D.C. Noir

by George Pelecanos

  “Mama!” said Leon, who could see that her slow response to shutting down the crazy idea meant she was considering it. “We’re talking about Sophia. Lo can talk all that foolishness about the Kingdom, but she ain’t his sister.”

  “Lorenzo has been just as much of a brother to her as you,” defended his mother. “I don’t recall you changing her diapers, mister. When have you ever taken a real interest in anyone in this family? You got your position as the president of Groove, but the first sign of trouble…? You’re willing to cut a deal with them!”

  “We’re talking about the Mafia!” said Leon.

  “And they bleed like anyone else,” countered Lorenzo. “I know how we can checkmate them.”

  “How?! How you gonna do that? Huh? We only have a few days for Sophia—”

  The door opened and in wheeled Rayford Devereaux, the wounded Lear who had retired as the founding president of Groove Records years ago to work on his book. When Betty Lou had recently decided to leave the company’s helm to return to composing, that’s when the mob had spotted something fat and unprotected for the taking.

  “What are you two arguing over now?” asked Rayford as he approached them. The very sight of their father in a wheel chair underscored how his two years in prison had broken and discouraged him. He had finally given up, after battling for years to prove that black music was the social glue keeping Negroes together.

  No one had yet mentioned to him that the center of his heart had been stolen.

  “Daddy,” said Lorenzo, “something has happened.” Lorenzo peered around the room and his eyes settled on Leon, who, as the chief executive of Groove Records, ought to be the bearer of bad news. Leon looked away.

  “Sophia has been kidnapped,” said Lorenzo.

  Their father’s white eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead as he turned to his wife, who only nodded yes.

  “Who?”

  “The mob. Carmine D’Ambrosio,” replied Betty Lou. “They have given us seventy-two hours to make a decision. They want to be our, uhm, partners.”

  “You mean our masters,” corrected her husband. He turned to the CEO of his patrimony. “What’s your plan, son?”

  “Plan? Uh…” Leon stammered.

  “You got something up your sleeve or not?!”

  “Daddy, it’s the mob,” explained Leon. “They just want the company—parts of it.”

  “I’ll give them every bit of money we have to get my baby girl back, but they ain’t getting their hands on this firm! No deal.”

  “They’ll kill her…” started Leon, shocked at his father’s ruthlessness. He thought it had been drained out of him.

  Rayford Devereaux looked at his son and realized at that very moment that he had made a terrible mistake. Leon saw Groove Records only as a business, not an empire or dynasty, certainly not a way of life, a trust. He himself may have been a tired old nigger in the eyes of many, but he had become such the old way: arrested by the government and beaten in jail because he refused to denounce some of his artists as Communist. He spent two years in jail for Contempt of Congress, and many a patriotic Negro had stomped his ass in bids for early release.

  “Son, this is a ship, the USS Groove, and we’re officers. We go down with the ship. Money? Let them Italian crackers have it, but they will not get this company. Not even over Sophia’s body! This is our heritage.”

  Leon gaped at his mother.

  Betty, however, saw a miracle: Her husband was back. The old Rayford Devereaux, who won her heart forty years before when she was a college student under his tutelage, had empowered her to defy her blues-hating, preacher-crazy father. That man had re-emerged…but at the price of her daughter?

  “Lorenzo has an idea, Ray,” said Betty. “It’s risky.”

  “Hell,” said Rayford, “if Kennedy could risk the goddamn world over Cuba and make the Russians pull their missiles out of Dodge, I’ll take a chance.”

  “Yeah, for your record company,” muttered Leon.

  Lorenzo told his father the idea: Call in the Original Kingdom of Afrika. Seeing that the new chief executive of Groove Records had no other idea or plan, Rayford Devereaux dispatched Lorenzo to the temple immediately. Time was tight.

  “WHAT?” said Jimmy Falco. “Are you sure?…Damn . Okay…Yeah, I see…I understand…Right. Gotcha.”

  Jimmy “the Hydrant” hung up the pay phone at a Maryland rest stop just outside of the District line. He watched the cars along the highway and couldn’t shake off what he’d heard. He had to whack the bitch. It was fortunate that he had brought along Ricci, the sick bastard. It was one thing to follow orders, but Ricci was the kind of sick fuck who actually enjoyed hurting people.

  Jimmy got into his black Buick and returned to the place where he and Ricci were keeping the colored gal. When he had first heard the assignment, he was excited. Wow, he thought, the daughter of the owners of his favorite R&B label. Jimmy loved R&B; his hero, from his own tribe, was Louis Prima, the Italian-American who sounded colored because he had grown up in New Orleans. As a street-corner boy, one of the last Italians who lived in East Harlem before the spics took it over, Jimmy Falco had sung on stoops with his group, Spics & Spades. Darker than most Italians, he passed for PR, and fucked as many of them as he did Italian gals. Colored women? Shit, he couldn’t get enough: sweet, dark butter.

  After the two hoods grabbed the girl blocks away from Howard University earlier that week, they had driven out to Maryland and put a lid on her. She was scared crazy. She should be. Ricci was as big as the Hydrant was short, though the latter was in charge. Five-foot-four, one hundred seventy pounds of muscle and man, Jimmy was on the rise as a soldier and future crew leader; he followed orders, but did so with style and stealth. Whenever he put some sucker to sleep, he carried out his assignment as painlessly as possible.

  But whacking a dame? Orders were orders. The business transaction didn’t go right, and something new had come up.

  When he turned the bend onto the gravel road, he could see stars winking at him through the trees above. The air was clean, unlike stinky New York. He parked, then pulled his squat muscular body out of the car, lit a Camel, and trudged toward the little bungalow. He would give Ricci the order to waste her. When he reached the door, he knocked on it three times but heard nothing. He looked around, placed his hand on his heater, and knocked again. Still no response. He put his ear to the door and listened.

  That motherfucker.

  Jimmy darted around to the side of the bungalow and peeked into the window of the bedroom where the hostage was being kept. Ricci, a towering hulk, was having his way with the girl, who was sitting on the bed with her arms and legs bound.

  Jimmy cursed himself for leaving Ricci with her. Ricci had talked about doing something to her, but they both knew that anything untoward with a hostage was strictly forbidden unless sanctioned by the don.

  Now, Jimmy had an extremely serious disciplinary problem on his hands; it was a good thing that Ricci wasn’t a “made” man. The Hydrant went to the back door and quietly jimmied the lock. Crossing the room without a sound, he pulled out his silencer and affixed it to his piece.

  When Ricci heard his name, he knew instantly he was dead. But reflex action made him go for his holster. The Hydrant plugged him four times: one in the head, two to his heart, and the fourth blew off his putz.

  The colored gal screamed her head off until Jimmy told her to shut up and pulled her into the living room. She was in shock, having been struck a few times by Ricci before he molested her.

  Exhausted and disoriented, Jimmy decided to report the sudden turn of events. Jimmy untied her legs and told her to grab her shoes. They were heading out.

  Back at the rest stop, he parked the car and looked at her.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” he said. “That was very unprofessional. That’s why he was punished. I have to make a call. If you even try to get out of the car, I’ll have to take care of you the way I took care of him. Do you u
nderstand?”

  The girl was still in shock but had enough awareness to grasp what the short but handsomely ugly man was saying. Jimmy left the car, made his calls, and was back in. He looked at the colored gal again and thought about what he had to do, something that sickened him.

  As they approached D.C., two other cars joined them and they drove together to Union Station. Late at night, under the sleepy eyes of indifferent travelers, an exchange was made: a life for a life.

  Connie D’Ambrosio, dressed in a chic Chanel suit, was escorted by Dr. Minister Mallory Rex and his chief lieutenant; keeping security were several well-dressed black men known as the Sword of Izlam. Sophia Devereaux, dressed in the dungaree slacks and red cashmere sweater she had been wearing for days, was escorted by Jimmy the Hydrant; they were backed up by several Gambino hoods.

  The two men in charge said nothing. They each nodded, prompting their hostages to cross over to their respective.

  Finally, Jimmy spoke: “Mr. D’Ambrosio wishes for me to convey his apologies to the Devereaux family about this misunderstanding, and assures you that it will never happen again.”

  “It better not,” came the curt reply from the minister. He turned around, taking Sophia with him, his security team covering their backs.

  Both parties vanished as the early morning sun seeped through the large windows of the train station.

  Jimmy and two other members of the Gambino family headed north with Connie, who held the photos and negatives in her purse, greatly relieved that the whole situation was over. She talked about the “spades” and how they had kept her locked up. The boring food they served her…how stupid those moulianis were. She carried on for a while in this manner.

  The car soon pulled back onto the gravel road and came to a stop at the bungalow. Jimmy, sitting up front, told the driver and the other guy, Marcos, to go inside and collect Ricci’s body, which would be stuffed into the trunk.

  The Hydrant didn’t understand what hit him: It was very unprofessional, but he started to cry. He was spent.

  “What’s the matter, Jimmy?” asked Connie, who treated the lug as one of many “uncles.”

  “Nothing,” he choked. When Connie reached forward to console him, he grabbed her arm and pulled her over the seat before she could feel his stiletto cutting her throat.

  “Why?” asked Rex.

  The Messenger had sent the photos of Connie D’Ambrosio cavorting with Douglas to her father. The Messenger knew that her father would be compelled to murder her to avenge his honor as a man of respect. The deal was that the young woman would call her father and tell him she was being held in exchange for another person—nothing more.

  Rex felt that sending the photos was a betrayal, and that the young woman, though a she-devil, had been needlessly sacrificed. “We gave our word,” he said. “That means something.”

  “My son,” reflected the Messenger, feeling triumphant, “you gave your word. Besides, one’s word only means something if the other person is worthy of receiving it.”

  As a gift, the Messenger handed Rex a copy of one of his favorite books: Machiavelli’s The Prince

  Dr. Minister Mallory Rex withdrew from his teacher’s chamber. He had been firmly reinstated, with good standing, into the O.K.A., and the Messenger’s son, Kwami, would become an executive at Groove Records. But as he walked through the halls of the Temple of Ife No. 1, taking in the admiring gazes of those he passed, the minister wondered what the cost was to his soul, and how long would he keep it.

  Time would tell.

  THE DUPE

  BY JIM FUSILLI

  K Street, N.W.

  Though it was not quite 1 o’clock, the Bombay Club was already filled to capacity for Sunday brunch. Its décor reminiscent of a British officers’ lounge in occupied India, the restaurant’s dining room shimmered with the buzz of convivial conversation from the customary mix of Senators, Congressmen, White House aides, K Street lobbyists, TV pundits, and print journalists. The insiders acknowledged each other discretely.

  Surrounded by the whiff of coriander and piano jazz played with stately reserve, Jordan Port sat at the bar, his back to the clipped cordiality. He hunched into his camel’s hair topcoat, its collar turned high, incredulous still that Mendes had invited him to where he was no longer welcomed.

  Port had known Mendes for decades; he interned under her at the Des Moines Register, and she edited his first book, Restoring the Soul of America, a surprising bestseller that had made him all the more useful in the eyes of his handlers. Though the two had lunch together earlier in the week, he accepted her email invitation to the Bombay Club because he needed her. Taking a circuitous route that revealed his desperation, he arrived at the restaurant two blocks from the White House grounds well aware she was likely his last friend.

  Sweating under his violet shirt and black cashmere blazer, Port anxiously surveyed the room through the veined mirror behind the bar. He saw a half dozen people with whom he’d had dinner at their homes, and there were at least that many with whom he had shared a dais at a conference or a podium at a rally.

  They are shunning me, he thought. Every one of them.

  And all he had done was write a new book, one that could be summarized by what Ronald Reagan said some thirty years ago

  “When we begin thinking of government as instead of they, we’ve been here too long.”

  “Mr. Port?”

  He turned to find a young Indian man, a rail-thin bus-boy.

  “Mr. Port,” he said compliantly, “a message, please, from Ms. Mendes. She prefers for you to wait outside.”

  Port looked into the man’s dark eyes for a sign of sincerity. He wondered if the restaurant’s manager had been asked to send him elsewhere.

  “Please, sir,” said the Indian man with a sweep of his arm. “The lady is waiting.”

  Port nodded, left the bar stool, and headed out onto Connecticut Avenue.

  He was greeted there by pale sunlight and a sinewy black man who crossed the avenue to approach him. The black man wore a vest with the yellow logo of a company that owned a chain of parking garages. The winter wind rippled the sleeves of his white shirt.

  He towered over Port, who was as lithe and delicate as a young teen.

  “She’s in Room 523 at the St. Regis,” he said, repeating the room number.

  Port shivered and dropped his hands into his coat pockets. “I don’t understand. The St. Regis—”

  “Ana Mendes,” he said directly. “You’d better go now.”

  Port nodded and began to walk briskly toward I Street.

  When Port turned the corner, the valet dashed back across Connecticut Avenue to the garage where the Indian busboy was behind the wheel of a black Cadillac Escalade. The valet removed the uniform top he’d been given and tossed it behind the front seat.

  The busboy drove quickly toward I Street, but not so fast as to overtake Port.

  The St. Regis was one block away.

  Five days earlier, Port was summoned to Off the Record, a clubby bar in the basement of the Hay Adams Hotel. Douglas Weil Jr. was waiting, and with a wave he called him to a cherrywood table set deep in a dark corner. Framed political cartoons and caricatures rested on the wall above Weil’s neat salt-and-pepper hair.

  Weil had ordered a 2001 Viognier from a Virginia winery, and he poured Port a glass as his guest crossed the crowded room and eased into the banquette.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice, Jordie,” he said.

  “Always a pleasure, Doug,” he replied cheerfully, concealing his nervousness.

  They were both in their mid-forties, but Port’s famed boyishness and Weil’s grinding sense of purpose made them seem years apart.

  Before Port could reply, Weil said, “My father is disappointed, Jordie.”

  Port waited for Weil to fill his glass before he offered a silent toast.

  Weil returned the gesture, though his eyes were slits. “I read the manuscript,” he said, as the glasses met
. “You are way, way out of line.”

  “What did your father say?” He sipped the delightful wine, a favorite for its taste rich in peaches and apricots, and heady floral bouquet. “He knows we have to take back—”

  The thickset Weil leaned toward his guest. “Don’t, Jordie,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I read it. I don’t want to have to hear it.”

  Port had known a warning was coming, and he surmised it might be Weil who delivered it. Off the Record, a favorite of the city’s political insiders, was a suitable venue: All of Washington would know he’d been chastised, and thus responsibility for his actions couldn’t be attributed to the American Center for Culture in Communications, of which Doug was president and his father founder and chairman emeritus.

  But Port believed Weil could be swayed. “The principles your father shared with President Reagan mean nothing to these people, Doug. You know this.”

  Jutted chin hovering above the table candle, Weil said, “Don’t be a simpleton, Jordie. We have what we’ve worked toward for more than thirty years. No one is walking away from it because of you.”

  “When Ronald Reagan said a balanced budget was essential to restoring America, Doug, the deficit was $66 billion,” Port continued. “Today, it’s more than ten times that—after Clinton brought it to zero.”

  “Jordie…”

  The K Street lobbyists and White House staffers who peered with curiosity at the two men couldn’t tell from appearances what they were saying. They saw the twinkle in Port’s pale-blue eyes and his dimpled smile, an expression familiar to millions of Americans from talk shows, book jackets, magazines, and newspapers. All seemed well.

  “Middle America is being compelled to act against its own interests,” Port said, as he returned the chilled glass to the table. “They need tax relief, affordable health insurance, a promise fulfilled on Social Security…Doug, the ACCC can help them. We can help—”