“Don’t worry.”
“Thing is, you don’t want to carry it if you go back to see your Rastafarian friend. He might get the wrong idea.”
“Fuck him,” Eddie said. “I got no time for him. He wants that incense up his ass, he’s gonna have to stick it there himself.”
Lee and Jimmy and Eddie went out, laughing, joking, slapping backs. I started out after them, then doubled back and asked Wally if he had a minute.
“Sure,” he said. “Jesus, I don’t believe that. Look.”
“It’s a Batman shirt.”
“No shit, Sherlock. And look what’s printed right under the Bat signal.”
“The copyright notice.”
“Right, which makes it a legal shirt. We got any more of these? No, no, no, no. Wait a minute, here’s one. Here’s another. Jesus, this is amazing. There any more? I don’t see any others, do you?”
We went through the pile without finding more of the shirts with the copyright notice.
“Three,” he said. “Well, that’s not so bad. A mere fraction.” He balled up the three shirts, dropped them back on the pile. “You want one of these? It’s legit; you can wear it without fear of confiscation.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You got kids? Take something home for your kids.”
“One’s in college and the other’s in the service. I don’t think they’d be interested.”
“Probably not.” He stepped out from behind his desk. “Well, it went all right out there, don’t you think? We had a good crew, worked well together.”
“I guess.”
“What’s the matter, Matt?”
“Nothing, really. But I don’t think I can make it tomorrow.”
“No? Why’s that?”
“Well, for openers, I’ve got a dentist appointment.”
“Oh yeah? What time?”
“Nine-fifteen.”
“So how long can that take? Half an hour, an hour tops? Meet us here ten-thirty, that’s good enough. The client doesn’t have to know what time we hit the street.”
“It’s not just the dentist appointment, Wally.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t think I want to do this stuff anymore.”
“What stuff? Copyright and trademark protection?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the matter? It’s beneath you? Doesn’t make full use of your talents as a detective?”
“It’s not that.”
“Because it’s not a bad deal for the money, seems to me. Hundred bucks for a short day, ten to four, hour and a half off for lunch with the lunch all paid for. You’re a cheap lunch date — you don’t drink — but even so. Call it a ten-dollar lunch, that’s a hundred and ten dollars for what, four and a half hours’ work?” He punched numbers on a desktop calculator. “That’s twenty-four forty-four an hour. That’s not bad wages. You want to take home better than that, you need either burglar’s tools or a law degree, seems to me.”
“The money’s fine, Wally.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
I shook my head. “I just haven’t got the heart for it,” I said. “Hassling people who don’t even speak the language, taking their goods from them because we’re stronger than they are and there’s nothing they can do about it.”
“They can quit selling contraband, that’s what they can do.”
“How? They don’t even know what’s contraband.”
“Well, that’s where we come in. We’re giving them an education. How they gonna learn if nobody teaches ’em?”
I’d loosened my tie earlier. Now I took it off, folded it, put it in my pocket.
He said, “Company owns a copyright, they got a right to control who uses it. Somebody else enters into a licensing agreement, pays money for the right to produce a particular item, they got a right to the exclusivity they paid for.”
“I don’t have a problem with that.”
“So?”
“They don’t even speak, the language,” I said.
He stood up straight. “Then who told ’em to come here?” he wanted to know. “Who fucking invited them? You can’t walk a block in midtown without tripping over another super salesman from Senegal. They swarm off that Air Afrique flight from Dakar, and first thing you know they got an open-air store on world-famous Fifth Avenue. They don’t pay rent, they don’t pay taxes, they just spread a blanket on the concrete and rake in the dollars.”
“They didn’t look as though they were getting rich.”
“They must do all right. Pay two bucks for a scarf and sell it for ten, they must come out okay. They stay at hotels like the Bryant, pack together like sardines, six or eight to the room. Sleep in shifts, cook their food on hotplates. Two, three months of that and it’s back to fucking Dakar. They drop off the money, take a few minutes to get another baby started, then they’re winging back to JFK to start all over again. You think we need that? Haven’t we got enough spades of our own can’t make a living, we got to fly in more of them?”
I sifted through the pile on his desk, picked up a sun visor with the Joker depicted on it. I wondered why anybody would want something like that. I said, “What do you figure it adds up to, the stuff we confiscated? A couple of hundred?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Figure ten for a tee-shirt, and we got what, thirty or forty of them? Add in the sweatshirts, the rest of the shit, I bet it comes close to a grand. Why?”
“I was just thinking. You paid us a hundred a man, plus whatever lunch came to.”
“Eighty with the tip. What’s the point?”
“You must have billed us to the client at what, fifty dollars an hour?”
“I haven’t billed anything to anybody yet — I just walked in the door — but yes, that’s the rate.”
“How will you figure it, four men at eight hours a man?”
“Seven hours. We don’t bill for lunch time.”
Seven hours seemed ample, considering that we’d worked four and a half. I said, “Seven times fifty times four of us is what? Fourteen hundred dollars? Plus your own time, of course, and you must bill yourself at more than regular operative’s rates. A hundred an hour?”
“Seventy-five.”
“For seven hours is what, five hundred?”
“Five and a quarter,” he said evenly.
“Plus fourteen hundred is nineteen and a quarter. Call it two thousand dollars to the client. Is that about right?”
“What are you saying, Matt? The client pays too much or you’re not getting a big enough piece of the pie?”
“Neither. But if he wants to load up on this garbage” — I waved a hand at the heap on the desk — “wouldn’t he be better off buying retail? Get a lot more bang for the buck, wouldn’t he?”
He just stared at me for a long moment. Then abruptly, his hard face cracked and he started to laugh. I was laughing, too, and it took all the tension out of the air. “Jesus, you’re right,” he said. “Guy’s paying way too much.”
“I mean, if you wanted to handle it for him, you wouldn’t need to hire me and the other guys.”
“I could just go around and pay cash.”
“Right.”
“I could even pass up the street guys altogether, go straight to the wholesaler.”
“Save a dollar that way.”
“I love it,” he said. “You know what it sounds like? Sounds like something the federal government would do, get cocaine off the streets by buying it straight from the Colombians. Wait a minute, didn’t they actually do something like that once?”