Keller's Homecoming Read online

  Call Dot, tell her there was nothing for it but to give back the money.

  Hell. Maybe he should have one last look at the monastery.

  It looked as impregnable as ever.

  Oh, he could get a foot in the door. All he had to do was bang away with the knocker, and some creature in a plain brown robe would open it. But it wouldn’t be O’Herlihy, because when you were the abbot, you didn’t have the job of opening up for visitors. Instead you kept busy telling everybody else what to do, or stayed in your room sucking on the Scotch bottle.

  Or did monks have cells? They seemed to in books, but then they weren’t cloistered in Murray Hill townhouses, not in the novels he’d read. O’Herlihy, he somehow knew, would have a large and well-appointed bedchamber all to himself, unless he managed to smuggle in one of those women he’d been bragging about.

  Would that bedchamber front on the street? Could the man be standing at his window now, looking out at the passing scene? Looking out, perhaps, at the man he knew as Timothy Hannan?

  Keller, on the north side of the street, drew back into the shadows.

  If you knew which room was his, and if it did indeed look out on Thirty-sixth Street, then what?

  A bomb? Not a huge one to demolish the whole building, but something more along the lines of a hand grenade. Lob it through the window in the wee small hours of the morning, by which time O’Herlihy would have taken in enough Scotch to render him unconscious. Boom! The man would never know what hit him.

  Of course you’d have to know which window led to his room. And you’d also have to know where to get your hands on a grenade.

  Hmmm. If he could just find another way into the building. A back door, say. So that he could contrive to be inside when all but a skeleton crew of monks had retired for the night, and their abbot along with them. Then, gliding down the corridors like a ninja, he could find O’Herlihy’s room. Passed out and snoring, the man’s intimidation factor would be significantly diminished. Keller, who could bring any weapon he wanted, might as easily dispatch his quarry with his bare hands.

  He turned to his right, counting his steps as he walked to Madison Avenue, where he turned left and walked a block south. At Thirty-fifth Street he turned left again, and counted his steps again, stopping when he reached the number he’d tallied earlier. Now, unless he’d screwed up somehow, the building in front of him was one that backed up on Thessalonian House.

  And a handsome building it was, four stories tall, with a limestone façade and Greek Revival pillars. Like Thessalonian House, it had surely started life as a private home, and was just as surely something else now. There was a brass plaque alongside the door, but Keller couldn’t make out what it said, and—

  “Edward!”

  The voice was familiar, even if the name was not. Keller turned, and there was Irv Feldspar, the man who’d recognized him from years ago at Stampazine. He was wearing a tweed jacket and a checked shirt and a big smile, and he hurried along the sidewalk to where Keller was standing.

  “Edward Nicholas,” he said, panting from the effort. “Knew you right away. Never thought you’d be a member, living where you do. New Mexico, didn’t you say?”

  “New Orleans.”

  “Well, I was close. But of course we’ve got plenty of out-of-town members. We just don’t get to see them so often. You’re here for the presentation?”

  “I was just walking down the street,” Keller said. “And I’m afraid I’m not a member of anything, Mr. Feldspar.”

  “Please, make it Irv. And do you prefer Ed or Edward?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Or Eddie, even, for all I know.”

  “Actually,” he said, “my name’s Nicholas Edwards, so—”

  “Well, I was close. Nick? Nicholas?”

  “Either one, Irv.”

  “So you’re not a member of the Connoisseurs? Your feet just brought you here? Well, I have to say you’ve got smart feet. We meet the first and third Wednesday of the month, drinks and hors d’oeuvres for an hour, then a one-hour presentation, and we’re out by half-past seven. Tonight we’ve got a visiting speaker from Milwaukee, an expert on the philately of the Civil War. Come on.”

  Feldspar had taken him by the arm and was urging him toward the door. Keller said again that he wasn’t a member, but that didn’t seem to matter. “You’re my guest,” he said. “You’ll have a drink, you’ll have something to eat, and you’ll see some great philatelic material and listen to a terrific talk. And you’ll meet some wonderful fellows. Franklin Roosevelt was a member of this club, FDR himself. Come on, Nick, you don’t want to miss this.”

  “It was pretty interesting,” he told Julia. “The place is the next thing to a mansion, and it belongs to the club. Someone gave it to them a hundred years ago, and there’s no mortgage, and because they’re non-profit there are no taxes to pay. And they can afford to put out a spread of food and drinks before every meeting, and it’s all free.”

  “And the people were nice?”

  “Very pleasant fellows. And a couple of women, too. Irv kept introducing me to people, and he got a couple of names wrong, but they know him well enough to be used to him.”

  “Ass-backwards Syndrome,” she said. “How was the presentation?”

  “That’s what I wanted to tell you about. It was Civil War Philately, which of course means the USA—”

  “And the CSA, buster.”

  “Well, yeah. But it’s an area I don’t collect, so that made the material on display less interesting to me than it might have been otherwise. But the talk was fascinating, and I learned some things I never knew. Do you know what happened in 1861?”

  “Well, I guess I do,” she said. “Y’all started a damn war for no good reason.”

  “Besides that,” he said. “See, someone in Washington realized that all those U.S. post offices in the southern states had large stocks of U.S. stamps on hand.”

  “So? They couldn’t mail letters with them. They were a separate nation by then, even if nobody in Washington was willing to acknowledge it.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “you’re more southern than usual. This fellow in Washington was worried that those stamps constituted a danger to the Union. Confederate agents could smuggle them across the border and sell them at a discount to unscrupulous parties. On the one hand that would raise funds that could be used to aid the secessionist cause, and at the same time it could undermine the integrity of the United States mail.”

  “Would that work?”

  “I don’t see how. We’re talking about stamps, for God’s sake. But in order to nip such a scheme in the bud, the Post Office recalled all the current stamps and rushed a whole new series of stamps into production, with no end of complications that would only interest a stamp collector, and at a cost that had to be ten times what those mythical southern smugglers could have netted for their stamps.”

  “Yankees,” she said. “Was it a southern boy who gave the presentation?”

  “As a matter of fact he was from Milwaukee.”

  “Maybe his granddaddy moved north,” she said, “though why he’d want to do that is beyond me. I’m just having fun, you know, when I get like that.”

  “I know.”

  “It sounds as though you had a good time. Are the dues very high?”

  “Two hundred dollars a year.”

  “That’s hardly anything. What, four dollars a week?”

  “It’s even less for out of-town members. He offered to sponsor me.”

  “Who, Mr. Asberger?”

  “Feldspar. I’d need references, but there are enough dealers I’ve done business with. And I’m a member of the American Philatelic Society.”

  “I think you should join.”

  “Well, I’ll think about it. Who knows when I’ll be back in New York?”

  “But you feel okay there?”

  “Pretty much.” She hadn’t asked about the job that had brought him there, nor had he volunteered anything. �
�But I’ll be glad to get home.”

  “Me too. Tomorrow night, you said? I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

  “It’ll be way past Jenny’s bedtime. Anyway, I left the pickup in Long-Term Parking.”

  “So what’s there for me to do?”

  “You could leave a light on.”

  “I could. And there’ll be a fresh pot of coffee waiting for you. They don’t make it with chicory up there, do they?”

  “They don’t.”

  “In that case,” she said, “I guess you’ll be glad to get home.”

  The parlor floor of The Connoisseurs, half a flight up from street level, was given over to the club’s offices, along with their extensive philatelic library. The meeting was held on the second floor, with food and drinks arrayed on a table at the front of the building and a room for displays and lectures at the rear. Keller made himself a light Dewar’s and soda and helped himself to cheese and crackers and salted nuts while Feldspar introduced him to various members, all of whom seemed more than happy to have him in their midst.

  “A general worldwide collector,” said one man, whose name Keller recognized from articles in Linn’s. “The wonderful thing about it is that there’s always something to buy. And that’s also the horrible thing about it—there’s always something to buy.”

  Keller figured he’d remember that one. But he missed a lot at first because his mind was largely occupied with figuring out how the club could provide access to Thessalonian House. There was a stairway leading to a fourth floor, although a velvet rope indicated it was off-limits. Still, if he found a way to conceal himself in a men’s room when the meeting broke up, the velvet rope would hardly stop him from ascending a flight, and from there he ought to be able to get onto the roof.

  And then what? If all of these buildings were tenements, they might have been built right up against one another, enabling an adventurous fellow to spring from one roof to another. But that only worked if the buildings in question were the same height, and it seemed to him that the monastery was taller by a story. And both structures were on a block in Murray Hill that had never been given over to tenements, and the gap between this building and O’Herlihy’s was almost certainly one that not even Nijinsky could span.

  And if he somehow found himself on the monastery’s roof? Then what?

  No, forget the roof. The club surely had access to the rear courtyard, from the basement if not from the parlor floor, so that’s where he could direct his efforts if he could hide out while everybody else went home. The club’s rear exit would be locked, but fire laws assured that they could be opened from within. And there’d be a rear door for the monastery, and if he could work out a way to open it, why then he’d be in the basement of the monastery, surrounded by cellar-dwelling monks wondering who he was and what in hell he was doing there.

  That was as far as he got before the formal meeting began. Then the guest speaker began talking and showing his PowerPoint presentation, and Keller had the good fortune to get caught up in it and, at least for the time being, forget all about Fr. Paul Vincent O’Herlihy and the impregnable fortress that kept him out of harm’s way.

  Thursday morning, Keller woke up early. Showering, he realized that he felt good, and wondered why. He decided that somehow, during the night, he’d resigned himself to the failure of his assignment, and would be glad simply to be getting home.

  He found the same food cart as yesterday, ordered the same breakfast of croissant and coffee, and told himself he’d just saved another thirty dollars. And yesterday, by God, he’d fed himself all day for the couple of dollars breakfast cost him. The coffee and sandwiches at Peachpit had been a satisfactory lunch, and he’d skipped supper after having enjoyed the food and drink at The Connoisseurs. And now, while he enjoyed feeding his trim body a light breakfast, the plump and stately P.V. O’Herlihy would already be pouring the first of today’s whisky down his throat while he prepared to sweat out yesterday’s, and—

  Wait a minute.

  He dropped the remains of his croissant in the trash, followed it with his unfinished coffee. No time to waste. Things to do, people to see.

  Alphabet City had already changed substantially when Keller was last there, its nasty tenements getting rehabbed left and right for young monied tenants. Now it was even harder to recall what a foul pit it had once been.

  But he was comforted to see it was still a place to cop, if you could use your eyes and knew how to comport yourself. Keller, on East Fifth Street between Avenues C and D, watched business being done, and got into character. He picked out the right man to approach and braced him.

  “Got that,” the fellow said. “Say you want a set of works, too? You sure ’bout that? Nobody shoots this shit, man. These downs, they ain’t like lady or smack. You shoot up, you gone get abscesses.”

  “It’s for a friend,” Keller told him.

  “The very best,” the man said reverently. “It’s not a single malt, mind you. Some of the special-batch single malts can get up there in price, but what we have here is a blend of several malt whiskies, aged for an astonishing sixty years.”

  “And you say it’s five hundred dollars?”

  “A towering sum for a bottle of Scotch,” the man admitted. He was wearing the vest and trousers of a three-piece gray suit, with a fresh white shirt and what Keller had to think was the tie of a good regiment. His hair was styled and his mustache trimmed, and he looked just right for his role behind the counter of a Madison Avenue purveyor of fine wines and spirits.

  “The price,” he continued, “is ten times that of any number of truly excellent Scotches. But to keep it in perspective, we’ve any number of bottles of wine for which we’d have to get three or four times as much, and some that are quite stratospheric in price. A Latour of the right vintage, a Lafitte-Rothschild—and to open such a bottle is to finish it. An hour or two and you’ve emptied it, whereas a liter of whisky can be best enjoyed a dram at a time, over months or even years. And every time your man has his sip, he’s reminded of the generosity of the giver.”

  “It looks expensive,” Keller said.

  “At the very least, the packaging is equal to the contents. Notice the bottle is sealed with lead over its twist-to-open cork stopper. Notice the wooden casket that holds the bottle, brass-bound and equipped with its own tiny brass key. It looks not only expensive but special. One glance and the recipient cannot fail to be aware of the high esteem in which you hold him.”

  “Well, that’s important,” Keller said, and drew out his wallet.

  What was called for, Keller thought, was a Bunsen burner. And if he were back in his high school chemistry lab, he’d have the use of one. But he was in his room at the Savoyard, and had to make do with a candle.

  He’d opened all fifteen of the purple and yellow capsules, and their contents pretty much filled the steel serving spoon. He’d bought it, and the little votive candle as well, at a housewares store. The spoon had been paired with a serving fork, which he’d discarded on the way home. The candle came in a little glass container, and the Hebrew lettering on its paper label suggested it was some sort of Jewish memorial light.

  He added a few drops of tap water to the grains of powder, then held the spoon in the candle’s flame. A Bunsen burner couldn’t have served him any better; the powder liquefied, and he was able to draw up almost all of it into the hypodermic syringe.

  Now the bottle. Remove the lead seal? No, he’d never get it back just right. Easier to go right through the seal and the cork beneath it. Would it reach? Yes, easily, and he depressed the plunger all the way.

  After he’d rinsed out both spoon and syringe, he had a look at the bottle. There was a visible pinhole in the lead seal. He could probably let it go, but could he fix it?

  The lead extended almost two inches down the neck of the bottle. Keller helped himself to a small piece of the lowest portion, used the spoon and the candle to melt it, and used the softened lead to patch the top of the seal. The p
inhole was gone.

  He placed the bottle in its handsome wooden container, fastened the little lock. Reached for the wrapping paper.

  Dear Father O’Herlihy,

  First I must apologize for my intrusion into your life. I should never have bothered you, especially at a difficult time. Although my memory seemed real to me, you helped me to see that it was false, and I find myself wondering how many others have been unjustly smeared as a result of such false memories.

  But I must thank you for removing the veil. I now understand what really happened, and that is the first step toward recovery. I feel much better already.

  So I hope you will accept this gift as a token of apology and gratitude. I hope it brings you closure equal to mine.

  Yours in Christ,

  Timothy Michael Hannan

  Keller looked over what he’d written out on a sheet of hotel stationery. He added a set of quotation marks around memory in the second sentence, and frowned at the last line. Closure? Oh, it was cute enough, but was cute what was wanted here? He crossed it out, and considered other last lines, and rejected them all. Was anything needed after gratitude? Not really.

  On the front of the card he’d bought it said Thank You!, the words surrounded by unidentifiable flowers, and inside he copied his amended draft, using handwriting quite different from his own. The letters were small and carefully formed, and he felt they made a nice match with the voice and manner he’d given young Hannan.

  Near the end, he hesitated. Yours in Christ. Was that too much?

  Oh, the hell with it. He left it in.

  Keller, carrying a shopping bag and wearing a brand-new short-sleeved shirt with a buttondown collar, let the Savoyard’s doorman flag a cab for him. In the cab he put on the plain dark blue tie he’d tucked in the bag, checking the rearview mirror to get the knot right.