Hit Me

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—”

“You didn’t come in special for Bert’s auctions.”

“Hardly. I just showed up when I happened to be in town.”

“On business? What kind of business are you in, if I may ask?”

Keller, letting a trace of the South find its way into his speech, explained that he was retired, and then answered the inevitable Katrina questions, until he cleared his throat and said he really wanted to focus on the lots he was examining. And Irv Feldspar apologized, said his wife told him he never knew when he was boring people, and that she was convinced he was suffering from Ass-Backward syndrome.

Keller nodded, concentrated on the stamps.

Julia said, “I knew there was something. Something’s been different ever since you got back from Dallas, and I couldn’t say what it was, so I had to think it was another woman. And you’re a man, for heaven’s sake, and you were on the other side of the state line, and things happen. I know that. And I could stand that, if that’s what it was, and if what happened in Dallas stayed in Dallas. If it was going to be an ongoing thing, if she was important to you, well, maybe I could stand that and maybe I couldn’t.”

“That wasn’t it.”

“No, it wasn’t, was it?” She reached to lay her hand on top of his. “What a relief. My husband wasn’t fooling around with another woman. He was killing her.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Do you remember the night we met?”

“Of course.”

“You saved my life. I was taking a shortcut through the park, and I was about to be raped and killed, and you saved me.”

“I don’t know what got into me.”

“You saved me,” she said, “and you killed that man right in front of me. With your bare hands. You grabbed him and broke his neck.”

“Well.”

“That was how we met. When Jenny’s old enough to want to know how Mommy and Daddy met and fell in love, we may have to give her an edited version. But that’s not for a while yet. How was it? In Dallas? I know it went smoothly enough, and I think it’s pure poetry that the man you framed wound up confessing.”

“Well, he thinks he did it.”

“And in a sense he did, because if he hadn’t made that first phone call you would never have left the hotel.”

“I probably wouldn’t even have gone. I’d have sent in a few mail bids and let it go at that.”

“So he got what was coming to him, and it doesn’t sound as though either of them was a terribly nice person.”

“You wouldn’t want to have them to the house for dinner.”

“I didn’t think so. But what I wanted to know was how was it for you? How did it feel? You hadn’t done anything like this in a long time.”

“A couple of years.”

“And your life is different from what it was, so maybe you’re different, too.”

“I thought of that.”

“And?”

He thought it over for a moment. “It felt the same as always,” he said. “I had a job to do and I had to figure out how.”

“And then you had to do it.”

“That’s right.”

“And you felt the satisfaction of having solved a problem.”

“Uh-huh.”

“At which point you could buy that stamp without dipping into capital.”

“We only collected the first payment,” he said, “but even so it more than covered the cost of the stamps I bought.”

“Well, that’s a plus, isn’t it? And you didn’t have any trouble living with what you’d done?”

“I had trouble living with the secret.”

“Not being able to mention it to me, you mean.”

“That’s right.”

She nodded. “Having to keep a secret. That must have been difficult. There are things I don’t bother to tell you, but nothing I couldn’t tell you, if I wanted to. How do you feel now?”

“Better.”

“I can tell that. Your whole energy is different. Do you want to know how I feel?”

“Yes.”

“Relieved, obviously. But also a little troubled, because now I seem to be the one with a secret.”

“Oh?”

“Shall I tell you my secret? See, the danger is that you might think less of me if you knew.” Before he could respond, she heaved a theatrical sigh. “Oh, I can’t keep secrets. When you told me what happened in Dallas? What you did?”

“Yes?”

“It got me hot.”

“Oh?”

“Is that weird? Of course it is, it’s deeply weird. Here’s something I’m positive I never told you. It got me hot when you killed the rapist in the park. What it mostly did was it made me feel all safe and secure and protected, but it also got me hot. I’m hot right now and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“If we put our heads together,” he said, “maybe we can come up with something.”

Back in his room at the Savoyard, Keller figured it out. Asperger’s syndrome—that’s what Feldspar had, or what his wife said he had.

Though Ass-Backward syndrome wasn’t a bad fit.

“If I’d known what it would lead to,” he said, “I’d have told you right away.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I was afraid, I guess. That it would ruin things between us.”

“So you didn’t say anything.”

“No.”

“And then you did.”

“Right.”

She didn’t say anything, but he felt besieged by her thoughts, bombarded with them. He said, “I figured I was done with it, I’d never do it again, so why bother mentioning it? I could just keep my mouth shut and seal off the episode and let it fade out into the past.”

“Like the faces you picture in your mind.”

“Something like that, yes.”

“I guess you got another phone call.”

“This afternoon.”

“I noticed something was different,” she said, “when Jenny and I got home from Advanced Sandbox. How’s Dot these days?”

“She’s good.” He cleared his throat. “I reminded her what I’d told her right after Dallas. That I didn’t want to do this sort of thing anymore.”

“But she called you anyway.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s complicated.”