Lawrence Block - Hit Parade

“I won’t ask how it happened,” Keller said, “but I have to say you don’t seem like the kind of guy who’d make anybody that mad at him.”

“From where you sit, Jackie, I’m a stamp collector. That’s the great thing about a hobby. You get to be a nice guy. My life in Detroit is a little different.”

“I guess it would have to be.”

“All you and I really know about each other is what we collect. For all you know, I could be an ax murderer or a predatory pedophile. I’m not, I’d be safer if I were, but the point is I could be. And you could be, hmm, I don’t know. Nothing violent, you’re too gentle for that, but you could be a stock swindler or a confidence man, something like that.”

“I could?”

“Well, no, I don’t really think you could, but you see what I mean. When we’re collecting stamps, we’re none of those other things, no matter what we are in real life.”

Keller nodded, and asked a question that had occupied him much of the afternoon. “Did you bring bodyguards with you? I guess it’s not the sort of thing I would notice, but-”

“I don’t need them here, Jackie. They’re back in Detroit, guarding an empty house.”

“I would think you’d bring one or two along just as a precaution.”

The man shook his head. “I’m safer without them. See, nobody knows I’m here.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve got a friend with access to his company’s Gulfstream. I hitched a ride out here, and I’ll fly back the same way on Monday. My bodyguards think I’m holed up in the safe room.”

“You don’t trust them?”

“Up to a point, but they can’t tell what they don’t know, can they? I’m registered at the hotel under a false name, so that’s not going to set off any bells and whistles. And if my exhibit pulls in the top prize, even if they put my picture on the front page of Linn’s , well, somehow I don’t think the boys in Detroit are subscribers. If they are, it won’t do them any good, because I’ll be home before the story runs.”

So there wouldn’t be any bodyguards to worry about. Keller, who’d been looking, hadn’t spotted anyone suspicious, but he figured he’d ask. You couldn’t be too careful.

It was difficultto decide what he thought of Sheridan Bingham.

Because he kept flipping back and forth. On the one hand, the man was very close to being a friend, and Keller had warm feelings toward him. At the same time, Bingham was a job that had to be done, a problem that had to be solved, and Keller couldn’t help resenting him. Some people in his line of work, he knew, worked up a genuine hatred for their targets, in order to make the work easier to stomach. Keller had never felt the need to do that, but he was beginning to understand why other men did.

In the auction room Saturday morning, he sat halfway back on the center aisle with his auction catalog and his numbered paddle and his pen, waiting for his lots to come up. He tried to concentrate on the auction, and he managed reasonably well, but he still found his mind wandering now and then.

You could be a stock swindler , Bingham had said. Or a confidence man . And he thought about con men, and how their victims were often less wounded by the financial loss they’d sustained than by the betrayal itself. I thought he was my friend , they’d say, and he betrayed me .

Even as he would be betraying Bingham.

“And now the New Britain issues,” the auctioneer said. “ Lot 402. I have sixty, will you go sixty-five? I have sixty-five, will you go seventy? I have seventy in the back of the room, will you go seventy-five? I have seventy once, I have seventy twice, sold to bidder number 214.”

The same bidder bought all of the New Britain issues, and Keller didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. New Britain, he knew, was an island in the Bismarck Archipelago, named New Pomerania by the Germans, who discovered it back in 1700, and administered as part of German New Guinea. When it changed hands during the war, the British changed the island’s name to New Britain and applied the name to all of the occupied territory in the immediate region, overprinting some German colonial stamps while they were at it.

Keller had a few of the New Britain issues, but not that many. He might have bid on one or two of the lots in the sale, but he couldn’t go against his new friend. He could plan on killing him, but he couldn’t compete with him at a stamp auction.

But it wasn’t really betrayal, was it? It would be different, he thought, if he and Bingham had been friends before Horvath gave him the contract. If that had been the case he’d have turned it down, and even found a way to warn his friend.

That wasn’t the way it had happened. The contract came first, and he would never have gotten to know Bingham if he hadn’t already accepted the job of killing him.

Still, there was something about the whole business…

It would be a lot easier if you were a sociopath. A shame there wasn’t a school you could go to. Earn a degree, become a licensed sociopathic personality. Job placement guaranteed.

“ Lot 721. I have twenty dollars, will you go twenty-two? I have twenty-two, will you go twenty-four? I have twenty-two on the aisle, will you go twenty-four? Are you all through at twenty-four? I have twenty-four once, I have twenty-four twice, sold to bidder number 304.”

Keller lowered his paddle, circled the lot number, noted the price, and looked to see what was coming up next.

That night they went backto the steakhouse. “Quiet on Saturdays,” Bingham observed. “The businessmen are either home with their wives or in bed with their girlfriends. Not that it’s ever noisy here, but we’ve practically got the place to ourselves tonight. You make out okay this afternoon? Seems to me I saw a few lots hammered down to you.”

“I picked up a couple of bargains,” Keller said. “The lots I’m really interested in come up tomorrow.”

“I bought quite a bit today, and I’ll do the same tomorrow. Though sometimes I wonder why I bother.”

“Well, a stamp collection’s like a shark,” Keller said.

“Huh?”

“A shark has to keep swimming forward all the time,” he explained, “or it dies. At least that’s what I heard somewhere.”

“It does sound like the sort of thing a person would hear somewhere.”

“Well, whether it’s true or not for sharks, it works that way with a stamp collection. If you’re not adding to it, there’s not much pleasure in having it.”

“Absolutely true,” Bingham said. “I was always interested in Germany, but when I started out I collected Vatican City. Don’t ask me why. I’m not Catholic, but then I’m not German, either. It didn’t take me long to complete the collection, varieties and all, and it sat there in an album, and I never looked at it. I haven’t sold it, though I probably should, for all the pleasure I get out of it. Like a shark, eh? I never thought of it quite that way, but I like it, because I can picture a collection swimming along, devouring everything in its path.”

A little later he said, “You have a family, Jackie? No? Well, I’ve got a few stray cousins myself, but nobody I’ve had any contact with in years. Way my will’s drawn, I’m leaving everything to Wayne State University.”

“Is that where you went to college?”

“No, but they gave me an honorary degree a few years ago. You could call me Dr. Bingham, but don’t you dare. That degree’s going to turn out to be bread upon the waters, and they might as well have the money as anyone else. God knows what they’ll do with the stamps.”

“You could require that they keep the collection and display it.”