Quotidian Keller Read online

  Quotidian Keller

  Lawrence Block

  Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved

  Ebook by QA Productions

  A Lawrence Block Production

  Quotidian Keller

  * * *

  “Will you look at that?” Dot said.

  Keller looked, but all he could see was a chart of the price of some stock and, across the bottom of the screen, a crawl of stock symbols and numbers. The sound was off, as usual. Dot seemed to prefer TV with the sound off. Keller figured that worked okay with Animal Planet or the National Geographic channel, but it seemed less effective with CNBC. What good was a talking head if you couldn’t tell what it was talking about?

  “We’re doing okay,” she said.

  “We are?”

  “I seem to have a knack for this,” she said, “or else I’ve been lucky, which is probably just as good. Don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so. I didn’t know you were in the stock market.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m right here in my kitchen, sipping iced tea and talking to my partner.”

  “We’re partners?”

  She nodded. “Remember Indianapolis?”

  “Basketball,” he said.

  “Basketball and stock manipulation. We made out very nicely, and it was you who came up with the idea. We did some buying and selling, and no special prosecutor turned up to charge us with insider trading.”

  “And you’re still in the market?”

  “We both are, Keller. I never gave you your share.”

  “You didn’t?”

  She rolled her eyes. “And after the dust settled on that deal,” she said, “well, I looked around and found some other things to buy. It’s real easy, you just get on-line and click your mouse and there you are. You never have to have a conversation with a human being who might ask you what the hell you think you’re doing. We’ve been making money.”

  “That’s great, Dot.”

  “You want your half? Or should I keep doing what I’ve been doing?”

  “If you’re making money for us,” he said, “I’d be crazy to tell you to stop.”

  “That’s assuming we’ll continue to do well. I could lose it all, too.”

  “What have we got at this point?”

  She named a number, and it was higher than he would have guessed, considerably higher.

  “That’s what our account’s worth,” she said, “so half of that is yours. I’m inclined to keep playing, because I’d have to put the money somewhere, and it might as well be where it’s making more money. But if you have a use for it, or want to add it to your retirement fund—”

  “No,” he said. “You hang onto it, and keep on doing what you’ve been doing. I didn’t even know I had it, and if I drew the money I know what would happen to it.”

  “Stamps.”

  “Stamps,” he agreed. “It’s a good thing you didn’t give me my share of the original stock profits, because it’d probably be gone by now. Well, not gone, but—”

  “But pasted in an album.”

  “Mounted.”

  “I stand corrected. Look at that, will you?”

  He glanced at the screen, with no idea what he was supposed to be looking at. “Fascinating,” he said.

  “Isn’t it? Who would have guessed?”

  The stock crawl went on during the commercials, until they finally cut to some sort of mega-commercial that filled the screen. He seized the opportunity to ask her if that was why she’d asked him to come out to White Plains.

  “No,” she said, “it’s something else. I got so caught up in this that I almost forgot. It’s wonderful to develop an interest late in life, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “You with your stamps, me with my stocks. Our stocks. Keller, when I say Detroit, what comes to mind?”

  “Cars.”

  “That’s right, they still make a few cars there, don’t they? What else?”

  “Detroit,” he said, and thought about it. “Well, the Tigers, of course. The Lions, the Pistons. There’s a hockey team, too, but I can’t remember the name of it.”

  “Could it be the Horvaths?”

  “The Horvaths?”

  “As in Alan Horvath.”

  “Alan Horvath.”

  “That ring a muted bell for you, Keller?”

  “Quotidian,” Keller said.

  “Huh?”

  “Putative.”

  She held up her hands. “I give up,” she said. “Are you just throwing words at me or did you pick up some charms from Harry Potter?”

  “They were words he used,” he told her. “Alan Horvath, in Detroit. ‘I read books,’ he said. He had a stamp collection when he was a kid. At least he said he did.”

  “It’d be a strange thing to lie about. He liked you, Keller.”

  “He liked me?”

  “Not enough to ask you to the prom, but enough to call me on the phone and tell me who he was and what he wanted. And what he wants is you.”

  “I thought he was going to kill me,” he remembered. “He had me picked up at the airport, and I thought he was going to have me killed, but all he did was use some big words and send me back.”

  “And you haven’t been back to Detroit since.”

  He started to nod, then remembered. “Just once,” he said, and thought of a shopping mall in Farmington Hills. “That fellow I met on the plane.”

  “You didn’t run into Alan Horvath on that trip, did you? Because he remembers you fondly. He wants you to do some work for him.”

  “I can use the work.”

  “Just what I was thinking, although I didn’t come right out and say as much to Horvath. I told him I’d have to make sure the time worked for you. Because this is one of those where time is of the essence. You don’t get to spend a whole season following a baseball player around the country. It all has to be done next weekend.”

  “By next weekend? That’s not much time.”

  “Not by next weekend. During next weekend. Today’s what, Tuesday?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “Really? So it is. I wonder what happened to Tuesday. Then again, I wonder what happened to the last five years.” She glanced at the screen, frowned, then triggered the remote. “I don’t want to get distracted,” she said, “and the damn thing’s distracting, sound or no sound. Today’s Tuesday, and the window of opportunity here is Friday through Sunday. Not this Friday through Sunday but next Friday through Sunday. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, nothing I can’t change. I had a trip planned, I even had my plane tickets bought.”

  “Maybe you can get a refund.”

  “Or maybe I can just change the flight to Detroit, if the airline goes there.”

  She shook her head. “Forget Detroit,” she said. “After we got off the phone, your friend Horvath sent us something, and it wasn’t his boyhood stamp collection.”

  “Money?”

  “Uh-huh. Plus a photograph. It’s from a newspaper, but he cut it out so neatly there’s no caption.” She passed it to Keller. “Guy looks like he’s getting ready to accept an award.”

  The man in the photo had a broad forehead, a strong jaw line, and a full head of iron-gray hair. And his facial expression—well, Keller could see what Dot meant. “He probably is,” he agreed.

  “Oh? Anyway, his name is—”

  “Sheridan Bingham,” Keller said. “People call him Sherry.”

  Dot stared at him.

  “He lives in Bloomfield Village,” he told her. “That’s a suburb of Detroit.”

  “He called you himself, did he?”

  “Bi
ngham?”

  “No, Horvath. He called me and worked it out, and then he called you directly. He didn’t? Then how in the hell . . . no, don’t tell me. It’ll come to me in a minute. He never said one word to me about Bloomfield Village, or even about Bingham being in the Detroit area. He just said where Bingham would be next weekend.”

  “San Francisco.”

  “So you talked to him after all. You just said you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But—”

  “It took me a minute to recognize his name, remember?”

  She nodded. “And then you said those words. Quo something.”

  “Quotidian. It means everyday, ordinary.”

  “Then why not just say that? Never mind. What was the other word?”

  “Putative.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I looked it up, but I forget what it means.”

  “So the hell with it,” she said. “Okay, I give up. How do you know about San Francisco? How’d you know the guy’s name, and where he lives?”

  “I recognized the picture,” he said. “Bingham’s a stamp collector.”

  Keller changed his mind several times over the next week, but in the end he flew to San Francisco as originally scheduled, on a non-stop American Airlines flight that got him there early Thursday afternoon. He flew under his own name, used his own driver’s license as ID, and charged the ticket to his own credit card.

  All this resulted from the fact that the weekend had started out as a pleasure trip. If it had been a business trip from the outset, he’d probably be in the front of the plane, but he’d decided to economize so he’d have more money to spend on stamps. The plane was half empty, and American gave you adequate legroom in coach, so he was comfortable enough. But he felt oddly exposed, and somehow conspicuous. He was wearing a suit and tie, he looked for all the world like any other business traveler, but he felt as though the nature of his real business was somehow evident, and that anyone who glanced in his direction would know all about him.

  They used to feed you a full meal on a transcontinental flight, even though it was never very good, but this time all he got was a cup of weak coffee and a bag of pretzels. No peanuts, the flight attendant told him, because some people were allergic. He must have made a face, because the fellow nodded in sympathy. “I know,” he said. “Some people are allergic to coffee, too, and probably to pretzels, but the peanut people have a good lobby. But don’t get me started.”

  Keller ate the pretzels and drank the coffee, and when the plane landed he got a cab to his hotel. He was staying at the Cumberford, where the stamp show was being held, and his room was on a high floor with a good view. He’d checked a bag, because he’d brought his Scott catalog and a few other reference books, along with a couple of changes of clothing, and he had a pair of tongs and a magnifier, and you never knew what some security person might decide was a deadly weapon. According to a sign he’d seen at the airport, you couldn’t go through security with a cigarette lighter or a book of matches, nor could you transport either in your checked luggage. Keller, who had never smoked, wondered what a smoker could do these days. You couldn’t smoke on the plane, or anywhere in the airport, and now you couldn’t even light up after you got off, unless you managed to find somebody with a match.

  He unpacked, took a shower, stretched out on the bed. And studied the newspaper photo of Sheridan Bingham.

  “I’ll call Horvath,” Dot had said. “I’ll tell him it’s a scheduling problem, that we have to turn it down. I hate to give back money, especially once I’ve actually got it in my hand, but I don’t see what choice we’ve got.”

  “I’ll go to San Francisco,” he said, “and do the job.”

  “I thought you just said you knew the guy.”

  “I know who he is.”

  “You’re not friends?”

  “I don’t think we’ve ever spoken,” he said, “and if we did it would have been about the weather. I know I’ve been in the same room with him a couple of times. But I’ve seen his photo more than I’ve seen him in person.”

  “On America’s Most Wanted ?”

  “In Linn’s Stamp News. He’s an exhibitor, he enters frames from his collection in stamp shows and wins prizes, or tries to. His specialty is German States.”

  “You mean like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?”

  “Like Hanover and Lubeck,” he said. “And the Mecklenburgs.”

  “The Mecklenburgs? Would that be Ralph and Sheila Mecklenburg?”

  “Mecklenburg-Schwerin,” he said, “and Mecklenburg-Strelitz. There were all these different states and provinces during the nineteenth century, before they united to form modern Germany.”

  “And they all had stamps.”

  “Well, a lot of them did. Thurn & Taxis, that was one of the first postal systems.”

  “There’s nothing certain except Thurn and Taxis. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “I never thought of that,” he said, “and now I’ll never be able to get it out of my head. Anyway, that’s his specialty, German States. Plus Germany, and the German Colonies, but—”

  “Germany has colonies?”

  “Nobody has colonies,” he said. “Not anymore. Germany had colonies up until the end of the First World War. There was German East Africa, which the British wound up with, and German Southwest Africa, which is Namibia now, and Togo and Cameroon, which the French took, and . . .”

  He told her more than she may have needed to know about Germany’s long-lost empire, and when he stopped she looked at him and shook her head. “It’s really educational,” she said. “Stamp collecting.”

  “Well, that’s not the point, but you do wind up picking up a lot of stuff. Useless information, I guess.”

  “All information’s useless,” she said. “You collect German States yourself?”

  “It’s not a major interest of mine.”

  “So the two of you haven’t bumped heads when some particularly desirable stamp comes up.”

  “No.”

  “And you haven’t sat up together drinking Mai Tais and telling old stamp stories.”

  “I’d be surprised if I’m even a familiar face to him.”

  “And the fact that you’re both stamp collectors wouldn’t keep you from punching his ticket?”

  “Do you think it should?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Keller. Horvath used to be a stamp collector, and it’s not stopping him from putting out the contract. It all comes down to how you feel about it.”

  He thought it over. “It’s not as though he was a friend,” he said, “or even an acquaintance. It’s something in common, but so’s wearing the same brand of sneakers. You know how you’ll be riding the subway, and you’re wearing New Balance sneakers, and the guy across from you is wearing New Balance too, and you feel a sort of kinship?”

  “I never ride the subway,” she pointed out, “because it doesn’t reach all the way to White Plains. And I never wear sneakers. But I guess I know what you mean.”

  “Well,” he said, “just because some guy happens to be wearing the same brand of sneakers, I don’t see why that should give him a free pass.”

  Keller had attended stamp shows at the Javits Center that had it all over this one in terms of size. The dealers’ bourse fit neatly into the main ballroom at the Cumberford, and the exhibits were housed in a smaller room on the mezzanine. It was quality that had drawn him here, the quality of the material in the exhibits, the quality of the dealers in the bourse room, and especially the quality of the lots offered at the three-day auction, which was run by the white-shoe firm of Halliday & Okun.

  Of course you didn’t have to show up at an auction in order to bid. You could bid by mail, and the auction house would bid on your behalf, going no higher than your maximum figure for each lot. Or you could bid over the phone, saying yea or nay in real time and having the option of getting carried away and spending more than
you’d intended, just as if you were there in person.

  But it was more exciting to be there, no question. And, sitting on your folding chair, waiting for your lot to come up, you were able to find out just how much you really wanted a particular stamp. Sometimes you wound up sitting there, never even raising your numbered bidder’s paddle, letting the lot go to somebody else for far less than you’d been willing to pay for it. Other times you sailed recklessly past your maximum bid, discovering that you wanted the material more than you’d anticipated.

  Another advantage to being there was you got to see the auction lots up close and personal. The auction catalog featured photos of the more important items, but you couldn’t pick up a photo with your stamp tongs and determine just how much you liked the looks of it. Keller, taking advantage of his early arrival, went to the auction room as soon as he’d unpacked, signed in and got his bidder’s number—304—and sat down with his catalog. He went through it and called for the lots he was sufficiently interested in to examine, and one of the Halliday & Okun minions brought them to him for his inspection.

  Stamp collecting, except for a few moments now and then in a heated auction, was not an exciting hobby. It didn’t provide much in the way of edge-of-the-chair suspense, and that was fine with Keller. That really wasn’t what he wanted from it. He got enough of that in his work, or in what Alan Horvath might categorize as his quotidian life.

  What it did offer, and what Keller appreciated, was total absorption. Seated at his table with his albums and a selection of approvals, or sprawled on his couch with the latest issue of Linn’s, Keller’s attention was entirely occupied by something which was, all things considered, essentially trivial. Trimming a mount with his guillotine-style mount cutter, dipping a British Colonial issue in watermark detection fluid, checking another with his perforation gauge, Keller was completely caught up in the moment. Hours could fly by, with Keller quite unaware of their passage.

  Over the past month, he’d spent quite a few hours with the Halliday & Okun catalog, putting a little checkmark next to those lots in which he had any interest. There were half a dozen items that interested him enough to bring him to San Francisco, high-ticket stamps, five of them from various French Colonies, one an early stamp from Great Britain. He could afford to buy two or three of the six, depending on how the bidding went, and by careful examination he managed to reduce his list from six to four. (He didn’t care for the color of the stamp from Gabon, which seemed to him to have faded as a result of exposure to sunlight, and the British issue, nicely centered and with a wing margin, had a couple of raggedy perforations. He was partial to wing margins, but he decided the perfs bothered him.)