Chapter 2: Things Left in Mailboxes
The mailbox thing starts by accident.
You mean to slide the book under his door. That's the whole plan: a thank-you for the boiler, low stakes, no eye contact. But on Monday morning you get as far as the fourth-floor landing and hear him moving around inside 4B, the floorboards creaking under somebody who weighs as much as he does, and you lose your nerve so completely that you go all the way back down and shove the book into his mailbox instead. It barely fits. You have to angle it.
It's a used paperback of The Count of Monte Cristo, the unabridged one, twelve hundred pages with a cracked spine and someone else's coffee ring on the cover. You chose it because it's long and he seems to have a lot of nights free, at least some of the time. You do not choose it for any other reason. You spend a while that afternoon thinking about whether a man who comes home bleeding twice a week might read a book about a wronged man coming back from the dead to take elaborate revenge on everyone who betrayed him and find it, somehow, pointed.
It's too late by then. The book's gone from the mailbox.
On Tuesday, your mailbox has something in it.
A bag of clementines. Eight of them, the good kind with the leaves still on. No note.
On Wednesday, it's a small brass bracket and four screws in a sandwich bag, with a slip of paper: YOUR THIRD STEP SQUEAKS. FIXED IT. THIS IS FOR THE SHELF IN POETRY, IT'S GOING TO GO NEXT.
You go and look at the shelf in poetry. He's right. It's leaning about four degrees off true, and you've been walking past it for a year.
On Thursday, the box of bandages by the mailboxes is empty again, so you refill it and add a bottle of ibuprofen and a roll of actual medical tape, the soft kind, and a sticky note that says: Electrical tape is for wires.
On Friday, the tape is gone and the sticky note has been turned over. On the back, in blocky capitals: WIRES DON'T COMPLAIN.
You laugh so hard in the lobby that Mrs. Ocampo opens her door to see who's dying.
It goes on like that for a week and then two. You leave a thermos of soup on a night you hear him limp. He leaves your kitchen faucet not dripping, which means he's been in your apartment, which means at some point he picked your lock, and you lie in bed thinking about how you feel about that and land, embarrassingly, on mostly fine. He catches you on the stairs once and says, "Hey," and you say, "Hey," and you both stand there for slightly too long, and then Mr. Okafor comes out of 3A with his recycling and asks if you've heard about the warehouse fires.
Plural, now. Three of them since the first, all down by the river, all owned by companies inside companies. No one hurt. A red helmet seen, every time.
"Gotham," Mr. Okafor says, with deep satisfaction, the way some people say amen. He goes down the stairs. Jason watches him go and doesn't say anything at all.
At the end of the second week, The Count of Monte Cristo comes back.
It's in your mailbox on a Sunday morning, wrapped in a brown paper bag from the bodega on the corner, and when you open it on the counter downstairs a dozen strips of torn receipt paper fall out of it like confetti. He's marked pages.
You sit down on the stool behind the register and you read the whole thing. Not the book. Him.
He writes in the margins in pencil, the same blocky capitals, small and hard pressed. Next to the scene where Edmond Dantès is thrown into the Château d'If, he's written: ROUGH. Next to the Abbé Faria teaching Edmond languages and science through a tunnel in the walls: BEST PART. EVERYBODY NEEDS AN OLD GUY WHO KNOWS STUFF. Next to Mercédès, the fiancée who married Edmond's enemy after they told her Edmond was dead: SHE DIDN'T KNOW. NOBODY TELLS THEM ANYTHING. CUT HER SOME SLACK, ED.
Around page four hundred he's started arguing with the author. Around page seven hundred he's started arguing with you, which you only realize when you find a note next to one of Edmond's long, cold revenge speeches that just says: YOU PICKED THIS ON PURPOSE.
And underneath it, in smaller letters, like he came back to it later: IT'S OK. I LIKE IT.
On the last page, under the final line of the novel, the famous one, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, Wait and Hope, he's underlined Wait and Hope twice, and in the bottom margin he's written:
GOOD BOOK. GIVE ME ANOTHER ONE. —J
You sit there behind your register on a Sunday morning with the gray light coming in through the window and twelve hundred pages of a stranger's handwriting in your lap, and you understand that you are in a great deal of trouble.
On Wednesday night, somebody throws a brick through the shop window.
You're upstairs. You hear it go, a sound like a bag of ice dropped from a height, and by the time you've gotten your boots on and grabbed the baseball bat that lives behind the front door, Jason is already in the shop. He's in a T-shirt and sweatpants and bare feet, standing in the glass like it's carpet, holding the brick.
There's a piece of paper rubber-banded to it. He's already read it. He hands it to you without a word.
It says, in printed letters: VALUE ADD.
"Okay," you say, very calmly. "Okay. That's cute. That's a cute little pun."
"Go back upstairs."
"It's my window."
"There's glass everywhere."
"You're standing in it with no shoes on."
He looks down at his feet like he's only just noticed. There's a small cut on one of them, already bleeding a little onto your floor. Of course there is.
"I've got thick feet," he says.
"That's not a real thing."
"Go upstairs," he says again, and his voice goes low and flat and absolutely certain, and for a second he doesn't sound like the man who leaves clementines in your mailbox at all. He sounds like somebody you'd step back from in an alley. You don't step back. You stand there in your grandmother's coat with a baseball bat over your shoulder and look at him, and after a long moment the flatness goes out of his face and he just looks tired.
"Please," he says.
You go upstairs. You don't sleep. At three, through the floor, you hear the sound of a drill.
In the morning there's plywood over the shop window, cut exactly to size and screwed in flush. Somebody has painted it gray to match the brick. On the plywood, in very neat white letters, it says: HOLLIS BOOKS. STILL OPEN. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Customers love it. You sell more that Thursday than you have in a month.
On Friday, he cooks for you.
His stove's out, which you know because you're the landlord and he told you about it a week ago and you haven't fixed it, which means he cooks in your kitchen. You don't remember inviting him. He arrives at seven with two grocery bags and a cast-iron pan he must own personally, because it's seasoned black as a skillet in a cowboy movie, and he moves around your tiny kitchen like he's worked a line.
"Where'd you learn to do that?"
"Old guy who knows stuff." He tips garlic into the pan off the flat of a knife. "He'd say a man who can't feed himself is at the mercy of whoever can."
"Alfred," you say. "Your emergency contact."
The knife stops for half a beat. Then it goes on chopping.
"Yeah," he says. "Alfred."
You eat on the roof. It's March now, technically, the first night it hasn't been unbearable, and the tar paper is still holding a little of the day's sun. You sit on the low parapet wall with your plates on your knees and look out at Gotham doing its usual Friday night thing: sirens far off over in the Narrows, the gold-lit towers of the Diamond District, the elevated train shrieking around the bend at Robinson Park. Somewhere over Old Gotham, faint against the low clouds, the Bat-signal is on.
You watch him look at it. His face does something complicated and then nothing at all.
"Not a fan?" you say.
"Of a light?"
"Of what it's for."
He takes a long time with the question. "I grew up six blocks from here," he says finally. "Park Row. The bad part, back when that was all of it. Nobody ever turned on a light for us." He shrugs. "It's a nice light. It's just usually pointed at the wrong part of town."
You think about that. You think about a man who comes home bleeding twice a week, and warehouses burning down by the river, owned by companies inside of companies, and a red helmet walking away unhurried.
You don't ask.
Instead you tell him about Ilse. How she bought the building in 1971 with money she'd saved cleaning offices on the night shift in the Wayne Tower, back when it was still the old Wayne Tower. How she ran the bookshop with your grandfather until he died and then alone, and how when the Falcones' men came around in the eighties to tell her that her block needed protection, she told them she had protection, and pointed at the baseball bat behind the front door. The same bat.
"Did it work?" he asks.
"They took the bat off her and broke her shop window," you say. "She bought another bat. She never paid them a cent. I'm not selling this building to a man whose business card doesn't have a name on it, Jason."
He turns to look at you. The lights from the Diamond District are behind him, so you can't see his eyes, just the white streak in his hair and the line of his jaw.
"They're going to come back," he says. "It's not going to be a brick next time."
"Then I'll buy another bat."
He laughs, the rough short laugh, and shakes his head, and looks away over the city again. And then, very quietly, so quietly you almost don't hear it over the train, he says: "God, you're something."
You both sit there and pretend he didn't say it. It's the best part of the night.
You close up late on Saturday. Inventory. It's just after eleven, the grille still up and the plywood window giving the place the feel of a submarine, when the bell over the door rings.
"We're closed," you call from the back. "Unless you're here about the Christie box, in which case it's been through enough."
Nobody answers.
You come out from between the shelves with a stack of paperbacks in your arms and stop.
There are three men in your shop. They're dressed like anybody, jeans and work jackets, except that every one of them is wearing a mask. Not ski masks. Carved masks, pale and smooth and smiling, the kind that hang in the window of the costume shop on Sixth around Halloween, except these don't look like costumes. They look like faces somebody chose on purpose. They look like they've been worn a long time.
The one in front has a crowbar.
"Evening," he says. His voice comes out muffled and pleasant. "We're here about the value-add."
You set the books down very carefully on the counter. The bat is upstairs, behind the front door, where it does you no good at all.
"I've already given my answer."
"Mr. Sionis heard your answer," says the man with the crowbar. "He'd like you to hear his."
Then every light in the shop goes out at once.
In the sudden black, someone grunts. Something heavy hits the floor. And from the doorway, from the place where the bell is still faintly shivering on its hook, comes a voice, a deep, distorted, electronic voice, like a man talking through a radio at the bottom of a well.
"Store's closed, fellas."
The streetlight outside catches the shape in the door as it steps in, and for one second you see it clearly: a man in a leather jacket, broad through the shoulders, in a smooth red helmet with no face at all.
You know that jacket. You've seen it folded on top of your water heater.