Hit Man

“A week?”

“You know what? A week’s not long enough to unwind, the way you go at it. Better make it ten days.”

“Where do you want me to go?”

“Well, hell,” she said. “It’s your vacation, Keller. What do I care where you go?”

“I thought you might have a suggestion.”

“Anyplace nice,” she said. “So long as they’ve got a decent hotel, the kind where you’d be comfortable checking in under your own name.”

“I see.”

“Buy yourself a plane ticket.”

“Under my own name,” he said.

“Why not? Use your credit card, so you’ve got a good record for tax purposes.”

Keller rang off and sat back, thinking. A vacation, for God’s sake. He didn’t take vacations, the kind that called for travel. His life in New York was a vacation, and when he traveled it was strictly business.

He had a good idea what this was about, and didn’t really want to look at it too closely. Meanwhile, though, he had to pick a destination and get out of town. Where, though?

He reached for the latest stamp weekly, turned the pages. Then he picked up the phone and called the airlines.

Keller had been to Kansas City several times over the years. His work had always gone smoothly, and his memories of the town were good ones. They were crazy about fountains, he remembered. Every time you turned around you ran across another fountain. If a city had to have a theme, he supposed you could do a lot worse than fountains. They gladdened the heart a lot more than, say, nuclear reactor cones.

It was an unusual experience for him to travel under his own name and use his own credit cards. He sort of liked it, but felt exposed and vulnerable. Signing in at the restored downtown hotel, he wrote down not only his own name but his own address as well. Who ever heard of such a thing?

Of course, as a retiree he’d be doing that all the time. No reason not to. Assuming he ever went anyplace.

He unpacked and took a shower, then put on a tie and jacket and went to the third-floor suite to pick up an auction catalog.

There were half a dozen men in the room, two of them employees of the firm conducting the sale, the others potential bidders who’d come for an advance look at the lots that interested them. They sat at card tables, using tongs to extract stamps from glassine envelopes, squinting at them through pocket magnifiers, checking the perforations, jotting down notes in the margins of their catalogs.

Keller took the catalog to his room. He’d brought his checklists, a whole sheaf of them, and he sat down and got to work. The following day they were still offering lots for inspection, so he went down there again and examined some of the lots he’d checked off in the catalog. He had his own pair of tongs to lift the stamps with, his own pocket magnifier to squint through.

He got to talking with a fellow a few years older than himself, a man named McEwell who’d driven over from St. Louis for the sale. McEwell was interested exclusively in Germany and German states and colonies, and it seemed unlikely that the two of them would be butting heads during the sale, so they felt comfortable getting acquainted. Over di

It was indeed a three-day sale, and Keller was in his chair for all three days. The first session was all U.S., so there was nothing for him to bid on, but the whole process was fascinating all the same. There were mail bids for all the lots, and floor action on the majority of them, and the auction moved along at a surprisingly brisk pace. It was good to have a session where he was just an observer; it gave him the chance to get the hang of it.

The next two days, he was a player.

He’d brought a lot of cash, more than he’d pla

He had di

“It’s a milestone.”

“Well, it was for me. And I said to the dealer, ‘You know, that’s a lot of money.’ And he said, ‘Well, it is, but you’re only going to buy that stamp once.’ ”

“I never thought of it that way,” Keller said.

He stayed on at the hotel after the sale was over, and every morning at breakfast he read theNew York Times. On Thursday he found the article he’d been more or less waiting for. He read it several times through, and he would have liked to pick up a phone but decided he’d better not.

He stayed in Kansas City that day, and the next day, too. He walked around an art museum for a couple of hours without paying much attention to what he saw. He dropped in on a couple of stamp dealers, one of whom he’d seen at the auction, and he spent a few dollars, but his heart wasn’t really in it.

The next day he packed his bag and flew back to New York. First thing the following morning he got on a train to White Plains.

In the kitchen, Dot poured him a glass of iced tea and muted the television set. How many times had he been here, sitting like this? But there was a difference. This time the two of them were all alone in the big old house.

“It’s hard to believe he’s gone,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” Dot said. “I keep thinking I should be bringing him his breakfast on a tray, taking the paper up to him. Then I remind myself I’ll never get to do that again. He’s gone.”

“So many years…”

“For you and me both, Keller.”

“The paper just said natural causes,” he said. “It didn’t go into detail.”

“No.”

“But I don’t suppose it could have been all that natural. Or you wouldn’t have sent me to Kansas City.”

“That’s where you went? Kansas City?”

He nodded. “Nice enough town.”

“But you wouldn’t want to live there.”

“I’m a New Yorker,” he said. “Remember?”

“Vividly.”

“Natural causes,” he prompted.

“Well, what could be more natural? You live too long, you got a mind that’s starting to turn to pablum, you become erratic and unreliable, what’s the natural thing for someone to do?”

“It was that bad, huh?”

“Keller,” she said, “three weeks ago this reporter showed up. A kid barely old enough to shave, working his first job on the local paper. I’ll tell you, I thought he was there to sell me a subscription, but no, he came to interview the old man.”

“You’d think the editor would have sent somebody more experienced.”

“It wasn’t the editor’s idea,” she said, “or the kid’s either, God help him. And who does that leave?”

“You mean… ”

“He’d decided it was time to write his memoirs. Time to tell all the untold stories, time to tell where the bodies were buried. And I do mean bodies, Keller, and I do mean buried.”

“Jesus.”

“He saw this kid’s byline on some high school basketball roundup and decided he was the perfect person to collaborate with.”

“For God’s sake.”

“Need I say more? I’d already reached the point where I made sure all incoming calls got routed downstairs. Now I had to worry about the calls he made on his own. Keller, it’s the hardest decision I ever had to make in my life.”

“I can imagine.”

“But what choice did I have? It had to be done.”

“Sounds that way.” He picked up his tea, put it down untasted. “Who’d you get for it, Dot?”