Keller's Homecoming
Date: 2016-05-07 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: LB Productions

Keller’s Homecoming

Lawrence Block

Copyright © 2011, Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved

Publication History: Hit Me, Mulholland, 2013

Ebook by QA Productions

A Lawrence Block Production

Keller’s Homecoming

Keller, his suitcase unpacked, found himself curiously reluctant to leave his hotel room. He turned on the TV, channel-surfed without finding anything that held his attention, threw himself down on the bed, picked himself up, test-drove every chair in the room, and finally told himself to get over it. He wasn’t sure what it was that he had to get over, but he wasn’t going to find it sitting in his room. Or lying down, or pacing the floor.

One explanation occurred to him in the elevator. Keller, who’d lived all his life in and around New York, had never had occasion to stay at a New York hotel before. Why would he? For years he’d had a wonderfully comfortable apartment on First Avenue in the Forties, and unless he was out of town, or had been invited to spend the night in the bed of some congenial female companion, that was where he slept.

Nowadays the only female companion in his life, congenial or otherwise, was his wife, Julia, and he lived in her house in New Orleans’ Garden District. His name in New Orleans—and, for that matter, everywhere he went—was Edwards, Nicholas Edwards. He was a partner in a construction business, doing post-Katrina residential rehabilitation, and his partner called him Nick, as did the men they worked with. Julia called him Nicholas, except in intimate moments when she sometimes called him Keller.

But she didn’t do that so often anymore. Oh, the intimate moments were no less frequent, but she was apt to call him Nicholas then. And, he thought, why not? That was his name. Nicholas Edwards. That’s what it said on his driver’s license, issued to him by the State of Louisiana, and on his passport, issued to him by the United States of America. And that was the name on every credit card and piece of ID in his wallet, so how could you say that wasn’t who he was? And why shouldn’t his wife call him by his rightful name?

His daughter, Jenny, called him Daddy.

He realized that he missed them both, Jenny and Julia, and it struck him that this was ridiculous. They’d driven him to the airport that morning, so it had been only a matter of hours since he’d seen them, and he went longer than that without seeing them on any busy work day. Of course there’d been fewer busy work days lately, the economy being what it was, and that in fact had a little to do with this visit to New York, but even so . . .

How you do go on, he told himself. And, shaking his head, walked through the lobby and out onto the street.

His hotel, the Savoyard, stood at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Fifty-third Street. He took a moment to get his bearings, then headed uptown. There was a Starbucks two blocks from his hotel, and he waited at the counter while a young woman with a snake coiled around her upper arm—well, the inked representation of a snake, not an actual living reptile—made sure the barista understood exactly what she did and didn’t want in her latte. Keller couldn’t imagine caring quite that much about the composition of a cup of coffee, but neither could he imagine getting tattooed, so he let it go. When it was finally his turn, he asked for a small black coffee.

“That would be Tall,” said the barista, herself sporting a tattoo and a few piercings. She drew the coffee without waiting for his reply, which was just as well, because Keller didn’t have one. The tables were all taken, but there was a high counter where you could stand while your coffee cooled. He did, and when it was cool enough to drink he drank it, and when he was done he left.

By then he’d come up with another explanation for his disinclination to leave his hotel room. He wasn’t used to being in a hotel in New York, and consequently he wasn’t quite prepared for what they cost. This one, decent enough but hardly palatial, was charging him close to five hundred dollars for no more space than they gave you in a Days Inn.

Spend that much on a room, you wanted to get your money’s worth. If you never left the room, it would only be costing you $40 an hour. If, on the other hand, you used it solely to sleep and shower—

At Fifty-sixth Street he crossed to the west side of the avenue, and at Fifty-seventh Street he turned to his left and walked about a third of a block, stopping to look into the window of a shop that sold watches and earrings. Once Keller had heard one woman tell another on QVC that you couldn’t have too many earrings, a statement that he had found every bit as baffling as the snake tattoo.

Keller wasn’t really interested in looking at earrings, and it wasn’t long before he’d turned to gaze instead across Fifty-seventh Street. Number 119 was directly across the street, and Keller stayed where he was and tried to pay attention to the people entering and leaving the office building. People came and went, and Keller didn’t see anyone who looked familiar to him, but Fifty-seventh was one of the wide crosstown streets, so he wasn’t getting a really good look at the faces of those who were coming and going.

It wasn’t the hotel room, he realized. The price of it, the novelty of being in a New York hotel. He hadn’t wanted to leave the room because he was afraid to be out in public in New York.

Where there were people who used to know him as Keller, and who knew too that one fine day in Des Moines, that very Keller had assassinated a popular charismatic Midwestern governor with presidential aspirations.

Except he didn’t. It was a frame, he was the fall guy, and it cost him his comfortable New York life and the name under which he’d lived it. When all was said and done he didn’t have any regrets, because the life he led in New Orleans was worlds better than what he’d left behind. But that hadn’t been the plan of the man who set him up.

That plan had called for Keller to be arrested, or better yet killed outright, and it had taken all Keller’s resourcefulness to keep it from turning out that way. The man who’d done the planning was dead now, thanks to Keller, and so was the man who’d helped him, and that was as far as Keller saw any need to carry it. Someone somewhere had pulled the trigger and gunned down the governor, but Keller figured that faceless fellow was probably dead himself, murdered by the man who’d hired him, a loose end carefully tied off. And if not, well, the best of luck to him. He’d just been a man doing a job, and that was something Keller could relate to.

And Keller? He had a new name and a new life. So what was he doing back in New York?

He walked back to the corner of Sixth and Fifty-seventh, waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and walked to the entrance of 119 West Fifty-seventh. This was a building he’d entered a dozen or more times over the years, and always for the same purpose. There had been a firm called Stampazine on the second floor, and every couple of months they held a Saturday auction, and there was always some interesting and affordable material up for grabs. Keller would sit in a wooden chair with a catalog in one hand and a pen in the other, and every now and then he would raise a forefinger, and sometimes he’d wind up the high bidder. At six or six-thirty he’d pick up his lots, pay cash for them, and go home happy.

Stampazine was gone now. Had they closed before or after he’d left New York? He couldn’t remember.

He recognized the uniformed lobby attendant. “Peachpit,” he said, and the man nodded in recognition—not of Keller but of Keller’s purpose. “Seven,” he said, and Keller went over and waited for the elevator.

Peachpit Auction Galleries was a cut or two above Stampazine. Keller had never visited them during his New York years, but after he was settled in New Orleans an ad in Linn’s Stamp News send him to the Peachpit website. He bid on a couple of lots—unsuccessfully, someone else outbid him—but, having registered, he began to receive their catalogs several times a year. They were magnificently printed, with a color photograph of every lot, and he always found an abundance of choice material.

There was a way to bid online in real time, during the actual floor auction, and he’d planned on doing so but always seemed to be at work during their midweek auctions. Then a few months ago he’d had the day off—he and Donny had the whole week off, actually, although they’d have preferred it otherwise. And he remembered the Peachpit sale, and logged on and went through what you had to go through to bid, and he found the whole process impossibly nervewracking. An auction was anxiety-ridden anyway, but when you showed up in person you could at least see what was going on, and know that the guy with the gavel could see you in return. Online, well, he supposed a person could get the hang of it, but he hadn’t, and wasn’t inclined to try again.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Julia and Jenny walked into his upstairs office—Daddy’s Stamp Room—to find him shaking his head over the new Peachpit catalog. Julia asked what was the matter.

“Oh, this,” he said, tapping the catalog. “There are some lots I’d like to buy.”

“So?

“Well, the sale’s in New York.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Daddy ’tamps,” said Jenny.

“Yes, Daddy’s stamps,” Keller said, and picked up his daughter and set her on his lap. “See?” he said, pointing at a picture in the catalog, a German Colonial issue from Kiauchau showing the Kaiser’s yacht, Hohenzollern. “Kiauchau,” he told Jenny, “was an area of two hundred square miles in southeast China. The Germans grabbed it in 1897, and then made arrangements to lease it from China. I don’t imagine the Chinese had a lot of choice in the matter. Isn’t that a pretty stamp?”

“Pity ’tamp,” Jenny said, and there the matter lay.

Until the phone rang two days later. It was Dot, calling from Sedona, and the first thing she did was apologize for calling at all.

“I told myself I’d just call to see how you’re doing,” she said, “and to find out the latest cute thing Jenny said, but you know something, Keller? I’m too damn old to start fooling myself.”

Dot still called him Keller. And that figured, because that’s who she was calling to talk to. Not Nick Edwards, who fixed houses, but Keller. Who, in a manner of speaking, fixed people.

“The last thing I should be doing,” she went on, “is calling you. There’s two reasons why this is a mistake. First of all, you’re not in the business anymore. I dragged you back in once, that business in Dallas, and it wasn’t your fault that it didn’t go off perfectly. But it wasn’t what you really wanted, and we both agreed it was what the British call a one-off.”

“What does that mean?”

“One time only, I think. What’s the difference what it means? You went to Dallas, you came back from Dallas, end of story.”

But if it was the end of the story, what was this? A sequel?

“That’s one reason,” she said. “There’s another.”

“Oh?”

“Three words,” she said. “New. York. City.”

“Oh.”

“What am I even thinking, Keller, calling you when I’ve got a job in your old hometown? I didn’t throw New York jobs your way when you lived there, because you lived there.”

“I worked a couple of New York assignments.”

“Just a couple, and they weren’t exactly what you’d call problem-free. But at least you could walk around the city without wearing a mask. Now it’s the one place in the world where it’s not safe for you to be you, where even a waitress in a coffee shop can take a second look at you and reach for a telephone, and here I am calling you with a New York assignment, and that’s as far as this is going, because I’m hanging up.”

“Wait a minute,” Keller said.

The receptionist at Peachpit told him to have a seat, and he leafed through an old auction catalog while he waited. Then a stoop-shouldered man with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened came to show him inside and seat him in a stackable white plastic chair at a long table. He had already prepared a slip of paper with the numbers of the lots he wanted to inspect, and he looked them over carefully when they were brought to him.

The stamps were tucked into individual two-inch square pockets of a chemically inert plastic, each plastic pocket stapled to its own sheet of paper bearing the lot number, estimated value, and opening bid. Keller had brought a pair of tongs, and could have taken out a stamp for closer inspection, but there was no need, and the tongs remained in his breast pocket. Given that the catalog had already shown him clear color photos of all of these stamps, it probably wasn’t necessary that he look at them in the first place. But he’d learned that actually looking at a stamp, up close and personal, helped him decide just how much he really wanted to own it.

He’d requested a dozen lots, all of them stamps he needed, all of them stamps he genuinely wanted—and he didn’t want them any less now that he was getting a look at them. But he wasn’t going to buy them all, and this would help him decide which ones to buy only if they went cheap, and which ones deserved a firmer commitment. And, finally, which he’d go all out to get, hanging on like grim death, and—

“Hello there! Haven’t seen you in a while, have I?”

Keller froze in his white plastic chair.

“She loves watching you work with your stamps,” Julia said. “‘Daddy tamps,’ she says. She has a little trouble with the S-T combination.”

“I suppose philately is out of the question.”

“For now. But before you know it she’ll be the only kid in her class who knows where Obock is.”

“Just now I was telling her about Kiauchau.”

“I know. But see, I know how to pronounce Obock.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “There’s something we have to talk about.”

They sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee and he said, “I’ve been keeping something from you, and I can’t do that. Ever since we found each other I’ve been able to say whatever’s been on my mind, and now I can’t, and I don’t like the way it feels.”

“You met someone in Dallas.”

He looked at her.

“A woman,” she said.

“Oh God,” he said. “It’s not what you think.”

“It’s not?”

If he had to kill this man, how would he do it? He was close to sixty, and he looked soft and pudgy, so you couldn’t call him a hard target. The closest thing Keller had to a weapon was the pair of stamp tongs in his breast pocket, but he’d made do often enough with nothing but his bare hands, and—

“I guess you don’t recognize me,” the fellow was saying. “Been a few years, and it’s safe to say I put on a few pounds. It’s a rare year when I don’t. And the last time we saw each other the two of us were on a lower floor.”

Keller looked at him.

“Or am I wrong? Stampazine? I never missed their auctions, and I’d swear I saw you there a few times. I don’t know if we ever talked, and if I ever heard your name I’ve long since forgotten it, but I’m pretty good with faces. Faces and watermarks, they both tend to stick in my mind.” He stuck out a hand. “Irv,” he said. “Irv Feldspar.”

“Nicholas Edwards.”

“A damn shame Stampazine’s gone,” Feldspar said. “Bert Taub’s health was bad for years, and finally he closed up shop, and then the word got around that he missed the business and wanted to get back into it, and the next thing we knew he was dead.”

“A hell of a thing,” Keller said, figuring something along those lines was expected of him.

“Plenty of other auctions in this city,” Feldspar said, “but you could just show up at Stampazine and there’d be plenty of low-priced material to bid on. No fancy catalogs, no internet or phone bidders. I don’t think you and I ever bumped heads, did we? I’m strictly U.S. myself.”

“Everything but U.S.,” Keller said. “Worldwide to 1940.”

“So I was never bidding against you, so why would you remember me?”

“I didn’t come all that often,” Keller said. “I live out of town, so—”

“What, Jersey? Connecticut?”

“New Orleans, so—”

“You didn’t come in special for Bert’s auctions.”

“Hardly. I just showed up when I happened to be in town.”

“On business? What kind of business are you in, if I may ask?”

Keller, letting a trace of the South find its way into his speech, explained that he was retired, and then answered the inevitable Katrina questions, until he cleared his throat and said he really wanted to focus on the lots he was examining. And Irv Feldspar apologized, said his wife told him he never knew when he was boring people, and that she was convinced he was suffering from Ass-Backward Syndrome.

Keller nodded, concentrated on the stamps.

Julia said, “I knew there was something. Something’s been different ever since you got back from Dallas, and I couldn’t say what it was, so I had to think it was another woman. And you’re a man, for heaven’s sake, and you were on the other side of the state line, and things happen. I know that. And I could stand that, if that’s what it was, and if what happened in Dallas stayed in Dallas. If it was going to be an ongoing thing, if she was important to you, well, maybe I could stand that and maybe I couldn’t.”

“That wasn’t it.”

“No, it wasn’t, was it?” She reached to lay her hand on top of his. “What a relief. My husband wasn’t fooling around with another woman. He was killing her.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Do you remember the night we met?”

“Of course.”

“You saved my life. I was taking a shortcut through the park, and I was about to be raped and killed, and you saved me.”

“I don’t know what got into me.”

“You saved me,” she said, “and you killed that man right in front of me. With your bare hands. You grabbed him and broke his neck.”

“Well.”

“That was how we met. When Jenny’s old enough to want to know how Mommy and Daddy met and fell in love, we may have to give her an edited version. But that’s not for a while yet. How was it? In Dallas? I know it went smoothly enough, and I think it’s pure poetry that the man you framed wound up confessing.”

“Well, he thinks he did it.”

“And in a sense he did, because if he hadn’t made that first phone call you would never have left the hotel.”

“I probably wouldn’t even have gone. I’d have sent in a few mail bids and let it go at that.”

“So he got what was coming to him, and it doesn’t sound as though either of them were terribly nice people.”

“You wouldn’t want to have them to the house for dinner.”

“I didn’t think so. But what I wanted to know was how was it for you? How did it feel? You hadn’t done anything like this in a long time.”

“A couple of years.”

“And your life is different from what it was, so maybe you’re different, too.”

“I thought of that.”

“And?”

He thought it over for a moment. “It felt the same as always,” he said. “I had a job to do and I had to figure out how.”

“And then you had to do it.”

“That’s right.”

“And you felt the satisfaction of having solved a problem.”

“Uh-huh.”

“At which point you could buy that stamp without dipping into capital.”

“We only collected the first payment,” he said, “but even so it more than covered the cost of the stamps I bought.”

“Well, that’s a plus, isn’t it? And you didn’t have any trouble living with what you’d done?”

“I had trouble living with the secret.”

“Not being able to mention it to me, you mean.”

“That’s right.”

She nodded. “Having to keep a secret. That must have been difficult. There are things I don’t bother to tell you, but nothing I couldn’t tell you, if I wanted to. How do you feel now?”

“Better.”

“I can tell that. Your whole energy is different. Do you want to know how I feel?”

“Yes.”

“Relieved, obviously. But also a little troubled, because now I seem to be the one with a secret.”

“Oh?”

“Shall I tell you my secret? See, the danger is you might think less of me if you knew.” Before he could respond she heaved a theatrical sigh. “Oh, I can’t keep secrets. When you told me what happened in Dallas? What you did?”

“Yes?”

“It got me hot.”

“Oh?”

“Is that weird? Of course it is, it’s deeply weird. Here’s something I’m positive I never told you. It got me hot when you killed the rapist in the park. What it mostly did was it made me feel all safe and secure and protected, but it also got me hot. I’m hot right now and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“If we put our heads together,” he said, “maybe we can come up with something.”

Back in his room at the Savoyard, Keller figured it out. Asperger’s Syndrome—that’s what Feldspar had, or what his wife said he had.

Though Ass-Backward Syndrome wasn’t a bad fit.

“If I’d known what it would lead to,” he said, “I’d have told you right away.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I was afraid, I guess. That it would ruin things between us.”

“So you didn’t say anything.”

“No.”

“And then you did.”

“Right.”

She didn’t say anything, but he felt besieged by her thoughts, bombarded with them. He said, “I figured I was done with it, I’d never do it again, so why bother mentioning it? I could just keep my mouth shut and seal off the episode and let it fade out into the past.”

“Like the faces you picture in your mind.”

“Something like that, yes.”

“I guess you got another phone call.”

“This afternoon.”

“I noticed something was different,” she said, “when Jenny and I got home from Advanced Sandbox. How’s Dot these days?”

“She’s good.” He cleared his throat. “I reminded her what I’d told her right after Dallas. That I didn’t want to do this sort of thing anymore.”

“But she called you anyway.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s complicated.”

Keller, who’d found it hard to leave his hotel room earlier, now found it impossible to spend any time in it. He showered, got dressed, turned the TV on and then off again, and went out.

In New Orleans, Keller drove his pickup truck for business and Julia’s car on other occasions. If he walked north for a couple of blocks, he could hop on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar. And there was a fair network of buses, and it was never hard to get a cab.

For all the choices available to him, Keller did a lot of walking. New Orleans was one of a relatively small number of pedestrian-friendly American cities. Not only could you get around on foot and find interesting things to look at while you did so, but New Orleaneans—total strangers—would actually greet you in passing with a smile and a kind word. The ones who didn’t might well draw a gun and hold you up, post-Katrina street crime being a definite problem, but among the law-abiding citizenry you were apt to encounter a high level of politeness and genuine warmth. “Lovely morning, innit?” “Just grand! And how are y’all keeping this fine day?”

New York was at least as much of a city for walkers, to the point where Keller couldn’t understand why some people lived in the city and still felt compelled to own cars. The sidewalks might not be as quaintly friendly as those of New Orleans—there was, after all, good reason for the popularity of the line “Can you tell me how to get to the Empire State Building or should I just go fuck myself?”—but nevertheless it was a walker’s city, and Keller didn’t have to think about it. He left his hotel and started walking.

After his shower, he’d checked in the mirror to see if he needed a shave. He’d decided he could wait until morning, and looked a moment longer at the face Irv Feldspar had been able to recognize. It had changed some since Feldspar (or anyone else in New York) had last had a look at it. Back then his hair had been dark brown, almost black, and it had grown further down on his forehead. When he surfaced in New Orleans, with his face in newspapers and on TV, not to mention Post Office walls, he wore a cap all the time, and tried to figure out how to dye his hair gray.

Julia had dyed his hair for him, not gray but a sort of tan shade she called mouse-brown. And she cut his hair short, and gave him a receding hairline. He’d had to shave the stubble where the hairline grew back, but he didn’t have to do that anymore, as Time worked its own barbering tricks on him. She still touched up the dye job periodically, but the dark roots she’d had to lighten were now evolving into grey roots she needed to color.

And yet for all that transformation, worked by Julia and by the years, a guy Keller didn’t recall at all had placed him immediately. Of course he’d seen him in context, he knew him from one stamp auction and recognized him at another, so if they’d run into each other on a subway platform, say, Feldspar might not have given him a second glance.

If he had, Keller could have thrown him in front of a train.

“You may have read about the case,” Dot said. “Or caught it on the evening news. Political corruption in northern New Jersey.”

“I’m shocked,” Keller said.

“I know. It’s almost impossible to believe. Elected public officials taking bribes, laundering money, selling kidneys—”

“Selling kidneys?”

“So I understand, though who’d want to buy a politician’s kidney is a question I’d be hard-put to answer. You must have seen something in the paper or on TV.”

“In New Orleans,” he told her, “we don’t pay much mind to political corruption in faraway places.”

“Y’all like to eat your own cooking?”

“There you go,” he said.

“A lot of people got arrested, Keller, and a couple of them went so far as to resign, but most of them are out on bail and still collecting their municipal paychecks. But it looks as though they’ll all have to step down sooner or later, and the abbot will probably have to give up his position, and—”

“The abbot?”

“Well, I don’t see how he can go on heading the monastery.”

“There’s an abbot heading a monastery?”

“Keller, that’s what they do. Not all of them can be partners with Lou Costello.” She paused, and he realized too late that she’d been waiting for him to laugh. When he didn’t she said, “I don’t know how any of this works. I guess he can go on being a monk, unless he gets defrocked. And as for the other monks, well, I guess they’ll go on doing what they do. What do they do, anyway?”

“Pray,” Keller guessed. “Bake bread. Make cordials.”

“Cordials?”

“Benedictine? Chartreuse?”

“Monks make those? I thought that was Seagram’s.”

“Monks started it. Maybe they sold the business. I think basically they pray, and maybe work in the garden.”

“The garden-variety monks work in the garden,” she suggested,. “The laundry-variety keep themselves occupied with money and kidneys. See, the abbot was in cahoots with all the politicians.”

“Felonious monks,” Keller said. “Dot? You don’t think that was funny?”

“I chuckled a little,” she said, “the first time I heard it.”

“I just made it up.”

“You and every newscaster in the country.”

“Oh.”

“Long story short,” she said, “here’s the long and the short of it. The abbot’s the guy who knows where all the kidneys are buried. If he talks, nobody walks. Keller? You beginning to get a sense of what your role’s going to be?”

To Keller, the word monastery called up an image of a walled medieval building, set off somewhere in a secluded rural location, its design combining elements of a Romanesque cathedral and a fortified castle. There’d be those narrow windows, to shoot arrows out of, and there’d be places to sit on the battlements, whatever exactly battlements were, while you poured boiling oil on people. And there’d be a dungeon, and there’d be little individual cells where the little individual monks slept. And there’d be grains of rice, to kneel on during prayer.

And singing, there’d be lots of singing. Gregorian chants, mostly, but maybe some sea chanteys, too, because Keller tended to mix up chants and chanteys in his mind. He knew the difference, but he mixed them up anyhow.

You wouldn’t look for a monastery on a quiet residential block in the East Thirties. You wouldn’t expect to find a monastic order housed in a five-story limestone-front row house in Murray Hill.

Yet there it was.

It stood on the downtown side of West Thirty-sixty Street between Park and Madison, flanked on either side by similar structures. A small brass plaque identified one of them as the Embassy of the Republic of Chad, while the other looked to be what all of these houses had once been—an elegant private residence. Between them, the building whose plaque read simply Thessalonian House looked no more monastic than either of its neighbors.

Dot had referred to Paul Vincent O’Herlihy, abbot of the Thessalonians, as a fine figure of a man, giving the words a touch of stage-Irish lilt. Keller knew why when he checked him out via Google Images. The abbot was tall and broad-shouldered, heavily built but not fat, with a leonine head and a full mane of white hair. He had one of those open faces which tend to inspire trust, often unwarranted, and Keller could see right away how, if this man were to become a monk, he might very well wind up as the man in charge. With the same looks and bearing he could as readily have become some city’s commissioner of police, or chairman of the board of a Wall Street firm, or an insurance company CEO. Or, back when Tammany ran New York, he might have been mayor.

Likes his food, Keller had thought, noting O’Herlihy’s bulk, the fit of his jacket, and in his head he heard the voice of a middleaged Irishwoman: “Ah, but doesn’t he carry it well?” Likes a drink, Keller added, taking note of the florid complexion, the network of broken blood vessels in the cheeks and nose, “Ah, shure, and don’t they call that a strong man’s weakness?”

He was in there now, this fine figure of a man. He’d been there when a crew of Federal agents came to the door and rang the bell. (If there was one; Keller noted a great brass door knocker mounted in the middle of the door, and perhaps that had been what the Feds used to make their presence known.)

Keller liked the idea of them using the knocker. When they rounded up drug dealers, they generally used a battering ram and knocked the door down. That was how they did it on TV, anyway, and it was impressively dramatic. But when they had to pay a call on a man of God, they didn’t even need to disturb the tranquility with a doorbell’s chime. A discreet knock would serve.

So they’d knocked, Keller decided. And he knew that the visit had been no surprise to Fr. O’Herlihy, that he’d been forewarned by a phone call and was accordingly forearmed, with his attorney at his side when the door opened.

Had they cuffed him for the ride downtown? It was usually mandatory, but maybe they’d spared him that indignity. Keller couldn’t remember seeing news photos of a priest in handcuffs, and it was the kind of image that tended to stay with you.

Keller walked to the end of the block, crossed the street, and looked back at where he’d been. Having posted bond, Father O’Herlihy was now free to go where he pleased, but Keller was willing to bet he was under self-imposed house arrest, living the cloistered life in Thessalonian House. He’d be comfortable there, and those walls would keep him safe from reporters and photographers and other intrusive types.

And, of course, from Keller.

Suppose he just walked up and thumped away with the brass doorknocker? Somebody would open the door. And who was to say it wouldn’t be the man himself?

Keller, who was ordinarily inclined to take his time, had been in a hurry once in Albuquerque. And so he’d gone straight to the home of the designated victim, walked from his rented car to the front door, and rang the bell. The door was opened by the man in the photo they’d sent Keller, who’d promptly killed him and left. The girl at the Hertz counter said, “So soon? Is there something wrong with it?” He said something about a change in plans, and flew back to New York.

Keller couldn’t believe the duty of opening the front door would fall to the abbot, not even in more ordinary circumstances. So Keller would have to deal with whoever came to the door, and then there’d probably be other people to deal with before he got to O’Herlihy.

He turned his back on the monastery and started walking.

Keller had lived for years in an Art Deco apartment building on First Avenue in the Forties. He had rented the apartment, then bought it when the building went co-op. Since then it had appreciated enormously in value, although he supposed it must have dropped some in the current recession.

Not that it mattered, because he was pretty sure he didn’t own it anymore. How could he? He hadn’t paid the maintenance since his world turned upside-down and left him running for his life. It had probably taken the co-op board a while to figure out how to proceed, but they’d have long since worked it out, and someone else would be living there now.

It was, he thought, stupid to walk over there, stupid to show his face in his old neighborhood. But he couldn’t seem to help himself, and while his mind wandered here and there—thinking about O’Herlihy, thinking about stamps, thanking about Julia and Jenny—his feet insisted on carrying him to the block he used to live on, and planted him in a doorway directly across the street.

There was a light on in his window.

He felt very strange. Years and years ago, he’d had occasion to walk down the suburban street where he’d lived as a boy. By then it had been ages since he and his mother lived there, and he’d never had an urge to go back, and that unplanned visit hadn’t had much impact. Someone had painted it another color, he’d noted, but the old basketball backboard was still mounted on the garage. It seemed to him that the shrubbery looked different, though he couldn’t have said just how.

And he’d turned away and never gave the place another thought.

Now, though, it was somehow different. He hadn’t moved out of this apartment. He was just there, and then one day he wasn’t. He’d sneaked back in the dead of night, slipped the doorman a few bucks to look the other way, and went upstairs to retrieve his stamp collection. Only he was too late for that . . .

And so he’d gone off, never to return. Until now, when he was suddenly back in New York. He wasn’t Keller anymore, and he didn’t live here anymore, and just what did he think he was doing here, anyway?

He walked halfway across the street until he could get a look at the doorman. The fellow was wearing the uniform they all wore, maroon with gold piping, but as far as Keller could make out there was nothing else familiar about him. It had been a couple of years, and a certain amount of the staff turnover was to be expected. And if Keller didn’t recognize the guy, why should the guy recognize Keller?

He probably wouldn’t. That didn’t necessarily mean Keller could get past him, but it seemed likely Keller could at the very least get close to him, close enough to get his hands on him. And there was the package room, right off the lobby. He could put the guy in the package room and they wouldn’t find him until morning.

And then all he’d have to do was go upstairs, and give the doorbell a poke—no knocker on his door, not unless the new tenant had added one. “Hi, I’m your neighbor from downstairs, I don’t mean to disturb you but I’ve got water coming through my bathroom ceiling—”

Then the door would open, and there’d be a man or a woman standing there—or a man and a woman, or two men, or two women, it hardly mattered. And he didn’t have a weapon, but he had his hands, and that was all he’d need.

He drew back into the shadows, flattened himself against the brick wall of the building behind him. Across the street, the doorman stepped out onto the street for a quick cigarette break. He still didn’t look familiar to Keller, who found himself wondering why he’d been contemplating snapping the guy’s neck and sticking him in the package room.

Just so he could go upstairs and kill some stranger for no good reason at all.

The impulse—or fantasy, or whatever you called it—was gone now. Go home, he told himself sternly.

He stepped over to the curb, held up a hand for a cab. One came along, its dome light lit, and headed his way, whereupon Keller shook his head and waved him off. Keller wasn’t able to see the expression on the driver’s face, but he could imagine it.

He started walking.

He walked all the way back to his hotel, and he took his time getting there. He stopped for a slice of pizza and ate it standing at the counter, drank a cup of coffee at the diner that had been his regular breakfast place. He bought a newspaper at a deli, dropped it unread into the next trashcan he came to.

And wondered throughout just what he was doing.

He wasn’t entirely certain whether or not he recognized anybody. There were faces that looked familiar, but the waitress at the coffee shop wasn’t the one who’d served him all those breakfasts. She’d have finished her shift hours ago.

There’d been changes in the neighborhood. He saw a bank that hadn’t been there before, and a chain drugstore. What was missing? It seemed to him that a Chinese restaurant was gone, and a dry cleaners, and what happened to the shoe repair guy? Or was he over on the next block?

He was exhausted by the time he got back to his hotel. He took a shower, drank a bottle of water from the mini-bar. And went to bed.

Keller’s first thought was to have breakfast in the hotel. They had a huge buffet, but they charged thirty-five dollars for it, and he couldn’t see starting the day with thirty-five dollars worth of food in his stomach. He went across the street to an imitation French bistro, where an Asian girl with her hair in pigtails brought him a Croque Madame, which was essentially a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with a fried egg on top. He had orange juice, and a side of home fries, and finished up with a two-cup pot of filtered coffee, and the check came to $31.25, plus tip.

But it was money well spent, he decided, because his attitude was better after breakfast. A good night’s sleep had rid him of most of last night’s mood, and the meal had finished the job.

And, speaking of jobs, it was time he got to work on his.

Abbot O’Herlihy, Paul Vincent O’Herlihy, was tucked away in the Thessalonian residence in Murray Hill. There were, as far as Keller could make out, only two ways to carry out his assignment. He could get the man to leave the building, or he could contrive to get himself inside it.

The first way was better, he decided, if he could find a way to manage it. The second course had two parts to it, getting in and getting out, and both of them could present problems. Not that getting O’Herlihy out of his refuge was a piece of cake, but there ought to be a way to manage it.

It was Tuesday morning, and, according to his watch, not quite a quarter to ten. The Peachpit auction would take the form of morning and afternoon sessions Wednesday and Thursday. All of Wednesday was given over to general foreign, with British Commonwealth in the morning and the rest of the world in the afternoon. Thursday morning was a specialized offering of U.S. issues, and the final session on Thursday afternoon was devoted to a remarkable collection of German offices and colonies, including that stamp from Kiauchau he’d pointed out to his daughter.

So he had all of Tuesday, and Wednesday night and Thursday morning. And he could miss one or both of the Wednesday sessions if he had to, but he really wanted to be in the room Thursday afternoon when they sold the German collection.

And Thursday night he wanted to be on his way to New Orleans. The last flight out was Jet Blue’s, at 8:59, and with luck he’d be on it.

He walked all the way to Thessalonian House, and it looked no different than it had the previous afternoon. The brass knocker was just as inviting, the heavy door just as forbidding. He looked over at it from the uptown side of the street, and barely slowed as he passed on by.

He didn’t see a pay phone at the corner of Thirty-sixth and Park, and walked another block to Lexington. No pay phones there, either, and he walked a block uptown before he found one, and it didn’t work. He had a prepaid cell phone in his pocket, which he’d bought at the New Orleans airport, and he’d hoped he could use it to call Julia, but it looked as though he was only going to be able to get one call out of it.

Well, too bad.

He punched in 911, spoke briefly, and disconnected. Then he walked over to the curb and slipped the inoffensive phone down a storm drain.

He retraced his steps slowly, south to Thirty-sixth Street, west toward Thessalonian House. He was halfway to Park Avenue when he heard the first siren, but maintained his measured pace. By the time he reached the scene, three city vehicles had already arrived, two NYPD squad cars and an FDNY hook-and-ladder.

Not surprisingly, a crowd was gathering, with a couple of uniformed cops moving spectators to the uptown side of the street, and firefighters setting up barricades to block the sidewalk on either side of the monastery.

Keller picked out one of the cops and asked him what was going on. The man didn’t answer, but a fellow spectator chimed in. “Guy broke in, shot two nuns and he’s holding the rest of ’em hostage.”

The doors opened, and the monastery began to empty out, the sidewalk filling up with men, some of them in robes, some in business suits. The man who’d just spoken said he might have been wrong about the nuns, and a woman said you didn’t have nuns in a monastery, and another man said, “What meat can a priest eat on Friday? None. Get it?”

Keller was the first to spot the Bomb Squad truck, but he let somebody else point it out. It looked like one of the Brinks armored cars used to transport large amounts of cash, but it said BOMB SQUAD on the side, in letters large enough to command attention. “Oh, it must be a bomb,” someone said, and everyone immediately moved one step in from the street.

So did Keller, even though he couldn’t imagine what protection an additional foot of distance from a blast could possibly afford. And in any event he knew there was no bomb, having called it in himself.

Another cop, younger and larger than the first, was standing off to the side. He was smoking a cigarette, and Keller got the impression that doing so was against department regulations, and that the man didn’t give a damn.

Keller moved closer to him, but not too close, and asked if the building across the street was the Thessalonian monastery.

The cop bristled. “And if it is?”

“I just wondered,” Keller said. “A fellow I went to school with, a good friend actually, he was going to join the Thessalonians.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“He thought very highly of them,” Keller said. “But you know, you lose track of people. I don’t know whether he joined up or not. Say, isn’t that—”

“Father O’Herlihy,” the cop said. “He hasn’t got enough on his plate, he needs a bomb threat on top of everything else.”

The man in question looked to Keller as though very little stayed for very long on any plate of his. He had a full face and an extra chin, and looked massive even though his robe hid his figure. His was a plain brown robe, but somehow it seemed less plain and even less brown than those worn by the other monks. He was quite clearly in command, and while Keller couldn’t make out what he was saying he could see how the rest rearranged themselves according to his orders.

“And here comes Eyewitness News,” the cop said sourly. “Fuckin’ media won’t leave the man alone. Jersey’s got a certain level of corruption, and it don’t matter whether you’re the Church or some local businessman, you gotta go along to get along. But maybe you see it different.”

“No, I’m with you,” Keller said.

“But as soon as a man of God’s involved, and especially if he just happens to be a Catholic man of God, then it’s all over the goddam papers. These days beating up on the Church is everybody’s favorite sport. Not too many years ago this woulda got swept back under the rug where it belongs.”

“Absolutely,” Keller said.

“What did the man do, for Christ’s sake? I didn’t hear no scandals about altar boys. All right, somebody goes and sells a kidney, that’s gonna draw attention. I’ll grant you that. But is it any reason to sling mud at a man who does as much good in the world as Father O’Herlihy?”

Keller was ready to express agreement, when someone off to the side said, “Hey, look, a dog!” And indeed a uniformed Bomb Squad officer was fastening a leash to the collar of a sprightly beagle.

“Jesus,” somebody said, “don’t tell me the monks are selling drugs on top of everything else.”

“It’s a bomb-sniffing dog, you moron,” someone else said.

“It’s cute, whatever it is,” a woman said.

“We had one just like that when I was a kid,” a man said. “Dumber than dirt. Couldn’t find food in his dish.”

The dog disappeared into the building, and the conversation looked for other topics. The abbot continued to move among his corps of monks, patting this one on the back, touching this one on the shoulder, looking like an officer rallying the troops.

“Hey, O’Herlihy,” someone called out. “I hear you’re running a special on kidneys this week!”

The crowd had been buzzing with casual conversation, and it stopped dead as if someone had unplugged it. Keller sensed his fellow spectators gathering themselves, brought up short by the combination of shock and a sense of opportunity. The speaker had clearly crossed the line, and they were deciding whether to disapprove or join in. It would depend, he figured, on whether they came up with things too clever to suppress.

But the abbot made the decision for them. He broke off his conversation, spun around to his left, and stalked up to the curb. He drew himself up to his full height and silenced the crowd with a stare.

Then he spoke. “Disperse,” he said. “All of ye. Have ye nothing better to do? Go about your proper business, or return to your homes. There’s no need for ye here.”

And damned if they didn’t do exactly that, and Keller with them.

“It was pretty impressive,” he told Dot. “He just assumed command.”

“I guess he must be used to it. Comes with the job, wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose so, but I got the feeling he’s been like that all his life. I can picture him as a ten-year-old in the schoolyard, settling disputes in kickball games.”

“I always wanted to play kickball,” Dot said, “but at my school it was boys only. I’ll bet it’s different now.”

He’d bought another prepaid phone, with a chip good for 100 minutes or one call to 911, whichever came first. His first call was to Julia; he told her how it felt to be in New York, and how the auction was shaping up, and she filled him in on Jenny’s day, and passed on some gossip about a couple two doors down the street. He hadn’t told her anything specific about his assignment, and didn’t talk about it now.

To Dot he said, “I’m not sure I accomplished anything with that call I made.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Keller. You got a look at him, didn’t you?”

“It’s not as though I hadn’t seen enough pictures of him.”

“But seeing him in person’s a little different. You got a sense of the person.”

“I guess.”

“And you established for certain that he’s in residence there. You assumed as much, but now you know it for a fact.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“You don’t sound convinced, Keller. What’s the matter?”

“The phone.”

“Why’d you toss it? I know they log 911 calls, but I thought your phone’s untraceable.”

“They can’t tie it to me,” he said, “but they can tell what numbers I call with that phone. Then all they have to do is walk back the cat.”

“To Sedona,” she said, “and to New Orleans. No, you wouldn’t want them to do that. So what’s the problem? You bought a disposable phone and then you disposed of it.”

“I paid seventy bucks for that phone,” he said, “and I made one useless call with it, and now it’s floating in the New York sewer system.”

“I doubt it’s floating, Keller. It probably sank like a stone.”

“Well.”

“And landed on the bottom,” she said, “unless an alligator ate it. Remember Tick-Tock the Alligator? In Peter Pan?”

“Wasn’t that a crocodile?”

“Keller, I know there’s a difference between alligators and crocodiles, but is it one we have to care about? Tick-Tock swallowed a clock once, and that’s why you could always hear him coming.”

“Probably how he got his name, too.”

“Odds are. You know, I always wondered how come it didn’t run down. You figure it was like a self-winding watch? Just swimming around was enough to keep it going?”

“Dot—”

“So here’s your phone,” she said, “and this alligator swallows it, and now what happens if somebody calls you?”

How did he get into conversations like this? “Nobody has the number,” he said.

“Is that a fact.”

“Besides, I turned the phone off after I made the call. So it wouldn’t ring.”

“That was wise of you, Keller. Because all you need is an alligator in the sewer with a phone ringing inside his belly.”

“And anyway it’s a myth. There aren’t really any alligators in the New York sewers.”

She sighed heavily. “Keller,” she said, “you know what you are? A genuine killjoy. You got any inside information about Santa Claus, kindly keep it to yourself. And I wouldn’t worry too much about the seventy dollars. It’s not gonna keep you from buying any stamps, is it?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go. How’s New York?”

“It’s okay.”

“You comfortable there?”

“Pretty much. At first I was worried someone would recognize me, but nobody did, so I stopped worrying.”

“I guess so, if you actually started a conversation with a cop.”

“Until this moment,” he said, “it never occurred to me that I was doing anything risky.”

“Maybe you weren’t, Keller. The world has a short memory, and I have to say that’s just as well. Look, you’ll figure out a way to get the job done. You always do.”

Keller had Thai food for lunch. You could get perfectly decent Thai food in New Orleans, and almost everything else, but there was a Thai restaurant two blocks from his old apartment that he remembered fondly. He walked over there, and the hostess put him at a table for two on the left wall, about halfway between the front door and the kitchen.

He was studying the menu when the waitress brought him a glass of Thai iced tea before he could ask for it. How did she know that was what he wanted? He reached for it, and she said, “Papaya salad? Shrimp pad thai, very spicy?”

Was the young woman psychic? No, of course not. She remembered him.

And so had the hostess. Because, he realized, this was the table where he’d always sat years ago, and the meal was the one he’d almost invariably ordered.

Now what? He’d always paid cash, so they wouldn’t know his name. But they would certainly have seen his photograph, in the papers or on the TV news. But would it have registered out of context?

More to the point, what should he do now? Get up and make a run for it? Or, more discreetly, invent a pretext: “Uh-oh, forgot my wallet, I’ll be back in a minute.” And they’d never see him again.

But wouldn’t that create suspicion where it might well not already exist? And once he’d done that, they’d have reason to wonder what was the matter, and at that point one of them might link this old customer of theirs to a photo dimly recalled, and they could call 911 and it wouldn’t even cost them a seventy-dollar phone.

On the other hand, he’d be gone by then.

But the authorities, who’d had years to get used to the idea that Keller the Assassin had been liquidated by his employers, would have reason to believe he wasn’t dead after all. And there’d be a manhunt, and attention from the media, and what would happen to his life in New Orleans?

The papaya salad came. If he wanted to allay suspicion, he thought, then he ought to act like a man with nothing to hide. So he picked up his fork and dug in.

It was just as he remembered it.

So was the pad thai, the rice noodles nicely slippery on the tongue, the shrimp tender and flavorful, the whole thing fiercely hot. He’d lost his appetite when he realized he’d been recognized, but it returned in full measure once he started eating, and he cleaned both his plates. He might have ordered dessert, there was a baked coconut rice pudding he used to like, but he decided not to push it.

He scribbled in the air, and the hostess brought the check, took his money, and brought his change. He left a tip designed to be generous without being memorable, and on the way out the hostess said, “Long time we don’t see you.”

“I moved away.”

“Ah, that’s what I say! Somebody say maybe you don’t like us no more, but I say he move. Where you now, Upper West Side?”

“Montana.”

“Oh, so far! What city?”

The first thought that came to him was Cheyenne, but that was in Wyoming. “Billings,” he said, pretty sure it was in Montana.

“My brother’s in Helena,” she told him. “Big problem getting people there to try Thai food. So he put sushi on the menu. Sushi very big in Helena.”

“In Billings, too.”

“They come for sushi,” she said, “and then maybe they try something else. Smart guy, my brother. Almost went broke, thought of sushi, and now he’s making lots of money.”

“That’s great.”

“You get to Helena, you try Thai Pagoda. Nice place.” She frowned. “Cheap rent, too. Not like here. You come back when you in New York, okay?”

“I will.”

“You looking good,” she said. “Lost some weight!”

“A couple of pounds.”

“Almost didn’t recognize. Then it comes to me. Table Seven! Thai iced tea! Papaya salad! Shrimp pad thai!”

“That’s me, all right.”

“Very spicy! Make sure very spicy!”

Keller, back in his hotel room, sat in front of the television set watching New York One, the 24-hour local news channel. It was pointless, he knew; if somebody at Thai Garden did make the connection and felt compelled to rat him out to the law, the media wouldn’t be reporting it for at least a couple of hours. But he sat there for a half hour anyway, and learned more than he needed to know about the sports and weather, along with ongoing coverage of the bomb scare at Thessalonian House. Once again he got to hear the abbot thunder at the crowd, bidding them to disperse, and even spotted himself in the act of dispersal.

That gave him a turn, but he realized that no one could have identified him on the basis of what he’d just seen. He was part of a crowd shot, seen from a distance, and he had his back to the camera. If he hadn’t known he was there, he doubted he’d have recognized himself.

There was, of course, no bomb to be found. The beagle’s name turned out to be Ajax, which struck Keller as a pretty decent name for a dog, bomb-sniffing or otherwise. There was a brief interview with Ajax’s handler, a light-side-of-the-news piece that Keller found reasonably interesting, and then the announcer’s voice turned serious as she talked about the criminal nature of bomb threats, and the need to respond to each of them, and the high cost involved.

“Every call reporting a bomb is logged, and every caller identified,” she said. “If you make a false report, it’s just a question of time before the long arm of the law reaches out and takes hold of you.”

Well, maybe not, Keller thought. Not unless the long arm of the law could reach all the way down into the sewers, and yank his phone out of the alligator’s belly.

In the hotel’s business center, Keller logged onto the Peachpit site and checked the current status of the lots he was interested in. With one or two exceptions, the opening bids were unchanged. He noted the changes in his catalog and was ready to return to his room when he thought of something.

Google. Who could imagine life without Google?

He was on the computer for fifteen minutes more, and made a few more notes. Then he pulled down the History menu and deleted that day’s searches, his and everybody else’s.

Then back to his room.

“I’d like to talk to Abbot O’Herlihy,” Keller said. His voice, he noticed, was pitched higher than usual. He hadn’t planned on it. It just came out that way.

“That would be Abbot Paul,” said the monk who’d answered the phone. “And I’m afraid he’s not taking any calls.”

“I think it would be a good idea for him to take this one,” Keller said, and he could only hope he’d said it ominously.

There was a thoughtful silence. Then, “Perhaps you could tell me the nature of your business with the abbot.”

“It was almost thirty years ago,” Keller said, “and he wasn’t Abbot Paul then. He was Father O’Herlihy, with a parish in Cold Spring Harbor. And I was little Timmy Hannan, just ten years old, and, and—”

“I’m putting you on Hold,” the monk said, and Keller heard a click, and then spent a full five minutes listening to recorded Gregorian chants.

Keller was just beginning to get into the music when it cut out in the middle of a phrase, and the voice that took over was very different from that of the mild-mannered chap who’d answered the phone. He placed it at once, the timbre, the authority, the slight but unmistakable touch of brogue.

“Who is this?”

“Someone you knew in Cold Springs Harbor.”

“Tell me your name.” Not What’s your name? but Tell me your name. This man, when he prayed, probably gave orders to God.

“Timothy Michael Hannan, father, but you called me Timmy.”

“Did I? And when was this, by God?”

“Almost thirty years ago. You did . . . bad things.”

“Bad things.”

“And I forgot! I blocked it all out, and last week I saw you on television, and I heard your voice, and—”

“And it all came back to ye, did it?”

Remarkable how the son of a bitch managed to put you on the defensive. Keller, in his high-voiced role as little Timmy Hannan, damn near cowered.

He drew a quick breath and said, “Father, they want me to go to the media, to the District Attorney, to the Diocesan office, but first I wanted—”

“Wanted what?”

“To meet with you. If I could just have a few private minutes with you this afternoon, or perhaps this evening—”

“Private minutes.”

“Because, I don’t know, maybe it’s a false memory. God knows I want it to be. If we could just meet in person, in private—”

“Tomorrow.”

“Uh, I was hoping we could find some time today.”

“Tomorrow morning,” the abbot said, “a car will call for me at 9:45 to take me to the New York Athletic Club. Do ye know where that is?”

“I can find it.”

“No doubt ye can. I am a member, and I will arrange for ye to be admitted as my guest. Spell your name for me.”

“T-I-M—”

“Your last name, ye idiot.”

Keller wasn’t sure how to spell it, Hannan or Hannon, but he figured he was all right either way. He spelled it with two As.

“You’ll arrive at 10:15, no sooner and no later. They’ll give ye a pass and a locker key, and tell ye how to find the steam room. Strip to the skin, put your clothes in a locker, fasten the key around your wrist, and help yourself to a towel. I’ll be taking the steam before my massage. You’ll come join me, and we’ll have our ‘private time.’”

Keller wasn’t sure how to reply to that. While he was working it out, the phone clicked in his ear.

Hell.

Wednesday morning’s session at Peachpit would feature Great Britain and the British Commonwealth, and there were several lots that Keller was hoping to bid on. The starting time was ten o’clock, and he’d just agreed to show up at the New York Athletic Club at 10:15.

Or had he? It seemed to him that he, in the persona of little Timmy Hannan, hadn’t been provided with the opportunity to agree or disagree. He’d been issued his instructions, and it seemed to be a given that he would follow them to the letter. And to the number, which was precisely fifteen minutes after the Peachpit crew began selling British stamps.

It was impossible to predict the pace of an auction; the more competitive the bidding, the longer it took to get through the lots. But no matter how you figured it, Keller couldn’t keep his date with the abbot without missing the first half of the session, and the tyranny of alphabetical order placed British East Africa very much in that time span.

British East Africa was what philatelists designate a dead country. The first time Keller heard that term he visualized an arid wasteland, with the skulls of cattle scattered here and there, and noxious vapors rising from the occasional water source. In due course he learned that the term merely indicated that a particular stamp-issuing entity was no longer operating under that name.

Keller’s collection had a cutoff date of 1940. He’d stretched that out to include British Commonwealth issues through 1952, the end of George VI’s reign constituting a natural stopping-point. And lately he seemed to be stretching his limits for other countries as well, to accommodate World War II issues. All in all, though, his collection held no end of dead countries, and the list kept growing. Even Czechoslovakia had become a dead country, once it divvied itself up into the separate Czech and Slovak Republics.

British East Africa had its philatelic birth in 1890, when the British East Africa Company overprinted three Indian stamps for use in the territory under its administration. The next eight years saw the appearance of just over a hundred British East Africa stamps, some of them created specifically for the colony, others overprinted on stamps of India or Zanzibar. Then British East Africa was incorporated in the East Africa and Uganda Protectorate, which was subsequently folded into the Kenya colony, which gave way to what collectors knew as K.U.T., for Kenya Uganda and Tanganyika, which Keller always thought of as an African version of the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe.

Dead countries, all of them.

Commencing in 1890, British East Africa issued seventeen stamps with the design of a crowned sun, ostensibly symbolizing light and liberty. The following year, a shortage of certain denominations led the postal authorities to surcharge others, changing their denominations either by handstamp or pen and ink, and creating eight collectible stamps in the process. One of these, listed in the Scott catalog as #33, consisted of a 2 anna vermilion stamp surcharged 1/2 anna in manuscript, and marked as well with the initials A. B., for Archibald Brown.

Keller had no idea who Archibald Brown might be, and didn’t much care, but he wanted the stamp. It was unused, with only a trace of original gum, and the centering was not absolutely perfect, but the color was bright and unfaded, and an accompanying Sergio Sismondo certificate proclaimed it genuine and free of flaws.

Scott valued the stamp at $6000, and Peachpit’s pre-sale estimate was $3500. A mail or internet bidder had submitted an opening bid of $2750, and no one had topped it when Keller had last checked. But there was no telling what would happen when it went under the hammer.

How much did he want it? How high would he go for it? Well, that was one of the things you found out when you sat in an auction room. You might have a top figure in mind, but when the time came you might find out you didn’t really want it all that much. Or you might go much higher than you’d planned.

Could he get there in time? No, not a chance. British East Africa #33 was Lot No. 77, and would surely be sold in the first hour of the auction. At 10:15 he’d show up at the NYAC, and by the time he was actually inside the steam room it would be 10:30, and he couldn’t envision a scenario that left Paul Vincent O’Herlihy dead and Keller dressed and in Peachpit’s auction room by eleven o’clock.

Get real, he told himself. It’s only a hobby.

It was only a hobby, and the stamp was only a stamp, but that didn’t mean he could get it out of his head. He had dinner at a deli that was famous for giving you more food than you could eat, and they lived up to their reputation. The waiter was surprised, and seemed slightly offended, when Keller didn’t want to take home the leftover half of his enormous sandwich. “That’s a whole meal you’re throwing away,” the man told him. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you they’re starving in Africa?”

And there he was, back in the blighted landscape of British East Africa, with its longhorned cattle skulls and poisoned waterholes. And now, thanks to this helpful son of a bitch, the picture included little black children, their stomachs bloated with kwashiorkor, flies buzzing around their mournful eyes. It was a hard image to get rid of, and the only solution was to resume thinking about the stamp.

And he went on thinking about the stamp for the rest of the evening, except when he forced himself to think about what he would do in the steam room. He could guess why O’Herlihy had chosen it as the venue for their meeting, as it combined convenience with security. He was going there anyway for his massage appointment, so there’d be no unexplained absence from the monastery. And how could Timmy Hannan, with only a towel to cover himself, wear a wire into a steam room?

Keller hadn’t planned on wearing a wire, as a recording of the proceedings was the last thing he wanted. But it would be nice to have a weapon.

A gun, say. Keller wasn’t that crazy about guns. They were noisy, unless you used a suppressor. They left nitrate particles on your hand, unless you wore gloves. Sometimes they jammed, and sometimes they misfired. And, unless you got fairly close to your target, there was always the chance that you would miss. If you were close enough to rule out a miss, well, you were probably close enough to get the job done without a gun.

Still, O’Herlihy was an awfully large man. Sheer bulk was part of what made him so imposing. It might be mostly fat, but simply carrying all that weight around could make a man strong, couldn’t it? So there was a certain appeal in being a couple of steps away from him, maybe even three or four steps, and pointing a gun at him, and finding out if he could stop the bullets by sheer force of will.

Well, forget that. They wouldn’t make you go through a metal detector to get into the New York Athletic Club, but there’d be other people in the locker room, and possibly in the steam room as well, and even if he took a second towel and wrapped the gun in it—no, never mind, he couldn’t go in there with a gun.

Not that he had a gun, or knew offhand where to get hold of one.

Then what? A knife? Anything large enough to do the job would be a problem to conceal.

He walked around, letting his mind play with the problem. He remembered a television program he’d seen ages ago, in which the murder weapon was an icicle. A nice touch, he’d thought at the time. It was a locked-room murder, if he remembered correctly; the murderer and the victim were found in the room, the victim stabbed to death, and no murder weapon to be found. Because it melted.

Did they solve it? Find water droplets in the wound and put two and two together? Or did the killer get away with it? He couldn’t remember, and didn’t see that it mattered. Nor did he see where he was going to find an icicle at this time of year, let alone carry it into a steam room.

Maybe the best he could hope for from tomorrow’s meeting was to lay the groundwork for another meeting at a more promising venue. And then what? Set up something for Thursday afternoon and miss his shot at the German colonials?

He spent twenty minutes in a chain drugstore. Then he headed back to his room at the Savoyard and went to bed.

It was a quarter after seven when Keller opened his eyes, and he was grateful for the opportunity to get up and start the day. He’d set the bedside alarm clock for eight and backed it up with an 8:15 wake-up call, and he shut off the first and canceled the second and got under the shower, hoping the spray would sluice away the residue of the dream.

He’d dreamed about the stamp, of course, and it managed to incorporate the old naked-in-public-places dream that he’d had in one form or another for most of his life. It had pretty much stopped since he wound up in New Orleans, but here it was again, with him sitting in Peachpit’s auction room and suddenly realizing that he was wearing a T-shirt and nothing else.

And all night long he kept realizing it was a dream, and turning over and going back to sleep, and slipping right back into the dream all over again, trying to find a way to make it come out right. He missed out on the lot he wanted to buy, and he made mistakes and bought other things that he didn’t want or need, and throughout it all he was hoping nobody would notice that he didn’t have any pants on.

Only a dream, he thought. Only a dream, only a hobby, only a stamp.

Hell.

Downstairs, he visited the business center and checked the stamp’s current price. It was unchanged, still $2750. Keller had decided the most he was willing to pay was $4500, and he registered on the site and entered the bid. He waited a minute or two and refreshed the page, and saw that the opening bid had now increased to $3000. That meant he was the high bidder, and someone else would have to raise it another $1750 to top his maximum.

Was it time to meet O’Herlihy? No, not even close. He had plenty of time for breakfast, but he’d just committed himself to pay $4500 for a stamp, and it would cost him more than that by the time he was done. The auction gallery tacked on a buyer’s premium of 20%, and there was New York sales tax on top of that, so a lot he bought for $4500 would cost him something over $5800, which wasn’t that much less than its $6000 Scott valuation.

Shelling out thirty-five dollars for breakfast never seemed like a great idea to Keller, but it was even less attractive after the bid he’d just made. So he passed on both the hotel’s buffet and the ersatz bistro and found a vendor’s cart on one of the side streets. He got a croissant and a cup of coffee, which was as much as he wanted, and the bright-eyed immigrant, no doubt from a dead country, gave him change back from his five-dollar bill.

The croissant was fine, and so was the coffee, and they had pedestrianized Times Square since he moved away, so he was able to pull a little chair up to a little table and have his breakfast in—well, not peace and quiet, not exactly, but it was pleasant all the same.

When he was done he glanced at his watch. There was time, he saw, but he’d have to hurry.

He walked quickly back to his hotel. The business center had four people in it, but it had five computers, and Keller was grateful for that.

The New York Athletic Club was on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Central Park South, not far from the Savoyard and even closer to the Peachpit offices on Fifty-seventh Street. Parked out in front, next to a convenient fire hydrant, stood a black limousine, its chauffeur chatting away on a no-hands cell phone. And waiting, Keller suspected, to drive the abbot back to the monastery.

Keller had put on a suit and tie, thinking the place might have a dress code, and realized the absurdity of it when a couple of over-age preppies passed him wearing workout clothes. Still, the suit might make a decent impression on the desk attendant, who looked up at his approach. “Hannan,” Keller told him. “I’m Father Paul O’Herlihy’s guest.”

“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 full 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 held 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.

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 townhouses, 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 Thirty-sixth 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 led to his room. And you’d also have to know where to get your hands on a grenade.

Hmmm. 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. Passed out and snoring, the man’s intimidation factor would be significantly diminished. Keller, who could bring any weapon he wanted, might as easily dispatch his quarry with his bare hands.

He turned to his right, counting his steps as he walked to Madison Avenue, where he turned left and walked a block south. At Thirty-fifth 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 façade 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.”

Feldspar had taken him by the arm and was urging him toward the door. Keller said again that he wasn’t a member, but that didn’t seem to matter. “You’re my guest,” he said. “You’ll have a drink, you’ll have something to eat, and you’ll see some great philatelic material and listen to a terrific talk. And you’ll meet some wonderful fellows. Franklin Roosevelt was a member of this club, FDR himself. Come on, Nick, you don’t want to miss this.”

“It was pretty interesting,” he told Julia. “The place is the next thing to a mansion, and it belongs to the club. Someone gave it to them a hundred years ago, and there’s no mortgage, and because they’re non-profit there are no taxes to pay. And they can afford to put out a spread of food and drinks before every meeting, and it’s all free.”

“And the people were nice?”

“Very pleasant fellows. And a couple of women, too. Irv kept introducing me to people, and he got a couple of names wrong, but they know him well enough to be used to him.”

“Ass-backwards Syndrome,” she said. “How was the presentation?”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you about. It was Civil War Philately, which of course means the USA—”

“And the CSA, buster.”

“Well, yeah. But it’s an area I don’t collect, so that made the material on display less interesting to me than it might have been otherwise. But the talk was fascinating, and I learned some things I never knew. Do you know what happened in 1861?”

“Well, I guess I do,” she said. “Y’all started a damn war for no good reason.”

“Besides that,” he said. “See, someone in Washington realized that all those U.S. post offices in the southern states had large stocks of U.S. stamps on hand.”

“So? They couldn’t mail letters with them. They were a separate nation by then, even if nobody in Washington was willing to acknowledge it.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “you’re more southern than usual. This fellow in Washington was worried that those stamps constituted a danger to the Union. Confederate agents could smuggle them across the border and sell them at a discount to unscrupulous parties. On the one hand that would raise funds that could be used to aid the secessionist cause, and at the same time it could undermine the integrity of the United States mail.”

“Would that work?”

“I don’t see how. We’re talking about stamps, for God’s sake. But in order to nip such a scheme in the bud, the Post Office recalled all the current stamps and rushed a whole new series of stamps into production, with no end of complications that would only interest a stamp collector, and at a cost that had to be ten times what those mythical southern smugglers could have netted for their stamps.”

“Yankees,” she said. “Was it a southern boy who gave the presentation?”

“As a matter of fact he was from Milwaukee.”

“Maybe his granddaddy moved north,” she said, “though why he’d want to do that is beyond me. I’m just having fun, you know, when I get like that.”

“I know.”

“It sounds as though you had a good time. Are the dues very high?”

“Two hundred dollars a year.”

“That’s hardly anything. What, four dollars a week?”

“It’s even less for out of-town members. He offered to sponsor me.”

“Who, Mr. Asberger?”

“Feldspar. I’d need references, but there are enough dealers I’ve done business with. And I’m a member of the American Philatelic Society.”

“I think you should join.”

“Well, I’ll think about it. Who knows when I’ll be back in New York?”

“But you feel okay there?”

“Pretty much.” She hadn’t asked about the job that had brought him there, nor had he volunteered anything. “But I’ll be glad to get home.”

“Me too. Tomorrow night, you said? I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

“It’ll be way past Jenny’s bedtime. Anyway, I left the pickup in Long-Term Parking.”

“So what’s there for me to do?”

“You could leave a light on.”

“I could. And there’ll be a fresh pot of coffee waiting for you. They don’t make it with chicory up there, do they?”

“They don’t.”

“In that case,” she said, “I guess you’ll be glad to get home.”

The parlor floor of The Connoisseurs, half a flight up from street level, was given over to the club’s offices, along with their extensive philatelic library. The meeting was held on the second floor, with food and drinks arrayed on a table at the front of the building and a room for displays and lectures at the rear. Keller made himself a light Dewar’s and soda and helped himself to cheese and crackers and salted nuts while Feldspar introduced him to various members, all of whom seemed more than happy to have him in their midst.

“A general worldwide collector,” said one man, whose name Keller recognized from articles in Linn’s. “The wonderful thing about it is that there’s always something to buy. And that’s also the horrible thing about it—there’s always something to buy.”

Keller figured he’d remember that one. But he missed a lot at first because his mind was largely occupied with figuring out how the club could provide access to Thessalonian House. There was a stairway leading to a fourth floor, although a velvet rope indicated it was off-limits. Still, if he found a way to conceal himself in a men’s room when the meeting broke up, the velvet rope would hardly stop him from ascending a flight, and from there he ought to be able to get onto the roof.

And then what? If all of these buildings were tenements, they might have been built right up against one another, enabling an adventurous fellow to spring from one roof to another. But that only worked if the buildings in question were the same height, and it seemed to him that the monastery was taller by a story. And both structures were on a block in Murray Hill that had never been given over to tenements, and the gap between this building and O’Herlihy’s was almost certainly one that not even Nijinsky could span.

And if he somehow found himself on the monastery’s roof? Then what?

No, forget the roof. The club surely had access to the rear courtyard, from the basement if not from the parlor floor, so that’s where he could direct his efforts if he could hide out while everybody else went home. The club’s rear exit would be locked, but fire laws assured that they could be opened from within. And there’d be a rear door for the monastery, and if he could work out a way to open it, why then he’d be in the basement of the monastery, surrounded by cellar-dwelling monks wondering who he was and what in hell he was doing there.

That was as far as he got before the formal meeting began. Then the guest speaker began talking and showing his PowerPoint presentation, and Keller had the good fortune to get caught up in it and, at least for the time being, forget all about Fr. Paul Vincent O’Herlihy and the impregnable fortress that kept him out of harm’s way.

Thursday morning, Keller woke up early. Showering, he realized that he felt good, and wondered why. He decided that somehow, during the night, he’d resigned himself to the failure of his assignment, and would be glad simply to be getting home.

He found the same food cart as yesterday, ordered the same breakfast of croissant and coffee, and told himself he’d just saved another thirty dollars. And yesterday, by God, he’d fed himself all day for the couple of dollars breakfast cost him. The coffee and sandwiches at Peachpit had been a satisfactory lunch, and he’d skipped supper after having enjoyed the food and drink at The Connoisseurs. And now, while he enjoyed feeding his trim body a light breakfast, the plump and stately P.V. O’Herlihy would already be pouring the first of today’s whisky down his throat while he prepared to sweat out yesterday’s, and—

Wait a minute.

He dropped the remains of his croissant in the trash, followed it with his unfinished coffee. No time to waste. Things to do, people to see.

Alphabet City had already changed substantially when Keller was last there, its nasty tenements getting rehabbed left and right for young monied tenants. Now it was even harder to recall what a foul pit it had once been.

But he was comforted to see it was still a place to cop, if you could use your eyes and knew how to comport yourself. Keller, on East Fifth Street between Avenues C and D, watched business being done, and got into character. He picked out the right man to approach and braced him.

“Got that,” the fellow said. “Say you want a set of works, too? You sure ’bout that? Nobody shoots this shit, man. These downs, they ain’t like lady or smack. You shoot up, you gone get abscesses.”

“It’s for a friend,” Keller told him.

“The very best,” the man said reverently. “It’s not a single malt, mind you. Some of the special-batch single malts can get up there in price, but what we have here is a blend of several malt whiskies, aged for an astonishing sixty years.”

“And you say it’s five hundred dollars?”

“A towering sum for a bottle of Scotch,” the man admitted. He was wearing the vest and trousers of a three-piece gray suit, with a fresh white shirt and what Keller had to think was the tie of a good regiment. His hair was styled and his mustache trimmed, and he looked just right for his role behind the counter of a Madison Avenue purveyor of fine wines and spirits.

“The price,” he continued, “is ten times that of any number of truly excellent Scotches. But to keep it in perspective, we’ve any number of bottles of wine for which we’d have to get three or four times as much, and some that are quite stratospheric in price. A Latour of the right vintage, a Lafitte-Rothschild—and to open such a bottle is to finish it. An hour or two and you’ve emptied it, whereas a liter of whisky can be best enjoyed a dram at a time, over months or even years. And every time your man has his sip, he’s reminded of the generosity of the giver.”

“It looks expensive,” Keller said.

“At the very least, the packaging is equal to the contents. Notice the bottle is sealed with lead over its twist-to-open cork stopper. Notice the wooden casket that holds the bottle, brass-bound and equipped with its own tiny brass key. It looks not only expensive but special. One glance and the recipient cannot fail to be aware of the high esteem in which you hold him.”

“Well, that’s important,” Keller said, and drew out his wallet.

What was called for, Keller thought, was a Bunsen burner. And if he were back in his high school chemistry lab, he’d have the use of one. But he was in his room at the Savoyard, and had to make do with a candle.

He’d opened all fifteen of the purple and yellow capsules, and their contents pretty much filled the steel serving spoon. He’d bought it, and the little votive candle as well, at a housewares store. The spoon had been paired with a serving fork, which he’d discarded on the way home. The candle came in a little glass container, and the Hebrew lettering on its paper label suggested it was some sort of Jewish memorial light.

He added a few drops of tap water to the grains of powder, then held the spoon in the candle’s flame. A Bunsen burner couldn’t have served him any better; the powder liquefied, and he was able to draw up almost all of it into the hypodermic syringe.

Now the bottle. Remove the lead seal? No, he’d never get it back just right. Easier to go right through the seal and the cork beneath it. Would it reach? Yes, easily, and he depressed the plunger all the way.

After he’d rinsed out both spoon and syringe, he had a look at the bottle. There was a visible pinhole in the lead seal. He could probably let it go, but could he fix it?

The lead extended almost two inches down the neck of the bottle. Keller helped himself to a small piece of the lowest portion, used the spoon and the candle to melt it, and used the softened lead to patch the top of the seal. The pinhole was gone.

He placed the bottle in its handsome wooden container, fastened the little lock. Reached for the wrapping paper.

Dear Father O’Herlihy,

First I must apologize for my intrusion into your life. I should never have bothered you, especially at a difficult time. Although my memory seemed real to me, you helped me to see that it was false, and I find myself wondering how many others have been unjustly smeared as a result of such false memories.

But I must thank you for removing the veil. I now understand what really happened, and that is the first step toward recovery. I feel much better already.

So I hope you will accept this gift as a token of apology and gratitude. I hope it brings you closure equal to mine.

Yours in Christ,
Timothy Michael Hannan

Keller looked over what he’d written out on a sheet of hotel stationery. He added a set of quotation marks around memory in the second sentence, and frowned at the last line. Closure? Oh, it was cute enough, but was cute what was wanted here? He crossed it out, and considered other last lines, and rejected them all. Was anything needed after gratitude? Not really.

On the front of the card he’d bought it said Thank You!, the words surrounded by unidentifiable flowers, and inside he copied his amended draft, using handwriting quite different from his own. The letters were small and carefully formed, and he felt they made a nice match with the voice and manner he’d given young Hannan.

Near the end, he hesitated. Yours in Christ. Was that too much?

Oh, the hell with it. He left it in.

Keller, carrying a shopping bag and wearing a brand-new short-sleeved shirt with a buttondown collar, let the Savoyard’s doorman flag a cab for him. In the cab he put on the plain dark blue tie he’d tucked in the bag, checking the rearview mirror to get the knot right.

Still in the bag, along with the gift-wrapped bottle of Scotch, was a billed cap the same medium blue as the shirt. The clerk who’d sold it to him had called it a Greek fisherman’s cap, but to Keller it looked like something a messenger might wear.

The cab dropped him at the corner of Thirty-sixth and Madison, and once it had driven off he put the cap on his head, tucked the package under his arm, and dropped the empty shopping bag in a trash basket. Then he walked straight to Thessalonian House, where he finally got the chance to use the brass knocker. It was satisfying, and enough time passed so that he was about to do it again, when the door opened to reveal a plump little monk in a nut-brown robe.

“Express rush delivery,” said Keller, in Timothy Hannan’s voice. “For Abbot Paul O’Herlihy. You’ll make sure he gets it right away, won’t you?”

Two blocks from the monastery, Keller ditched the Greek fisherman’s cap and caught another cab back to his hotel. He took a quick shower, put on a clean shirt, finished packing, and went downstairs to check out. He shook off the doorman and walked, arriving at the Peachpit offices in plenty of time for a pre-session sandwich and coffee.

Before things got underway, he went to the men’s room and locked himself in a stall, where he had a chance to count the cash in his money belt. He had a little over twelve thousand dollars, and it was okay with him if he spent every cent of it.

Keller got to JFK hours before his flight. He remembered, finally, to buy a plush rabbit for Jenny, who collected stuffed animals as ardently as he collected stamps. He checked his bag, the rabbit snugly stowed inside it, and picked up his boarding pass, then found a bar with a TV tuned to local news. He ordered a Diet Coke, and of course the third news item reported a new link between sugar-free soft drinks and cancer. The barmaid evidently heard the item herself, and glanced at Keller even as he was looking her way.

Neither of them had to speak a word. She scooped up his glass, dumped its contents, rinsed it, and looked inquiringly at him. He pointed to a bottle of beer, which she uncapped and placed before him, along with the glass. He reached for his wallet, but she shook her head and walked off to serve somebody else.

The beer lasted Keller for most of an hour. He was waiting for a particular news item, not really expecting to hear it, but disappointed all the same.

Waiting was always the hardest part.

Around 7:30 he realized that a sandwich and the better part of a croissant didn’t amount to a full day’s rations. He moved from the bar to a nearby table, where he ordered a Caesar salad with grilled shrimp and a second beer. The salad wasn’t bad. Neither was the beer, but half of it was plenty.

He could see and hear the bar’s TV from where he was sitting, so he got another go-round with the sports and weather and various fires and traffic wrecks. And nothing much else.

Just as they were about to call his flight for boarding, he took out his cell phone and called Dot. “I’m heading home,” he said.

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. I don’t know why I sent you in the first place. I’ll send back the money.”

“No, don’t do that,” he said.

“No?”

“Not just yet,” he said. “Wait three days and see what happens.”

“Three days?”

“Maybe four.”

“Four days. I could do that. I mean, they don’t know you’re on your way home, do they?”

He ended the call, stopped in the men’s room. Was the phone compromised? Even if it wasn’t, what did he need with it now? He took it apart, snapped the chip in half, and did other things to render the thing inoperative. He dropped the different components in different trash receptacles and went to board his plane.

“She’s going to love this,” Julia said, brandishing the rabbit. “Not only is it wonderfully soft and squishy, it’s from her daddy. Why don’t you go put it in her bed and she’ll find it when she wakes up.”

Was there anything more beautiful than Jenny sleeping? He tucked in the rabbit at her side and returned to the kitchen, where he looked at his wife and found an answer to his question.

“I’m a rotten husband,” he said. “I didn’t bring you anything.”

“You came back in one piece,” she said. “That’s good enough. Did you bring a story to get me all excited?”

“Not quite yet.”

That puzzled her, but she let it go. “Not a problem,” she said. “Tonight you won’t need a story. You know what they say about absence? Well, it’s not just the heart that grows fonder.”

“Now here’s a stamp I’m happy to have,” Keller said, lifting Gabon #48 with his stamp tongs. “If you just take a quick look, you’d think it was the same as this one here. Denomination’s the same, five francs, colors are the same, and you’ve got the same picture. That’s a woman of the Fang tribe, and isn’t she pretty?”

“Pity,” Jenny agreed.

“When I was a little boy, I had some of these stamps. Well, ones just like them. The low values. You see this stamp? It shows a warrior, also of the Fang tribe, and he’s a man, and very fierce. But I saw the fancy headdress and always thought he was a woman. Funny, huh?”

“Funny.”

“Now what makes this stamp different,” Keller said, even as he slipped the stamp into the mount he’d cut for it, “is the inscription. It says Congo Français, and the other one says Afrique Orientale, so it belongs to the first of the two sets. It goes in the last blank space on the page, one I’ve been looking to fill for years now. There. Doesn’t it look nice?”

“Nice ’tamp.”

“Gabon was a French colony in West Africa,” he told her. “It issued stamps until 1934, when it was merged into French Equatorial Africa. Now of course it’s an independent country, but Daddy’s collection only goes to 1940, so his Gabon stamps stop in 1933.”

“Maybe Daddy’ll take us to Gabon someday,” Julia said. “You know what we ought to get? A globe, so you could show her where all the countries are. I can see how you thought the warrior was a woman. Though you might have noticed that he’s holding a couple of spears.”

“A fierce woman,” he said. “A globe’s a good idea. That’s probably what I should have bought instead of the stuffed rabbit.”

“Well, globe or no globe, don’t try to take the rabbit away from her. She’ll tear your arm off.”

“Rabbit,” Jenny said.

“A bunny rabbit,” Keller agreed. “One of your better words, isn’t it? Now these stamps are interesting. They aren’t very pretty, but there’s a great story that goes with them. See, they’re from German East Africa, which was a German colony before the First World War.”

“Like Koochoo, which Daddy told you about, except even your Mommy can tell where this one’s located.”

“Kiauchau.”

“Gesundheit. I was close, wasn’t I?”

“You were,” Keller said. “But listen to this, will you? During the war, the post office in German East Africa couldn’t get stamps from the fatherland, so they had these printed by the evangelical mission in Wuga—”

“Wuga,” Jenny echoed.

“See, sweetie? Now Daddy’s talking your language.”

“—but before they were needed, new stamps did arrive from Germany. Then, with British troops advancing, the postal authorities buried all of the Wuga stamps—”

“Wuga. Wuga.”

“—to keep the Brits from capturing them. Stamps! Why would they care if the enemy captured the stamps? They were overrunning the whole colony, for God’s sake.”

“Who thought that up, the same genius who ran your Yankee post office during the War of the Northern Aggression?”

“You’d almost think so,” he said. “After the war, before the colony was taken away from Germany and parceled out to Britain and Belgium, the Germans dug up the stamps. Most of them were so damaged from being buried that they had to be destroyed, and the rest weren’t exactly pristine, but they took them home and auctioned them off.”

“And you’ve got a whole sheet of them.”

“Of the seven and a half heller, yes. It’s the least expensive of the three denominations, but an actual unbroken sheet—well, let’s just say I wasn’t the only person who wanted it.”

No one actually present in the room had fought him for it, but there was competition online, and a phone bidder who just wouldn’t quit. But here he was, trimming a large sheet of plastic mounting material to fit, and preparing a blank album page to receive it.

The sheet was fragile, and he handled it with great delicacy. He’d have done so anyway, but having shelled out a small fortune for it made him especially careful with it.

Would he get the money back? He’d put on CNN at breakfast, behavior uncharacteristic enough to get a raised eyebrow from Julia, if not a question. He’d been hoping for a particular news item from New York, the same one he’d hoped for at the airport bar.

No luck. And there were so many things that could go wrong, the most likely of which being that O’Herlihy would decide to save this magnificent bottle for a special occasion, or even attempt to curry favor by passing it on to a bishop. Keller had an awful vision of the brass-bound casket ascending up the hierarchy, until it wound up carrying off the Holy Father himself.

Things to think about while affixing an extraordinary pane of stamps to an album page. And while Jenny was standing patiently at his side, waiting for him to tell her more about what he was doing. So he told her how the Belgian portion of German East Africa had been known as Ruanda-Urundi, but when it became independent it split into two countries, Rwanda and Burundi.

“Wanda,” Jenny said. “Rundi.”

“It’s Dot.”

He looked up. It was remarkable how stamps took him into another dimension. He hadn’t been aware that Julia had left the room, hadn’t heard the phone ring, hadn’t heard her return, and here she was, handing him the phone.

“Well, congratulations,” Dot said. “Your horse came in and paid a good price.”

“Oh?”

“There’s an online news feed that keeps you up to the minute,” she said, “and the story’s breaking right now. Respected religious leader, blah blah blah, extreme stress, blah blah blah, expected to provide invaluable testimony, blah blah blah.”

“Sounds as though it’s mostly blah blah blah.”

“Well, isn’t that always the way, Keller? Everything is mostly blah blah blah. What it boils down to, evidently the poor fellow got this special bottle of whisky and it was so good he drank more than his usual amount.”

“His usual amount,” Keller said, “was enough to float a battleship.”

“Oh, this is interesting. Preliminary examination suggests that the alcoholic intake was exacerbated by barbiturates. The man washed down sleeping pills with booze, and that’s never a good idea, is it?”

“No.”

“Death by misadventure,” she said. “Now I have to wonder how you got him to take the pills. And if I had to guess, I’d say you dissolved them in the whisky. Which would be good.”

“Why?”

“Because once the lab works its magic on the leftover booze, they’ll know what really happened. And that’ll keep the client from whining that he doesn’t want to pay us for something that happened all by itself. Not that I’d let him get away with that, but who needs the hassle?”

“Not us.”

“You betcha. So I don’t have to give the money back, and they have to send us some more. You happy?”

“Very.”

“And New York was all right?”

“New York was fine.”

“And I’ll bet you brought home some stamps. Well, you must want to go play with them, so I’ll let you go now. Now put Jenny on the phone so Aunt Dot can give her a big kiss.”

“See?” Keller said. “I told you it wasn’t exciting.”

“It was a problem,” Julia said, “and a complicated one, and you tried different things, and in the end you found the solution. How could that fail to be exciting?”

“Well . . . ”

“Oh, because there was no action? No slam-bang adventure? The life of the mind is exciting enough, at least for those of us who have one.”

It was evening, and Jenny had gone to bed, clutching her new rabbit. Julia and Keller were at the kitchen table, drinking coffee with chicory.

“I wasn’t sure it would work,” he said.

“But you came home anyway.”

“Well, if it didn’t work, what was I going to do about it? I didn’t have anything else to try.” He thought for a moment. “Besides, I was ready to come home. I had you and Jenny to come home to.”

“Otherwise you’d have stayed there.”

“Probably. But there wouldn’t have been any real point to it.”

“More coffee?”

“No, I’m good. Does it bother you that he was a priest?”

“No, why should it?”

“Well, it’s your church.”

“Only in the most tenuous way. I’m the child of lapsed Catholics. I was baptized, that was their sole concession to their own upbringing, but it was pretty much the extent of my own involvement with the church.”

“I never asked you if you wanted Jenny baptized.”

“Don’t you think I’d have said something? Do you even know what baptism is for?”

“Isn’t it to make you a Catholic.”

“No, darling, guilt is what makes you a Catholic. What baptism does is rid you of original sin. Do you suppose our daughter is greatly weighed down by the burden of original sin?”

“I don’t even know how you could go about finding an original sin these days.”

“I suppose selling somebody else’s kidney might qualify. And no, what do I care about some fat drunken priest whose greatest boast was that all his sins were strictly heterosexual? You want to know what’s exciting?”

“What?”

“That you can tell me all this. That we can sit here drinking coffee—”

“Damn good coffee, too.”

“—and either of us can tell the other anything about anything, and how many people have anything like that? God, though, I have to say I’m glad you’re home.”

“Me too,” Keller said.

T H E • E N D

About the Author

Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. He has written five books about Keller, the Urban Lonely Guy of assassins—Hit Man, Hit List, Hit Parade, Hit and Run, and Hit Me, and a Keller series for cable television is in development. “Keller,” he points out, “is a Guilty Pleasure for a lot of my readers. They like him, even though they don’t think they should.”

Block’s other series characters include Bernie Rhodenbarr (The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons) and Matthew Scudder, brilliantly embodied by Liam Neeson in the new film, A Walk Among The Tombstones. His non-series novella, Resume Speed, is a bestselling Kindle Single, and will soon appear as a deluxe hardcover from Subterranean Press.

The author is also well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and Write For Your Life, and for his writings about the mystery genre and its practitioners, The Crime Of Our Lives. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

lawrenceblock.com

NEWSLETTER: Lawrence Block sends out an email newsletter from time to time, with updates, announcements, and special offers. It’s free, and an email to lawbloc@gmail.com with NEWSLETTER—KH in the header will get you on the list.

Now turn the page for a bonus excerpt from Keller’s Designated Hitter, an out-of-the-park Keller story exclusively eVailable on Amazon:

E X C E R P T

Keller’s Designated Hitter

Keller, a beer in one hand and a hot dog in the other, walked up a flight and a half of concrete steps and found his way to his seat. In front of him, two men were discussing the ramifications of a recent trade the Tarpons had made, sending two minor-league prospects to the Florida Marlins in return for a lefthanded reliever and a player to be named later. Keller figured he hadn’t missed anything, as they’d been talking about the same subject when he left. He figured the player in question would have been long since named by the time these two were done speculating about him.

Keller took a bite of his hot dog, drew a sip of his beer. The fellow on his left said, “You didn’t bring me one.”

Huh? He’d told the guy he’d be back in a minute, might have mentioned he was going to the refreshment stand, but had he missed something the man had said in return?

“What didn’t I bring you? A hot dog or a beer?”

“Either one,” the man said.

“Was I supposed to?”

“Nope,” the man said. “Hey, don’t mind me. I’m just jerking your chain a little.”

“Oh,” Keller said.

The fellow started to say something else, but broke it off after a word or two as he and everybody else in the stadium turned their attention to home plate, where the Tarpons’ clean-up hitter had just dropped to the dirt to avoid getting hit by a high inside fastball. The Yankee pitcher, a burly Japanese with a herky-jerky windup, seemed unfazed by the boos, and Keller wondered if he even knew they were for him. He caught the return throw from the catcher, set himself, and went into his pitching motion.

“Taguchi likes to pitch inside,” said the man who’d been jerking Keller’s chain, “and Vollmer likes to crowd the plate. So every once in a while Vollmer has to hit the dirt or take one for the team.”

Keller took another bite of his hot dog, wondering if he ought to offer a bite to his new friend. That he even considered it seemed to indicate that his chain had been jerked successfully. He was glad he didn’t have to share the hot dog, because he wanted every bite of it for himself. And, when it was gone, he had a feeling he might go back for another.

Which was strange, because he never ate hot dogs. A few years back he’d read a political essay on the back page of a news magazine that likened legislation to sausage. You were better off not knowing how it was made, the writer observed, and Keller, who had heretofore never cared how laws were passed or sausages produced, found himself more conscious of the whole business. The legislative aspect didn’t change his life, but, without making any conscious decision on the matter, he found he’d lost his taste for sausage.

Being at a ballpark somehow made it different. He had a hunch the hot dogs they sold here at Tarpon Stadium were if anything more dubious in their composition than your average supermarket frankfurter, but that seemed to be beside the point. A ballpark hot dog was just part of the baseball experience, along with listening to some flannel-mouthed fan shouting instructions to a ballplayer dozens of yards away who couldn’t possibly hear him, or booing a pitcher who couldn’t care less, or having one’s chain jerked by a total stranger. All part of the Great American Pastime.

He took a bite, chewed, sipped his beer. Taguchi went to three-and-two on Vollmer, who fouled off four pitches before he got one he liked. He drove it to the 396-foot mark in left center field, where Bernie Williams hauled it in. There had been runners on first and second, and they trotted back to their respective bases when the ball was caught.

“One out,” said Keller’s new friend, the chain jerker.

Keller ate his hot dog, sipped his beer. The next batter swung furiously and topped a roller that dribbled out toward the mound. Taguchi pounced on it, but his only play was to first, and the runners advanced. Men on second and third, two out.

The Tarpon third baseman was next, and the crowd booed lustily when the Yankees elected to walk him intentionally. “They always do that,” Keller said.

“Always,” the man said. “It’s strategy, and nobody minds when their own team does it. But when your guy’s up and the other side won’t pitch to him, you tend to see it as a sign of cowardice.”

“Seems like a smart move, though.”

“Unless Turnbull shows ’em up with a grand slam, and God knows he’s hit a few of ’em in the past.”

“I saw one of them,” Keller recalled. “In Wrigley Field, before they had the lights. He was with the Cubs. I forget who they were playing.”

“That would have had to be before the lights came in, if he was with the Cubs. Been all around, hasn’t he? But he’s been slumping lately, and you got to go with the percentages. Walk him and you put on a .320 hitter to get at a .280 hitter, plus you got a force play at any base.”

“It’s a game of percentages,” Keller said.

“A game of inches, a game of percentages, a game of would-coulda-shoulda,” the man said, and Keller was suddenly more than ordinarily grateful that he was an American. He’d never been to a soccer match, but somehow he doubted they ever supplied you with a conversation like this one.

“Batting seventh for the Tarpons,” the stadium announcer intoned. “Number 17, the designated hitter, Floyd Turnbull.”

“He’s a designated hitter,” Dot had said, on the porch of the big old house on Taunton Place. “Whatever that means.”

“It means he’s in the lineup on offense only,” Keller told her. “He bats for the pitcher.”

“Why can’t the pitcher bat for himself? Is it some kind of union regulation?”

“That’s close enough,” said Keller, who didn’t want to get into it. He had once tried to explain the infield fly rule to a stewardess, and he was never going to make that sort of mistake again. He wasn’t a sexist about it, he knew plenty of women who understood this stuff, but the ones who didn’t were going to have to learn it from somebody else.

“I saw him play a few times,” he told her, stirring his glass of iced tea. “Floyd Turnbull.”

“On television?”

“Dozens of times on TV,” he said. “I was thinking of seeing him in person. Once at Wrigley Field, when he was with the Cubs and I happened to be in Chicago.”

“You just happened to be there?”

“Well,” Keller said. “I don’t ever just happen to be anyplace. It was business. Anyway, I had a free afternoon and I went to a game.”

“Nowadays you’d go to a stamp dealer.”

“Games are mostly at night nowadays,” he said, “but I still go every once in a while. I saw Turnbull a couple of times in New York, too. Out at Shea, when he was with the Cubs and they were in town for a series with the Mets. Or maybe he was already with the Astros when I saw him. It’s hard to remember.”

“And not exactly crucial that you get it right.”

“I think I saw him at Yankee Stadium, too. But you’re right, it’s not important.”

“In fact,” Dot said, “it would be fine with me if you’d never seen him at all, up close or on TV. Does this complicate things, Keller? Because I can always call the guy back and tell him we pass.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Well, I hate to, since they already paid half. I can turn down jobs every day and twice on Sundays, but there’s something about giving back money once I’ve got it in my hands that makes me sick to my stomach. I wonder why that is?”

“A bird in the hand,” Keller suggested.

“When I’ve got a bird in my hand,” she said, “I hate like hell to let go of it. But you saw this guy play. That’s not gonna make it tough for you to take him out?”

Keller thought about it, shook his head. “I don’t see why it should,” he said. “It’s what I do.”

“Right,” Dot said. “Same as Turnbull, when you think about it. You’re a designated hitter yourself, aren’t you, Keller?”

“Designated hitter,” Keller said, as Floyd Turnbull took a called second strike. “Whoever thought that one up?”

“Some marketing genius,” his new friend said. “Some dipstick who came up with research to prove that fans wanted to see more hits and home runs. So they lowered the pitching mound and told the umpires to quit calling the high strike, and then they juiced up the baseball and brought in the fences in the new ballparks, and the ballplayers started lifting weights and swinging lighter bats, and now you’ve got baseball games with scores like football games. Last week the Tigers beat the A’s fourteen to thirteen. First thing I thought, Jeez, who missed the extra point?”

“At least the National League still lets pitchers hit.”

“And at least nobody in the pros uses those aluminum bats. They show college baseball on ESPN and I can’t watch it. I can’t stand the sound the ball makes when you hit it. Not to mention it travels too goddam far.”

The next pitch was in the dirt. Posada couldn’t find it, but the third base coach, suspicious, held the runner. The fans booed, though it was hard to tell whom they were booing, or why. The two in front of Keller joined in the booing, and Keller and the man next to him exchanged knowing glances.

“Fans,” the man said, and rolled his eyes.

The next pitch was belt-high, and Turnbull connected solidly with it. The stadium held its collective breath and the ball sailed toward the left field corner, hooking foul at the last moment. The crowd heaved a sigh and the runners trotted back to their bases. Turnbull, looking not at all happy, dug in again at the plate.

He swung at the next pitch, which looked like ball four to Keller, and popped to right. O’Neill floated under it and gathered it in and the inning was over.

“Top of the order for the Yanks,” said Keller’s friend. “About time they broke this thing wide open, wouldn’t you say?”

With two out in the Tarpons’ half of the eighth inning, with the Yankees ahead by five runs, Floyd Turnbull got all of a Mike Stanton fastball and hit it into the upper deck. Keller watched as he jogged around the bases, getting a good hand from what remained of the crowd.

“Career home run number 393 for the old warhorse,” said the man on Keller’s left. “And all those people missed it because they had to beat the traffic.”

“Number 393?”

“Leaves him seven shy of four hundred. And, in the hits department, you just saw number 2988.”

“You’ve got those stats at your fingertips?”

“My fingers won’t quite reach,” the fellow said, and pointed to the scoreboard, where the information he’d cited was posted. “Just twelve hits to go before he joins the magic circle, the 3000 Hits club. That’s the only thing to be said for the DH rule—it lets a guy like Floyd Turnbull stick around a couple of extra years, long enough to post the kind of numbers that get you into Cooperstown. And he can still do a team some good. He can’t run the bases, he can’t chase after fly balls, but the sonofabitch hasn’t forgotten how to hit a baseball.”

The Yankees got the run back in the top of the ninth on a walk to Jeter and a home run by Bernie Williams, and the Tarpons went in order in the bottom of the ninth, with Rivera striking out the first two batters and getting the third to pop to short.

“Too bad there was nobody on when Turnbull got his homer,” said Keller’s friend, “but that’s usually the way it is. He’s still good with a stick, but he hits ’em with nobody on, and usually when the team’s too far behind or out in front for it to make any difference.”

The two men walked down a succession of ramps and out of the stadium. “I’d like to see old Floyd get the numbers he needs,” the man said, “but I wish he’d get ’em on some other team. What they need for a shot at the flag’s a decent lefthanded starter and some help in the bullpen, not an old man with bad knees who hits it out when you don’t need it.”

“You think they should trade him?”

“They’d love to, but who’d trade for him? He can help a team, but not enough to justify paying him the big bucks. He’s got three years left on his contract, three years at six-point-five million a year. There are teams that could use him, but nobody can use him six-point-five worth. And the Tarps can’t release him and go out and buy the pitching they need, not while they’ve got Turnbull’s salary to pay.”

“Tricky business,” Keller said.

“And a business is what it is. Well, I’m parked over on Pentland Avenue, so this is where I get off. Nice talking with you.”

And off the fellow went, while Keller turned and walked off in the opposite direction. He didn’t know the name of the man he had talked to, and would probably never see him again, and that was fine. In fact it was one of the real pleasures of going to a game, the intense conversations you had with strangers whom you then allowed to remain strangers. The man had been good company, and at the end he’d provided some useful information.

Because now Keller had an idea why he’d been hired.

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