Lawrence Block - Hit Man

“About the same as a fruit fly’s.”

“But I must have spent more time than I thought, and paid more attention. I keep seeing stamps I recognize. I’ll look at a black-and-white photo of a stamp and right away I know what the real color is. Because I remember it.”

“Good for you, Keller.”

“I learned a lot from stamps, you know. I can name the presidents of the United States in order.”

“In order to what?”

“There was this series,” he said. “George Washington was our first president, and he was on the one-cent stamp. It was green. John Adams was on the pink two-cent stamp, and Thomas Jefferson was on the three-cent violet, and so on.”

“Who was nineteenth, Keller?”

“Rutherford B. Hayes,” he said without hesitation. “And I think the stamp was reddish-brown, but I can’t swear to it.”

“Well, you probably won’t have to,” Dot told him. “I’ll be damned, Keller. It sounds for all the world as though you’ve got yourself a hobby. You’re a whatchamacallit, a philatelist.”

“It looks that way.”

“I think that’s great,” she said. “How many stamps have you got in your collection so far?”

“None,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“You have to buy them,” he said, “and before you do that you have to decide exactly what it is you want to buy. And I haven’t done that yet.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, all the same, it certainly sounds like you’re off to a good start.”

“I was thinking about collecting a topic,” he told Wallens.

“You mentioned dogs, if I remember correctly.”

“I thought about dogs,” he said, “because I’ve always liked dogs. I had a dog named Soldier around the same time I had my stamp collection. And I thought about some other topics as well. But somehow topical collecting strikes me as a little, oh, what’s the word I want?”

Wallens let him think about it.

“Frivolous,” he said at length, pleased with the word and wondering if he’d ever had occasion to use it before. Not only did you learn the presidents in order, you wound up expanding your working vocabulary.

“I’ve known some topical collectors who were dedicated, serious philatelists,” Wallens said. “Quite sophisticated, too. But all the same I have to say I agree with you. When you collect topically, you’re not collecting stamps. You’re collecting what they portray.”

“That’s it,” Keller said.

“And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what you’re interested in.”

“No, it’s not.”

“So you probably want to collect a country, or a group of countries. Is there one in particular you’re drawn to?”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Keller said.

“Suggestions. Well, Western Europe ’s always good. France and colonies, Germany and German states. Benelux-that’s Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg.”

“I know.”

“ British Empire ’s good-or at least it was when there was such a thing. Now all the former colonies are independent, and some of them are among the worst offenders when it comes to issuing meaningless stamps by the carload. Our own country’s getting bad itself, printing stamps to honor dead rock stars, for God’s sake.”

“Reading the magazines,” Keller said, “it made me want to collect everything, but most of the newer stamps… ”

“Wallpaper.”

“I mean, stamps with Walt Disney characters?”

“Say no more,” said Wallens, rolling his eyes. He drummed the counter. “You know,” he said, “I think I know where you’re coming from, and I could tell you what I would do in your position.”

“Please do.”

“I’d collect worldwide,” Wallens said, warming to the topic. “But with a cutoff.”

“A cutoff?”

“They issued more stamps worldwide in the past three years than they did in the first hundred. Well, collect the first hundred years. Stamps of the world, 1840 to 1940. Those are your classic issues. They’re real stamps, every one of them. They aren’t pretty in a flashy way, they’re engraved instead of photo-printed, and they’re most of them a single color. But they’re real stamps and not wallpaper.”

“The first hundred years,” Keller said.

“You know,” Wallens said, “I’d be inclined to stretch that a dozen years. 1840 to 1952, and that way you’re including the George the Sixth issues and stopping short of Elizabeth, which was about the time the British Empire quit amounting to anything. And that way you’re also including all the wartime and postwar issues, all very interesting philatelically and a lot of fun to collect. A hundred years sounds like a nice round number, but 1952’s really a better spot to draw the line.”

Something clicked for Keller. “That’s very appealing,” he said.

Wallens suggested he start by buying a collection. He’d save money that way and get off to a flying start. Two whole shelves in the dealer’s back room held collections, general and specialized. Wallens showed him a three-volume collection, stamps of the world, 1840 to 1949. No great rarities, Wallens said as they paged through the albums, but plenty of good stamps, and the condition was decent throughout. The catalog value of the entire lot was just under $50,000, and Wallens had it priced at $5450.

“But I could trim that,” he said. “Five thousand even. It’s a pretty good deal, but on the other hand it’s a major commitment for a man who never paid more than ten or twenty cents for a stamp, or thirty-two cents if he was getting ready to mail a letter. You’ll want to take some time and think about it.”

“It’s just what I want,” Keller said.

“It’s nice, and priced very fair, but I’m not going to pretend it’s unique. There are a lot of collections like this on the market, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to shop around.”

Why? “I’ll take it,” Keller said.

Keller, at his desk, lifted a stamp with his tongs, affixed a folded glassine hinge to its back, then mounted the stamp in his new album. At Wallens’s urging he had purchased a fine set of new albums and was systematically remounting all the stamps from the collection he had bought. The new albums were of much better quality, but that wasn’t the only reason for the remounting operation.

“That way you’ll come to know the stamps,” Wallens had told him, “and they’ll become yours. Otherwise you’d just be adding new stamps to another man’s collection. This way you’re creating a collection of your own.”

And Wallens was right, of course. It took time and it absorbed you utterly, and you got to know the stamps. Sometimes the previous owner had mounted a stamp in the wrong space, and Keller took great satisfaction in correcting the error. And, as he finished transferring each country to the new album, he made himself a checklist, so he could tell at a glance what stamps he owned and what ones he needed.

He was up to Belgium now, and had gotten as far as Leopold II. The stamps he was working on had little tabs attached, stating in French and Flemish, the nation’s two languages, that the letter was not to be delivered on a Sunday. (If you wanted Sunday delivery, you removed the tab before you licked the stamp and stuck it on the envelope.) A couple of Keller’s stamps lacked the Sunday tab, which made them much less desirable, and Keller decided to replace them when he got the chance. He’d prepare his checklist accordingly, he thought, and the phone rang.

“Keller,” Dot said, “I’ll just bet you’re playing with your stamps.”

“Working with them,” he said.

“I stand corrected. Speaking of work, why don’t you come out and see me?”

“Now?”

“You’re just a part-time philatelist,” she pointed out. “You haven’t retired yet. Duty calls.”