away in lacquered cabinets - are small objects like inro and netsuke and fans. It's all very exciting! Hilary had a staggering collection of fans."
"Fans?" Qwilleran echoed, doubting that he'd heard correctly.
"Folding fans, you know, with ivory sticks and hand-painted leaves, most of them signed! To research these I may have to fly to Chicago... Want to come along?" she added playfully.
"How about the stuff on the second floor?"
"Oh, that junk! I threw out a roomful of dead plants, but there were a lot of growing lights that will be salable."
It occurred to Qwilleran that she might have thrown out a $20,000 crop of whatever VanBrook was cultivating in the back room.
"I haven't touched the books," she was saying. "Most of the cartons are sealed, so I brought a craft knife for you to use and a legal pad in case you want to make notes, or lists, or whatever. I don't know how to tell you to sort them. You can decide that when you see what's there."
"I wonder if Hilary catalogued his books. There should be a catalogue."
"If there is, you'll probably find it in his study upstairs." It's really good of you, Qwill, to do this for me."
"Glad to help," he murmured. "Yow!" came a comment from the backseat. Koko entered the spacious high-ceilinged house in grand style, seated regally in his carrier as if in a palanquin. He was conducted around the main floor on a leash to avoid accidental collision with a two-foot cloisonn‚ vase. He was tugging, however, toward the staircase, a fact that Qwilleran considered significant. The cat liked books, no doubt about it. He enjoyed sniffing the spines of fine bindings, probably detecting glue made from animal hides, and occasionally he found cause to knock a pertinent title off the bookshelf. (To discourage this uncivilized practice, Qwilleran had installed a shelf in the cats' apartment, stocked with nickel-and- dime books that Koko could knock about to his heart's content, although it was characteristic of feline perversity that he ignored them.)
"Where shall we start?" Qwilleran asked as the cat pulled him up the stairs.
For answer, Koko tugged toward VanBrook's study with its four walls of bookshelves. There he prowled and sniffed and jumped effortlessly onto shelves eight feet above the floor, while Qwilleran made a superficial search for a catalogue of the 90,000 books. Ninety thousand?
He found it difficult to believe. Unfortunately the desk drawers were locked and the Oriental box had been removed from the desktop, no doubt by the attorney. Either place would be the logical spot for a catalogue.
"No luck," Qwilleran said to his assistant. "Let's go next door and start unpacking." There were several large rooms on the second floor, originally bedrooms but now storerooms for book cartons. He chose to begin with the, room nearest the staircase. Like the others, it contained nothing but casual stacks of corrugated cartons, formerly used for shipping canned soup, chili sauce, whiskey, and other commodities. Now, according to the adhesive labels, they contained Toynbee, Emerson, Goethe, Gide and the like, as well as classifications such as Russian Drama, Restoration Comedy, and Cyprian History. Each sticker carried a number in addition to identification of the contents.
"There's got to be a catalogue," Qwilleran muttered, for the benefit of any listening ear.
There was no reply from Koko. The cat was surveying the irregular stacks of boxes like a mountain goat contemplating Mount Rushmore, and soon he bounded up from ledge to ledge until he reached the summit and posed haughtily on a carton of Western Thought. Meanwhile, Qwilleran closed the door and went to work with his craft knife, slitting open a box of Dickens, labeled A-74.