The Scarlet Ruse (4 page)

"A lot of the trouble in my life has come from not following your rule, Jen."

"It's always better when you don't have to give a damn."

"Take care of yourself."

"Let's try to see if we can find a place most of the old hands can tie up permanent. You know. Enough room and everything."

I watched her walk away. She slapped her old boat shoes down with stumpy authority. Her hair had smelled fresh and sweet. I needed a lady to be happy with. Not that lady, though. It had been a long time between amiable ladies. Chauvinist pig yearning for new playtoy, new love object? Not so as you would hardly know it. Reverse of Jenny's dictum: It's always better when you give a damn. But how do you tell a genuine damn from one you muster up to justify tupping the wench? Well, you can tell. That's all. You can. And so can she. Unless, of course, she is just a female chauvinist pig yearning after you as a playtoy, a sex object, and drumming up her little rationalizations.

I dreamed about a lady I saw on one of those stamps. Antigua. 1863. Lady in profile in rosy mauve, with an elegant neck, a discreet crown on her pretty head. She turned with a half smile, looking out of the stamp at me, then shook her head, frowned, and said, "Oh, golly. You again, huh?"

"I can't believe it," she kept saying. "I just can't believe it."

"Hirsh believes it. He got a good look two weeks ago today. The good stuff is gone, except what you put in that day."

"We knew something was awfully wrong. The way he's been acting. Jane and I talked about it. We tried to find out from him. I just can't believe it."

It felt good to walk with a girl who matched my stride, nice brown knees alternating. Any kind of a close look and that twelve-year-old impression was gone all of a sudden.

She said, "It wasn't any of your really great stuff. You know. Like one-of-a-kind or tied to historical covers or anything. But it was all really first-class, high-catalog material, the kind you can depend on to hold value."

"You like futzing around with postage stamps?"

She gave me a blank, frowning look. "What do you futz around with, huh? Hitting an innocent little white ball with a long stick? Soldering wires together and playing four-track stereo? Slamming some dumb little car around corners, upshifting and downshifting? Are you a gun futz or a muscle futz?"

"I think I know where you're going with that."

"Where I'm going is that there's no list to tell you where you rate on some kind of scale of permanent values and find out how unimportant you are. But I can tell you what nobody ought to be doing."

"What's that?"

"Nobody ought to be sneering at anybody else's way of life."

"Mrs. McDermit?"

"Mmm?"

"Could we set our personal clock back and start over again?"

Her smile was bright, vivid, personal, merry. "Why, you dummy? We're getting along pretty remarkable."

"We are? Good."

"I like people. I really do. Here's the bank."

The safety deposit vault was in the back left corner. There were three people on duty there. Hirsh Fedderman signed the slip and put down the number of his own personal box. They let us all in, and had the three of us wait in the corridor off to the side which led to the private booths and little rooms. Hirsh joined us, with his box under his arm. The attendant led us back to one of the little rooms. There was a table, three chairs. The attendant said he would bring another chair. I told him thanks, not to bother.

The table was butted against the wall. It was narrower than a card table and about half again as long. They moved the chairs to where they had been in an identical little room on September seventh. As I stood with my back against the closed door, Hirsh and Mary Alice sat at the right, Mary Alice nearest me, facing Meyer across the table-Meyer, of course, representing Sprenger.

I said, "Try to make as exact a reconstruction as you can. I'll stop you if I have any questions."

Hirsh said, "I put the box right here, against the wall, nearest me, and I opened it like this and took the stock book out. Okay. Here is the stock book I brought, so…"

"Put it in the box and close the box and then take it out as you did before and do with it exactly what you did the other time."

Hirsh took it out and put it in front of Mary Alice and said, "Other clients, I hand them the book. They want to take a look at their money. Not Sprenger. I tried at first. He wouldn't take it. He'd just shrug."

Mary Alice said, "That was when I was taking the new purchases out of my purse, like this. And the inventory sheet. I gave the inventory sheet to Mr. Sprenger, and I put the new stamps, in their mounts, right here, where they would be handy for Mr. Fedderman."

"I took a copy of the list out of my pocket," Hirsh said. "I put it here in front of me, like this. Then I read off the items and found each one and showed it to Sprenger and then pushed it toward Mary Alice."

"By then," she said, "I'd taken the book out of the slip case and opened it up, and as Hirsh pushed them toward me, I would pick them up and slip them into the book like this, into these transparent strips. I used these tongs because you have to have something to lift the edge of the strip. The stamps were in mounts like this, so it was just because it's easier for me, not to protect the stamps, I used stamp tongs."

"Is that the same inventory list?" I asked.

"Exactly," she said. "And I fixed up the right number of mounts and the right size. But these stamps I just put in are junk from the new issue service."

"Go ahead just the way you did with him," I said.

Hirsh tried to smile. "I'd try to give a little spiel. Clients like it. I couldn't tell if Sprenger did or not. We never got loosened up with each other. He'd grunt. He always seemed bored, like I was taking too long. Okay. I'll say the sort of thing I said to Sprenger. It won't be exact, but it will be close."

I watched intently. I had them do a repeat of Mary Alice looking back through the book to see if there was room on a prior page to put the new Barbados stamps with the previous Barbados stamps. I had Hirsh take the book and leaf through it and give it back to Mary Alice. She put it in the fiber slip case and handed it to Hirsh. He opened the box and put the stock book in and closed the lid.

"Then I picked up the box and started to stand up, but he said he had some money. I thought he had it with him so I sat down, but he said he would be in touch and get it to me soon. I haven't seen it yet. We left the room. When I came out of the vault, he was gone. Mary Alice was waiting for me. We walked back to the store. Like always, I would have been kind of depressed. He never said, 'Very nice. Very pretty.' Nothing. You like people to take an interest. But I was too scared to be depressed. I was terrified. My head was spinning. I almost told this girl."

"You should have told me, Hirsh. Really."

"I should worry your pretty head with total disaster?"

She looked at me. "Did you see anything?"

"Nothing at all. Did you always do it that way?"

"Always," she said. "With him and the other clients too. Just like that. Except it's more fun with the others."

Meyer said, "Do either of you remember a distraction? Did anybody yell fire, drop anything, fall off a chair?"

They remembered nothing like that. They had been buoyed by a fragile hope. It seeped away. Hirsh went from looking sixty-two to looking ninety-two. Meyer was somber. The girl bit her thumb knuckle and blinked rapidly. So we all got out of there. We went back to the shop. Jane Lawson looked at us with anxious query when we all walked in. Hirsh and Mary Alice shook their heads no. Jane looked bitterly depressed. An old man with hair like Brillo sat erect on a stool, using gold tongs with great deftness as, one by one, he examined stamps and replaced them in the stock book in front of him. "Fedderman," he said, "everything here is perfectly ordinary, quite tiresome, exceedingly unremarkable."

"Colonel, if I had looked through them, I would have known that, right?"

"Yes, but-"

"And then if I told you I had not looked through them, I would be lying. Right? Believe me, that book is exactly the way I found it, in one of the cartons. If it's tiresome, I'm sorry."

"Huh!" said the Colonel.

"What?" asked Fedderman.

"Nothing. Nothing at all."

"Wait. You put this one back crooked. Let me help you. What do you know? Look, Mary Alice. A nice double surcharge on Canada C3. Doesn't that go pretty good?"

"Like about seventy dollars in Scott, Mr. Fedderman.''

"See, Colonel? In the middle of all this junk, a nice little error. Let me see. Original gum. Never hinged. Nice centering. To you, Colonel, only forty dollars."

"Forty!"

"I know," said Mary Alice. "That surprises me too, sir. It ought to be fifty-five at least."

"Well… put it aside, dear girl," said the colonel.

They meshed smoothly and well, did Fedderman and Mary Alice. She went behind the counter. Meyer and I went back to Fedderman's office with him and closed the door.

"Now what?" Fedderman asked out of the depths of his despair.

"One thing I know," Meyer said. "The impossible doesn't ever happen. Only possible things happen."

"To me the impossible happens," said Fedderman.

"If it isn't you and it isn't Sprenger," Meyer said, "then it has to be Mary Alice."

"Impossible!"

"So we are comparing two impossible things, and it being Mary Alice is not quite as impossible as what happened."

"Maybe I follow you," Hirsh said. "My head hurts. I hurt all over. I'm coming down. I should be in bed with a pill."

"Did she bring that same purse," I asked Fedderman.

"Purse?"

"The one she had today is like a picnic basket made of straw painted white. Did she have the same purse the last time?"

"Yes. No. How should I know? There are five clients. What difference does it make?"

"I wish I knew if it made any difference. That junk you saw in the Sprenger collection. Could it have come out of your stock here in the store?"

"What I saw? Some of it, maybe. Very little. I didn't have long enough to study it, you understand. A dealer has a good memory for defective pieces. No, I'd say probably none of it from my stock, or I would have recognized one piece anyway. Besides, it was higher catalog value than what I stock here."

I remembered Meyer's interesting thought. "Hirsh," I asked, "suppose whoever switched the goods has sold the Sprenger items to the trade. Could you identify them?"

He thought, nodded, and gave me a show-and-tell answer. Once again the projection viewer came out. He put a slide box in place and in the darkened office clicked through a half-dozen slides and stopped at a block of four blue stamps imprinted "Graf Zeppelin" across the top. They were a two-dollar-and-sixty-cent denomination.

"This is one I picked up for Sprenger. It was in a Mozian auction catalog last year. It is absolutely superb, and I had to go to fourteen hundred for it. I take an Ektachrome-X transparency of everything I put in an investment account. I use a medical Nikon, and I keep it right here on this mount. Built-in flash. Now you see where the perforations cross in the middle of the block, those little holes? They make a certain pattern. Distinctive. Maybe unique? Not quite. Now look out at the corners. See this top left corner? That paper between the perforations, right on the comer, is so long, it looks as if maybe there was a pulled perforation on the stamp that was up here, in the original sheet. Okay, add that corner to the pattern in the middle, and it is unique. Any dealer could look at this slide, go through a couple dozen blocks and pick this one out with no trouble. Individual stamps would be a lot harder, especially perforated. Imperforate, usually they are cut so the margins are something you can recognize. Of course, postally used stuff, old stuff, the cancellation is unique."

As he put his toys away, I said, "Could you get prints made from the slides of the most valuable items and circulate them to your friends in the trade?"

"A waste of time and money. These days, believe me, there are more stamp collections being ripped off than ever in history. Information comes in all the time. Watch for this, watch for that. Hoodlums come in here to the store, and they tell me their uncle left them some stamps in an album, do I want to take a look, maybe buy them? I say I've got all the stock I want. They'll find people who'll buy. But not me. I don't need the grief. After fifty years in the business, I should be a fence? Am I going to look at the stamps the hoodlum brings in and call a cop? Who needs a gasoline bomb through the front door?"

"Then there's no way?" Meyer asked.

Fedderman sighed. "If all that stuff goes back into circulation, a lot of those pieces have to find their way into the auction houses. Every catalog, there are pictures of the best pieces. Like if there are two thousand lots listed in the catalog, there could be a hundred photographs of the best items. One day last week I sat in here, I went through a couple dozen catalogs to try to spot any item from the Sprenger account. H. R. Harmer, Harmer, Rooke and Company, Schiff, Herst, Mozian, Siegel, Apfelbaum. Nothing."

"Oh," said Meyer, his disappointment obvious.

"I think I am going home to bed, the way I feel," Fedderman said. "What are you fellows going to do now?"

I said, "I am going to get Mary Alice to help me."

"How do you mean?" Hirsh asked.

"If she knows more than she's told us, the only thing she can do is play along with me."

"But that kind of person," Hirsh said, "she would help if you ask. It wouldn't prove anything."

"Suppose I get to the point where I ask something or do something which would make her back away fast if she was innocent, and she doesn't back away?"