Dutch Blue Error (6 page)

I looked at Sullivan, who returned my stare for a moment, then shrugged and reached into the inside pocket of his sports jacket. He removed a thin cardboard folder, which he handed to the curator. Dopplinger placed it directly before him on the table and gingerly opened the cover. Inside, tacked into a slot, was a glassine envelope. Dopplinger removed the envelope from the cardboard folder, lifted the flap, and reached inside with tweezers to remove the tiny blue square of paper. He placed the stamp in a shallow black ceramic tray. Then he looked at me.

“Mr. Coyne? I’ll need your stamp, too.”

“Sure,” I said, and handed him the pigskin album. Dopplinger removed Ollie Weston’s Dutch Blue Error with his tweezers and arranged it beside Sullivan’s under a very bright white light.

Dopplinger then bent his face so close to the two stamps that his big nose nearly touched them. He muttered “Hm” and “Ah, yes.” He seemed to have forgotten that the rest of us were present. Sullivan and Zerk and I hitched our stools closer.

Dopplinger set a beaker of water on a tripod over a Bunsen burner, and when the water was boiling briskly he picked up Sullivan’s stamp with the tweezers and dunked it. He held it there for a moment, grunted, then removed the bit of blue paper and laid it on a piece of paper towel. Then he scratched a few lines into his notebook.

“Tell us what you’re doing,” said Zerk.

“Sh!” said Dopplinger.

With an eye dropper, he extracted some clear liquid from one of the glass jars and dabbed the stamp. Then he again bent close to it. After a moment, he lifted the stamp with the tweezers and placed it on a glass slide under a big microscope. He adjusted the lens and peered through it, humming tunelessly in the back of his throat. Then he repeated the process with the other stamp—Ollie’s. I watched him carefully, as if he were a carnival sharpie with a pea under walnut shells. I wanted to be sure the two stamps did not become confused.

Dopplinger shifted his attention to the notebook which lay open by his elbow. He scribbled into it for a moment. Then he repeated the previous process, this time with a different chemical. Again he made some notes. Then he fiddled with the microscope, peered through it, and turned more knobs. Evidently satisfied, he placed both stamps side by side under the lens. With the tweezers, he pushed them together so that their edges were touching. He stared at them through, the lens, muttered “Humph!” and reversed the position of the two stamps. This time when he looked he said quite clearly, “just as I thought.” He wrote in his notebook for a minute, then closed it and shoved it back into his pocket.

He straightened up slowly and spun around on the stool to face us. He lifted his glasses off his ears, using both hands. Carefully he folded them, returned them to his shirt pocket and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose. Then he put his other glasses back on.

“Well?” said Zerk.

“Oh, it’s genuine, all right,” said Dopplinger. “They’re both genuine. Matter of fact, they were originally paired.”

“Paired?” repeated Sullivan.

“Yes. Attached. These stamps—they have no perforations, like most stamps today. Those little holes along the edges to make tearing them apart easy. They just came in a sheet, and you had to cut them apart with scissors. These two stamps were once next to each other on the sheet. Here, look.”

Dopplinger laid the two stamps side by side on the black enamel tray. All three of us crowded together to look over his shoulder. He pushed the two stamps together. They did seem to fit nicely, although to my eye it was simply a matter of two straight edges naturally matching up. I kept my opinion to myself.

“The other thing,” continued Dopplinger, “is the watermark. Both copies of the stamp have this same watermark. It’s very faint. I can only bring it out with the carbon tet, but it looks like this.” He tore a piece of paper from a pad on the table and drew what looked like a powderhorn hanging by a thong. “This is in the paper on both stamps. Actually, your stamp,” he said, turning to Sullivan, “is in somewhat better condition than Mr. Weston’s. The postmark is a shade lighter, and Mr. Weston’s stamp has a dim spot in the upper left corner. A fine copy, still, but not quite as good as this other one.”

Dopplinger returned Ollie’s stamp to its plastic pouch inside the pigskin album and handed it to me. He tweezed Sullivan’s into the glassine envelope, stuck it back inside the cardboard folder, and held it for Sullivan to take. Albert Dopplinger had not mixed the two stamps up.

“You seem to know your stuff, all right,” said Sullivan with a broad smile, tucking the folder back into his jacket pocket. He turned to me. “Satisfied, Mr. Coyne?”

“Yes, I am,” I answered. “I’ll have to report this to Mr. Weston, of course, but I think we can safely plan our transaction.”

“I’ll draw up the papers of authentication and mail them to Mr. Weston,” said Dopplinger.

“No copies,” I told him, remembering Ollie’s instructions. “And be sure to include your notes. Mr. Weston must have everything that has been written.”

Dopplinger smiled, his mouth curving up on either side of his pendulous nose. “Of course. I’ve done business with Mr. Weston before. I value the work he gives me. And now, gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I have a manuscript which is purported to be J. S. Bach’s rough notes for his Third Brandenburg Concerto…”

“Oh, sure,” said Sullivan. “Just one thing, though.”

“Yes?” said Dopplinger.

“How the hell do we get out of here?”

“I know,” said Zerk. “Follow me.”

We all shook hands with the tall curator and walked out of his laboratory. Zerk led the way. Sullivan stayed behind me. I could sense his .22 automatic pointing at my spine, I was glad Zerk was with me.

The chill afternoon breeze outside the museum made me shiver. The three of us stood on the sidewalk. I held out my hand to Sullivan. He gave me a little embarrassed smile, then withdrew his hand, which had been caressing his weapon, from his jacket pocket.

“So how shall we do it?” he asked, grasping my hand quickly.

“Let’s see,” I said, pretending to be thinking about it for the first time. “Why don’t I give you a call—hm, today’s Saturday—oh, say, next Tuesday?”

“I’ll call you,” he said firmly. “Will you have the cash by then?”

“Cash. Yes, I suppose so,” I said. “Okay. Call me at my office at noon on Tuesday, and we’ll arrange the exchange.”

I took a business card from my wallet and handed it to him. “I’m in the phone book, if you lose it,” I added.

“I won’t lose it, Mr. Coyne. I’m a very careful man.”

“Yes, I imagine you are.”

“I’ll call you at noon on Tuesday, then. You’ll have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash—nothing larger than five hundreds, please. I’ll have the stamp.”

He turned abruptly and walked away.

“Let’s go get a drink,” said Zerk.

“In a minute. Do you think you can find Dopplinger’s lab again?”

“Sure. We coloreds have an uncanny sense of direction. It’s in our blood, you know.”

“Right. Along with your innate rhythm and athletic ability. Comes from your ancestors creeping through the trackless jungles of Africa. You caught it, then.”

“Sure I caught it. ‘Colored friend!’ Shee-it! If that honkie wasn’t someone we had to do business with…”

“He had a gun, you know.”

“Sure I knew it. Knew it the minute I saw him. You can’t carry a gun in your pocket without it showing.”

“I guess you develop an eye for that sort of thing,” I said.

“It’s in the blood.”

“You could tell I had one, too?”

Zerk laughed. “It was as plain as the nose on Dopplinger’s face.”

“Take me to him, okay?”

Dopplinger’s door was locked, and he took several minutes to open it when I knocked. “Oh. You,” he said when he saw us. “What is it? I’m right in the middle of something.”

“Sorry to bother you. There’s one more thing you’ll have to do to complete your part in all this. Mr. Weston insists that you be present when the stamp exchanges hands. That will probably be Tuesday afternoon, but if that’s not convenient for you, I need to know.”

“Where will this deal take place?”

“There’s a lounge on the top floor of the Hyatt Regency on Memorial Drive. Called The Spinnaker. Know it?”

“The floor revolves so you can see the whole three-sixty degrees of the city. Sure, I know it. Damn near got seasick there once.” Dopplinger consulted his little notebook. “I can be there at five-thirty, if that’s all right.”

“Fine. You understand…”

“Sure I understand. Can’t have your friend pulling the old switcheroo. You’ll want me to verify that the stamp you buy is the same one I examined today. That will be simple. Magnifying glass is all I’ll need. No problem.”

“Good. Thanks. Unless you hear otherwise, we’ll see you then.” I shook Dopplinger’s hand again, and Zerk escorted me out of the museum’s maze for the second time.

As he drove us back into the city, Zerk said, “Suppose he’s planning to rob you. A man’ll do a lot for a quarter million, cash money.”

“I’m not too worried.”

“No? Why not?”

“I’ll have you with me.”

“Ah,” said Zerk. “That explains it.”

T
UESDAY MORNING, 11:47 A.M.
by my wristwatch.
I pressed
the button on my console.

“Yup?” came Zerk’s amplified voice.

“How about a cup of coffee?”

“Black, right?”

“If you’ll excuse the expression.”

A minute later Zerk entered my inner office bearing the stained and chipped coffee mug that my son Joey constructed for me in his ninth-grade pottery class. He put it on the desk at my elbow and said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. That’s why you’re here. To learn.”

“Okay. Here’s my question. Did Julie used to bring you coffee when you buzzed her?”

I sipped from my mug. “You’ve got to understand,” I said, “that Julie—well, she thought that was, ah, demeaning to a woman. I mean, at first she did—bring me coffee, do some shopping for me, like that. Then one day she told me she wouldn’t any more. That it wasn’t her job, wasn’t what she was trained to do, wasn’t what I hired her for and paid her good money for. So after that we brought each other coffee.”

Zerk nodded. “That’s what I figured.”

“Aha.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Aha. It’s bad enough I have to sit there by the typewriter and the telephone and greet the rich white folks who walk through the door, smile and make them feel right at home when they’re staring at me. But bringing you coffee, man…”

“Sure, I get it. Something else to do with your heritage, right? The old roots again.”

“No more coffee, okay?”

“Okay,” I shrugged. “That’s fair enough, I guess. But greeting the clients, answering the phone, typing the letters—that’s the job. You’re a secretary here, remember, not a lawyer. I didn’t ask to have a black man for this position, you may recall. I expected something with slimmer legs, actually. Something of the female persuasion is what I had in mind. You asked for this job, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. But I didn’t expect I was going to be treated like a…”

“Like a woman?”

He glared at me. “Okay. Like a woman.”

I cocked an eyebrow at him. “How should a woman be treated, then?”

He stared at me for a moment, then his face burst into a broad grin. “Okay. You got me. Still, no coffee, right?”

I nodded. “Right. Listen. Sullivan is going to call in a couple minutes. Any other calls between now and then, tell them I’ll get right back to them. I don’t think I want to keep our Mr. Sullivan waiting.”

“Gotcha,” said Zerk, and returned to his desk in the reception area.

When my watch said 11:59, I lit a Winston, sipped the last of my coffee, and hitched myself up to my desk. I watched the buttons on my phone console, waiting for one of them to begin blinking.

Noon came and went. At ten after twelve I walked out to the outer office, where Zerk was doing a good Gene Krupa imitation on his typewriter.

“No calls, huh?” I said.

“Not yet,” he answered, without missing a beat on his IBM.

“That’s odd. He’s been compulsively prompt up to now. Our lines haven’t been tied up, have they?”

Zerk removed his hands from the typewriter, folded them under his chin, and twisted his head around to look up at me.

“You want me to get out this letter, or you want to make idle conversation? Our man hasn’t called. When he does, I’ll let you know. Okay?”

I shrugged. “Sure. Okay. Sorry.” I returned to my desk. At twelve-thirty Zerk brought in some letters for me to sign. “No call,” he said.

At one o’clock I tried to smooth out a couple of clauses in a complicated will I was working on. I kept glancing at the row of unlit buttons on my console, and at my watch, and back at the phone.

At quarter of two I went out and said to Zerk, “Look, ordinarily I wouldn’t mention it, but I really don’t want to leave the phones and I haven’t had a bite since my untoasted English muffin and peanut butter at six-thirty this morning…”

He nodded. “No sweat. What do you want?”

“Tuna salad on rye. Chocolate shake. And Zerk?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. This isn’t part of your job description.”

“I know. That’s why I’ m doing it.”

At four, Zerk and I were sitting across from each other on the twin sofas in the conference area in my office. I was tossing out hypothetical questions of law to him, and he was citing cases and precedents. Part of the deal we made when he persuaded me to hire him.

“Ballinger v. Moorehouse, 1963,” he said. “Prior restraint not applicable. He’s not gonna call.”

“What?”

“Sullivan. He’s not going to call. He chickened out.”

“Why would a man who’s about to earn a quarter-million dollars in smallish bills chicken out?”

“He was going to rob you. His henchmen backed out.”

“His henchmen. Jesus Christ! Nah, I don’t buy that.”

“Well,” said Zerk, “maybe his car broke down. His telephone’s out of order, and he’s got to wait for the repairman. He got a broken leg. His wife made him mow the lawn. Lots of things could have happened. So he’ll call tomorrow.”