D. C. Noir 2

by George Pelecanos

  Oddly enough I had met him through Fredl, who had once done a feature on Negro society in Washington. Hardman ranked high in one clique of that mysteriously stratified social realm. After the story appeared in the Frankfurt paper, Fredl sent him a copy. The story was in German, but Hardman had had it translated and then dropped around the saloon carrying a couple of dozen long-stemmed roses for my wife. He had been a regular customer since and I patronized his bookie operation. Hardman liked to show the translation of the feature to friends and point out that he should be regarded as a celebrity of international note.

  Holding three drinks in one giant hand, he moved over to Betty and served her and then handed one to me.

  “Did my partner come off a ship?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Which one?”

  “Flyin a Liberian flag and believe it or not was out of Monrovia. She’s called the Frances Jane and was carryin cocoa mostly.”

  “Mush wasn’t picking up a pound of cocoa.”

  “Well, it was a little more’n a pound.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “Mush was waitin to meet somebody off that boat and was just hangin around waitin for him when the two of them jumped him. Next thing he knows he’s lyin down and this friend of yours has done stepped in and was mixin with both of them. He doin fine till they start with the knives. One of them gets your friend in the ribs and by then Mush is back up and saps one of them and then they both take off. Your friend’s down and out so Mush goes through his pockets and comes up with your address and calls me. I tell him to hang around to see if he can make his meet and if he don’t connect in ten minutes, to come back to Washington and bring the white boy with him. He bled some on Mush’s car.”

  “Tell him to send me a bill.”

  “Shit, man, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I didn’t think you did.”

  “Mush’ll be back in a little while. He’ll take you and your buddy down to the hotel.”

  “Fine.”

  I got up and walked back into the bedroom. Padillo was still lying quietly in the bed. I stood there looking at him, holding my drink and smoking a cigarette. He stirred and opened his eyes. He saw me, nodded carefully, and then moved his eyes around the room.

  “Nice bed,” he said.

  “Have a good nap?”

  “Pleasant. How bad am I?”

  “You’ll be O.K. Where’ve you been?”

  He smiled slightly, licked his lips, and sighed. “Out of town,” he said.

  * * *

  Hardman and I helped Padillo to dress. He had a white shirt that had been washed but not ironed, a pair of Khaki pants in the same condition, a Navy pea jacket, and black shoes with white cotton socks.

  “Who’s your new tailor?” I asked.

  Padillo glanced down at his clothes. “Little informal, huh?”

  “Betty washed em out in her machine,” Hardman said. “Blood hadn’t dried too much, so it came out easy. Didn’t get a chance to iron em.”

  “Who’s Betty?”

  “You’ve been sleeping in her bed,” I said.

  “Thank her for me.”

  “She’s in the next room. You can thank her yourself.”

  “Can you walk?” Hardman said.

  “Is there a drink in the next room along with Betty?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can walk.”

  He could, although he moved slowly. I carried the forbidden shoes. Padillo paused at the door and put one hand on the jamb to brace himself. Then he walked on into the livingroom. “Thanks for the use of your bed, Betty,” he said to the tall brown girl.

  “You’re welcome. How you feel?”

  “A little rocky, but I think it’s mostly dope. Who bandaged me?”

  “Doctor.”

  “He give me a shot?”

  “Uh-huh. Should be bout worn off.”

  “Just about is.”

  “Man wants a drink,” Hardman said. “What you like?”

  “Scotch, if you have it,” Padillo said.

  Hardman poured a generous drink and handed it to Padillo. “How’s yours, Mac?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Mush’ll be here any minute,” Hardman said. “He’ll take you down to the hotel.”

  “Where am I staying?” Padillo asked.

  “At your suite in the Mayflower.”

  “My suite?”

  “I booked it in your name and it’s paid for monthly out of your share of the profits. It’s small—but quietly elegant. You can take it off your income tax if you ever get around to filing it.”

  “How’s Fredl?”

  “We got married.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  Hardman looked at his watch. “Mush’ll be here any minute,” he said again.

  “Thanks for all your help—yours and Betty’s,” Padillo said.

  Hardman waved a big hand. “You saved us having a big razzoo in Baltimore. What you mess in that for?”

  Padillo shook his head slowly. “I didn’t see your friend. I just turned a corner and there they were. I thought they were after me. Whichever one had the knife knew how to use it.”

  “You off that boat?” Hardman said.

  “Which one?”

  “The Frances Jane.”

  “I was a passenger.”

  “Didn’t run across a little old Englishman, name of Landeed, about fifty or fifty-five, with crossed eyes?”

  “I remember him.”

  “He get off the boat?”

  “Not in Baltimore,” Padillo said. “His appendix burst four days out of Monrovia. They stored him away in the ship’s freezer.”

  Hardman frowned and swore. He put heart into it. The chimes rang and Betty went to open the door and admitted a tall Negro dressed in a crow-black suit, white shirt, and dark maroon tie. He wore sunglasses at two-thirty in the morning.

  “Hello, Mush,” I said.

  He nodded at me and the nod took in Betty and Hardman. He crossed over to Padillo. “How you feeling?” His voice was precise and soft.

  “Fine,” Padillo said.

  “This is Mustapha Ali,” Hardman told Padillo. “He’s the cat that brought you down from Baltimore. He’s a Black Muslim, but you can call him Mush. Everybody else does.”

  Padillo looked at Mush. “Are you really a Muslim?”

  “I am,” the man said gravely.

  Padillo said something in Arabic. Mush looked surprised, but responded quickly in the same language. He seemed pleased.

  “What are you talkin, Mush?” Hardman asked.

  “Arabic.”

  “Where you learn Arabic?”

  “Records, man, records. I’ll need it when I get to Mecca.”

  “You the goddamndest cat I ever seen,” Hardman said.

  “Where’d you learn Arabic?” Mush asked Padillo.

  “From a friend.”

  “You speak it real good.”

  “I’ve had some practice lately.”

  “We’d better get you to the hotel,” I told Padillo. He nodded and stood up slowly.

  “Thanks very much for all your help,” he said to Betty. She said it was nothing and Hardman said he would see me tomorrow at lunch. I nodded, thanked Betty, and followed Padillo out to Mush’s car. It was a new Buick, a big one, and had a telephone in the front and a five-inch Sony television in the back.

  “I want to stop by my place on the way to the hotel,” I said to Mush. “It won’t take long.”

  He nodded and we drove in silence. Padillo stared out the window. “Washington’s changed,” he said once. “What happened to the streetcars?”

  “Took em off in ’sixty-one,” Mush said.

  Fredl and I lived in one of those new brick and glass apartments that have blossomed just south of Dupont Circle in a neighborhood that once was made up of three- and four-story rooming houses that catered to students, waiters, car washers, pensioners, and professional tire changers. Speculators tore
down the rooming houses, covered the ground with asphalt, and called them parking lots for a while. When enough parking lots were put together, the speculators would apply for a government-insured loan, build an apartment house, and call it The Melanie or The Daphne after a wife or a girl friend. The rents for a two-bedroom apartment in those places were based on the supposition that both husband and wife were not only richly employed, but lucky in the stockmarket.

  Nobody ever seemed to care what had happened to the students, waiters, car washers, pensioners and the professional tire changers.

  Mush parked the car in the circular driveway where it said no parking and we rode the elevator up to the eighth floor.

  “Fredl will be glad to see you,” I told Padillo. “She might even invite you to dinner.” I opened the door. The light from one large lamp burned in the livingroom, but the lamp had been knocked to the floor and the shade was lying a foot or so away. I went over and picked up the lamp, put it on the table, and replaced the shade. I looked in the bedrooms, but that seemed a foolish thing to do. She wasn’t there. I walked back into the livingroom and Padillo was standing near the record player, holding a piece of paper in his right hand. Mush stood by the door.

  “A note,” I said.

  “A note,” he agreed.

  “But not from Fredl.”

  “No. It’s from whoever took her away.”

  “A ransom note,” I said. I didn’t want to read it.

  “Sort of.”

  “How much do they want?”

  Padillo saw that I didn’t want to read the note. He put it down on the coffee table.

  “Not much,” he said. “Just me.”

  REFLECTING

  BY RHOZIER “ROACH” BROWN

  Lorton, VA

  (Written in 1969)

  Two hands resting on bars of steel

  Wondering was all this really real

  Living from day to day using dope

  Death was waiting with a steel rope.

  Living a life I thought was pretty cool

  Moving in a hurry and breaking all the rules

  Stepping on anyone who got in my way

  Never expecting any dues to pay.

  I was hooked quite early, and dying quick

  Staying high and fly, and pretty slick

  The world passed by and I was in a deep nod

  To awake a young old man and find no God.

  Wine and reefers were a part of my song

  Getting my kicks and doing wrong

  It’s a miracle, how I managed to survive

  Riding a pale white horse, bent on suicide.

  Her eyes are moist, bursting from within

  Alone and crushed, her man in the pen

  Patiently she tried and done all she could

  It didn’t work, it just wasn’t any good.

  I killed all the love that stood in my path

  Love was for suckers, and I was in a Hip Bag

  If only I had listened, or even cared

  My youth and dreams, wouldn’t die in here.

  I knew all the angles, and how to score

  But all it’s brought me was time and a steel door.

  A few days of fun and years of pain

  Is the price I pay for doing my thing.

  Now I hurt in a way I’ve never known

  For the rest of my life, I’ll be alone.

  Here in the House of Time, grown men cry

  I, too, am one of them and I know why

  My brand of cigarettes tells of a hip young fool

  Who destroyed his life and family being real KOOL.

  NORA

  BY WARD JUST

  Connecticut Avenue

  (Originally published in 1971)

  Nora believed that my stories were old-fashioned. She said once, “Friend, why don’t you write something up-to-date, immediate. The romantics are dead. Friend, they’re gone.” She was really very serious about it, and I had to tell her that hers was a liverish idea whose time had not yet come. Not that it made any difference, because in 1965 nobody would buy the stories except an obscure review in the Midwest, whose payment was in prestige. In the first six months of 1965 I had two payments of prestige with a third on the way. For eats, as Nora liked to call them, I worked as a researcher for Congressional Weekly Digest, an expensive private newsletter which purported to give its subscribers advance information on legislation pending before the House and Senate. I was paid a hundred dollars a week for reading the Congressional Record and reporting my findings to the editor, who would rearrange them into breathless verbless sentences.

  But that had little to do with Nora Bryant. She was English and had come to Washington as correspondent for one of the popular London dailies. She had good looks, and good brains to go with the good looks, but she was admired for her idiosyncrasies. Nora believed that America was alive and Britain was dead; interesting, amusing in its way, but dead nonetheless. She thought that this country was open to possibilities and in perpetual motion in a way that Britain was not. She had a wide circle of American friends, and spent as little time at the British embassy as she could manage; the ambassador there was an aging peer whom she called the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake stream-lined baron. In a bewitching West Riding accent she spoke American slang, and the effect was hilarious: Somerset Maugham imitating Allen Ginsberg. Her specialty was southern politicians and she told me it was a high point of her life here when she spent an evening with the then-occupant of the White House and came away with enough vocabulary to last her a month or more. She came to my apartment after dinner at the White House, still laughing over all the wonderful words and phrases she’d learned. I tried to pump her about the man himself, what he was like. How much did he drink? What was on his mind? Was his mood hot or cold?

  “I didn’t have a thermometer up his bum, friend,” she said.

  “Come on, Nora! Give! What did he say about the war? Anything about—”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  “Nora …”

  “That dog won’t hunt,” she said, and that was that.

  * * *

  We’d met at a party on Capitol Hill, and I was quickly taken with her because she asked me about my stories. Under any normal circumstance a writer doesn’t like to be asked what he’s working on, except in Washington no one cared at all. No one ever asked me about my fiction, so my identity was frozen at “researcher for Congressional Weekly Digest,” a job I despised and was defensive about. Nora understood right away. She was persistent in asking about the stories and it was clear to me as I answered her that I hadn’t thought them out clearly. She saw this, too, but did not press it. She told me to keep working, and everything would be fine.

  “You’ll be jake,” she said. “You’re a writer, I can see that.”

  “Oh? Just how?”

  “You don’t know what you think.”

  Nora is barely five feet tall, and I come in at just under six feet four. In a brief moment of anger I saw her as a little girl who worked for a second-string London newspaper, looking up at me and figuratively patting me on my head; the patronage was unmistakable and outrageous, but I was charmed. At our first meeting, listening to her voice and watching her glide around the room, I fell half in love with her. She seemed wonderfully cheerful and inquisitive, intelligent and sure of herself, and I liked the attention. It was a large, jumbled party and she left it early, and two days later called me at my apartment.

  “I’ve got a pretty good tip,” she said. “Will that do you any good at that thing you work for? That newsletter?” She sounded brisk and impatient.

  “Sure,” I said. Gottschault, the editor, paid me a ten-dollar bonus for any authentic inside story, anything that had not been printed elsewhere. I had never taken advantage of this, because I seldom read the newspapers and therefore did not know what was news and what wasn’t.

  “All right,” she said. “The Senate Finance Committee will take up the oil section of the tax bill on Thursday. T
hey will report it on Friday. There will be one day of discussion, in private. No more.”

  “Thursday, huh?”

  “Yes, Thursday. Now does that suggest anything to you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, today is Wednesday. That might suggest to you that the oil section has already been written.”

  “Stop the presses,” I said.

  “Would you like to have that? For your very own?”

  “Are you under the Official Secrets Act?”

  “I’ll send it over by messenger.”

  “Are you serious?” I suspected a joke.

  “Yes,” she said, and rang off.

  The document arrived that afternoon, and when I gave it to Gottschault he whooped with pleasure and literally did stop the presses to get it in the newsletter. Then he gave me a twenty-dollar bonus, but when I asked Nora to dinner to celebrate, she declined.

  * * *

  I don’t remember when she started calling me “friend.” It was probably the period when she began dropping in at my apartment unannounced. This was a two-room apartment in a brownstone off Connecticut Avenue. I’d know she was there when I heard the phonograph; Brahms if she was in a good mood, Bunk Johnson if she was not. She’d taken to American jazz along with everything else and loved to listen to the blues when she was low. I worked in my bedroom and would finish whatever passage I was writing and join her and we’d sit and talk, sometimes all night. Washington politicians fascinated her, she thought they had nothing in common with the ones she knew in Britain. She came to modify that opinion, but in the first months in Washington she was as intrigued as a biologist investigating a new species. Nora developed categories for the politicians that she met.

  It was clear from the first month that there would be no romance. I was never exactly sure why. She seemed to want a friend, someone off the Washington political circuit, who was compatible and what she called “talkable.” I was pleased and flattered—romance or no—because I was being very reclusive and difficult at that time of my life, and Nora was one of the ornaments of Washington. She had her own center of gravity, a distinct and (I thought) hard-won personal style. Late at night we tried to analyze the town, what made it work, why some men were successful and others were not, why women seemed to fail, and what each had to do with the other.