I smiled. “That sounds fine.”
“Stamps can be doctored. Altered, sir, in small ways that can enhance their value. Perforations can be changed, for example. That creates an entirely different stamp. Or they can be cut off to create imperforates. Or added to previously un-perforated stamps. Overprints can be added. Stamps can be regummed. All of these things make a different stamp from the original, sir. The average man cannot detect such doctoring. That is why a collector should make his purchases only from a reputable dealer.”
“Could a person create a forgery—or a fake—of the Dutch Blue Error?”
Graustein cocked his head in amusement at me. “To attempt such a thing, sir, would be a monumental waste of time. Monumental.”
I nodded. That had been Ollie Weston’s opinion, I recalled. In fact, aside from some myths about the Blue Error that Ollie had neglected to tell me, Morris Graustein had convinced me that Ollie hadn’t lied about the stamp.
“Mr. Graustein…”
“Morris. Call me Morris, my friend.”
“Morris,” I said, “you’ve been a big help to me. I do appreciate it.”
“Oh, it has been my pleasure, sir.” He raised his glass to me and dipped his head. “My pleasure,” he repeated.
I noticed that his glass was nearly empty. “I suppose we really ought to have one more,” I said.
“Yes, sir. I think we ought. One more glass of this magnificent German beer is what we ought to have.”
12
WHEN I WAS IN college I could tuck away a couple of six-packs in an evening, no sweat. If I respected the demands of my bladder, I could drink beer all day and all night.
No more. My bladder continues to cry for attention, but in addition my eyes grow heavy, my stomach churns and gurgles, my intestines begin to snarl and kink, and a dull meat cleaver commences a slow descent through the center of my forehead.
When Morris Graustein and I finally bumbled out of the little baron Washington Street, night had fallen and the Combat Zone had sprung to life. Red and green neon flashes jabbed painfully at my eyes. The insistent beat of amplified music—what my son Joey had once told me was called “heavy metal”—reverberated in my liquid brain. Graustein shook my hand vigorously, thanked me for the fine beer, and disappeared among the crowds on the street.
I had no interest in the business establishments, nor did the ladies moving in and out of them arouse my curiosity, I wanted only to go home and vomit.
The subway ride did nothing to ease my misery. I stumbled into my apartment, put the heat on under the water, and climbed into the shower, leaving a trail of clothing behind me. I adjusted the flow for faster and hotter than I could normally stand it. Steam filled the room. I breathed the humid air deeply. I thought that if I quit smoking cigarettes I might be able to drink better. I thought that if I quit drinking I could smoke better. I thought that if I quit doing both I could live longer.
I thought none of that would be any fun.
I dialed Deborah’s home number. It rang three times before I heard a click and then her recorded voice. “This is Deborah Martinelli,” said the voice. I’m all business, her tone made clear. I’m an important executive lady, not to be mistaken for a fluff-headed girl. I don’t play. So don’t mess around. “I can’t come to the phone right now. When you hear the tone, please leave your name and message. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” There was a pause, and then she continued, a different edge to her voice. “And if that’s you again, Philip, the answer is still no, it will always be no, and you needn’t leave a message. Just stop calling me, will you?”
Then I heard the beep. I cleared my throat. Talking to an answering machine inhibits me. It’s like being interviewed for television, which has happened to me a couple of times. I can’t think of anything intelligent to say. I mumble. My syntax goes all to hell. I grin foolishly.
Once outside a courtroom where I had just finished winning a hefty award in damages from the city of Lawrence for a client who had been run over by a school bus, a reporter touched my arm and asked if I would mind answering a few questions. Behind him stood a fat, bearded man with a camera perched on his shoulder like a parrot on a pirate. The camera was trained on me. A crowd of people quickly ringed the reporter, the cameraman, and me.
“Ready, Sal?” said the reporter. The cameraman thrust up his thumb. The reporter then turned to me. “All set, Mr. Coyne?”
I smiled stiffly and nodded.
The reporter glanced at the cameraman, hesitated, then said, “I’m here at the Lawrence courthouse with Brady Coyne, the attorney for Jacqueline Callahan, who has just been awarded three-quarters of a million dollars damages for injuries sustained in an accident with a city school bus last December. Mr. Coyne,” he said, turning suddenly to me and smiling his dazzling television smile, “do you expect the city to appeal this decision?”
“Well, jeez, I dunno. I mean, hey, I suppose I would. Wouldn’t you?” That was my speech—this from the same attorney who had the previous afternoon delivered without notes a fifty-minute summation, a model of grammatical exactitude and verbal dexterity. “Jeez, I dunno.”
When I heard myself speak, I looked at the reporter and said, “Hey, I hope this is on tape. Let me try it again, huh?”
“This is the live ‘Action Cam,’ Mr. Coyne,” purred the reporter. He turned to the camera. “Well, that’s the word from the victorious attorney here live at the Lawrence courthouse, Frank and Jenny. Now back to you.”
I felt equally daunted by Deborah’s answering machine. I considered hanging up. Then I figured this was as close as it appeared I was going to get to speaking to her.
“I tried to reach you several times today,” I said to her machine. “I hate talking to machines, by the way. Though your Darlene isn’t a hell of a lot friendlier. And maybe she doesn’t deliver messages. Anyway, to say hi, really. And to suggest you find someplace else to crash for a few days, just in case our friend should decide to pay you another visit. Maybe that’s what you’ve done already. Maybe that’s why you’re not home. Oh, hell. The real reason I called originally was to see if you’d like to have dinner with me tonight. Too late for that, I guess. God, I sound inane. Look. I’ve been doing some thinking about the stamp, and there’s a question I forgot to ask you. So call me, will you?”
I hung up, wishing there was some way I could erase my speech.
I dug out a couple of my old Stan Getz records and put them on the stereo. I realized that I wanted to see Deborah badly. I padded on bare feet into the kitchen and studied my sparse collection of canned goods. No beef stew, no canned spaghetti, no hash. I settled on a can of Friend’s pork and beans. I cranked it open and put it on medium heat. Then I levered the top off the last bottle of Molson’s in my refrigerator.
The phone rang.
“I’m home,” said Deborah. “What about the stamp?”
“Hi.”
“What about the stamp?”
“Look. It’s nothing. Really. I just was concerned about you. You okay? Do you think you should be staying there tonight?”
“I’ll be fine. Darlene’s with me. She’ll stay with me the whole night.”
“Aha,” I said.
“What the hell does ‘aha’ mean?”
“Aha. The whole night. I get it.”
“You get what?”
“Come on, Deborah. I woke up. I told you, I always wake up early. You were sleeping, I was awake. So I came home to change before work, that’s all. I tried to write you a note. I couldn’t do justice…”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Can you talk?”
“Not really. Just a minute, okay?”
I heard muffled voices. Deborah said, “Hang on, will you?” to me, and then there were more voices.
Then I heard her sigh. “Okay. We can talk.”
“So about last night.”
“Don’t worry about last night. No obligation. No problem.”
“Why should I care about that?”
“I just figured, your not answering my calls…”
“I’ve been busy. I do work, you know. Anyhow, I did. I just called you.”
“Well,” I said lamely, “I assumed…”
“What? That I’d accuse you of seducing me? That my delicate feelings would be bruised because you snuck away before I woke up so I would be deprived of the privilege of lavishing a fancy breakfast on my conquering hero after he has swept me off my feet? Come off it, Coyne.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You forgetting how it happened? It was me who crawled into your bed. Remember? It was me who…”
“I do remember, Deborah.”
“Well, okay. Did you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Me, too.”
“I was thinking maybe we could have dinner together,” I said.
“I told you. No obligation. It’s all right. We’re square. Even Steven.”
“You don’t want to have dinner with me?”
“I don’t want you to feel like you have to repay me for the use of my body.”
“That’s not…”
“Yes, it is,” she said firmly. “You are so damn old-fashioned. You think you should feel guilty because we—my goodness, I was going to say ‘fucked’ but I wouldn’t want to offend—because we knew each other in a carnal sort of way. So you keep calling me, you want to make it up to me, to appease your Victorian conscience. Hey, forget it. You owe me nothing. I liked it.”
“You know,” I said after a moment, “I think you’re right. I felt, I guess, that I was taking advantage of you, somehow. And that leaving like I did just made it worse. You’re not upset?”
“Hell, yes, I’m upset. I’m upset that you can’t see me as a person, but as some character in a nineteenth-century English novel.”
“I think I’m beginning to get the picture.”
“Well, good.”
“So. How about dinner?”
“You really don’t have to do this.”
“God damn it, I want to do this.”
“I don’t think dinner.”
“Look…”
“I think a movie.”
“A movie?”
“Yeah. A movie. Anything wrong with taking a girl to a movie? Not sophisticated enough for the big-city lawyer? Don’t forget, I know you’re a closet popcorn freak, so don’t try to fool me. Anyhow, we’ll make it an Italian movie. With subtitles. That sophisticated enough for you?”
“Sure. It probably won’t compare to James Bond, but it’ll probably do.”
“There’s a little theater in Maynard. Know it?”
“Suppose I pick you up there.”
“Here? At home?”
“Sure. Make it a proper date.”
“Maybe a little fooling around before we leave?”
“No, I didn’t mean that. It would just…”
“I rather thought we’d save the fooling around for afterward,” she said. “So meet me at the theater. I really want to see the film.”
“Well, okay.”
“Know where it is?”
“I’ll find it.”
“What about the stamp?”
“Oh. That.” I hesitated. “Okay, I admit it. That was to try to persuade you to call me.”
“You lied, then, eh? No news on the stamp?”
“I did have a question which is related. It’s this. Do you know where your father kept his handgun?”
“He didn’t have a gun.”
“He had one when I was with him.”
“I’m sure he didn’t own a gun.”
“Oh, well,” I said.
“Why? What about a gun?”
“The police are looking for a twenty-two caliber pistol. When I met your father, he said he had a twenty-two in his pocket. Albert Dopplinger was killed with a twenty-two.”
“But I thought…”
“Sure. Albert was killed after your father. It just seemed there might be a link.”
“Well, of course there’s a link,” she said. “Somebody killed him, then he killed your friend Albert, then he broke into my house.” Her voice went low and dramatic. “Will he bash my head in, do you think, or will he shoot me?”
“Jesus, Deborah.”
“Fear not. Darlene will protect me. Believe me, she is fearsome. Speaking of which—or of whom—she’s coming back in now. So I better hang up. See you.”
“Maynard. About nine.”
“Yes.”
Deborah was waiting for me in the lobby of the theater in Maynard. She hugged a big cardboard bucket to her chest. When she saw me she held up the bucket and grinned. “Popcorn. I’ve got the tickets. It’s about to start. Let’s go in.”
The film had no plot that I could discern. The scene kept shifting from idle rich, middle-aged Italians lounging aboard a yacht moored in the deserted cove of a tropical island to black-and-white flashbacks of a World War II internment center. First we were treated to close-ups of lush flesh, all bronze and copper, strapped into bikinis. Then a sudden shift to protruding ribs, empty eyes, and fingers picking at scabs. Peeled fruits—papayas, mangoes, bananas—slipping between shiny red lips. An infant with a distended belly sucking at a flaccid breast. Beringed fingers languidly wandering over fat thighs, brushing blond hair, gripping a wet cocktail glass. Shaved skulls and toothless grimaces.
All overlaid with a heavy Wagnerian score.
Afterward we had coffee at Deborah’s kitchen table.
“It was a sad film, didn’t you think?” she said.
“It was a sad excuse for a film.”
“Not enough action for you?”
“I just don’t like having my symbols crammed down my craw, that’s all. Every Italian film I’ve ever seen seems hellbent on expiating the great Fascist guilt.”
She shrugged. “The popcorn was good.”
“The popcorn was the second-best I’ve had recently.”
“You going to stay for breakfast this time?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Up to you,” she said.
I woke up in the gray dawn to the honking of migrating Canada geese. I pictured the big wedge in the sky on its southward journey. Hudson Bay to Chesapeake Bay. Rain pattered gently outside, dripping onto the roof from the pines that towered over it. A soft breeze soughed through the branches.
Deborah lay on her back beside me, her black hair fanned out over the pillow. She breathed through her mouth. Her head was turned toward me. Her hand rested lightly on my thigh. I lifted myself onto my elbow and bent over to kiss her forehead. Her silver eyes snapped open.
“You leaving?”
“Go to sleep,” I said.
“Call me sometime,” she mumbled, her eyes falling shut.
“I’m staying for breakfast,” I said. The clamor of the geese had faded into the damp dawn. The rain still sifted through the pines. I lay back into Deborah’s warm bed and slept.
13
ZERK AND I WORKED late on Thursday. The paperwork had been piling up, and I wanted to clean it away before the weekend. Deborah and I were driving to the Cape on Saturday. We’d take potluck at whatever restaurants might still be open and find a room in an old country inn. We’d see how many lighthouses we could find, we’d walk the beaches with our shoes in our hands, and we’d make love several times. I didn’t want to have to worry about my business.
I ran out around seven o’clock and brought back ham and Swiss cheese sandwiches and coffee while Zerk typed in the blanks on a couple of wills. While we ate, I grilled him on Massachusetts contract law. I told him I thought he was ready to take the bar exam any time. Then we went back to work.
At nine o’clock I said to him, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“We’re nowhere near done,” he said.
“Fill your briefcase. We’ll take it to my place.”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
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He followed me in his own car. When we got to my apartment building on Atlantic Avenue I told Jerry, the guard at the gate to the underground parking garage, that a man in a yellow Volkswagen would be right along. His name was Garrett, he was my associate, and he should be allowed to park in the visitors’ section. Then I rode down the ramp, and when the bar lifted I drove in, circled around a couple of concrete pillars, and tucked my BMW into my reserved parking slot.
I grabbed my briefcase, slung my topcoat over my arm, locked up the car, and went to the elevator. Zerk would have to park on the other side of the lot, and it would take him a couple of minutes to walk across to the elevator. I poked the UP button and waited for the box to slide down the cables to me. I leaned against the cement wall, sighed deeply, and lit a Winston.
When the soft voice murmured into my ear, I felt as if a spider was crawling up the back of my neck. I had heard that voice before. Most recently it had said, “Sorry, pal,” shortly before I tumbled into an unwelcome chloroform sleep. It took me a moment to remember the other time I had heard it.
“Just relax, Mr. Coyne,” the voice said. “I’m going to be going along with you.”
He had a narrow, sly face and a neatly trimmed black beard salted with gray. Both of his hands were thrust into the side pockets of his coat. One of the pockets bulged.
“Why, it’s Mr. Schwartz,” I said. “Haven’t seen you since Shaughnessey’s wake.”
He smiled and inclined his head. “I’m flattered that you remember me.”
“Friend of Francis Shaughnessey is a friend of mine,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“Take me to your apartment. And don’t try anything, please. This is a gun in my pocket.”
“This is really tacky.”
His smile was decidedly hostile. “I’m sorry if my style offends you. Perhaps I lack imagination.”
The bell on the elevator chimed. As the doors slid open I saw Zerk hurrying toward us.
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