Hit Parade

6

“So who do you like in the third?”

Keller had to hear the question a second time before he realized it was meant for him. He turned, and a little guy in a Mets warm-up jacket was standing there, a querulous expression on his lumpy face.

Who did he like in the third? He hadn’t been paying any attention and was stuck for a response. This didn’t seem to bother the guy, who answered the question himself.

“The Two horse is odds-on, so you can’t make any money betting on him. And the Five horse might have an outside chance, but he never finished well on turf. The Three, he’s okay at five furlongs, but at this distance? So I got to say I agree with you.”

Keller hadn’t said a word. What was there to agree with?

“You’re like me,” the fellow went on. “Not like one of these degenerates, has to bet every race, can’t go five minutes without some action. Me, sometimes I’ll come here, spend the whole day, not put two dollars down the whole time. I just like to breathe some fresh air and watch those babies run.”

Keller, who hadn’t intended to say anything, couldn’t help himself. He said, “Fresh air?”

“Since they gave the smokers a room of their own,” the little man said, “it’s not so bad in here. Excuse me, I see somebody I oughta say hello to.”

He walked off, and the next time Keller noticed him the guy was at the ticket window, placing a bet. Fresh air, Keller thought. Watch those babies run. It sounded good until you took note of the fact that those babies were out at Belmont, running around a track in the open air, while Keller and the little man and sixty or eighty other people were jammed into a Midtown storefront, watching the whole thing on television.

Keller, holding a copy of the Racing Form, looked warily around the OTB parlor. It was on Lexington at Forty-fifth Street, just up from Grand Central, and not much more than a five-minute walk from his First Avenue apartment, but this was his first visit. In fact, as far as he could tell, it was the first time he had ever noticed the place. He must have walked past it hundreds if not thousands of times over the years, but he’d somehow never registered it, which showed the extent of his interest in offtrack betting.

Or on-track betting, or any betting at all. Keller had been to the track three times in his entire life. The first time he’d placed a couple of small bets-two dollars here, five dollars there. His horses had run out of the money, and he’d felt stupid. The other times he hadn’t even put a bet down.

He’d been to gambling casinos on several occasions, generally work-related, and he’d never felt comfortable there. It was clear that a lot of people found the atmosphere exciting, but as far as Keller was concerned it was just sensory overload. All that noise, all those flashing lights, all those people chasing all that money. Keller, feeding a slot machine or playing a hand of blackjack to fit in, just wanted to go to his room and lie down.

Well, he thought, people were different. A lot of them clearly got something out of gambling. What some of them got, to be sure, was the attention of Keller or somebody like him. They’d lost money they couldn’t pay, or stolen money to gamble with, or had found some other way to make somebody seriously unhappy with them. Enter Keller, and, sooner rather than later, exit the gambler.

For most gamblers, though, it was a hobby, a harmless pastime. And just because Keller couldn’t figure out what they got out of it, that didn’t mean there was nothing there. Keller, looking around the OTB parlor at all those woulda-coulda-shoulda faces, knew there was nothing feigned about their enthusiasm. They were really into it, whatever it was.

And, he thought, who was he to say their enthusiasm was misplaced? One man’s meat, after all, was another man’s poisson. These fellows, all wrapped up in Racing Form gibberish, would be hard put to make sense out of his Scott catalog. If they caught a glimpse of Keller, hunched over one of his stamp albums, a magnifying glass in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, they’d most likely figure he was out of his mind. Why play with little bits of perforated paper when you could bet money on horses?

“They’re off!”

And so they were. Keller looked at the wall-mounted television screen and watched those babies run.

It started with stamps.

He collected worldwide, from the first postage stamps, Great Britain ’s Penny Black and Two-Penny Blue of 1840, up to shortly after the end of World War Two. (Just when he stopped depended upon the country. He collected most countries through 1949, but his British Empire issues stopped at 1952, with the death of George VI. The most recent stamp in his collection was over fifty years old.)

When you collected the whole world, your albums held spaces for many more stamps than you would ever be able to acquire. Keller knew he would never completely fill any of his albums, and he found this not frustrating but comforting. No matter how long he lived or how much money he got, he would always have more stamps to look for. You tried to fill in the spaces, of course-that was the point-but it was the trying that brought you pleasure, not the accomplishment.

Consequently, he never absolutely had to have any particular stamp. He shopped carefully, and he chose the stamps he liked, and he didn’t spend more than he could afford. He’d saved money over the years, he’d even reached a point where he’d been thinking about retiring, but when he got back into stamp collecting his hobby gradually ate up his retirement fund-which, all things considered, was fine with him. Why would he want to retire? If he retired, he’d have to stop buying stamps.

As it was, he was in a perfect position. He was never desperate for money, but he could always find a use for it. If Dot came up with a whole string of jobs for him, he wound up putting a big chunk of the proceeds into his stamp collection. If business slowed down, no problem-he’d make small purchases from the dealers who shipped him stamps on approval, send some small checks to others who mailed him their monthly lists, but hold off on anything substantial until business picked up.

It worked fine. Until the Bulger amp; Calthorpe auction catalog came along and complicated everything.

Bulger amp; Calthorpe were stamp auctioneers based in Omaha. They advertised regularly in Linn’s and the other stamp publications, and traveled extensively to examine collectors’ holdings. Three or four times a year they would rent a hotel suite in downtown Omaha and hold an auction, and for a few years now Keller had been receiving their well-illustrated catalogs. Their catalog featured an extensive collection from France and the French colonies, and Keller leafed through it on the off chance that he might find himself in Omaha around that time. He was thinking of something else when he hit the first page of color photographs, and whatever it was, he forgot it forever.

Martinique #2. And, right next to it, Martinique #17.

On the screen, the Two horse led wire to wire, winning by four and a half lengths. “Look at that,” the little man said, once again at Keller’s elbow. “What did I tell you? Pays three-fucking-forty for a two-dollar ticket. Where’s the sense in that?”

“Did you bet him?”

“I didn’t bet on him,” the man said, “and I didn’t bet against him. What I had, I had the Eight horse to place, which is nothing but a case of getting greedy, because look what he did, will you? He came in third, right behind the Five horse, so if I bet him to show, or if I semiwheeled the trifecta, playing a Two-Five-Eight and a Two-Eight-Five…”

Woulda-coulda-shoulda, thought Keller.

7

He’d spent half an hour with the Bulger amp; Calthorpe catalog, reading the descriptions of the two Martinique lots, seeing what else was on offer, and returning more than once for a further look at Martinique #2 and Martinique #17. He interrupted himself to check the balance in his bank account, frowned, pulled out the album that ran from Leeward Islands to Netherlands, opened it to Martinique, and looked first at the couple hundred stamps he had and then at the two empty spaces, spaces designed to hold-what else?-Martinique #2 and Martinique #17.

He closed the album but didn’t put it away, not yet, and he picked up the phone and called Dot.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if anything came in.”

“Like what, Keller?”

“Like work,” he said.

“Was your phone off the hook?”

“No,” he said. “Did you try to call me?”

“If I had,” she said, “I’d have reached you, since your phone wasn’t off the hook. And if a job came in I’d have called, the way I always do. But instead you called me.”

“Right.”

“Which leads me to wonder why.”

“I could use the work,” he said. “That’s all.”

“You worked when? A month ago?”

“Closer to two.”

“You took a little trip, went like clockwork, smooth as silk. Client paid me and I paid you, and if that’s not silken clockwork I don’t know what is. Say, is there a new woman in the picture, Keller? Are you spending serious money on earrings again?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Then why would you…Keller, it’s stamps, isn’t it?”

“I could use a few dollars,” he said. “That’s all.”

“So you decided to be proactive and call me. Well, I’d be proactive myself, but who am I gonna call? We can’t go looking for our kind of work, Keller. It has to come to us.”

“I know that.”

“We ran an ad once, remember? And remember how it worked out?” He remembered and made a face. “So we’ll wait,” she said, “until something comes along. You want to help it a little on a metaphysical level, try thinking proactive thoughts.”

There was a horse in the fourth race named Going Postal. That didn’t have anything to do with stamps, Keller knew, but was a reference to the propensity of disgruntled postal employees to exercise their Second Amendment rights by bringing a gun to work, often with dramatic results. Still, the name was guaranteed to catch the eye of a philatelist.

“What about the Six horse?” Keller asked the little man, who consulted in turn the Racing Form and the tote board on the television.

“Finished in the money three times in his last five starts,” he reported, “but now he’s moving up in class. Likes to come from behind, and there’s early speed here, because the Two horse and the Five horse both like to get out in front.” There was more that Keller couldn’t follow, and then the man said, “Morning line had him at twelve-to-one, and he’s up to eighteen-to-one now, so the good news is he’ll pay a nice price, but the bad news is nobody thinks he’s got much of a chance.”

Keller got in line. When it was his turn, he bet two dollars on Going Postal to win.

Keller didn’t know much about Martinique beyond the fact that it was a French possession in the West Indies, and he knew the postal authorities had stopped issuing special stamps for the place a while ago. It was now officially a department of France, and used regular French stamps. The French did that to avoid being called colonialists. By designating Martinique a part of France, the same as Normandy or Provence, they obscured the fact that the island was full of black people who worked in the fields, fields that were owned by white people who lived in Paris.

Keller had never been to Martinique-or to France, as far as that went-and had no special interest in the place. It was a funny thing about stamps; you didn’t need to be interested in a country to be interested in the country’s stamps. And he couldn’t say what was so special about the stamps of Martinique, except that one way or another he had accumulated quite a few of them, and that made him seek out more, and now, remarkably, he had all but two.

The two he lacked were among the colony’s first issues, created by surcharging stamps originally printed for general use in France ’s overseas empire. The first, #2 in the Scott catalog, was a twenty-centime stamp surcharged “ MARTINIQUE ” and “5c” in black. The second, #17, was similar: “ MARTINIQUE / 15c” on a four-centime stamp.

According to the catalog, #17 was worth $7,500 mint, $7,000 used. #2 was listed at $11,000, mint or used. The listings were in italics, which was Scott’s way of indicating that the value was difficult to determine precisely.

Keller bought most of his stamps at around half the Scott valuation. Stamps with defects went much cheaper, and stamps that were particularly fresh and well centered could command a premium. With a true rarity, however, at a well-publicized auction, it was very hard to guess what price might be realized. Bulger amp; Calthorpe described #2-it was lot #2144 in their sales catalog-as “mint with part OG, F-VF, the nicest specimen we’ve seen of this genuine rarity.” The description of #17-lot #2153-was almost as glowing. Both stamps were accompanied by Philatelic Foundation certificates attesting that they were indeed what they purported to be. The auctioneers estimated that #2 would bring $15,000, and pegged the other at $10,000.

But those were just estimates. They might wind up selling for quite a bit less, or a good deal more.

Keller wanted them.

Going Postal got off to a slow start, but Keller knew that was to be expected. The horse liked to come from behind. And in fact he did rally, and was running third at one point, fading in the stretch and finishing seventh in a field of nine. As the little man had predicted, the Two and Five horses had both gone out in front, and had both been overtaken, though not by Going Postal. The winner, a dappled horse named Doggen Katz, paid $19.20.

“Son of a bitch,” the little man said. “I almost had him. The only thing I did wrong was decide to bet on a different horse.”

What he needed, Keller decided, was fifty thousand dollars. That way he could go as high as twenty-five for #2 and fifteen for #17 and, after buyer’s commission, still have a few dollars left for expenses and other stamps.

Was he out of his mind? How could a little piece of perforated paper less than an inch square be worth $25,000? How could two of them be worth a man’s life?

He thought about it and decided it was just a question of degree. Unless you planned to use it to mail a letter, any expenditure for a stamp was basically irrational. If you could swallow a gnat, why gag at a camel? A hobby, he suspected, was irrational by definition. As long as you kept it in proportion, you were all right.

And he was managing that. He could, if he wanted, mortgage his apartment. Bankers would stand in line to lend him fifty grand, since the apartment was worth ten times that figure. They wouldn’t ask him what he wanted the money for, either, and he’d be free to spend every dime of it on the two Martinique stamps.

He didn’t consider it, not for a moment. It would be nuts, and he knew it. But what he did with a windfall was something else, and it didn’t matter, anyway, because there wasn’t going to be any windfall. You didn’t need a weatherman, he thought, to note that the wind was not blowing. There was no wind, and there would be no windfall, and someone else could mount the Martinique overprints in his album. It was a shame, but-

The phone rang.

Dot said, “Keller, I just made a pitcher of iced tea. Why don’t you come up here and help me drink it?”

In the fifth race, there was a horse called Happy Trigger and another called Hit the Boss. If Going Postal had resonated with his hobby, these seemed to suggest his profession. He mentioned them to the little fellow. “I sort of like these two,” he said, “but I don’t know which one I like better.”

“Wheel them,” the man said and explained that Keller should buy two exacta tickets, Four-Seven and Seven-Four. That way Keller would only collect if the two horses finished first and second. But, since the tote board indicated long odds on each of them, the potential payoff was a big one.

“What would I have to bet?” Keller asked him. “Four dollars? Because I’ve only been betting two dollars a race.”

“You want to keep it to two dollars,” his friend said, “just bet it one way. Thing is, how are you going to feel if you bet the Four-Seven and they finish Seven-Four?”

“It’s right up your alley,” Dot told him. “Comes through another broker, so there’s a good solid firewall between us and the client. And the broker’s reliable, and if the client was a corporate bond he’d be rated triple-A.”

“What’s the catch?”

“Keller,” she said, “what makes you think there’s a catch?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But there is, isn’t there?”

She frowned. “The only catch,” she said, “if you want to call it that, is there might not be a job at all.”

“I’d call that a catch.”

“I suppose.”

“If there’s no job,” he said, “why did the client call the broker, and why did the broker call you, and what am I doing out here?”

Dot pursed her lips, sighed. “There’s this horse,” she said.

8

The fifth race was reasonably exciting. Bunk Bed Betty, a big brown horse with a black mane, led all the way, only to be challenged in the stretch and overtaken at the wire by a thirty-to-one shot named Hypertension.

Hit the Boss was dead last, which made him the only horse that Happy Trigger beat.

Keller’s new friend got very excited toward the end of the race, and showed a ten-dollar win ticket on Hypertension. “Oh, look at that,” he said, when they posted the payoff. “Gets me even for the day, plus yesterday and the day before. That was Alvie Jurado on Hypertension, and didn’t he ride a gorgeous race there?”

“It was exciting,” Keller allowed.

“A lot more exciting with ten bucks on that sweetie’s nose. Sorry about your exacta. I guess it cost you four bucks.”

Keller gave a shrug that he hoped was ambiguous. In the end, he’d been uncomfortable betting four dollars and unable to decide which way to bet his usual two dollars. So he hadn’t bet anything. There was nothing wrong with that, as a matter of fact he’d saved himself two dollars, or maybe four, but he’d feel like a piker admitting as much to a man who’d just won over three hundred dollars.

“The horse’s name is Kissimmee Dudley,” Dot told him, “and he’s running in the seventh race at Belmont Saturday. It’s the feature race, and the word is that Dudley hasn’t got a prayer.”

“I don’t know much about horses.”

“They’ve got four legs,” she said, “and if the one you bet on comes in ahead of the others, you make money. That’s as much as I know about them, but I know something about Kissimmee Dudley. Our client thinks he’s going to win.”

“I thought you said he didn’t have a prayer.”

“That’s the word. Our client doesn’t see it that way.”

“Oh?”

“Evidently Dudley’s a better horse than anybody realizes,” she said, “and they’ve been holding him back, waiting for the right race. That way they’ll get long odds and be able to clean up. And, just so nothing goes wrong, the other jockeys are getting paid to make sure they don’t finish ahead of Dudley.”

“The race is fixed,” Keller said.

“That’s the plan.”

“But?”

“But a plan is what things don’t always go according to, Keller, which is probably a good thing, because otherwise the phone would never ring. You want some more iced tea?”

“No thanks.”

“They’ll have the race on Saturday, and Dudley ’ll run. And if he wins you get two thousand dollars.”

“For what?”

“For standing by. For making yourself available.”

“I think I get it,” he said. “And if Kissimmee Dudley should happen to lose-where’d they come up with a name like that, do you happen to know?”

“Not a clue.”

“If he loses,” Keller said, “I suppose I have work to do.”

She nodded.

“The jockey who beats him?”

“Is toast,” she said, “and you’re the toaster.”

None of the horses in the sixth race had a name that meant anything to Keller. Then again, picking them by name hadn’t done him much good so far. This time he looked at the odds. A long shot wouldn’t win, he decided, and a favorite wouldn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile, so maybe the answer was to pick something in the middle. The Five horse, Mogadishy, was pegged at six-to-one.

He got in line, thinking. Of course, sometimes a long shot came in. Take the preceding race, for instance, with its big payoff for Keller’s OTB buddy. There was a long shot in this race, and it would pay a lot more than the twelve bucks he’d win on his six-to-one shot.

On the other hand, no matter what horse he bet on, the return on his two-dollar bet wasn’t going to make any real difference to him. And it would be nice to cash a winning ticket for a change.

“Sir?”

He put down his two dollars and bet the odds-on favorite to show.

Dot lived in White Plains, in a big old Victorian house on Taunton Place. She gave him a ride to the train station, and a little over an hour later he was back in his apartment, looking once again at the Bulger amp; Calthorpe catalog.

If Kissimmee Dudley ran and lost, he’d have a job to do. And his fee for the job would be just enough to fill the two spaces in his album. And, since the horse was racing at Belmont, it stood to reason that all of the jockeys lived within easy commuting distance of the Long Island racetrack. Keller wouldn’t have to get on a plane to find his man.

If Kissimmee Dudley won, Keller got to keep the two-thousand-dollar standby fee. That was a decent amount of money for not doing a thing, and there were times when he’d have been happy to see it play out that way.

But this wasn’t one of those times. He really wanted those stamps. If the horse lost, well, he’d go out and earn them. But what if the damned horse won?

The sixth race ended with Pass the Gas six lengths ahead of the field. Keller cashed his ticket and ran into his friend, who’d been talking with a fellow who bore a superficial resemblance to Jerry Orbach.

“Saw you in line to get paid,” the little man said. “What did you have, the exacta or the trifecta?”

“I don’t really understand those fancy bets,” Keller admitted. “I just put my money on Pass the Gas.”

“Paid even money, didn’t he? That’s not so bad.”

“I had him to show.”

“Well, if you had enough of a bet on him-”

“Just two dollars.”

“So you got back two-twenty,” the man said.

“I just felt like winning,” Keller said.

“Well,” the man said, “you won.”

He’d put down the catalog, picked up the phone. When Dot answered he said, “I was thinking. If that Dudley horse wins, the client wins his bet and I don’t have any work to do.”

“Right.”

“But if one of the other jockeys crosses him up-”

“It’s the last time he’ll ever do it.”

“Well,” he said, “why would he do it? The jockey, I mean. What would be the point?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’m just trying to understand it,” he said. “I mean, I could understand if it was boxing. Like in the movies. They want the guy to throw a fight. But he can’t do it, something in him recoils at the very idea, and he has to go on and win the fight, even if it means he’ll get his legs broken.”

“And never play the piano again,” Dot said. “I think I saw that movie, Keller.”

“All the boxing movies are like that, except the ones with Sylvester Stallone running up flights of steps. But how would that apply with horses?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been years since I saw National Velvet.”

“If you were a jockey, and they paid you to throw a race, and you didn’t-I mean, where’s the percentage in it?”

“You could bet on yourself.”

“You’d make more money betting on Kissimmee Dudley. He’s the long shot, right?”

“That’s a point.”

“And that way nobody’d have a reason to take out a contract on you, either.”

“Another point,” Dot said, “and if the jockeys are all as reasonable as you and I, Keller, you’re not going to see a dime beyond the two grand. But they’re very small.”

“The jockeys?”

“Uh-huh. Short and scrawny little bastards, every last one of them. Who the hell knows what somebody like that is going to do?”

Keller’s friend was short enough to be a jockey, but a long way from scrawny. Facially, he looked a little like Jerry Orbach. It was beginning to dawn on Keller that everybody in the OTB parlor, even the blacks and the Asians, looked a little like Jerry Orbach. It was sort of a generic horseplayer look, and they all had it.

“Kissimmee Dudley,” Keller said. “Where’d somebody come up with a name like that?”

The little man consulted his Racing Form. “By Florida Cracker out of Dud Avocado,” he said. “ Kissimmee ’s in Florida, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“I think so.” The fellow shrugged. “The name’s the least of that horse’s problems. You take a look at his form?”

The man reeled off a string of sentences, and Keller just let the words wash over him. If he tried to follow it he’d only wind up feeling stupid. Well, so what? How many of these Jerry Orbach clones would know what to do with a perforation gauge?

“Look at the morning line,” the man went on. “Hell, look at the tote board. Old Dudley ’s up there at forty-to-one.”

“That means he doesn’t have a chance?”

“A long shot’ll come in once in a while,” the man allowed. “Look at Hypertension. With him, though, his past performance charts showed he had a chance. A slim one, but slim’s better than no chance at all.”

“And Kissimmee Dudley? No chance at all?”

“He’d need a tailwind and a whole lot of luck,” the man said, “before he could rise to the level of no chance at all.”

Keller slipped away, and when he came back from the ticket window his friend asked him what horse he’d bet on. Keller’s response was mumbled, and the man had to ask him to repeat it.

“Kissimmee Dudley,” he said.

“That right?”

“I know what you said, and I suppose you’re right, but I just had a feeling.”

“A hunch,” the man said.

“Sort of, yes.”

“And you’re a man on a lucky streak, aren’t you? I mean, you just won twenty cents betting the favorite to show.”

The line was meant to be sarcastic, but something funny happened; by the time the man got to the end of the sentence, his manner had somehow changed. Keller was wondering what to make of it-had he just been insulted or not?

“The trick,” the fellow said, “is doing the wrong thing at the right time.” He went away and came back, and told Keller he probably ought to have his head examined, but what the hell.

“Kissimmee Dudley,” he said, savoring each syllable. “I can’t believe I bet on that animal. Only way he’s gonna win the seventh race is if he was entered in the sixth, but it’ll be some sweet payoff if he does. Not forty-to-one, though. Price is down to thirty-to-one.”

“That’s too bad,” Keller said.

“Except it’s a good sign, because it means some late bets are coming in on the horse. You see a horse drop just before post time from, say, five-to-one to three-to-one, that’s a good sign.” He shrugged. “When you start at forty-to-one, you need more than good signs. You need a rocket up your ass, either that or you need all the other horses to drop dead.”

9

Keller wasn’t sure what to watch for. He knew what you did to get your horse to run faster. You hit him with the whip, and dug your heels into his flanks.

But suppose you wanted to slow him down? You could sit back in the saddle and yank on the reins, but wouldn’t that be a little on the obvious side? Could you just hold off on the whip and cool it a little with the heel-digging? Would that be enough to keep your mount from edging out Kissimmee Dudley?

The horses were entering the starting gate, and he picked out Dudley and decided he looked like a winner. But then they all looked like winners to Keller, big well-bred horses, some taking their positions without a fuss, others showing a little spirit and giving their riders a hard time, but all of them sooner or later going where they were supposed to go.

Two of the jockeys were girls, Keller noticed, including the one riding the second favorite. Except you were probably supposed to call them women, you had to stop calling them girls these days around the time they entered kindergarten, from what Keller could tell. Still, when they were jockey-size, it seemed a stretch to call them women. Was he being sexist? Maybe, or maybe he was being sizeist, or heightist. He wasn’t sure.

“They’re off!”

And so they were, bursting out of the starting gate. Neither of the girl jockeys was riding Kissimmee Dudley, so if one of them won, well, she’d live to regret it, albeit briefly. Some people in Keller’s line of work didn’t like to take out women, while others were supposed to get a special satisfaction out of it. Keller didn’t care one way or the other. He wasn’t a sexist when it came to business, although he wasn’t sure that was enough to make him a hero in the eyes of the National Organization for Women.

“Will you look at that!”

Keller had been looking at the screen but without registering what he was seeing. Now he realized that Kissimmee Dudley was out in front, with a good lead on the rest of the field.

Keller’s little friend was urging him on. “Oh, you beauty,” he said. “Oh, run, you son of a bitch. Oh, yes. Oh, yes!”

Were any of the horses being held back? If so, Keller couldn’t see it. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear Kissimmee Dudley was simply outrunning all of the other horses, proving himself to be superior to the competition.

But wait a damn minute. That piebald horse-what did he think he was doing? Why was he gaining ground on Dudley?

“No!” cried the little man. “Where’d the Two horse come from? It’s that fucking Alvie Jurado. Fade, you cocksucker! Die, will you? Come on, Dudley!”

The guy had liked Jurado well enough when he was making money for him on Hypertension. Now, riding a horse called Steward’s Folly, he’d become the enemy. Maybe, Keller thought, the jockey was just trying to make it look good. Maybe he’d ease up at the very end, settling for the place money and avoiding any suspicion that he’d thrown the race.

But it was a hell of a show Jurado was putting on, standing up in the stirrups, flailing away with the whip, apparently doing everything he possibly could to get Steward’s Folly to the wire ahead of Kissimmee Dudley.

“It’s Kissimmee Dudley and Steward’s Folly,” the announcer cried. “Steward’s Folly and Kissimmee Dudley. They’re neck and neck, nose to nose as they hit the wire-”

“Shit on toast,” Keller’s friend said.

“Who won?”

“Who fucking knows? See? It’s a photo finish.” And indeed the word photo flashed on and off on the television screen. “Son of a bitch. Where did that fucking Jurado come from?”

“He gained a lot of ground in a hurry,” Keller said.

“The little prick. Now we have to wait for the photo. I wish they’d hurry. See, I really got behind that hunch of yours.” He showed a ticket, and Keller leaned over and squinted at it.

“A hundred dollars?”

“On the nose,” the little man said, “plus I got him wheeled in the five-dollar exacta. You got a hunch, and I bet a bunch. And he went off at twenty-eight to one, and if it’s a Six-Two exacta with him and Steward’s Folly, Jesus, I’m rich. I’m fucking rich. And you got two bucks on him yourself, so you’ll win yourself fifty-six dollars. Unless you went and played him to show, which would explain why you’re so calm, ’cause it’d be the same to you if he comes in first or second. Is that what you went and did?”

“Not exactly,” Keller said and fished out a ticket.

“A hundred bucks to win! Man, when you get a hunch you really back it, don’t you?”

Keller didn’t say anything. He had nineteen other tickets just like it in his pocket, but the little man didn’t have to know about them. If the photo of the two horses crossing the finish line showed Dudley in front, his tickets would be worth $58,000.

If not, well, Alvie Jurado would be worth almost as much.

“I got to hand it to you,” the little man said. “All that dough on the line, and you’re calm as a cucumber.”

Ten days later, Keller sat at his dining room table. He was holding a pair of stainless steel stamp tongs, and they in turn were holding a little piece of paper worth-

Well, it was hard to say just how much it was worth. The stamp was Martinique #2, and Keller had wound up bidding $18,500 for it. The lot had opened at $9,000, and there was a bidder in the third row on the right who dropped out around the $12,000 mark, and then there was a phone bidder who hung on like grim death. When the auctioneer pounded the gavel and said, “Sold for eighteen five to JPK,” Keller’s heart was pounding harder than the gavel.

It was still racing eight lots later when the second stamp, Martinique #17, went on the block. It had a lower Scott value than #2, and was estimated lower in the Bulger amp; Calthorpe sales catalog, and the starting bid was lower, too, at an even $6,000.

And then, remarkably, it had wound up sailing all the way to $21,250 before Keller prevailed over another phone bidder. (Or the same one, irritated at having lost #2 and unwilling to miss out on #17.) That was too much, it was three times the Scott value, but what could you do? He wanted the stamp, and he could afford it, and when would he get a chance at another one like it?

With buyer’s commission, the two lots had cost him $43,725.

He admired the stamp through his magnifier. It looked beautiful to him, although he couldn’t say why; aesthetically, it wasn’t discernibly different from other Martinique overprints worth less than twenty dollars. Carefully, he cut a mount to size, slipped the stamp into it, and secured it in his album.

Not for the first time, he thought of the little man at the OTB parlor. Keller hadn’t seen him since that afternoon, and doubted he’d ever cross paths with him again. He remembered the fellow’s excitement, and how impressed he’d been by Keller’s own coolness.

Cool? Naturally he’d been cool. Either way he won. If he didn’t cash the winning tickets on Kissimmee Dudley, he’d do just about as well when he punched Alvie Jurado’s ticket. It was interesting, waiting to see how the photo came out, but he couldn’t say it was all that nerve-wracking.

Not when you compared it to sitting in a hotel suite in Omaha, waiting for hours while lot after lot was auctioned off, until finally the stamps you’d been waiting for came up for bids. And then sitting there with your pencil lifted to indicate you were bidding, sitting there while the price climbed higher and higher, not knowing where it would stop, not knowing if you had enough cash in the belt around your waist. How high would you have to go for the first lot? And would you have enough left for the other one? And what was the matter with that phone bidder? Would the man never quit?

Now that was excitement, he thought, as he cut a second mount for Martinique #17. That was true edge-of-the-chair tension, unlike anything those Jerry Orbach look-alikes in the OTB parlor would ever know.

He felt sorry for them.

What difference did it make, really, how the photo finish turned out? What did he care who won the race? If Kissimmee Dudley held on to win by a nose or a nose hair, it was up to Keller to work out a tax-free way to cash twenty $100 tickets. If Steward’s Folly made it home first, Alvie Jurado moved to the top of Keller’s list of Things to Make and Do. Whichever chore Keller wound up with, he had to pull it off in a hurry; he had to have his money in hand-or, more accurately, in belt-when his flight took off for Omaha.

And now it was over, and he’d done what he had to, so did it matter what it was he’d done?

Hell, no. He had the stamps.