Dutch Blue Error (17 page)

“Nope.”

“Why do I think you’re lying to me?”

Zerk swiveled around and glared up at me. “Same reason the fat man does, maybe.”

“The fat man?”

“The cop.”

“Yeah. Stone.”

“Stone was here?”

“Stone called me. Stone knows I killed those two guys. Stone’s gonna get me. Stone’s a tough guy. Stone’s smart and patient. Stone’s gonna get his lungs ripped out.”

“You can’t let him get to you, Zerk. He’s trying to make you blow your cool.”

“Right. I figured that out.” He pushed himself away from his desk and pounded his thighs with his fists. “He is, too, the son of a bitch. Makes it seem personal.”

“You want a cup of coffee?”

“I want a drink. I wanna smoke some dope. I wanna bust up a face.”

“So let’s go get a drink.”

“I got work to do. Leave me alone.”

“Were there any other calls?”

“Like from a lady?”

I shrugged.

“No. I told you. No calls for you.”

He wheeled himself back to his desk, fiddled with the typewriter for a minute, then his fingers began to fire staccato bursts on the machine. I went into my office and picked up the telephone.

Darlene informed me that Deborah was out with a client, she didn’t know when she’d be back, yes, she had delivered my earlier messages, and she would tell Deborah that Mr. Coyne had called again.

I placed a yellow legal pad on the desk in front of me and with a pencil divided it vertically into four columns. I wrote headings at the top of each column. Name. The lie. Reason for the lie. The truth. Then I filled in the first column with all the relevant names, leaving plenty of space between them. I figured each person could have contributed several lies, each of which would suggest several alternative truths, and each of which might have several possible motivations.

Ollie Weston was the first name on my list. His first lie I phrased simply as “Dutch Blue Error.” I didn’t know what the lie might be, but I realized that until I knew more about the stamp I wouldn’t be able to imagine the lie.

I opened the Yellow Pages to
PHILATELY
, and found nothing. I tried
STAMPS
, and found what I wanted under
STAMPS FOR COLLECTORS
. I learned that in the city of Boston several dozen stamp dealers plied their trade, and a great many of them had their offices on Bromfield Street. I copied down some addresses.

Zerk didn’t look up, nor did the tempo of his typing change, when I left my office.

Bromfield Street is a narrow little one-way street, wide enough only for a single automobile to pass. It cuts across from Tremont Street to Washington Street near the Boston Common, right opposite the Granary Burial Ground, a two-minute walk from where Charlie and I had eaten our hot dogs an hour earlier.

I selected one of those office buildings randomly and walked into the dark lobby. Under a framed glass panel a directory listed three stamp dealers. Two were located on the second floor. I found no elevator, so I climbed the stairs.

I arrived at the office of Morris Graustein. His name was hand-printed on an index card taped to his door. He had a thick bush of curly white hair, watery blue eyes, and yellow teeth. He wore a tattered blue cardigan sweater over a faded plaid shirt. His tiny office contained a large wooden desk, several head-high metal file cabinets, a couple of cardboard boxes piled on top of each other in a corner, and a single pigeon-stained window which looked fuzzily on to the building across the street.

Morris Graustein sat at his paper-strewn desk sipping from a mug and staring at the telephone. When I entered the room he said, “Come in, sir, come in. Nice day, eh? Are you buying or selling today?” Graustein pronounced it “buy-ink or sell-ink.”

He looked up at me. When he smiled, a thousand wrinkles spread across his face as if a strong wind had sprang up suddenly over a placid body of water. “Or maybe you want to buy a little starter outfit for your nephew, eh?” He squinted as if he could see into my intentions. “Aha, yes. I have got it. You have a shoebox full of United States first-day covers you want to sell because you have collected them for twenty years and now it is time to put the children into college. Am I right, sir?”

I laughed. “I’m not a philatelist. You’re right. My name is Coyne, I’m an attorney, and I need some information about a rare stamp.”

“Coyne.” The breeze blew across Graustein’s face again. “You should be a numismatist, Mr. Coyne. Your first name, it isn’t Bill, is it, sir?”

I smiled and shook my head. “No. It’s Brady.”

“Well,” he continued, “there just happens to be the smallest lull in my business at this moment, and you just happen to be talking with a man who knows all about rare stamps, sir.” He glanced again at his telephone. “So. Do you want to know about a particular rare stamp? Or rare stamps in general? How may I help you, Mr. Coyne?”

“A particular one. It’s called the Dutch Blue Error. Are you familiar with it?”

He ran his fingers through his thick tangle of white hair. “Everybody is familiar with the blue 1852 Netherlands fifteen-cent. I cannot tell you how to buy it, sir. But I can tell you many things about it.” He bent over and rummaged in a drawer in his desk. In a moment he produced a tattered old magazine, which he flipped through and then spread out on the desktop in front of me. “The official story is in here. You can read it. But it is not the whole story, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me ask you a question, sir,” said Graustein.

“What’s my interest in the stamp, right?”

He nodded.

“I’m inquiring for a client.”

He lifted his eyebrows.

“That’s all I can tell you,” I said.

“Does your client want to buy the Dutch Blue Error?”

I smiled and shrugged.

“Because if he does, I cannot help you. However, if he desires to sell it…”

“Yes?”

“If he wants to sell it—if your client owns the Dutch Blue Error—I would like to have the opportunity to buy it from him. Will you tell him that for me, sir? You might not think so, but I
could
buy that stamp.”

“My client,” I said carefully, “wants neither to buy nor to sell the Dutch Blue Error. Believe me. I just want to learn about it. I just need the information.”

Graustein sighed. “Yes. Well, have it that way, then. All right. Briefly. The Blue Error, it is assumed, was originally one of a single sheet of the fifteen-cent orange issue. The plate was probably incorrectly inked. It may have been the first sheet printed, and the printer realized his mistake after the first sheet was produced. No one knows. There are many ways such errors can be made. At any rate, the stamps probably did not circulate, except for the Blue Error of which you inquire. None of the others, if there was an entire sheet, has ever turned up, sir. It has been assumed for many years that the other blue errors—if there were others—were destroyed by the printer. Perhaps they have simply disappeared. Once that assumption became widely accepted, once it seemed probable that there were no other blue errors, the value of that one stamp increased rapidly. Of course, it is possible—not likely, I should say, sir, but possible—that there are others yet to be found.”

Graustein told me of the stamp’s discovery by a Dutch boy in 1885, his sale of it to a dealer, and the periodic exchanges of the stamp among European dealers. “Each of these sales is documented,” he said. “Right up to the last one.”

“When was that?”

“That was 1967, at an auction in Paris.”

“And the stamp hasn’t been sold since then?”

“No”

“Could it be sold privately?”

“Only in violation of the tax laws of every civilized nation on earth, sir,” said Graustein. “No. It is assumed that the 1967 buyer still owns the Dutch Blue Error.”

“Who,” I asked hesitantly, “was that buyer?”

He shrugged. “I do not know.”

“You don’t?”

“No. It is a mystery. The man who did know is dead.”

“Dead?” I elevated my eyebrows to encourage him.

“Yes. The agent. The sale, we assume, was made to an American. Perhaps an individual, more likely a corporation or a conglomerate. Conceivably even a museum, although one would assume they would want to show the stamp. In any case, whoever bought it used a purchaser. An agent, a Frenchman, who acted on behalf of the buyer. This is quite common among wealthy collectors, sir. They have agents in the major cities with the authority and the access to funds to make purchases. In any case, a French agent purchased the Blue Error in April of 1967.”

“He has since died, you say:”

Graustein’s faded blue eyes stared at me. “He died within twenty-four hours of the transaction. He was found in the swimming pool of the hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with a broken neck. Suicide, sir. He jumped from the balcony outside the building into the pool. Eight floors down.”

I took out a Winston and tapped it on the top of his desk.

“Oh, please, sir. Do not smoke in here.”

“Sorry,” I said, sticking the cigarette back into the pack.

“I do not stock a great number of stamps. But those I have are very valuable. The smoke is not good for them. And I do fear fire, sir.”

“I understand.” I returned the pack to my pocket. “So this French agent was the last one to have the stamp.”

“It is believed that he bought the stamp and delivered it to his client in Puerto Rico before he jumped from the balcony. The trail of the Dutch Blue Error ends there, sir. In 1967 in San Juan with the suicide of the French agent.”

My mind whirled with half-formed thoughts.

“Of course,” continued Graustein, “there are stories. Now and then a Dutch Blue Error story will make the rounds. The latest story is that one of Fidel Castro’s henchmen duped the French agent out of the stamp, and when the Frenchman realized what had been done to him, he took his own life so that he would not have to face his client.”

“What do
you
think, Mr. Graustein?”

“Me?” He looked surprised. “I do not know, sir. There was an earlier story that makes about as much sense.”

I smiled and waited.

Graustein rested his forearms on his desktop and leaned toward me. “The Dutch Blue Error has always been owned by Europeans. In 1934 it was purchased from an Englishman by a Parisian. Monsieur Ouelette. When Paris was occupied, so the story goes, Ouelette bought his and his family’s passage to Switzerland from a Nazi officer. The Dutch Blue Error was the price of his liberty. According to the tale, a Citroen registered to a Monsieur Ouelette drove off a mountain a few miles short of the Swiss border.”

I shook my head. I thought of Francis Shaughnessey and Albert Dopplinger. A lot of dead men lay strewn in the wake of the Dutch Blue Error.

“When the 1967 transaction was made,” he continued, “the agent who sold it had all the right papers. He claimed to be acting on behalf of a Mr. Ouelette.” Graustein shrugged. “Ouelette is not an uncommon name. So who knows whether it is a true story or not? But that is not the interesting thing, sir.”

“The interesting thing?”

“Yes. The interesting thing is this. If you believe the story, the Nazis intended to create several duplicates of the Blue Error.”

“Duplicates!” Scenarios abounded. “Why would they want to do that?”

“Possibly simply to make money. The Nazis, as you remember, were very interested in owning valuable things. Or else, as a part of their grand plan, they intended to devalue all things not owned by the Germans.” He pronounced it “Chermans.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“If good forgeries of the Dutch Blue Error began to turn up, people would become increasingly cautious about buying other rare stamps. That would be natural, do you see, sir? It would be considered a poor investment. The market would become depressed. Conceivably at that point, agents of the German government would begin to buy up the rare stamps of the world, just as they had confiscated and hoarded the contents of the great museums and private collections of Europe.” Graustein shrugged again. “It is just a story. Since the Nazis lost the war, I suppose we will never know.”

“I thought forgeries were easy to detect.”

“That is very complicated, sir,” he said. He turned his head around to stare at the clock on the wall behind him. It was 4:25. “Very complicated to explain about forgeries,” he repeated.

“Mr. Graustein, suppose I buy you a beer?”

“A nice glass of German beer. Yes, that would be fine, sir,” said Graustein, smiling as if he hadn’t thought of it. “I even know a little place.”

He fumbled with the several locks on his door and led me down the stairs and out onto Bromfield Street. We turned left, and at the end of the alley emerged onto Washington Street. We had entered what is universally known as Boston’s Combat Zone. The City Fathers, in their infinite wisdom, have designated that stretch of Washington Street a kind of legal no-man’s land, a free-fire area, where porno film operators, topless dancers, prostitutes, and pimps can all ply their dubious trades more or less free of official interference, and visiting salesmen and commuting executives can buy watered-down drinks for five bucks, provided they’ll do the same for the bar girls who sit beside them, and by asking the right questions they can also invest in a case of herpes to bring home to their wives.

In the evening, loud music spills out onto the streets, hookers stroll in pairs and threesomes, cars creep slowly along the streets, and old men urinate in the alleys against the brick walls. A few years ago, a Harvard football player was stabbed to death in a Combat Zone bar. He and some of his teammates had gone to celebrate their season, which had ended with a glorious victory over Yale. He was a linebacker, a senior who had played the last game of his career that afternoon. A pre-med student, the papers said.

No one ever figured out who stabbed the kid, or why. A cop was quoted as saying that was the risk you took going into the Combat Zone.

But at 4:30 on a bright Monday afternoon in early October, the Combat Zone was enjoying an armistice. The people who walked along the sidewalks barely glanced into the darkened establishments along the way. They seemed to be just passing through, secretaries and bankers and account executives on their way home from their State Street offices.