I bought wholesale, and I bought well.
By the time the second-day stories appeared I was hardened to it: cop suspended, they both said. There was a picture of Jackie, looking like the sole survivor of Nagasaki. There I was, too, plastered next to him, one mean- looking bastard. They had used my old mug shot, my killer pose. You’d never know from just a look which of these two guys is the real hood, 1 thought. Take a look and guess.
I didn’t get much comfort from my friends. I talked to Hennessey and that was okay—Neal never changes: he reminds me of a Saint Bernard dog, always there with a keg of cheer at exactly the right moment. Others in the department weren’t so hot. Somebody leaked the gory details of my long feud with Jackie, and the papers picked that up and ran with it. It looked like 1 had had a long vendetta against the guy, without a helluva lot in the proof department. All the times I had picked Jackie up were examined and dissected. It didn’t look good.
Finally there was Carol. We talked several times over the next few days and nothing came of it. She wanted to come over but somehow it didn’t happen. There was a coolness now, a distance between us. I thought I knew how that was going to turn out too.
In the middle of the third day, my phone rang.
“Dr. Janeway, I presume.”
“You got me.”
“Rubio here. That’s quite a beating you took in the papers this morning.”
“You should see the other guy.”
“I did, my friend. His nose looked like one of my legs flopping down between his eyes. But look, I didn’t call just to be sociable. I’ve got three questions for you. Ready?”
“Shoot.”
“Number one. You want to make a fast two bills on that Golding item?”
The book happened to be on the table before me. I looked at it and thought.
Ruby, catching my drift, said, “If you’re gonna deal books, Dr. J, you can’t fall in love with the bastards.”
“Sure,” I said, and my rite of passage began.
“Number two,” Ruby said. “Will you let me make a little money on it?”
“That seems fair.”
“All the right answers so far. Now for the big one. You ready to take the plunge?”
“I might be.”
“I thought you might after I read the papers. A lot of things started coming clear after that.”
“What’ve you got in mind?”
“Tell you when I see you. Meet me at the store in an hour, and bring the book.”
The client was a man in his fifties who had been looking for the Golding for a year. “Pickiest bastard you ever saw,” Ruby said. “He’ll pay top dollar, but it really has to be the world’s nicest copy.” He had seen and rejected half a dozen copies, Ruby said, and was primed for this one. Ruby had warned him that the tariff would be four hundred dollars.
The guy bought it without a whimper. He paid with a check to Seals & Neff and left a happy man.
I felt strangely elated, inexplicably confident. In that moment, every book I had was for sale.
“Mr. Janeway, it looks like you’re a book dealer after all,” Emery Neff said. “All you need now is a place to hang your shingle and the guts to take the leap.”
“Which brings us back to that third question,” Ruby said. “The place on the far corner has been empty about six months. It used to be a Greek restaurant and nobody thinks of it any other way. But man-oh-man, what a great bookstore that’d be. Plenty of room, lots of atmosphere—I’d rent it myself if I had the money and wasn’t tied in here with a five-million-year lease.”
I walked up the street and looked in the window.
It was one of those old places with alcoves and side rooms and high ceilings. The house had been built, I guessed, around 1910: a residence long ago, before Kast Colfax had hardened and become Hustler’s Avenue. When the hustlers had moved in, the place had gone commercial: the porch had been stripped away and bricked up; a storefront had been added and grates put over the windows. The last tenants had not been kind: there was grime on the walls and grit on the floor; the ceiling sagged and the carpet, where it existed, was a nest for all the rats and bugs of east Denver. But if you could see past the dirt to what it could be, none of that mattered.
I copied the number from the sign in the window, went back to Ruby’s and called the man. He wanted $800 a month and a two-year lease: he would maintain the outside and I’d take care of the inside. The place was 2,500 square feet, which included two rooms in the basement. I told him I was interested, and we agreed to meet later in the afternoon and talk some more.
