Keller's Fedora (Kindle Single) (9 page)

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.”

W
HEN 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. His 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.

H
E 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.

A
FTER 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?”

J
ULIA AND
J
ENNY
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.”

“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.”

H
E 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?”

“Chekhov, but what was the gun?”

“My third phone, the burner. Purchased for the sole purpose of calling the client if I had to, and there was never a time when I had to.”

“But you still had the phone.”

“Right.”

“And knew what number to call. What did you tell him? Hurry home and you can watch your wife make the beast with three backs?”

“That she’d be expecting not one but two gentleman guests, and that what she didn’t know was that they had an agenda. That once they’d tired of having sex with her, their plan was to kill her and rob the house.”

“And he believed all of this, of course.”

“If it had been the first of April,” he said, “he might have suspected something. But why wouldn’t he buy the whole package? I helped him see how it was his chance to be a hero. Get there right around four, walk in with a gun, and do what needs to be done. He’d be saving her life, he’d be a romantic figure in her eyes, and—”

“And they’d live happily ever after. You can almost hear the movie soundtrack, can’t you?”

“Just about.”

“Did he know who was calling him?”

“I said I was somebody who didn’t know him at all, just a well-meaning stranger who wanted to do the right thing.”

“Well, all of that was true enough.”

“When he pressed a little, I let on that I was a friend of one of the pair, that I’d done time with him in Joliet.”

“Oh, were they criminals?”

“Not that I know of, but I figured the more I made them sound like desperate characters, the less likely he’d be to show up without a gun.”

She nodded, thinking about it. “And then you ended the call and went to Chicago and—”

“No, I was already in Chicago. I called him from Chicago.”

“And that was that. There was nothing more for you to do. It would play out one way or the other, and Dot would keep the money or give it back, and either way you washed your hands of it.”

“Literally,” he said. “Because I ditched the burner in the men’s room, and on my way out I washed my hands.”

“And I guess Dot doesn’t have to give the money back.”

“No.”

“What happened?”

“Dot gave me a pretty sketchy summary,” he said, “but we can probably watch it in a month or two.”

“We can watch it?”

“On
Dateline.
”

“They had their party, and the husband crashed it.”

“I don’t know what time Roy and Pete showed up, but it wouldn’t have been much after 3:15, as eager as they were. Four o’clock’s what I told Todd, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he was fifteen minutes early or fifteen minutes late. I guess he walked right in, and I guess they were too busy doing things to listen for doors opening and closing.”