Hit Man - Lawrence Block [107]
Keller had been to Kansas City several times over the years. His work had always gone smoothly, and his memories of the town were good ones. They were crazy about fountains, he remembered. Every time you turned around you ran across another fountain. If a city had to have a theme, he supposed you could do a lot worse than fountains. They gladdened the heart a lot more than, say, nuclear reactor cones.
It was an unusual experience for him to travel under his own name and use his own credit cards. He sort of liked it, but felt exposed and vulnerable. Signing in at the restored downtown hotel, he wrote down not only his own name but his own address as well. Who ever heard of such a thing?
Of course, as a retiree he’d be doing that all the time. No reason not to. Assuming he ever went anyplace.
He unpacked and took a shower, then put on a tie and jacket and went to the third-floor suite to pick up an auction catalog.
There were half a dozen men in the room, two of them employees of the firm conducting the sale, the others potential bidders who’d come for an advance look at the lots that interested them. They sat at card tables, using tongs to extract stamps from glassine envelopes, squinting at them through pocket magnifiers, checking the perforations, jotting down notes in the margins of their catalogs.
Keller took the catalog to his room. He’d brought his checklists, a whole sheaf of them, and he sat down and got to work. The following day they were still offering lots for inspection, so he went down there again and examined some of the lots he’d checked off in the catalog. He had his own pair of tongs to lift the stamps with, his own pocket magnifier to squint through.
He got to talking with a fellow a few years older than himself, a man named McEwell who’d driven over from St. Louis for the sale. McEwell was interested exclusively in Germany and German states and colonies, and it seemed unlikely that the two of them would be butting heads during the sale, so they felt comfortable getting acquainted. Over dinner at a steakhouse they talked stamps far into the night, and Keller picked up some good pointers on auction strategy. He felt grateful, and tried to grab the check, but McEwell insisted on splitting it. “It’s a three-day auction,” he told Keller, “and you’re a general collector with a ton of lots in there to tempt you. You save your money for the stamps.”
It was indeed a three-day sale, and Keller was in his chair for all three days. The first session was all U.S., so there was nothing for him to bid on, but the whole process was fascinating all the same. There were mail bids for all the lots, and floor action on the majority of them, and the auction moved along at a surprisingly brisk pace. It was good to have a session where he was just an observer; it gave him the chance to get the hang of it.
The next two days, he was a player.
He’d brought a lot of cash, more than he’d planned on spending, and he got more in the form of a cash advance on his Visa card. When it was all over he sat in his hotel room with his purchases on the desk in front of him, pleased with what he’d acquired and the bargain prices he’d paid, but a little bit anxious at having spent so much money.
He had dinner again that night with McEwell, and confided some of what he was feeling. “I know what you mean,” McEwell said, “and I’ve been there myself. I remember the first time I paid over a thousand dollars for a single stamp.”
“It’s a milestone.”
“Well, it was for me. And I said to the dealer, ‘You know, that’s a lot of money.’ And he said, ‘Well, it is, but you’re only going to buy that stamp once.’ ”
“I never thought of it that way,” Keller said.
He stayed on at the hotel after the sale was over, and every morning at breakfast he read the New York Times. On Thursday he found the article he’d been more or less waiting for. He read it several times through, and he would have liked to pick up a phone but decided he’d better not.
He stayed in Kansas City that