The Martini Shot

by George Pelecanos

  One time he really screamed at Raymond, the head cook on the line, called him a “lazy shine” on this night when the place was packed. When the dining room cleared up, Schmidt walked back into the kitchen and told Raymond in a soft voice that he didn’t mean nothing by it, giving him that smile of his and patting his arm. Raymond just nodded real slow. Schmidt told me later, “That’s all you got to do, is scold ’em and then talk real sweet to ’em later. That’s how they learn. ’Cause they’re like children. Right, Bill?” He meant coloreds, I guess. By the way he talked to me, real slow the way you would to a kid, I could tell he thought I was a colored guy, too.

  At the end of the night the waiters always sat in the dining room and ate a stew or something that the kitchen had prepared. The busmen, we served it to the waiters. I was running dinner out to one of them and forgot something back in the kitchen. When I went back to get it, I saw Raymond, spitting into a plate of stew. The other colored guys in the kitchen were standing in a circle around Raymond, watching him do it. They all looked over at me when I walked in. It was real quiet and I guess they were waiting to see what I was gonna do.

  “Who’s that for?” I said. “Eh?”

  “Schmidt,” said Raymond.

  I walked over to where they were. I brought up a bunch of stuff from deep down in my throat and spit real good into that plate. Raymond put a spoon in the stew and stirred it up.

  “I better take it out to him,” I said, “before it gets cold.”

  “Don’t forget the garnish,” said Raymond.

  He put a flower of parsley on the plate, turning it a little so it looked nice. I took the stew out and served it to Schmidt. I watched him take the first bite and nod his head like it was good. None of the colored guys said nothing to me about it again.

  I got drunk with John Petersen in a saloon a coupla nights after and told him what I’d done. I thought he’d a get a good laugh out of it, but instead he got serious. He put his hand on my arm the way he did when he wanted me to listen.

  “Stay out of Schmidt’s way,” said John.

  “Ah,” I said, with a wave of my hand. “He gives me any trouble, I’m gonna punch him in the kisser.” The beer was making me brave.

  “Just stay out of his way.”

  “I look afraid to you?”

  “I’m telling you, Schmidt is no waiter.”

  “I know it. He’s the worst goddamn waiter I ever seen. Maybe you ought to have one of those meetings of yours and see if you can get him thrown out.”

  “Don’t ever mention those meetings again, to anyone,” said John, and he squeezed my arm tight. I tried to pull it away from him but he held his grip. “Bill, do you know what a Pinkerton man is?”

  “What the hell?”

  “Never mind. You just keep to yourself, and don’t talk about those meetings, hear?”

  I had to look away from his eyes. “Sure, sure.”

  “Okay, friend.” John let go of my arm. “Let’s have another beer.”

  A week later John Petersen didn’t show up for work. And a week after that the cops found him floating down river in the Potomac. I read about it in the Tribune. It was just a short notice, and it didn’t say nothing else.

  A cop in a suit came to the restaurant and asked us some questions. A couple of the waiters said that John probably had some bad hooch and fell into the drink. I didn’t know what to think. When it got around to the rest of the crew, everyone kinda got quiet, if you know what I mean. Even that bastard Wesley didn’t make no jokes. I guess we were all thinking about John in our own way. Me, I wanted to throw up. I’m telling you, thinking about John in that river, it made me sick.

  John didn’t ever talk about no family and nobody knew nothing about a funeral. After a few days, it seemed like everybody in the restaurant forgot about him. But me, I couldn’t forget.

  One night I walked into Chinatown. It wasn’t far from my new place. There was this kid from St. Mary’s, Billy Nicodemus, whose father worked at the city morgue. Nicodemus wasn’t no doctor or nothing, he washed off the slabs and cleaned the place, like that. He was known as a hard drinker, maybe because of what he saw every day, and maybe just because he liked the taste. I knew where he liked to drink.

  I found him in a no-name restaurant on the Hip Sing side of Chinatown. He was in a booth by himself, drinking something from a teacup. I crossed the room, walking through the cigarette smoke, passing the whores and the skinny Chink gangsters in their too-big suits and the cops who were taking money from the Chinks to look the other way. I stood over Nicodemus and told him who I was. I told him I knew his kid, told him his kid was good. Nicodemus motioned for me to have a seat.

  A waiter brought me an empty cup. I poured myself some gin from the teapot on the table. We tapped cups and drank. Nicodemus had straight black hair wetted down and a big mole with hair coming out of it on one of his cheeks. He talked better than I did. We said some things that were about nothing, and then I asked him some questions about John. The gin had loosened his tongue.

  “Yeah, I remember him,” said Nicodemus, after thinking about it for a short while. He gave me the once-over and leaned forward. “This was your friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “They found a bullet in the back of his head. A twenty-two.”

  I nodded and turned the teacup in small circles on the table. “The Tribune didn’t say nothing about that.”

  “The papers don’t always say. The police cover it up while they look for who did it. But that boy didn’t drown. He was murdered first, then dropped in the drink.”

  “You saw him?” I said.

  Nicodemus shrugged. “Sure.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “You really wanna know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was all gray and blown up, like a balloon. The gas does that to ’em, when they been in the water.”

  “What about his eyes?”

  “They were open. Pleading.”

  “Huh?”

  “His eyes. It was like they were sayin please.”

  I needed another drink. I had some more gin.

  “You ever heard of a Pinkerton man?” I said.

  “Sure,” said Nicodemus. “A detective.”

  “Like the police?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “They go to work with other guys and pretend they’re one of them. They find out who’s stealing. Or they find out who’s trying to make trouble for the boss. Like the ones who want to make a strike.”

  “You mean, like if a guy wants to get the workers together and make things better?”

  “Yeah. Have meetings and all that. The guys who want to start a union. Pinkertons look for those guys.”

  We drank the rest of the gin. We talked about his kid. We talked about Schmeling and Baer, and the wrestling match that was coming up between Londos and George Zaharias at Griffith Stadium. I got up from my seat, shook Nicodemus’s hand, and thanked him for the conversation.

  “Efharisto, patrioti.”

  “Yasou, Vasili.”

  I walked back to my place and had a beer I didn’t need. I was drunk and more confused than I had been before. I kept hearing John’s voice, the way he called me “friend.” I saw his eyes saying please. I kept thinking, I should have gone to his goddamn meeting, if that was gonna make him happy. I kept thinking I had let him down. While I was thinking, I sharpened the blade of my Italian switch knife on a stone.

  The next night, last night, I was serving Wesley Schmidt his dinner after we closed. He was sitting by himself like he always did. I dropped the plate down in front of him.

  “You got a minute to talk?” I said.

  “Go ahead and talk,” he said, putting the spoon to his stew and stirring it around.

  “I wanna be a Pinkerton man,” I said.

  Schmidt stopped stirring his stew and looked up my way. He smiled, showing me his white teeth. Still, his eyes were cold.

  “That’
s nice. But why are you telling me this?”

  “I wanna be a Pinkerton, just like you.”

  Schmidt pushed his stew plate away from him and looked around the dining room to make sure no one could hear us. He studied my face. I guess I was sweating. Hell, I know I was. I could feel it dripping on my back.

  “You look upset,” said Schmidt, his voice real soft, like music. “You look like you could use a friend.”

  “I just wanna talk.”

  “Okay. You feel like having a beer, something like that?”

  “Sure, I could use a beer.”

  “I finish eating, I’ll go down and get my car. I’ll meet you in the alley out back. Don’t tell anyone, hear, because then they might want to come along. And we wouldn’t have the chance to talk.”

  “I’m not gonna tell no one. We just drive around, eh? I’m too dirty to go to a saloon.”

  “That’s swell,” said Schmidt. “We’ll just drive around.”

  I went out to the alley where Schmidt was parked. Nobody saw me get into his car. It was a blue ’31 Dodge coupe with wire wheels, a rumble seat, and a trunk rack. A five-hundred-dollar car if it was dime.

  “Pretty,” I said, as I got in beside him. There were hand-tailored slipcovers on the seats.

  “I like nice things,” said Schmidt.

  He was wearing his suit jacket, and it had to be 80 degrees. I could see a lump under the jacket. I figured, the bastard is carrying a gun.

  We drove up to Colvin’s, on 14th Street. Schmidt went in and returned with a bag of loose bottles of beer. There must have been a half-dozen Schlitz in the bag. Him making waiter’s pay, and the fancy car and the high-priced beer.

  He opened a coupla beers and handed me one. The bottle was ice cold. Hot as the night was, the beer tasted good.

  We drove around for a while. We went down to Hains Point. Schmidt parked the Dodge facing the Washington Channel. Across the channel, the lights from the fish vendors on Maine Avenue threw color on the water. We drank another beer. He gave me one of his tailor-mades and we had a couple smokes. He talked about the Senators and the Yankees, and how Baer had taken Schmeling out with a right in the tenth. Schmidt didn’t want to talk about nothing serious yet. He was waiting for the beer to work on me, I knew.

  “Goddamn heat,” I said. “Let’s drive around some, get some air moving.”

  Schmidt started the coupe. “Where to?”

  “I’m gonna show you a whorehouse. Best secret in town.”

  Schmidt looked me over and laughed. The way you laugh at a clown.

  I gave Schmidt some directions. We drove some, away from the park and the monuments to where people lived. We went through a little tunnel and crossed into Southwest. Most of the streetlamps were broke here. The row houses were shabby, and you could see shacks in the alleys and clothes hanging on lines outside the shacks. It was late, long past midnight. There weren’t many people out. The ones that were out were coloreds. We were in a place called Bloodfield.

  “Pull over there,” I said, pointing to a spot along the curb where there wasn’t no light. “I wanna show you the place I’m talking about.”

  Schmidt did it and cut the engine. Across the street were some houses. All except one of them was dark. From the lighted one came fast music, like the colored music Laura had played in her room.

  “There it is right there,” I said, meaning the house with the light. I was lying through my teeth. I didn’t know who lived there and I sure didn’t know if that house had whores. I had never been down here before.

  Schmidt turned his head to look at the row house. I slipped my switch knife out of my right pocket and laid it flat against my right leg.

  When he turned back to face me, he wasn’t smiling no more. He had heard about Bloodfield and he knew he was in it. I think he was scared.

  “You bring me down to niggertown, for what? ” he said. “To show me a whorehouse?”

  “I thought you’re gonna like it.”

  “Do I look like a man who’d pay to fuck a nigger? Do I? You don’t know anything about me.”

  He was showing his true self now. He was nervous as a cat. My nerves were bad, too. I was sweating through my shirt. I could smell my own stink in the car.

  “I know plenty,” I said.

  “Yeah? What do you know?”

  “Pretty car, pretty suits…top-shelf beer. How you get all this, huh?”

  “I earned it.”

  “As a Pinkerton, eh?”

  Schmidt blinked real slow and shook his head. He looked out his window, looking at nothing, wasting time while he decided what he was gonna do. I found the raised button on the pearl handle of my knife. I pushed the button. The blade flicked open and barely made a sound. I held the knife against my leg and turned it so the blade was pointing back.

  Sweat rolled down my neck as I looked around. There wasn’t nobody out on the street.

  Schmidt turned his head. He gripped the steering wheel with his right hand and straightened his arm.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “I just wanna know what happened to John.”

  Schmidt smiled. All those white teeth. I could see him with his mouth open, his lips stretched, those teeth showing. The way an animal looks after you kill it. Him lying on his back on a slab.

  “I heard he drowned,” said Schmidt.

  “You think so, eh?”

  “Yeah. I guess he couldn’t swim.”

  “Pretty hard to swim, you got a bullet in your head.”

  Schmidt’s smile turned down. “Can you swim, Bill?”

  I brought the knife across real fast and buried it into his armpit. I sunk the blade all the way to the handle. He lost his breath and made a short scream. I twisted the knife. His blood came out like someone was pouring it from a jug. It was warm and it splashed onto my hands. I pulled the knife out, and while he was kicking at the floorboards, I stabbed him a coupla more times in the chest. I musta hit his heart or something because all of the sudden there was plenty of blood all over the car. I’m telling you, the seats were slippery with it. He stopped moving. His eyes were open and they were dead.

  I didn’t get tangled up about it or nothing like that. I wasn’t scared. I opened up his suit jacket and saw a steel revolver with wood grips holstered there. It was small caliber. I didn’t touch the gun. I took his wallet out of his trousers, pulled the bills out of it, wiped off the wallet with my shirttail, and threw the empty wallet on the ground. I put the money in my shoe. I fit the blade back into the handle of my switch knife and slipped the knife into my pocket. I put all the empty beer bottles together with the full ones in the paper bag and took the bag with me as I got out of the car. I closed the door soft and wiped off the handle and walked down the street.

  I didn’t see no one for a couple of blocks. I came to a sewer and I put the bag down the hole. The next block, I came to another sewer and I took off my bloody shirt and threw it down the hole of that one. I was wearing an undershirt, didn’t have no sleeves. My pants were black, so you couldn’t see the blood. I kept walking toward Northwest.

  Someone laughed from deep in an alley and I kept on.

  Another block or so I came up on a group of mavri standing around the steps of a house. They were smoking cigarettes and drinking from bottles of beer. I wasn’t gonna run or nothing. I had to go by them to get home. They stopped talking and gave me hard eyes as I got near them. That’s when I saw that one of them was the cook, Raymond, from the kitchen. Our eyes kind of came together, but neither one of us said a word or smiled or even made a nod.

  One of the coloreds started to come toward me and Raymond stopped him with the flat of his palm. I walked on.

  I walked for a couple of hours, I guess. Somewhere in Northwest I dropped my switch knife down another sewer. When I heard it hit the sewer bottom I started to cry. I wasn’t crying ’cause I had killed Schmidt. I didn’t give a damn nothing about him. I was crying ’cause my father had given me that knife, and no
w it was gone. I guess I knew I was gonna be in America forever, and I wasn’t never going back to Greece. I’d never see my home or my parents again.

  When I got back to my place I washed my hands real good. I opened up a bottle of Abner-Drury and put fire to a Fatima and had myself a seat at the table.

  This is where I am right now.

  Maybe I’m gonna get caught and maybe I’m not. They’re gonna find Schmidt in that neighborhood and they’re gonna figure a colored guy killed him for his money. The cops, they’re gonna turn Bloodfield upside down. If Raymond tells them he saw me, I’m gonna get the chair. If he doesn’t, I’m gonna be free. Either way, what the hell, I can’t do nothing about it now.

  I’ll work at the hotel, get some experience and some money, then open my own place, like Nick Stefanos. Maybe if I can find two nickels to rub together, I’m gonna go to church and talk to that girl, Irene, see if she wants to be my wife. I’m not gonna wait too long. She’s clean as a whistle, that one.

  I’ve had my eye on her for some time.

  The Martini Shot

  I was up in my suite in a residence hotel, where the production housed out-of-town talent and department heads, when I heard a knock on my door. It was late, around two in the morning, but we had wrapped less than an hour earlier, and crew kept different hours than straights. Few of us went to sleep as soon as we got home. We had to have a snack, or a couple of drinks, or some smoke, a little television, sex if we could get it. Anything to make us feel normal at the end of the day. Anything that would make us feel that we led normal lives.

  I looked through the peephole. Annette was standing out in the carpeted hall. She’d called me minutes earlier on the house phone and asked if I wanted some company. I was expecting her, but still, I liked to watch her out there, waiting for me to open the door. It made my pulse run. Both of us had been single for a long while, but our relationship was private.

  I let Annette in and closed the door.

  “Hi,” she said, her mouth curved up in a sweet smile. She stepped out of her sandals.