D.C. Noir

by George Pelecanos

  The war had left him appalled by firearms. He abruptly realized he could not imagine using this one.

  He was forty-one years old and felt twice that age most of the time.

  He did not own a car, had never thought to buy one, although he could easily afford anything on the road. He walked where he needed to go, or took the streetcar and later the bus. He ate most of his meals next door at Jimmy’s Café or sometimes at Crisfield’s, just over the District line in Silver Spring. And after the nights when images of his sister and parents came back too plainly in his dreams, he would take the longer walk to the synagogue on 16th Street and sit in the back and try to locate comfort in the rituals of his people.

  On Sundays, the only day he closed the store, Liebmann rode the bus without any particular destination, his excursions a way past the dismay that could still run under his thoughts at any given moment, memory rivering through and working, down beneath the ordinary rhythms of his shopkeeper life.

  On this Sunday in the middle of November, he crossed the street to catch the downtown bus, stepped up and greeted the driver and dropped the fare, and found his seat midway back. He preferred sitting on the right side of the bus although he could not explain the preference. Washington’s decline slid past the smeared window, the boarded store-fronts of Petworth and the catastrophe of Shaw, the choked streets around Howard University gone to every manner of destitution and loss.

  The bus wheezed into downtown and hit the turnaround at Federal Triangle and gave up the last two passengers. Liebmann kept his seat. The driver scouted back down the aisle, picking up trash and the crumpled transfers left on seats or tossed on the floor. He stopped and sat in the seat across from Liebmann.

  “Mr. Liebmann,” he said. He sighed heavily as he lowered himself against the red vinyl. He was a big man, overweight from the hours passed behind the wheel.

  “How are you today, my friend?” Liebmann asked.

  “Not too bad,” the driver said. He was perhaps fifty years old and had the practiced mix of resentment and acceptance that Liebmann noticed in many of the black men who lived in the neighborhood. “You out for your weekly pleasure trip?”

  Liebmann said yes.

  “Well,” the driver said, “that’s good. ’Course, for me it’s the same as ever. No pleasure about it. The job I do. I’m just happy the damn rain’s let up.”

  The Nazis came when Liebmann was seventeen. His family lived in Berlin, in a yellowing apartment building filled with other Jewish families. Later, after his family was lost, he would wonder that his and so many other families continued to live together, in the same neighborhoods, the same buildings, huddling on the same streets, long after they understood what the Nazis were doing, after so many others had been taken.

  He had not understood then what little his father or any of the fathers could have done—Germany’s borders closed and the jobs gone and the food gone and the possibility of hiding or shelter or refuge little more than fragrant wishes and the net pulling tighter day by day. The SS finally came in 1943, at dawn, stomping up the stairwells of the building, pounding on doors and shouting, and the staccato barking of the leashed shepherds in the hallways.

  Liebmann roused his sleeping sister, gesturing that she hurry, get up and dress. For some reason he was afraid to speak, as if talking would give them away to the soldiers already in their building and moving room to room. He struggled quickly into his clothes, his half-top boots left untied when he heard the front door of the apartment give way and his father objecting and a louder voice ordering them out, downstairs, into the street. He heard something break—a dish or glass—and the door of his bedroom swung wide. The SS trooper standing there seemed massive but he was not much older than Liebmann. He was holding some sort of machine gun across his chest. The gun was black and gleamed with oil. The soldier stood easily, calm, expressionless, looking first at Liebmann and then his sister, still in her nightgown, only eleven years old.

  The soldier may as well have been evaluating the fate of two barnyard animals. After a moment he simply waved them forward with the barrel of his gun and stood aside in the doorway as they walked out.

  * * *

  Liebmann stayed aboard the bus past his stop on the return trip. He thought he might get off at the National Guard Armory in Silver Spring and go across the street for a cup of coffee at the diner before he walked back up Georgia, into the District and home to his apartment. Three teenaged boys got on at the Kalmia Road stop, shoving and jockeying past the driver and down the aisle.

  Liebmann recognized one of them immediately. An episode at the store a month or so back. Today the kid had a couple of buddies along. Blue-collar kids, but with the open pink faces that marked them as suburban, maybe in from the white-flight neighborhoods out in Glenmont or Aspen Hill, in the city and drunk on the jolt of getaway freedom that came with crossing the District line and wandering loose where nobody cared who they were or where they were going.

  The driver called them back for the fare and the tallest of the boys, the kid that Liebmann had thrown out of his store, swaggered to the front of the bus.

  “Seventy-five cents,” the driver said, pointing at the coin box. The kid stretched it out, gazing at the side of the driver’s head. He leaned against the coin box, scratched his genitals, looked back to his friends for the designated response. They were piled into a seat across the aisle from Liebmann and snickered on cue.

  “I thought it was a quarter to ride.” The kid had a blond crewcut, wore a white round-neck T-shirt under a black leather motorcycle jacket.

  The driver brought the bus to a stop at a red light. “There’s three of you,” he said. “Twenty-five times three. Or is that too hard for you to figure?”

  The kid looked away from his appreciative audience, back to the driver. “You got a smart mouth on you, don’t you?” he said.

  The driver said nothing. Reached across to the lever on his right and pulled it to open the door behind the kid.

  “Off,” he said.

  “I’m not gettin off,” the kid said. “This ain’t my stop.”

  It had been a Saturday night when one of Liebmann’s clerks spotted the same kid slipping a pint of vodka under the same leather jacket. The kid was eighteen—or had a driver’s license that said he was—old enough to buy in the District. But he was trying to steal a bottle.

  The traffic light went to green.

  The driver looked at the kid, waiting, and the kid said, “I told you. I ain’t getting off. I’ll get off when it’s my stop.”

  A car behind the bus honked.

  When Liebmann had asked for the bottle under his jacket, the kid said something about how he had to steal because of the “Jew prices” in the place. But he had given up the bottle and left, ambling out, making an elaborate show of being in no particular hurry, meeting the gaze of the store’s patrons with slack-jawed hostility.

  The driver put the bus in neutral and set the brake and put on the safety flashers. The kid said, “You can’t put me off the bus, man. It’s against the goddamn law.”

  “My goddamn bus. My goddamn law.” The driver’s voice was low and controlled. “Get off now, so’s I don’t need to do it for you.”

  The kid backed toward the door, slipped on the top step and caught himself. “What you need to do, man, is kiss my white ass.”

  “You just keep your white ass moving right out that door.”

  The kid looked back into the bus. There were only a few riders. A man three seats in front of Liebmann held his gaze on the window, peering out, waiting for the episode to be over, to resolve itself in one way or another.

  Liebmann stood and stepped into the aisle, watching the kid still standing at the front of the bus.

  “Oh, now, look at this,” the kid said. “We got us a kike in the mix. You gonna kick my ass too, hymie? Come on up here and kick my—”

  The driver was up and reached across and had the collar of the kid’s leather jacket. The kid sucked for air
, rocked forward onto the balls of his feet. He struggled against the driver’s grip a moment, then stopped and hung there, his cheeks flaming.

  “Get off the bus,” the driver said. “I won’t be telling you another time.”

  “You best get your goddamn nigger hand off me.” The kid’s voice shook but he worked to hold the arrogance.

  The driver let go and the kid stumbled backwards down the two steps to the curb. The driver squeezed the door closed, shifted into gear, and jerked the bus through the intersection

  The kid lifted his arms and shot the air with both middle fingers as the bus roared past him.

  Liebmann sat down again. Glanced across at the buddies, sitting sober now, hangdog cowboys left in the lurch.

  The driver called back, voice booming. “Fifty cents, fellas. Hike it up here.”

  The two filed up and dropped their coins and came back toward Liebmann, this time passing him to go all the way to the back of the bus, away from the other riders.

  * * *

  The driver brought the bus to a stop on the north side of the Armory in Silver Spring, and cut the motor. The two kids got off at the rear door and walked a few paces, then broke into a worried run and disappeared beyond the Armory building. The other riders left from the front.

  Liebmann waited until everybody was off, then walked up and stood next to the driver. “I know that boy,” he said. “He came in my store. He tried to steal from me.”

  “Little turd,” the driver said.

  “I threw him out.”

  “Looks like that’s all he’s good for,” the driver said. “Gettin thrown out of places. Little peckerwood son of a bitch.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The driver heaved a sigh and looked up toward Liebmann. “No, man, I’m sorry. Sorry you got spoken to that way on board my bus.”

  Liebmann shrugged slightly. There was a moment of silence between them.

  “Are you off work now?” Liebmann asked.

  “Yeah. Gotta park this thing, but I’m through for the day.”

  “Then I will see you next time,” Liebmann said. “Let’s hope we get ourselves a nice quiet ride.”

  After he got home, Liebmann sat in his apartment, at a window overlooking the street. He lifted the window in spite of the cold and pulled a kitchen chair close and sat with his coat on. The trees along Georgia Avenue were skeletal, black silhouettes in the endless afternoon. A few days after he had kicked the kid out of his store for trying to steal a bottle of vodka, Liebmann came to work to find the words JEWS SUCK SHIT spray-painted in red on the store’s front window.

  He stood looking at the words painted unevenly on the glass, the morning traffic moving behind him. Thinking of it now in his apartment, he touched a point on his coat sleeve above the tattoo on his forearm. He always believed he could feel it there no matter how many layers were above it, the tattoo carved between his skin and the blood underneath.

  The man who gave Liebmann the tattoo at Auschwitz was said to have once been the finest tattoo artist in Berlin. There was talk of his freehanding elaborate sailing ships and floral hearts and the names of mothers and lovers in elegant cascading script. But he was a Jew. Now branding his own people, one after the other, letters and numbers, working through the line. He was thin with a long face and beagle eyes and wire-rimmed glasses, and he never looked up, never looked at the faces of the people he marked, trading their names for numbers. Everybody knew he had no choice.

  It was weeks later when the guards came to the dormitory and ordered everybody out.

  Near dawn. The dormitory shouted awake and everybody made to stand outside in the crusted snow, freezing in rags. When this happened a prisoner was often singled out and led away. This time an SS major pointed at the tattoo artist. Two corporals pulled the man out of the group and pushed him around the side of the building. Within a few seconds came the sound of a pistol shot. A flat, dry snap echoing away into the dark forest beyond the wire.

  The two corporals and the major came back around the side of the building as if they had been to the latrine or were returning from a smoke break. They ordered everybody back inside. Liebmann filed into the dormitory and lay down on the pine slat that passed for his bed. He realized that he did not know the tattoo artist’s name, and now the man and his name were lost with all the others, disappeared. Liebmann repeated his own name to himself, over and over, Jacob Liebmann, Jacob Liebmann, suddenly convinced that doing so might stand as some sort of protection, an incantation prayed to all the names of the lost gone silent in a thousand forsak nights, in the trackless abandoned last winter of the war.

  Liebmann walked the streets of Shepherd Park. It was after midnight, in the week between Christmas and New Year. A gentle snow had fallen earlier in the day, leaving a half-inch dusting on the rooftops and cars and in the trees.

  When Liebmann could not sleep he often gave up on the effort, got up and dressed and went out to walk the silent world. The cover of snow left the night even quieter, and he turned south outside his building, crossed Georgia Avenue and followed several blocks down to Fern, turned right to track the fenceline of the grounds of Walter Reed, the sprawling army hospital. Turned into the residential area on 13th Street and saw the snowfall had spangled shrubbery and porch railings and fences. The houses were mostly dark, a lamp here or there in a living room or behind an upstairs bedroom curtain. As he rounded up toward the corner where Alaska Avenue met Georgia, he saw lights moving inside his tore

  He approached the intersection of Georgia and Alaska Avenues and Kalmia Road, and then stopped directly across from the front windows of his store. Lights flicked and darted somewhere inside. Liebmann was at first confused, then he understood—flashlights. In the quiet out on the street, even at his distance, he heard glass shattering, as if somebody was breaking one bottle with another. And laughter.

  Someone inside smashing bottles and laughing.

  Later, Liebmann would not remember any thought or specific plan as he cut around the rear of his store to edge in close to the wall. The glass plate in the back door was punched out. He crouched and eased through the opening, taking care to avoid the shards around the edges of the frame. He stood and saw three figures in a furious pleasure, flinging pints and fifths of whisky and vodka and gin against the wall, wailing and hooting when a bottle hit and exploded. One of them swung something sideways into the shelves, scattering bottles that popped like firecrackers as they hit the floor and burst.

  A fierce alcohol reek, overheated, sick and pungent, the fouled sweetness everywhere.

  The three carried on, oblivious to Liebmann, who moved into his office and found a key on the ledge over the door and unlocked the lower left desk drawer. He took out the little pistol, pushed the safety off, and stepped back out into the store. He held the gun straight up over his head at arm’s length and squeezed the trigger.

  The sound inside his store was nothing like the flat snap a Luger made in the open, frosted air of Germany—this was contained thunder, the sudden combustion of something unbridled and wild.

  The three figures startled and crouched and froze where they were, faces ratcheted toward him. Liebmann stepped forward, crunching broken glass, felt the floor wet and precari-

  Two of them bolted, slipping and flailing as if they were on ice, making their way for the door. One of them fell, sliding on the floor, riding the glass, yelping in pain.

  Liebmann ignored them to come within ten feet of the kid with the crewcut. The kid was wearing the motorcycle jacket. A baseball bat dangled in his right hand.

  “You just couldn’t do it,” Liebmann said. “Mind your own business. Leave me alone.”

  The kid stared a moment, the same slack-jawed insolence as when Liebmann kicked him out of the store, when the bus driver tossed him off the bus. Then he said, “I’m outta here, man.” He started to move.

  Liebmann lifted the pistol into view, holding it up beside his face, pointed at the ceiling. “Not so fast. I thought maybe w
e have a little talk.”

  The pistol gave the kid pause but he worked quickly back into his moody swagger. “So, what, you gonna shoot me? For this? We was just havin a little fun.”

  “It was you who painted the words, yes?”

  “What words?”

  Liebmann lifted the pistol and fired into a wall. The kid hunched backward, cried out, dropped the bat, and lifted his hands as if to shield himself.

  “The words,” Liebmann said, after the echo of the gun blast subsided. “Red paint. The front window.”

  The kid straightened, let his hands move back to his sides. “So what if I did?” He started to work his way across the glass.

  Liebmann pointed the pistol directly at the kid, tracking him as he moved. The kid kept a few yards between himself and Liebmann and said, “You can’t do nothin crazy here, man. We was just screwin around.”

  Liebmann shifted the pistol to the right of the kid and fired again, this time into the wall. He moved the barrel a degree and fired again. A case of Coca-Cola hissed, spitting and fizzing and boiling over. Moved the barrel and fired again. The kid was howling now, hands over his face, knees going soft.

  Liebmann fired into a flank of Alsatian whites, Rieslings, and Gewurztraminers. The rack of bottles ignited and blew apart in glittering spray, silvered glass and golden wines showering into the aisle.