Keller's Homecoming

by Lawrence Block

  “You have some ID?”

  To sit in a steambath? Keller had a full set of ID, but nothing that proclaimed him to be Timothy Hannan.

  He patted his pockets. “No idea I’d need it,” he said. “I don’t like to leave my wallet in a locker.”

  The clerk, whose totem animal was clearly the weasel, explained that all guests had to show identification. “I’m afraid I can’t make an exception,” he said.

  Oh, I’ll bet you can, Keller thought. “Fine,” he said, and turned toward the door. “I’ll just tell the abbot that the fellow behind the desk took his job a little too seriously.”

  He took three steps, but before he could take a fourth the weasel must have imagined the conversation he’d wind up having with Fr. O’Herlihy. In view of the abbot’s prominence, he suggested, and because Mr. Hannan hadn’t been informed of standard procedures, well, perhaps these were special circumstances. And here’s a locker key, and to get to the locker room, all you do is . . .

  Well, Keller thought, now for the hard part.

  In the locker room, one flight below ground level, two men in their fifties were discussing a proposed corporate merger while they got back into their business attire. “These things always take too long,” one of them said. “But then everything’s like that these days. I’m with my girlfriend the other day and I realized I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I didn’t want the pleasure, I wanted the memory of the pleasure.”

  The other nodded. “Some days,” he said, “all I want is to move everything in my life from the In box to the Out box.”

  Keller picked up a towel and found the right locker. He stripped and loaded his clothes into it. There was a wooden hanger for his jacket, another for his shirt. Before he took off his pants, he took his home-made weapon from his pocket. He’d bought a few yards of picture-hanging wire at the drugstore the night before, and in his room he’d bent it back and forth until he’d equipped himself with a piece two feet long. He’d fashioned a loop at either end and wound up with what ought to be a perfectly serviceable garrote, which he now wound around his left wrist.

  It looked like a bracelet, an arts and crafts project from some facility for the developmentally-challenged, but when Keller slipped his hand through the locker key’s elastic band, it pretty much blended in. And he could have it off his wrist and his hands in its loops in a matter of seconds. He’d spent half an hour last night trying, and if practice hadn’t made him perfect, it had made his movements swift and sure.

  He secured the towel around his middle and headed for the steam room.

  And walked into a fog bank. One thing he somehow hadn’t taken into account was the presence of steam, though it now seemed to him an obvious component of a steam room, like water in a swimming pool. The steam was hot, and right there in his face, and he couldn’t really see anything, just colorless shapes looming in the colorless mist.

  While he couldn’t see much, that didn’t mean he was himself invisible. He learned as much when a voice he recognized said, “Hannan? Over here.”

  He blinked, moved toward the voice. Either the steam was clearing or his eyes were getting used to it, because he could see a little better now. There were seven men—well, he could only assume they were men—seated on ledges on three of the room’s sides. The abbot of the Thessalonians was all by himself at the extreme right of the far wall.

  “Sit beside me, Hannan. No, get closer, but not so close that your leg is touching mine. Ye might like that but I would not.”

  Keller so arranged himself that there was a good six-inch gap between his leg and O’Herlihy’s. He’d have preferred to be on the man’s other side, so that his wire-wrapped wrist would be shielded from view, but there was a wall on that side.

  “Now remove the towel.”

  Oh, Jesus, Keller thought.

  “So that I may assure myself you’re not wearing a wire, lad. I’ve no interest in any part of your wretched self that’s beneath the towel.”

  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, this 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 Springs 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 fu
ll of witnesses, against a man twice his size who’d yank it out of his hands and lash him with it.

  Right.

  “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 peace 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 #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 steambath 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 it 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 this 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 catalogue, 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 catalogue and stared intently at it. Then he closed his eyes and hel
d the image in his mind—the vivid color, details of the design, the handstamped 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.

  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.