Hit Me

Seventeen

I felt like a worm,” he told Dot. “I’m not sure, but I think he had me groveling.”

“That’s not how I picture you, Keller. Did you go to Catholic school?”

“No. I was in a Boy Scout troop that met in the parish hall of a Catholic church, but the scoutmaster wasn’t a member of the clergy.”

“So he just wore one of those silly little soldier suits.”

“It was a Boy Scout uniform,” he said, “and it never looked silly to me. Though I guess it might nowadays. You know, I don’t think it was the religious aspect that got to me. He just plain assumed command of the situation.”

“I guess he’s used to it.”

“Yesterday I thought maybe the robe had something to do with it, but this time all he had was a towel draped over his lap. Dot, the guy was sweating out yesterday’s Scotch and he already had a good start on today’s. His nose is red and his face is full of broken blood vessels. It’s a shame the client can’t wait for cirrhosis to take him off the board.”

“We don’t get paid for cirrhosis,” she said, “and the client can’t wait, not if he’s made up his mind to testify. But I have to say I don’t know how the hell you’re gonna get to him. There’s no way he’ll take another meeting with you, is there?”

“No, I had my chance. If I’d just gone ahead and given it my best shot—”

“You’d be dead,” she said, “or in jail. Say you brought it off. Then what? Dash out of the steam room with half a dozen witnesses in hot pursuit, pause to unlock your locker and put on your suit and tie your tie—”

“I wouldn’t have bothered with the tie.”

“Well, I hadn’t realized that, Keller. That’d make all the difference, all right. Get dressed, rush past everybody, ring for the elevator—”

“I’d have taken the stairs. But I get the message, Dot. I know you’re right. I just feel there should have been something I could do.”

“The question,” she said, “is what can you do now, and I have the feeling the answer is nothing. Say he keeps the same schedule every day as far as the steam room and massage are concerned. He walks what, ten or a dozen steps from his door to the limo? And if he’s not escorted, at a minimum he’s got the limo driver standing there holding the door.”

“It wouldn’t work.”

“No, of course not. And what are your chances of getting inside the residence?”

“None, as far as I can see.”

“Well, Keller, what does that leave?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Look,” she said, “except for the money, what do we care if some of New Jersey’s finest get a small fraction of what’s coming to them? I’ll give back the money. That’s easy enough.”

“You hate to give back money.”

“I do,” she said, “because once I have it in hand I think of it as my money, and giving it back is like spending it, and what am I getting for it? Well, in this case what we’re both getting is piece of mind, and you could say we’re paying for it with somebody else’s money.”

“Don’t give it back just yet,” he said. “Maybe I’ll come up with something.”

When he got out of the New York Athletic Club, Keller had had a fleeting thought of rushing to the auction gallery. But that was ridiculous; it was after eleven, and the most spirited bidding since the sale of the Ferrary collection couldn’t have delayed the sale of British East Africa number 33. Besides, he’d already put in a high bid, which he’d second-guessed himself into raising after downing his croissant and coffee.

He’d rushed back to the hotel computer and upped his own bid from $4500 to $6000, and the instant he’d done so he began to have regrets. If he got the stamp for that bid, tax and buyer’s premium would boost it to something like $7700, and that was far more than the stamp was worth to him.

Well, it was done. Before, he’d worried that he would miss out on the stamp, and now he was worried that he’d get it, and it was hard to say which was worse. It would work out however it worked out, and in the meantime he’d pushed it out of his mind and gone to his rendezvous with the Thessalonian abbot.

For all the good that did him.

Afterward, flushed from the steam bath and the ignominy of it all, he returned to the Savoyard. He walked right past the business center and went to his room, and after he’d spoken with Dot he walked right past the business center again and continued four blocks uptown. He was a full half hour early for the afternoon session, and one of the assistants was happy to check on lot 77.

“Went for eighty-five hundred,” the woman reported. “All of British Africa was going way over estimate. All the best stuff, that is. Well, that’s the beauty of auctions. You never know.”

“Like life itself,” Keller said.

“Well, in my life,” she said, “sometimes you know. But auctions, all it takes is two bidders who both really want the same lot. And this is just a stamp. With postal history, where every cover is essentially unique, well, there’s no predicting. One piece will go for ten or twenty times estimate and another won’t bring a single bid. You really never know.”

She steered him to a refreshment table, where Keller joined a couple of other bidders who were drinking coffee and chipping away at a platter of sandwiches. Keller helped himself, and listened while one man told another how he’d been unable to interest his son in stamps, but his grandson was shaping up as an ardent young philatelist.

“Right now he likes first-day covers,” the man said, “which is fine at his age, but I take him to shows, and he’ll sit and go through boxes of covers, and you can see his imagination growing.”

“So it skips a generation,” his friend said.

“Exactly. Well, not to say what I shouldn’t, but better he should take after his grandfather than his father in certain respects.”

“And we’ll leave it at that,” the friend said, “before I say what I shouldn’t.”

The men walked off, laughing. Keller finished his sandwich and took his coffee into the auction room. He took a seat, paged through a catalog, and tried to get in the mood.

Without much success. The auction began at its appointed hour, and Keller couldn’t get lot 77 out of his head. He was at once relieved not to have to pay the $6000 plus extras that his bid had committed him to, and disappointed to have missed out on the stamp. On the one hand he was a fool to have bid as much as he did; on the other, the high bidder had evidently seen something in the stamp that Keller had not, and maybe he knew something; maybe Keller should have been in there all the way.

He had, he realized, a severe case of the woulda-coulda-shouldas, and recognizing the syndrome wasn’t enough to make it go away. Here he was, in a comfortable chair with a whole afternoon of worldwide stamps up for sale, and he couldn’t concentrate on what was going on now because he was trying to rewrite what had already taken place hours ago.

The first lot he’d circled was a 1919 set of Albanian overprints, with a catalog value just under $500 and an estimate of $350. Keller had looked at the stamps, and figured he’d go $375, maybe $400. The bidding opened at $200, and there were no bids from the live online participants, no phone bids reported by either of the women manning the phones. Keller was one of a mere dozen bidders physically present in the room, and none of his companions showed any interest in the Albanian set.

Nor did Keller. He sat there as if mummified while the set was sold to the book bidder for $200.

Wonderful. That gave him something new to regret.

After an Egyptian lot got away from him, knocked down to an Internet bidder for less than he’d been prepared to pay, Keller knew what he had to do. There was an exercise he’d developed to keep his work from exacting a psychic toll, and if it worked with dead people, why shouldn’t it work with a stamp from a dead country?

First, he found the photo of lot 77 in his catalog and stared intently at it. Then he closed his eyes and held the image in his mind—the vivid color, the details of the design, the hand-stamped overprint, the handwritten initials. He brought the image in close, so that it was larger than its actual size.

And then he turned it over to the Photoshop of his mind. He let the colors go dim, the vermilion washing out, the black overprint fading to gray. He pushed the stamp away, letting it recede in the distance, growing smaller and smaller in his mind’s eye. It became a distant colorless blur, and grew smaller and smaller until it vanished altogether.

By the time the lots from France and the French Colonies came up, he was back in the game.