“It’s hot,” Wally said.
“ ‘It’s hot.’ What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means it’s hot. That’s what it means. It’s hot means it’s hot. Everybody wants it because everybody else wants it, and that means it’s hot.”
“I seen the movie,” Eddie said. “You see it?”
Two of us had, two of us hadn’t.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Basically I’d say it’s a kid’s movie, but it’s okay.”
“So?”
“So how many T-shirts in extra large do you sell to kids? Everybody’s buying this shit, and all you can tell me is it’s hot because it’s hot. I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to,” Wally said. “It’s the same as the niggers. You want to try explaining to them why they can’t sell Batman unless there’s a little copyright notice printed under the design? While you’re at it, you can explain to me why the assholes counterfeiting the crap don’t counterfeit the copyright notice while they’re at it. The thing is, nobody has to do any explaining because nobody has to understand. The only message they have to get on the street is Batman no good, no sell Batman. If they learn that much we’re doing our job right.”
Wally paid for everybody’s lunch. We stopped at the Flatiron Building long enough to empty the trunk and carry everything upstairs, then drove down to the Village and worked the sidewalk market on Sixth Avenue below Eighth Street. We made a few confiscations without incident. Then, near the subway entrance at West Third, we were taking a dozen shirts and about as many visors from a West Indian when another vendor decided to get into the act. He was wearing a dashiki and had his hair in Rastafarian dreadlocks, and he said, “You can’t take the brother’s wares, man. You can’t do that.”
“It’s unlicensed merchandise produced in contravention of international copyright protection,” Wally told him.
“Maybe so,” the man said, “but that don’t empower you to seize it. Where’s your due process? Where’s your authority? You aren’t police.” Poe-lease, he said, bearing down on the first syllable. “You can’t come into a man’s store, seize his wares.”
“Store?” Eddie Rankin moved toward him, his hands hovering at his sides. “You see a store here? All I see’s a lot of fucking shit in the middle of a fucking blanket.”
“This is the man’s store. This is the man’s place of business.”
“And what’s this?” Eddie demanded. He walked over to the right, where the man with the dreadlocks had stick incense displayed for sale on a pair of upended orange crates. “This your store?”
“That’s right. It’s my store.”
“You know what it looks like to me? It looks like you’re selling drug paraphernalia. That’s what it looks like.”
“It’s incense,” the Rasta said. “For bad smells.”
“Bad smells,” Eddie said. One of the sticks of incense was smoldering, and Eddie picked it up and sniffed at it. “Whew,” he said. “That’s a bad smell, I’ll give you that. Smells like the catbox caught on fire.”
The Rasta snatched the incense from him. “It’s a good smell,” he said. “Smells like your mama.”
Eddie smiled at him, his red lips parting to show stained teeth. He looked happy, and very dangerous. “Say I kick your store into the middle of the street,” he said, “and you with it. How’s that sound to you?”
Smoothly, easily, Wally Witt moved between them. “Eddie,” he said softly, and Eddie backed off and let the smile fade on his lips. To the incense seller Wally said, “Look, you and I got no quarrel with each other. I got a job to do and you got your own business to run.”
“The brother here’s got a business to run, too.”
“Well, he’s gonna have to run it without Batman, because that’s how the law reads. But if you want to be Batman, playing the dozens with my man here and pushing into what doesn’t concern you, then I got no choice. You follow me?”
“All I’m saying, I’m saying you want to confiscate the man’s merchandise, you need you a policeman and a court order, something to make it official.”
“Fine,” Wally said. “You’re saying it and I hear you saying it, but what I’m saying is all I need to do it is to do it, official or not. Now if you want to get a cop to stop me, fine, go ahead and do it, but as soon as you do I’m going to press charges for selling drug paraphernalia and operating without a peddler’s license—”
“This here ain’t drug paraphernalia, man. We both know that.”
“We both know you’re just trying to be a hard-on, and we both know what it’ll get you. That what you want?”
The incense seller stood there for a moment, then dropped his eyes. “Don’t matter what I want,” he said.
“Well, you got that right,” Wally told him. “It don’t matter what you want.”
We tossed the shirts and visors into the trunk and got out of there. On the way over to Astor Place Eddie said, “You didn’t have to jump in there. I wasn’t about to lose it.”
“Never said you were.”
“That mama stuff doesn’t bother me. It’s just nigger talk, they all talk that shit.”
“I know.”
“They’d talk about their fathers, but they don’t know who the fuck they are, so they’re stuck with their mothers. Bad smells, I shoulda stuck that shit up his ass, get right where the bad smells are. I hate a guy sticks his nose in like that.”
“Your basic sidewalk lawyer.”
“Basic asshole’s what he is. Maybe I’ll go back, talk with him later.”
“On your own time.”
“On my own time is right.”
Astor Place hosts a more freewheeling street market, with a lot of Bowery types offering a mix of salvaged trash and stolen goods. There was something especially curious about our role, as we passed over hot radios and typewriters and jewelry and sought only merchandise that had been legitimately purchased, albeit from illegitimate manufacturers. We didn’t find much Batman ware on display, although a lot of people, buyers and sellers alike, were wearing the Caped Crusader. We weren’t about to strip the shirt off anybody’s person, nor did we look too hard for contraband merchandise; the place was teeming with crackheads and crazies, and it was no time to push our luck.
“Let’s get out of here,” Wally said. “I hate to leave the car in this neighborhood. We already gave the client his money’s worth.”
By four we were back in Wally’s office and his desk was heaped high with the fruits of our labors. “Look at all this shit,” he said. “Today’s trash and tomorrow’s treasures. Twenty years and they’ll be auctioning this crap at Christie’s. Not this particular crap, because I’ll messenger it over to the client and he’ll chuck it in the incinerator. Gentlemen, you did a good day’s work.” He took out his wallet and gave each of the four of us a hundred-dollar bill. He said, “Same time tomorrow? Except I think we’ll make lunch Chinese tomorrow. Eddie, don’t forget your purse.”
“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 this. 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 n
ot 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 desk top calculator. “That’s $24.44 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 hot plates. 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 T-shirt, and we got what, thirty or forty of them? Add in the sweatshirts, the rest of the shit, I bet it comes to 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 lunchtime.”
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?”
“I think so, but I don’t think it was cocaine.”
“No, it was opium. It was some years ago, they bought the entire Turkish opium crop because it was supposed to be the cheapest way to keep it out of the country. Bought it and burned it, and that, boys and girls, that was the end of heroin addiction in America.”
“Worked like a charm, didn’t it?”
“Nothing works,” he said. “First principle of modern law enforcement. Nothing ever works. Funny thing is, in this case the client’s not getting a bad deal. You own a copyright or a trademark, you got to defend it. Otherwise you risk losing it. You got to be able to say on such-and-such a date you paid so many dollars to defend your interests, and investigators acting as your agents confiscated so many items from so many merchants. And it’s worth what you budget for it. Believe me, these big companies, they wouldn’t spend the money year in and year out if they didn’t figure it was worth it.”
“I believe it,” I said. “Anyway, I wouldn’t lose a whole lot of sleep over the client getting screwed a little.”
“You just don’t like the work.”
“I’m afraid not.”
He shrugged. “I don’t blame you. It’s chickenshit. But Jesus, Matt, most P.I. work is chickenshit. Was it that different in the department? Or on any police force? Most of what we did was chickenshit.”
“And paperwork.”
“And paperwork, you’re absolutely right. Do some chickenshit and then write it up. And make
copies.”
“I can put up with a certain amount of chickenshit,” I said. “But I honestly don’t have the heart for what we did today. I felt like a bully.”
“Listen, I’d rather be kicking in doors, taking down bad guys. That what you want?”
“Not really.”
“Be Batman, tooling around Gotham City, righting wrongs. Do the whole thing not even carrying a gun. You know what they didn’t have in the movie?”
“I haven’t seen it yet.”
“Robin, they didn’t have Robin. Robin the Boy Wonder. He’s not in the comic book anymore, either. Somebody told me they took a poll, had their readers call a nine-hundred number and vote, should they keep Robin or should they kill him. Like in ancient Rome, those fights, what do you call them?”
“Gladiators.”
“Right. Thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and Robin got thumbs-down, so they killed him. Can you believe that?”
“I can believe anything.”
“Yeah, you and me both. I always thought they were fags.” I looked at him. “Batman and Robin, I mean. His ward, for Christ’s sake. Playing dress-up, flying around, costumes, I figured it’s gotta be some kind of fag S-and-M thing. Isn’t that what you figured?”
“I never thought about it.”
“Well, I never stayed up nights over it myself, but what else would it be? Anyway, he’s dead now, Robin is. Died of AIDS, I suppose, but the family’s denying it, like What’shisname. You know who I mean.”
I didn’t, but I nodded.
“You gotta make a living, you know. Gotta turn a buck, whether it’s hassling Africans or squatting out there on a blanket your own self, selling tapes and scarves. Fi’ dollah, ten dollah.” He looked at me. “No good, huh?”
“I don’t think so, Wally.”
“Don’t want to be one of Batman’s helpers. Well, you can’t do what you can’t do. What the fuck do I know about it, anyway? You don’t drink. I don’t have a problem with it, myself. But if I couldn’t put my feet up at the end of the day, have a few pops, who knows? Maybe I couldn’t do it either. Matt, you’re a good man. If you change your mind—”
Enough Rope Page 106