“Afternoon,” I said. “Ron Wilson, Variety Foods. And your name?”
“Cheek.”
“Cold enough out there for ya today?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Colder than a brass monkey’s balls, right?”
Cheek rolled his eyes in exasperation and sighed. “What can I do for you?”
“Is the owner or manager in?”
“He’s in,” he said in a high voice, and touched the paper hat that was stained at the rim with the oil of his hair. He wiped a smudge of grease off one thick eyebrow that ran unbroken over his deeply set brown eyes. “But he don’t see salesmen without an appointment.”
“What’s his name?”
“Frank.”
“Do me a favor.” I leaned on the counter, buddying up. “It’s New Year’s Eve, and this is my last call of the day. Hell, it’s my last call of the year, and I’ve got to make my numbers.” I winked. “Go back there and tell Frank that there’s a guy out dth="ht="0em" here, he’s willing to sell anything on his price sheet for fifty percent better than what he’s buying it for anywhere else.”
“Fifty off?”
“Five-oh.”
“He still won’t see you,” Cheek said.
I said, “Give it a shot, huh?”
Cheek moved into the kitchen and stayed there for quite some time. I waited with my price book under my arm. When a customer entered and the door chime sounded, Cheek returned from the kitchen. He licked the graphite tip of his pencil before he wrote the customer’s order on a green guest check pad, then he turned and walked back into the kitchen. I stayed put and five minutes later Cheek was back with a square, flat box of pizza. He rang the customer up and slammed the drawer closed as the customer headed out the front door. Cheek began to reenter the kitchen when I stopped him.
“What about Frank?” I said cheerfully.
Cheek turned around and pushed the paper hat back on his damp head. “He says he’ll see you for a minute, if what you got’s legit. But only for a minute. He’s busy.”
“A minute’s all it will take. Thanks.”
Cheek waved me back. “Come on,” he said.
I followed him behind the counter, through a doorless frame, and into the kitchen. The kitchen was open and bright with a track of fluorescent tubes that lighted it from front to back. On the north wall stood a large baker’s oven, its door down. A thick young expediter with curly brown hair, long in the back and shaven on the sides, peered into the oven. He checked the pies inside and then flung the door up and shut. Beside the oven, warming lights glowed red over a two-level steel table, and on the shelf above the lights sat an institutional microwave oven. Next to the microwave a Sony box with removable speakers was set on DC101. The righteous freak-out of Van Halen’s guitar careened throughout the room.
A large stainless-steel prep table was situated in the middle of the room, and on the opposite wall a cold salad bar abutted a sandwich block, both refrigerated underneath. Several black-handled knives of various sizes were racked above the sandwich block. Next to the block a four-foot-wide stainless-steel refrigerator stood upright and stopped inches from the ceiling. On the third wall sat two deep stainless-steel sinks, with a rinse hose suspended above. A tall, wiry man with slick black hair and a severely pocked face stood before the prep table in the middle of the room, ladling sauce into a pie shell. Neither he nor the expediter looked up as I passed into the kitchen.
Cheek raised his hand and said, “Wait here.”
I stopped walking and cradled my book. The thick young expediter moved quickly behind me to the sandwich block and pulled a knife off the rack. He retrieved some onions from a plastic container below and deftly began to peel and slice them on the board with the knife’s serrated edge. The pock-faced man pushed tomato sauce around the pie shell with the bottom of his ladle in slow, careful circles. Cheek entered a small office in the back of the kitchen. I watched him do it.
Two men sat in chairs in the office. I could see their pants legs-one wore black twills, the other khakis-and the wooden legs of the chairs in which they sat. Some smoke drifted out of the office door. I listened to Cheek’s high voice, and a deeper one after that, and then the khaki legs unwound and the man inside them stepped out of the office with Cheek.
He was an average man of average-to-heavy build, with a blue work shirt tucked into the khakis and a dirty apron tied over half of both. There was a plastic foam cup in his right hand and the ass end of a cigar in the fingers of his left. He plugged the cigar in the side of his saliva-caked mouth and stopped walking a foot shy of my face.
“What ya got,” he said. Booze was heavy on his breath.
“Deals,” I said, my salesman’s smile glued ridiculously high. “Unbelievable deals, Frank.” I extended my hand. “Ron Wilson, Variety Foods.”
Frank put his hand to his mouth, unplugged the cigar, and had a gulp of scotch from the plastic foam cup. “Let’s skip all the bullshit, okay? Cheek said you had something good, and it’s New Year’s Eve, and to tell you the truth I’m already half in the bag. So let’s see what you got, quick, before my mood changes and I make you come in on order day like every other slob.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “Where should we go? In your office?”
“Uh-uh.” Frank’s head tipped like a bell in the direction of the sinks. “Over there.”
I followed him and watched the office as I walked. Smoke still leaked out from behind the door. At the sink I set my black book on the drain platform and opened to a random page. Black-and-white photographs of canned goods ran top to bottom on the left quarter of the page, and corresponding price columns took up the balance.
“I assume you use all of these goods,” I said, lightly running the tip of my forefinger down the column of photographs, studying the gimmick as I spoke. The dollar amounts lessened as the purchase quantities increased.
“We use a lotta shit,” Frank said as he pulled the scotch cup away from his lips. He had chewed small crescents of plastic foam off the rim. “What’s the deal?”
“Like I told Mr. Cheek, fifty off.” I looked around for Cheek’s support, but he was back out front.
“Fifty off what?”
“Our best price on the sheet,” I stuttered through the smile. The smile had atrophied now to a twitch.
“Bullshit,” Frank said. A cloud of cheap cigar smoke hung between our faces. “What’s the catch?”
“No catch,” I said with wide eyes. “New Year’s special, onetime order. No limit. You get acquainted with our business, we make a new friend.”
The bluesy intro to Jethro Tull’s “Locomotive Breath” played through the Sony. Frank had another slug and belched. The belch watered his eyes and causedyesem"› his lips to part like two pink slugs.
“One thing I always say, Winston.”
“Wilson. Ron Wilson.”
“One thing I always say. If it’s on sale today, it can be on sale tomorrow. Right?”
“Maybe so,” I said. “ But I sure would like to write an order before the clock strikes twelve.”
“Never happen,” Frank said. “I’m not that kind of sucker. Nice try, though. Always ask for the sale.” He rocked back on his heels. “Look me up after the New Year, hear?”
“I will. Thanks.” I extended my hand again, and again Frank ignored it. Instead he turned his head back toward the young expediter.
“Turn that shit down!” he yelled, pointing at the boom box. Then he waddled back like a man carrying something odious in the seat of his pants and shut the door behind him.
The thick young expediter moved to the Sony and reduced the volume by a hair. I closed my book, put it under my arm, and walked through the kitchen toward the lobby. The tall, wiry, pock-faced man glanced up and looked me over as I passed. His eyes were small and heavily hooded, all black pupil, whiteless as a snake’s. I felt them on me as I exited the kitchen.
TWENTY-SIX
Out on the street I walked quickly back
to my Dart. I put the price book in the car and retrieved a heavy wool sweater from the trunk. I removed my tie and put the sweater over my shirt, and my overcoat on top of them both.
On my way back I stopped in a deli named Costaki’s and bought the largest go-cup of coffee they sold. I tore a hole in the plastic lid and sipped the contents as I walked south on Twenty-first. I kept low passing the Olde World and just beyond it cut left down a narrow alley.
The alley ran between Twentieth and Twenty-first. A tan building stood east to west on the south side of the alley, with two green dumpsters positioned and spaced against its side. A doorway cut into the building next to the dumpster closest to Twentieth. I walked down the alley and stepped up onto the curb and stood in the doorway. I could see the Olde World’s back entrance from the doorway, on the north side of the alley.
Nothing much happened after that. Steam rose from the hole in the coffee lid, and the traffic sounds from the right and the left began to soften. I had a cigarette and smoked it down to the filter. A couple of women walked across the alley and quickened their pace when they saw me in the doorway. A bundled bicycle courier rode by, and then a gray Step-Van, both without incident. An hour passed and dusk darkened the alley.
At 7:25 a brown Mercury Marquis drove by slowly and stopped in the alley at the Olde World’s door. From the shadow of my doorway I watched an obese man in a brown coat get out of the Marquis and open the trunk. He removed what looked to be two filled piromllowcases and carried them up to the door, where he rang the buzzer. Hands appeared shortly thereafter from behind the door. The hands grabbed the pillowcases, pulling them inside. The obese man in the brown suit walked back to the trunk and closed it, then reentered the driver’s side and drove out of the alley.
I lit another cigarette. By eight o’clock no one else had driven in or out of the alley. There was little sound now, except for the rustle of paper and debris that the wind blew and lifted in tight, violent circles.
I jogged back to my Dart, started it, and drove over to Twenty-first, where I parked facing south on the street, in sight of the Olde World’s window. I turned the radio on and switched it to WDCU. I listened to a Coltrane set, and one by Stan Getz. In the middle of the Getz set, the lights in the Olde World’s window went out. I turned the ignition key on my Dart.
A black Lincoln passed my car and stopped in front of the Olde World. The young expediter who had retrieved the car got out of the driver’s seat and left the engine running. A heavy man in his fifties with bushy gray sideburns walked out of the Old World and moved toward the car. A live cigarette in an alabaster holder dangled between his fingers as he walked. Black twill pants legs showed beneath his double-breasted black overcoat. The heavy man climbed into the Lincoln and drove away. Before he did it I wrote his D.C. license plate number in my notebook and checked my wristwatch. The time was 8:35.
The expediter zipped his green army jacket and walked north on Twenty-first, toward Ward Park. Frank and the tall pock-faced man emerged from the Olde World right after that. Frank had an inch of cigar in his mouth and a plastic foam cup in his hand, and he wore a corduroy car coat. The tall man had changed into gray slacks and a long gray overcoat a shade darker than the slacks. The two of them walked to a silver blue Lincoln parked three car lengths ahead. Frank unlocked the door and got behind the wheel. The tall man waited in the street until his side unlocked, then climbed into the shotgun seat. They pulled away from the curb. I yanked the column shift down out of neutral and felt it engage.
The Lincoln turned down the alley and at the end of it made a left onto Twentieth. When the taillights disappeared around the corner of the building, I followed. At New Hampshire Avenue the Lincoln cut right and headed northeast. At Georgia it turned left and shot straight north, and at Kansas Avenue it turned right again and resumed its northeastern path.
Kansas was wide and clean and residential, and free of cops. The Lincoln accelerated and stayed at fifty. I kept back two hundred yards the entire trip, running three reds along the way.
The Lincoln cut right at Missouri, crossed New Hampshire, and continued on at the top of North Capitol. Missouri became Riggs, and the Lincoln veered right down a slope that began South Dakota Avenue. We headed southeast then, paralleling Eastern Avenue at the Maryland line. At an arm of Fort Totten Park in Northeast, as the garden apartment complexes decreased, near an industrial section of concrete yards and waste-disposal sights, the Lincoln turned right on Gallatin, along a grove of widely spaced trees. I kept on, easing my foot off the gas.
A quarter-mile past a home for unwed mothers, the Lincoln turned left onto an unmarked, unpaved road and slowly drove into a break of tree brsizs. I continued past and in my rearview watched the taillights fade. I stopped the Dart in front of an isolated row of brick colonials on Gallatin and killed the engine.
I pulled my arms out of my overcoat, put lined leather gloves over my hands, and left the coat behind me on the seat. Out of the car, I ran quickly across the road, through a hard field, and into the grove of evergreens and willows. A dim yellow light glowed in the direction of the Lincoln’s path, and I cut toward it diagonally through the trees, with slow, careful steps. As I neared a wide clearing, I stopped and crouched down behind the trunk of a scrub pine. My breath was visible in the yellow light ahead. Through it, I watched the Lincoln come to a slow stop.
The light topped a leaning lamppost. Next to the lamppost a bungalow stood far back at the edge of the clearing. The woods continued on behind the bungalow. The silver blue Lincoln sat parked next to the black Lincoln that had been driven by the man in black twills. Lights glowed from inside the bungalow.
Frank and the pock-faced man climbed out of the silver blue Lincoln. Frank walked over to the black Lincoln and unlocked the trunk while his partner, tall and unmoving, stood by. Then Frank pulled the two pillowcases out-the pillowcases the expediter had transferred earlier to the trunk when he had retrieved his boss’s car-and shut the lid. They crossed the yard and stepped up onto the bungalow’s porch. The wooden porch gave and creaked beneath their weight.
The two of them entered with the turn of Frank’s key. A square of light spilled out as the door opened. After it closed, the porch darkened, and then there was only my breath against the light of the lamppost, and the headstone cold of the woods around me. I waited awhile to let some nerve seep in. When I thought I had it, I looked behind me once, and again. I swallowed spit and crept low, like a prowler, away from the pine and out into the clearing.
I stopped behind the trunk of the black Lincoln. Soft music hopped with the intermittent surge of horns played from inside the bungalow, but the clearing was quiet. I could hear my own breathing and feel the rubbery thump of my heart against my ribs. I pushed away from the car, staying low, and stepped up onto the porch, crawling heels-to-ass to a spot below the front bay window.
I raised my head until my eyes cleared the bottom of the window’s frame.
It was a Sears bungalow from the 1920s, modified into some sort of private casino. The walls of the first floor had been removed, leaving one large room with a door leading back to the kitchen. Two twenty-five-inch televisions sat on the left wall, and two different basketball games were being broadcast on the sets. A round card table covered with dirty green felt stood in the center of the room, with six wooden swivel chairs placed around it. Red, white, and blue chips were strewn about the table’s green top.
On the back wall an oak bar ran between the kitchen door and a wood staircase. The kitchen door was open, and the staircase led to a dark landing. Two closed doors were outlined in the shadows of the landing.
One high-backed stool stood at the far end of the bar. Behind the bar Frank poured scotch into a rocks glass filled with ice. The checkered walnut stock of a. 38 Airweight showed above the waistband of his khakis, where it was, wran secured by a snap in a nylon holster. Frank replaced the scotch in a small group of medium call bottles illuminated by a naked-drop light from above. A small dirty mirror
hung on the cedar paneling behind the bottles. A compact stereo with squat black speakers stood next to the bottles.
The heavy man in black twills stood with a drink in his hand in front of the two television sets, shifting his head slowly between the two games. The blue light from the sets danced across his unemotional, heavy-lidded eyes. The tall, pock-faced man was bent over one of the pillowcases, with his hand inside. He withdrew a fistful of small white slips of paper, and he turned and said something to Frank, and both of them laughed. A mangled smile turned up on the heavy man’s face as well, but he kept his eyes on the games.
The pock-faced man turned his head back down toward the pillowcase on the floor. It was then that I studied his face for the first time. The scars only covered the right side, and they were chunked deep, and red. The left side of his face was tightly smooth, with street-pretty definition. I lowered my head and crawled away from the window, off the porch.
A small, curtained window was positioned on the right side of the bungalow. I walked lightly past it, to the rear of the house. A narrow set of painted wood stairs led to the back entrance of the kitchen. From the bottom of the stairs I could see a tubular fluorescent light hung on the white plaster ceiling. A string switch dangled from the light. I walked up the stairs, my hand sliding up a loose splintered rail, and looked through a sheer lacy curtain.
Through the tiny kitchen, past the main room, and out the front bay window to the yard, a set of headlights approached from up the road.
I jumped off the steps and hit the ground running. I saw the headlights pass across the house and traverse the ground at my feet, and I heard myself grunt as I sprinted blindly into the woods. Willow sticks lashed my face, and there was the sound of branches snapping at my feet, and the sound of the branches adrenalized my legs, and I turned right and ran harder and faster, as if a fire were chasing me up a flight of stairs. I kept running until I reached the broken grove of willow and pine.
I stopped for breath, looked behind me once more, and ran out of the grove, across the hard field and the road, back to my Dart. I gunned it and drove up Gallatin to the Maryland line at Chillum, where I cracked the window and lit a smoke, hanging a left and then another just after that, back into the District.
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