“I was hoping,” he says, “you might tell me.”
She shrugs and then realizes he probably can’t see her and says, “I’m just a customer. Was a customer. I picked up a camera here yesterday. I haven’t even paid for it yet. I needed to talk to—”
“Derry,” he interrupts.
“Yeah,” she says, “Mr. Derry. About the camera. I need to pay him.”
“I’m afraid,” he says, “I have just the opposite problem. Derry owes me a good deal of money. I was worried something like this might happen.”
He tilts his head back until his face is aimed at the ceiling. It makes her uncomfortable and she says, “This is crazy. He can’t just pack up and disappear overnight. That doesn’t happen.”
He brings his head back down. “It appears that is exactly what has happened.”
“I can’t believe this.”
The man folds his hands together and rests them on the counter. “You are not one of Derry’s regular customers?” he says.
She looks at his face, then looks past him to the front door and it suddenly strikes her how out of place he appears. The old suit and the formal manner. They’re in the Canal Zone, for God’s sake.
“Do you work here?” she asks.
He gives a brief smile and shakes his head. “Forgive me, again. Derry’s departure is no excuse for my rudeness.” He actually bows slightly and says, “I am Luis Quevedo. I am the manager next door. Derry was my neighbor, you see.”
“Sylvia Krafft,” she says and puts out her hand to shake, but he takes it and brings it up to his lips and kisses it.
She gets a little flustered and amused and blurts out, “Next door?” then immediately regrets it. But Mr. Quevedo just smiles and nods, takes a business card from his pocket and extends it toward her. She looks at it and reads
Brody’s Adult Books
purveyors of fine erotica
custom tailored to your individual needs
L. Quevedo, manager
“You manage the place next door?” she says.
“For over twenty years now,” he says. “It was the first job I found after I emigrated. It has supported me well all these years.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to sound so surprised. You just don’t look … I mean, you just didn’t seem—”
“Have you ever visited my store?” he asks.
“No,” she says, biting off a laugh. “No, I don’t believe I’ve ever visited.”
His shoulders sag a bit and he nods and says, “Would you like to visit now?”
“Oh,” she says, caught off guard. “Well, I don’t think so. Thank you for the offer and all. But I should really get going. I should really—”
“It’s very slow in the morning,” he says. “I could make us some tea. We could discuss our mutual problem.”
“Problem?”
“How to find Derry? You still wish to find Derry, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Yes, but—”
“Please, Sylvia, you have nothing to fear from an old man. You can see that, can’t you?”
“It’s not that. I—”
“I could tell you some things that might help you locate him. After twenty years, a man comes to know some things about his neighbor.”
“What things?” she says.
“Come next door,” he says, extending his arm like some elderly groom. “Come now. I will give you a tour of my shop. Aren’t you the least bit curious? I find most people are.”
“What things do you know about Mr. Derry?” she asks.
“Let us have some tea, Sylvia,” he says, gesturing toward the door with his head. “We can relax. I’ll tell you everything.”
She moves around the counter, all set to walk past him and head home. But she surprises herself by stopping at the door and turning back and saying, “After you.”
“Wonderful,” he says and gives a snap of his wrist to assemble his cane. She’s a little startled by the vigor of his movement. He comes up next to her and again extends his arm and not knowing what else to do, she takes it, as if he were some bizarre and long-lost grandfather, and they step out onto the sidewalk.
“The weather people,” Mr. Quevedo says, “they are predicting a particularly cold winter.”
They step over to the adjoining storefront and he pulls a set of keys from his suitcoat pocket. Sylvia watches his hands tremble a bit as he tries to fit the correct key into the slot. Like Jack Derry’s the front of the building is red brick with two inset plate glass windows on either side of the doorway. There’s no neon above the entrance, however, just a handpainted sign, slightly faded, with calligraphied lettering that reads Brody’s Adult Books on what looks like a steel-plated door. The front windows of the shop have some kind of smoked glaze over them that makes it almost impossible to see inside.
“I hate the winter myself,” Mr. Quevedo says, pushing the door open and stepping aside so she can enter. It’s dark inside until he throws a wall switch and the room fills with an old-fashioned kind of yellowish glow from stencilled globe lamps mounted high up on the walls.
“May I take your coat?” he asks, but she shakes him off.
“No thanks,” she says, folding her arms. “I can only stay a few minutes.”
Somewhere in the rear of the store a phone starts to ring.
“That’s unusual,” he says, seemingly to himself. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be back in just a moment.” He disappears down a tall aisle of bookcases and after a second the ringing stops.
The shop is nothing like Sylvia would have expected. She’s never been in one of these places before, but she’s got to imagine Brody’s is the exception and not the rule. If it weren’t for the sign on the door, she’d mistake it for a cozy, secondhand book den, the kind of place you’d stumble upon in one of those semi-sleepy Berkshire towns. The only thing it shares with Derry’s location. She expected a kind of sleazy, shabby dump, sort of a gritty, stale shack with dirty linoleum on the floor and peeling paint and steaming radiators and lines of these hard-up raincoat perverts drooling over crumpled magazines.
Brody’s is as neat as some tony doctor’s office, but a lot warmer. There are beautiful Persian rugs on the floor and the walls are covered with what look like mahogany bookshelves. There are a few prints hanging on an open wall, all framed in antique gilt. She’s struck immediately by the one she recognizes — Jean Fouquet’s Madonna and Child, a painting that’s always bothered her a little, probably due to all those wooden-faced angels surrounding the mother and infant. Today, it’s like some eerie warning sign of coincidence.
There are two brocade-covered settees facing each other and separated by a low, wide, heavy-looking coffee table covered with oversized art books. It’s only when you start to settle in and look closer that the true nature of the shop becomes recognizable. The porcelain figurines displayed here and there on shelves are locked into various stages of lewd behavior. The leather-bound coffee table books sport titles like Beyond the Kama Sutra and A Manual for Extended Ecstasy. Even the coat rack in the corner seems to have a slightly phallic design to it.
She starts to walk toward a glass cabinet with a sign above it that reads First Editions — Please ask the manager for help, when Mr. Quevedo returns to the front of the store. His white cane is gone and he has no difficulty in making his way to the couch.