D.C. Noir

by George Pelecanos

  Ngame paused a beat, then came up with a watch in his hand, gold-gleaming in the morning sun.

  “A Rolex President? I will give a discount.”

  Solomon watched the two cops get in their car and leave. In the street the crow continued working on the dead rat.

  “You watch yourself today, Waverly,” he whispered, and swung his gaze along the alley, past Ngame’s van, toward 31st Street.

  Motherfucker’s runnin’ late. Voice came up inside Solomon’s head, peevish, accusing.

  “He be along,” Solomon told Voice, “he be along.”

  When?

  As though on cue, tires squealed. A white Navigator roared in off 31st. Sprays of gravel ricocheted off dumpsters. Partway down the alley the Navigator turned right and disappeared into the Hamilton Court garage.

  “See?” Solomon whispered to Voice.

  Moments later, Asad the Somali appeared, coming up the ramp carrying a large brief case. A tall, thin man, he had a snaky, boneless way of moving. His tight-fitting yellow suit had a long jacket with five buttons and his skin was a light cocoa and his black hair lay slicked in thinning waves against his skull.

  As usual, Asad’s two goons flanked him. Gehdi and Nadif. Solomon had decided they were brothers. Maybe twins, whose orangutan mother had fallen out of an ugly ree.

  Two weeks ago, Asad had come to Georgetown and leased a dingy storefront, paying cash. Solomon knew that storefront. A single window displayed garish men’s clothes. The display had never changed. For years, players came and went. But he’d never seen any of them wearing those clothes. That shit only fools or Somalis would wear. Place never had sold anything legal. The Somali wasn’t going to start now.

  Asad didn’t waste time setting up his network. He and his goons started with the street vendors. The vendors signed on to buy watches, sunglasses, and handbags from Asad. Asad gave his new partners discounts on the junk. C-phones came with the deal. In return, Asad got a cut on the profits and he would know what was going on the streets. All the vendors had bought in except the Nigerian.

  That first day, one of Solomon’s carts had been sticking partway out into the alley. Gehdi misjudged his clearance and scraped the Navigator’s fender.

  Asad had stood there and watched with his hard black marble eyes while Gehdi and Nadif punched Solomon to the ground then kicked the shit out of him. They threw his carts out into the middle of Wisconsin Avenue. Things he’d collected, his precious things. The Nigerian had saved some, but the rest, his clippings, his notebooks, they’d been swept away with the street trash.

  He’d been beaten before. But never in his alley. That they had done those things to him there shamed him. The alley had provided for him, and when danger came, he had been unable to defend the alley in return.

  He gonna make the call?

  “Sure he is.” Voice didn’t know its ass from apple butter sometimes.

  Looking past Solomon and toward Ngame’s stand, Asad reached into the briefcase and pulled out a fat c-phone/walkietalkie. Flipping it open, he held it in front of his face.

  Solomon saw Asad’s lips move. A second or two passed and Solomon heard one crackling reply, then another.

  “One more,” he said to Voice.

  Asad waited, holding the c-phone out from his face. Gehdi and Nadif swiveled their heads back and forth, searching the alley.

  They expectin’ Santy Claus?

  A third crackle. Asad replied and stowed the c-phone away in the briefcase. He said something to the two goons and the three began walking toward Solomon.

  They gonna hit you? Hurt you today?

  Solomon got a tightness in his chest. How it had been came back to him like it had every day since.

  Curled up on the alley bricks. Crying and slobbering and puking. Waiting for the goons to swing another steel-capped oe.

  They had grunted with the effort and they had cursed Solomon because beating a man while he was down was hard work and it made them sweat and they blamed him for that.

  He lowered his head and pretended to doze. Through slitted eyelids, he saw the shoes approach, then pass.

  “Not today,” he whispered to Voice. “Not today.”

  As soon as he thought it safe, he lifted his eyes and followed the three Somalis approaching Ngame’s stand.

  And along Wisconsin, the other vendors watched.

  Ngame saw them cross Wisconsin. He turned and busied himself tightening a C-clamp. He started counting silently. At nine, he heard the sliding scuffle of shoe leather on the sidewalk behind him.

  “I need a decision,” he heard Asad say.

  He didn’t turn, but continued fiddling with the clamp.

  “You got mine,” he said, “I don’t need a partner.”

  “Every businessman needs a partner. Suppose you get sick?”

  “I am healthy.”

  A twisting, tearing at his shoulders, and his elbows were pinned behind him as he was spun around to face Asad.

  Gehdi stood to Asad’s right, and Nadif held him tight, the goon’s sour breath on his neck.

  “You may be healthy,” Asad whispered, smiling, “but men have accidents.”

  Gehdi dropped his hand into his jacket pocket.

  Ngame flexed his knees and sagged, loosening Nadif’s grip. Then with a violent burst, he straightened up. He raised his heavy boot and brought it down with all his strength on the top of Nadif’s foot. He felt bones grind as Nadif’s arch collapsed.

  Nadif was still screaming as Ngame swung his foot forward. His toe caught Gehdi in the crotch, lifting him off the pavement. Gehdi gasped. His hand flew out of his pocket. A switchblade clattered to the sidewalk.

  Almost casually, Ngame clenched Asad’s collar with one hand, twisting it tight around his neck. Stooping slightly, he scooped up Gehdi’s switchblade. He held it up before Asad’s bulging eyes. He pressed the release. Asad stared hypnotically as the silver blade flicked open. Ngame slammed Asad up against a lamppost and brought the blade against the Somali’s throat just below the Adam’s apple.

  Gehdi lay curled on the sidewalk clutching his balls, and Nadif, sobbing, stood on his undamaged foot, hanging on to a parking meter.

  In a swift motion, he pulled the blade away from Asad’s throat, cocked his arm, and brought the knife forward in a stabbing motion.

  Asad let out a high-pitched scream. The crotch of his trousers darkened.

  A fraction of an inch from Asad’s ear, Ngame drove the knife into the lamppost, snapping its blade.

  “You’re right,” Ngame said to Asad in his best BBC voice, “men have accidents.”

  The rest of the morning, Solomon watched Ngame at his stand. The Nigerian went about his business as though nothing had happened. Asad and his goons had disappeared into the storefront. The other vendors in sight of Ngame’s corner were careful not to be seen paying attention, but it seemed to Solomon they moved like men tiptoeing around a sleeping beast.

  Around 3:00, Solomon, eyes half-closed, was drowsing in his canvas deck chair. For seconds, he paid no attention to the car that pulled up to the curb by Ngame’s stand, until the driver-side door opened and the black cop got out.

  Oh shit, Voice said.

  Solomon ignored Voice and sat up to get a better view of the cop and Ngame.

  “You already find out who killed Skeeter?” Ngame asked.

  José Phelps picked up a pair of Ray Ban knockoffs and examined them. “Not yet.”

  “Those are ten dollars.”

  José put the shades back, taking care to line them up just

  “Little while ago, we were over at Eastern Market,” he said. “Buzz was, you had a run-in with Asad.”

  “News travels fast.”

  José didn’t say anything but left the question on his face.

  Ngame shrugged. “A discussion. A business proposition.”

  “You know,” José threw in, “DEA’s interested in him.” Ngame nudged the shades José had held. “That’s good. I’m not.”

>   “You ever thought to moving somewhere else?”

  Ngame gave José a hard look. “I have been here almost ten years. I am somebody here.”

  José picked up the Ray Ban knockoffs again. This time he tried them on. He leaned forward to check himself out in a small mirror hooked to the stand. He angled his face one way, then the other.

  “Absolutely Hollywood,” Ngame said.

  José did another 180 in the mirror and handed over a ten. “You need anything…”

  Toward evening the alley was getting dark. Solomon didn’t need a watch to know Ngame would be closing up in an hour unless business was good. And today business hadn’t been good. Not bad, but not good either. He saw Gehdi come out of Asad the Somali’s store, stand in the doorway, and look down the block toward Ngame. Gehdi had a duffle bag slung over his shoulder. He stood there for a moment as though listening to a reply, then turned and said something to someone in the store. He shut the door and made his way across Wisconsin toward the alley. Solomon slouched in his canvas chair, pulled the American flag he used for a blanket up under his chin, and pretended to sleep.

  Gehdi passed within a few feet of Solomon, and Solomon watched him disappear in the darkening alley toward the parking garage. Across the street, Ngame started disassembling his stand. Solomon began his night critique, judging how Ngame stowed the bulky handbags into the nylon sacks, taking care to dust each one carefully before putting it away

  Where Gehdi?

  Voice surprised him. Feeling a flush of irritation and guilt, Solomon realized he hadn’t been paying attention to his alley. If Gehdi was going to bring the Navigator around, why wasn’t he out by now?

  Minutes passed. Ngame was working on the last of the handbags. Solomon squinted down the alley, trying to pierce the deepening darkness.

  What’s that? Voice asked.

  “What’s what?

  That!

  “You seeing shit,” Solomon scolded, but even as he said it something moved, the slightest shift of black against the deeper black in the shadow of Ngame’s van. And then nothing.

  For a moment, stillness returned to the alley, then a figure crossed the sliver of light coming from between Old Glory and Johnny Rockets.

  Paying no attention to Solomon, Gehdi walked by and returned to the store.

  Solomon waited a moment or two, then slipped down the alley toward Ngame’s van and the parking garage.

  When he got back, Ngame was breaking down his stand, stacking the wire grate shelving, and bagging the C-clamps. His merchandise was packed away in the nylon sacks and the blue plastic storage boxes.

  Up the street, Asad came out, followed by Nadif. Nadif walked with a heavy limp. In one hand, an umbrella he used for a cane. His other cluched Gehdi’s shoulder. Asad locked up, keyed the alarm, and the three made their way toward him.

  Solomon smiled. One gimpy Somali. Man gonna remember this day, long as he live.

  The three passed by him and soon headlights swept the alley as the Navigator came up the garage ramp. It stopped where the alley intersected 31st, then took a right toward M Street and disappeared from view.

  “Goodbye, Somalis,” Solomon whispered. He got up, folded his flag carefully, and hung it over one of his Safeway carts. He crossed Wisconsin to stand guard over Ngame’s goods while the Nigerian fetched his van.

  It was 9:30 when Ngame slammed the doors of his van. He palmed Solomon their customary closing-of-the-day bill.

  “This a twenty,” Solomon said, offering it up.

  Ngame waved it away. “We had a good day today.”

  “Business wasn’t that good.”

  Ngame got into his van and started the engine. He leaned out the window and patted Solomon on the shoulder. “Business isn’t all that makes a good day.”

  Canal Road runs northwest out of Georgetown along the Potomac River. Round a bend, the bright lights fade and it becomes a country road. After a mile, Waverly Ngame noticed headlights coming up behind him, speeding at first, then taking a position fifty yards or so behind and hanging in there. He checked his rearview. The lights behind him belonged to Asad’s white Navigator.

  And somebody in the passenger seat had an arm out the window, pointing something at him.

  “Don’t get so close,” Asad said. “Drop back some.”

  Gehdi eased off the gas. He gave Asad a leer. “Fried Nigerian.”

  Asad laughed and pressed the button of the garage door opener. He imagined the sequence: the electronic command sent to the door opener’s receiver, the receiver that would shoot thirty-six volts into the blasting cap, the blasting cap embedded in the quarter pound of C-4 plastic explosive that the magnet held to the gas tank of the Nigerian’s van.

  An hour later, José Phelps ducked under the police line tape.

  Floodlights washed out color and turned the carnage two-dimensional: an axle with one wheel attached, its tire still smoldering, grotesque twists of metal strewn across the roadway and into the trees, a man’s shoe obscenely lined up on the asphalt’s center-stripe, a portion of the owner’s foot still in it.

  Renfro Calkins huddled with two of his forensics techs at the far side of the road, looking into the drainage ditch.

  José walked over. “ID?”

  Calkins shook his head. “Gonna have to be DNA. All we gots is hamburger.” He pointed into the ditch. “That’s the largest.”

  José walked over and looked. It took him several seconds to make out the thing that had been an arm. “What’s that in the hand?”

  “Looks like a switch for a garage door. Best guess, these guys set off a bomb in their own vehicle.”

  “How’d they manage that?”

  Calkins shrugged. “They not gonna tell you, José.”

  Gonna be a quiet day today.

  Solomon looked down his alley, then across Wisconsin to where the Nigerian was setting up his stand.

  “For once,” he said to Voice, “you got your shit together.”

  THE LIGHT AND THE DARK

  BY ROBERT WISDOM

  Petworth, N.W.

  They called him Bay Ronnie but I don’t know why. People in the neighborhood said he used to live around here but him and his people moved a long time ago. They said he was mean. Crazy-mean, like he’d rather take a switchblade to you than talk. He wore shades, a black dobb, Dak slacks or Sansabelts, silk socks, and Romeo Ballys. Black as tar, with pure white around the eyes. He would always come down singing from up Sherman Circle way. On Saturday morning, the 22nd of August, you could hear that ugly, husky voice: “…It’s a thin liiiine between love and hate/It’s a thin line between love and hate…”

  Sunday, the 23rd of August, was a muggy and humid morning. It also marked the last sermon Reverend Yancey would preach at the old Gethsemane Baptist Church. Gethsemane had been on that hilltop at Georgia Avenue and Upshur Street for twentysome years. The church was set to be “tore down,” as all the adults were saying around me. “It gon’ be tore down by Monday mornin’.” Torn down to make room for a Safeway. The church was so small I couldn’t see how a big old grocery store was gonna fit, but I didn’t know nuthin’ about buildings. I was eight years old at the time. The youth and senior choirs would sing in a big service that day. My sister was in the youth choir and my mother taught Sunday school.

  We moved into this two-story house on Crittenden Street between Georgia Avenue and 9th Street in the ’50s. There were a couple of white families when we came in, and everybody was friendly, but they had all left the neighborhood maybe a year after we moved in. Just as we started to play together, the white kids had to move someplace else. There were other friends too—Jon, Brian, Mark, and Lisa Rammelford—who lived around the corner on 9th Street before we arrived, along with Darryl Watson, a cousin of my sister’s friend Joyce, who was around most of the time.

  At some point, like most of the other people on the block, my mother and father started renting out rooms in our house. Some were family, like cousins Ivy, June, and Neville, and al
l of us Jamaicans and Trinidadians ate together. There was always loud laughter and somebody telling you what to do. When we first moved in, my parents took in some black Americans and a Chinese man, who were all real different from the West Indians—Miss Ruby, Mr. Palmer, Miss Lucy, and Mr. Price. Mr. Kinney and his come-and-go wife were Americans. They stayed in the room that looked over the backyard and were pretty nice and quiet. There was Tommy and Doris (or Clay and Liston, as my father called them), who were also American. All the Americans and Mr. Lee, the Chinese man, kinda kept to themselves and ate different foods, like grits, which Mr. Kinney taught me to make with butter for breakfast.

  Mr. Lee was a mystery. He always locked the door to his room, even when he was home or just going to the bathroom. He was real polite. When he came home, he’d stand in the living room and look at everybody and bow and say something under his breath with a big grin, like, “…Harerow…” Sometimes his strange speaking went on for many minutes. Then he’d go upstairs for the night. My father loved it, he’d stand up and bow and smile. Then he’d have a big laugh when Mr. Lee left and tell us, “That man got good manners.” It got to the point that when I heard Mr. Lee’s key in the front door, I’d go to the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to do the greeting.

  All three bedrooms in the house were rented out, which left the living room and dining room. My parents slept on a bed in the dining room and my sisters and I shared a foldout sofa-bed in the living room. This felt normal to us. My moth was always saying this setup was just for a little while and it helped them make ends meet.

  There were a lot of times that I didn’t like the folks who stayed at our house. I didn’t appreciate my mom cooking for everybody, and I thought they were stupid when they asked where Jamaica was or turned up their noses at ackee and saltfish or boiled green bananas and mackerel. But everybody knew food was always cooking at our house or at the home of one of our aunts or numerous cousins who lived nearby, so there were always people around and we always felt safe.

  Still, there was a lot I wanted to understand about black Americans. Sometimes I would sneak into their rooms when they weren’t home. Not that I was looking for anything, but I was curious to know who they were—their smells, how they were different from us. Mr. Kinney’s magic shave smelled like rotten eggs; he said he used it so he wouldn’t get razor bumps, but it stank. Snooping in his room one day, I opened the can to see what it looked like and spilled it all over the floor. I swept it up and put it back in the can and cleaned the floor, but then it started smelling like rotten eggs, so I left and prayed that the scent would disappear. If he ever knew what happened, he never said. In the other rooms I would find clothes that didn’t get hung up, leftover fried fish sand-wiches brought home from takeout, suitcases that never got unpacked, framed pictures and snapshots of smiling kids with missing teeth and shorts and barrettes. In some of the pictures taken long before I was born, the young men and women wore tweed suits and hats, their kids in front of placid monotone backdrops of trestled bridges over duck-filled English ponds, with Queen Elizabeth always somewhere in the background. But never any smiles. No Jamaican joy—only stern faces. All kinds of people were coming and going; why my parents chose them over other people was another mystery to me.