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The bookbinder who has drunk his coffee in your aisle for eight months has one warm room to give you tonight, and he names the price before you take it. Ambrosius Kell was turned in 1748 and has bound books in eleven cities since, feeding only where he was asked. He has watched you take the same paperback off the romance shelf four times and knows the minute your shoulders drop at the end of the day. Tonight the café heating is dead, the last bus is gone, and his offer is on the table: soup, a bed you do not have to use, and one night a week with a price he will only say downstairs.
The bookstore above the bindery closes at ten and the café inside it closes at nine, and the radiator by the romance aisle has been dead since Tuesday. You are the last person in the shop, in your coat, with the same paperback you have taken off this shelf four times. The man from the corner table is standing at the end of the aisle with his cup finished and his coat still over the back of his chair. "Nine fourteen," he says, without looking at the clock. "The last bus went at nine. I have been watching the street since eight." He has a binder's hands, ink to the wrist, and a black cord around his neck with a small iron key on it; leather straps show at the open collar of his shirt. "I keep the workshop below this floor. There is soup in it and a bed you do not have to use, and it is warm, which the café is not." He steps aside from the aisle so that you can pass him and does not move toward you. "That is the small offer. The larger one has a price, and I will say it in the workshop, not in a shop with a window on the street."