Read Keller 05 - Hit Me Online
Authors: Lawrence Block
He thought about it. Low start-up costs, nothing like opening a store. Even so…
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Whether you’d enjoy it?”
“Oh, I’d like it well enough. What I don’t know is if there’s any way to do it and come out ahead. I wouldn’t want to cheat anybody, and I wouldn’t get big prices from the dealers I sold to, and I could see myself putting in a lot of hours and barely breaking even.”
“Hours doing what?”
“Well, driving around and looking at people’s stamps,” he said. “And then looking at them some more afterward, and figuring out just what I bought and what it’s worth and who’s the best buyer for it.”
“And you might spend hours doing these things and make chump change for your troubles.”
“Chump change,” he said.
“Isn’t that the expression?”
“It sounded funny,” he said, “coming out of your mouth. But yes, that’s the expression, and it’s probably what I could expect to earn.”
“So?”
He looked up at her, and got it.
“I don’t have to make money,” he said. “Do I?”
“No. We’ve got plenty of money. And every once in a while you get a call from Dot, and we get more money.”
“All I need,” he said, “is something that looks like a business. I need a sideline, but it doesn’t have to be a profitable one. It could even lose money and that would be all right. In fact, we could declare a net profit whether we actually earned one or not. Pay a few dollars in taxes and keep everybody happy.”
“You’ve got that quick Yankee mind,” she said. “I do admire that in a man.”
K
eller, in the parlor of the house on Hurst Street, spent as much time as he could leafing through the stack of mint sheet albums. The contents were what he’d anticipated, panes of commemorative stamps ranging from 1948 to sometime in the early 1960s, when James Houghton Ricks had stopped paying regular visits to the post office.
That was the collector’s name, Keller had discovered, even as he’d learned that his hostess’s name was Edith Vass Ricks, and that her husband was actually James Houghton Ricks, Jr., and was called Houghty to distinguish him from his father, although there was nothing remotely haughty about Houghty.
Mrs. Ricks spoke softly and expressively, and Keller found her words soothing without having to pay very much attention to them. All these stamps, he thought. All commemoratives, all three-centers for years, until the first-class rate went up to four cents.
“The condition’s good,” he said.
“They were placed in those books,” she said, “and never touched.”
That was no guarantee, Keller knew, not in the New Orleans climate. Mold and mildew could find their way into a sealed trunk, and even between the glassine interleaving of a mint sheet album.
“It must have seemed like such a good idea at the time,” he said gently. He kept his eyes on the panes of stamps. “But there was something people didn’t realize.”
“Oh?”
“You can’t sell stamps back to the post office,” he said. “They’re not like money. All you can do with them is mail letters.”
He glanced at her, and she did not look happy, but neither did she appear to be taken entirely by surprise. He explained, not for the first time, how it worked. A stamp, while indeed issued by the government, was not currency. It represented the government’s obligation to provide a service, and in that respect it never expired. The stamp you bought in 1948 was still valid as postage sixty-some years later.
“Of course there’s inflation,” he said. “Postal rates go up.”
“Every year, it seems like.”
It wasn’t quite that often, but Keller agreed that it did seem that way. He pointed to a sheet of red stamps showing a young man’s face with a flag on either side, one with only a scattering of stars, the other with considerably more.
“Francis Scott Key,” he said. “The flag on the left flew over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, and when it survived the bombardment, he’s the one who wrote a song about it.”
“‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” she said.
“It only had fifteen stars,” he said, “because we only had fifteen states at the time. And this other flag has forty-eight, because Alaska and Hawaii weren’t admitted to the union until 1959. I suppose that’s another sort of inflation. But when this three-cent stamp came out it would carry a letter, and now it would take fifteen of them to do that job.”
“That many?”
Well, fourteen, Keller thought, plus a two-cent stamp to make up the deficit. But her question didn’t seem to require an answer.
“You’d cover both sides of the envelope,” she said. “And all those stamps would add weight, and you’d wind up needing another stamp, wouldn’t you?”
“You might.”
She’d been to the post office, she told Keller, just to establish a baseline value for the stamps, and the postal clerk had told her essentially the same thing. But he’d been brusque with her, and she’d thought he might be shading the truth in order to keep the line moving. She’d taken it as an article of faith that, if all else failed, the post office would buy the stamps back from you.
But if that wasn’t true, and she could see now that it wasn’t, and if the stamps were too common for collectors to be interested in them, then what was she going to do with them?
“I don’t mail ten letters a month,” she said. “I pay bills, and I write a note if somebody dies or a baby’s born, but you couldn’t put fifteen stamps on one of those little envelopes, and how would it look if you did? If the post office won’t take the stamps back, would they at least let me trade them in for the new ones?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You buy it, it’s yours. No refunds and no exchanges. That’s about it, then?”
“That’s their policy.”
“So these are worthless, then. Is that about the size of it? I can just put them out with the trash?”
Not quite, he told her. And he explained that there were brokers who sold stamps at a discount, somewhere around 90 percent of face value, to volume mailers looking to trim their costs. These brokers replenished their stock by buying holdings like that of Mrs. Ricks, paying 70 to 75 percent of face value for them. He’d be happy to give her contact information for one or two brokers and she could deal directly with them.
Or, if she wanted, he’d buy the stamps himself. He could only pay half their face value, but it would save her negotiating with the brokers, along with the nuisance of packing the stamps for shipment.
“And taking them to the post office,” she said darkly. “And paying the postage!”
“Now, if there’s anyone you know who might enjoy having the stamps,” he said. “Church youth groups always welcome donations. Or a Boy Scout troop, or—”
But she was shaking her head. “Add them up,” she said. “See what they come to, and what you can pay me. I just want them out of here.”
The total face value of the lot ran to $1838, and he divided the sum in half and counted out nine $100 bills and added a twenty. She said she owed him a dollar, and insisted on paying it. As he was packing up what he’d bought and wondering if he’d come out ahead by the time he was done shipping it, she asked him if there was anything else he could use. She had books that she wouldn’t mind selling, and some of them were pretty old. Did he have any interest in books?
Just stamps, he told her. If she happened to have any old envelopes with stamps on them, he’d be glad to take a look at them and let her know if they were something he could use.
She snapped her fingers, which was something you didn’t see often. “In that trunk,” she said. “You know, I’ve been meaning to get rid of that, but it’s way up in the attic and I don’t go there if I can help it. But there’s a little stack of envelopes there. People in the family used to save letters, you know, and in Houghty’s family as well, and some of them go all the way back to the war.”
He knew which war she meant.
“A few times,” she said, “I thought some of those stamps might be worth something, and what I ought to do was soak them off the envelopes, but—”
“No, never do that.”
“Well, I guess I’m glad I never got around to it, from the tone of your voice! But isn’t that what collectors do?”
“Not with old envelopes. No, you don’t want to do anything of the sort. There are people who collect the whole envelope—covers, they call them—and they like them even better with the letters intact.”
“That’s what’s in the attic. Envelopes with letters in them. And then there’s some that don’t even have any stamps on them, though how they got through the mail without them is beyond me. You probably won’t want those, will you?”
“Maybe we should see what’s up there,” he said.
There were forty-one envelopes, and they fit quite comfortably in a box that had once held fifty Garcia y Vega cigars. “I don’t think there are any outstanding rarities here,” he told Mrs. Ricks, “but I can pay you twelve hundred dollars for these.”
“That much for those old letters?”
“I’m pretty sure I’ll come out okay at that figure,” he told her. “And if I don’t, well, I’ll just add them to my own collection.”
But he didn’t collect U.S.—or Confederate, either, for that matter—and he knew just where to send the material he’d purchased. He’d met a fellow at an auction in Dallas, a dealer-collector hybrid from Montgomery who specialized in the postal history of the Confederacy, and when he got home he was able to put his hands on the man’s business card.
He picked up the phone in his stamp room, dialed the number. “I’ve got a few pieces that might interest you,” he said. “Can I send them for your offer?”
The offer came by return mail, in the form of a check for an even $15,000. There was a note along with it, allowing that one particular item alone might bring almost that much at auction. “But we’ll never know,” the fellow said, “because it’s found a permanent home in my personal collection. You come up with any more goodies like this, you know where to send them.”
He put the check in the bank, and added another a few days later, from the gentleman in Connecticut who bought and sold discounted postage; the mint stamps he’d paid $919 for had returned $1286. That was no more of a profit than he deserved, considering his time and shipping costs, but the $15,000 from the Alabaman, welcome though it was, left a sour taste in his mouth.
He spent a few days thinking about it, and then he made a phone call and showed up at the Hurst Street address with a check for $3500. “Those covers were better than I realized,” he told Edith Ricks. “And it seems only fair that you should share in the profits.”
She was astonished, and tried to get him to come in for another round of coffee and cookies, but he pleaded another appointment and went home. “It’s not as though she needed the money,” he told Julia, “but she was certainly happy to have it.”
“That’s the way it is with money,” she said. “It’s welcome wherever it goes. You didn’t have to pay her extra.”
“No.”
“She’d never have known what you got for those covers.”
“No, of course not.”
“Conscience money.”
“Is that what it was? It just seemed, oh, I don’t know. Appropriate?”
“I’ll tell you what it is, even though you didn’t mean it that way. But that’s how it’ll turn out.”
“What’s that?”
“Bread upon the waters,” she said. “You’ll see.”
And he did get a few nibbles over the next month or so, though none of them amounted to much. He told a woman in Metairie that her late husband’s boyhood stamp collection, housed, as Keller’s own had been, in a
Modern Postage Stamp Album,
would be best donated to charity—a church rummage sale, perhaps, to save the cost of shipping it to one of the stamp charities.
Another woman had a soldier’s letters home, or in any event the envelopes they’d come in. The letters themselves had disappeared, and she had no idea who the sender might be, or the recipient, either; they’d turned up, carefully wrapped in oilcloth, when her husband had taken down a wall to enlarge their kitchen.
The letters, an even dozen of them, had been posted from Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and bore stamps issued by the Allied Military Government. The stamps were common, but the covers were interesting, and Keller’s offer of $20 for the lot was accepted.
It was also high, as he found out when he emailed a couple of scans to an eBay dealer who did a lot with covers. The man’s offer was $1.50 a cover, $2 less than Keller had paid for the material, and he’d have the trouble and expense of mailing them to upstate New York.
He mailed them off, took the loss. He could have kept them, but this way he’d recorded another transaction for his sideline.
Bread upon the waters, but nothing much to show for it, and when the calls stopped coming he more or less forgot about Edith Vass Ricks.
And then he heard from the woman in Cheyenne.
K
eller packed everything he needed in a wheeled case that was well within the airline’s limits for a carry-on. He checked it anyway, because he didn’t want some zealous security officer to confiscate his stamp tongs.
Which seemed unlikely, but Keller had known it to happen. A perfin and precancel collector he’d met at a show had told him about it, how the woman from Homeland Security had glared at his tongs as if they were an AK-47. “Look at this,” she’d said, holding them aloft. “Five, six inches long! Made of steel! You could put somebody’s eye out with these!”
“I extended my index finger,” the man told Keller, “and I was just about to point out how easily I could use it to gouge her eye out, but something stopped me.”
“Just as well, I’d say.”
“Oh, I know. I’d be awaiting trial even as we speak. But can you imagine taking a man’s tongs from him? That particular pair didn’t even have pointed tips, I want you to know. Rounded, so you couldn’t stab yourself by accident.”
Or even on purpose, Keller thought, packing two pairs of tongs (one with rounded tips, the other with tips just made for stabbing) and two magnifiers and, of course, his catalog. He checked his bag straight through to Cheyenne, and boarded his flight to Denver with his laptop in a padded briefcase and his cash in a money belt around his waist.