“No, when it’s two men and one lady.” He snapped his fingers. “Tag team!”
“Ever done that?”
Pete shook his head.
“Me neither. Jim?”
It was, for a change, a question Keller could answer honestly. “Never,” he said.
Pete: “When you think about, you know, the possibilities…”
Roy, who seemed to be thinking about the possibilities, drew a deep breath and got to his feet, cell phone in hand. “Y’all give me a minute,” he said.
ROY CAME BACK with another round of beers, and news that the phone call had been a success. “Quarter past three tomorrow afternoon,” he announced. “We’ll meet up and take my van, ’cause there’s only room for one vehicle in her garage.”
Was that double entendre? Keller decided it wasn’t.
“What we don’t want to be is late,” Roy went on, “on account of we want to take our time. Husband’s got a long drive home after a full day at the office, but he could walk in anytime after six.”
“And what was it Jim here said? ‘Four’s a crowd.’”
“I’d say the two of us could handle him, but I’d just as soon not have to.”
“Rather spend my time handling her,” Pete said. “Damn, man, you went and talked her into it!”
Roy beamed, but Keller sensed that it hadn’t been that hard a sell. More like persuading a bee to sip nectar, or coaxing a moth toward a flame.
Pete said, “You’re the man, man. Old Harold, you figure he would have shared?”
“I’d say no. Harold, he was a hell of a guy, but I can’t say he was much of a one for sharing. Let me borrow his van one time, and first I had to sit through a whole lecture on how to keep from grinding the gears.”
“You want to grind her gears tomorrow, buddy, I’d say go right ahead.”
“Hey, no worry there, Pete. This particular model’s self-lubricating.”
Oh, spare me, Keller thought. He said, “Two hours and change should be plenty of time. I mean, you won’t have to invest a lot of time in small talk.”
“No,” Roy said, “have to say she’s good to go.”
He nodded. “Of course,” he said, “it’d be good to be prepared just in case. Suppose he comes home early and he’s got something in his hand.”
“A hammer,” Pete said.
They looked at him.
“Guy like that,” he explained, “guy that owns his own home, you know he’s got a work bench with a few hundred tools on it.”
“Right,” Roy said. “Son of a bitch could walk into the bedroom carrying a spirit level.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Or a measuring tape,” Roy said, “in case there’s anything Melania doesn’t get around to measuring.”
“I said a hammer because I was thinking about Harold is all.”
Right, Keller thought. “What I was thinking,” he said, “is if I was coming to that party tomorrow, I’d think about bringing a gun.”
“Harold had one,” Roy said.
He did?
“And a whole lot of good it did him,” Pete said. “Guy sneaks up behind you, your head’s caved in before you can even think about getting that old gun off your hip.”
“And it’s no use unless you’ve got it in your hand,” Roy said. “But you’re right, pardner.” He patted his hip. “I won’t have to remember. Never leave home without it, you know?”
A FEW MINUTES later Keller had a genuine reason to visit the restroom, and decided he didn’t need to return to the table. He slipped outside, went to his car.
So the Marlboro Man had had a gun on his hip? He hadn’t known that, and it struck him as the sort of thing one would want to know in advance. Then again, he hadn’t suspected Cowboy Roy was walking around strapped, and that could have posed a real problem, especially if the scenario had called for him to deal with Roy and Pete at the same time. There were far too many ways that could have gone wrong, and just thinking about them was sobering.
Speaking of which, he wondered if he was okay to drive. He’d had what, three beers? And a sip of a fourth? He thought about it and decided he felt clearheaded enough. And once he got underway he certainly seemed to be fine, listening to the gentle but firm voice of the GPS lady, and following her instructions all the way back to the Super 8.
“I GOT RID of the hammer,” he told Dot. “Brand new hammer and I tossed it in a trash can.”
“You could have taken it back for a refund,” she said, “but what would you do, tell them it didn’t work? ‘Sir, you’re supposed to hold it by the handle, not the head.’ How far away was the trash can?”
“I was standing right next to it. It wasn’t a toss, really. I just dropped it in.”
“Well, nobody’s gonna give you a medal for that. So now should I send the money back?”
“Maybe wait a day,” he said.
HE PUT THE Pablo phone away, took out his iPhone, decided he didn’t care if it pinged off towers in Baker’s Bluff. What difference did it make now? He called Amtrak and booked a roomette on the City of New Orleans for the following night, then called Julia and told her he’d be home the day after that.
“I’ll pick you up at the station,” she said. “It, uh, went okay?”
“I sort of called it off.”
“I’m glad, if it means you’re getting on a train tomorrow night. Still, it’s a shame. Not that you called it off, but that you made the trip for nothing.”
“Well,” he said. “That remains to be seen.”
HE SLEPT UNTIL he woke up, then checked out of his motel and drove across the street to Denny’s. Something made him follow the GPS prompts to Robin’s Nest Drive, and all that accomplished was confirmation that the Overmont house was still standing. It had not burned to the foundation, or been swept away in a flash flood, or imploded from emotional intensity. The garage door was closed, the drapes were drawn, and not a single vehicle was parked at the curb for the full length of the block.
Was there any reason to look more closely? Any reason to do anything at all in the pleasant town of Baker’s Bluff?
None that he could think of. He touched the GPS screen, selected Previous Destinations, and headed for O’Hare to give the car back to Hertz.
AND FROM THERE to Chicago, where James J. Miller of Waco went back to being Nicholas Edwards of New Orleans. It wasn’t noon yet, and his train wasn’t scheduled to leave until 8:05, so after he’d picked up the ticket he’d reserved and used it to check his bag through to New Orleans, he had a whole day to kill.
Well, he thought, maybe that wasn’t the best choice of words.
He’d put his three phones in three different pockets before he checked his bag, and now he found a quiet corner in Amtrak’s Metropolitan Lounge. He examined all three phones in turn, and decided there was really only one call he had to make, and only one phone on which to make it.
It rang three times before it was answered, and the fellow on the other end managed to put a world of uncertainty into the single word hello.
“You don’t know me,” Keller said. “But there’s something you really need to know, and something you really ought to do about it.”
WHEN HE LIVED in New York, a stone’s throw from the United Nations, Keller had done a minimal amount of decorating. The bedroom held a couple of inoffensive Japanese prints. He’d never paid much attention to them, and at this point he couldn’t begin to remember what they’d looked like.
But in the living room he’d hung a framed poster he’d picked up at the Whitney. There’d been an Edward Hopper retrospective, and one painting after another had caught him and held him, although it would have been hard for him to say why. The hold was sufficient to prompt him to buy the poster, and it still worked when he brought it home and hung it on the wall.
It was Nighthawks, perhaps the artist’s most iconic work, and while it had been on loan to the Whitney when he saw it, he seemed to remember that its actual home was a museum in Chicago. H
is iPhone Google app confirmed this, and a cab took him to the front steps of the Art Institute, and in no time at all he was standing in front of the painting, looking at the three customers in the diner.
He stood there, drinking it in. It had been a few years now since a trip to Des Moines left him framed for a political assassination, and that was the end of his residence in New York. Of all the apartment’s contents, only his stamp collection remained in his possession, and only because Dot had rushed to retrieve it.
Had he seen a reproduction of Nighthawks since then? He could have, it was reproduced frequently, and he might have run across it when browsing the internet, but he couldn’t specifically recall such an occasion. And yet the painting was as vivid in his memory as if he’d looked at it yesterday, and had the emotional impact upon him that it had the first time he stood in front of it.
He found it cheering, actually. Loneliness, it assured him, was the human condition. It hadn’t singled him out.
Both male customers, he noted, were wearing fedoras.
HE WAS SETTLED in the lounge a little after six, and thought about hauling out the burner phone and trying the number again. But to what end?
In fact, wasn’t it dangerous to have the phone on his person? He’d powered it down after making the single call on it, so it wouldn’t be doing any pinging, but simply continuing to own it might be a bad idea. A storm drain was a logical destination for it, but he’d have to leave Union Station to find one, and that seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
The safest thing to do, he thought, was to smash the thing. But for that he’d need a hammer, and the one he’d bought was in a trash can at the Super 8.
You’re overthinking this, he told himself, and headed for the lounge’s restroom, then overthought that as well and left the lounge long enough to visit a public restroom on the other side of the concourse. There he balanced the phone on top of the paper towel dispenser, where someone could adopt it, use up its remaining minutes, and find his own storm drain.
AFTER THE RITUAL preliminaries (“Mr. Edwards, a pleasure to see you, sir!” “Oh, am I in your car, Ainslie? Then I know I’m in good hands.”) and the ritual passing of the twenty-dollar bill, Ainslie said, “Now I was just about to ask what had become of that fine hat of yours, and then I remembered you didn’t have it with you when you boarded in New Orleans.”
“I didn’t,” Keller agreed, “and I have to say I missed it.”
“Well, we’ll get you right on back to New Orleans, Mr. Edwards. And to that splendid hat.”
A CUP OF hot chocolate in the café car, a decent night’s sleep, a good breakfast. Back in his roomette, he got out the Pablo phone and placed a call.
“I’m on the train,” he told Dot. “We just passed through Yazoo City.”
“Has it changed much?”
“I didn’t get too good a look at it. I’ll be home in a few hours.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it. And glad to hear your voice, but not entirely sure why I’m hearing it. Something I should know?”
“That’s a good question,” he said, “and I’m hoping you can find out the answer. I wonder if anything interesting happened yesterday north and west of Chicago.”
There was a pause. Then she said, “Google’s not that hot on a cell phone.”
“Not for an elaborate search, no.”
“And the reception’s a little uncertain on a moving train.”
“Or even a stationary one, if it’s in the middle of Mississippi.”
“That where Yazoo City is? But I won’t be looking for Yazoo City, will I? Tell me the name of the damn town, because I can’t come up with it.”
“Baker’s Bluff,” he said.
“Right, of course. This may take a while, Pablo. Don’t go anywhere.”
Where would he go? He left the phone on and stuck it in his shirt pocket and picked up the timetable, a hefty volume with schedules for all Amtrak trains. The front cover opened up to a map of all the routes, and while Keller was by no means seeing it for the first time, it never failed to engage him. He could sit there plotting out the various ways you could get from Tampa to Seattle, assuming of course that you had reason to be in Tampa, and reason to go to Seattle. The Sunset Limited ran between New Orleans and Los Angeles, and he thought he might like to ride it someday, with Julia and Jenny, although he wasn’t sure how crazy Julia might be about trains. He somehow knew Jenny would like them.
There was a time, he knew, when the Sunset Limited had run all the way from Jacksonville to L.A., but some years ago they’d cut out the Jacksonville-to-New Orleans stretch. It still showed on the map as a dotted line, which indicated the service was suspended.
Keller thought this was a damned shame. Now if you wanted to go from New Orleans to Miami, say, you had to go hundreds of miles out of your way.
No, the hell with that. He didn’t even want to think about it. Now a long run north and west, that looked interesting. The City of New Orleans to Chicago—he could imagine how courtly Ainslie would be toward Jenny—and then the Empire Builder up and across, through North Dakota and Montana and clear to Seattle…
He’d dozed off, and when the phone rang it took him a moment to recognize it as such. He answered it and said hello, and Dot said, “Well, I guess I don’t have to give the money back.”
“What happened?”
“Jesus,” she said. “What didn’t?”
JULIA AND JENNY picked him up from the station. They went straight home, and after an early dinner Keller took Jenny into his stamp room for story time. He wasn’t much good at making up bedtime stories, and reading her books to her bored both of them in equal measure, but she loved to sit on his lap while he turned the pages of one of his albums and told her about the stamps and where they were from.
His collection, worldwide stamps from 1840 to 1940, was housed in sixteen binders, their contents in alphabetical order. This evening Jenny pointed to an album in the middle of the second shelf and he opened it at random and told her a little about Memel, which was the German name for the city the Lithuanians called Klaipeda. There were around 130 different stamps issued for Memel from 1920 through 1922, all of them German and French stamps overprinted for use in the district. Then in 1923 Lithuanian forces occupied the place, and issued 15 stamps of their own, most but not all of them overprints. A year later the League of Nations approved the designation of Memel—well, better make that Klaipeda—as a semi-autonomous district of Lithuania.
Keller had the country complete, including most but not all of the errors listed in his Scott catalogue—here an inverted overprint, there a double surcharge. All were inexpensive, except for one set of four surcharged Klaipeda stamps worth just over a thousand dollars; Keller’s set had been certified as genuine by an expert, but he had his doubts. And none of them were what you could call visually appealing, or of any conceivable interest to anyone other than a fairly devout philatelist.
And yet Jenny gave every indication of being fascinated by what he told her. She repeated the country’s two names, Memel and Klaipeda, with such precision that Keller found himself wondering if he was pronouncing them correctly himself. It would be a hell of a thing, he thought, for her to be the only kid her age in Louisiana who’d ever heard of the place, and then for her to be saying it wrong.
He said as much to Julia, after Jenny was bedded down for the night. “For me,” he said, “it’s about as good as it gets, sitting with her and pointing at stamps and telling her stuff. And she seems to enjoy it, but I’m damned if I can figure out why.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Not at all. She gets to hear a lot of blather about stuff that happened ages before anybody she knows was born, in places nobody ever heard of. Sometimes there’ll be animals on the stamps, or scenery, but most of the stamps have nothing to look at but the occasional dead king.”
“You show her where the countries are,” she said. “On the globe.”
“Well, sure.”
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“And she gets to cuddle up on her daddy’s lap, and be talked to like a grown-up. And she gets to learn things, which as you may have noticed is very important to her.”
“Yes, she does.”
“She gets that from her mother. So tell me what happened in Baker’s Bluff.”
HE TOLD HER about the Wet Spot and the Spotted Tiger, and how he’d blown the whole mission trying to find out what rhymed with El Paso.
“Once we were all three at that table together,” he said, “drinking our beer straight out of the bottle, well, it was time for me to pack up and come home. What makes my job possible, what allows me to do what I do and not be looking over my shoulder all the time, is that there’s no connection between me and the, uh—”
“Dead guy on the floor.”
“Uh, right. Nobody can put me with the client or the dead guy, so nobody looks at me twice. But if I’m seen hanging out in public with someone—”
“I understand.”
“But then I got to thinking,” he said. And he told her about the rest of the conversation in the Spotted Tiger.
“You set up a threesome for them.”
“I may have nudged the conversation in that direction.”
“Why? Because it was a way to do something kinky but from a distance?”
“No.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” she said. “But it doesn’t sound like you.”
“Dot hates to give money back,” he said.
“Well, there’s a surprise. I mean, doesn’t everybody?”
“It bothers her more than most people. But she said fine, come home, I’ll send the money back and get us out of it. And I thought maybe there’s a way to keep the money.”
“What if she just forgets to send a refund? It’s not like he can take her to court.”
He shook his head. “Word gets around,” he said. “It’s bad policy, and simpler to give it back. And here I was, knowing exactly what time Cowboy Roy and Pistol Pete were going to be two points on a triangle on Robin’s Nest Drive.”
The penny dropped. “You made a phone call.”
“Isn’t there something about if you show a gun in Act One it has to get fired before the final curtain comes down?”