Hit Me

Ten

Except he didn’t. It was a frame, he was the fall guy, and it cost him his comfortable New York life and the name under which he’d lived it. When all was said and done he didn’t have any regrets, because the life he now led in New Orleans was worlds better than what he’d left behind. But that hadn’t been the plan of the man who set him up.

That plan had called for Keller to be arrested, or, better yet, killed outright, and it had taken all Keller’s resourcefulness to keep it from turning out that way. The man who’d done the planning was dead now, thanks to Keller, and so was the man who’d helped him, and that was as far as Keller saw any need to carry it. Someone somewhere had pulled the trigger and gunned down the governor, but Keller figured that faceless fellow was probably dead himself, murdered by the man who’d hired him, a loose end carefully tied off. And if not, well, the best of luck to him. He’d just been a man doing a job, and that was something Keller could relate to.

And Keller? He had a new name and a new life. So what was he doing back in New York?

He walked back to the corner of Sixth and 57th, waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and walked to the entrance of 119 West 57th. This was a building he’d entered a dozen or more times over the years, and always for the same purpose. There had been a firm called Stampazine on the second floor, and every couple of months they held a Saturday auction, and there was always some interesting and affordable material up for grabs. Keller would sit in a wooden chair with a catalog in one hand and a pen in the other, and every now and then he would raise a forefinger, and sometimes he’d wind up the high bidder. At six or six thirty he’d pick up his lots, pay cash for them, and go home happy.

Stampazine was gone now. Had they closed before or after he’d left New York? He couldn’t remember.

He recognized the uniformed lobby attendant. “Peachpit,” he said, and the man nodded in recognition—not of Keller but of Keller’s purpose. “Seven,” he said, and Keller went over and waited for the elevator.

Peachpit Auction Galleries was a cut or two above Stampazine. Keller had never visited them during his New York years, but after he was settled in New Orleans an ad in Linn’s Stamp News sent him to the Peachpit website. He bid on a couple of lots—unsuccessfully; someone else outbid him—but, having registered, he began to receive their catalogs several times a year. They were magnificently printed, with a color photograph of every lot, and he always found an abundance of choice material.

There was a way to bid online in real time, during the actual floor auction, and he’d planned on doing so but always seemed to be at work during their midweek auctions. Then a few months ago he’d had the day off—he and Donny had the whole week off, actually, although they’d have preferred it otherwise. And he remembered the Peachpit sale, and logged on and went through what you had to go through to bid, and he found the whole process impossibly nerve-racking. An auction was anxiety-ridden anyway, but when you showed up in person you could at least see what was going on, and know that the guy with the gavel could see you in return. Online, well, he supposed a person could get the hang of it, but he hadn’t, and wasn’t inclined to try again.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Julia and Jenny walked into his upstairs office—Daddy’s Stamp Room—to find him shaking his head over the new Peachpit catalog. Julia asked what was the matter.

“Oh, this,” he said, tapping the catalog. “There are some lots I’d like to buy.”

“So?

“Well, the sale’s in New York.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Daddy ’tamps,” said Jenny.

“Yes, Daddy’s stamps,” Keller said, and picked up his daughter and set her on his lap. “See?” he said, pointing at a picture in the catalog, a German Colonial issue from Kiauchau showing the kaiser’s yacht, Hohenzollern. “Kiauchau,” he told Jenny, “was an area of two hundred square miles in southeast China. The Germans grabbed it in 1897, and then made arrangements to lease it from China. I don’t imagine the Chinese had a lot of choice in the matter. Isn’t that a pretty stamp?”

“Pity ’tamp,” Jenny said, and there the matter lay.

Until the phone rang two days later. It was Dot, calling from Sedona, and the first thing she did was apologize for calling at all.

“I told myself I’d just call to see how you’re doing,” she said, “and to find out the latest cute thing Jenny said, but you know something, Keller? I’m too damn old to start fooling myself.”

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.”