And now, sitting in the Checker a block down Eldridge, he thinks of those days with a detachment that he neither understands nor wishes to understand. The memories are as clear as a familiar movie, as sharp as his vision in this instant through the windshield of the cab. But it’s as if it were some clone of himself shoving open the door of the Text Shoppe, flashing the badge and hoping, just a little, that Rudy would run so he could knock the little shyster to the floor, maybe throw an elbow or two and rip one of those pathetic floral shirts the dealer insisted on wearing. Let the word get back to Oster and his boys that Gilrein was capable of his own heat.
But being a hard ass has never come naturally to Gilrein. The best he ever managed was to walk up and down the aisles, his shoulders knocking stack after stack of manuscripts and magazines and binders into a snow cover of paper all over the greasy linoleum.
“You call this a roust?” Perez would say, nonplussed, squinting and scratching at his beard. “You’re a nuisance, not a threat. Nobody ever tell you the difference?”
Ostensibly, the Text Shoppe is an eccentric secondhand bookstore. That’s how the joint is listed in the Yellow Pages directory and that’s what it says on Perez’s business cards. And Perez may well spend a quarter of his working hours hustling a mishmash of rare first editions and worn-out pulp novels and limited-series broadsides that only twelve people in the world can decipher. But where Perez really makes his true coin is in the murky side of the business, the gray margin of pirated collectibles and bootleg variants, the world where copyright law gets interpreted at the most liberal end of the spectrum. Remember that beyond the usual run of specialty collectors there are half a dozen colleges in this city. And if their curators and librarians aren’t too curious as to the source of the materials Perez can provide, then the only specifics left to discuss are financial.
When you walk into the Shoppe, you think you’ve stumbled upon the final yard sale of a very sloppy paper hoarder. While it might be overstating the case to say that Perez’s emporium perpetually looks like a bomb has just gone off, the fact is nothing seems very organized and everything seems shabby and dog-eared.
Perez operates out of the basement of his old brownstone on the periphery of downtown. Gilrein is no book expert, but he can’t believe a cellar is the best place to store paper products, especially if the bulk of them are old and fragile. The back of the basement houses the building’s original furnace, and once a puff-back put Perez out of business for six months. There’s a washer-and-dryer setup next to the furnace and Perez has been known to change a load of his Hawaiian shirts in the middle of a transaction.
The floor of the shop is poured concrete covered by a roll of scavenged linoleum that doesn’t quite make it to the walls. The walls are unfinished, rough stone painted white, with the paint peeling everywhere in big circular patches. One side of the store is filled with narrow aisles of mismatched filing cabinets, both metal and wooden, the metal units usually some shade of green and often dented in a place that makes the drawers hard to open. The opposite side of the basement is lined with plywood shelving crammed with used books for sale. And in between the file cabinets and the shelves are redwood picnic tables used as display space and featuring review copies and limited editions, small press runs and foreign titles. Above the tables are lines of strung wire running front to rear, and clothespinned to the wires are assortments of typewritten manuscripts, some of them autographed, hanging like yesterday’s wash or the butcher’s display of salamis.
Usually Perez sits on a stool behind the front counter reading stock through ancient bifocals, his hands never far from the little.32 he keeps tucked inside his ankle boot. He’ll nod to browsers when they enter and he’ll respond if they ask him a question, but other than that he’ll remain silent and work on an air of suspicion, peering up repeatedly at the customer over his tortoise rims until the patron is subliminally forced to either make a purchase or leave.
Perez doesn’t have any great love for unknown browsers anyway. He knows his customer base. His clients all have their own unique and unspoken protocol for barter. Perez knows their areas of interest by heart. He can sense when they’re branching out and when they’re looking to unload some items and free up a little cash. The colleges are hesitant to leave their wrought-iron-and-ivy enclosures, but still, on principle, Perez makes them come to him. St. Ignatius is always on the prowl for stolen missives from any of the vaults of Rome. Every spring, Jonas Hall University is interested in Freud juvenilia. Come fall, they’re salivating for the “lost” notebooks of an early rocketry pioneer. And last year, Perez unloaded a cache of love letters from the city’s school superintendent to a variety of sixteen-year-old coeds. The buyer was the State Teachers College, and it paid through the nose.
Over the years, Perez has put together some deals that belie his shabby little workstation. He was an essential player in the auction of Levasque’s last and supposedly nonexistent novel. He grabbed a percentage of the take on the sale of the suicide note by that beloved of depressive feminist poets everywhere, Janine McBell. And though he never actually handled the artifact itself, he arranged for the shipping of the rarest Quatrich volume of all, Con Crete Crib, a book that could be physically taken apart and reassembled into an unknown number of tremendously intricate labyrinths.
All of this without any major legal consequence, beyond the original deportation and lifetime banishment from his native Puerto Rico. So he’ll miss springtime in Luquillo; life is a trade-off.
There have been a few scrapes here and there. Detective Gilrein did manage to nail Perez a few times. Nothing spectacular — a bootleg draft of a book of poems by someone named Quinn, a stash of letters written by a forgotten novelist that had been missing from a university library in Iowa for a decade. Perez always made bail by suppertime and nothing ever went before a judge, but being a pain in the ass had to count for something, didn’t it?
Rudy Perez turns the corner of Waldstein, fishing in his pockets as he walks and finally pulling free a huge set of keys on some kind of fur-covered fob. Gilrein gets out of the cab and tries to be casual jogging across the street through traffic. Perez climbs down the five stairs and is stepping into the store when Gilrein reaches the brownstone and, without a word of warning, leaps the stairs and shoves the dealer into a table that overturns and spills its display to the floor.
Perez yells as he rolls onto his behind and pulls his.32 out of an ankle boot crafted from some kind of animal skin and dyed kelly green.
Gilrein’s got his own.38 leveled down on Perez and Perez yells, “Jesus Christ, it’s you.”
They both stare at each other as the moment diffuses, and then Perez gives a forced laugh and reboots his pistol.
“What?” he says. “You don’t knock no more?”
“Got to talk to you, Rudy.”
Perez gestures to the mess they’ve made.
“You got to talk to me, coño? What, you don’t have a phone? Look at this place. Take your Prozac today, officer?”
Perez stands up and they both start to put the display table back in order.
“I’m not on the job anymore,” Gilrein says as he picks up a cardboard, hand-lettered sign that reads EPHEMERA AND ODDMENTS.
“Tha’s right,” Perez says gleefully. “You some low-rent cab-boy these days. I feel for you, Gilrein. My heart breaking from it all.”