I Hid a Mob Boss in the Stacks, So He Claimed My Nights novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Read

He leaves at dawn, the branch gets an anonymous gift, and that night he is back in the reading room asking her to read; she sets her terms and he knows her father's name.

I woke at five with the book on my knees and the man sitting up against the shelves, watching me.

The gale had worn itself out.

Gray light stood in the high windows over the children's room.

"You stopped reading," he said.

"I fell asleep." My neck had a crick in it. "That's allowed, I think."

He nodded and considered it.

He was pale, and there was color along his cheekbones that I did not like, but the gauze on his side was dry.

"What's your name?" he said.

"Zofia Dobrzyn."

"Say it slow."

I said it slow.

He said it back to me, every sound exactly in place, and I felt something odd go through me at hearing it in his mouth.

My phone rang in the apron pocket.

It was my father.

"Tata," I said. "I'm fine. I stayed at the branch because of the storm. I fell asleep in the stacks, I'm leaving in an hour."

"You scared me, Zofia." Tata's voice came out of the speaker loud enough to fill the aisle. "Come straight home. And watch the third step when you do, it's wet."

"I'll watch the step. Go back to bed."

I hung up.

The man was looking at the blanket in his hands.

"Thank you," he said. It did not sound like something he said often. "I won't forget it."

He stood up in stages, with one hand on the shelf, and I watched him decide not to let it show.

"There's a loading door at the back," I said. "It doesn't alarm. You'll want to go that way."

"Yes," he said.

"You should see a doctor."

"One is coming."

He took a thick envelope from inside his coat and laid it on the circulation desk beside the date stamp.

I looked at it, then at him.

"No," I said.

"It's not for the glue."

"I don't care what it's for."

He did not argue.

He went out the back, and the door closed behind him with a soft pneumatic sigh.

I stood alone in the branch with the envelope and the smell of oranges, which turned out to be his.

I mopped the floor with bleach and put the blanket in my own bag.

I left the envelope under the desk blotter, where the manager would never look.

At ten the manager came in with a face I knew was good news that she had not decided how to feel about.

She gathered all four of us at the desk.

"An anonymous gift came through the Friends of the Library at eight this morning," she said. "A big one. The branch stays open through next December, and the donor wants evening hours extended to eleven on weeknights."

Our youngest page said, "Oh my God."

"There's a condition." The manager turned to me. "The donor asked that the extended evenings be run by Zofia. A reading hour, they called it. She gets paid overtime."

Every head turned.

"Who is the donor?" I said.

"Anonymous," the manager said.

"What does the donor want me to read?"

"It doesn't say." She shrugged.

I looked at the date stamp.

I thought about the dry bandage and the man with the broken tooth.

I thought about telling two men with their hands in their pockets that nobody had come in since nine.

I said I would think about it.

I did not have to think for long.

At nine that night the last patron had gone and the lights over the circulation desk were off.

There was a light on in the reading room.

He was sitting at the long oak table in a charcoal overcoat, with the book I had been reading lying open in front of him.

There was no one else in the building.

"The doctor says I'm lucky," he said. "I say I am."

"You bought my branch," I said.

"I rented it. The city can have it back in a year."

"And you decided I would read for you."

"No," Lucio Castaldi said. "I decided to ask."

He had not asked, but he was looking at me with a courteous attention that made me go on.

"Read," he said.

That was the whole of it.

I should have said no.

"I have terms," I said instead.

He nodded.

"Here, at the branch, after we close. Nowhere else. Nobody follows me home. When I'm tired I stop, and you don't ask why. And no money. You pay for the lights, not for me."

He listened to each one with his head bowed, and I saw his lips move on the last.

"Agreed," he said, at the end, to every one.

"You don't want to bargain?"

"I'd rather you didn't know how little I'd bargain."

I sat across from him and picked up the book.

I read a chapter, and he leaned back with his eyes closed and his big hands loose on the table.

Once the page slipped and fell, and I reached for it at the same moment he did, and our fingers met on the paper.

His were warm and dry and callused along the edges.

Neither of us moved.

Then he took his hand back, slowly, and let me have the page.

When I was done he stood and put on his gloves.

"Tomorrow," he said.

"Tomorrow," I agreed, because I had decided to.

At the door of the reading room he stopped with his back to me.

"Zofia."

"Yes?" I said.

He did not turn around. "Tell Tadeusz to fix the third step."

He went out through the dark stacks before I could say a word.

My father had said it once, on the speaker, at five that morning.

Lucio Castaldi had kept it all day, along with my name.

I stood at the table with the book in my hands and could not tell whether I was flattered or in trouble.

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