Hit List Read Free Page B

Hirschhorn dropped off the kids, then let it go when Hirschhorn got on the interstate. Why follow the man to his office? Keller knew where the office was, and he didn’t need to fight commuter traffic to go have a look at it now.
    He found another family restaurant and ordered orange juice and a western omelet with hash browns and a cup of coffee. The orange juice was supposed to be fresh-squeezed, but one sip told you it wasn’t. Keller thought about saying something, but what was the point?
    “Bring your own catalog?”
    “I use it as a checklist,” Keller explained. “It’s simpler than trying to carry around a lot of sheets of paper.”
    “Some use a notebook.”
    “I thought of that,” he said, “but I figured it would be simpler to make a notation in the catalog every time I buy a stamp. The downside is it’s heavy to carry around and it gets beat up.”
    “At least you’ve only got the one volume. That the Scott Classic? What do you collect?”
    “Worldwide before 1952.”
    “That’s ambitious,” the man said. “Collecting the whole world.”
    The man was around fifty, with thin arms and legs and narrow shoulders and an enormous belly. He sat in an armchair on wheels, and a pair of high-tech aluminum crutches propped against the wall suggested that he only got out of the chair when he had to. Keller had found him in the Yellow Pages and had had no trouble locating his shop, in a strip mall on the Bardstown Road. His name was Hy Schaffner, and his place of business was Hy’s Stamp Shoppe, and he was sure he could keep Keller busy looking at stamps. What countries would he like to start with?
    “Maybe Portugal,” Keller said. “Portugal and colonies.”
    “Angra and Angola,” Schaffner intoned. “Kionga. Madeira, Funchal. Horta, Lourenço Marques. Tete and Timor. Macao and Quelimane.” He cleared his throat, swung his chair around to the left, and took three small black loose-leaf notebooks from a shelf, passing them over the counter to Keller. “Have a look,” he said. “Tongs and a magnifier right there in front of you. Prices are marked, unless I didn’t get around to it. They run around a third off catalog, more or less depending on condition, and the more you buy the more of a break I’ll give you. You from around here?”
    Keller shook his head. “New York.”
    “City or state?”
    “Both.”
    “I guess if you’re from the city you’d have to be from the state as well, wouldn’t you? Here on business?”
    “Just passing through,” Keller said. That didn’t really answer the question, but it seemed to be good enough for Schaffner.
    “Well, take your time,” the man said. “Relax and enjoy yourself.”
    Keller’s mind darted around. Should he have said he was from someplace other than New York? Should he have invented a more specific reason for being in Louisville? Then he got caught up in what he was doing, and all of that mental chatter ceased as he gave himself up entirely to the business of looking at stamps.
    He had collected as a boy, and had scarcely thought of his collection until one day when he found himself considering retirement. The old man in White Plains was still alive then, but he was clearly losing his grip, and Keller had wondered if it might be time to pack it in. He tried to imagine how he’d pass the hours, and he thought of hobbies, and that got him thinking about stamps.
    His boyhood collection was long gone, of course, with the rest of his youth. But the hobby was still there, and it was remarkable how much he remembered. It struck him, too, that most of the miscellaneous information in his head had got there via stamp collecting.
    So he’d gone around and talked to dealers and looked at some magazines, dipping a toe in the waters of philately, then held his breath and plunged right in. He bought a collection and remounted it in fancy new albums, which took hours each day for months on end. And he bought stamps over the counter from dealers in