Word Made Flesh

6

If you want information on the rare-book trade in Quinsigamond, there are any number of people you could go see, including Gilrein’s ex-lover, Wylie Brown. If you want information about the stolen rare-book trade, then Rudy Perez is the only man in town. The Text Shoppe is a trashy little place down on the corner of Eldridge and Waldstein, a cellar hole that takes in water every spring. Gilrein visited the place more than once when he was working out of bunko.

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.”

“Don’t be a dick, Rudy, okay? I still got friends—”

“Hey, Gilrein”—gloves off now—“you don’t got no friends, okay? You never had no friends, all right? Your wife, she had the friends. Christ sake, I had more weight with the boys in blue than you did.”

“Good to know you haven’t changed.”

“Just so we understan’ each other, cabron.”

“Don’t call me names, Rudy. It’ll just piss me off.”

“You’re the one jumps down on me. I di’n’t come to your taxi an’ mess you up.”

As a wedding gift, someone, maybe Zarelli from narcotics, gave Gilrein and Ceil a set of matching his-and-hers blackjacks. An elaborate and overpriced joke at a time when they really could’ve used a new microwave oven. Gilrein wishes he could remember what he did with them. He’d love to sap Perez across the belly right now, follow up with a couple of shots to the back of the head, ring his bell till he never said the word chico again.

Perez moves behind the sales counter and starts shuffling papers. Gilrein stands in place and looks around the Text Shoppe. He takes in some air and gets that same smell, something like old glue and hay and wet suede and maybe just a little sewage.

“So,” he says, “you still scouting for St. Ignatius these days?”

Perez looks up, scratches his beard. “Wha’s a cab-drivin’ fool like you care who I trade with?”

“You’re going to be a hump about this?”

“Someone knocks me down, trashes my store, that puts me in a bad mood all day, cab-boy.”

“You know, Rudy, savvy businessman like you, I’d think you’d know when there might be some coin involved in a discussion.”

Perez stares at him, picks up a pencil, and taps on the counter.

“Tell you how savvy I am, mister taxicab, mister I stop for any scumwad whistles my way. I learned long time back, you don’t piss on tomorrow’s dollar for today’s nickel.”

“Where the Christ did you learn English?”

“Cab-boy, you flatter me so much, I’m going to close down the shop and take you to breakfast. Tell you everything you want to know.”

“Let’s skip breakfast and instead we can go down the Manetti Home. Pay our last respects to Leo Tani.”

Perez looks up but keeps his mouth shut.

It’s Gilrein’s only chip so he plays it all the way, looks around the shop and in a low voice asks, “You wouldn’t have a Mass card lying around here?”

“Tani’s dead?” Perez says and Gilrein gives a single nod.

Technically, Leo and Perez were business rivals. But where Tani’s merchandise varied from month to month and client to client, Perez stayed in the specialty line. Gilrein knows that now and again the two men broke bread together down on San Remo Avenue and that more than once they made a mutual profit off a joint transaction.

“Leo Tani was trussed up like a pig inside Gompers,” Gilrein says, watching Perez study his face. “Somebody peeled all the skin off his body. You imagine that, Rudy? Can you get a picture of that?”

“Holy mother …” Perez begins and lets the sentence fade.

Gilrein walks to the counter and comes close to Perez’s face. “I heard,” he says, “he was sniffing around for August Kroger.”

He waits a beat, then adds, “What did you hear, Rudy?”

Perez starts to shake his head, but there’s no joke and no insult. He simply says, “I don’t know shit, Gilrein.”

“If the ’Shank was working for Kroger,” Gilrein says, “we both know it was a book. And we both know that means at some point he gave you a call.”

“I knew this was going to be a bad day,” Perez says.

“Rudy, there are always two ways to do this. First way is, you tell me everything you know about Leo Tani and August Kroger and what business they might have had cooking.”

“What’s plan B?”

“Plan B is I come back here tonight with a gas can and a butane lighter.”

“That’s pathetic, Gilrein. Tell me something I can at least pretend to believe.”

“Listen, Rudy, understand something. You don’t know me anymore, okay? You haven’t known me for three years now—”

“You grow some balls in the interim?”

“You might have this dump insured,” Gilrein says, straining to keep an even voice, “but I’m pretty sure none of the real stuff, none of the bootlegs or the hot property, would be listed on your policy. Would it, Rudy?”

“Gilrein,” Perez says, “you know the San Remo boys still look out for me, huh? You know I go fifteen percent a month to avoid threats like this.”

“You don’t know me anymore, asshole. I don’t give a pig’s bladder about your San Remo thugs.”

“You be a dead man before the last fire team pulled away, Gilrein.”

“You do what you want, Rudy,” Gilrein says. “Because I sure as hell will.”

Perez stares at him, then shakes his head and says, “Your wife, she’d be rolling in her grave.”

Gilrein nods.

“All right,” Perez says. “It’s not much but you can have it. A new book came onto the market. Something from out of town. Eastern Europe. Old Bohemia. More than one party is interested.”

“Kroger and who else?”

“Don’t know, but the product originated in Maisel, so who you think?”

“You’re trying to say Hermann K?”

Perez nods.

“But Kinsky’s no collector. Bastard’s never read a book in his goddamn life.”

“First of all,” Perez says, “collectors aren’t always readers. Second, just ’cause he wants it doesn’t mean he wants it for himself. Man’s the neighborhood mayor for the Bohemians. His people wanted it, Kinsky would do what he could.”

“What kind of book is it?”

“I’ve heard a lot of rumors. None of them scratch my butt, you know?”

Gilrein takes a deep breath and says, “Okay, Rudy, this has been a good start. Now one last piece of business and I’m out of your life.”

“Don’t make promises you won’t keep.”

“It’s about Wylie. And where I can find her.”

“Oh no, shit, Gilrein, c’mon,” Perez whines, shaking his head. “This is pathetic. Don’t do this. You embarrassing both of us.”

“A phone number or an address. Then I’m gone.”

“I don’t step in boy-girl fights. This ain’t dignified, hermano.”

“It’s business. She’ll understand. Let’s go.”

Perez puts a flat hand on his own chest and says, “She may understand. But I don’ think her boss would be too excited, you know?”

Gilrein looks at Perez and says, “Her boss? What are you talking about?”

And Perez realizes he’s made a huge mistake, that as bad as the morning has been already, it’s about to get worse.

“I wish I could help you,” he tries, feeble and distracted. “If I knew where—”

“Cut the bullshit,” Gilrein yells. What little play there had been is now immediately sucked out of the exchange. “I know you were with Wylie last night.”

Perez shakes his head, conscious now of just how tightly wound up the cab-boy is, of the bruises on the taxi driver’s face. He stares at Gilrein, frantic for a way to end the dialogue.

“She’s working for Kroger,” he says, spilling it all at once, opting for the truth in a moment of fright and weakness.

The sentence has an effect on Gilrein exactly the opposite of what Perez was hoping for.

“You lying sack of shit,” Gilrein says.

And then he does what he’s never done before. He throws the first punch, connects under the chin and sends Perez reeling back into the plywood shelving. The dealer falls to the floor and reams of paper tumble down on top of him. Gilrein leaps the counter as Perez pulls his piece again, but this time Gilrein stomps his wrist and Perez screams and the gun comes loose. Gilrein kicks him in the ribs, kicks down on a kneecap, pulls Perez to his feet, and then sails him into a glass case filled with oversized Bibles. The case topples and shatters and blood starts flowing from Perez’s cheek.

Gilrein comes down with a knee into his chest. Perez tries to roll and Gilrein drives a foot into his stomach. Perez loses his air, hunches into a fetal tuck, one arm up waving, trying to signal surrender.

Then Gilrein takes a step back and as the adrenaline recedes, he realizes what he’s done. His own body is throbbing and he goes down on his knees, gets his hands under Perez’s arms and helps him into sitting.

“Jesus Christ,” Perez’s rasping.

“I’m sorry” is all Gilrein can say. “You okay?”

Perez shifts and cradles his wrist, tears in his eyes, sniffing in blood and mucus, trying still to get a good draw of breath.

“What the hell happened to you?” he whispers.

Gilrein needs to get outside now. He reaches into his pocket, takes out a fold of bills and, without looking at it, lays it on the floor next to Perez.

Neither threatening nor pleasing, but in an overly controlled voice, Gilrein says, “You call Wylie. You tell her to meet me at the greenhouse. You tell her it’s an emergency.”

Perez clears his throat and says, “You out of your mind, Gilrein. You can’t do this. You ain’t no cop no more.”

Gilrein gets up and goes to the door. Without turning back he says, “I don’t want to come back here, Rudy. You make sure Wylie gets my message.”