Dot still called him Keller. And that figured, because that’s who she was calling to talk to. Not Nick Edwards, who fixed houses, but Keller. Who, in a manner of speaking, fixed people.
“The last thing I should be doing,” she went on, “is calling you. There’s two reasons why this is a mistake. First of all, you’re not in the business anymore. I dragged you back in once, that business in Dallas, and it wasn’t your fault that it didn’t go off perfectly. But it wasn’t what you really wanted, and we both agreed it was what the British call a one-off.”
“What does that mean?”
“One time only, I think. What’s the difference what it means? You went to Dallas, you came back from Dallas, end of story.”
But if it was the end of the story, what was this? A sequel?
“That’s one reason,” she said. “There’s another.”
“Oh?”
“Three words,” she said. “New. York. City.”
“Oh.”
“What am I even thinking, Keller, calling you when I’ve got a job in your old hometown? I didn’t throw New York jobs your way when you lived there, because you lived there.”
“I worked a couple of New York assignments.”
“Just a couple, and they weren’t exactly what you’d call problem-free. But at least you could walk around the city without wearing a mask. Now it’s the one place in the world where it’s not safe for you to be you, where even a waitress in a coffee shop can take a second look at you and reach for a telephone, and here I am calling you with a New York assignment, and that’s as far as this is going, because I’m hanging up.”
“Wait a minute,” Keller said.
The receptionist at Peachpit told him to have a seat, and he leafed through an old auction catalog while he waited. Then a stoop-shouldered man with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened came to show him inside and seat him in a stackable white plastic chair at a long table. He had already prepared a slip of paper with the numbers of the lots he wanted to inspect, and he looked them over carefully when they were brought to him.
The stamps were tucked into individual two-inch-square pockets of a chemically inert plastic, each plastic pocket stapled to its own sheet of paper bearing the lot number, estimated value, and opening bid. Keller had brought a pair of tongs, and could have taken out a stamp for closer inspection, but there was no need, and the tongs remained in his breast pocket. Given that the catalog had already shown him clear color photos of all of these stamps, it probably wasn’t necessary that he look at them in the first place. But he’d learned that actually looking at a stamp, up close and personal, helped him decide just how much he really wanted to own it.
He’d requested a dozen lots, all of them stamps he needed, all of them stamps he genuinely wanted—and he didn’t want them any less now that he was getting a look at them. But he wasn’t going to buy them all, and this would help him decide which ones to buy if they went cheap, and which ones deserved a firmer commitment. And, finally, which ones he’d go all out to get, hanging on like grim death, and—
“Hello, there! Haven’t seen you in a while, have I?”
Keller froze in his white plastic chair.
“She loves watching you work with your stamps,” Julia said. “‘Daddy ’tamps,’ she says. She has a little trouble with the s-t combination.”
“I suppose philately is out of the question.”
“For now. But before you know it she’ll be the only kid in her class who knows where Obock is.”
“Just now I was telling her about Kiauchau.”
“I know. But see, I know how to pronounce Obock.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “There’s something we have to talk about.”
Eleven
They sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee and he said, “I’ve been keeping something from you, and I can’t do that. Ever since we found each other I’ve been able to say whatever’s been on my mind, and now I can’t, and I don’t like the way it feels.”
“You met someone in Dallas.”
He looked at her.
“A woman,” she said.
“Oh, God,” he said. “It’s not what you think.”
“It’s not?”
If he had to kill this man, how would he do it? He was close to sixty, and he looked soft and pudgy, so you couldn’t call him a hard target. The closest thing Keller had to a weapon was the pair of stamp tongs in his breast pocket, but he’d made do often enough with nothing but his bare hands, and—
“I guess you don’t recognize me,” the fellow was saying. “Been a few years, and it’s safe to say I put on a few pounds. It’s a rare year when I don’t. And the last time we saw each other the two of us were on a lower floor.”
Keller looked at him.
“Or am I wrong? Stampazine? I never missed their auctions, and I’d swear I saw you there a few times. I don’t know if we ever talked, and if I ever heard your name I’ve long since forgotten it, but I’m pretty good with faces. Faces and watermarks, they both tend to stick in my mind.” He stuck out a hand. “Irv,” he said. “Irv Feldspar.”
“Nicholas Edwards.”
“A damn shame Stampazine’s gone,” Feldspar said. “Bert Taub’s health was bad for years, and finally he closed up shop, and then the word got around that he missed the business and wanted to get back into it, and the next thing we knew he was dead.”
“A hell of a thing,” Keller said, figuring something along those lines was expected of him.
“Plenty of other auctions in this city,” Feldspar said, “but you could just show up at Stampazine and there’d be plenty of low-priced material to bid on. No fancy catalogs, no Internet or phone bidders. I don’t think you and I ever bumped heads, did we? I’m strictly U.S. myself.”
“Everything but U.S.,” Keller said. “Worldwide to 1940.”
“So I was never bidding against you, so why would you remember me?”
“I didn’t come all that often,” Keller said. “I live out of town, so—”
“What, Jersey? Connecticut?”
“New Orleans, so—”