Lawrence Block - Hit Man

“Any hobby, as long as you can really get caught up in it. Building model airplanes, racing slot cars, keeping bees… ”

“The landlord would love that.”

“Well, anything. Collecting stuff-coins, buttons, first editions. There are people who collect different kinds of barbed wire, can you believe it? Who even knew there were different kinds of barbed wire?”

“I had a stamp collection when I was a kid,” Keller remembered. “I wonder whatever happened to it.”

“I collected stamps when I was a boy,” Keller told the stamp dealer. “I wonder whatever became of my collection.”

“Might as well wonder where the years went,” the man said. “You’d be about as likely to see them again.”

“You’re right about that. Still, I have to wonder what it would be worth, after all these years.”

“Well, I can tell you that,” the man said.

“You can?”

He nodded. “Be essentially worthless,” he said. “Say five or ten dollars, album included.”

Keller took a good look at the man. He was around seventy, with a full head of hair and unclouded blue eyes. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a couple of pens shared his shirt pocket with some philatelic implements Keller recognized from decades ago-a pair of stamp tongs, a magnifier, a perforation gauge.

He said, “How do I know? Well, let’s say I’ve seen a lot of boyhood stamp collections, and they don’t vary much. You weren’t a rich kid by any chance, were you?”

“Hardly.”

“Didn’t get a thousand dollars a month allowance and spend half of that on stamps? I’ve known a few like that. Spoiled little bastards, but they put together some nice collections. How did you get your stamps?”

“A friend of my mother’s brought me stamps from the overseas mail that came to his office,” Keller said, remembering the man, picturing him suddenly for what must have been the first time in twenty-five years. “And I bought some stamps, and I got some by trading my duplicates with other kids.”

“What’s the most you ever paid for a stamp?”

“I don’t know.”

“A dollar?”

“For one stamp? Probably less than that.”

“Probably a lot less,” the man agreed. “Most of the stamps you bought probably didn’t run you more than a few cents apiece. That’s all they were worth then, and that’s all they’d be worth now.”

“Even after all these years? I guess stamps aren’t such a good investment, are they?”

“Not the ones you can buy for pennies apiece. See, it doesn’t matter how old a stamp is. A common stamp is always common and a cheap stamp is always cheap. Rare stamps, on the other hand, stay rare, and valuable stamps become more valuable. A stamp that cost a dollar twenty or thirty years ago might be worth two or three times as much today. A five-dollar stamp might go for twenty or thirty or even fifty dollars. And a thousand-dollar stamp back then could change hands for ten or twenty thousand today, or even more.”

“That’s very interesting,” Keller said.

“Is it? Because I’m an old fart who loves to talk, and I might be telling you more than you want to know.”

“Not at all,” Keller said, planting his elbows on the counter. “I’m definitely interested.”

“Now if you want to collect,” Wallens said, “there are a lot of ways to go about it. There are about as many ways to collect stamps as there are stamp collectors.”

Douglas Wallens was the dealer’s name, and his store was one of the last street-level stamp shops in New York, occupying the ground floor of a narrow three-story brick building on Twenty-eighth Street just east of Fifth Avenue. He could remember, Wallens said, when there were stamp stores on just about every block of midtown Manhattan, and when Nassau Street, way downtown, was all stamp dealers.

“The only reason I’m still here is I own the building,” he said. “Otherwise I couldn’t afford the rent. I do okay, don’t get me wrong, but nowadays it’s all mail-order. As for the walk-in trade, well, you can see for yourself. There’s none to speak of.”

But philately remained a wonderful pastime, the king of hobbies and the hobby of kings. Kids still mounted stamps in their beginner albums-though fewer of them, in this age of computers. And grown men, young and old, well-off and not so well-off, still devoted a substantial portion of their free time and discretionary income to the pursuit.

And there were innumerable ways to collect.

“Topical’s very popular,” Wallens said. “Animals on stamps, birds on stamps, flowers on stamps. Insects-there’s series after series of butterflies, for example. Instead of running around with a net, you collect your butterflies on stamps.” He thumbed a box of Pliofilm-fronted packets, pulling out examples. “Very attractive stamps, some of these. Railroads on stamps, cars on stamps, paintings on stamps-you can start your own little gallery, keep it in an album. Coins on stamps, even stamps on stamps. See? Modern stamps with pictures of classic nineteenth-century stamps on them. Nice-looking, aren’t they?”

“And you just pick a category?”

“Or a topic, which is what they generally call it. And there’s checklists available for the popular topics, and clubs you can join. You can design your own album, too, and you can even invent your own topic, like stamps relating to your own line of work.”

Assassins on stamps, Keller thought. Murderers on stamps.

“Dogs,” he said.

Wallens nodded. “Very popular topic,” he said. “Dogs on stamps. All the different breeds, as you can imagine… Here we go, twenty-four different dogs on stamps for eight dollars plus tax. You don’t want to buy this.”

“I don’t?”

“This is for a kid’s Christmas stocking. A serious collector wouldn’t want it. Some of the stamps are the low values from complete sets, and sooner or later you’d have to buy the whole set anyway. And a lot of these packet stamps are garbage, from a philatelic point of view. Every country’s issuing ridiculous stamps nowadays, printing up tons of colorful wallpaper to sell to collectors. But you’ve got certain countries, they probably don’t mail a hundred letters a month from the damn place, and they’re issuing hundreds of different stamps every year. The stamps are printed and sold here in the U.S., and they’ve never even seen the light of day in Dubai or Saint Vincent or Equatorial Guinea or whatever half-assed country authorized the issue in return for a cut of the profits…”

By the time Keller got out of there his head was buzzing. Wallens had talked more or less nonstop for two full hours, and Keller had found himself hanging on every word. It was impossible to remember it all, but the funny thing was that he’d wanted to remember it all. It was interesting.

No, it was more than that. It was fascinating.

He hadn’t parted with a penny, either, but he’d gone home with an armful of reading matter-three recent issues of a weekly stamp newspaper, two back numbers of a monthly magazine, along with a couple of catalogs for stamp auctions held in recent months.

In his apartment, Keller made a pot of coffee, poured himself a cup, and sat down with one of the weeklies. A front-page article discussed the proper method for mounting the new self-adhesive stamps. On the “Letters to the Editor” page, several collectors vented their anger at postal clerks who ruined collectible stamps by canceling them with pen and ink instead of a proper postmark.

When he took a sip of his coffee, it was cold. He looked at his watch and found out why. He’d been reading without pause for three straight hours.

“It’s funny,” he told Dot. “I don’t remember spending that much time with my stamps when I was a kid. It seems to me I was outside a lot, and anyway, I had the kind of attention span a kid has.”