“I don’t mail ten letters a month,” she said. “I pay bills, and I write a note if somebody dies or a baby’s born, but you couldn’t put fifteen stamps on one of those little envelopes, and how would it look if you did? If the post office won’t take the stamps back, would they at least let me trade them in for the new ones?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You buy it, it’s yours. No refunds and no exchanges. That’s about it, then?”
“That’s their policy.”
“So these are worthless, then. Is that about the size of it? I can just put them out with the trash?”
Not quite, he told her. And he explained that there were brokers who sold stamps at a discount, somewhere around 90 percent of face value, to volume mailers looking to trim their costs. These brokers replenished their stock by buying holdings like that of Mrs. Ricks, paying 70 to 75 percent of face value for them. He’d be happy to give her contact information for one or two brokers and she could deal directly with them.
Or, if she wanted, he’d buy the stamps himself. He could only pay half their face value, but it would save her negotiating with the brokers, along with the nuisance of packing the stamps for shipment.
“And taking them to the post office,” she said darkly. “And paying the postage!”
“Now, if there’s anyone you know who might enjoy having the stamps,” he said. “Church youth groups always welcome donations. Or a Boy Scout troop, or—”
But she was shaking her head. “Add them up,” she said. “See what they come to, and what you can pay me. I just want them out of here.”
The total face value of the lot ran to $1838, and he divided the sum in half and counted out nine $100 bills and added a twenty. She said she owed him a dollar, and insisted on paying it. As he was packing up what he’d bought and wondering if he’d come out ahead by the time he was done shipping it, she asked him if there was anything else he could use. She had books that she wouldn’t mind selling, and some of them were pretty old. Did he have any interest in books?
Just stamps, he told her. If she happened to have any old envelopes with stamps on them, he’d be glad to take a look at them and let her know if they were something he could use.
She snapped her fingers, which was something you didn’t see often. “In that trunk,” she said. “You know, I’ve been meaning to get rid of that, but it’s way up in the attic and I don’t go there if I can help it. But there’s a little stack of envelopes there. People in the family used to save letters, you know, and in Houghty’s family as well, and some of them go all the way back to the war.”
He knew which war she meant.
“A few times,” she said, “I thought some of those stamps might be worth something, and what I ought to do was soak them off the envelopes, but—”
“No, never do that.”
“Well, I guess I’m glad I never got around to it, from the tone of your voice! But isn’t that what collectors do?”
“Not with old envelopes. No, you don’t want to do anything of the sort. There are people who collect the whole envelope—covers, they call them—and they like them even better with the letters intact.”
“That’s what’s in the attic. Envelopes with letters in them. And then there’s some that don’t even have any stamps on them, though how they got through the mail without them is beyond me. You probably won’t want those, will you?”
“Maybe we should see what’s up there,” he said.
There were forty-one envelopes, and they fit quite comfortably in a box that had once held fifty Garcia y Vega cigars. “I don’t think there are any outstanding rarities here,” he told Mrs. Ricks, “but I can pay you twelve hundred dollars for these.”
“That much for those old letters?”
“I’m pretty sure I’ll come out okay at that figure,” he told her. “And if I don’t, well, I’ll just add them to my own collection.”
But he didn’t collect U.S.—or Confederate, either, for that matter—and he knew just where to send the material he’d purchased. He’d met a fellow at an auction in Dallas, a dealer-collector hybrid from Montgomery who specialized in the postal history of the Confederacy, and when he got home he was able to put his hands on the man’s business card.
He picked up the phone in his stamp room, dialed the number. “I’ve got a few pieces that might interest you,” he said. “Can I send them for your offer?”
The offer came by return mail, in the form of a check for an even $15,000. There was a note along with it, allowing that one particular item alone might bring almost that much at auction. “But we’ll never know,” the fellow said, “because it’s found a permanent home in my personal collection. You come up with any more goodies like this, you know where to send them.”
He put the check in the bank, and added another a few days later, from the gentleman in Connecticut who bought and sold discounted postage; the mint stamps he’d paid $919 for had returned $1286. That was no more of a profit than he deserved, considering his time and shipping costs, but the $15,000 from the Alabaman, welcome though it was, left a sour taste in his mouth.
He spent a few days thinking about it, and then he made a phone call and showed up at the Hurst Street address with a check for $3500. “Those covers were better than I realized,” he told Edith Ricks. “And it seems only fair that you should share in the profits.”
She was astonished, and tried to get him to come in for another round of coffee and cookies, but he pleaded another appointment and went home. “It’s not as though she needed the money,” he told Julia, “but she was certainly happy to have it.”
“That’s the way it is with money,” she said. “It’s welcome wherever it goes. You didn’t have to pay her extra.”
“No.”
“She’d never have known what you got for those covers.”
“No, of course not.”
“Conscience money.”
“Is that what it was? It just seemed, oh, I don’t know. Appropriate?”
“I’ll tell you what it is, even though you didn’t mean it that way. But that’s how it’ll turn out.”
“What’s that?”
“Bread upon the waters,” she said. “You’ll see.”
And he did get a few nibbles over the next month or so, though none of them amounted to much. He told a woman in Metairie that her late husband’s boyhood stamp collection, housed, as Keller’s own had been, in a Modern Postage Stamp Album, would be best donated to charity—a church rummage sale, perhaps, to save the cost of shipping it to one of the stamp charities.
Another woman had a soldier’s letters home, or in any event the envelopes they’d come in. The letters themselves had disappeared, and she had no idea who the sender might be, or the recipient, either; they’d turned up, carefully wrapped in oilcloth, when her husband had taken down a wall to enlarge their kitchen.
The letters, an even dozen of them, had been posted from Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and bore stamps issued by the Allied Military Government. The stamps were common, but the covers were interesting, and Keller’s offer of $20 for the lot was accepted.
It was also high, as he found out when he emailed a couple of scans to an eBay dealer who did a lot with covers. The man’s offer was $1.50 a cover, $2 less than Keller had paid for the material, and he’d have the trouble and expense of mailing them to upstate New York.
He mailed them off, took the loss. He could have kept them, but this way he’d recorded another transaction for his sideline.
Bread upon the waters, but nothing much to show for it, and when the calls stopped coming he more or less forgot about Edith Vass Ricks.
And then he heard from the woman in Cheyenne.
Thirty-Five
Keller packed everything he needed in a wheeled case that was well within the airline’s limits for a carry-on. He checked it anyway, because he didn’t want some zealous security officer to confiscate his stamp tongs.
Which seemed
unlikely, but Keller had known it to happen. A perfin and precancel collector he’d met at a show had told him about it, how the woman from Homeland Security had glared at his tongs as if they were an AK-47. “Look at this,” she’d said, holding them aloft. “Five, six inches long! Made of steel! You could put somebody’s eye out with these!”
“I extended my index finger,” the man told Keller, “and I was just about to point out how easily I could use it to gouge her eye out, but something stopped me.”
“Just as well, I’d say.”
“Oh, I know. I’d be awaiting trial even as we speak. But can you imagine taking a man’s tongs from him? That particular pair didn’t even have pointed tips, I want you to know. Rounded, so you couldn’t stab yourself by accident.”
Or even on purpose, Keller thought, packing two pairs of tongs (one with rounded tips, the other with tips just made for stabbing) and two magnifiers and, of course, his catalog. He checked his bag straight through to Cheyenne, and boarded his flight to Denver with his laptop in a padded briefcase and his cash in a money belt around his waist.
The airport in Denver had a free wi-fi connection, so he logged on and checked his email. He’d been outbid in an eBay auction, and the email invited him to raise his bid and win the lot after all. But of course the other bidder had waited until the last minute to top him, so the auction was over by the time Keller received the invitation.
Not that he’d have bothered anyway. He always bid his maximum at the beginning, and if someone else was willing to outbid him, then that person wanted it more than he did. He’d explained as much to Julia once, and she’d told him his attitude was remarkably mature. He still hadn’t decided whether she was being ironic.
He thought of killing time at a couple of favorite sites, but decided to save his battery instead. He logged off and carried his briefcase to the men’s room, where he locked himself in a stall and took out the envelope Dot had sent. It held a pink ruled index card with one side blank and a name and address and phone number on the other.
He’d memorized that information earlier, and had considered destroying the index card afterward, but dismissed the notion as stupid. He’d also considered copying the data into a computer file, and decided that would be even stupider. For now the man whose name was on the card was alive and well, and that meant there was no risk in having the card in his possession. If something happened to the fellow, then something would happen to the card as well. You could get rid of an index card, you could burn it or shred it or chew it up and swallow it, but once it was on a computer it had eternal life.
The envelope also contained two small photographs, which Keller could only assume were of the same man. One was taken from the side, and showed him walking along a street, with a shoe repair shop behind him. The other was full-face, and had probably been taken at fairly close range and with a flash, because it had caught the subject blinking. If the subject had any strong features, neither photograph had managed to capture them. You couldn’t use them to make an ID, just to rule out other fish that might turn up in the net.
Keller, who hadn’t needed to use the toilet, flushed it anyway in the interests of verisimilitude. The rushing water proved a stimulus, and he used the toilet after all, and then flushed it again, which was rather more verisimilitude than the occasion would seem to require. Way more, he found upon exiting the stall, as he seemed to be the only person in the restroom.
He walked away, frowning.
His Cheyenne flight was on a regional carrier, and the plane was a small one, with minimal capacity for overhead luggage storage. Most of the passengers had to check their putative carry-ons at the gate, and Keller, who’d checked his all the way through, felt he was ahead of the game.
The pilot spent most of the hour apologizing for the rough air, which didn’t seem all that rough to Keller. The landing was certainly smooth enough. He collected his bag, picked up the car Hertz had waiting for him. It was a perky little Toyota, slate blue in color, and it had a GPS system, but Keller didn’t have an address to program into it, so he just followed the signs to the motel strip on West Lincolnway. Ten or a dozen of them huddled there, like cattle bracing against a storm, and he passed three for no particular reason before pulling into a La Quinta.
It seemed to him he’d stayed at a La Quinta not too long ago, but he couldn’t remember where, or whether he’d liked it. He tried phrases in his mind: Oh, La Quinta, that was the nice clean one. Oh, La Quinta, with the moldy carpet. One seemed as likely as the other, and what difference did it make? If this one had a moldy carpet, or a flickering TV, or a bad smell, well, he’d go to the one next door.
The woman behind the desk had an easy manner that inspired confidence, and the room she gave him was perfectly acceptable. He unpacked, shifting his stamp tongs to his breast pocket.
His cell phone got a signal right away. His first call was to Julia, just to let her know he’d survived a couple of hours in the air. She didn’t offer to put Jenny on, nor did he ask. He was working, and that part of his life could wait until the job was done.
He made a second call, to Denia Soderling, who immediately invited him to dinner. There was enough for two, she said, if he hadn’t eaten. He said he was tired, which was true enough, and that it would be better to start fresh in the morning. He wrote down the directions she gave him, and they agreed that he’d show up around nine thirty or ten.
He ate across the street, at a family restaurant that proclaimed itself locally owned and operated. He had shrimp in a basket, which didn’t strike him as all that local, and a small garden salad, and drank a glass of iced tea. The menu promised him unlimited refills on the iced tea, but one glass was plenty.
Back in his room, he took a shower and decided his shave could wait until morning. The TV had a satellite connection, and got what seemed to be an infinite number of channels. He put on CNN while he booted up his laptop and checked his email. No email of note, and no news he cared about. He turned everything off and went to bed.
Ten hours later he was eating breakfast down the street at Denny’s. An hour and a half after that he was looking at stamps.
Thirty-Six
The first thing that struck Keller, when Denia Soderling showed him into her husband’s den, was that no one could have designed a better room for a stamp collector. Walls paneled in knotty cedar, half a dozen rifles and shotguns in a glass-fronted cabinet, a pair of swords crossed on one wall, a matched pair of dueling pistols to their right. A picture window opened onto a rail-fenced paddock, where a pair of horses as well matched as the pistols stood enjoying the morning sun. And the window faced north, Keller saw, so the sun wouldn’t come into the room and cause trouble.
One of a pair of glass-fronted bookcases held books unrelated to stamp collecting, most of them history, along with a dictionary of quotations and a few volumes of poetry. The other case contained the owner’s philatelic library. There was a full set of the Scott catalogs, each volume two or three years old, and there were other catalogs as well, Michel and Yvert and Gibbons and more. And the shelves were filled with books and pamphlets on one stamp-related subject or another. The majority dealt with European nations and their colonies, but Keller spotted Michael Laurence’s study of the ten-cent covers of 1869. He’d almost bought the book himself, even though he didn’t collect U.S. issues and had no real interest in the subject. J. S. Soderling had evidently had the same impulse, and acted on it.
The second thing Keller realized, and he did so even as he was looking around and taking everything in, was that it shouldn’t have been necessary for him to check his carry-on bag. Bringing his own tongs to a room like this had to be right up there with carrying coals to Newcastle.
He confirmed this when he opened the bookcases where the stamp albums were housed. One shelf held the tools of the well-equipped philatelist, and Soderling had equipped himself fully. There were magnifiers and watermark detectors and guillotine-style mount cutters and, not surprisingly, an even dozen pa
irs of tongs. There were tongs with pointed tips, with blunt tips, with spade-shaped tips, with rounded tips. There were tongs with angled tips, for getting at otherwise inaccessible stamps, and tongs with their arms angled in the middle, which no doubt made them particularly well suited for some special purpose, although Keller couldn’t think what it might be.
And then there were the stamps. The albums stood up in rows—France and Colonies, Portugal and Colonies, Italy and Colonies, Germany and Colonies. Russia. Eastern Europe. No U.S. that he could see, and no British Empire, and no Latin America, either. No Asia or Africa, aside from the colonial issues. But all of continental Europe was there, from Iceland and Denmark clear across to Russia and Turkey, and the albums filled two large bookcases. Most of them were from the Scott Specialized series, but there were leather-bound stock books as well, and blank albums.
“It’s overwhelming,” Denia Soderling said, and Keller was surprised to realize she was in the room with him. They’d entered it together, but he’d been so transported by the room and its contents that he’d lost track of her. But there she was, a tall and slender woman with just a touch of gray in her dark hair.
“It’s quite a room,” Keller said.
“Jeb loved it. If he wasn’t at the desk working on his stamps he’d be in the leather chair with his feet up, reading about some battle in the Thirty Years’ War. Or the Hundred Years’ War, I’m afraid I can never keep them straight.”
“One was longer.”
“Once a war lasts thirty years,” she said, “I can’t see that another seventy would make much of a difference. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come into this room since Jeb passed. I can’t keep from coming in, and I can’t make myself stay for more than a few minutes. Do you know what I mean?”
He nodded.
“I tried to look at the stamps. And I thought he might have left a letter for me, telling me what to do with them. I couldn’t find anything. And of course there were all those letters from all those dealers. Overwhelming, all of it.”