Hit Man

almost?”
    “These things you do,” she said, “aren’t things you do.”
    “Huh?”
    “What they are, they’re things you keep busy with while you’re waiting for the phone to ring. They’re things you do between jobs. But if there weren’t any jobs, if you finally got used to the idea that the phone wasn’t going to ring, all that other stuff would have to be your whole life. And there’s not enough there, Keller. You’d go nuts.”
    “You really think so?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “I sort of see what you mean,” he admitted. “The work is an interruption, and I’m usually irritated when the phone rings. But if it stopped ringing altogether. . . ”
    “Right.”
    “Well, hell, ” he said. “People retire all the time, some of them men who loved their work and put in sixty-hour weeks. What have they got that I don’t?”
    She answered without hesitation. “A hobby,” she said.
    “A hobby?”
    “Something to be completely wrapped up in,” she said, “and it doesn’t much matter what it is. Whether you’re scuba diving or fly-fishing or playing golf or making things out of macramé.” She frowned. “Do you make stuff out of macramé?”
    “I don’t.”
    “I mean, what exactly is macramé, do you happen to know? It’s not like papier-máche, is it?”
    “You’re asking the wrong person, Dot.”
    “Or is it that crap you make by tying knots? You’re right about me asking the wrong person, because whatever the hell macramé is, it’s not your hobby. If it was you could make a cabin out of it, along with the clay and the wattles.”
    “We’re back to wattles,” he said, “and I still don’t know what they are. The hell with them. If I had some sort of a hobby—”
    “Any hobby, as long as you can really get caught up in it. Building model airplanes, racing slot cars, keeping bees. . . ”
    “The landlord would love that.”
    “Well, anything. Collecting stuff—coins, buttons, first editions. There are people who collect different kinds of barbed wire, can you believe it? Who even knew there were different kinds of barbed wire?”
    “I had a stamp collection when I was a kid,” Keller remembered. “I wonder whatever happened to it.”
    “I collected stamps when I was a boy,” Keller told the stamp dealer. “I wonder whatever became of my collection.”
    “Might as well wonder where the years went,” the man said. “You’d be about as likely to see them again.”
    “You’re right about that. Still, I have to wonder what it would be worth, after all these years.”
    “Well, I can tell you that,” the man said.
    “You can?”
    He nodded. “Be essentially worthless,” he said. “Say five or ten dollars, album included.”
    Keller took a good look at the man. He was around seventy, with a full head of hair and unclouded blue eyes. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a couple of pens shared his shirt pocket with some philatelic implements Keller recognized from decades ago—a pair of stamp tongs, a magnifier, a perforation gauge.
    He said, “How do I know? Well, let’s say I’ve seen a lot of boyhood stamp collections, and they don’t vary much. You weren’t a rich kid by any chance, were you?”
    “Hardly.”
    “Didn’t get a thousand dollars a month allowance and spend half of that on stamps? I’ve known a few like that. Spoiled little bastards, but they put together some nice collections. How did you get your stamps?”
    “A friend of my mother’s brought me stamps from the overseas mail that came to his office,” Keller said, remembering the man, picturing him suddenly for what must have been the first time in twenty-five years. “And I bought some stamps, and I got some by trading my duplicates with other kids.”
    “What’s the most you ever paid for a stamp?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “A dollar?”
    “For one stamp? Probably less than that.”
    “Probably a lot less,” the man agreed. “Most of the stamps you bought probably didn’t run you more than a few cents apiece. That’s all they were worth then, and that’s all they’d be worth now.”
    “Even after all these years? I guess stamps aren’t such a good investment, are they?”
    “Not the ones you can buy for pennies apiece. See, it doesn’t matter how old a stamp is. A common stamp is always common and a cheap stamp is always cheap. Rare stamps, on the other hand, stay rare, and valuable stamps become more valuable. A stamp that cost a dollar twenty