Keller 05 - Hit Me

by Lawrence Block

  But he was in fact wearing a wire, Keller thought, and then realized the man was talking about a recording device, not something Keller hoped to loop around his thick neck. Keller lifted the towel, and the man looked at him and looked away so quickly that Keller found himself feeling somehow inadequate.

  “Now we can talk, Hannan. If we keep our voices at this level these other men won’t hear us. The steam’s an insulator. And it will probably keep ye from recording this, should ye be equipped with some new device I’m unable to detect.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Ah, well, I’m sure I can take ye at your word.”

  The sarcasm was razor-sharp, and came wrapped in the rank odor of yesterday’s alcohol draining from the man’s pores. That, Keller guessed, was the point of the steam bath; it drew out yesterday’s poison and made room for today’s.

  And room would be needed, because O’Herlihy’s breath carried a slightly different scent, one of alcohol not yet processed by that bulky body. So he’d had a drink to start the day. Some sort of whiskey, by the smell of it.

  Ah, well. A strong man’s weakness.

  “Now I’ll talk,” O’Herlihy said, in a cloud of whiskey breath. “And ye’ll listen. If ye’d called six months ago with the same sorry tale I’d have told ye to feck off. And hung up on ye, and taken no calls from ye afterward. Do ye know why?”

  Keller shook his head.

  “Because I’m not queer,” he said, “and there’s women who’d swear to it. There’s a woman who was a housekeeper of mine, in Cold Spring Harbor and other parishes, and I’d still see her after I went with the Thessalonians. Not as often, as I was older and felt the heat less, and she’s along in years herself, but still has her charms. But they’d be wasted on ye, wouldn’t they? You’re a gay boy yourself, are ye not?”

  “No, I—”

  “Of course ye are, and fixing to blame myself for your sorry state. Six months ago the press’d pay no mind to ye. They’d have heard rumors of this woman of mine, and one or two others who needn’t concern you, and they’d dismiss your dirty talk out of hand. But now I’m in the public eye, and if nothing else they’d have to refute your bloody words, and she’d get dragged into it, and I won’t have that. Do ye follow me, lad?”

  “Father, I must have made a mistake.”

  “Indeed ye did, thinking to squeeze money out of myself.”

  “No,” Keller said. “No, I honestly thought—Father, I have these memories, but they can’t be true, can they?”

  There was a pause. The door to the steam room opened. A man left, and two others entered.

  “There might be something in those memories,” O’Herlihy said grudgingly. “There was another priest in the same parish, as thin as I was stout, and as dark as I was fair. Father Peter Mullane was his name, and he had a weakness for boys, and—”

  “Father Peter,” Keller said, glad for a straw to grasp at.

  “You recall him, lad?”

  “I’d forgotten him completely, but as soon as you said his name I could picture him. Very slender, and dark-haired, and—God, I can see his face now!”

  “Well, ye needn’t start searching for him. The poor man’s twenty years dead. And didn’t he take his own life? Whatever grief he caused ye, he’s paying for it many times over. Burning in hell for all of eternity, if ye believe the shite we taught ye.”

  Scotch, Keller thought, getting the strongest whiff yet of the man’s breath. He said, “Father, I don’t know what to say. I made a terrible mistake.”

  “Ye did, but at least spare me the burden of hearing your confession.” A sigh. “Well, they’ll get my testimony, the bastards, and there’ll be some misfortunate men in New Jersey, but it can’t be helped.” He snorted, and then seemed to remember there was someone sitting beside him. “And that’s nothing to ye, is it? Ye can go now, and we needn’t set eyes on one another again.”

  Keller glanced at his wrist, where the garrote reposed, ready to be uncoiled and put to work. In a hot steamy room full of witnesses, against a man twice his size who’d yank it out of his hands and lash him with it.

  Right.

  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.

  Eighteen

  Back at his hotel room, Keller found another reason to be glad he’d missed the British East Africa stamp. The way things stood, it looked as though he wasn’t going to be able to carry out his assignment. Dot would have to refund the advance payment, and he wouldn’t be getting paid.

  With nothing coming in, he’d have to pay attention to his expenses. He still had substantial funds in an offshore bank, but he’d been dipping into them just to cover ongoing household expenses, ever since the economic downturn flattened the business of rehabbing houses and flipping them. He could still afford to buy stamps, but he could spend more freely out of profits than out of capital.

  He put away the stamps he’d just purchased, including a high value from Gabon that had eluded him for years. He was happy to have them, but maybe it was just as well he’d missed out on the stamps from Albania and Egypt.

  Maybe he should skip tomorrow’s afternoon session, with all of that outstanding German Colonial material. Maybe he should move up his departure. He could probably still get a seat on tonight’s 8:59 flight to New Orleans. He wouldn’t save anything on the hotel bill, it was hours past checkout time, but he’d be home a day earlier, and that had to be worth something.

  Call Dot, tell her there was nothing for it but to give back the money.

  Hell. Maybe he should have one last look at the monastery.

  It looked as impregnable as ever.

  Oh, he could get a foot in the door. All he had to do was bang away with the knocker, and some creature in a plain brown robe would open it. But it wouldn’t be O’Herlihy, because when you were the abbot, you didn’t have the job of opening up for visitors. Instead you kept busy telling everybody else what to do, or stayed in your room, sucking on the Scotch bottle.

  Or did monks have cells? They seemed to in books, but then they weren’t cloistered in Murray Hill town houses, not in the novels he’d read. O’Herlihy, he somehow knew, would have a large and well-appointed bedchamber all to himself, unless he managed to smuggle in one of those women he’d been bragging about.

  Would that bedchamber front on the street? Could the man be standing at his window now, looking out at the passing scene? Looking out, perhaps, at the man he knew as Timothy Hannan?

  Keller, on the north side of the street, drew back into the shadows.

  If you knew which room was his, and if it did indeed look out on 36th Street, then what?

  A bomb? Not a huge one to demolish the whole building, but something more along the lines of a hand grenade. Lob it through the window in the wee small hours of the morning, by which time O’Herlihy would have taken in enough Scotch to render him unconscious. Boom! The man would never know what hit him.

  Of course you’d have to know which window belonged to his room. And you’d also have to know where to get your hands on a grenade.

  Hmm. If he could just find another way into the building. A back door, say. So that he could contrive to be inside when all but a skeleton crew of monks had retired for the night, and their abbot along with them. Then, gliding down the corridors like a ninja, he could find O’Herlihy’s room with the man passed out and snoring, his intimidation factor severely diminished. Keller, who could bring any weapon he wanted, might as easily dispatch his quarry with his bare hands.

  He turned to his ri
ght, counting his steps as he walked to Madison Avenue, where he turned left and walked a block south. At 35th Street he turned left again, and counted his steps again, stopping when he reached the number he’d tallied earlier. Now, unless he’d screwed up somehow, the building in front of him was one that backed up on Thessalonian House.

  And a handsome building it was, four stories tall, with a limestone facade and Greek Revival pillars. Like Thessalonian House, it had surely started life as a private home, and was just as surely something else now. There was a brass plaque alongside the door, but Keller couldn’t make out what it said, and—

  “Edward!”

  The voice was familiar, even if the name was not. Keller turned, and there was Irv Feldspar, the man who’d recognized him from years ago at Stampazine. He was wearing a tweed jacket and a checked shirt and a big smile, and he hurried along the sidewalk to where Keller was standing.

  “Edward Nicholas,” he said, panting from the effort. “Knew you right away. Never thought you’d be a member, living where you do. New Mexico, didn’t you say?”

  “New Orleans.”

  “Well, I was close. But of course we’ve got plenty of out-of-town members. We just don’t get to see them so often. You’re here for the presentation?”

  “I was just walking down the street,” Keller said. “And I’m afraid I’m not a member of anything, Mr. Feldspar.”

  “Please, make it Irv. And do you prefer Ed or Edward?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Or Eddie, even, for all I know.”

  “Actually,” he said, “my name’s Nicholas Edwards, so—”

  “Well, I was close. Nick? Nicholas?”

  “Either one, Irv.”

  “So you’re not a member of the Connoisseurs? Your feet just brought you here? Well, I have to say you’ve got smart feet. We meet the first and third Wednesday of the month, drinks and hors d’oeuvres for an hour, then a one-hour presentation, and we’re out by half past seven. Tonight we’ve got a visiting speaker from Milwaukee, an expert on the philately of the Civil War. Come on.”