The Assassins Gallery - [Dr Mikhal Lammeck 01]

by David L. Robbins

  The woman paused, blinking at Judith with concern.

  “One last thing. If you’ve come to Washington to find a romance, honey, forget it. With almost every man good enough to hear thunder gone off in uniform somewhere else, the ratio of women to men here is about eight to one. So before I help you find a room, I got to ask if you’re sure you want to be here?”

  Judith stood from the chair. She’d taken more than her share of this kindly woman’s time. The others in the line, the coloreds who would make the real difference in this city and country, stirred expectantly.

  She stretched out her hand.

  “Thank you, ma’am. I’ll take the list, please.”

  * * * *

  January 10

  JUDITH RESTED HER LUGGAGE. This was her second frustrating day of hauling her two bags around Washington’s inner city, working her way down the rental list in her purse. She stood on the porch of the only apartment she’d found that was available for a single colored woman. Everything else on Miz Sanderson’s list had already been rented when she got there, or was shared space like a dormitory.

  On the porch next door, an old, dark woman wrapped in a patch quilt tilted in a creaking cane rocker. The woman pulled a corncob pipe from her mouth and raised it in greeting.

  In front of the locked door, the landlord fiddled with a ridiculous ring of keys, jangling and cursing under his breath. He had a lazy eye and a bristled gray chin. Behind him, his teenage son had the same wandering eye. The eye probably kept him out of the military. He wore a black-and-white jacket too thin for the weather.

  “Jus’ a minute,” the landlord muttered, not looking up. He tried several keys. The old Negro woman chuckled in the cold afternoon, shaking her head behind her pipe. At the man’s rear, his son edged into impatient fidgeting, waiting for the door to be unlocked. The boy ran hands along his temples to smooth down his slicked hair. He chewed a toothpick and lightly tapped a foot to a song in his head, as if he were standing at a microphone. Judith smiled at the boy, who jerked his shoulders in response, cool, eager to be older and not standing behind his clumsy father who was keeping them all waiting.

  Another three keys were rejected by the lock. Before another could be slid into the slit, the boy stepped up. He snatched the key ring from his father—Judith thought it impatient and disrespectful— to locate the proper key. The man raised his hands to surrender to the boy and sighed, but did not scold his son.

  Waiting, Judith looked up and down the alley of rotting steps and tar-paper shingles, careful to keep her face impassive. Litter rolled across the old cobbles; two Negro boys chased a paper cup caught in a wind devil. The only other time Judith had been in Washington, D.C., had been winter, too, four years ago, ten months before Pearl Harbor. The weather then was just as freezing and damp. But she had seen none of this squalor, only the central train station, a trolley, the lobby of the Bellevue Hotel, room 310, and, again, the train station.

  With a triumphant grin, the boy found the right key. He jiggled the rickety door open. The glass pane in the door was spiderwebbed and held together by tape.

  The father did not touch her bags, but the son made a show of lifting the heavier of the two. The boy held the door for her to enter first, crooning “Missy.” The father, oblivious, stepped inside ahead of her; the son grimaced at his back. Judith hefted her smaller bag and followed into a dim hall lit by one bare dangling bulb. The smells of greasy cooking clung to the green walls. The man led her to the third door. The son stayed one stride behind. Judith smelled the fustiness of cigarettes on them both.

  “Here you go.” This time the man had the room key ready. When Judith flattened her palm to receive it, he drew the key back.

  “First month’s rent.”

  “May I see the room first?”

  “Sure, but I got three gals just like you waitin’ for it, if you don’t want it.”

  Judith cut her eyes to the boy, who made a scrunched face and nodded sharply, telling her to take it. She set down her bag and took from her purse a small wallet, to give the man a ten and four ones.

  He pocketed the money, handing over the key. The boy winked; his toothpick jumped on his lips.

  The father said, “I’ll be around the first of every month. Cash only.”

  Judith asked, “What if something breaks?”

  “Fix it or wait to the first of the month to tell me about it.”

  She smiled prettily into the wandering eye.

  “Or, you know,” the son piped up, pulling out the toothpick and sliding in front of his father, “you can leave a note at the front office and I can maybe drop by, if you need somethin’ bad enough.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I can fix most anything.”

  The father elbowed the son aside. “Alright, Josh.”

  The man turned away. Josh the son lingered long enough to wink again and mouth “Anytime” to her. Then he followed his father down the hall.

  Judith slid the key into the lock. Opening the door, she caught her breath at the condition of the room; nothing seemed without a stain. The doorknob came off in her hand. She stood beside her bags in the threshold, then awoke, striding for the front door, hoping to catch them to at least repair the knob. Reaching the porch and the cold slap of air, she saw father and son already far down the alley, turning a corner, and gone. Judith looked above the tin roofs of the alley. One mile to the south, the white dome of the U.S. Capitol jabbed into a sulky sky.

  The old colored woman in her rocking chair nodded, still sucking her corncob. Judith acknowledged her, raising the doorknob in her hand. The woman laughed.

  “Oh, I can see already. You gon’ love it here, darlin’.”

  * * * *

  JUDITH MOVED DOWN THE hall, matching sounds to closed doors. At the wail of an infant, she knocked and found a hefty black woman with a fat baby on her hip and two others on the floor. Judith borrowed a broom and dustpan. Next, she followed the sound of a radio and scored a box of suds, given to her by a large yellow-eyed man in a torn undershirt. From a third door, oddly hiding a practicing violin, she secured a scouring brush and a sponge. The little pigtailed girl who gave her these was alone.

  Judith cleaned her room. Hot water flowed amply in the sink, where she soaked the bed linens in the soap powder. She chipped baked clots off the hot plate and used the wet sponge to lift dust from shelves. She unpacked her bags into an old chifforobe and bureau, both of them peeling veneer. Driving south from Boston, she’d passed through New York City. In Harlem she’d purchased the luggage, two dresses, a winter coat, slacks, shoes, undergarments, a sweater, and the pillbox hat. She shoved her passports, identifications, cash, and kits under the blue tick mattress. The Nash she’d driven from Massachusetts waited in a rented garage three blocks away.

  Once the room lost its musty odor, Judith scrubbed the floor. She stood after an hour on hands and knees, ignoring the curtains on the dingy window. She’d wash them some other afternoon. She walked outside to let her floorboards dry.

  The old woman had not left her rocker but had finished her pipe. Judith walked to the railing separating the porches, determined that it would hold her weight, and sat. She swept a curl of hair from her face.

  “Girl,” the woman said, “you bes’ go back inside and put some clothes on. You catch a death out here.”

  “I’m alright. Thank you.”

  “Come over here and set with me, then.”

  Judith left her porch and took a stool beside the woman.

  “What’s your name, child?”

  “Desiree Charbonnet.”

  “That’s pretty, that’s nice. Kinda rhymes. Everybody calls me Mrs. P. My husband was Mr. Pettigrew.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. P.”

  “Where your people from?”

  “New Orleans.”

  “Laws.” Mrs. P. rocked and cackled. “I love that town! Bourbon Street. Yes.” The woman composed a memory and did not share it. Judith put her arms around herse
lf. Her sweat began to chill in her clothes. Mrs. P. undid the comforter and wrapped it around Judith.

  “Thank you.”

  “You jus’ skin and bone. But we gon’ fatten you up. I used to look just like you, ‘cept them pretty blue eyes. What are you, girl, one of them Creole Negroes?”

  Judith had no reason to object, it seemed a fine explanation.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, welcome to the capital of America. When you get here?”

  “Last week. I’ve been staying in a motel, looking for a room to rent.”

  “A mo-tel? That must’ve been ‘spensive.”

  Judith thought of the six thousand dollars she’d just stashed under her mattress. In addition to her fee, she was allowed to keep whatever she did not spend.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You gon’ stay long?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t sure neither, forty years ago when I come to town. Things sure done changed.”

  Judith accepted the respite beside this affable old woman. Nestled inside the quilt, which smelled crisp and clean, she let Mrs. P. ramble.

  “This war is what done it. Yes, ma’am, jus’ six years ago this was nothin’ but a sleepy little town. Then people start comin’ after that Pearl Harbor. White people comin’ on trains and buses, like pigeons goin’ after corn, flockin’ here.”

  She waved her cool pipe to encompass all around her, the capitol spire in the sky.

  “Gubmint workers. Throwin’ up temporary buildings all over D.C. You seen ‘em, big ugly things on the Mall and both sides of the Reflecting Pool. Oh, my, this war is big business. And black folks, too, comin’ here lookin’ for work, like I reckon you doin’. City got twice as many people since the war. Now, tell me somethin’. Where everybody gon’ live? Where they gon’ put all them new office buildings to run they war? You think the whites gon’ knock down they homes? No, ma’am.”

  Mrs. P. pointed her pipe west. “ ‘Cross the river, they knocked down homes of two hundred Negro families to put up that Pentagon. And more Negroes was kicked out when they took more space for Arlington Cemetery. Black homes been busted up all over this city, for offices and highways and homes for white folk. Like in Foggy Bottom where I lived for nineteen years. Kicked out so the gubmint could build theyself some buildings and such. Same thing over in Georgetown, blacks just been shooed out. And we ain’t got nary a thing back from them. Didn’t build us nothin’. Jus’ about every new home goin’ up is restricted.”

  Judith did not know this term or idea. “Restricted?”

  “Girl, whites only. Can’t sell to no black folks; it’s the law. What you talkin’ ‘bout, you don’t know restricted?”

  Mrs. P.’s surly moment passed. She patted Judith’s knee.

  “So here we are, right where we supposed to be, I reckon, right where we started out. These alleys been here since the War Between the States. White folks been ownin’ these shacks for a hundred years, makin’ a dollar off of black folk. Coloreds been on these stones since Abe Lincoln, and it ain’t gon’ change no time soon. You can hang on to that quilt. I’ll get it back sometime after you settle in.”

  Judith nodded her appreciation.

  The old woman stood on swollen ankles and bowed legs. She asked, “Desiree, you don’ talk much, do you?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t have much to say.”

  “Child, everybody got somethin’ to say.”

  The woman stepped close. She lifted a hand to Judith’s chin, moving her face side to side, examining. “Mmm, somethin’,” she said. “Somethin’ here, I dunno.”

  Mrs. P. stepped back. “Jus’ not everybody uses words to say it. That’s all.”

  Judith smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”

  The woman pivoted on her legs, so arched she seemed to straddle a barrel. She opened her own door, and before stepping off the porch said, “You need anything, you come see Mrs. P.”

  “I will.”

  “That’s right. Whatever you come to this capital to do, girl, now you got a friend.”

  * * * *

  POVERTY WAS SHOT THROUGH the veins of this capital city, not unlike Cairo or Algiers. But when Judith walked onto the broad boulevard of New York Avenue, the poorness of the alleys vanished; the city’s Negroes and their shantytowns were neatly tucked away. The ten-block walk to the White House took her along a streetcar route, past many large buildings, many of them still glittering with Christmas decorations, among them the Hippodrome Theater, a department store called Goldenberg’s, a Greyhound bus station, and, closer to the White House, more theaters and playhouses. The one-mile walk was trivial; Judith could have run it full bore. But the flashing green and red bulbs and golden bows from the holiday colored the sundown and slowed her gait. Streetcar bells tolled their stops. The stroll was pleasant.

  Traffic on New York Avenue thickened as the end of the business day neared. The sidewalk buzzed with pedestrians, mostly women in rich fabrics and furs. Judith ducked into a store just before it closed. She did not speak with a Negro accent and did not avert her eyes, so the salesclerk was pleasant. She bought a scarf and thicker woolen gloves than what she’d been wearing.

  At a quarter to five o’clock, Judith stood on the lawn of the Ellipse, the vast oval expanse two hundred yards south of the President’s residence. Guards manned two gates left and right, checking the credentials of cars pulling onto the grounds. In the distance, other guards patrolled the vast green expanse at the foot of the big columned building. Judith pulled up her scarf against the wind, narrowing her focus.

  Tonight she watched only the southern face of the White House. For the past week, she’d walked the perimeter, studying the routes in and out, the State Department and its barracks, the Treasury building, the guards, gateways, the visitors and how they dressed, when they arrived and left, where they came from, the types of cars and limousines allowed to enter, the security checks. Tourist groups entered, too, gaggles of schoolchildren herded by teachers and parents.

  How to get inside? How to get to the President of the United States? Then, when the time came, how to kill him?

  The building across from her and the man inside were the most heavily guarded in the world. Judith felt no impatience. Every lock had a key, no matter how hard to find. That was her profession, and her heritage, finding the key, the way in. Franklin Roosevelt might be the most powerful man on earth, but no power in history had yet been great enough to avoid an assassin. That required luck. And Judith knew her luck was as good as Roosevelt’s.

  This thought of luck was rewarded. At precisely five o’clock, the southern gate to the White House swung inward.

  A large black Ford rolled past the checkpoint. The Marine guards saluted, ramrod-straight. Judith counted four men inside the car in overcoats and felt hats. Another Ford followed, but larger, heavier, perhaps armored. At the rear, a third car matching the first, with four serious-looking men, closed ranks. The little motorcade turned left, past the statue of some old American general, and headed into the windy warren of the city.

  “So,” Judith murmured inside her scarf, “every once in a while, the great man comes out.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  January 11

  Boston, Massachusetts

  LAMMECK STEPPED FROM THE cargo plane as soon as the props quit spinning. He’d been the only passenger. His welcome back to America was a broad tarmac as wind-scoured as any place in Scotland, and an idling black Packard.

  Dag unfolded out of the car. Lammeck plucked cotton balls from his ears. He lifted his collar against the New England chill.

  Dag grabbed his duffel to stow it in the trunk. “How was your trip?”

  Lammeck answered with a sour tone. “You mean trips. By car to Glasgow. Night train to Leeds. Plane to Dublin. Plane to Newfoundland. Plane to Boston.”

  Dag slammed the trunk lid. He patted the Packard. “And now car to Newburyport. Get in.”

  Lammeck
slid into the passenger side. Unbuttoning his overcoat, he noticed the government vehicle was not a mess yet, with only two manila folders on the rear seat. Shabby Dag must have just picked the car up from the motor pool.