01 The Big Blowdown

by George Pelecanos

  Wong smiled, lighted a tailor-made, let the cigarette dangle from the side of his mouth. He kicked up his chin, squinted his eyes. “Su tells me you were in war. The Pacific.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That where you get your leg?”

  “Jap shell,” said Karras. He caught the blonde’s eyes flicking down to his knee.

  “You kill many Japanese?”

  “Tons.”

  Wong showed some rotten teeth. “Then I like you fine. The Japanese, they very bad people.”

  “Yes,” said Karras. Whatever it will take to get you to talk.

  Karras pushed the photograph of Lola Florek across the table. Wong did not look down.

  “So now we talk.”

  “You and me alone,” said Karras.

  “I wanna stay,” said the blonde, tossing the orangeish mane of straw off her shoulder.

  “Beat it,” said Wong, keeping his eyes on Karras as he jerked his head sharply toward the front door. “Brow.”

  Brow. It’s “blow,“you pimp.

  Karras thought of Recevo, how if he had been here the two of them would have had a good laugh now at the expense of this flyweight. Seeing Recevo earlier in the night, Karras had been reminded that he had not laughed like that in a very long time.

  The woman snorted, rolled her eyes. Neither Wong nor Karras paid attention. After a few more second-bill theatrics the woman left the table. Wong picked up the photograph, studied it. Some ash fell from his cigarette into his lap.

  “She’s not one of mine,” he said.

  “Maybe you’ve seen her around. Like over at the Eastern House.”

  “How you know about Eastern House, Kawwas?”

  “I grew up in this neighborhood. We used to call it the ‘Eastern Cat-house’ when we were kids.”

  Wong nodded. “1 know many woman at Eastern House. This is one I have not seen.” He took the tailor-made from his mouth, crushed it in the ashtray. “Why you come to me?”

  “You look like a businessman. I see you sittin’ over here with a blonde hooker—”

  “All my women blonde,” bragged Wong.

  “No Chinese?”

  “One Chinese woman to every ten Chinese men. Chinese women too valuable to whore. We marry them, make whore of them like that. Whore who make baby, clean house.”

  “This one I’m looking for, she’s taking drugs, too.”

  “Not unusual. Drugs make very loyal whore.”

  Karras tapped his finger on Lola’s thick-featured face. “So you don’t know her.”

  “No.”

  Karras took back the photograph. If not for Su, he might have slapped this creep around, just for fun. Instead he shook Wong’s hand.

  “Thanks for your time.”

  “Okay, Kawwas. I see you around.”

  Boyle was back at the four-top, out of uniform and having a little gin with Su. Karras limped across the dining room, letting the fisheyes from the patrons pass. He had a seat, lighted a cigarette.

  “Jimmy.”

  “Pete.”

  Su knocked off the rest of his gin. “I seen you shake Wong’s hand. How you like the way it feel?”

  “Next time I’ll pet a snake.”

  “You find anything out, though?”

  “Nothing. Not even the secret handshake.”

  Su grinned. “Well, I tried. Anyway, I gotta get back to my cab, make a little dough.”

  “So long, Su.”

  “See ya, Karras. Boyle.”

  Su speed-walked from the restaurant. Karras poured gin from the teapot, watched Boyle’s fingers beat out a rhythm on the table. Gene Krupa with flesh sticks.

  “What’s with all the energy tonight, Jimmy?”

  “Couldn’t sleep, that’s all. I’m glad you called me, Pete. I stopped workin’ nights, I’m crawling the walls, looking for something to do.”

  “You quit workin’ the door for La Fontaine?”

  “Yeah, that’s done. La Fontaine’s eighty-one years old, it ain’t gonna be long before he kicks. And the feds are stepping up on those gambling raids out in the county. What’s that DA’s name, been in the papers every day?”

  “You’re talking about Fay.”

  “Yeah, him. His boys raided Snags Lewis’s joint last week, got twenty grand from the Crossroads alone. And they got forty-five numbers-and-ponies men in a raid on Ninth Street last month, screwed up the handbook action for a whole week. Course, Charlie Ford’ll get ‘em all off. The point is, it just ain’t kosher for cops to be pulling bounce jobs out at those clubs anymore. Eventually, the shit’s gonna rain down on them, too. And it looks bad when promotion time comes around.”

  “I never liked that county action, myself,” said Karras. “To tell you the truth, it never felt right to me, being outside the city. I was always lookin’ over my shoulder.”

  “That’s you, Pete. That’s you all over.”

  “Here you go, chum.” Karras slid the picture of Lola in front of Boyle.

  “This that whore you told me about on the phone?”

  “Yeah. You keep the picture, the kid’s got another one for me. Lola Florek’s her name—I wrote it on the back.”

  “I hear anything,” said Boyle, “I’ll let you know.”

  Boyle glanced nervously around the room. Karras tapped his cigarette ash off in the tray, studied his friend: pale, flabby, with shaded half-moons beneath hard, glassy eyes.

  “Want a little soup or somethin’, Jimmy? They got a hot and sour here, so good it’ll make you sing about it in the street.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Soup’ll make you feel better. You look like you might be comin’ down with something.”

  “I never felt better. You Greeks, always pushin’ food.”

  “Okay, Jimmy. Suit yourself.”

  They had another teapot of gin, and Karras smoked a few more cigarettes, and somewhere in the middle of the night he decided he’d had enough. Boyle had done most of the talking, gone on about the prostitute murders and about their childhood and other silly things that began to make less and less sense as the time passed. It was like he was in love with the sound of his own voice. When Karras turned at the door to wave goodbye, Boyle was still sitting at the table, beating out a drum roll with his fingers, some elusive number he could neither name nor forget, like the strange tingle that came and went inside his head.

  Out on the street, Karras headed for his building. A ‘40 Chevy coupe passed on H. The kid in the passenger side put his head out the window, yelled something at Karras. Karras kept walking, listened to their laughter fade.

  He entered his building, began the long trip up the steps. He stopped once, bent over, rubbed at his knee, a habit that did little to erase the pain. He made it to the apartment, entered quietly, hung his topcoat in the closet. He checked on Dimitri, leaned into the crib, smelled the boy’s hair. Karras left the door open as he exited the room. That way the boy would not be so hot.

  Peter Karras undressed, slipped under the sheets of his bed. Eleni slept on her side, her breath deep and heavy. Karras lay beside her, let one arm fall around her shoulders. He pushed his groin below her buttocks. She shifted beneath him, his cock settling between her thick thighs.

  “Pete.”

  “It’s me, baby. Go to sleep.”

  Chapter 24

  Mike Florek stood at the prep table, reached for a tomato that floated in a water-filled bus tray among a dozen others. Florek held a small instrument in his hand that looked like something from his mother’s knitting basket, an orange-handled piece with a round, sharp-toothed cap on its end. He dug the cap into the edge of the tomato’s stem, careful not to let it slip too deeply beneath the red skin. He cut around the stem in a clockwise direction, scooped the stem out, and dropped the tomato back in the water. Florek liked coring the tomatoes, getting them ready for Nick to slice. Usually, when Florek was done, Nick would come over, give the tomatoes a brief inspection, offer a mild criticism, and tell Florek
he had done a good job. But not today. Today Nick just walked to the prep table, lifted up the bus tray with a grunt, and carried it back out to the front of the house without a word. It had been like that with Nick all morning, and with Costa as well.

  Florek looked across the kitchen at Costa, who had not spoken more than a handful of words to him that day. Costa had opened his switchblade and was now making a two-inch cut at the top of the long leather sheath before him. He made another cut parallel to the first, then went down past the halfway point of the sheath and made two more identical slices with the knife.

  “What’re you doing?” said Florek.

  “I’m makin’ somethin’,” said Costa. “You just keep workin’, take care of that lettuce underneath the table there. We gotta get this place ready for lunch.”

  Florek picked up the cardboard crate of lettuce, dropped it onto the prep table. Coring lettuce was not the same as coring tomatoes—coring lettuce was hard work. And after a few minutes of slamming his palm against the lettuce core, loosening it and then digging his fingers in and pulling the core out by hand, he was always ready to move onto something else. His first couple of days at Nick’s, Florek’s palms were bruised purple from the job.

  “Ah,” said Costa, who had removed his belt and had passed it through the slices he made in the sheath. “I’m gonna need one more belt. Then it’s gonna work pretty goddamn good.”

  “What’s that, Costa?”

  “Nothing, Florek. I’m only talkin’ to myself a little bit here. You just worry about that lettuce.”

  Costa folded the blade back into the handle of the knife, slipped it into his pocket. Yessir, there was nothing like a good knife when you wanted to get a job done. A gun, you had to clean it and buy ammunition and worry about the casings you left behind, and anyway, a gun, it could blow up for no reason right in your face. After all, look what had happened to Niko with that cheap Italian pistol of his, up in Batavia, New York. Yeah, you could have your pistols and your shotguns and everything else; close in, there was nothing like a knife.

  Costa smiled crookedly, thinking that it was a knife that had brought him to America in the first place. That knife was beautiful, the best one he ever owned, a six-inch blade with an inlaid, onyx handle. Too bad he had to leave it in the man who married his sister. The bastard, he had reneged on the dowry he promised when he asked for Stella’s hand.

  The day of the wedding, after the papathe had made them man and wife, Costa had asked his new brother-in-law about the details and whereabouts of the promised dowry. The bastard had laughed then, told Costa to relax, to have a good time at the party—that the dowry, the prika, it was a myth he had dreamed up to secure Stella’s hand. The prika never existed, it held no more value than smoke. The bastard laughed, like it was some big joke. Costa laughed then, too; he let them have their fun at the party, danced and ate their fayito and drank with them all, even wished his sister and her new husband well as they went off late that night to their wedding bed. And the next morning, as the lying, laughing bastard walked down the road to get his first cafe, Costa stepped out from behind a stand of olive trees beside the cafeneion, and plunged the knife with the onyx handle deep into the bastard’s armpit, shoved it straight in and clean down to the hilt, twisted it there as the warm blood spilled over his hand. A cousin came from behind another tree as Costa stepped back, handed Costa a handkerchief to wipe away the blood. Costa thanked him and walked away. He kept right on going that morning, to Cairo first and on to America, where he met a fellow Spartan named Nick Stefanos, a young immigrant running bootleg hootch in upstate New York. Costa had never looked back, had never spoken or contacted his sister again, knew he could not return—as the man whom he had killed, this man had cousins, too. He felt neither regret nor remorse, though occasionally he would dream about the incident, the dream ending with the look on the bastard’s face: surprise at first, coupled with raw pain, and then fear, the fear of the black unknown that was swiftly rushing toward him as Costa gave him the knife, gave it to him real good and quick. Yes, close in, there was nothing like a knife.

  “You workin’ on that lettuce?” said Stefanos, stepping into the kitchen, a tomato in one hand and a knife in the other.

  “Yes,” said Florek, wondering why Nick was being so short and impatient with him.

  “When you gonna work on it, huh? Next week?”

  “My hand’s sore,” said Florek. “I bruised it coring that other crate of lettuce two days ago.”

  “Ah,” said Costa with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You got more excuses than Carter’s got liver pills, boy.”

  “I’ll be done in a couple of minutes.”

  “Yeah, hokay. I’ll be looking for it out front.” He turned to Costa. “And what the hell you think you’re doin’?”

  “I’m makin’ somethin’! Why you gettin’ all upset about everything?”

  “It’s my nevra, I guess. I’m waitin’ on that phone call, that’s all.”

  “Uh,” said Costa.

  Stefanos walked back out to the front of the house. A couple of Negroes sat in a booth, talking quietly, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in the slow hour between breakfast and lunch. Stefanos went to the radio, pushed the plug into the wall socket. Music came from the speaker, some mavros going on and on about a woman who left him for another mavros. This colored music, Stefanos could take it or leave it. But it made the customers happy, so what the hell.

  Stefanos looked at the phone on the wall. When was the Italos going to call?

  He picked up a tomato, held it firmly in his left hand, began to slice it thin.

  They thought they could squeeze him for protection money, they had another thing coming to them, goddamn right.

  The knife slipped off the skin of the tomato, its serrated edge raking across Stefanos’s thumb. He pulled his hand back, shook it, looked at the thumb. The cut was not so deep, but it had already begun to bleed. He pressed his thumb tight against his apron to stop the blood. He took a deep breath, let it out slow.

  There was no way he would let them push him around. In this country, he had learned straight away, an immigrant had to stand his ground.

  From the moment he stepped off the boat at Ellis Island, Stefanos recognized the importance of that. After his young wife had died of tuberculosis in the village, Stefanos had left his infant son with a sister and had come to America where it was said there was money to be picked right up off the street. He worked a few weeks as a common laborer in New York City, then met a man in a speakeasy who offered him a job as muscle for a bootleg operation he ran upstate, in a place called Batavia. Stefanos looked at the man’s fine suit, the way he wore his hat, and accepted the offer. Soon he was wearing a fine suit himself, riding in a car behind a truck full of hootch, armed with an Italian pistol, protecting the load on its weekly run. The driver of the car was a tough little patrioti named Costa, from a village in Sparta not unlike his own. The two of them became fast friends.

  Stefanos and Costa made two runs each week without incident over the course of seven months. It was on the last of these routine runs that they were ambushed by rival bootleggers after being flagged off the road by a woman standing beside a broken-down jalopy. The woman was a plant, but Stefanos had been suspicious from the start—there was no steam coming from beneath the upraised hood of the car, and the woman looked cheap, way too hard to be as helpless as she wished to appear. By the time the two gunmen had come from out of the trees, Stefanos had already rolled out of the passenger side of their car. He came up firing, wounding both men with four shots. On the fifth pull of the trigger, the Italian piece blew up in his face, sending a hot shard of barrel into his cheek. Costa finished the two gunmen with his knife; Stefanos heard the gurgle of their final breaths as he watched the woman drive off.

  Costa and Stefanos headed south right away, drove straight into the night for Washington, D.C., where Nick had the address of a third cousin who lived in the city’s Chinatown district. The c
ousin put them up, stopped the infection in Stefanos’s wound. Nick bought a pearl-handled Smith and Wesson at a pawnshop shortly thereafter, vowing never again to touch an Italian-made gun. Costa stuck to knives, and soon married the sister of Stefanos’s cousin, a dour young woman named Toula.

  From his first job in D.C., as a dollar-a-week-plus-tips busboy at the Hotel Washington, to his ownership of Nick’s, it had all been plain hard work. Stefanos believed in putting your head down, not getting distracted by looking too far in the distance, because getting ahead of yourself was what tripped a man up. He would always remind himself of the fable of the dog with the bone in his mouth who saw his reflection in a pool of water, dropped the one in his mouth to get the one he saw, lost the one he had forever. That was just an old story, he knew it; but hard work and focus, it had always produced for him. He loved this country, loved everything about it, the shiny cars and the tailored suits and the beautiful, laughing women, and he loved the feeling of walking down 14th Street and putting the key to the door, his door, every single day. And now, these sons-of-bitches, they thought that they were gonna make him pay? He’d like to see them try.

  The phone rang on the wall. Stefanos went to it, picked up the receiver, listened to what the man on the other end had to say. He felt a pressure rise in his chest, heard the emotion in his own voice, saw spit fly from his mouth as he spoke. He slammed the receiver into its cradle, stood there, saw the Negroes in the booth staring at him, saw them look away as they caught the blackness in his eyes. He turned and walked back through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

  Costa and Florek had stopped working. Karras, freshly changed from his street clothes into his work pants and apron, had just come in from the warehouse. He shook a Lucky Strike out of his pack, put it to his lips.

  “Well,” said Stefanos. “That’s that.”

  “What was all that racket out there?” said Karras.

  “I was talkin’ to your friend on the phone. The Italos.”

  “And?”

  “I told him to go to hell.”

  Costa smiled crookedly. “Tora thai thoome.”