Dutch Blue Error Page 4

  “You ready to do business, Mr. Coyne?”

  “I don’t even know your name,” I said. “Perhaps now that we’ve met face-to-face, you could introduce yourself.”

  His broad smile revealed excellent teeth. Too excellent. An expensive set of dentures, uppers and lowers. “Of course,” he said, reaching his hand across the table. “Daniel F. X. Sullivan, at your service.”

  I took his hand. “Pleasure, Mr. Sullivan.” I didn’t bother telling him that I didn’t believe we were using his real name. For now, I couldn’t see that it mattered. “Yes, I’m prepared to do business,” I continued. “My client doesn’t wish to haggle with you. He considers your price reasonable, provided the item is what you claim it to be.”

  Sullivan, or whatever his name really was, bowed his head. “Mr. Weston is a wise man. Haggling would prove counterproductive to him. I assure you, Mr. Coyne, the item is genuine.”

  “Regardless, I’m sure you understand that he wishes to take no chances in that regard. I have arranged to have your item authenticated. Unless, of course, you can provide documents…”

  “I have no documents. I told you, no one knows that I possess this stamp. That, as we both know, is what makes it valuable to Mr. Weston. The stamp was discovered. Its value was unsuspected until it came into my hands. I have told nobody about it, except Mr. Weston.”

  “That was shrewd,” I said. “You must know a lot about the world of rare stamps, Mr. Sullivan, to go straight to the man who owns the only other copy of the Dutch Blue Error.”

  Sullivan dipped his head, as if in modest embarrassment, but said nothing.

  “Are you willing to permit us to authenticate your stamp?” I persisted.

  “I assumed you’d want to. What’s the arrangement? Can you assure me that my interests will be protected?”

  “We have no desire to do anything except purchase the stamp, Mr. Sullivan. Your protection, it seems to me, is your knowledge. And our knowledge of it.”

  Sullivan showed his dentures again. “Precisely. I’m glad you understand that.”

  “If you will meet me in front of the main entrance to the Peabody Museum tomorrow afternoon at this same time—three o’clock—we have an appointment with a curator there. Mr. Weston trusts his expertise. Assuming he authenticates the stamp, we will then arrange the actual transaction. Fair enough?”

  “That sounds fair. I’ll be there at three.”

  “With the stamp.”

  “Of course.”

  Sullivan began to push himself out of the booth. “One moment, Mr. Sullivan,” I said. “You haven’t even had a beer. Won’t you have a drink with me?”

  He held up his hand. “Doctor’s orders, Mr. Coyne.”

  “I did want to ask you one thing.”

  Sullivan stood beside the table, looking down at me. “And what was that?”

  “Mr. Weston is most eager to know how you learned that he owned the Blue Error.”

  Sullivan eased himself back into the booth, placed both elbows on the table, and leaned his face toward mine. “I’m sure he is, Mr. Coyne. I have no doubt that he would like very much to know how I learned that. But I’m really surprised at you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Why, how I learned Mr. Weston’s secret is my protection. I’m sure Mr. Weston appreciates just how well protected that knowledge makes me. I’m equally certain that you, Mr. Coyne, do not appreciate the value of what I know. In case there is any doubt, please be sure to convey this message to your employer.”

  “He’s my client, not my employer.”

  “Whatever,” said Sullivan, with a wave of his hand. “Tell Mr. Weston this: Not only do I know that he owns the Dutch Blue Error, but I also know how he came into possession of it, and I know about all the precautions he has taken to protect his secret. Be sure to tell him that, Mr. Coyne. And I’m sure he will instruct you to be most solicitous of my interests in this matter. Okay?”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said with a shrug. “Three tomorrow, then.”

  “I’ll be there,” said Daniel F. X. Sullivan, and with a half-wave he disappeared.

  My appointment at the Peabody Museum with Sullivan had been set for Saturday afternoon. Albeit Dopplinger, the assistant curator, did not usually work on Saturdays, so he was free to carry on some free-lance business. The museum, I was given to understand by Ollie Weston, allowed Dopplinger to use his laboratory on his own time.

  Sullivan, we figured, would have to know that authentication of his stamp would require us to bring Ollie’s original. Using the museum at its busiest time of the week—a Saturday afternoon—would protect us all. Neither of us could easily do violence to the other with hundreds of people wandering all over the big building.

  I asked Zerk to meet me at the office at noon. I wanted him with me. Zerk had gone both ways as linebacker and fullback at Tufts as an undergraduate. He remained a sturdy fellow. I knew I’d feel more comfortable if I had the quickest hands in Akron along with me.

  Zerk walked in as I was bent over the safe in my conference room. When I straightened up, he said, “Now what the hell do you want that thing for? I thought we were going to take a tour of the stuffed birds and Egyptian mummies.”

  I spun the cylinder of my .38-caliber Smith and Wesson in what I knew was a poor imitation of Kojak, snapped it into place, and tucked the heavy weapon into my jacket pocket. “You never can tell,” I said out of the corner of my mouth. “Could be some foul play.”

  “Foul play!” screeched Zerk, his face collapsing in laughter. “Holy shit, man. Foul play! Hey, can you handle that thing?”

  I jerked a Winston out of the pack on my desk and shoved it into the corner of my mouth. “Better believe it, baby.”

  Zerk put his hands over his ears and slowly shook his head. Then he said, “Seriously. If you’ll pretend you’re a forty-something-year-old Boston attorney, I’ll play the eager, young law school graduate. We’ll leave the weapon in your safe here, and everyone will know exactly where they stand. Okay?”

  “I’m bringing the gun, Zerk. Don’t worry, I have no intention of using it. Ollie Weston thought it would be a good idea.”

  “Ollie Weston! That guy thinks he’s Papa Hemingway still playing with bad guys on the frontier. That’s no way to do business. Believe me. I know about that stuff. You don’t want to be carrying a weapon.”

  I shrugged. “My choice. You ready to go?”

  Zerk threw his hands into the air. “You’re the boss.”

  When we pulled up under the portico in front of the Weston estate, Zerk, who was driving, said, “I’ll just wait right here.”

  “You should meet Ollie Weston. He’s a good man to know.”

  Zerk held up his hand. “I’ll pass. Places like this, people like him—they make me nervous. I can’t help it. It’s my heritage. My roots.”

  “Bugger your roots,” I said. “Whatever happened to upward mobility?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll wait here.”

  Ollie was out in the back garden sitting in his wheelchair reading Field & Stream. He wore a ratty brown sweater against the autumn chill. Edwin offered me coffee and de-materialized when I declined. When I sat down beside him, Ollie reached inside his jacket and pulled out the pigskin volume. “Here you go,” he said.

  I accepted the Dutch Blue Error in both of my hands.

  “You’re armed?”

  “Yes. I feel silly, but I’m armed.”

  “You’ll remember to arrange the transaction for the middle of next week. It’ll take me a few days to round up the cash.”

  “You’re giving him cash?”

  “Perhaps I should write him a personal check? Suppose our friend will take American Express?”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “Assuming his stamp is genuine, of course.”

  “Of course,” Ollie grinned. “Go, now. I doubt that our Mr. Sullivan would like it if you were late. I don’t want any foul-ups.”

  “Right.” I turned to go.
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  “Brady.”

  I stopped. “Yes?”

  “Take care, will you?”

  “No sweat, Ollie.”

  Zerk and I drove the short distance from Ollie’s house in Belmont to the Peabody Museum in Cambridge in silence. I was disappointed that he refused to allow me to introduce him to Ollie Weston. He, I knew, disapproved of my choice of clients. We would have to talk through this little value conflict between us. I knew I’d have to take the first step, because I understood his position. I had entered law school so that I could right the world’s wrongs, too. The difference was, my commitment was arbitrary, and shallow, and readily adjusted to the conditions of my life. When I got my degree at Yale Law I was a young, inexperienced attorney who had but a single ambition: I wanted to go it alone. So I took the clients who wanted me. The first one was a rich old lady with a son missing in the Vietnam War. She recommended me to her friends, also wealthy. And so it went. I found that wealthy people like to retain discreet attorneys, just to handle whatever might come up. I discovered wealthy people paid generously for discretion. I discovered I could live quite comfortably serving wealthy people. Anyway, justice, as they keep telling us, is blind. Everyone has an equal right to legal protection, rich or poor. I happen to have ended up with the rich.

  And if that sounds like an apology, I suppose it is.

  Zerk’s commitment, of course, went deeper than mine. I had no desire to change it. I simply wanted him to respect our difference. So far I had done a poor job of it.

  Zerk found a parking space on the street a couple of blocks from the Peabody Museum. We got to the front entrance with ten minutes to spare. We sat on the steps in the dim September sunlight to wait for our friend, Daniel F. X. Sullivan.

  The Peabody Museum is an example of the functional school of architecture. It’s big, bulky, square, and gray—unmistakably a museum. The rooms inside are abundant, and large enough to contain reconstructed dinosaurs and whales; stuffed animals, and birds of every conceivable size and shape, as well as glass flowers. I’m convinced that you could spend months there without examining the same exhibit twice or dallying too long at any one of them. Inside, it smells vaguely of formaldehyde and dust. The floors are dark, scarred wood, the walls dirty white piaster. My boys, when they were younger, never tired of spending Saturdays wandering among the exhibits at the Peabody. They would come home chattering endlessly about the snakes and the mummies, and end up having bad dreams.

  When that happened after our divorce, Gloria was able to transform even a well-intentioned visit to a museum into a guilt trip for the once-a-week father. Gloria was an expert at that sort of thing.

  “You must be Brady Coyne,” said a voice beside us.

  I looked up from where I sat on the museum steps. Peering down at us was a smiling, bespectacled young man with a curved, banana-shaped nose more or less bisecting his face. He reached down with his hand. “Am I right? Albeit Dopplinger.”

  I took his hand as I stood up. “You’re right. Nice to meet you. This is my associate, Xerxes Garrett.”

  Zerk rose and shook Dopplinger’s hand. I noticed that the young curator stood several inches taller than Zerk, which is going some. Zerk is six-two. On the other hand, I guessed that Zerk, who went about two-twenty, had at least fifty pounds on young Dopplinger.

  “How’d you recognize me?” I asked him.

  “Ah, details, Mr. Coyne. My stock in trade. You fit the general description, of course. Fortyish, but well-preserved. Touch of gray at the temples. A shade over six feet. No rings on your fingers. No shine on your shoes. And the scar that interrupts your left eyebrow. Who else could you be?”

  “Ollie described me that way, eh? Even the part about the shoes?”

  “The shoes and the scar were the important details, Mr. Coyne. Well. Is the other party here yet?”

  I glanced at my watch. “He’ll arrive in precisely three minutes, unless I miss my guess. Will this take long?”

  “It shouldn’t. If you have the original stamp, it’s simply a matter of comparison. The grain of the paper, age of the ink, watermarks, cancellations, that sort of thing. We so-called experts like to preserve the aura of mystery about our science, but really there’s not much to it. I guarantee you, if this fellow’s stamp is a fake, I’ll spot it. I’ll stake my reputation on it.”

  “You’re staking several of Ollie Weston’s dollars on it, Mr. Dopplinger.”

  “Albert, please. Okay? And Brady, is it? And…” He looked at Zerk.

  “Mr. Garrett,” said Zerk.

  Dopplinger looked confused for a moment, then he shrugged. “Sure, okay. Mr. Garrett.”

  “Are we all here now?” A hand touched my arm. I whirled around to face Daniel F. X. Sullivan. His hand had brushed my jacket pocket where my Smith and Wesson .38 sagged uncomfortably.

  I introduced Sullivan to Dopplinger and Zerk, and the four of us climbed the broad steps and entered the museum. Dopplinger led the way. We turned right, through a room lined with glass cases containing Indian artifacts. There were hundreds of pieces of stone. Some of them were recognizably arrowheads, hatchets, spear points, and hand tools. Most of them appeared to be no more than randomly shaped bits of obsidian and flint. Some exhibits contained shards of pottery—uniformly dull gray or brown. When we left the Indian room we turned sharp left, descended a steep stairway, turned again, followed a long, dimly lit corridor lined with closed wooden doors without windows, and went down another stairway. We had entered the bowels of the Peabody Museum. At the bottom of this stairway, Dopplinger pushed through a pair of swinging doors, turned left, and stopped outside a door that might have opened into a broom closet. He fished a key from his pants pocket, inserted it into the lock, and pushed open the door for us.

  “Be it ever so humble,” he said, ushering us in with a little bow.

  Dopplinger’s laboratory was long and narrow and windowless. From its high ceilings hung two long rows of fluorescent bulbs which flickered on sequentially as the scientist threw the switches by the door. A narrow, waist-high island bisected the length of the room. It was equipped with sinks, gas jets, microscopes, and goose-neck lamps. Along the far wall stood glass cabinets crammed with jars and boxes and equipment.

  “Make yourself at home,” said Dopplinger. He plucked a green apron from a hook, replaced the glasses he had been wearing with another pair from his shirt pocket, and bustled around the room. From the cabinet, he took down three jars containing liquid chemicals. He placed these beside a microscope. Sullivan and Zerk and I each perched on a high stool. We watched Dopplinger prepare himself. I felt wary, cautious, awkward. I could sense Zerk’s tension. Sullivan appeared to be thoroughly at ease.

  I spoke in a low voice to Sullivan, so that Dopplinger wouldn’t hear me but Zerk might. “I want you to know, Mr. Sullivan, that I am carrying a revolver. It is in my pocket where my hand is. It is pointed at you. Just to insure that all of this goes smoothly, you understand.”

  Sullivan turned his head slowly to smile at me. “That’s just fine,” he said quietly. “Of course I understand. And by the way, the little twenty-two automatic in my pocket is presently directed toward the kidneys of your young colored friend there. I, too, am committed to the proposition that this transaction be consummated without undue disturbance. So we seem to be at a stalemate of sorts, Mr. Coyne.”

  “So we do,” I said. I kept my hand in my pocket. If Zerk heard Sullivan’s use of the word “colored,” he gave no indication of it.

  “There. I guess we’re about all set.” Albert Dopplinger had climbed atop a stool and was twisting his fingers into a pair of surgical rubber gloves. Then he extracted a small notebook from his hip pocket and placed it beside him. “If I can have the stamps, gentlemen, this shouldn’t take but a few minutes.”

  I looked at Sullivan, who returned my stare for a moment, then shrugged and reached into the inside pocket of his sports jacket. He removed a thin cardboard folder, which he handed to the curator. Dopplinger placed
it directly before him on the table and gingerly opened the cover. Inside, tacked into a slot, was a glassine envelope. Dopplinger removed the envelope from the cardboard folder, lifted the flap, and reached inside with tweezers to remove the tiny blue square of paper. He placed the stamp in a shallow black ceramic tray. Then he looked at me.

  “Mr. Coyne? I’ll need your stamp, too.”

  “Sure,” I said, and handed him the pigskin album. Dopplinger removed Ollie Weston’s Dutch Blue Error with his tweezers and arranged it beside Sullivan’s under a very bright white light.

  Dopplinger then bent his face so close to the two stamps that his big nose nearly touched them. He muttered “Hm” and “Ah, yes.” He seemed to have forgotten that the rest of us were present. Sullivan and Zerk and I hitched our stools closer.

  Dopplinger set a beaker of water on a tripod over a Bunsen burner, and when the water was boiling briskly he picked up Sullivan’s stamp with the tweezers and dunked it. He held it there for a moment, grunted, then removed the bit of blue paper and laid it on a piece of paper towel. Then he scratched a few lines into his notebook.

  “Tell us what you’re doing,” said Zerk.

  “Sh!” said Dopplinger.

  With an eye dropper, he extracted some clear liquid from one of the glass jars and dabbed the stamp. Then he again bent close to it. After a moment, he lifted the stamp with the tweezers and placed it on a glass slide under a big microscope. He adjusted the lens and peered through it, humming tunelessly in the back of his throat. Then he repeated the process with the other stamp—Ollie’s. I watched him carefully, as if he were a carnival sharpie with a pea under walnut shells. I wanted to be sure the two stamps did not become confused.

  Dopplinger shifted his attention to the notebook which lay open by his elbow. He scribbled into it for a moment. Then he repeated the previous process, this time with a different chemical. Again he made some notes. Then he fiddled with the microscope, peered through it, and turned more knobs. Evidently satisfied, he placed both stamps side by side under the lens. With the tweezers, he pushed them together so that their edges were touching. He stared at them through, the lens, muttered “Humph!” and reversed the position of the two stamps. This time when he looked he said quite clearly, “just as I thought.” He wrote in his notebook for a minute, then closed it and shoved it back into his pocket.