“I’m gonna be straight with you, man.” My throat nearly
choked me, but I forced the words out. “These books, one of them has got to be
bugged.”
I checked back over my shoulder, a quick, unintentional
flinch. No reason to do it down here. There had to be half a mile of concrete
and steel between this sewer pipe and the surface. No bug could transmit
through that. We were safe, for the moment.
The buyer’s scraggly gray eyebrows went up, slow, sarcastic,
unconcerned. “How do you know?”
“They keep chasing me,” I said. “They find me, whenever I go
to the surface.”
“And you keep getting away?” there’s some respect in his
voice.
I expect him to close the ragged backpack full of old books
and hand it back to me, but instead he slips something from the pocket of his
tattered suit coat. A small, flat rectangle, an old-fashioned cell phone.
My breathing quickens. “You’ve got a scanner?”
He gives me a look that asks me if I really think he’s an
idiot. Then he juts out his chin and takes out a book.
Water trickles by at the bottom of the pipe. The dim
electric lantern at our feet splashes strange, upside-down shadows on his face.
The worn plastic covering on the book glints in the light. This one had once
lived in a library. Alice
“This one’s clean,” he sets it aside on the tunnel floor,
careful to keep it out of the stream of water, leaned up against the curve of
the wall.
Another book comes out, and another. Jane Eyre, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Grapes of Wrath, Harry
Potter. “You like the classics, do you?” he asks.
“More valuable,” I shrug, not wanting to admit how much the
books draw me. That I’m not just a mercenary, trading in black market goods,
but I have a passion that drives me to preserve these ancient words. There’s a
power in them that goes beyond anything I know.
A heavy volume comes out, The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
“That one’s not for sale,” I said, just as the cell phone
screen flashes red.
“I wouldn’t buy this one from you anyway,” the man said, his
voice a grim joke. “Better burn it, right here.” He pulls a lighter from his
pocket.
I stare at the stained cardboard cover, a faded portrait of
the bard stares back at me, his eyes boring into mine.
