Of course you didn’t have to show up at an auction in order to bid. You could bid by mail, and the auction house would bid on your behalf, going no higher than your maximum figure for each lot. Or you could bid over the phone, saying yea or nay in real time and having the option of getting carried away and spending more than you’d intended, just as if you were there in person.

But it was more exciting to be there, no question. And, sitting on your folding chair, waiting for your lot to come up, you were able to find out just how much you really wanted a particular stamp. Sometimes you wound up sitting there, never even raising your numbered bidder’s paddle, letting the lot go to somebody else for far less than you’d been willing to pay for it. Other times you sailed recklessly past your maximum bid, discovering that you wanted the material more than you’d anticipated.

Another advantage to being there was you got to see the auction lots up close and personal. The auction catalog featured photos of the more important items, but you couldn’t pick up a photo with your stamp tongs and determine just how much you liked the looks of it. Keller, taking advantage of his early arrival, went to the auction room as soon as he’d unpacked, signed in and got his bidder’s number-304-and sat down with his catalog. He went through it and called for the lots he was sufficiently interested in to examine, and one of the Halliday amp; Okun minions brought them to him for his inspection.

Stamp collecting, except for a few moments now and then in a heated auction, was not an exciting hobby. It didn’t provide much in the way of edge-of-the-chair suspense, and that was fine with Keller. That really wasn’t what he wanted from it. He got enough of that in his work, or in what Len Horvath might categorize as his quotidian life.

What it did offer, and what Keller appreciated, was total absorption. Seated at his table with his albums and a selection of approvals, or sprawled on his couch with the latest issue of Linn’s, Keller’s attention was entirely occupied by something which was, all things considered, essentially trivial. Trimming a mount with his guillotine-style mount cutter, dipping a British colonial issue in watermark detection fluid, checking another with his perforation gauge, Keller was completely caught up in the moment. Hours could fly by, with Keller quite unaware of their passage.

Over the past month, he’d spent quite a few hours with the Halliday amp; Okun catalog, putting a little check mark next to those lots in which he had any interest. There were half a dozen items that interested him enough to bring him to San Francisco, high-ticket stamps, five of them from various French colonies, one an early stamp from Great Britain. He could afford to buy two or three of the six, depending on how the bidding went, and by careful examination he managed to reduce his list from six to four. (He didn’t care for the color of the stamp from Gabon, which seemed to him to have faded as a result of exposure to sunlight, and the British issue, nicely centered and with a wing margin, had a couple of raggedy perforations. He was partial to wing margins, but he decided the perfs bothered him.)

Besides those six stamps, though, there were thirty or forty other lots, ranging in estimated value from ten to two hundred dollars. They would fill spaces in his collection, and he might or might not bid on them, depending on how they looked on close inspection and how the bidding proceeded. So he had all of those lots to look at as well, and notes to make in his catalog, and he gave himself up completely to the task at hand.

He was not the only prospective bidder in the room. There were eight chairs positioned at the bank of tables, and at no time was his the only one occupied. Others came and went, with Keller never more than marginally aware of their coming and going. The conversation in the room was subdued, and largely limited to men (and at least one woman) calling the lots they wanted to examine. But occasionally some small talk crept into the conversation, most of it dealing with sports or the weather, or an inquiry about a mutual acquaintance. One man talked about airport security and what a nuisance it was, and Keller expressed his agreement without looking up or having any idea whose opinion he was seconding. Or caring, because his concentration remained centered upon the stamp he was holding to the light, to determine if the paper had thinned where a previous collector’s hinge had been removed. It hadn’t, and he made a note to that effect in his catalog.

“Thurn and Taxis,” someone said. There’d been words preceding those, but Keller hadn’t noted them. His mind registered the phrase, Thurn and Taxis, and Dot’s wordplay popped into his head, and out of his mouth.

“The only certainties,” he said.

He spoke almost without realizing he’d done so, but the words echoed in the room, and an attention-getting silence followed them.

“Say again?”

“Oh,” Keller said. “Well, you know what they say. Nothing’s inevitable in this life besides Thurn and Taxis.”

“Well, I’m damned,” a man said. He had a shock of iron gray hair, and wore a well-tailored suit. A wafer-thin watch contrasted with a surprisingly gaudy ring. “All the years I’ve been collecting the damned stamps, and there’s a connection I never made. Do I know you? You’re not a German states guy, are you?”

Keller shook his head. “Worldwide before 1940,” he said. “Well, through ’49, actually. British Empire through ’52.”

“To include all of George the Sixth.”

“Right.”

“Never had the urge to specialize?”

“Not really. Although there are some areas I’m more interested in than others.”

“Like?”

“Well, French colonies.”

“Pretty interesting,” the fellow acknowledged. “And you don’t go crazy with watermarks and perf varieties. Of course you’ve got to watch out for counterfeit overprints.”

“I know.”

“Tons of counterfeits in the German states issues. And then there are all the stamps that are worth more used than mint, so you’ve got fake cancellations to worry about. It’s almost as bad as early Italy, where something like ninety-five percent of the used stamps have fake cancels.”

“I’d rather have mint anyway,” Keller said.

“If you can find them, what with all the counterfeiters buying up the mint stamps and hitting ’em with fake cancellations. But, see, I want mint and used. And cancellation varieties. And multiples, mint and used, and covers. That’s what happens when you specialize. You want everything, and there’s just no end to it.”

Keller just nodded. He should never have piped up in the first place, he thought, and now if he just let the conversation die maybe he could get out of this.

No such luck.

“Say, can I buy you a drink? Seems like the least I can do, since you were kind enough to point out the inevitability of Thurn and Taxis.”

And that wasn’t all that was inevitable, Keller thought, and raised his eyes to meet those of the man in the newspaper photograph.