Keller's Homecoming

by Lawrence Block

  Then the door would open, and there’d be a man or a woman standing there—or a man and a woman, or two men, or two women, it hardly mattered. And he didn’t have a weapon, but he had his hands, and that was all he’d need.

  He drew back into the shadows, flattened himself against the brick wall of the building behind him. Across the street, the doorman stepped out onto the street for a quick cigarette break. He still didn’t look familiar to Keller, who found himself wondering why he’d been contemplating snapping the guy’s neck and sticking him in the package room.

  Just so he could go upstairs and kill some stranger for no good reason at all.

  The impulse—or fantasy, or whatever you called it—was gone now. Go home, he told himself sternly.

  He stepped over to the curb, held up a hand for a cab. One came along, its dome light lit, and headed his way, whereupon Keller shook his head and waved him off. Keller wasn’t able to see the expression on the driver’s face, but he could imagine it.

  He started walking.

  He walked all the way back to his hotel, and he took his time getting there. He stopped for a slice of pizza and ate it standing at the counter, drank a cup of coffee at the diner that had been his regular breakfast place. He bought a newspaper at a deli, dropped it unread into the next trashcan he came to.

  And wondered throughout just what he was doing.

  He wasn’t entirely certain whether or not he recognized anybody. There were faces that looked familiar, but the waitress at the coffee shop wasn’t the one who’d served him all those breakfasts. She’d have finished her shift hours ago.

  There’d been changes in the neighborhood. He saw a bank that hadn’t been there before, and a chain drugstore. What was missing? It seemed to him that a Chinese restaurant was gone, and a dry cleaners, and what happened to the shoe repair guy? Or was he over on the next block?

  He was exhausted by the time he got back to his hotel. He took a shower, drank a bottle of water from the mini-bar. And went to bed.

  Keller’s first thought was to have breakfast in the hotel. They had a huge buffet, but they charged thirty-five dollars for it, and he couldn’t see starting the day with thirty-five dollars worth of food in his stomach. He went across the street to an imitation French bistro, where an Asian girl with her hair in pigtails brought him a Croque Madame, which was essentially a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with a fried egg on top. He had orange juice, and a side of home fries, and finished up with a two-cup pot of filtered coffee, and the check came to $31.25, plus tip.

  But it was money well spent, he decided, because his attitude was better after breakfast. A good night’s sleep had rid him of most of last night’s mood, and the meal had finished the job.

  And, speaking of jobs, it was time he got to work on his.

  Abbot O’Herlihy, Paul Vincent O’Herlihy, was tucked away in the Thessalonian residence in Murray Hill. There were, as far as Keller could make out, only two ways to carry out his assignment. He could get the man to leave the building, or he could contrive to get himself inside it.

  The first way was better, he decided, if he could find a way to manage it. The second course had two parts to it, getting in and getting out, and both of them could present problems. Not that getting O’Herlihy out of his refuge was a piece of cake, but there ought to be a way to manage it.

  It was Tuesday morning, and, according to his watch, not quite a quarter to ten. The Peachpit auction would take the form of morning and afternoon sessions Wednesday and Thursday. All of Wednesday was given over to general foreign, with British Commonwealth in the morning and the rest of the world in the afternoon. Thursday morning was a specialized offering of U.S. issues, and the final session on Thursday afternoon was devoted to a remarkable collection of German offices and colonies, including that stamp from Kiauchau he’d pointed out to his daughter.

  So he had all of Tuesday, and Wednesday night and Thursday morning. And he could miss one or both of the Wednesday sessions if he had to, but he really wanted to be in the room Thursday afternoon when they sold the German collection.

  And Thursday night he wanted to be on his way to New Orleans. The last flight out was Jet Blue’s, at 8:59, and with luck he’d be on it.

  He walked all the way to Thessalonian House, and it looked no different than it had the previous afternoon. The brass knocker was just as inviting, the heavy door just as forbidding. He looked over at it from the uptown side of the street, and barely slowed as he passed on by.

  He didn’t see a pay phone at the corner of Thirty-sixth and Park, and walked another block to Lexington. No pay phones there, either, and he walked a block uptown before he found one, and it didn’t work. He had a prepaid cell phone in his pocket, which he’d bought at the New Orleans airport, and he’d hoped he could use it to call Julia, but it looked as though he was only going to be able to get one call out of it.

  Well, too bad.

  He punched in 911, spoke briefly, and disconnected. Then he walked over to the curb and slipped the inoffensive phone down a storm drain.

  He retraced his steps slowly, south to Thirty-sixth Street, west toward Thessalonian House. He was halfway to Park Avenue when he heard the first siren, but maintained his measured pace. By the time he reached the scene, three city vehicles had already arrived, two NYPD squad cars and an FDNY hook-and-ladder.

  Not surprisingly, a crowd was gathering, with a couple of uniformed cops moving spectators to the uptown side of the street, and firefighters setting up barricades to block the sidewalk on either side of the monastery.

  Keller picked out one of the cops and asked him what was going on. The man didn’t answer, but a fellow spectator chimed in. “Guy broke in, shot two nuns and he’s holding the rest of ’em hostage.”

  The doors opened, and the monastery began to empty out, the sidewalk filling up with men, some of them in robes, some in business suits. The man who’d just spoken said he might have been wrong about the nuns, and a woman said you didn’t have nuns in a monastery, and another man said, “What meat can a priest eat on Friday? None. Get it?”

  Keller was the first to spot the Bomb Squad truck, but he let somebody else point it out. It looked like one of the Brinks armored cars used to transport large amounts of cash, but it said BOMB SQUAD on the side, in letters large enough to command attention. “Oh, it must be a bomb,” someone said, and everyone immediately moved one step in from the street.

  So did Keller, even though he couldn’t imagine what protection an additional foot of distance from a blast could possibly afford. And in any event he knew there was no bomb, having called it in himself.

  Another cop, younger and larger than the first, was standing off to the side. He was smoking a cigarette, and Keller got the impression that doing so was against department regulations, and that the man didn’t give a damn.

  Keller moved closer to him, but not too close, and asked if the building across the street was the Thessalonian monastery.

  The cop bristled. “And if it is?”

  “I just wondered,” Keller said. “A fellow I went to school with, a good friend actually, he was going to join the Thessalonians.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “He thought very highly of them,” Keller said. “But you know, you lose track of people. I don’t know whether he joined up or not. Say, isn’t that—”

  “Father O’Herlihy,” the cop said. “He hasn’t got enough on his plate, he needs a bomb threat on top of everything else.”

  The man in question looked to Keller as though very little stayed for very long on any plate of his. He had a full face and an extra chin, and looked massive even though his robe hid his figure. His was a plain brown robe, but somehow it seemed less plain and even less brown than those worn by the other monks. He was quite clearly in command, and while Keller couldn’t make out what he was saying he could see how the rest rearranged themselves according to his orders.

  “And here comes Eyewitness News,” the cop said sourly. “Fuc
kin’ media won’t leave the man alone. Jersey’s got a certain level of corruption, and it don’t matter whether you’re the Church or some local businessman, you gotta go along to get along. But maybe you see it different.”

  “No, I’m with you,” Keller said.

  “But as soon as a man of God’s involved, and especially if he just happens to be a Catholic man of God, then it’s all over the goddam papers. These days beating up on the Church is everybody’s favorite sport. Not too many years ago this woulda got swept back under the rug where it belongs.”

  “Absolutely,” Keller said.

  “What did the man do, for Christ’s sake? I didn’t hear no scandals about altar boys. All right, somebody goes and sells a kidney, that’s gonna draw attention. I’ll grant you that. But is it any reason to sling mud at a man who does as much good in the world as Father O’Herlihy?”

  Keller was ready to express agreement, when someone off to the side said, “Hey, look, a dog!” And indeed a uniformed Bomb Squad officer was fastening a leash to the collar of a sprightly beagle.

  “Jesus,” somebody said, “don’t tell me the monks are selling drugs on top of everything else.”

  “It’s a bomb-sniffing dog, you moron,” someone else said.

  “It’s cute, whatever it is,” a woman said.

  “We had one just like that when I was a kid,” a man said. “Dumber than dirt. Couldn’t find food in his dish.”

  The dog disappeared into the building, and the conversation looked for other topics. The abbot continued to move among his corps of monks, patting this one on the back, touching this one on the shoulder, looking like an officer rallying the troops.

  “Hey, O’Herlihy,” someone called out. “I hear you’re running a special on kidneys this week!”

  The crowd had been buzzing with casual conversation, and it stopped dead as if someone had unplugged it. Keller sensed his fellow spectators gathering themselves, brought up short by the combination of shock and a sense of opportunity. The speaker had clearly crossed the line, and they were deciding whether to disapprove or join in. It would depend, he figured, on whether they came up with things too clever to suppress.

  But the abbot made the decision for them. He broke off his conversation, spun around to his left, and stalked up to the curb. He drew himself up to his full height and silenced the crowd with a stare.

  Then he spoke. “Disperse,” he said. “All of ye. Have ye nothing better to do? Go about your proper business, or return to your homes. There’s no need for ye here.”

  And damned if they didn’t do exactly that, and Keller with them.

  “It was pretty impressive,” he told Dot. “He just assumed command.”

  “I guess he must be used to it. Comes with the job, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I suppose so, but I got the feeling he’s been like that all his life. I can picture him as a ten-year-old in the schoolyard, settling disputes in kickball games.”

  “I always wanted to play kickball,” Dot said, “but at my school it was boys only. I’ll bet it’s different now.”

  He’d bought another prepaid phone, with a chip good for 100 minutes or one call to 911, whichever came first. His first call was to Julia; he told her how it felt to be in New York, and how the auction was shaping up, and she filled him in on Jenny’s day, and passed on some gossip about a couple two doors down the street. He hadn’t told her anything specific about his assignment, and didn’t talk about it now.

  To Dot he said, “I’m not sure I accomplished anything with that call I made.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Keller. You got a look at him, didn’t you?”

  “It’s not as though I hadn’t seen enough pictures of him.”

  “But seeing him in person’s a little different. You got a sense of the person.”

  “I guess.”

  “And you established for certain that he’s in residence there. You assumed as much, but now you know it for a fact.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “You don’t sound convinced, Keller. What’s the matter?”

  “The phone.”

  “Why’d you toss it? I know they log 911 calls, but I thought your phone’s untraceable.”

  “They can’t tie it to me,” he said, “but they can tell what numbers I call with that phone. Then all they have to do is walk back the cat.”

  “To Sedona,” she said, “and to New Orleans. No, you wouldn’t want them to do that. So what’s the problem? You bought a disposable phone and then you disposed of it.”

  “I paid seventy bucks for that phone,” he said, “and I made one useless call with it, and now it’s floating in the New York sewer system.”

  “I doubt it’s floating, Keller. It probably sank like a stone.”

  “Well.”

  “And landed on the bottom,” she said, “unless an alligator ate it. Remember Tick-Tock the Alligator? In Peter Pan?”

  “Wasn’t that a crocodile?”

  “Keller, I know there’s a difference between alligators and crocodiles, but is it one we have to care about? Tick-Tock swallowed a clock once, and that’s why you could always hear him coming.”

  “Probably how he got his name, too.”

  “Odds are. You know, I always wondered how come it didn’t run down. You figure it was like a self-winding watch? Just swimming around was enough to keep it going?”

  “Dot—”

  “So here’s your phone,” she said, “and this alligator swallows it, and now what happens if somebody calls you?”

  How did he get into conversations like this? “Nobody has the number,” he said.

  “Is that a fact.”

  “Besides, I turned the phone off after I made the call. So it wouldn’t ring.”

  “That was wise of you, Keller. Because all you need is an alligator in the sewer with a phone ringing inside his belly.”

  “And anyway it’s a myth. There aren’t really any alligators in the New York sewers.”

  She sighed heavily. “Keller,” she said, “you know what you are? A genuine killjoy. You got any inside information about Santa Claus, kindly keep it to yourself. And I wouldn’t worry too much about the seventy dollars. It’s not gonna keep you from buying any stamps, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there you go. How’s New York?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You comfortable there?”

  “Pretty much. At first I was worried someone would recognize me, but nobody did, so I stopped worrying.”

  “I guess so, if you actually started a conversation with a cop.”

  “Until this moment,” he said, “it never occurred to me that I was doing anything risky.”

  “Maybe you weren’t, Keller. The world has a short memory, and I have to say that’s just as well. Look, you’ll figure out a way to get the job done. You always do.”

  Keller had Thai food for lunch. You could get perfectly decent Thai food in New Orleans, and almost everything else, but there was a Thai restaurant two blocks from his old apartment that he remembered fondly. He walked over there, and the hostess put him at a table for two on the left wall, about halfway between the front door and the kitchen.

  He was studying the menu when the waitress brought him a glass of Thai iced tea before he could ask for it. How did she know that was what he wanted? He reached for it, and she said, “Papaya salad? Shrimp pad thai, very spicy?”

  Was the young woman psychic? No, of course not. She remembered him.

  And so had the hostess. Because, he realized, this was the table where he’d always sat years ago, and the meal was the one he’d almost invariably ordered.

  Now what? He’d always paid cash, so they wouldn’t know his name. But they would certainly have seen his photograph, in the papers or on the TV news. But would it have registered out of context?

  More to the point, what should he do now? Get up and make a run for it? Or, more discreetly, invent a pretext: “Uh-oh, forgot my
wallet, I’ll be back in a minute.” And they’d never see him again.

  But wouldn’t that create suspicion where it might well not already exist? And once he’d done that, they’d have reason to wonder what was the matter, and at that point one of them might link this old customer of theirs to a photo dimly recalled, and they could call 911 and it wouldn’t even cost them a seventy-dollar phone.

  On the other hand, he’d be gone by then.

  But the authorities, who’d had years to get used to the idea that Keller the Assassin had been liquidated by his employers, would have reason to believe he wasn’t dead after all. And there’d be a manhunt, and attention from the media, and what would happen to his life in New Orleans?

  The papaya salad came. If he wanted to allay suspicion, he thought, then he ought to act like a man with nothing to hide. So he picked up his fork and dug in.

  It was just as he remembered it.

  So was the pad thai, the rice noodles nicely slippery on the tongue, the shrimp tender and flavorful, the whole thing fiercely hot. He’d lost his appetite when he realized he’d been recognized, but it returned in full measure once he started eating, and he cleaned both his plates. He might have ordered dessert, there was a baked coconut rice pudding he used to like, but he decided not to push it.

  He scribbled in the air, and the hostess brought the check, took his money, and brought his change. He left a tip designed to be generous without being memorable, and on the way out the hostess said, “Long time we don’t see you.”

  “I moved away.”

  “Ah, that’s what I say! Somebody say maybe you don’t like us no more, but I say he move. Where you now, Upper West Side?”

  “Montana.”

  “Oh, so far! What city?”

  The first thought that came to him was Cheyenne, but that was in Wyoming. “Billings,” he said, pretty sure it was in Montana.