Gone, all of them.
It wasn’t as though it took him entirely by surprise. He’d known there was a good possibility he’d come home to find his stamps missing, carried away by one or another of his visitors. The cops might very well have confiscated the stamps, but he thought it was more likely that Al, or whoever Al dispatched, had spotted the albums and knew enough about the market in collectibles to recognize their value. Whoever took them would be lucky to realize ten cents on the dollar, but even so he might regard it as worth risking a hernia to haul the ten big books out of there and find a stamp dealer who wasn’t too scrupulous to pass up a bargain.
If the latter was what happened, they were gone forever. If the cops had them, they were still gone, for all the good it would do him. They might spend the next twenty years in an evidence locker somewhere, while heat and humidity and vermin and air pollution did their work, and the chances that they’d ever find their way back into Keller’s possession, even if by some miracle somebody in Des Moines broke down and confessed to everything, including having framed Keller — even if all of that happened, in spite of the fact that he knew it never would or could, he’d still never see the stamps again.
They were gone. Well, all right. So was Dot. That had been entirely unexpected, he’d expected to have her as a friend for the rest of his life. So it had stunned and saddened him, and he was still sad about it, and would very likely feel that way for a long time. But he hadn’t responded to her death by curling up in a ball. He’d gone on, because that was what you did, what you had to do. You had to go on.
The stamps didn’t constitute a death, but they were certainly a loss, and having allowed for the possibility didn’t do anything to lessen its impact. But they were gone, period, end of report. He wasn’t going to be able to get them back, any more than he was going to be able to revive Dot. Dead was dead, when all was said and done, and gone was gone.
Now what?
His computer was gone, too. The cops would have taken that without having to think twice, and even now some technicians were sure to be poring over his hard drive, trying to coax out of it information it did not in fact possess. It was a laptop, a MacBook, quick and responsive and user-friendly, but as far as he could make out there was nothing incriminating on it, and all it would take to replace it was money.
His telephone answering machine was in pieces on the floor, which explained why it hadn’t answered his phone. He wondered what it had done to upset anyone. Maybe someone had started to steal it, decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, and bounced it off the wall in anger. Well, so what? He wouldn’t have to replace it, because he didn’t have a phone for it to answer, or anyone who’d want to leave him a message.
The answering machine wasn’t the only thing on the floor. They’d been through his drawers and closets, and the contents of several dresser drawers had been dumped out, but as far as he could make out his clothes were all there. He picked out a few things, shirts and socks and underwear, a pair of sneakers, things he might find a use for on the way to wherever he would go next. Now, he thought, stamps or no stamps, he’d finally find a use for that fucking duffel bag, and he went to the closet where he kept it and the damn thing was gone.
Well, of course, he thought. The bastards had needed something to hold the stamp albums, and they wouldn’t have known to bring anything because they’d only have found out about the stamp collection when they saw it. So they kept hunting until they found the duffel.
He’d have been unable to fill it, anyway. A shopping bag held what little he felt like taking.
He set the bag down and found a small screwdriver in the hardware drawer in the kitchen, used it to remove the switch plate on the bedroom wall. Years ago, before Keller moved into the apartment, there must have been a ceiling fixture in the bedroom, but a previous tenant had remodeled it out of existence. The wall switch remained, but didn’t do anything, a fact Keller demonstrated repeatedly early on by forgetting and flicking the thing to no purpose.
When he bought the apartment and became a property owner instead of a tenant, it seemed to him that some sort of home improvement was in order to mark the occasion, and he took the switch plate off, intending to stuff the cavity with steel wool, spackle over it, and paint it to match the surrounding wall. But once he opened it up he recognized it for the ideal hiding place it was, and it had held his emergency cash fund ever since.
The money was still there, just over twelve hundred dollars. He replaced the switch plate, wondering why he was wasting time on it. He would never be coming back to this apartment.
He didn’t waste further time replacing the dresser drawers, or straightening the mess his visitors had left. Nor did he wipe away his fingerprints. It was his apartment, he’d lived in it for years, and his prints were all over it, and what difference did it make? What difference did anything make?
When Keller got to the lobby, Neil was standing on the sidewalk to the left of the entrance, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes aimed somewhere around the seventh floor of the building across the street. Keller looked, and the only lighted windows had their shades drawn, so it was hard to guess what was over there to hold such interest for the doorman. Keller decided it wasn’t what he was seeing, it was what he was taking care not to look at, which in this case was Keller.
Sure, Officer, and I never set eyes on the man.
The man’s stance didn’t invite speech, so Keller passed him without a word, carrying his shopping bag in one hand, feeling the pressure of the SIG Sauer in the small of his back. He walked to the corner and put on his Homer Simpson cap even as he disappeared forever from Neil’s field of vision.
On the next block, he stopped for a moment to watch a tow truck’s two-man crew making their preparations for the removal of the Lincoln Town Car. No longer shielded by its DPL plates, or any plates at all, and being at once too far from the curb and right in front of a hydrant, it was an outstanding candidate for a tow, and would soon be on its way to the impound lot.
The sight of this gladdened Keller beyond all reason. There was, he knew, a German word — Schadenfreude — for what he was feeling; it meant experiencing joy through the pain of another, and Keller didn’t suppose it was the noblest of emotions.
But he found himself smiling broadly all the way to his car, and just minutes ago he would have deemed it unlikely that he’d ever have occasion to smile again. Schadenfreude, he could only conclude, was better than no Freude at all.
The bridge and tunnel tolls were only collected from cars entering Manhattan. It cost you six dollars to come in and nothing to leave. That halved the number of agents required to collect the money, but Keller had always figured there was a further underpinning of logic to the scheme. After a visit to the big bad city, how many tourists still had enough money left to buy their way out?
What it meant to him was one less person who’d get a look at his face. He left the city via the Lincoln Tunnel and stopped at the first convenient place on the Jersey side to unfasten the DPL tags, which could draw unwelcome attention outside of the city. He didn’t foresee any further use for them, but it seemed a waste to toss them, and he put them in the trunk, next to the spare tire.
He wondered if the Lincoln’s owner would ever be reunited with his car, and if its disappearance might touch off an international incident. Maybe there’d be something about it in the papers.
He drove at first with no destination in mind, and when he finally asked himself where he was going, all he could think of was the Gujarati motel in Pennsylvania where he’d spent the previous night. “Me again,” he’d say, and the slim dark girl in the parochial school getup would check him in with as little interest as she’d shown the first time. But could he even find the place? It was off Route 80, he knew that much, and he might recognize the exit when he got to it, but—
But it was a bad idea, he realized.
It was familiarity that made it attractive. He’d stayed there once, without incident, and that led him to regard it as safe. But suppose the girl who’d paid so little attention to him at the time had seen the inescapable photograph once more since his departure, and suppose it had rung a little bell, barely more audible than the rustle of that beaded curtain. She wouldn’t bother to call the authorities, after all the man had checked out by then, and maybe she only fancied his resemblance to the man in the photograph. She might mention it to her parents, but that’s as far as it would go.
Unless he was sufficiently brain-dead to show up again, giving her the chance for a good long look this time around, one that would confirm her suspicions. And the recognition might show on her face, the legendary inscrutability of Asians notwithstanding, in which case he’d have to do something about it. Or it wouldn’t, and she’d check him in, wish him a pleasant evening, and pick up the phone the minute he was out of the office.
Besides, it was already two in the morning, and it would be another four hours or more before he reached the motel. Guests did drive all night and check in at daybreak, but not too many of them, because they’d run up against the motel’s checkout time, which was generally noon at the latest. So anyone who showed up at six or seven in the morning was inviting more than the usual amount of attention, along with a time-wasting conversation about checkout time and the need to pay for a second night, and—
Never mind. It was a bad idea, and it was out of the question even if it had been a good idea, and the only appealing thing about it, its familiarity, was actually not so good after all.
Should he just grab the first right-looking motel he came to? It was late, and it had been a long day, and he might think more clearly after a night’s sleep.
Still, he was awfully close to New York. Earlier, heading east, he’d felt safer the closer he got to New York. Now New York felt perilous, and he felt safer the more distance he put between himself and the city.
Should he eat something? Grab a cup of coffee?
He hadn’t eaten anything since the movie house popcorn, but he wasn’t hungry. Didn’t much want coffee, either. And, while he was tired and his nerves frayed, he wasn’t what you would call sleepy.
A rest area loomed ahead, and he pulled off and parked. The little building was locked up for the night, but the whole area was empty, and he peed in the bushes and went back to his car. He made himself comfortable behind the wheel and closed his eyes, and within seconds the lids popped right back up again. Another attempt yielded the same results. He gave up, turned the key, pulled out of the rest area and drove on.