If it was five, Keller said, I wouldnt have to think about it.
Go ahead and think it through, McCue said. I wouldnt really care to go lower than six. I can take a credit card, if that makes it easier.
It made it easier, all right, but Keller wasnt sure he wanted to take that route. He had an American Express card in his own name, but he hadnt used his own name at all this trip, and figured hed just as soon keep it that way. And he had a Visa card hed used to rent the Nissan Sentra from Hertz, and to register at the Days Inn, and the name on it was Holden Blankenship, which matched the Connecticut drivers license in his wallet, on which Blankenships middle initial was J., which Keller figured would help to distinguish him from all the other Holden Blankenships in the world.
According to Dot, who had a source for credit cards and drivers licenses, the license would pass a security check, and the cards would be good for at least a couple of weeks. But sooner or later all the charges would bounce when nobody paid them, and that didnt bother Keller as far as Hertz and Days Inn and American Airlines were concerned, but the last thing he wanted to do was screw a stamp dealer out of money that was rightfully his. He had a feeling that wouldnt happen, that the credit card company would be the one to eat the loss, but even so he didnt like the idea. His hobby was the one area of his life where he got to be completely clean and aboveboard. If he bought the stamps and avoided paying for them, he was essentially stealing them, and it hardly mattered if he was stealing them from James McCue or Visa. He was perfectly comfortable with the notion of having official reprints on the first page of his Swedish issues, but not stolen reprints, or even stolen originals. If he couldnt come by them honestly, hed just as soon get along without them.
Dot would have a snappy comeback for that one, he supposed, or at the very least roll her eyes. But he figured most collectors would get the point.
But did he have enough cash?
He didnt want to check in front of an audience, and asked to use the bathroom, which wasnt a bad idea anyway, after all the coffee hed had with breakfast. He counted the bills in his wallet and found they came to just under eight hundred dollars, which would leave him with less than two after he bought the stamps.
And he really wanted them.
That was the trouble with stamp collecting. You never ran out of things to want. If hed collected something else rocks, say, or old Victrolas, or art hed run out of room sooner or later. His one-bedroom apartment was spacious enough by New Yorks severe standards, but it wouldnt take many paintings to fill the available wall space. With stamps, though, he had a set of ten large albums, occupying no more than five running feet of bookshelf space, and he could collect for the rest of his life and spend millions of dollars and never fill them.
Meanwhile, it wasnt as though he couldnt afford six hundred dollars for the Swedish reprints, not with the fee he was collecting for the job that had brought him to Des Moines. And McCues price was certainly fair. Hed be getting them for a third of catalog, and would have cheerfully paid close to full catalog value for them.
And did it matter if he wound up short of cash? Hed be out of Des Moines in a day or two, three at the most, and aside from buying the occasional newspaper and the odd cup of coffee, what did he need cash for, anyway? Fifty bucks to cover a cab home from the airport? That was about it.
He shifted six hundred dollars from his wallet to his breast pocket and went back to have another look at the stamps. No question, these babies were going home with him. Suppose I pay cash? he said. That get me any kind of a discount?
Dont see much cash anymore, McCue said, and grinned. One side of his mouth went up while the rest stayed frozen. Tell you what, we can skip the sales tax, long as you promise not to tell the governor.
My lips are sealed.
And Ill throw in those Norway stamps you picked out, though I dont guess thatll save you much. They cant come to more than ten dollars, can they?
More like six or seven.
Well, thatll buy you a hamburger, if you dont want fries with it. Call it an even six hundred and were good.
Keller gave him the money. McCue was counting it while Keller made sure he had all of the stamps hed bought, tucking them away in an inside jacket pocket, adding the pair of tongs to another, closing the stamp catalog, when abruptly McCue said, Oh, holy hell! Hold everything.
Were the bills counterfeit? He froze, wondering what was the matter, but McCue was on his feet, walking over to the radio, turning up the volume. The music had stopped and an agitated announcer was interrupting with a news bulletin.
Holy hell, McCue said again. Were in for it now.
2
Of course not.
I didnt think so. The picture they showed on CNN didnt look much like the one they sent us.
It made him nervous, talking like this on a cell phone. The technology kept improving, to the point where you had to take it for granted that there was a record somewhere of every call you made, and that the authorities could access the information in a heartbeat. If you used a cell phone, they could pinpoint the location of it when you made the call. They kept building better mousetraps, and the mice had to be correspondingly more resourceful. Lately, whenever he had a job, he would buy two prepaid cell phones for cash from a store on West Twenty-third Street, making up a name and address for their records. Hed give one to Dot and keep the other for himself, and the only calls either would make were to the other. Hed called a few days ago, to report his arrival in Des Moines, and hed called again earlier that morning to say that theyd told him to wait at least one more day, although he could have hit the guy and been on his way home by now.