Philadelphia Noir

by Carlin Romano

  He flipped over in the water, raised the Glock, and fired, hitting the man three times. Before his victim fell into the water, Richard submerged and swam hard to his right. Ten bullets bored into the water around him, but none of them found their target. By the time he surfaced, he was nearly fifty yards away, and the man who’d shot at him was frantically searching for him in the darkness.

  Richard climbed the gate and fell on the sloping grass, wincing at the pain in his leg as he rolled to the bottom of the hill. He looked up and saw the man who’d shot at him climbing the gate about forty yards away. Then he heard footsteps running around the bend.

  He’d lost the phone and the second gun in the water, but there was no time to lament. Richard got up and hobbled across Reservoir Drive, heading toward the old mansion at Smith Memorial Playground. He crouched as he passed orange construction barriers near the massive house that was buttressed by scaffolding.

  Richard’s limp was more pronounced than it had been just seconds before, and when he reached the mansion, bullets struck the metal scaffolding. Richard aimed his gun at the lock on the door and fired a shot of his own. A second later, he was inside.

  He could see the dim outlines of tricycles and hobby horses strewn about the floor, and the shape of a giant sliding board in the back. The newly painted walls bore pictures that were barely visible in the darkness.

  Richard crouched low and ducked into a room thirty yards ahead, knowing that the trail of blood from his wound would lead them to him. But he wanted them to find him now. He wanted it to be over.

  The doorknob twisted and three men moved in, spreading out to either side of the room.

  “We’re here!” said the leader. “Are you?”

  Richard recognized the voice now. It was Joe Miller, the same man who’d led the CIA team in the mountains of Tora Bora. Miller was the kind of man others followed. It wasn’t because he was especially intelligent or threatening. Nor was it the fact that he’d been a Special Forces major prior to joining the agency. There was just a force about him—a feeling. He had only to speak in that world-weary, cynical growl, and it was enough to make lesser men submit.

  Richard was not a lesser man, and he had no intention of submitting. “You know I’m here, Miller,” he said as he slid along the wall, his legs even weaker than his voice. “And you know all of us won’t be walking out.”

  Miller used hand signals to point to the area where Richard’s voice had come from and his men moved in that direction. “It’s hard to know anything when it comes to you, Richard. We thought we knew where you were in the mountains, and we were wrong, weren’t we?”

  Richard moved toward an opening in the wall that led to another room. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said as his pursuers moved closer.

  “I’m talking about Afghanistan, Richard. I’m talking about the reasons you kept going back.”

  “I wanted to fight,” Richard said, sliding down the wall and easing the gun around the corner.

  “That’s what we all thought at first,” the squad leader said as he got down in a prone position and turned on his weapon’s laser scope. “And with all the intelligence we gathered and got to you guys in Delta Force, we figured the fight would be easy.”

  “It should’ve been,” Richard said. “But it’s hard to fight a war with the CIA in the way.”

  “It’s even harder when one of your best soldiers is a traitor,” he said in an effort to hold Richard’s attention. “I have to admit, it took us awhile to figure out how you did it. The simplicity of it was pure genius.”

  Suddenly, one of the men flew around the wall. Even with his bleeding leg and dimmed senses, Richard was too fast to be caught off guard. He turned and fired one shot from the silenced gun, hitting the agent in the temple. The man was dead before he stopped moving.

  Another flew around the wall and was upon Richard, who grabbed his arm and twisted it until it broke. There was a scream and a muffled gunshot, and the agent’s last breath came out along with the contents of his bowels.

  Richard pushed the body away with a grunt, and when he did so, Miller was standing over him with his gun pointed at Richard’s head. His face was just as Richard remembered it—red and pockmarked with a bulbous nose and a mouth that was fixed in a scowl.

  “Drop the gun,” Miller said, his tone low and angry.

  Richard did as he was told. With the blood he’d lost since being shot in his leg, and the energy he’d expended fighting them off, he was too tired and weak to do otherwise.

  “I should kill you right now,” Miller said.

  “Yeah you should. So why don’t you?”

  “Because I need to hear, from your own mouth, why you helped the enemy in Tora Bora.”

  Richard was parched. He was finding it difficult to breathe, let alone talk. The house seemed to be getting colder. Still, he wanted to tell him why, because in a perverse way, Richard needed to hear it from his own mouth too.

  Richard ripped open his T-shirt, revealing the ugly scar on his chest. “I did it because of this,” he said.

  Miller looked at him curiously.

  “Fighting the battle at Tora Bora was like getting this scar all over again,” Richard said wistfully. “It was like reliving ethnic cleansing.”

  Miller furrowed his brow. He was clearly confused.

  “I’m Bosnian. I grew up in a mountain village where you could look out and see minarets from four-hundred-year-old mosques poking through the clouds. It was beautiful. It was peaceful. It was home. Then the war started.

  “I was eleven years old when the Serbs came to our village. They stripped the men and paraded them in front of their wives before executing them. Then they raped the women. I was lucky, I guess. They just sliced my chest with a machete and left me to die.”

  Richard looked up at Miller, who’d been struck dumb by the story. “I saw my mother and sister violated. I saw my father humiliated. I saw all of them murdered. And the only thing I had to remember them by was this scar. Even after I got adopted by a nice American diplomat and his wife, even after they changed my name from Mujo to Richard, even after I learned to love this country, I never forgot what happened to my people. I couldn’t, because I had this scar to remind me.

  “I never thought when they trained me for Special Forces and put me in Delta Force that I’d end up fighting Muslims in those mountains in Tora Bora. But when I did, something snapped, and it was like I was that frightened, angry little boy back in Bosnia.”

  “So you sent a radio transmission to make them think you’d been cut off from your unit,” Miller said matter-of-factly. “Then you went over a mountain pass and killed enough Afghan militia to let the mujahideen escape.”

  The house was silent except for the sound of Richard’s increasingly labored breathing.

  “Did you realize who you were helping?” Miller asked.

  “I realized I was helping Muslims who had the ability to fight back. That was more than my family ever had.”

  “But you knew that the man commanding those Muslim fighters in Tora Bora was Osama bin Laden. Didn’t you?”

  Richard closed his eyes and smiled. It was a joyless gesture—one fraught with all the contradictions that had plagued him all his life. “Of course I knew. That’s why I kept going back to Afghanistan. I wanted to make up for it by doing my duty for America. But when I couldn’t atone for my sins, I wanted to forget I’d ever committed them. That roadside bomb that hit my Humvee was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to come home and forget Afghanistan. It allowed me to come here and marry Corrine. At least for a little while, I had something beautiful again. But you and your men took that away too.”

  “Actually, they didn’t.”

  Richard’s eyes snapped open at the sound of that voice. It was velvety, feminine, and familiar. It was Corrine. As she walked into the room, Richard tried to make his mouth form the question, but it wouldn’t.

  Perhaps he’d been struck dumb by the blood loss
and the resultant dementia. Or maybe he was already dead, and Corrine was meeting him in paradise.

  “You did a good job, Agent Miller,” she said to the squad leader who’d captured Richard. “We lost five men, but at least we got our subject, and we got him alive.”

  “Our subject? What are you talking about?” asked Richard.

  “The same thing you were talking about a few minutes ago,” Corrine said as she wiped the fake blood from her chest. “Doing my duty for my country.”

  “But you can’t be real,” Richard said, laboring to breathe as he began to hyperventilate. “You can’t be one of them. You died back at the house. They killed you.”

  “Funny what a little red paint and a lot of imagination can do, isn’t it?” Corrine replied with a wicked grin.

  “But you said you loved me,” Richard said as his facial expression went from hurt to sadness to outright devastation. “You married me.”

  “And you married me too, even though you knew the CIA could come after you one day for what you did. You valued your happiness more than you valued my safety, and you never trusted me enough to tell me what happened in Tora Bora, no matter how many times I asked you.”

  “I kept that from you to protect you,” he said as a tear rolled down his cheek. “I kept it from you because I loved you. Not that it matters. This was all just another operation for you. The marriage, the house—everything.”

  “Marrying you was the only way to get close enough to find the truth,” she said coldly. “We had to know if you were part of a larger cell or if you acted of your own volition. The fact is, I did it for the same reason you helped bin Laden escape in Tora Bora. I love my people, and I wasn’t about to watch you or anyone else hurt them.”

  Richard leaped forward and grabbed Miller’s weapon from his hands, but before he could fire, Corrine pulled a gun from the small of her back and pumped three rounds into his chest.

  The gun slipped from his fingers as blood bubbled up in his mouth. He looked at Corrine for the last time before closing his eyes and leaning back against the wall.

  At that moment, everything went quiet and Richard was afraid. But it wasn’t the numbness in his body or the sensation of blood spilling down his chest that frightened him. It was the silence.

  As Richard fought through the depths of unconsciousness to reach back toward life, it was the silence that enveloped him like a shroud, pulling him down into the tomb his life had become.

  He was tempted to surrender—to lay his head upon the breast of silence and allow it to rock him to sleep, the way his mother had rocked him as a child. What, after all, did he have to live for? Who would shed tears if death folded him in its arms and held him there forever?

  Richard was a scarred man in more ways than one. He wasn’t connected to a home, or to a family, or to a wife. Not anymore. He’d been severed from them all, like the silence was severing him from life. Even now he felt it, sliding up through his ears and into the recesses of his mind. He felt it pouring over his body, slow and thick and sweet, like syrup. It was silence, and as his eyes closed for the last time, Richard reached toward it with his very soul, hoping at last for peace.

  SECRET POOL

  BY ASALI SOLOMON

  West Philadelphia

  I learned about the University City Swim Club around the same time things started disappearing from my room. First I noticed that I was missing some jewelry, and then the old plaid Swatch I’d been saving for a future Antiques Road-show. I didn’t say anything to my mother, because they say it’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. But then I felt like we were all sleepwalkers when Aja told me about the pool, hiding in plain sight right up on 47th Street in what looked like an alley between Spruce and Pine.

  “You don’t know about the University City Swim Club?” she said, pretending shock. It was deep August and I sat on the steps of my mother’s house. Aja was frankly easier to take during the more temperate months, but since my summer job had ended and there were two and a half more weeks before eleventh grade, I often found myself in her company.

  Aja Bell and I had been friends of a sort since first grade, when we’d been the only two black girls in the Mentally Gifted program, though there couldn’t have been more than thirty white kids in the whole school. Aja loved MG because there was a group of girls in her regular class who tortured her. Then in sixth grade, I got a scholarship to the Barrett School for Girls and Aja stayed where she was. Now she went to Central High, where she was always chasing these white city kids. It killed her that I went to school in the suburbs with real rich white people, while her French teacher at Central High was a black man from Georgia. Despite the fact that I had no true friends at my school and hated most things about my life, she was in a one-sided social competition with me. As a result, I was subjected to Aja’s peacocking around about things like how her friend Jess, who lived in a massive house down on Cedar Avenue, had invited her to go swimming with her family.

  “Come off it, Aja. I just said I didn’t know about it.”

  “I just think if you live right here … maybe your mom knows about it?”

  “Look, is there a story here?”

  “Well, it’s crazy. There’s this wooden gate with a towing sign on it like it’s just a parking lot, but behind it is this massive pool and these brand-new lockers and everything. And it was so crowded!”

  “Any black people there?”

  “Zingha, why you have to make everything about black and white?”

  “Maybe because people are starting all-white pools in my neighborhood.”

  She sighed. “There was a black guy there.”

  “Janitor?”

  “I think he was the security guard.”

  I snorted.

  We watched a black Range Rover crawl down the block. The windows were tinted, and LL Cool J’s “The Boomin’ System” erupted from the speakers.

  “Wow,” I said, in mock awe. “That’s boomin’ from his boomin’ system.”

  “So ghetto,” said Aja.

  “Um, because this is the ghetto,” I said, though my mother forbade me to use the word.

  “He spoke to me,” Aja said suddenly. “The pool security guard. He wasn’t that much older than us.”

  “Was he cute?” I asked without much interest.

  “Tell you the truth, he’s a little creepy. Like maybe he was on that line between crazy and, um, retarded.”

  I laughed and then she did too.

  “So you been hanging out with Jess a lot this summer?” Jess, a gangly brunette with an upturned nose, was Aja’s entry into the clique to which she aspired. But Jess sometimes ignored Aja for weeks at a time, and had repeatedly tried to date guys who Aja liked.

  “Well, not a lot. She was at tennis camp earlier,” Aja said, glancing away from my face. She could never fully commit to a lie. I imagined my older brother Dahani a couple of nights ago, spinning a casual yarn for my mom about how he’d been at the library after his shift at the video store. He said he was researching colleges that would accept his transfer credits. Dahani had been home for a year, following a spectacular freshman-year flameout at Oberlin. That memory led me to a memory from seventh grade when Dahani said he’d teach me how to lie to my mother so I could go to some unsupervised sleepover back when I cared about those things. I practiced saying, “There will be parental supervision,” over and over. Dahani laughed because I bit the inside of my cheek when I said my line.

  “You mean the pool at the Y?” my mom asked me later that night. We had just finished eating the spaghetti with sausage that she had cooked especially for my brother. She had cracked open her nightly can of Miller Lite.

  “Not that sewer,” I said.

  “Poor Zingha, you hate your fancy school and you hate your community too. Hard being you, isn’t it?”

  “Sorry,” I muttered, rather than hearing again about how I used to be a sweet girl who loved to hug people and cried along with TV characters.

  Dahani, who used to
have a volatile relationship with our mother, was now silent more often than not. But he said, “I know what you’re talking about, Zingha. Up on 47th Street.” Then he immediately looked like he wanted to take it back.

  “You been there?” I asked.

  “Just heard about it,” my brother said, tapping out a complicated rhythm on the kitchen table. When he was younger it meant he was about to go to his room. Now it meant he was trying to get out of the house. I wasn’t even sure why he insisted on coming home for dinner most nights. Though of course free hot food was probably a factor.

  “So what are you up to tonight?” my mother asked him brightly.

  “I was gonna catch the new Spike Lee with Jason,” he said.

  My mother’s face dimmed. She always hoped that he’d say, Staying right here. But she rallied. “You liked that one, didn’t you, Zingha?”

  I looked at Dahani. “Sure, watch Wesley Snipes do it with a white woman and stick me with the dishes.”

  “Oh, I’ll take care of the dishes,” my mother snapped, managing to make me feel petty. Turning to Dahani she asked, “How is Jason?”

  “Just fine,” Dahani said, in a tight voice. I followed his eyes to the clock above the refrigerator. “Movie starts at seven.”

  My brother kissed my mom and left, just like he did every night since he’d come home in disgrace. I went upstairs so I wouldn’t have to listen to the pitiful sound of her cleaning up the kitchen. After that she would doze in front of the TV for a couple of hours, half waiting for Dahani to come home. She always wound up in bed before that.

  I went up into my brother’s room. I didn’t find my things, but I helped myself to a couple of cigarettes I knew I’d never smoke, and an unsoiled Hustler magazine.

  It happened after I had done the deed with a couple of contorting blondes who must have made their parents proud. I had washed up for bed and was about to put on my new headphones, which would lull me to sleep.