01 The Big Blowdown

by George Pelecanos

  “Yeah,” said Stefanos. “Now we gonna see what’s gonna happen next.”

  Karras struck a match. He lighted his cigarette, studied the big Greek through the dancing flame.

  * * *

  “Well?” said Burke.

  Recevo ran his hand along the phone’s receiver. “He told me to go to hell.”

  “Hah!” said Reed. He took his feet off the big table in front of him, stood from his chair. “Well, I guess that tears it. How do you want us to handle it, Mr. Burke? We go back over there right now, or you want us to wait until tonight?”

  Burke slowly rubbed his temples. His hair had gone off in a couple of odd directions, and he needed a barber’s shave. He looked like hell; Recevo would have bet his savings that Burke had gotten stinking drunk the night before, but even a track bum could have played that ticket to win. Burke had been drunk most nights since the holidays of ‘48.

  “Relax, Reed,” he said.

  “What. We’re gonna sit here and let that Greek tell us to shove it?”

  “Of course not. But there’s no reason to move forward with something that might result in gunfire. So far, we’ve been lucky in not attracting attention. No, I think that Gearhart had a very good idea when he talked about implementing that old shell game with the second group of men.”

  Gearhart moved his turtle eyes beneath their lids. Other than that, nothing moved. He sat in his oversized chair, his hands folded in his lap. “It’s worked in the past.”

  “And so it shall work again,” said Burke. “We bring in a second group of men to talk to this Nick character, they promise him protection from us at a cheaper price. He’ll see it as a bargain.”

  He’ll see red, thought Recevo. And he won’t pay a goddamn cent.

  “Well, Joe?” said Burke.

  Recevo said, “It’s worth a try.”

  “Who are we talking about here?” said Reed.

  Burke had a sip of coffee, placed the cup back on the desk. “It so happens that Bender and his men are down from Philadelphia for a couple of days. They’re doing some gambling out at La Fontaine’s place. Bender owes me a favor from a couple of years back.”

  “Christ,” said Reed, “not Bender. That guy’s all queer.”

  “I know how that offends you. Reed. But the truth of it is, he’s just…what’s that word, Gearhart?”

  “Theatrical,” said Gearhart.

  “Yes, that.”

  “Well,” muttered Reed, “he looks all queer to me.”

  Burke turned to Recevo. “How about you, Joe? Any objections?”

  “Call Bender,” said Recevo. He blew into his deck of Raleighs and pulled free a cigarette.

  Chapter 25

  Vera Gardner reached behind her, wrapped her hands around the rails of the bed. Karras pushed himself into her, retreated, pushed in again, buried himself inside her to the base of his cock. The bed lifted off the floor, slammed down and bounced on its springs.

  Karras tasted the salty sweat which had gathered at the fold of Vera’s breast. He bit gently on her hard red nipple. Vera arched her back. Karras’s hand traced the steps of Vera’s ribcage.

  “Pete,” said Vera.

  He slipped one finger in her mouth. Her lips closed around it, her tongue cool and dry. He went in, kept himself there. Vera pushing up with her hips, her buttocks off the bed. She held her breath and broke with a spasm; he came like a river, his thigh trembling against hers. He rested his head on her chest. She brushed her fingers through his damp hair. They lay in the wet pool that had settled on the bed.

  Karras and Vera showered together, dressed together in the room. Karras went to a chair by the window while Vera applied her makeup. He moved the chair so that it sat fully in the light. He had a seat, lighted a smoke.

  Vera ran a comb through her long blonde hair, looked at Karras in the mirror. “Take me out, Pete. You said you’d take me out.”

  “Sure, honey. We’ll go out.”

  “There’s a play finishing its run down at the National.”

  “You know I’m not crazy about plays.”

  “It’s a Eugene O’Neill. Mourning Becomes Electra. Michael Redgrave’s in it, and Rosalind Russell.”

  “Rosalind Russell? If they had Jane Russell in it, then maybe I’d go.”

  “Oh, come on, Pete, it would be fun. Why don’t we see if they have tickets for tonight?”

  Because I’ve got a date with my wife tonight. Because with you and me it doesn’t go any further than this room. You don’t get it, Vera. You never have.

  “Not tonight. Vera. Tonight I’ve got plans.”

  Vera’s shoulders slumped. Her eyes darted away. She reached for an eyebrow pencil, leaned into the mirror. Karras watched her hand shake as she ran the pencil across her brow.

  “What’s wrong with you, anyway?” said Karras.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  But Karras knew. He had felt it pulse through her as they had lain together afterwards on the bed. It was that girlfriend of hers, a dark, brooding woman named Natalie, with whom Vera had shared an office at the Census Bureau since 1946. Natalie, who had worked support staff on the Manhattan Project throughout the war and had been on site at Trinity. The woman had filled Vera’s head with a nightmare’s worth of information on the bomb. She had made her obsession Vera’s obsession, too. It was always crawling around in Vera’s mind—who had it, what it did, when it would land on us—and when Karras held her sometimes, during one of their frequent afternoon naps, Vera’s head would snap back and forth and she would often wake with a start. It was this Natalie character who had put the cancer into Vera’s dreams.

  “You’re thinking about that bomb business again, aren’t you.”

  “No,” said Vera, wincing slightly at the unconvincing sound of her own voice. She looked at him again in the mirror. “What about you? What’s your excuse?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “You haven’t been right all day.”

  Karras nodded his head in the direction of the bed. “Not right, huh. I didn’t hear you complainin’.”

  “You know what I mean. When we make love, everything’s fine. Other than that, you’re off somewhere else.”

  Karras dragged on his cigarette. The smoke from it hung in the blocks of light coming through the bedroom window.

  “I saw an old friend the other day. When I saw him walking into the grill, I felt nothing, like he had died or something and I had gotten all the way over it. But since then, I’ve been thinking about him more and more. It’s like someone’s tapping a finger on my shoulder, and when I turn around, there’s no one there. But that finger on my shoulder, it won’t go away.”

  “Your friend Joe,” said Vera.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not going to go away, Pete. It’s not going away until and you and Joe settle it. You know it, and that’s what bothering you. You realize that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Karras. He squinted at the sunlight that had entered his eyes. “Somehow, me and Joe are gonna have to make things right.”

  * * *

  Lois Roman came up naked behind Joe Recevo, put her arms around his shoulders, ran her hands across his chest. Recevo was fumbling with his tie, trying to put together a quick Windsor. He pushed her hand out of the way.

  “Move it, baby, I’m tryin’ to get dressed.”

  “What’s your hurry?” said Lois.

  “We got some guys comin’ in from Philly tonight.”

  “That’s not for a few hours yet.”

  “I know it. I thought you and me would head over to Mark Gallagher’s first, have a couple of beers.”

  Gallagher’s was up on Georgia Avenue, near Recevo’s apartment. It was just a bar, a place where he could watch the fights, jawbone with friends, sip fifteen-cent drafts. It was a man’s joint mainly, a little bit on the dull side, and Lois didn’t care for it one bit.

  “Ooh, Gallagher’s,” said Lois playfully. “You better be careful
, you might spend a dollar or two on me by accident.”

  “Maybe I’m savin’ it up for somethin’ nice.”

  “Like a ring, maybe?”

  Recevo reached behind him, grabbed a handful of Lois’s perfect ass. “What we got baby, you can’t buy in a jewelry store.” He slapped her one there. “Go get dressed.”

  He turned and watched her walk back to the bathroom. Lois’s bottom half—God, that was some kind of temple. He smiled just looking at it, thinking that his face had been wet with it just a half-hour earlier. Lois had sat herself on the side of the bed, put her hands behind her and shook that black hair of hers off her shoulders, and Recevo had kneeled there in front of her like he was in church, and he had buried his face in it until she had called out his name. And all the while his hands had been working on that beautiful ass of hers. Recevo knew that there would never be anything better than that.

  But marriage? Hell, Lois was a nice kid, and all that. You might be able to stretch it and even say that he loved her. But weddings, steady jobs, a family, yatta, yatta, yatta, that kind of noise was not for him. He’d have to be careful how he danced around it, though, because a man would be a fool to let a flesh trophy like that get away. Lois and her goddamn beautiful ass. Recevo could live down there, never come up for air. What did Pete always call him when they were clowning around? “The Frogman,” on account of he loved to dive for gash. Yeah, “Frogman,” that was it. Pete Karras and his names.

  Karras. It was funny about Pete. He hadn’t seen him since that night in the alley back in ‘46, hadn’t thought a whole lot about him after the first six months had passed. And now, having run into him at Nick’s, it was like someone had pointed out to Recevo that he had been walking around for the last three years without a right arm. It was like some joker had tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Here, buddy, you musta dropped this back there,” and then handed him his own limb. Like he had been some kind of cripple, all that time, and didn’t even know it. A cripple, just like—

  “C’mon, Joe,” said Lois, walking into the room in a sharp-looking tight skirt and high heels. “I thought you were gonna fix that tie.”

  Recevo looked in the mirror. He hadn’t done a thing to it in the last five minutes.

  “You better get it for me. My mind’s somewheres else.”

  Lois turned him around, fixed it for him, tightened the knot. She patted him on his chest, smiled.

  “Thanks, baby,” he said.

  “We better get goin’,” said Lois with a wink. “1 mean, you never know—Gallagher’s, they might run out of those fifteen-cent beers.”

  * * *

  “Mike, you’re shaking.”

  “It’s cold, that’s all.”

  Kay laughed. “It’s not so cold in here, Mike. Look at the windows. How cold could it be?”

  Florek had a look around the interior of the car. It was true that it had gotten plenty warm, the windows had even steamed up since the last time he had checked. It smelled sweaty and kind of briny in there, too. Florek wondered if Kay’s father would notice the smell when he got into his car the next morning. He squirmed a little at the thought.

  “Where you goin’,” said Kay with a chuckle, “wigglin’ away from me like that.”

  Kay put her hand behind his head and drew him to her. She kissed him roughly, sliding her tongue across his. Florek thought he would burst from his trousers—God, this Kay was something! And then he felt her reach for his hand, take it, move it across the wool of her carcoat. The coarseness of the wool gave to the smooth heat of her skin, and now she was moving his hand inside her blouse, the top buttons of which had come undone somehow, and then beneath her loose brassiere, where his knuckles barely brushed the fine weave of lace. Then his fingers were tracing the bumps of her nipple as he listened to Kay’s steady moan, and he opened his eyes to watch her even as they kissed. Kay’s eyes were neither open nor closed, but kind of away and not looking at anything at all. Her scent was strong in the car now, and Florek felt something rising in his cock, and he wanted to stop it but he could not. He caught his breath at the point of his own dull explosion, a quiet ejaculation sending rhythmic, warm spurts into the underwear which he had cleaned in the sink that very afternoon.

  “Why are you stopping, Mike?”

  “I don’t know.” He pushed his hair away from his eyes. “I’m nervous, I guess, that we’re going to get caught.”

  She kissed him again, but saw that the passion in it had passed. Kay dropped her head onto his shoulder. “You had a good time, didn’t you?”

  “I had a great time, Kay.”

  Kay smiled. “1 did, too.”

  They sat there for a while, but not too long, because Florek really did worry that someone would come along. He thought that a parking lot in Rock Creek Park would be the first place a cop would look for couples necking after dark. So he and Kay drove around a little and listened to the radio, and then she dropped him off at 14th and U Streets before heading uptown to her parents’ house in Shepherd Park. Florek kissed her through the open driver’s window before she sped off. He pulled the tail of his shirt out so that it covered the damp gray spot on the front of his trousers, and he began to walk south.

  Another good night! They had seen a show at the Uptown called Hills of Home, a Lassie picture that Florek would have yawned through if not for a very young actress named Janet Leigh, who did it for him and reminded him of Kay. He and Kay had made out in the balcony off and on through most of the feature, and afterwards, at her suggestion, they had skipped any kind of food or drink and driven into the park. Thinking of them in the car, Florek found that he was walking very fast, running almost, down the street. Tonight had been a night of firsts: He had felt his first bare tit, had shot off for the first time without his own hand on the trigger. His buddies back home, they would have laughed and said that a dry hump was no cherry-bust, but any kind of lovemaking with Kay was good enough for him.

  Florek smiled, running down 14th, thinking of how happy he was that he had come to D.C. And then he slowed down to a walk and finally a dead stop as the image of his sister entered his mind. Lola…just where the hell was Lola now?

  * * *

  Lola Florek looked up at her reflection in the ornate mirror angled and suspended from the ceiling above. Her body was mostly covered by the man who was inside her, but she could see her face above his muscled back, her head inching backward with each violent thrust. The sheets were bunched tightly in one of the man’s hands, while his other hand gripped the bed rails for support. The bed had moved slowly in a clockwise direction since she had been watching it. She’d made a game of it, to see how far the bed would move before the man was done. There was pain, and she could feel it, but the pain was happening to someone else: the girl in the mirror. The girl with the black streaks running down her face.

  Lola heard laughter and colored music from down below. She took her eyes from the mirror, felt the ripping inside her. For a moment, she could not breathe in or out. Then the pain passed, and she let some air out of her lips.

  “I’m too dry,” she said.

  “Sssh,” said the man.

  Lola said, “Daddy.”

  The man said, “You go on and call me anythin’ you want.”

  * * *

  “What’s your hurry, officer?”

  “We’re done. And it’s cold out here.”

  “If it’s cold out here for you, how you think I feel, my backside up against these bricks? Anyway, why you so jumpy tonight?”

  “I gotta go.”

  “Don’t you wanna love me a little bit more, sugar?”

  “Wouldn’t do me any good to be seen with a whore. You know that.”

  “A colored whore, you mean.”

  “You know that makes no difference to me.”

  “Course not. Matter of fact, colored woman’s the only kind of woman you like.”

  “What say?”

  “Nothin’, sugar. I was talkin’ on the wrong side of
you, I guess. You know, that bum ear of yours gon’ get you in trouble some day.”

  “Listen, Delilah…”

  “I like to hear you say my name.”

  “1 was wondering. If a colored man had a little money in his pocket…if he wanted to pay for a white woman, I mean, where would he go?”

  “You lookin’ for white women now? ‘Cause you know you got everything you need right here. You been pickin’ me up at the same place every week, 5th and K, for the last—”

  “I’m not looking for myself. I’m talking about one specific white woman that I’m trying to find.”

  “You want to talk to a pimp?”

  “Not exactly. Someone that sets dates up, maybe through a pimp—white women for colored men. Is there a name that comes to mind?”

  “Let me think about it a little bit, sugar. I might just know someone you could talk to, yeah.”

  “Thanks, Delilah.”

  “My pleasure, officer. Now you better get yourself out of this cold. You don’t mind my sayin’ so, you lookin’ a little pale, even for you.”

  * * *

  Sometimes, Peter Karras didn’t know how Eleni talked him into these things. Who would have thought he’d be sitting at a table with his wife at the Casino Royal, watching a bunch of midgets doing some crazy juggling and acrobatic act on stage?

  “Aw, come on, Pete, we’ll have a ball,” said Eleni that morning, just an hour before he had headed into Southeast to see Vera.

  And that had been why, he supposed, he had agreed to go—his guilt over Vera, and what he was about to do. But first he had to put up a little bit of a fight. She expected that much of him at the very least.

  “Ochi, Eleni. What do I wanna go watch a bunch of dwarves for, wearin’ costumes, singin’ songs—”

  “Don’t be such a bump on a log, Pete. I’ll get your mom to babysit Dimitri. And they’re not just dwarves. It’s Hermine’s Little People, honey. They’re a national act!”

  After a couple of cocktails, Karras had gotten into the spirit of things. And Eleni, in the new outfit he had bought her at Jelleff’s, she was looking pretty sharp. He caught the way her nose crinkled up every time one of the midgets made a pratfall, and knew for sure that she was having a good old time.