He felt the girl looking at him as he pulled out of the lot. Did she believe he was one more sorry nigger, a killer?
He headed downtown on New York Avenue. Approaching Chinatown a few minutes later, he still didn’t know what to do.
One of his favorite spots, the China Doll, was open till 4 a.m. on weekends. He turned left on 5th, right on H, and parked under a streetlight. He looked over and the girl was so pale, the eyes so big. Striking.
He wondered what the moment felt like to her. Wondered who she was, where she was from, what her story was.
As if she’d read his mind, she said, “I’m Mariana. From Moldova.” Heavy accent, but understandable.
“Mol—?”
“Moldova. My country.”
It sounded familiar, but only vaguely. Sherman felt stupid.
“Your first time in Washington?” he said. “Nation’s capital?” And felt stupider yet.
“Capital of the world,” she said. “Is what we learn in school. We study English language and much about United States.”
“How’d you end up here?”
She shrugged. “Why you ask? Man say you kill me. So?”
“I’m not going to kill you,” Sherman said. “I’m police, not a killer.”
No reaction. Maybe she didn’t believe him.
At a loss, he asked her again how she happened to get to the U.S. from…“Moldavia?”
“Moldova.”
“I don’t even know where it is,” Sherman said.
“Is far. You know Romania? On other side. Far.”
They sat there for most of an hour, under the streetlight, while she told her story. She said Moldova was one of the old Soviet states, one of the poorest countries in the world. In their capital, she said, men who worked in hospitals had been arrested for chopping up corpses and selling the flesh as meat at open-air markets. She grew up in a village called Droki, in a little house where the electricity rarely worked—her and two sisters and their mother, after her father drank himself to death. She quit school at fourteen and worked in a beetroot factory. Two years ago, when she was seventeen, an aunt in a neighboring village sold her out—told her about job opportunities abroad and dropped her off for an interview, supposedly, but the “interviewers” were Albanian gangsters who locked her up with some other girls and later drove them across Romania and Serbia to Macedonia, where they were locked in little rooms in back of a kafane, a club—like the Sunbeam, Sherman imagined—and forced to service twenty, thirty men every night. Slaves. After sixteen months she was saved by a man who bought her and took her to the authorities. The authorities arranged her passage back to Moldova. She got home only to find the Albanian Mafia had not only snatched her sister Nataly but murdered their little sister Lena, who had witnessed the snatching. Nataly had been gone for nearly a year. Their mother had received a single card from her, which said she’d been taken to Italy and forced into prostitution.
Sherman tried to take it all in. You thought growing up in Barry Farms was tough?
She—Mariana—said she’d gone to Albania then, last year, and asked to go to Italy as a prostitute, “my only hope to find my sister.” She was sold at an auction and put on a speedboat across the Adriatic at midnight with other illegal immigrants. Gangsters in Italy took her first to a beautiful seaside town called Rimini and then many other places. Everywhere, she showed a picture of Nataly, but no one knew her.
The life was brutal, as in Macedonia. Threats, beatings, torture. When one girl was suspected of talking to the polizia the men gathered all the others, tied the “bad” one in a chair, pulled her tongue out with pliers and sliced it off. Mariana saw girls killed for no reason than to put the fear in the others. Three girls killed themselves.
Sherman was sweating, hearing it. He started the Cutlass and ran the AC.
She said she was finally reunited with her sister. The gangsters had murdered a Nigerian girl and believed Mariana might go to a priest about it. One night they took her to a warehouse and produced Nataly—with a knife at her throat, and did Mariana still want to talk to the priest?
To get them out of Italy, away from the authorities, the gangsters flew them to Mexico. Then they were trafficked into the U.S. and sold again. Eventually they were brought to D.C.
“Together, at least,” she said. “But they take me one place, Nataly another. I no see her. Sometime I hear something, but I no see her.”
Sherman didn’t know what to say. He sure as hell didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t take her to a police station—no telling who might be connected with LaPhonso or LaPhonso’s people. If he took her to any authority at all, including the FBI’s human-trafficking unit, he was asking for trouble—he’d have to say how he happened to know her, have to tell about the Sunbeam. He’d immediately be put on administrative leave and would probably wind up out on his ass. It was illegal for a cop to work anyplace that served alcohol—aside from the dealing, prostitution, and everything else at the Sunbeam. The MPD brass looked the other way if you wanted to take your chances, but if things blew up they’d hang you out to dry.
That was the best-case scenario. It would get a lot worse if they found out LaPhonso was dead and Sherman hadn’t reported it.
And beyond the authorities, there was Antwain. Sherman would be as good as dead when Antwain found out he hadn’t taken this girl somewhere, straight from the club, and murdered her.
This girl. Mariana. From Moldova. Her life more harrowing than Sherman’s, LaPhonso’s, Antwain’s.
“At this place they lock me in the room,” she was saying, “and I know what I must do. Every day, every night. And this man—this man—”
“LaPhonso?”
“—he come sometime, too, and I must do for him. Anything. Sometime he want this and this and I say no and he hit me, hurt me. Sometime I want him to kill me. I’m dead inside, so no matter. Except for my sister. I live for my sister. I know she live for me.”
She told it with no emotion at all. Spooky, as if she dead inside. Except Sherman didn’t believe she was. This girl could be saved, if he only knew how.
“Now,” she said, “is okay I die. No matter. You kill me, is okay.”
Sherman didn’t understand. “I’m not going to kill you. And you just said you need to live, for your sister.”
“No. Dead, my sister.”
“Dead? You said…”
“Yes, dead. A girl come from the other place and say they kill a girl for nothing. I know is Nataly—hair, scars on the hand where men in Italy burn her with cigarette. Yes. And now, why I live? They kill me?—okay. You kill me?—okay.”
Jesus.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Sherman said. “Let’s go in the restaurant and figure out what to do with you. Eat if you want.”
“No eat. No.”
Sherman couldn’t eat either. They went into the China Doll and the graveyard waitress, Lejing, brought them tea. Mariana seemed not to even notice.
“So,” Sherman said finally. He had to hear the rest.
“Yes.” She looked off at the mirrored wall. “Is why I shoot this man. Many times—Macedonia, Italy, United States—I dream I have a pistol, but no. I can do nothing.”
“But you got your hands on one tonight.”
“Yes. He come and hurt me again. Drunk, or he use the drugs. He close his eyes later and I think he sleep. I go bathroom. Come back, I step on his clothes on floor. Something hard. When I lie down, he wake up and go bathroom, close door.”
Sherman pictured LaPhonso on the crapper, in all his glory.
Mariana stared at her trembling hand on the tabletop. “So fast. I go touch hard thing under clothes. A pistol, after so many times I dream. This man, maybe he no kill my sister, but maybe yes. What I know, he is like these men everywhere. I take pistol, open door, shoot. Then think to kill myself, but—no.”
She stared at the mirrored wall again. Sherman wondered if she saw their reflections there or was only seeing what was in her head—LaPhonso
toppling off the can, the back wall already bloody. The many other bad men. The sister who’d been murdered recently. The little sister murdered in Moldova. Lord only knew.
He still didn’t know what to do. He sympathized, he understood why she killed LaPhonso, but the bottom line was she’d killed a man, and he, Sherman Brown, was a police officer.
She might get off. There were no witnesses—a decent lawyer might get her off on self-defense. Then the authorities might get her back to Moldova.
He’d be through, of course. Not only off the force but dead, as soon as Antwain realized he hadn’t killed her.
Still…“I want to help you,” he said.
“No. My sister dead, my mother no expect see me again—”
“But she see you again.”
She turned away, staring out at lit-up H Street. Sherman wondered how it looked to her, this foreign place. He wondered how the capital of Moldova, where men sold human flesh at open-air markets, would look to him.
“I remember first night here,” she said. “Men take me in car and I see Washington Monument—something I see in book when I’m a girl. Now, I am here. Land of the free. I see people on street, I want to cry for help—‘Save me! This no happen in United States, in Washington, capital of the world!’ But I can no scream. No one hear me outside. Feel I’m under the water, you understand?”
Sherman understood. Underwater, trying to be heard, and it was impossible. He remembered how he felt as a kid, the times he saw the nice part of D.C. Those people didn’t see a little black boy from Barry Farms, and if they did, they wouldn’t hear him—if he dared to speak. And he wouldn’t dare. Even as a teenager, a little bit of a player in Barry Farms, he wouldn’t talk to anyone in the D.C. you saw on TV. Show up, even, and people looked at you like they couldn’t wait to call the police.
Lejing appeared, exhausted. “Solly, Mista Sherman. We close.”
Sherman held out a hand to Mariana. “Let’s go.”
Without any idea where. No idea what he was going to do. Expecting a call from Felice any minute, when she woke up to go to the bathroom and realized he wasn’t there. It’s 4 in the morning. What’re you doing?
Thinking of Felice, little Cheri, the twins on the way. His career, his livelihood. Whatever he did, whatever he didn’t do, he was taking a big chance.
They were on the sidewalk, H Street, heading toward the Cutlass, when his cell phone rang. Caller ID told him it was Antwain.
“Officer Brown here.”
“Officer. Shit. Where you at, officer?”
“I’m here. You need me?”
“Wanna know whassup. Where that ho-bag at?”
“Where you think?” Sherman said. “Out You know what I mean?”
“I don’t know. How you think I know? Tell me.”
“She’s out, trust me.”
“Trust you, boy? Uh-huh.” Sherman heard him chortle.
“Listen—”
That was when the girl bolted in front of him, across the sidewalk, off the curb, lunging in front of a speeding Lexus, somebody probably high as the sky at 4 in the morning. Driver never had time to slow—Sherman heard the impact a split second before the screeching noise.
She flew up on the hood and across the windshield and ended up sprawled across the center line, a lane over.
Even as he ran to her, Sherman was looking around wondering who’d seen them together, wondering what to do. Save himself? Say he never saw her before, she came out of nowhere?
Blood running out her mouth, her pale face scraped raw from the pavement. No way she survived.
She hadn’t wanted to. So did it matter what he said?
He knelt beside her. Mariana from Moldova, in the capital of the world.
THE NAMES OF THE LOST
BY RICHARD CURREY
Shepherd Park, N.W.
Liebmann locked the front door and walked through his store to the back. He propped the rear door open and picked up what was left of the boxes. He never had more than three or four boxes at the end of a day, most of them gone to the people who did not come in to buy liquor but for these sturdy weight-bearing cartons perfect for moving or for storage. Tonight there was a Wild Turkey box jammed into the corrugated white carton that Mogan David shipped in, both of those slipped into the wider brown flat that held a case of Iron City beer.
He carried the nested stack across the alley and lofted it into the dumpster.
It was November in the city of Washington and the dark came early and deep now. Liebmann paused in the falling cold, the same metallic chill he grew up with in Germany. Washington’s weather turned European in November, the same dank gray, skies lowered and closed and withholding. Just a few weeks until Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year. If the weather was never his favorite, it was Liebmann’s best season in business, the only liquor store for ten miles in any direction to stay open until midnight on New Year’s Eve. The liquor kept selling until the ball fell in Times Square on the little portable black-and-white TV he kept in his office. And he had no other place to go. If the second thought might have carried an element of dejection, Liebmann felt only a distant surge of something akin to melancholy: He was a businessman, he told himself, and business was good.
Down at the end of the alley a car clocked past on Kalmia Road, its headlights sweeping the misted gloom. He looked back into the glow spreading from inside his store, thinking that it would soon be 1968. He had been in America for twenty-two years, the owner of this liquor store for sixteen of them. One day to another and he was still here, surviving. He stood a moment longer in the chill before he went inside to close out for the day.
Liebmann was married once. His wife died. Cancer, in 1962. There was nothing anyone could do. He met her at the Shepherd Park public library on the corner of Georgia Avenue and Geranium Street. She caught his eye and he knew immediately that she was a survivor like himself. They talked for a few minutes in English and then he went to German and she smiled broadly. After a moment of shy quiet there on the steps of the library, she spoke the single word, Mauthausen. A camp in Austria. He understood that it was where she had been taken during the war.
He was standing a step below her and looked up and said: Auschwitz. Und danach Flossenburg.
They were married less than four months later, and lived together in the walk-up apartment. She brought a woman’s touch. She cooked German, and made Liebmann buy a radio. They figured out the game of baseball and were regulars at Senators home games, sitting in their favorite spot above the third base line. She got him started with the long neighborhood walks around Shepherd Park.
He was not swept away by her, not at first, did not fall in love the way lovers do who meet and capsize together into the heat and surprise and mystery of discovering each other. But it was a mystery nonetheless, his love building for her like slowly painting a picture of something he had never seen and could never have imagined. All they needed to know was where they had been and that they had found their way to this place and to each other. They were companions. Affection anchored them. They worked the store together. They saved to buy a house. His wife wanted to live on Morningside Drive—she took him walking there and admired the big four-square homes with their precise lawns and the satisfying geometry of their flower beds and careful flagstone walks.
They imagined together what it would be like when they could afford to move.
When she was sick and it was clear her time was short, Liebmann sometimes could not sleep and got up at night o sit beside the bedroom window in the apartment, looking down on Georgia Avenue. He touched the tattoo on his left forearm.
There was nothing anyone could do.
He was transferred from Auschwitz to the camp at Flossenburg to work in the granite quarry there. The Nazis had killed off most of the older prisoners with overwork and starvation and random executions by that point in the war. Liebmann was young and still able to stand on his feet and swing a pick. When the Americans liberated Flossenburg, he was among the
few left alive. In the holding settlement where he was clothed and fed and gained twenty pounds in as many days, Liebmann made it clear that he wanted to come to America, that he never wanted to see Germany again. Refugees were assigned to cities when they arrived in America, and Liebmann was given Washington, D.C., a part of town called Shepherd Park. An apartment was held in his name, where he lived rent-free for a year, after which time he was expected to support himself and pay his own way.
Twenty-two years later and Liebmann was still there, a four-room walk-up at 7701 Georgia Avenue. It met his needs.
Shepherd Park cornered into the northern edge of the District of Columbia and up against the Maryland town of Silver Spring. A few blocks to the west of Liebmann’s apartment building was a sylvan grid of tranquil streets with redbrick colonials and tudors and substantial brownstone duplexes, the part of the neighborhood where his wife wanted to move. Further west, along 16th Street, there were pillared mansions on half-acre lots arching down to Rock Creek Park. But where Liebmann lived, at the corner of Georgia and Juniper Street, the area was failing. He had watched his six or seven blocks ebb and drift in a long collapse, falling faster and harder in the last few years. Stores and cafés and the bakery and the pharmacy and the neighborhood dry cleaner had all closed or moved to the suburbs. There was an open-air shopping mall out in Wheaton, a new invention of commerce drawing shoppers like nothing before, and merchants were moving north to Maryland and the money.
Liebmann was robbed once as the neighborhood faltered, held up by a frenzied black man with one clouded eye. The thief yelled and waved a gun around. Liebmann emptied the contents of the register into a paper sack and the man took it and bolted. Four mortified customers left quickly without purchasing anything. Liebmann filed a police report; one of the young officers who answered the call suggested he buy a handgun, for protection. In case this happens again. And the way things’re going around here, it will.
A few of Liebmann’s friends urged him to sell and move. They would stop in for a couple bottles of Mogan David or Manischewitz and talk to him as they paid. Jacob, they’d say, it’s time to go. Rent a place in Wheaton. Your business won’t miss a beat. But Liebmann didn’t see it. Liquor sold everywhere and on any day. His wife was gone. He had no children. There was nobody he cared about who needed a different kind of life. He saw no reason to make any change at all. He took the policeman’s advice and bought a .22 caliber pistol, a little revolver with white plastic grips that cost fifty dollars used. He got a quick tutorial on the pistol’s operation from the gun store owner. Took the gun back to the store, loaded it and spun the cylinder and set the safety, and locked it in the lower left drawer of his desk in the office cubicle.
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