Hit Man

mint copy of Austria’s first stamp, Scott #1, the one kreuzer orange. It was an error, printed on both sides, and listed in the catalog at $1450. Hildebrand had tagged it $1000 and indicated he’d take $900 for it, but that struck Keller as an awful lot to pay for a stamp that his album didn’t even have a space for. Besides, he could pick up a used copy for a tenth the price of a mint specimen.
    Still, he hadn’t been able to get the stamp out of his head. And now, with a windfall like this. . .
    And it wasn’t as if he were in that big a rush to get back to New York.
    It was about a month later when the telephone rang in Keller’s apartment. He was at his desk, working on his stamp collection. He still hadn’t finished the task of remounting everything in his new albums, but he’d made good progress, having recently knocked off Sweden and started in on Switzerland.
    He picked up the phone, and Dot said, “Keller, you work too goddam hard. I think you should take a vacation.”
    “A vacation,” he said.
    “That’s the ticket. Haul your butt out of town and stay gone for a week.”
    “A week?”
    “You know what? A week’s not long enough to unwind, the way you go at it. Better make it ten days.”
    “Where do you want me to go?”
    “Well, hell,” she said. “It’s your vacation, Keller. What do I care where you go?”
    “I thought you might have a suggestion.”
    “Anyplace nice,” she said. “So long as they’ve got a decent hotel, the kind where you’d be comfortable checking in under your own name.”
    “I see.”
    “Buy yourself a plane ticket.”
    “Under my own name,” he said.
    “Why not? Use your credit card, so you’ve got a good record for tax purposes.”
    Keller rang off and sat back, thinking. A vacation, for God’s sake. He didn’t take vacations, the kind that called for travel. His life in New York was a vacation, and when he traveled it was strictly business.
    He had a good idea what this was about, and didn’t really want to look at it too closely. Meanwhile, though, he had to pick a destination and get out of town. Where, though?
    He reached for the latest stamp weekly, turned the pages. Then he picked up the phone and called the airlines.
    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.