Chapter 4 The Hidden Room
The Hidden Room
Mitch was good with his hands. Curious by nature, he’d learned to be handy as a little boy, by watching his parents.
His father had spent the weekends in his attic workshop, repairing things other people threw away.
Lamps, old bookshelves, lopsided tables, wobbly chairs.
His mother, likewise, had been determined to fix anything that broke in their old house.
Tinkering, cooking, gardening, sewing – there wasn’t much that Mitch couldn’t do.
The secret room’s electrics, with its paper-sheathed wires and sputtering circuit-breakers, was too dilapidated to take a modern power supply; the risk of fire was too great.
He started by running a new power cable into the space and hanging light bulbs from the ceiling.
After connecting the cable to the meter, he flipped the switch.
In the light, the room looked even bigger.
Beneath a thick layer of dust lay a splendid chestnut parquet floor.
There was also a large quantity of equally dusty furniture: six stools at the zinc-topped bar, two sofas, a number of worn leather club chairs, three tables surrounded by six chairs each, an old trunk sitting open.
But what really caught his eye were the rows and rows of bookshelves running along the back wall.
As he continued to inspect the space, a few things became clear to Mitch.
This room had been frozen in time, and it had happened suddenly.
Glasses had been abandoned on the bar, cards, dice and notepads with scribbled scores had been left scattered across the low tables.
The faint smell of old wood, leather and malt whiskey still lingered in the air.
This secret room had once been much more than just a storage space.
It had been a gambling den, a speakeasy.
The sheer amount of work it would take to restore the place didn’t daunt Mitch in the slightest. The possibilities it held were far more exciting.
* * *
For the next two months, Mitch took the first train into the city every morning, to make the most of the quiet hours before the shop opened.
He closed the store between noon and 2:30 p.m., worked in the secret room after hours, and even spent a few nights on one of the leather sofas he had carefully cleaned.
Every spare moment was spent restoring the place: rearranging furniture, scrubbing the floor, vacuuming, painting, polishing the zinc bar, mounting wall lights, deep-cleaning the carpets.
Mitch was completely exhausted. When the secret room finally matched his vision, he carried the four hundred and thirty-seven copies of banned books he possessed – his collection was missing only one – from the storeroom through the coal hatch and down to their new hiding place.
At last, one night just before midnight, after eight weeks of work and having arranged his banned books in alphabetical order, Mitch sank into an armchair with a glass of contraband whiskey from one of the bottles he’d found stashed behind the bar.
Raising his glass to the books, he toasted himself for a job well done.
Everything was set. Soon Mitch would open his clandestine bookshop, one reserved for customers he deemed trustworthy enough to be let in on the secret.
The next morning, Mitch made his way home with a serious hangover and something on his mind.
It was the question that had nagged at him all night: who could he trust?
How could he be sure no one would betray him?
He made himself a coffee, left it untouched in the living room, and collapsed into bed.
He woke at sunset, groggy and desperate for some fresh air. He grabbed a shopping bag – there was nothing in the fridge – and went out.
There weren’t many of his neighbours left in the apartment building, but the ones who did still live there were just getting home from work.
With the elevator long out of order, the stairwell echoed with the sounds of footsteps and muffled conversations.
On the second-floor landing, Mitch ran into Mr Horstein, who he’d always figured was either Hungarian, Polish or Romanian, but had never been able to find out which.
Mr Horstein was either naturally awkward or he didn’t understand a word anyone said to him, because he tended to burst out laughing whenever Mitch said, “Hello”, “Goodbye” or even “How are you?” But this evening, for once, Mr Horstein didn’t laugh.
In fact, he looked terrible, as if something awful had happened to him.
With what looked like a superhuman effort, he raised his wrist and tapped his watch with his index finger, shaking his head slowly from side to side – the universal sign for it’s over, or maybe it’s too late.
Mitch had learned that gesture years ago, from the manager at his father’s factory, who’d rung their doorbell one day to deliver the news of the fatal accident.
Wearing an equally serious expression, he had shaken his head in that same slow movement, left-right-left-right.
The situation was far less grave this time around.
Having spotted Mitch’s shopping bag, Mr Horstein only wanted to tell him the grocery store was closed at this time of day.
For once, Mitch understood him perfectly – especially when the old man reached into his own shopping bag for the baguette he’d just bought, broke it in two and offered half to Mitch, followed by a chunk of Gruyère cheese and an apple.
Then, giving Mitch a friendly thump on the shoulder, wearing the serene smile of a good Samaritan, he turned and headed back into his apartment without even waiting for a thank you.
So Mitch went for a walk, baguette in one hand, cheese in the other, and the apple tucked into his pocket.
Later that night, back in his kitchen, he made himself a sandwich, thinking that language barriers rarely kept people from becoming friends.
The unexpected encounter with Mr Horstein had also planted the seed for a brilliant idea.
Mitch thought about the words he loved most in the books he read, how they stirred his emotions, gave him clarity, and, most importantly, encouraged an appreciation of nuance.
And as he contemplated this notion, something occurred to him.
The edict HB 1467 made it illegal for bookshops to sell banned books and for libraries to lend them, but it made no mention – and he scrutinized every line of the text to be absolutely sure – of renting them.
That night, Mitch slept soundly, happier than he’d been in a very long time.
* * *
The clock had hardly struck eight the next morning when the metal shutter rose, flooding the bookshop with sunlight.
Customers were rare before ten o’clock, except for the odd student in need of schoolbooks, and the even smaller handful who still read periodicals.
Since the governor’s first term, the opposition newspapers had shut down, and only a single paper remained, which belonged to a wealthy businessman close to the seat of power.
The articles that ran in the Lighthouse invariably praised the government’s actions and criticized other countries.
Alongside those were a few op-ed pieces, plenty of local news, and, on Sundays, updates from the clergy, a culture page and the weekly weather forecast.
Mitch set about his usual morning tasks – unpacking boxes, arranging table displays, checking the order log.
But despite his best efforts, his mind kept circling back to the same questions: how to share banned books right under the noses of the authorities, and with whom.
In the end, he decided that the best course of action would be to rely on his own intuition.
He’d been in this business for long enough to recognize the kind of reader he was dealing with, but is it true that you are what you read?
Do you lean left because you read Camus?
Does reading Marx make you a revolutionary?
If you’re a fan of Romain Gary, does that make you a humanist?
The door opened and a woman stepped into the shop.
Her hair was tied in a low knot at the nape of her neck, and she wore a sleek black trench coat cinched at the waist, revealing her legs from the knees down.
Her sleeves were rolled up, exposing slender and work-worn hands.
She set down her suitcase and wandered from table to table, picking up a book here and there, putting it down again.
She hadn’t noticed Mitch yet, or maybe she had, and was ignoring him. But he was watching her. He was sure she’d never been in in his shop before, and couldn’t tell whether or not she could be trusted.
A strange woman lingering in his bookshop early in the morning like this might very well have been sent by the authorities to entrap him.
Mitch believed that anyone who enforced unjust laws had a corrupt soul, but he refused to give in to paranoia; it was more likely that this woman had simply come in here to get out of the rain.
What better time, he thought, to put his intuition to the test?
She was flipping through a volume of poetry and jumped when he spoke to her.
“I was a million miles away – didn’t see you,” she blurted, smiling apologetically.
“This one slipped through the net.” He nodded toward the book in her hand. “You should take it – I’ve only got one copy left, and I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to hold on to it.”
She didn’t seem to understand. Russell Banks, the author whose poetry collection she was holding, was a dissenting voice, Mitch explained, a visionary who exposed the divisions in society and spoke out against the plutocratic stranglehold on democracy.
“That might not be exactly what I’m looking for,” she admitted.
“What sort of book are you looking for, then?”
“I have no idea.” She sighed. “It’s for a long trip.”
“A tourist guide, maybe? Where are you going?”
“Not a guide. More like… a travel companion. Something friendly.”