01 The Big Blowdown

by George Pelecanos

  “Well, how about it, Florek?”

  “How about what?”

  Stefanos put his foot up on the cooler. “How much they payin’ you down at People’s?”

  “Seventy-five cents an hour, somethin’ like that. Why?”

  Costa walked over with an empty glass in his hand. Stefanos poured the rest of the Ballantine into Costa’s glass.

  “Business is pickin’ up. I’m gonna need some help around here, four, five nights a week. I’m gonna match what they’re payin’ you down there. Only here, you’re gonna get it under the table, cash.” Stefanos rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “You understand?”

  “I guess so,” said Florek.

  “You work out here when we’re busy like tonight, and sometimes you’re gonna help the cook in the back. Unloading, stocking, preppin’ food, things like that. There’s a few things my cook can’t do. Might put a little muscle on you, too, liftin’ things like that. You could use a few pounds.”

  “Yessir.”

  Stefanos turned to his friend. “That okay by you, Costaki?”

  “Me? I don’t give a damn nothing!” He smiled crookedly at Florek, had a sip of beer. Then he went to the television set and pulled its plug from the wall socket. “Little bit of quiet, that’s all I need.”

  “Come on,” said Stefanos, pulling on Florek’s arm. “I’m gonna introduce you to the cook.”

  Florek walked along through the swinging doors, a little dizzy from the beer and the heat. He wasn’t exactly certain as to what had just happened, and he tried to remember if he had agreed back there to any of Nick’s terms. Not that it mattered—he knew that there really wasn’t any doubt that he would take the job; it felt right, being in a place like this, with these kinds of men.

  The cook was sitting on a tall stool, drinking a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette. The cook’s hair was all gray, but his face was smooth and unlined. Now that Florek had a longer look, he could see that this man was much younger than he had first appeared.

  “Panayoti,” said Stefanos to the cook. “I want you to meet our new counter man, Mike Florek.”

  The cook got off the stool, winced a little as he stood. He took a few steps toward Florek, limping deeply. Florek looked at the cook’s left leg: even through the fabric of the trousers, he could see the bend, the awful twist at the knee. Florek stepped forward, met the man halfway, put out his hand. The cook reflexively touched at a black smudge on his face, then extended his own hand. The two of them shook.

  “Mike,” said Florek.

  “Pete Karras,” said the cook. “C’mon, chum, I’ll show you around.”

  Chapter 18

  Peter Karras caught his breath sharply as his foot touched the floor. He tried to relax and let some air out, give it a few seconds to let the moment pass. Three years after the night in the alley, the mornings still gave him trouble. It was hell for Karras, getting out of bed.

  After the operation, when he had been in rehabilitation for a while, the doctors told him that the knee was nearly useless, that the sack of smashed bone and cartilage that had been his left foot would never set just right. He’d have to wear a brace on his leg, they said, with the hope that maybe someday, if he was real good and lucky, he could graduate to a cane. There was also some talk of a special shoe for the foot, a Boris Karloff-looking number with a built-up sole and laces on the side. Of course, on account of the mangled knee, the bum leg would always be shorter than the other. But the Karloff shoe coupled with the cane would lessen the limp.

  Karras asked the doctors if he had heard them right: that if he went along with the program, and didn’t expect a whole lot, then a lucky guy like him, he might be able to make do with a gimp’s shoe and yero’s cane. Is that what the doctor meant to say? The young doctor had laughed skittishly and made several attempts to strike a match to a cigarette.

  Dimitri was crying in the second bedroom of the apartment. Drowsily calling out, “Maaama, Maaama, Maaaaaa…,” probably standing up in his crib about now, his chubby olive hands wrapped around the wood rails. Eleni would be in the kitchen, cooking some breakfast, listening to her records, playing them just loud enough that she couldn’t hear the kid. Karras figured he better get up and help the little guy out.

  Those first few steps in the morning were always the worst. He always worked through it, though, like he had worked through the worst of it in the beginning, without the brace from the very start and later without the cane. As for the shoe, a cobbler in Chinatown had stretched out one of his brogues, fitted it with a couple of padded inner soles, and Karras had made do with that. He walked, and when it hurt so bad he thought he’d scream, he kept walking. Soon he learned how to keep the pain from showing on his face, so that after a while, except in the morning and on very cold days, the pain crawled away like a beaten dog to a black corner in the back of his mind. That was the mental part of it; it was the physical part he couldn’t lick. Karras knew that he would always have that damned and goddamned limp.

  “Maaaaa…,” said Dimitri.

  Karras got off the bed, grunted as he walked across the hardwood floor. He pulled his underpants away from his sleeper’s hard-on, scratched beneath his balls. The pain was rough this morning, rougher than most. He could take the pills he had in the bathroom, the ones he had gotten from a pharmacist on 14th and Colorado Avenue, a friend of a friend. Karras always thought it over, ended up never taking the pills. A doper was just another kind of cripple to him. Still, he kept the pills in the medicine cabinet, never considered throwing them away. It was good to know that they were there.

  Out in the hall, he pushed on Dimitri’s door, opened it to a wall of heat. He had told Eleni to leave the door open at night, what with the radiator in there, but she insisted on keeping it closed. And there he was, standing in the crib, his cheeks flushed like some living Raggedy Andy doll, his black hair as damp as if he had been sleeping beside a furnace.

  “Da,” said Dimitri, his eyes—the same shade of brown as Eleni’s, the same exact shape—registering mild disappointment.

  “Son.”

  Karras lifted him from the crib. Dimitri’s sleeping outfit, the powder blue one with the sewed-on feet, was wet around the crotch.

  “Eleni!” yelled Karras.

  “What?” came the weak response from the kitchen.

  “The pethi is wet!”

  “Then change his diaper!”

  Karras looked dolefully at the stack of cloth folded neatly near the cup of safety pins on the table by the crib. A picture of a bear wearing a baseball cap had been painted on the table. Karras felt ridiculous, standing there with the kid in his arms, the cartoon bear’s eyes bugging idiotically in his direction.

  “Diapers,” he said to his son. “Someone ought to let your mom in on a little secret: I don’t know how to operate these damn things.”

  Dimitri pointed to the door. “Mom.”

  Karras lowered the boy to the floor, steadied him on his feet, patted him on the rump.

  “Yeah,” said Karras. “You go on and see Mom. Mom’ll fix you up.”

  Dimitri stumbled once, regained his footing as he went giggling out the door. Two years old—Eleni always corrected Karras, had to remind him that Dimitri was “eighteen months”—and the kid was already running around, putting a few words together. Karras watched him go, a stocky, dark boy, more Triandokidis than Karras. The old man had noticed it straight off, the day Eleni and Pete had brought the infant home from the hospital: “He’s no Spartan, that one. Miazi ti mitera tou, aftos.” After that, Karras’s father rarely paid attention to the boy, despite the fact that Dimitri was his namesake and his blood. Peter Karras should have been angry, but oddly, he was not. The boy did favor his mother, both in looks and gesture, and given a choice, young Dimitri would run to her over him every time. From the start, Karras felt disconnected from him, wondering sometimes if a bond would ever grow between them, if he would ever really feel like a father to the boy. And then he wondered i
f that was what he wanted after all.

  Karras went to the bathroom, pulled his softening cock from his underpants and stood over the head. His urine split and went off in two directions, some of it splashing onto the black and white tiles of the bathroom floor. His first piss of the day was always like this; and it had been that way for his old man. Karras smiled, remembering the mornings he’d stand in the door frame of his parents’ bathroom as a boy, watching the old man pissing two streams, hungover and pressing one palm flat against the wall. Back then, Karras believed that his father had more than one dick, that this was what happened when a boy became a man. He used to wonder when he would begin to grow his second one, too.

  Karras washed his face, looked in the mirror. Twenty-seven years old, and all-the-way gray. His father, he had gone gray early as well. Gray or no, Karras could still get the looks, if the girls didn’t happen to catch his walk. Then they’d look away. But on good days Karras could still pass for a blue-eyed Hodiak. John Hodiak with a limp, and a full head of gray hair.

  Karras found his robe hanging on a hook behind the bathroom door. He put it on and went out to the kitchen.

  The sound of Betty Hutton singing “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief” hit him as he walked into the room. Dimitri stood in his playpen in the middle of the living area, holding onto the netting, squatting up and down in rough cadence to the song’s beat. Personally, Karras couldn’t stand those novelty numbers, and to top it off Hutton had the hardness of a man. But the kid liked the tune, and Karras knew that Eleni had put it on for him.

  “Mornin’,” said Karras to Eleni’s back. Eleni turned her head and smiled, then went back to the bread she was soaking in a bowl filled with egg yolk beaten into milk.

  She tossed her mane of brown hair. “I’m makin’ a little French toast, honey.”

  “Okay by me.”

  “Pete?”

  She wanted something. He could tell it by the singsong way she said his name.

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “You think we might be able to sneak out to a picture this weekend?”

  “To see what?”

  “There’s this movie called The Boy With Green Hair, it’s opening down at the Keith’s.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Robert Ryan’s in it.”

  “I like Robert Ryan. Ryan’s the McCoy. But I didn’t ask you who was in it. I asked what the picture was about.”

  “There’s this little boy, see, and he wakes up with a head of green hair. People treat him differently because of it, like he’s some kind of freak—”

  “Sounds like a million laughs. I don’t think so, baby.”

  “You never wanna take me out.”

  Karras checked out his wife’s backside. She hadn’t lost much of the weight she had put on from having the kid, would probably never lose it now. And he had been warned about her ankles. He could remember when he just got back from the war, when he had brought her over to meet the folks. His father had taken him aside, made some negative comment about her family, the village they had come from, what they had not amounted to, like that. Then his father had gotten to the real point.

  “And one more thing,” Dimitri Karras had said. “She’s got them fat ankles.”

  “So what. Pop?”

  “You marry a girl with fat ankles, the rest of hers gonna get fat, too, goddamn right.”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes.”

  “I’m serious, boy. Acous? You marry a girl, there’s a good chance she’s gonna get fat anyway, they all gonna get fat, nothin’ you can do about that. But why you wanna marry one you know’s gonna get fat? Huh?”

  Karras married her, and she had put on the weight, and she had kept it on, and that had been fine with him. He liked a woman with a little something on her. Anyway, he liked it on Eleni. She carried it well, her big-boned legs firm and strong, her breasts full and unsagging. Eleni, standing there in that red rayon robe he had picked up for her at Morton’s for three and change—yeah, she looked pretty damn good. Karras began to imagine her beneath the robe, caught the dryness in his mouth, looked away. He knew he ought to save it for later in the day.

  Karras picked the Times-Herald up off the kitchen table, glanced at the front page. The Reds in Hungary had kicked out Selden Chapin, the American foreign minister, after Chapin had gone and stuck his nose in the Cardinal Mindszenty affair. The Soviets had given the Catholic cardinal a life stretch for his anti-commie activities, but Karras thought, so what? Let the cardinal rot there, if it would keep a country of boys out of another war. If there was a God, and this God had any justice in Him, wouldn’t saving young lives be His racket? Wouldn’t that be what He would want?

  “Take these empty bottles out, will ya, honey? The milkman’s gonna be here soon.”

  “Sure thing,” said Karras, not glancing up from the paper.

  Below the fold, a story appeared about the new lead on the latest prosti killing, the third in as many years. This one had died like the others, a razor cut from throat to groin. The lead was a phony, a plant from a department eager to convince the public that they were on the case—Karras knew as much from a conversation with Jimmy Boyle. Karras wondered when the blueboys would figure this one out; overworked and plain stumped by the seemingly motiveless intensity of the killings, and not used to a repeat-murder case remaining unsolved for such a long period of time, the detectives appeared to be chasing their tails. At least it looked that way to Karras. And Boyle had told him that the department had nada.

  “These bottles, honey.”

  Karras looked up at Eleni, standing there holding the empty bottles. Her robe had opened a little, giving to a view of the tops of her breasts. Goddamn her, she never wore a brassiere underneath that robe.

  “Oh, what the hell,” said Karras.

  Karras went to the record player, took the Hutton off the platter. He found Stan Kenton’s “Artistry Jumps” in the stack, put that on, let it spin. He limped across the room, doing a stutter step to the tune. Dimitri bounced up and down, holding the netting of the playpen walls. Karras moved toward Eleni.

  “What’s got into you, anyway?”

  “Just feel like cuttin’ the rug this morning,” said Karras.

  “We don’t have any rugs, Pete,” said Eleni, her nose crinkling from the repressed smile. “And you never could dance.”

  “Come here.”

  Karras took the bottles from Eleni’s hands, placed them on the kitchen table. He danced her a couple of steps around the room, opened his robe, pushed himself against her and gave it some friction as he kissed her softly, running his tongue along her gums. Eleni’s breath smelled of coffee.

  “Pete.”

  “Aw, shut up.”

  “I haven’t even brushed my teeth.”

  “Shut up, baby.”

  They moved to the living room, where Karras fell back into an overstuffed lounge chair. He drew her down to him.

  “Mom,” said Dimitri from the playpen. He began to cry.

  “The pethi.” Eleni’s breath had become short.

  “He’s all right.”

  Karras fumbled at Eleni’s robe, opened it. He pinched the nipple of her right breast, kissed her roughly on the mouth. She pushed herself against him. He freed his cock, rubbed the head of it against her damp panties. Eleni bucked, made a grunting sound, pulled the fabric of her panties aside.

  “Est else etimi,” said Karras.

  “Elk Pete.”

  She made a small wave of her hips, forward and down again to let him in. And then he was in, deep into her pussy, which was wet and always hot.

  “Um,” she said.

  “Quit complainin,’” said Karras.

  She threw her head back; a string of saliva dripped from the side of her mouth onto Karras’s chest. The Kenton band kicked it in the room, the sound drowning out the boy’s crying. Karras watched Eleni’s right leg convulse, watched it beat against the side of the chair.

  Karras laughed. “Just look
at you, baby. You’re kickin’ like a mule.”

  “Scase, Pete.”

  Karras did as he was told: He shut his mouth and closed his eyes.

  “Hey, Pete,” said Eleni. “Where you goin’, all dressed up like that? You’re not wearin’ that suit to work, are you?”

  Karras had taken his shower, dressed in his blue, chalk-striped, double-breasted suit. He stood in the kitchen buttoning the jacket.

  “I guess I forgot to tell you. The new kid is handling lunch today. I’m gonna go in after that.”

  “The Polish kid?”

  “Yeah, Mike Florek. It’s only been a week, but he’s catchin’ on pretty good.”

  “You better look out. He might catch on good enough to bounce you out of your job.”

  “I’m not worried. There’s plenty of customers now to keep all of us busy. Anyway, Nick’ll always treat me right.”

  Eleni rested a fist against her hip. “So where you goin’?”

  “I heard about a couple of businesses downtown that were up for sale.”

  “What kind of businesses?”

  Karras fumbled with the change in his pocket. “There’s this soda bar concession…and a little lunch counter I got my eye on, too.”

  Eleni’s face brightened. “Oh, Pete!”

  Karras moved his eyes away from Eleni’s. “I said I was lookin’, that’s all. Just trying to get some kind of idea.”

  Dimitri sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, banging a wooden spoon against a pot. Karras went to him, bent down, kissed him on the top of his head. The boy’s hair was wet with sweat—Christ, the kid was gonna roast in this place.

  “See ya, Jimmy.”

  “Da,” said Dimitri.

  “Pete?”

  “Yes, sweetheart.”

  “Phillip’s has a GE vacuum cleaner on sale this week, one of those new upright models. Thirty-nine ninety-five. You can pay on it, too, a buck a week.”

  “What’s wrong with just sweeping out the place with a broom? We don’t even have any carpets.”

  “I was thinkin’ we could look into a couple of throw rugs, too.”