Chapter Fifteen
Elena lived in a third-floor walkup on Columbia Road in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, a neighborhood of shops, restaurants and bars representing the two dozen Latin American nations whose people resided in the blocks branching out from Columbia Road and 18th Street Northwest. Anglos, Africans, American Blacks, Asians and Native Americans created a kind of world soup on the streets as pedestrians walked through a cloud of international music blasting from the nightspots and bodegas.
The young people on the streets tended to be edgier than their buttoned-down contemporaries in Georgetown or their suited-up fellows along K Street. Adams Morgan had attitude and world culture, not to mention the food and the languages. It was positioned between the upscale gay culture of Dupont Circle and the gentrifying U Street corridor, where white people were grabbing up the row houses that had recently housed working class African Americans who had held the neighborhood together for decades.
Elena liked the diversity of her neighborhood, even as she complained about the noise that rose up like a thick fog from the streets on weekend nights as drunken bar patrons shouted at cops, who shouted back and handcuffed revelers whose enthusiasm for their good times overflowed into spitting and fighting at all hours. It was quieter during the cold weather, but it would never be described as peaceful. But it had energy.
She got off the bus a half block from her apartment and walked fast through the cold night air. Two men from El Salvador noticed her and shouted an obscene invitation, which she ignored. Salsa music came from a speaker outside a Latin American market and she saw several people inside picking through the winter produce. The woman who owned the store was behind the register and waved to her.
She hurried on, thinking about Dave and wondering why she bothered with him. She knew why. She loved him and it infuriated her. She climbed the stairs to her apartment, ignoring the murals that depicted an ideal life in a fantasy Latin country. She smelled the cooking from the apartments near hers and she regretted that her dinner would be leftover Chinese.
She opened her door and turned on the light, closing and locking the door and hanging her coat on a brass hook on the wall. She poured herself a glass of red wine and placed her dinner in the microwave. She glanced at her phone and saw that the message light was blinking. She took a deep breath and a swallow of the wine, sat down, and pressed the button.
The first message was from Sid telling her he had changed her schedule because Dave was away. She was due in for the early morning feed and was expected to produce at least two Washington pieces for the stations. She had to be back at work in six hours. The second was from Dave telling her that he was safe. She played it again. There was no “I miss you” or “I wish you were here”. She drank the rest of the wine and felt sorry for herself. She ate her leftover dinner and turned out the light.
Outside, standing next to his car, Malone saw that the apartment had gone dark. He went back to his room. He pondered his next move and prayed that he would have the strength to do what had to be done. He sat in the darkness and pondered the great questions between life and death, God and Satan, man and woman. He considered the man he was chasing and wondered what he was doing at that hour.
Father Darius was in a small room at a bed and breakfast in the Virginia countryside, also sitting on a bed, pondering the same great questions. He was experiencing a pain he believed to be exquisite, a sacrifice to Her, The Virgin, to whom all fealty was due. He was bleeding from the discipline and the knotted assembly of leather spiked with small tacks. He saw himself as a spiritual disciple of those who scourged the flesh in ancient days and the blood that fell upon the plastic sheet on the bed was a modest price to pay for the eternity of Her in Heaven. He experienced a sexual release and said a Rosary, hoping for expiation for his sin.
Elena slept and dreamt of Dave, seeing him as a man running from evil. In the dream, his face was passive. Evil was hard to see in the dream, just an idea, really, chasing him as she watched, unable to intervene. She was sweating when the alarm went off at four o’clock, and breathing hard. She pressed the button to silence it but heard a police siren outside her window racing toward Columbia Road and in her confusion she pounded the alarm again. She showered and dressed and took a cab to Now News, arriving just after four-thirty.
The newsroom smelled of old coffee and the stale odor that came from the jackets of those who secretly smoked in the stairway. The coffee had been made hours earlier and was thick and bitter, so she made a fresh pot. The overnight desk assistant, a pasty young woman named Megan, had a permanent stricken look that gave her the appearance of someone who has just heard bad news. In fact, she always looked like that, even after Sid promoted her from a part time, weekend job. Megan had been reading the wires and nothing much had caught her attention, something she shared with Elena.
“Have you heard from Dave?” she asked, looking quite stricken and concerned.
“He’s fine,” Elena said, logging in to a work station.
“I hope no one kills him,” Megan said, offering a slight smile.
Elena was shocked and upset. “Yeah, me too.” She did not look Megan in the eye.
Elena’s cell phone rang and she pulled it from her purse and saw that Dave was calling. “Elena here,” she said.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“I’ll have to call you back.” She got up and went to the ladies bathroom. Her fingers were trembling as she pressed the button labeled “Dave”. He picked up after one ring. “I had to go to a private place,” she said. “I don’t want everybody to know I’m talking to you.”
“Are you working?” He asked.
“Yeah, I just got here. Sid called me in to work on some projects because we’re short-handed. How are you?”
“I miss you.”
“Now you say that! You’re in fucking hiding and you tell me you miss me!”
“Yeah.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m not supposed to tell anyone. I’m in Virginia at some mountain place. One of Captain O’Neil’s men drove me out here. Maybe you can visit.”
She was scared, that much she knew, but was it for him or herself? “Is is okay for you to have visitors?”
“I don’t know why not. It’s not like you’ll tell anyone. I think Sid already knows.”
“I’ll ask him. Then we can talk about it.” She looked around to see if anyone was listening. “Are you all right?”
“Aside from the fact that I’m in hiding, yeah, I suppose so.”
“What are you going to do with your time?”
“Try to figure this out. I’ve never been in this spot before.” There was a sound in the background and Elena heard him respond to another person. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.”
She stared at the phone and put it into the pocket of her jeans and went back to her work station, wondering whether he was in danger.
Dave answered the door and saw a smiling Frank blowing on his hands. “I hope you like early breakfast because it’s ready in the house. Did I hear you talking to someone?”
“Yeah, someone at work. I’ll get my coat.” He followed Frank down a path that looked like an old logging road. It was not plowed and the thawing and freezing of the snow had made it icy.
“Watch your step,” Frank said. “You don’t want to fall here or you can slide down the mountain.”
It was hard to see what was on the other side of the road. Frank had laid some logs alongside the edge where the road gave way to the mountainside. The logs were rotting and in places they were nearly gone. The road appeared to have been cut with a bulldozer following a line from Frank’s house to the cabin. The sky was growing gray with the light of the coming day as the two men walked into the house.
“I make a mean egg casserole,” Frank said. “I got bacon and biscuits to go with it and some strong coffee. Let’s dig in.”
Dave sat at the table and gazed past Bob the Bear at the gray valley below and into the shadow of
the mountains beyond. He missed Elena. Even more, he missed working the street.
Butterfly Knife Page 15
