It was Nighthawks, perhaps the artist’s most iconic work, and while it had been on loan to the Whitney when he saw it, he seemed to remember that its actual home was a museum in Chicago. His iPhone Google app confirmed this, and a cab took him to the front steps of the Art Institute, and in no time at all he was standing in front of the painting, looking at the three customers in the diner.
He stood there, drinking it in. It had been a few years now since a trip to Des Moines left him framed for a political assassination, and that was the end of his residence in New York. Of all the apartment’s contents, only his stamp collection remained in his possession, and only because Dot had rushed to retrieve it.
Had he seen a reproduction of Nighthawks since then? He could have, it was reproduced frequently, and he might have run across it when browsing the internet, but he couldn’t specifically recall such an occasion. And yet the painting was as vivid in his memory as if he’d looked at it yesterday, and had the emotional impact upon him that it had the first time he stood in front of it.
He found it cheering, actually. Loneliness, it assured him, was the human condition. It hadn’t singled him out.
Both male customers, he noted, were wearing fedoras.
He was settled in the lounge a little after six, and thought about hauling out the burner phone and trying the number again. But to what end?
In fact, wasn’t it dangerous to have the phone on his person? He’d powered it down after making the single call on it, so it wouldn’t be doing any pinging, but simply continuing to own it might be a bad idea. A storm drain was a logical destination for it, but he’d have to leave Union Station to find one, and that seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
The safest thing to do, he thought, was to smash the thing. But for that he’d need a hammer, and the one he’d bought was in a trash can at the Super 8.
You’re overthinking this, he told himself, and headed for the lounge’s restroom, then overthought that as well and left the lounge long enough to visit a public restroom on the other side of the concourse. There he balanced the phone on top of the paper towel dispenser, where someone could adopt it, use up its remaining minutes, and find his own storm drain.
After the ritual preliminaries (“Mr. Edwards, a pleasure to see you, sir!” “Oh, am I in your car, Ainslie? Then I know I’m in good hands.”) and the ritual passing of the twenty-dollar bill, Ainslie said, “Now I was just about to ask what had become of that fine hat of yours, and then I remembered you didn’t have it with you when you boarded in New Orleans.”
“I didn’t,” Keller agreed, “and I have to say I missed it.”
“Well, we’ll get you right on back to New Orleans, Mr. Edwards. And to that splendid hat.”
A cup of hot chocolate in the café car, a decent night’s sleep, a good breakfast. Back in his roomette, he got out the Pablo phone and placed a call.
“I’m on the train,” he told Dot. “We just passed through Yazoo City.”
“Has it changed much?”
“I didn’t get too good a look at it. I’ll be home in a few hours.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it. And glad to hear your voice, but not entirely sure why I’m hearing it. Something I should know?”
“That’s a good question,” he said, “and I’m hoping you can find out the answer. I wonder if anything interesting happened yesterday north and west of Chicago.”
There was a pause. Then she said, “Google’s not that hot on a cell phone.”
“Not for an elaborate search, no.”
“And the reception’s a little uncertain on a moving train.”
“Or even a stationary one, if it’s in the middle of Mississippi.”
“That where Yazoo City is? But I won’t be looking for Yazoo City, will I? Tell me the name of the damn town, because I can’t come up with it.”
“Baker’s Bluff,” he said.
“Right, of course. This may take a while, Pablo. Don’t go anywhere.”
Where would he go? He left the phone on and stuck it in his shirt pocket and picked up the timetable, a hefty volume with schedules for all Amtrak trains. The front cover opened up to a map of all the routes, and while Keller was by no means seeing it for the first time, it never failed to engage him. He could sit there plotting out the various ways you could get from Tampa to Seattle, assuming of course that you had reason to be in Tampa, and reason to go to Seattle. The Sunset Limited ran between New Orleans and Los Angeles, and he thought he might like to ride it someday, with Julia and Jenny, although he wasn’t sure how crazy Julia might be about trains. He somehow knew Jenny would like them.
There was a time, he knew, when the Sunset Limited had run all the way from Jacksonville to L.A., but some years ago they’d cut out the Jacksonville-to-New Orleans stretch. It still showed on the map as a dotted line, which indicated the service was suspended.
Keller thought this was a damned shame. Now if you wanted to go from New Orleans to Miami, say, you had to go hundreds of miles out of your way.
No, the hell with that. He didn’t even want to think about it. Now a long run north and west, that looked interesting. The City of New Orleans to Chicago — he could imagine how courtly Ainslie would be toward Jenny — and then the Empire Builder up and across, through North Dakota and Montana and clear to Seattle...
He’d dozed off, and when the phone rang it took him a moment to recognize it as such. He answered it and said hello, and Dot said, “Well, I guess I don’t have to give the money back.”
“What happened?”
“Jesus,” she said. “What didn’t?”
Julia and Jenny picked him up from the station. They went straight home, and after an early dinner Keller took Jenny into his stamp room for story time. He wasn’t much good at making up bedtime stories, and reading her books to her bored both of them in equal measure, but she loved to sit on his lap while he turned the pages of one of his albums and told her about the stamps and where they were from.
His collection, worldwide stamps from 1840 to 1940, was housed in sixteen binders, their contents in alphabetical order. This evening Jenny pointed to an album in the middle of the second shelf and he opened it at random and told her a little about Memel, which was the German name for the city the Lithuanians called Klaipeda. There were around 130 different stamps issued for Memel from 1920 through 1922, all of them German and French stamps overprinted for use in the district. Then in 1923 Lithuanian forces occupied the place, and issued 15 stamps of their own, most but not all of them overprints. A year later the League of Nations approved the designation of Memel — well, better make that Klaipeda — as a semi-autonomous district of Lithuania.
Keller had the country complete, including most but not all of the errors listed in his Scott catalogue — here an inverted overprint, there a double surcharge. All were inexpensive, except for one set of four surcharged Klaipeda stamps worth just over a thousand dollars; Keller’s set had been certified as genuine by an expert, but he had his doubts. And none of them were what you could call visually appealing, or of any conceivable interest to anyone other than a fairly devout philatelist.
And yet Jenny gave every indication of being fascinated by what he told her. She repeated the country’s two names, Memel and Klaipeda, with such precision that Keller found himself wondering if he was pronouncing them correctly himself. It would be a hell of a thing, he thought, for her to be the only kid her age in Louisiana who’d ever heard of the place, and then for her to be saying it wrong.