They walked along the building toward the side street, past two cars parked against the building to a door with a three-step concrete stoop. One of Simon’s office windows, the door they’d come out of, the door they faced, and two little windows stacked above it were the only openings in three stories of solid brick, a taller red half to the left, a shorter yellow half to the right. Simon unlocked the metal door, displaying a square hallway with an elevator to the right.
“That leads into the stockroom,” said Simon, indicating a door to the left. “We use the elevator to carry dolly loads of books to the second floor. The doors to the stockroom and the parking lot are always locked, but you’d have keys.”
Simon heaved the folding grille aside and they stepped into the elevator, waiting while the grille latched lethargically, with loud complaint. Simon pushed button three and the cage creaked upward, moaning.
“It likes to pretend it’s on its last legs, but it’s actually completely safe. It gets inspected every year.”
The grille let them see the second-floor landing, with its small window and single door, and then the third floor, identical. The window only pretended to light the space, and Benita thought it unlikely anyone ever washed it, certainly not from outside.
They went through the door opposite the elevator onto the top landing of an enclosed stairs descending along the outside wall.
“Fire-stairs,” said Simon. “They come out behind the rest rooms on the second floor and go on down into the stockroom, where there’s an emergency exit to the street.”
The door to the right opened on a room about forty by fifty-five or sixty, smelling of hot dust, with tall, dirty windows extending almost corner to corner over the side street. Four steel columns supported an I beam and a high, ornamental tin ceiling hung with cobwebs.
A U-shaped kitchen took up the corner nearest the elevator, and ended at the line of columns. Next to it was an enclosed room about the same size.
“The bathroom,” said Simon. “The artist who lived here put some screens and free-standing cabinets between the columns and used the area behind them as his bedroom. He also had some good-looking drapes all along that front wall, but he took everything interesting with him. The blinds are still here, and they’re fairly new.”
Fairly new and supposed to be white, as were the walls. The blinds would wash, but the walls were unlikely to come clean. There was plenty of room, but no closet, anywhere. A couch and chair stood near the front windows, protected by plastic sheeting. A sheet covered box-spring and mattress along with a stepladder and a bed-frame, in parts, stood against the back wall under a row of metal, wireglass windows, their bottom edges about five feet from the floor. Benita pulled the ladder out and climbed up a couple of steps to look through the windows. The bottom of the windows were barely above the flat roof of the adjacent building.
The place certainly looked break-in proof! But talk about bleak!
“There’s a lot of room here,” she said without enthusiasm.
He looked worried. “About twenty-three hundred square feet.”
“The bookstore looks longer than this.”
He nodded. “This is the third floor of half the bookstore. Maybe you noticed from the parking lot? The store is actually two buildings, side by side, built at different times. We started with the one next door and bought this one when it became available. This building has higher ceilings, so the floors don’t line up. The ground floor is eighteen inches higher, the second floor is three feet. We only joined the first two floors. The third floor of the other building isn’t connected to this one at all. The only access to that space is by stairs from the street.”
“Is it rented?”
“Not at the moment, no. If all goes well, eventually we’ll probably use all of it, and this space, too, but that’s no time soon.”
She moved out into the middle of the room and turned around, staring at the walls. “How much would you charge for this, and what would you do by way of cleaning it up?”