Hit List

by Lawrence Block

  “Why Scarsdale?”

  “Well, someplace like it. Westchester or Long Island, or maybe Connecticut. Well-to-do suburban.”

  “I live in Manhattan.”

  “Why would you want to bring up kids in Manhattan?”

  “I don’t have any. I’m not married.”

  “I thought of seeing what John Kellers I could find in Westchester,” she said, “but you’d be at the office and I’d get your wife.”

  “I don’t have a wife.”

  “So then I thought of calling your office.”

  He didn’t have an office, either. “How? I never said where I worked.”

  “I was going to work my way through the Fortune 500 companies until I got you. But then you called me and saved me the trouble.”

  “I guess you see me as a corporate type.”

  “And why would I jump to a conclusion like that?” She put her hand on him. “Pegged you at a glance, Keller. Did you show up at the opening in basic black? Were you making a statement in paint-splattered jeans and a red bandanna? No, there you were in a suit and tie. Now where would I get the idea you were a corporate kind of guy?”

  “I’m retired.”

  “Aren’t you a little young for that? Or did you make such a pile of money that there’s no point in working anymore?”

  “I still work once in a while.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Consulting.”

  “Consulting for whom?”

  “Corporations.”

  “Bingo,” she said.

  “So once in a while I have to go out of town for a few days or a week.”

  “To consult.”

  “Well, I’m a sort of consultant-slash-troubleshooter. And a couple of jobs a year is all I get, so it’s not that far from being completely retired.”

  “And you’re all right for money.”

  “I manage okay. I saved money over the years, and I inherited some, and I was lucky in my investments.”

  “Doesn’t alimony and child support eat up a lot of it?”

  “I’ve never been married.”

  “Honestly? I know you’re not married now, I was just yanking on your chain a little, but you’ve never been married at all? How did you escape?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I dragged a guy home once,” she said, “back when I was still painting ugly pictures and sleeping with strangers. He was about your age and incredibly good-looking and just sensational in bed, and he’d never been married, either. I couldn’t figure it until I found out he was a priest.”

  “I’m not a priest.”

  “That’s a shame. You could be a troubleshooter for God. You know something? We shouldn’t be talking like this. In the first place, I want to keep this relationship superficial.”

  “Then I’d say this conversation is a step in the right direction.”

  “No, it’s too personal. We can talk about things, but not about ourselves. Nothing ruins everything like getting to know each other.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, you’re almost as cute as the priest, and even better in bed. And you’re right here, and God only knows where he is, which, when you think about it, is perfectly appropriate. But why are we wasting time talking?”

  A little later he said, “I went back to that gallery today.”

  “Which gallery?”

  “Where we met. Regis Buell? I wanted to see how the paintings looked without wine and cheese.”

  “And a few hundred people. What did you think?”

  “I liked them,” he said. “The man can paint the daylights out of a tree. But they’re not exactly flying off the walls. I only spotted two paintings with red dots.”

  “That’s two more than Declan would prefer.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, all I know is what people are saying. It seems he called several people who’ve been collecting his work, and a few museum officials who’ve shown an interest, and he told them all the same thing. Come to the show, have a look at what I’ve been doing lately, but for God’s sake don’t buy anything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Declan can’t stand Regis Buell.”

  “The gallery owner? Then why doesn’t he show his paintings somewhere else?”

  “He’s going to, now that he’s out from under his contract with Regis. This is his last show there, and as of the first of the month he’ll be represented by Ottinger Galleries. So Declan wants everybody to wait, so that Jimmy Ottinger gets the commission on his work and not Regis Buell.”

  “Will the prices be the same at Ottinger?”

  “Jimmy may nudge them up a notch or so,” she said. “If he thinks the traffic will bear it. He thinks a great deal of Declan’s work.”

  “And Regis Buell doesn’t?”

  “What Regis knows is that this is his last chance to make money off Declan’s work. So he’d want to keep prices low enough to make the maximum number of sales. Jimmy Ottinger can afford to think long-term. It may be better to establish a higher price for the artist now than to sell everything at a lower level.”

  “I guess it’s all more complicated than it looks.”

  “Like everything else,” she agreed. “And what about you? Why the interest? Are you thinking of investing in one of Declan’s mighty oaks?”

  “There are a few that might work in my apartment,” he said. “One in particular, but don’t ask me to describe it.”

  “A tree is a tree is a tree.”

  “This is an old one, and it’s a winter setting, but that fits quite a few of them. The thing is they’re all different, but when you describe them the descriptions all come out the same.”

  “I know. Listen, don’t tell Declan I said this, but what do you care who gets the commission? If you’ve found one you really love, and if you’re sure you’ll still want to look at it a month or a year from now . . .”

  “Buy it?”

  “You’ll never get it cheaper. And somebody else might buy it out from under you.”

  Around one-fifteen, Maggie walked him to the door and stood on her tiptoes to give him a kiss. “No more flowers,” she cautioned him. “Once was perfect, but once is enough. Call me every now and then, say once a week, and we’ll get together like this for an hour or two.”

  “A couple of hours,” he said. “Every week or so.”

  “Is that too much?” She patted his cheek. “More often than that and we might wear it out.”

  More often than that, he thought, as the cab carried him home, and we might wear me out.

  Seven

  * * *

  At home, he paged through one of his stamp albums. Many of his fellow hobbyists were topical or thematic philatelists, collecting stamps not of a particular country or time period but united by what they portrayed. Stamps showing trains, say, or butterflies, or penguins. A doctor might choose stamps with a medical connection, while a musician could seek out stamps showing musical instruments, or those with portraits of the great composers. Or you could collect rabbit stamps for no more abiding reason than that you just plain liked to look at rabbits.

  Art on stamps was an increasingly popular topic. Early on, when postage stamps were commonly of a single color, reproducing a great painting on a scrap of paper was easier said than done. A monochromatic miniature of the Mona Lisa might be recognizable for what it was, but it lacked a certain something.

  Those early stamps, skillfully engraved and beautifully printed, were to Keller’s mind far more attractive than what they turned out these days, when virtually every stamp from every country was printed in full color, and any stamp-issuing entity could spew out gemlike reproductions of the world’s art treasures. Collectors made such endeavors profitable, and, unlike animation art from Disney or Warner Brothers, the works of Rembrandt and Rubens were unprotected by trademark or copyright. Anyone could copy them, and many did.

  Keller’s 1952 cutoff date put most of the world’s art stamps out of his re
ach. But some countries had issued such stamps back in the old one-color days, more out of pride in their artistic heritage than in a grab for the collector’s dollar. The French were particularly eager to show off their culture, portraying writers and painters and composers at the slightest provocation, and Keller looked now at a set of French semipostals that gave you a real sense of the artists’ power.

  And of course there was the Spanish set honoring Goya. One of the stamps showed his nude portrait of the Duchess of Alba. The painting had caused a stir when first displayed, and, years later, the stamp had proven every bit as stirring to a generation of young male philatelists. Keller remembered owning the stamp decades ago, and scrutinizing it through a pocket magnifier, wishing fervently that the stamp were larger and the glass stronger.

  In the current issue of Linn’s, as in almost every issue, there was a spirited exchange in the letters column on the best way to attract youngsters to the hobby. Evidently boys and girls were less strongly drawn to philately in a world full of computers and Nintendo and MTV. If kids stopped collecting stamps, where would the next generation of adult collectors come from?

  Keller, having considered the question, had decided that he didn’t care. All he wanted to do was add to his own collection, and he didn’t really give a damn how many other men and women were working on theirs. Without new collectors joining the fold, stamps might eventually decline in value, but he didn’t care about that, either. He wasn’t going to sell his collection, and what difference did it make what became of it upon his death? If he couldn’t take it with him, then somebody else could figure out what to do with it.

  But others clearly did care about the hobby’s future. The U.S. Post Office evidently saw a very profitable sideline threatened, and had responded by issuing stamps designed specifically to appeal to the young collector. When Keller was a boy, stamps showed great American writers and inventors and statesmen, people he mostly hadn’t heard of, and in the course of collecting their images he had in fact learned a great deal about them, and about the history in which they’d played a part.

  Nowadays, stamp collecting was a great way for young Americans to learn about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

  Keller thought it over and decided they were doing it wrong. He’d collected avidly as a boy not because stamp collecting was designed for kids but because it was something undeniably grown-up that he could enjoy. If it had felt like kid stuff he wouldn’t have had any part of it.

  Would a stamp with Bugs Bunny’s picture on it have prompted a young Keller to whip out his magnifying glass for a closer look?

  Not a chance. If they wanted to get the kids interested, he thought, let them start putting naked ladies on them.

  He called Dot first thing in the morning. “I hope it’s not too early,” he said.

  “Five minutes ago you’d have been interrupting my breakfast,” she told him. “Now all you’re interrupting is the washing up, and that’s fine with me.”

  “I was wondering,” he said. “About the client.”

  “Refresh my memory, Keller. Didn’t we already have this conversation?”

  “Suppose you were to call whoever called you,” he said. “Suppose you ask how the client feels about mushrooms.”

  “You going into the catering business, Keller?”

  “Innocent bystanders,” he said. “Drug dealers call them mushrooms because they just sort of pop up and get caught in the crossfire.”

  “That’s charming. When did you take to hanging out with drug dealers?”

  “I read an article in the paper.”

  “That’s where you get your figures of speech, Keller? From newspaper articles?”

  He drew a breath. “What I’m getting at,” he said, “is suppose something happened to a guy in Brooklyn, and his wife and kid got in the way.”

  “Oh, I see where you’re going.”

  “And the art gallery’s another possibility, but there too you might have people around.”

  “So I should run it past my guy so he can get in a huddle with the client.”

  “Right.”

  “And I report back to you, and then what? Don’t tell me the job gets done and we can all move on.”

  “Sure,” he said. “What else?”

  Keller sat in front of the Hopper poster, taking it in. If you wanted to hang something on the wall, you couldn’t beat a poster. Ten or twenty bucks plus framing and you had a real piece of art in your living room.

  On the other hand, how many posters could you hang before you ran out of wall space? No, if you were going to collect art in a small apartment, stamps were the way to go. One album, a few inches of shelf space, and you could put together a tiny Louvre all your own.

  He could go either way. He could start a topical collection, art on stamps, or he could look for a few more posters that hit him the way Hopper’s did.

  He put on a tie and jacket and got on a crosstown bus.

  It was ridiculous, he thought, walking from the bus stop to the gallery. The painting he liked best, #19 on the laminated price list, was one of the larger ones, and the price they were asking was $12,000. It would be nice to be able to look at it whenever he felt like it, but he could walk over to Central Park anytime he wanted and look at thousands of trees. He could get as close as he wanted and it wouldn’t cost him a dime.

  The same Vassar graduate sat behind the desk, reading the same Jane Smiley novel and waiting for her Wall Street prince to come. She nodded at Keller without moving her head—he wasn’t sure how she managed that—and went back to her book while he crossed the room to the painting.

  And there it was, as vivid and powerful as ever. He felt himself drawn into the picture, sucked into the trunk and up the branches. He let himself sink into the canvas. This had never happened to him before and he wondered if it happened to other people. He stayed in front of the painting for a long time, knowing that there was no question of passing it up. He had the money, he could spend it on a painting if he wanted.

  He’d tell the girl he wanted to buy it, and they’d take his name and perhaps a deposit—he wasn’t sure how that part worked. Then they’d record it as sold, and when the show came down at the end of the month he’d pay the balance and take it home.

  And have it framed? It was minimally framed now with flat strips of dark wood, and that worked okay, but he suspected a professional framer could improve on it. Something simple, though. Something that enclosed the painting without drawing attention to itself. Those carved and gilded frames looked great around a portrait of a codger with muttonchop whiskers, but they were all wrong for something like this, and—

  There was a red dot on the wall beside the painting.

  He stared at it, and it was there, all right, next to the number 19. He extended a forefinger, as if to flick the dot away, then let his hand fall to his side.

  Well, he’d left it too long. Remembering to look before he leapt, he’d hesitated, and was lost.

  And so was the painting, lost to him.

  Disappointment washed over him, along with a paradoxical sense of relief. He wouldn’t have to part with twelve thousand dollars, wouldn’t have to seek out a framer, wouldn’t have to pick a spot and hammer a nail into the wall.

  But, dammit to hell, he wouldn’t own the painting.

  Of course there were others. This was the one he’d picked, the old tree trying to get through one more winter, but the choice hadn’t been all that clear-cut, because he’d responded strongly to all of Declan Niswander’s work. If he couldn’t have his favorite, well, it wasn’t the end of the world. How hard would it be to find one he liked almost as well?

  Not hard at all, as it turned out. But it would be equally impossible to buy any of the other works, no matter how much he liked them, because every single painting in the gallery had been given the red dot treatment.

  He stared at the desk until the girl looked up from her book. “Everything’s been sold,” he said.

  “Yes,” she ag
reed. “Isn’t it marvelous?”

  “It’s great for you people,” he said, “and I suppose it’s great for Mr. Niswander, but it’s not so great for me.”

  “You were in yesterday afternoon, weren’t you?”

  “And I should have bought the painting then, but I wanted to sleep on it. And now it’s too late.”

  “Things happen overnight in this business,” she said. “I always heard that, and here’s an example. When I went home last night there were only two paintings sold, the ones that were purchased the night of the opening. And when I came in this morning there were so many red dots I thought the walls had measles.”

  “Well,” he said, “at least I’ve got the rest of the month to look at the paintings. Who bought them, anyway?”

  “I wasn’t here. Look, suppose I get Mr. Buell? Maybe he can help you.”

  She went away and Keller returned to Niswander’s trees, trying not to notice the plague of red dots. Then a man appeared, the willowy young chap who’d introduced Niswander at the opening. Up close, Keller could see that Regis Buell wasn’t really as young as he appeared. He looked like an aging boy, and Keller wondered if he might have had a face-lift.

  “Regis Buell,” he said. “Jenna informs me we’ve disappointed you by selling out to the bare walls.”

  “I’m the one with the bare walls,” Keller told him.

  Buell laughed politely. “What painting was it? That you had your heart set on.”

  “Number nineteen.”

  “The old horse chestnut? A splendid choice. You have a good eye. But I have to say they’re all good choices.”

  “And they’ve already been chosen. Who bought them?”

  “Ah,” Buell said, and clasped his hands. “Mystery buyers.”

  “More than one?”

  “Several, and I’m afraid I can’t disclose any of their names.”

  “And they all came through at the same time? I was here yesterday and there were only two paintings sold.”