Keller 05 - Hit Me (7 page)

“Nicholas Edwards.”

“A damn shame Stampazine’s gone,” Feldspar said. “Bert Taub’s health was bad for years, and finally he closed up shop, and then the word got around that he missed the business and wanted to get back into it, and the next thing we knew he was dead.”

“A hell of a thing,” Keller said, figuring something along those lines was expected of him.

“Plenty of other auctions in this city,” Feldspar said, “but you could just show up at Stampazine and there’d be plenty of low-priced material to bid on. No fancy catalogs, no Internet or phone bidders. I don’t think you and I ever bumped heads, did we? I’m strictly U.S. myself.”

“Everything but U.S.,” Keller said. “Worldwide to 1940.”

“So I was never bidding against you, so why would you remember me?”

“I didn’t come all that often,” Keller said. “I live out of town, so—”

“What, Jersey? Connecticut?”

“New Orleans, so—”

“You didn’t come in special for Bert’s auctions.”

“Hardly. I just showed up when I happened to be in town.”

“On business? What kind of business are you in, if I may ask?”

Keller, letting a trace of the South find its way into his speech, explained that he was retired, and then answered the inevitable Katrina questions, until he cleared his throat and said he really wanted to focus on the lots he was examining. And Irv Feldspar apologized, said his wife told him he never knew when he was boring people, and that she was convinced he was suffering from Ass-Backward syndrome.

Keller nodded, concentrated on the stamps.

Julia said, “I knew there was something. Something’s been different ever since you got back from Dallas, and I couldn’t say what it was, so I had to think it was another woman. And you’re a man, for heaven’s sake, and you were on the other side of the state line, and things happen. I know that. And I could stand that, if that’s what it was, and if what happened in Dallas stayed in Dallas. If it was going to be an ongoing thing, if she was important to you, well, maybe I could stand that and maybe I couldn’t.”

“That wasn’t it.”

“No, it wasn’t, was it?” She reached to lay her hand on top of his. “What a relief. My husband wasn’t fooling around with another woman. He was killing her.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Do you remember the night we met?”

“Of course.”

“You saved my life. I was taking a shortcut through the park, and I was about to be raped and killed, and you saved me.”

“I don’t know what got into me.”

“You saved me,” she said, “and you killed that man right in front of me. With your bare hands. You grabbed him and broke his neck.”

“Well.”

“That was how we met. When Jenny’s old enough to want to know how Mommy and Daddy met and fell in love, we may have to give her an edited version. But that’s not for a while yet. How was it? In Dallas? I know it went smoothly enough, and I think it’s pure poetry that the man you framed wound up confessing.”

“Well, he thinks he did it.”

“And in a sense he did, because if he hadn’t made that first phone call you would never have left the hotel.”

“I probably wouldn’t even have gone. I’d have sent in a few mail bids and let it go at that.”

“So he got what was coming to him, and it doesn’t sound as though either of them was a terribly nice person.”

“You wouldn’t want to have them to the house for dinner.”

“I didn’t think so. But what I wanted to know was how was it for you? How did it feel? You hadn’t done anything like this in a long time.”

“A couple of years.”

“And your life is different from what it was, so maybe you’re different, too.”

“I thought of that.”

“And?”

He thought it over for a moment. “It felt the same as always,” he said. “I had a job to do and I had to figure out how.”

“And then you had to do it.”

“That’s right.”

“And you felt the satisfaction of having solved a problem.”

“Uh-huh.”

“At which point you could buy that stamp without dipping into capital.”

“We only collected the first payment,” he said, “but even so it more than covered the cost of the stamps I bought.”

“Well, that’s a plus, isn’t it? And you didn’t have any trouble living with what you’d done?”

“I had trouble living with the secret.”

“Not being able to mention it to me, you mean.”

“That’s right.”

She nodded. “Having to keep a secret. That must have been difficult. There are things I don’t bother to tell you, but nothing I
couldn’t
tell you, if I wanted to. How do you feel now?”

“Better.”

“I can tell that. Your whole energy is different. Do you want to know how I feel?”

“Yes.”

“Relieved, obviously. But also a little troubled, because now I seem to be the one with a secret.”

“Oh?”

“Shall I tell you my secret? See, the danger is that you might think less of me if you knew.” Before he could respond, she heaved a theatrical sigh. “Oh, I can’t keep secrets. When you told me what happened in Dallas? What you did?”

“Yes?”

“It got me hot.”

“Oh?”

“Is that weird? Of course it is, it’s deeply weird. Here’s something I’m positive I never told you. It got me hot when you killed the rapist in the park. What it mostly did was it made me feel all safe and secure and protected, but it also got me hot. I’m hot right now and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“If we put our heads together,” he said, “maybe we can come up with something.”

Back in his room at the Savoyard, Keller figured it out. Asperger’s syndrome—that’s what Feldspar had, or what his wife said he had.

Though Ass-Backward syndrome wasn’t a bad fit.

“If I’d known what it would lead to,” he said, “I’d have told you right away.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I was afraid, I guess. That it would ruin things between us.”

“So you didn’t say anything.”

“No.”

“And then you did.”

“Right.”

She didn’t say anything, but he felt besieged by her thoughts, bombarded with them. He said, “I figured I was done with it, I’d never do it again, so why bother mentioning it? I could just keep my mouth shut and seal off the episode and let it fade out into the past.”

“Like the faces you picture in your mind.”

“Something like that, yes.”

“I guess you got another phone call.”

“This afternoon.”

“I noticed something was different,” she said, “when Jenny and I got home from Advanced Sandbox. How’s Dot these days?”

“She’s good.” He cleared his throat. “I reminded her what I’d told her right after Dallas. That I didn’t want to do this sort of thing anymore.”

“But she called you anyway.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s complicated.”

Twelve

K
eller, who’d found it hard to leave his hotel room earlier, now found it impossible to spend any time in it. He showered, got dressed, turned the TV on and then off again, and went out.

In New Orleans, Keller drove his pickup truck for business and Julia’s car on other occasions. If he walked north for a couple of blocks, he could hop on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar. And there was a fair network of buses, and it was never hard to get a cab.

For all the choices available to him, Keller did a lot of walking. New Orleans was one of a relatively small number of pedestrian-friendly American cities. Not only could you get around on foot and find interesting things to look at while you did so, but New Orleanians—total strangers—would actually greet you in passing with a smile and a kind word. The ones who didn’t might well draw a gun and hold you up, post-Katrina street crime being a definite problem, but among the law-abiding citizenry you were apt to encounter a high level of politeness and genuine warmth. “Lovely morning, innit?” “Just grand! And how are y’all keeping this fine day?”

New York was at least as much of a city for walkers, to the point where Keller couldn’t understand why some people lived in the city and still felt compelled to own cars. The sidewalks might not be as quaintly friendly as those of New Orleans—there was, after all, good reason for the popularity of the line “Can you tell me how to get to the Empire State Building or should I just go fuck myself?”—but nevertheless it was a walker’s city, and Keller didn’t have to think about it. He left his hotel and started walking.

After his shower, he’d checked in the mirror to see if he needed a shave. He’d decided he could wait until morning, and looked a moment longer at the face Irv Feldspar had been able to recognize. It had changed some since Feldspar (or anyone else in New York) had last had a look at it. Back then his hair had been dark brown, almost black, and it had grown further down on his forehead. When he surfaced in New Orleans, with his face in newspapers and on TV, not to mention on post office walls, he wore a cap all the time, and tried to figure out how to dye his hair gray.

Julia had dyed his hair for him, not gray but a sort of tan shade she called mouse brown. And she had cut his hair short, and had given him a receding hairline. He’d had to shave the stubble where the hairline grew back, but he didn’t have to do that anymore, as Time had worked its own barbering tricks on him. Julia still touched up the dye job periodically, but the dark roots she’d had to lighten were now evolving into gray roots she needed to color.

And yet for all that transformation, worked by Julia and by the years, a guy Keller didn’t recall at all had placed him immediately. Of course he’d seen him in context, he knew him from one stamp auction and recognized him at another, so if they’d run into each other on a subway platform, say, Feldspar might not have given him a second glance.

If he had, Keller could have thrown him in front of a train.

“You may have read about the case,” Dot said. “Or caught it on the evening news. Political corruption in northern New Jersey.”

“I’m shocked,” Keller said.

“I know. It’s almost impossible to believe. Elected public officials taking bribes, laundering money, selling kidneys—”

“Selling kidneys?”

“So I understand, though who’d want to buy a politician’s kidney is a question I’d be hard put to answer. You must have seen something in the paper or on TV.”

“In New Orleans,” he told her, “we don’t pay much mind to political corruption in faraway places.”

“Y’all like to eat your own cooking?”

“There you go,” he said.

“A lot of people got arrested, Keller, and a couple of them went so far as to resign, but most of them are out on bail and still collecting their municipal paychecks. But it looks as though they’ll all have to step down sooner or later, and the abbot will probably have to give up his position, and—”

“The abbot?”

“Well, I don’t see how he can go on heading the monastery.”

“There’s an abbot heading a monastery?”

“Keller, that’s what they do. Not all of them can be partners with Lou Costello.” She paused, and he realized too late that she’d been waiting for him to laugh. When he didn’t, she said, “I don’t know how any of this works. I guess he can go on being a monk, unless he gets defrocked. And as for the other monks, well, I guess they’ll go on doing what they do. What do they do, anyway?”

“Pray,” Keller guessed. “Bake bread. Make cordials.”

“Cordials?”

“Bénédictine? Chartreuse?”

“Monks make those? I thought that was Seagram’s.”

“Monks started it. Maybe they sold the business. I think basically they pray, and maybe work in the garden.”

“The garden-variety monks work in the garden,” she suggested. “The laundry-variety monks keep themselves occupied with money and kidneys. See, the abbot was in cahoots with all the politicians.”

“Felonious monks,” Keller said. “Dot? You don’t think that was funny?”

“I chuckled a little,” she said, “the first time I heard it.”

“I just made it up.”

“You and every newscaster in the country.”

“Oh.”

“Long story short,” she said, “here’s the long and the short of it. The abbot’s the guy who knows where all the kidneys are buried. If he talks, nobody walks. Keller? You beginning to get a sense of what your role’s going to be?”

To Keller, the word
monastery
called up an image of a walled medieval building, set off somewhere in a secluded rural location, its design combining elements of a Romanesque cathedral and a fortified castle. There’d be those narrow windows, to shoot arrows out of, and there’d be places to sit on the battlements, whatever exactly battlements were, while you poured boiling oil on people. And there’d be a dungeon, and there’d be little individual cells where the little individual monks slept. And there’d be grains of rice, to kneel on during prayer.

And singing, there’d be lots of singing. Gregorian chants, mostly, but maybe some sea chanteys, too, because Keller tended to mix up chants and chanteys in his mind. He knew the difference, but he mixed them up anyhow.

You wouldn’t look for a monastery on a quiet residential block in the East 30s. You wouldn’t expect to find a monastic order housed in a five-story limestone-front row house in Murray Hill.

Yet there it was.

It stood on the downtown side of East 36th Street between Park and Madison, flanked on either side by similar structures. A small brass plaque identified one of them as the Embassy of the Republic of Chad, while the other looked to be what all of these houses had once been—an elegant private residence. Between them, the building whose plaque read simply
THESSALONIAN HOUSE
looked no more monastic than either of its neighbors.

Dot had referred to Paul Vincent O’Herlihy, abbot of the Thessalonians, as a fine figure of a man, giving the words a touch of stage-Irish lilt. Keller knew why when he checked him out via Google Images. The abbot was tall and broad-shouldered, heavily built but not fat, with a leonine head and a full mane of white hair. He had one of those open faces that tend to inspire trust, often unwarranted, and Keller could see right away how, if this man were to become a monk, he might very well wind up as the man in charge. With the same looks and bearing, he could as readily have become some city’s commissioner of police, or chairman of the board of a Wall Street firm, or an insurance company CEO. Or, back when Tammany Hall ran New York, he might have been mayor.