In an undertone Wally said, “Here we go. These three were here yesterday. Matt, why don’t you and Lee check down the block, make sure those two down at the corner don’t have what we’re looking for. Then double back and we’ll take these dudes off. Meanwhile I’ll let the man sell me a shirt.”
Lee and I walked down to the corner. The two vendors in question were selling books. We established this and headed back. “Real police work,” I said.
“Be grateful we don’t have to fill out a report, list the titles of the books.”
“The alleged books.”
When we rejoined the others Wally was holding an oversize tee-shirt to his chest, modeling it for us. “What do you say?” he demanded. “Is it me? Do you think it’s me?”
“I think it’s the Joker,” Jimmy diSalvo said.
“That’s what I think,” Wally said. He looked at the two Africans, who were smiling uncertainly. “I think it’s a violation, is what I think. I think we got to confiscate all the Batman stuff. It’s unauthorized, it’s an illegal violation of copyright protection, it’s unlicensed, and we got to take it in.”
The two vendors had stopped smiling, but they didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of what was going on. Off to the side, the third man, the fellow with the scarves and purses, was looking wary.
“You speak English?” Wally asked them.
“They speak numbers,” Jimmy said. “ ‘Fi’ dollah, ten dollah, please, t’ank you.’ That’s what they speak.”
“Where you from?” Wally demanded. “Senegal, right? Dakar. You from Dakar?”
They nodded, brightening at words they recognized. “Dakar,” one of them echoed. Both of them were wearing western clothes, but they looked faintly foreign — loose-fitting long-sleeved shirts with long pointed collars and a glossy finish, baggy pleated pants. Loafers with leather mesh tops.
“What do you speak?” Wally asked. “You speak French? Parley-voo français?” The one who’d spoken before replied now in a torrent of French; Wally backed away from him and shook his head. “I don’t know why the hell I asked,” he said. “Parley-voo’s all I know of the fucking language.” To the Africans he said, “Police. You parley-voo that? Police. Pólicia. You capeesh?” He opened his wallet and showed them some sort of badge. “No sell Batman,” he said, waving one of the shirts at them. “Batman no good. It’s unauthorized, it’s not made under a licensing agreement, and you can’t sell it.”
“No Batman,” one of them said.
“Jesus, don’t tell me I’m getting through to them. Right, no Batman. No, put your money away, I can’t take a bribe, I’m not with the Department no more. All I want’s the Batman stuff. You can keep the rest.”
All but a handful of their tee-shirts were unauthorized Batman items. The rest showed Walt Disney characters, almost certainly as unauthorized as the Batman merchandise, but Disney wasn’t Reliable’s client today so it was none of our concern. While we loaded up with Batman and the Joker, Eddie Rankin looked through the cassettes, then pawed through the silk scarves the third vendor had on display. He let the man keep the scarves, but he took a purse, snakeskin by the look of it. “No good,” he told the man, who nodded, expressionless.
We trooped back to the Fleetwood and Wally popped the trunk. We deposited the confiscated tees between the spare tire and some loose fishing tackle. “Don’t worry if the shit gets dirty,” Wally said. “It’s all gonna be destroyed anyway. Eddie, you start carrying a purse, people are gonna say things.”
“Woman I know,” he said. “She’ll like this.” He wrapped the purse in a Batman tee-shirt and placed it in the trunk.
“Okay,” Wally said. “That went real smooth. What we’ll do now, Lee, you and Matt take the east side of Fifth, and the rest of us’ll stay on this side and we’ll work our way down to Forty-second. I don’t know if we’ll get much, because even if they can’t speak English they can sure get the word around fast, but we’ll make sure there’s no unlicensed Batcrap on the Avenue before we move on. We’ll maintain eye contact back and forth across the street, and if you hit anything give the high sign and we’ll converge and take ’em down. Everybody got it?”
Everybody seemed to. We left the car with its trunkful of contraband and returned to Fifth Avenue. The two tee-shirt vendors from Dakar had packed up and disappeared; they’d have to find something else to sell and someplace else to sell it. The man with the scarves and purses was still doing business. He froze when he caught sight of us.
“No Batman,” Wally told him.
“No Batman,” he echoed.
“I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” Wally said. “The guy’s learning English.”
Lee and I crossed the street and worked our way downtown. There were vendors all over the place, offering clothing and tapes and small appliances and books and fast food. Most of them didn’t have the peddler’s license the law required, and periodically the city would sweep the streets, especially the main commercial avenues, rounding them up and fining them and confiscating their stock. Then after a week or so the cops would stop trying to enforce a basically unenforceable law, and the peddlers would be back in business again.
It was an apparently endless cycle, but the booksellers were exempt from it. The courts had decided that the First Amendment embodied in its protection of freedom of the press the right of anyone to sell printed matter on the street, so if you had books for sale you never got hassled. As a result, a lot of scholarly antiquarian booksellers offered their wares on the city streets. So did any number of illiterates hawking remaindered art books and stolen bestsellers, along with homeless street people who rescued old magazines from people’s garbage cans and spread them out on the pavement, living in hope that someone would want to buy them.
In front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral we found a Pakistani with tee-shirts and sweatshirts. I asked him if he had any Batman merchandise and he went right through the piles himself and pulled out half a dozen items. We didn’t bother signaling the Cavalry across the street. Lee just showed the man a badge — Special Officer, it said — and I explained that we had to confiscate Batman items.
“He is the big seller, Batman,” the man said. “I get Batman, I sell him fast as I can.”
“Well, you better not sell him anymore,” I said, “because it’s against the law.”
“Excuse, please,” he said. “What is law? Why is Batman against law? Is my understanding Batman is for law. He is good guy, is it not so?”
I explained about copyright and trademarks and licensing agreements. It was a little like explaining the internal combustion engine to a field mouse. He kept nodding his head, but I don’t know how much of it he got. He understood the main point — that we were walking off with his stock and he was stuck for whatever it cost him. He didn’t like that part, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.
Lee tucked the shirts under his arm and we kept going. At Forty-seventh Street we crossed over in response to a signal from Wally. They’d found another pair of Senegalese with a big spread of Batman items — tees and sweatshirts and gimme caps and sun visors, some a direct knockoff of the copyrighted Bat signal, others a variation on the theme, but none of it authorized and all of it subject to confiscation. The two men — they looked like brothers and were dressed identically in baggy beige trousers and sky-blue nylon shirts — couldn’t understand what was wrong with their merchandise and couldn’t believe we intended to haul it all away with us. But there were five of us, and we were large intimidating white men with an authoritarian manner, and what could they do about it?