21st Century Bogatyr: November 2020

"On average we live pretty well. Worse than last year, but definitely better than next year."

Russian proverb

This is the fifteenth part of a work of fiction in progress. Links to the rest can be found at the bottom of this page.

by Zvi Baranoff

As far as age is concerned, Frank was a clear outlier. As the "boys" entered the apartment, the aged aspects of this particular branch of this conspiratorial cabal could hardly be ignored.

They wheezed and groaned. They walked slowly, some with canes or walkers. A couple had brought assistants to lean on. What little hair they had between them was grey. They all wore thick glasses. As old as Bob and I were on that day, all the "boys" were older.

Each of these fellows had a long history in the book business, but likely a fairly short future in the biz. Some of them were involved way back when books were still legal. They each understand the trade inside and out. They each had their own network of "clients" and, even if their aging eyes were bordering on blindness, they still had an inner eye and intuitive feel for what would turn a buck.

The old men, as tired and as creaky and as cranky as they may have been when they came through the door, each perked up a bit as they began to move about the merchandise. They picked up books and brought them close to their eyes for examination. They ran their fingers up and down the spines. They checked for printing dates and publishing information. Methodically, they each piled up the books that they would be willing to cut loose hard currencies to acquire.

The evening dragged on. The dealers consolidated their piles. Payments were made in various contraband currencies and with the exertion of way too much mathematics.

We had made significant progress, but we still had quite a bit of product left over. Buyers were needed for the rest of this lot, and the best of it had already been sold. I had to put the best face on this situation, although I was silently cursing out Marcel for dumping this load of shit on me.

As the last of those ancient ones shuffled out, Frank handed me an opened book, James Joyce's The Dubliners. Before I even looked down at the page, I sensed and perceived what Frank had seen. Perhaps Joyce had envisioned in some sort of time warping way the last couple of hours we had transpired in Bob's apartment, in the shadow of West Philly's Great Mosque.

The words jumped from the page. "One by one they were all becoming shades. Better to pass boldly into the other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."

I shook my head and handed that book back to the young man. I don't know. Probably best to take it all as it is, including old age and aches and pains and all the shadows and the shades. I don't know. I don't know. I just don't know.

Frank was the last to exit and he had only bought a few books for cash. That, however, was what I had expected. He assured me that he would get back with me in the morning to work on Phase Two, which is exactly what I hoped.

Bob and I gave the mess a final look. We each grimaced and shook or scratched our heads as was our individual nature. We then each trailed to opposite ends of that apartment for the night.

I didn't waste much time counting sheep. It had been a long day that had stretched into a long night of a particularly long trip. What doesn't kill you just makes you very, very tired, I suppose. I slept like the dead.

I was awake fairly early and Frank showed up while the coffee was still hot but before I had quite got my head around the idea of breakfast.

I pulled together some huevos reminiscent of rancheros or something like that. Tortillas are about as close as I could get to injera or pizza or pita or something relating to Frank's heritage. Nonetheless, we each recognized what I pulled together as food - and not bad, at that - and I was glad to eat breakfast with this intelligent young man.

We dumped our dishes into the sink, adding them to the preexisting mess. A few cockroaches scattered out of the way.

We selected a few books as samples, stashing them in a shoulder bag. Frank took a couple of pictures of the piles and stacks. We headed out together into those West Philly streets, to see what we could do with the hand we were dealt.

We crossed West Philly by walking some, we took the sliding sidewalks a bit and rode on one of the city's electric trams part of the way as well. We crossed through a park and down some alleyways and back on the sliding sidewalks. Frank had an associate that he thought could help us with the project so I let Frank lead the way through these still familiar neighborhoods.

Along the way, Frank would greet people, shifting language or dialect to fit the need most seamlessly. Of course, Italian, Eritrean, Spanglish and English were the dominant languages, but Frank was as comfortable in African Pidgin and the heavily Portuguese-influenced Papiamentu and was more than passable in Korean as well. Impressive. Possibly useful. Certainly interesting and entertaining.

The chitchat and glad-handing and schmoozing along the way somewhat distracted me from my inner brooding.

The old neighborhood, as much as it had altered over the years, brought on a flood of memories. Here I was again running through familiar patterns of being trapped in a maze and wondering how to break the pattern and being in the old neighborhood with this uncomfortable sense of déjà vu got me thinking about being blocked in or locked out and all that thinking about how to get out of this mess reminded me of my old friend, Spider.

Spider was a second story man. He climbed in and out of windows and knew more about locks than anyone alive. He always knew how to get in and then out again.

He had a very long streak of luck before he caught a bullet in his leg one night. No one - except perhaps Spider - could say if the shooter was a jealous husband or an enraged property owner.

Spider made it back to his Mom's house. She greeted him with wailing and crying. She cursed and she prayed. His cousin removed the bullet and his sister bandaged the wound. His mother screamed and hit him with her shoe between crying and calling out to Jesus to save her baby. The rest of the family looked on with varying degrees of interest and concern. No one considered taking him to the ER, which would have brought the police into the mix. This was a family matter.

It all must have been cathartic for Spider. The limp and the cane certainly were a discouragement to climbing up and down the sides of buildings, but something more fundamental had been altered. Spider lost his interest in thievery, began to speak of his personal relationship with Jesus, and he started selling pot. Spider went through a metamorphosis that was profound. He had been somewhat notorious at his old trade but in the underground weed market he developed a shining reputation for honesty and responsibility. This was around the time that I met the man.

So, while Spider had given up a career steeped in moral relativism, he never lost the skills or knowledge that he had gained during that phase of his work life. If locked out of the house or the car keys were inside the locked car, resolving such problems was just child's play for Spider.

Spider had a knack for reverse engineering, so he could take apart and put together anything. He could fix gadgets, open safes, untangle knots.

One time, one of my drivers thought that it would be a good idea to hide cash in the air filter of a pickup truck. This was back in the days of gas-burning internal combustion engines. Needless to say, all the cash was sucked into the engine. Spider took the sucker apart, recovered all the cash and put it all back together, without tripping up and voiding the truck's warranty.

Many people will call upon their Patron Saints to help them out of a tight squeeze. Whenever I find myself in a situation that requires bypassing locks to get in or get out, I would ask myself "What Would Spider Do?" and try to channel the depth and wisdom of that most unlikely of Patron Saints.

As we moved across West Philly I couldn't help but wonder how Spider would get himself out of the mess I had gotten myself into. Spider, however, was never much of a reader so he probably never would have gotten himself into the deep shit that I found myself in at that moment. I hadn't seen him in a forever plus a few years more but I often wondered about him and this was his old hood, for sure.

These were my musings while Frank led the way to the rendezvous. So, I was a bit distracted when Frank tapped my shoulder and indicated that we had arrived at our destination.

From the outside, the place was non descriptive. It looked pretty much like all of the other dwellings on that block which was made up of row houses with steps up to very similar doors. This one was roughly in the middle of a block in the middle of a part of town and blended with obscurity. It was, indeed, an ideal criminal hideout. Frank rang the doorbell.

At the door, there was an exchange in Papiamentu with a dreadlocked Caribbean Islander. Once formalities including all the necessary shibboleths had been finalized, the door was opened for us.

A barefoot, curly headed moppet with the sweetness and color of dark chocolate and the brightest, broadest smile of spectacularly white teeth offered to show us the way to her dad's den.

The youngin performed a pirouette, trilled like a bird, and skipped down the hallway. We followed her, somewhat less enthusiastically, but gladly. It has been an awful long time since I have last skipped or trilled.

The place was clean and well kept. An Arabic melody and the exotic fragrances of herbs that I couldn't quite recognize drifted our way from a kitchen somewhere in the building.

The elfin one darted through a doorway and a moment later we followed, finding ourselves in a comfortable room of bookshelves full of books. On the wall hung a quilt with an artistic depiction of the African continent. Rising from a chair at an old-fashioned desk was the man we came to see.

On his head, Haj wore a colorful embroidered taqiyah with intricate patterns and a flowing white robe covered his torso. When he came out from behind the desk, we could see that he wore matching white pants as well as tie-dye socks that fit the toes like gloves. Each toe was a different color, comfortably wiggling in sandals. He kissed his daughter on the top of her head, whispered something in her ear and shooed her out of his study before greeting us.

We spent quite a bit of time going through the formalities as we Salaam Alaikumed and Alaikum Salaamed each other. We were just about finishing this stage as Haj's impish daughter returned pushing a rolling cart with a samovar and a platter of pastries. She performed one more pirouette, winked at her dad and skipped out of the room.

So, we sat and drank tea and nibble pastries for a while and then we sat and smoked a hookah for a while and then we drank some more tea.

Eventually we got down to discussing business. Haj had a good thing going, selling books out of his place and a network of other joints around town. He spoke about the network he ran with evident pride but without boasting.

We haggled a bit over prices, but only enough for appearances with no real sticking points between us. Haj agreed to pay 10% upfront with a promise of the balance in three weeks. That stretched things out further than I hoped, but, any timeline I had started out this trip with had already been shot to hell and I guess that three more weeks to cash out was better than I had really expected by that point.

Frank had vouched for Haj, which would have been enough for me, but Haj won me over with his Brooklyn accent and the Yiddishisms he sprinkled into the conversation. Haj told me that he liked to read, that he was a bit of a zamler and that he started selling a few books on the side to make ends meet. When he told me that everyone has to macht a leben, well...who was I to disagree?

We arranged the transfer of product for mid morning the next day and headed back out into the West Philly streets. It was already getting dark. We had burned through another day. We headed back in the direction we had started out from.

We were passing one of those corner stores that dot that part of the city. There was a knot of Black men standing on that corner, each with a can of beer in hand. Only a dim light emitted from the store. The street light on that corner was not functioning, permanently disabled as per the very localized esthetics.

Well, as we passed in the darkness, I felt a thud in my chest. I looked down and saw the bottom end of a cane. My eyes followed the length of the stick to the black hand holding the handle, extending from a black long sleeve shirt and then to the black face that was barely distinguishable from the black cloth. And out of all that darkness I heard a familiar voice say "Aren't you gonna say boo to the Spider?"

Spider had always been the darkest man I had known and he still was. Most of his hair was still black although there was a touch of grey. Other than that, on a dark corner Spider was nearly invisible.

Spider lowered his cane and I dropped all my apprehensions. We wrapped our arms around each other right there on that dark corner.

Spider pulled a couple of beer cans, with black labels of course, from some hidden pocket and handed one to Frank and the other beer to me.

After a couple of beers, we exchanged digits and promised to get back to each other before long. Frank and I headed home.