As far as he could tell, they were okay. And the ad from Just Plain Klassics was still there, and still impossible.
Because the only person
who could possibly have placed that ad was dead, shot twice in the head and burned up in a fire in White Plains.
31
He thought of stopping in, to see if they had any other issues of Linns around. That way he could find out if the ad had run before, but why bother? What difference did it make?
Ten minutes later he was parked across the street from an Internet café, where a kid who looked more like a college wrestler than your prototypical geek pointed him to a computer. He hadnt sat in front of one since he was bidding for stamps on eBay, back before the flight to Iowa. His laptop had been gone by the time he returned to his New York apartment, and hed never even considered replacing it. What for?
Julia, whod sold her own computer before moving back from Wichita, had talked about getting another, but with about the same sense of urgency as she talked about cleaning out the attic. It might happen, possibly even in their lifetime, but you couldnt call it a high-priority item.
Even if shed had a computer, he wouldnt have used it for this. A public machine in a public setting, far from his own neighborhood, was what the situation called for.
He settled in, booted up Explorer, and typed in www.jpktoxicwaste.com. And clicked on Go.
The headline could have been a coincidence. A dealer specializing in the classic issues from philatelys first century, 1840 to 1940, might chance upon Just Plain Classics as a name for his business venture, and might decide to distort the spelling as an homage, say, to Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
If so, hed managed to hit on a name that resonated with Keller. Not so much because those were the stamps Keller collected, since he was hardly unique in this respect, but because the initials were his. JPK = John Paul Keller or, as Dot was apt to point out, Just Plain Keller.
The owner of Just Plain Klassics hadnt troubled to include his name, but he wasnt unique in that respect. He hadnt included a postal address, either, or a phone or fax number, but limited himself to the URL of his website. A lot of philatelic business was conducted on the Web these days, and plenty of classified ads limited their contact information to an email address, but this was unusual in a display ad.
But what nailed it was the URL itself. www.jpktoxicwaste.com.
Years ago, back when the old man was still running things, he and Dot had been troubled by the fact that their boss was turning down job after job for no apparent reason. Accordingly they went proactive before either of them had become familiar with the term, and Dot placed an ad in a Soldier of Fortune imitator called Mercenary Times . Odd jobs wanted, removals a specialty something along those lines, with the firms name given as Toxic Waste, and a post office box in Hastings or Yonkers, someplace like that.
JPK. Toxic Waste.
Coincidence? It had about as much chance of being coincidental as his trip to Des Moines. But if it wasnt a coincidence, then it was a visitation from the dead, because no one but Dot could possibly have placed that ad.
The website, when the computer found its way there through the ether, was anticlimactic. Just the initials at the top, JPK in plain boldface capitals. Nothing about stamps, nothing about toxic waste. Nothing, in fact, but a very brief notice announcing that the site was under construction, along with a mathematical formula that made no sense to him:
19? = 28 x 24 + 37 34 ÷ 6
Huh?
He got on Google, tried various permutations. JPK, just plain klassics, JPK Stamps. Nothing. If you were going to replace the first c in classics with a k , why not do the same with the last one? He tried JPK klassiks, and JPK classics, and got nowhere. Google returned no end of hits for toxic waste, none of which he found himself eager to pursue, and when he tried to type in the formula, or equation, or whatever it was, he couldnt figure out how to reproduce some of the symbols. He did the best he could, and Google was quick to tell him that his search did not match any documents. He gave up and went back to the original URL, jpktoxicwaste.com, and got the same page all over again, advising him once more that the site was under construction, and providing him with the same formula. This time he copied it off the site, then returned to Google and pasted it in, and didnt get any hits.
Do the math, Keller.
He worked it out with pencil and paper. It looked algebraic, and the algebra hed studied in high school was long gone, but maybe he could get somewhere with simple arithmetic. 28 times 24 was 672, plus 37 was 709, minus 34 was 675 (though why you would add 37 only to subtract 34 a moment later was beyond him). Divide all that by 6 and it came to 112.5. So 19 little triangles was equal to 112.5, which meant one of them was what? The answer wouldnt come out even, and by the time hed worked it out to nine decimal places 5.921052631 he decided that couldnt be right.