After half an hour I’d barely managed to complete a single shelf, and was standing with my back to the aisle, wresting another few volumes off the shelf, when I had the sensation of being watched. I heard a sibilant whisper and turned, promptly dropping the books in my hand.
An albino man of uncertain age was no more than two feet from me, his pale eyes moving involuntarily behind pince-nez glasses. From the first it was his eyes. His eyes could not be caught. He stepped back and knocked over several books I had set aside. Ignoring his clumsiness, he took in my surprise with practiced unsurprise. I had never seen anyone like him, nor any face more marked with defensive disdain.
“Walter Geist, the Arcade’s manager,” he whispered, turning. “Follow me, girl.”
I picked up the books I’d dropped, forced them onto the shelf, and caught up with him as his stooped shoulder disappeared around a corner stack.
As I trailed behind his quaint figure, I had the fleeting fantasy that this man was what someone would look like if he’d been born inside the Arcade, never having left its dim confines. Pigment would disappear and eyesight would be ruined beneath weak light, until one lay passively, like a flounder on the ocean floor.
In fact, as I walked behind him, Geist’s white ears reminded me of delicate sea creatures suddenly exposed to light, vulnerable and nude. There was a shrinking quality to him, a retraction from attention like an instinctual retreat from exposure. I was fascinated and repulsed in equal measure, a contradiction that was never to leave me. As I follow him there in my memory, I feel again that charge to his strangeness, a shock that compelled.
He led me to a small office in the very rear of the store, built high into the corner of the vast ceiling like a reef. I followed him up a narrow flight of wooden stairs, the handrail loose and broken.
“Wait here, girl.”
He indicated the patch of landing at the entrance to the office.
“My name is Rosemary, Mr. Geist. Rosemary Savage,” I said, tired of his anonymous address. I extended my hand then, thinking it appropriate, brave even, as I had seen Americans do. His hands remained clasped behind his back. He entered the office and reemerged holding several forms.
“Please fill these out. Print only.”
He handed me a pen and stood examining the activity on the floor below. From that high landing the chaos of the Arcade was fully evident, with the exception of Pike’s platform, where he moved as if choreographed, a small flicker of concentrated activity. I leaned over the rail, following the inclination of Geist’s head, to see what drew his attention. An obese man sat on the floor in a cul-de-sac made by piles of books, his legs splayed out like a toddler’s. He was turning the pages of a large photography book with one hand, his other hidden beneath the heavy covers opened across his lap. Even from the landing I could tell the images in the book were nudes.
“What are you looking at?” Geist asked me.
“Ah, just looking down where you were,” I said nervously.
“I don’t mean that,” he said. “What do you see?”
I described the fat man studying the photographs.
“Arthur!” Geist called down from the landing. “You should be shelving.”
“Just familiarizing myself with my inventory, Walter,” Arthur returned sardonically, his accent British and articulate.
He looked up at me and put a thick finger to his lips, indicating silence. Had I informed on him? Couldn’t Geist see what I had seen? Arthur returned to his nudes, his hand beneath the book’s cover moved rhythmically.
Geist stomped his small foot with impatience, and I noticed he was wearing elegant, polished boots, their smooth black shape nosing from his pant legs like the shiny heads of tiny seals.
“Mr. Geist, could I have something to lean on?” I asked, finding it difficult to write legibly without the support of a desk, and wishing to distract him, and myself, from Arthur.
“No,” he replied, his shifting eyes still directed over the rickety railing. He removed his glasses, placed them in his breast pocket, and continued to wait for me to complete the forms, his manner uncanny as his appearance.
Now that I was closer to him I could see Geist was younger than I at first thought, perhaps twenty years Pike’s junior, in his late forties. He was an unfinished version, a poor copy, of the masterful Pike, yet equally a creature from another time. Every feature was pallid. His hair was white and fleecy, the sheepish outcome of his soft face. His clothes were not as fastidiously kept as his boots, his trousers slightly frayed along the pockets. I completed the forms and handed them back to him.
“You will begin work tomorrow morning at nine,” he instructed without seeming to actually address me, a tactic he perhaps learned from Pike.
“You will finish for the day at six. Your responsibilities at the Arcade will, for the time being, be that of a floater. This means you do not belong in a specific section, as you have no expertise, but will float between tasks that are assigned to you. Do not concern yourself with assisting customers, you will only frustrate them with your ignorance.”
“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Geist,” I said, defensively.
He replaced his glasses, lodging them in the wrinkles of his forehead and frowning to keep them in place—or frowning because he thought me impudent. He leaned in toward my face, and his nostrils twitched as he appeared to take in my scent.
“Not in this one, Miss Savage,” he said. “Please do not interrupt. You will receive a salary of seventy dollars per week. There are no advances on wages. Do you have any questions?”
“No,” I said, afraid to lose the opportunity.
“Good. There is one more condition of employment you must understand.” Geist’s pink ears shifted back delicately. “George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books. Immediate termination of employment will result if theft is suspected.” This last admonition was said in an emphatic whisper.
Later, I saw the statement printed in placard capitals on a sign in the women’s bathroom, and again over the clock all employees punched when the day began and ended. Another sign was located directly in the line of vision on the wall in front of the staircase that descended to the cavernous basement. Reading these signs was like being regularly rebuked, and so they paradoxically served to remind patrons and staff alike that theft was in some sense assumed.
George Pike himself called to me as, newly hired, I passed his platform on my way out.
“George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books!” he cried, characteristically speaking of himself in the third person.
Theft was a problem, as I would discover. The Arcade was regularly scouted by shoplifters; but more seriously, there had been several scandals involving ludicrously overpriced volumes whose provenance had been fictitiously embellished, resulting in what Pike defended as imaginative pricing. Scandals only increased the number of customers, both sellers and buyers. In other words, theft ran both ways at the Arcade.
“Why you stopped saying hello to me?” the dark lady of the front desk asked loudly when I returned to the Martha Washington. She had taken the wires attached to the television from her ears, and I could hear a tinny whining, the sound of cartoons speaking cartoon language.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to be pleasant. “But I stopped