“I don’t mean for protection,” he said. “I mean to change their minds, to get them to call it off.”

“Not a chance.” Bingham picked up his glass of brandy, put it down untasted, and took a sip of coffee instead. “I did something that some people are never going to forgive. I can’t buy their forgiveness, and there’s no other way I can get it, either. They’re not about to let me off the hook.”

“You seem awfully calm about it.”

“It’s like having a terminal illness,” Bingham said, and this time he drank the brandy. “Once you accept it, well, you learn to live with it. And for the next few days it’s in remission. I’m safe here.”

They had dinner that evening at a Thai place, mostly empty, with prints in bamboo frames on the walls and a lot of paper lanterns. The food was fiery hot, and they ate a lot of it and washed it down with Mexican beer. They began by talking stamps, almost ritualistically, and then the conversation shifted.

“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 difficult to 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 back to 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.”

“What the hell for? Let ’em auction it off, so some other collectors can grab up chunks of it and have some fun with it.”

“Well,” Keller said, “that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

Bingham just looked at him.

46

“I was thinking natural causes,” he told Dot the following day.

“And why not? One of your subspecialties, Keller. You’re about as natural a cause of death as I’ve ever known.”

“Cyanide’s always good,” he said, “and I don’t think it would be hard to get my hands on some. It looks like a heart attack.”

“And it’s every bit as funny, too.”

“But you find it,” he said, “if you look for it. In a tox screen. And they’d look for it. The local cops might not know who he is, but they’d find out, and when the full story came back from Detroit they’d order a full workup, and they’d find it. Or anything else I can think of.”

“And if they look at it, they’re looking at you.”

“Whatever happens to him,” he said, “they’re going to be looking at me. We’ve been hanging out all over the place. I made sure I paid cash for our dinner last night, but I might as well have used a credit card, because what difference does it make?”

“You want to come home, Keller?”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“We can give back the money. You’re out the cost of your flight, but you were going there anyway, weren’t you? So we’ll just write it off and let somebody else figure out how to kill the son of a bitch.”

“He’s actually a pretty nice guy.”

“Oh, terrific. Just what I wanted to hear.”

“Out here, that is. He may not be such a nice guy in Detroit.”

“So do you want to follow him to Detroit and kill him there? Along with all his bodyguards?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it. What do you think, Keller? Should I make a phone call, and you can just write off the airfare?”

“It’s not just the airfare.”

“And the hotel, I suppose. But you were in for the airfare and the hotel anyway, weren’t you? You already had the room and the flight booked, if I remember correctly.”

“Besides the hotel.”