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Page 6

 

  Woulda-coulda-shoulda, thought Keller.

  7

  He’d spent half an hour with the Bulger amp; Calthorpe catalog, reading the descriptions of the two Martinique lots, seeing what else was on offer, and returning more than once for a further look at Martinique #2 and Martinique #17. He interrupted himself to check the balance in his bank account, frowned, pulled out the album that ran from Leeward Islands to Netherlands, opened it to Martinique, and looked first at the couple hundred stamps he had and then at the two empty spaces, spaces designed to hold-what else?-Martinique #2 and Martinique #17.

  He closed the album but didn’t put it away, not yet, and he picked up the phone and called Dot.

  “I was wondering,” he said, “if anything came in. ”

  “Like what, Keller?”

  “Like work,” he said.

  “Was your phone off the hook?”

  “No,” he said. “Did you try to call me?”

  “If I had,” she said, “I’d have reached you, since your phone wasn’t off the hook. And if a job came in I’d have called, the way I always do. But instead you called me. ”

  “Right. ”

  “Which leads me to wonder why. ”

  “I could use the work,” he said. “That’s all. ”

  “You worked when? A month ago?”

  “Closer to two. ”

  “You took a little trip, went like clockwork, smooth as silk. Client paid me and I paid you, and if that’s not silken clockwork I don’t know what is. Say, is there a new woman in the picture, Keller? Are you spending serious money on earrings again?”

  “Nothing like that. ”

  “Then why would you…Keller, it’s stamps, isn’t it?”

  “I could use a few dollars,” he said. “That’s all. ”

  “So you decided to be proactive and call me. Well, I’d be proactive myself, but who am I gonna call? We can’t go looking for our kind of work, Keller. It has to come to us. ”

  “I know that. ”

  “We ran an ad once, remember? And remember how it worked out?” He remembered and made a face. “So we’ll wait,” she said, “until something comes along. You want to help it a little on a metaphysical level, try thinking proactive thoughts. ”

  There was a horse in the fourth race named Going Postal. That didn’t have anything to do with stamps, Keller knew, but was a reference to the propensity of disgruntled postal employees to exercise their Second Amendment rights by bringing a gun to work, often with dramatic results. Still, the name was guaranteed to catch the eye of a philatelist.

  “What about the Six horse?” Keller asked the little man, who consulted in turn the Racing Form and the tote board on the television.

  “Finished in the money three times in his last five starts,” he reported, “but now he’s moving up in class. Likes to come from behind, and there’s early speed here, because the Two horse and the Five horse both like to get out in front. ” There was more that Keller couldn’t follow, and then the man said, “Morning line had him at twelve-to-one, and he’s up to eighteen-to-one now, so the good news is he’ll pay a nice price, but the bad news is nobody thinks he’s got much of a chance. ”

  Keller got in line. When it was his turn, he bet two dollars on Going Postal to win.

  Keller didn’t know much about Martinique beyond the fact that it was a French possession in the West Indies, and he knew the postal authorities had stopped issuing special stamps for the place a while ago. It was now officially a department of France, and used regular French stamps. The French did that to avoid being called colonialists. By designating Martinique a part of France, the same as Normandy or Provence, they obscured the fact that the island was full of black people who worked in the fields, fields that were owned by white people who lived in Paris.

  Keller had never been to Martinique-or to France, as far as that went-and had no special interest in the place. It was a funny thing about stamps; you didn’t need to be interested in a country to be interested in the country’s stamps. And he couldn’t say what was so special about the stamps of Martinique, except that one way or another he had accumulated quite a few of them, and that made him seek out more, and now, remarkably, he had all but two.

  The two he lacked were among the colony’s first issues, created by surcharging stamps originally printed for general use in France ’s overseas empire. The first, #2 in the Scott catalog, was a twenty-centime stamp surcharged “ MARTINIQUE ” and “5c” in black. The second, #17, was similar: “ MARTINIQUE / 15c” on a four-centime stamp.

  According to the catalog, #17 was worth $7,500 mint, $7,000 used. #2 was listed at $11,000, mint or used. The listings were in italics, which was Scott’s way of indicating that the value was difficult to determine precisely.

  Keller bought most of his stamps at around half the Scott valuation. Stamps with defects went much cheaper, and stamps that were particularly fresh and well centered could command a premium. With a true rarity, however, at a well-publicized auction, it was very hard to guess what price might be realized. Bulger amp; Calthorpe described #2-it was lot #2144 in their sales catalog-as “mint with part OG, F-VF, the nicest specimen we’ve seen of this genuine rarity. ” The description of #17-lot #2153-was almost as glowing. Both stamps were accompanied by Philatelic Foundation certificates attesting that they were indeed what they purported to be. The auctioneers estimated that #2 would bring $15,000, and pegged the other at $10,000.

  But those were just estimates. They might wind up selling for quite a bit less, or a good deal more.

  Keller wanted them.

  Going Postal got off to a slow start, but Keller knew that was to be expected. The horse liked to come from behind. And in fact he did rally, and was running third at one point, fading in the stretch and finishing seventh in a field of nine. As the little man had predicted, the Two and Five horses had both gone out in front, and had both been overtaken, though not by Going Postal. The winner, a dappled horse named Doggen Katz, paid $19. 20.

  “Son of a bitch,” the little man said. “I almost had him. The only thing I did wrong was decide to bet on a different horse. ”

  What he needed, Keller decided, was fifty thousand dollars. That way he could go as high as twenty-five for #2 and fifteen for #17 and, after buyer’s commission, still have a few dollars left for expenses and other stamps.

  Was he out of his mind? How could a little piece of perforated paper less than an inch square be worth $25,000? How could two of them be worth a man’s life?

  He thought about it and decided it was just a question of degree. Unless you planned to use it to mail a letter, any expenditure for a stamp was basically irrational. If you could swallow a gnat, why gag at a camel? A hobby, he suspected, was irrational by definition. As long as you kept it in proportion, you were all right.

  And he was managing that. He could, if he wanted, mortgage his apartment. Bankers would stand in line to lend him fifty grand, since the apartment was worth ten times that figure. They wouldn’t ask him what he wanted the money for, either, and he’d be free to spend every dime of it on the two Martinique stamps.

  He didn’t consider it, not for a moment. It would be nuts, and he knew it. But what he did with a windfall was something else, and it didn’t matter, anyway, because there wasn’t going to be any windfall. You didn’t need a weatherman, he thought, to note that the wind was not blowing. There was no wind, and there would be no windfall, and someone else could mount the Martinique overprints in his album. It was a shame, but-

  The phone rang.

  Dot said, “Keller, I just made a pitcher of iced tea. Why don’t you come up here and help me drink it?”

  In the fifth race, there was a horse called Happy Trigger and another called Hit the Boss. If Going Postal had resonated with his hobby, these seemed to suggest his profession. He mentioned them to the little fellow. “I sort of like these two,” he said, “but I don’t know which one I like better
. ”

  “Wheel them,” the man said and explained that Keller should buy two exacta tickets, Four-Seven and Seven-Four. That way Keller would only collect if the two horses finished first and second. But, since the tote board indicated long odds on each of them, the potential payoff was a big one.

  “What would I have to bet?” Keller asked him. “Four dollars? Because I’ve only been betting two dollars a race. ”

  “You want to keep it to two dollars,” his friend said, “just bet it one way. Thing is, how are you going to feel if you bet the Four-Seven and they finish Seven-Four?”

  “It’s right up your alley,” Dot told him. “Comes through another broker, so there’s a good solid firewall between us and the client. And the broker’s reliable, and if the client was a corporate bond he’d be rated triple-A. ”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “Keller,” she said, “what makes you think there’s a catch?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But there is, isn’t there?”

  She frowned. “The only catch,” she said, “if you want to call it that, is there might not be a job at all. ”

  “I’d call that a catch. ”

  “I suppose. ”

  “If there’s no job,” he said, “why did the client call the broker, and why did the broker call you, and what am I doing out here?”

  Dot pursed her lips, sighed. “There’s this horse,” she said.

  8

  The fifth race was reasonably exciting. Bunk Bed Betty, a big brown horse with a black mane, led all the way, only to be challenged in the stretch and overtaken at the wire by a thirty-to-one shot named Hypertension.

  Hit the Boss was dead last, which made him the only horse that Happy Trigger beat.

  Keller’s new friend got very excited toward the end of the race, and showed a ten-dollar win ticket on Hypertension. “Oh, look at that,” he said, when they posted the payoff. “Gets me even for the day, plus yesterday and the day before. That was Alvie Jurado on Hypertension, and didn’t he ride a gorgeous race there?”

  “It was exciting,” Keller allowed.

  “A lot more exciting with ten bucks on that sweetie’s nose. Sorry about your exacta. I guess it cost you four bucks. ”

  Keller gave a shrug that he hoped was ambiguous. In the end, he’d been uncomfortable betting four dollars and unable to decide which way to bet his usual two dollars. So he hadn’t bet anything. There was nothing wrong with that, as a matter of fact he’d saved himself two dollars, or maybe four, but he’d feel like a piker admitting as much to a man who’d just won over three hundred dollars.

  “The horse’s name is Kissimmee Dudley,” Dot told him, “and he’s running in the seventh race at Belmont Saturday. It’s the feature race, and the word is that Dudley hasn’t got a prayer. ”

  “I don’t know much about horses. ”

  “They’ve got four legs,” she said, “and if the one you bet on comes in ahead of the others, you make money. That’s as much as I know about them, but I know something about Kissimmee Dudley. Our client thinks he’s going to win. ”