An excerpt of Hit Me by Lawrence Block, the fifth novel to feature Keller, the philatelic assassin (available February 12, 2013).
Keller has gone legit, working in construction and living in New Orleans under a new name with a new family, but the domestic bliss doesn’t last long. One phone call drags him back into the game—killing people for a living. In New York, his target is the abbot of a midtown monastery. Another call puts him on a West Indies cruise, with several interesting fellow passengers—the government witness, the incandescent young woman keeping the witness company, and, sharing Keller’s cabin, his wife, Julia. But the high drama comes in Cheyenne, where a recent widow is looking to sell her husband’s stamp collection.
Chapter 1
The young man, who would have looked owlish even without the round eyeglasses, unfolded a piece of paper and laid it on the counter in front of Keller. “The certificate of expertization for Obock J1,” he said. “Signed by Bloch and Mueller.”
He might have been a Red Sox fan invoking Ted Williams, and Keller could understand why. Herbert Bloch and Edwin Mueller were legendary philatelists, and their assertion that this particular stamp was indeed a genuine example of Obock’s first postage due stamp, designated J1 in the Scott catalog, was enough to allay all doubt.
Keller examined the stamp, first with his unaided eye, then through the magnifier he took from his breast pocket. There was a photograph of the stamp on the certificate, and he studied that as well, with and without magnification. Bloch and Mueller had sworn to its legitimacy in 1960, so the certificate was old enough to be collectible in and of itself.
Still, even experts were sometimes careless, and occasionally mistaken. And now and then someone switched in a ringer for an expertized stamp. So Keller reached for another tool, this one in the inside pocket of his jacket. It was a flat metal oblong, designed to enable the user to compute the number of perforations per inch on the top or side of a stamp. Obock J1 was imperforate, which rendered the question moot, but the perforation gauge doubled as a mini ruler, marked out in inches along one edge and millimeters along the other, and Keller used it to check the size of the stamp’s overprint.
That overprint, hand stamped on a postage due stamp initially issued for the French Colonies as a whole, had the name of the place—Obock—in black capitals. On the original stamp, the overprint measured 12 ½ millimeters by 3 ¾ millimeters. On the reprint, a copy of which reposed in Keller’s own collection, each dimension of the overprint was half a millimeter smaller.
And so Keller measured the overprint on this stamp, and found himself in agreement with Mr. Bloch and Mr. Mueller. This was the straight goods, the genuine article. All he had to do to go home with it was outbid any other interested collectors. And he could do that, too, and without straining his budget or dipping into his capital.
But first he’d have to kill somebody.
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