by Mike Sager
A sudden squall of anger: “Why do people have to be put in categories?” she demanded. “What difference does it make anyway?”
“I didn’t mean … I just, well …” He started again: “No. People do not have to be put in categories if they don’t want to be. It’s just, you know, you’re unique. Very beautiful, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Sojii removed a pair of blunt-edged scissors from the coffee can, began cutting a sheet of green construction paper.
“What about your mother?” he asked.
“What about her?”
“Why can’t you go live with her?”
“She left me with my dad when I was six months old.”
“And you haven’t seen her since?”
“I’m hungry,” she said. “Can we get something to eat?”
He ran a few restaurant choices through his mind, then thought better of it. “It’s probably best if you lay low, at least until I figure out what’s going on with the Pope and all. This whole coke thing, the bust—something’s off, you know? It doesn’t sound right to me. You like eggs? I could make you an omelet.”
“The Pope is really anticoke,” Sojii said. “He hates crack. He says it all the time, how it ruined the neighborhood and the neighbors.”
“I know,” Seede said. “I can’t understand how he—”
Just then, from the vicinity of the small bedroom where Sojii had slept, there came a very strange sound—something that might be heard in a zoo at feeding time.
Seede turned his head toward the noise. “That sounded like a—”
And there it was again, unmistakable: the agitated screech of a large jungle cat, a panther or a jaguar perhaps, something of that order, aroused and very close.
Seede’s eyes widened. He hooked his heel onto the top rung of the barstool, extracted his knife from its ankle sheath. He moved carefully toward the bedroom.
Sojii brushed past him and entered the room. She sat down on the bed, reached for her backpack, which was sitting on the floor near the plastic milk crate. By the light of the lamp, she unzipped the top compartment, took out her CD player, a pair of headphones, and several CD jewel cases and placed them beside her on the bed.
Then she removed the Master Skull. “I think it was this,” she said, holding it up for Seede’s inspection.
PART THREE
27
A battered taxi, blue on white, pulled to the curb at the northeast corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street NW, the crossroads of Georgetown, Washington’s upscale tourist district, some eighteen blocks from the Strip. It was ten o’clock on Thursday morning. The back passenger-side door opened with a metallic groan; a brown leather ankle boot emerged, pointy-toed with a fun little heel.
Stepping over a yellow tie left abandoned in the gutter—artifact of an expense-account nightcrawl by some lobbyist or conventioneer through the Irish pubs, discos, and fern bars hereabouts—Salem gained the high ground of the sidewalk. She was wearing a calf-length lambskin coat with oversize shoulder pads that rather dwarfed her pale, swanlike neck. The wind was gusty but the styling mousse held her white-blonde hair fast, short spikes upthrust jauntily, a fitting metaphor for Salem herself, who had come far and suffered much in the short course of her lifetime.
She twirled around slowly on tiptoe, gathering her bearings, visualizing the map she’d studied earlier in her room, a page from a Fodor’s guidebook to Washington, DC. She’d found the brand-new paperback abandoned on a bench at the bus station in Miami. Freshly on the run—not sure, exactly, where she was running—she’d taken the book as a sign. At the other end of the journey she’d found Jamal, who’d bought her this expensive coat, stylish but unlined, no match for the temperature, which hovered around forty degrees, not counting windchill.
Putting the Potomac River at her back, she headed up Wisconsin Avenue at the leisurely but determined pace of a seasoned window-shopper. A Christmas carol emanated from an outdoor speaker somewhere; the aromas of pine needles and Godiva chocolates, imported perfume and sugary ice cream waffle cones mixed in the air with stale dishwater, auto exhaust, urine, the sweat smell of boiled hot dogs wafting from the umbrella cart across the street, attended by a kohl-eyed Somali refugee. According to the Fodor’s—Salem had read it twice on the two-day trip north—Georgetown was once a bustling seaport, the largest exporter of tobacco in a new nation whose largest export was tobacco. The city had also done a heavy trade in human chattel: a major slave auction house had been located just a few blocks north. Nearly 250 years after its founding, Georgetown was still a thriving commercial center, a sprawling outdoor shopping and entertainment mall, decorated merrily for the season in a colonial Christmas theme. The stores and bars and restaurants were housed in rows of joined but mismatched buildings, evidence of the march of time and taste: saltbox colonial beside domed Federal beside seventies glass and steel beside eighties nouveau Victorian, these last with their precious round crosshair windows peering down like eyes from the dormers.
She walked past Hats in the Belfry, past Britches for Men, her image reflected in the large storefront windows. Past a flower stand, sweet pollen tickling her nose, past White Castle Hamburgers, the facade rendered in the customary blue and white tile, the unmistakably delicious smell of grilled onions. Past an ice cream shop, a leather shop, a jewelry shop. At Cindy’s Slipper, her cadence faltered.
More than anything, Salem loved shoes. Pumps and sling-backs, cowboy boots and knee-high lace-ups, stiletto heels and fuzzy slippers, sandals and loafers and sneakers—you could never have enough shoes. Shoes made the outfit. Shoes revealed the inner woman. Shoes calmed the restive female soul. Shoes were dependable; they never disappointed you. If they fit once, they always fit, no matter how bloated or fat or ugly or evil you might be feeling on a given day. Likewise, if they didn’t fit you could be sure they never would, no matter how much you loved them or wished otherwise. It was a lesson about life that Salem was still trying to learn: wrong choices stay wrong. When she’d lived in South Beach, whenever she felt blue, she would drive her Corvette—titled in the name of the auto dealer who visited every Wednesday at lunchtime—to the mall in Bal Harbour and buy herself some new shoes. By the time she fled town she’d amassed a collection that numbered 134 pairs, each in its original box, carefully stacked by color and type in the walk-in closet of her condo. Of all her actions over the last several years, she had only one regret: leaving those shoes behind. She shuddered to imagine what had become of them. The condo, she figured, had been repossessed by the dentist. Poor man, she’d never had a chance to say good-bye. She felt bad about the body and all that blood on the white shag carpet. Lord knows what he told his wife. Maybe she ended up with the shoes.
As Salem eyeballed the offerings in the window—considering each shoe, trying it on mentally—a group of Japanese tourists shuffled down the sidewalk behind her. She watched their reflections as they went by, all of them in their late teens or early twenties, all of them wearing stiff new blue jeans and clean new Nikes, all of them sporting asymmetrical punk hairdos, infused with streaks of red and green and blue. They moved en masse, giggling and talking and smoking cigarettes, their heads tilted toward the epicenter of the group, as if networked together.
She checked her own hair in the window, fussed with several spikes, then cocked her hip, a model’s pose—her whole life, people always said she should be a model. She smoothed the epic lapels of her coat, the leather cold and creamy to her touch. Leaning closer to check her makeup, she could see the beginnings of fine lines in the various localities around her face that registered emotion. She was twenty-four years old. Eight years ago, when she was in high school, she won a prize from NASA for an essay about her dream of becoming an astronaut, part of a team, perhaps, that would settle the moon.
She checked her watch, started up the street again—she didn’t want to be late. She walked past an antique jewelry store, past Martha’s Knitting Shoppe, a couple of restaurants, a delicious long-legged
stride. Past more men’s clothing stores, all owned by the same Iranian family—post-Ayatollah, they preferred to be called Persian. Past a Korean woman behind a folding table, selling scarves, gloves, and hats. A group of black teens break-dancing on a piece of cardboard. A movie theater where Bob Guccione’s Caligula had been playing exclusively for nearly a decade. Every night during the second reel, the distinguished actor John Gielgud would slit his wrists and bleed out peacefully into a warm bath. No doubt he wished the movie would do the same. Past two men dismounting Harley-Davidsons. One wore chaps, the other sported a Nazi helmet. They walked off together in a southerly direction, holding hands.
At the intersection of Wisconsin and O, on the southwestern corner, was the site of the former slave auction. According to her guidebook, the slave dealers would march their chattel up the steep hill from the docks in lines of ten or more, men and women and children, chained neck to neck. Salem wondered what it felt like coming up the hill she’d just walked, chained to your mother or your brother, chained to your man. Then she thought about slavery in general, wondered about the difference between being sold and selling yourself. In place of the auction house was now a Gap clothing store. The company was pushing a layered look for winter—a clever ploy: to be in style you had to buy several pieces.
At R Street, she stopped and pulled a business card from her pocket. A gold shield was embossed on the front: Det. John O’Rourke, Internal Affairs. On the back was an address, handwritten. After some consideration, she turned east.
In short order the neighborhood became residential. Large houses, a canopy of stately bare trees—upper Georgetown, the ancestral home of Washington’s political elite. The air smelled clean, birds twittered and doves cooed, the din of traffic could scarcely be heard. Salem slowed her pace, taking in the majesty of her surroundings, the clip-clop of her chunky heels on the cobblestones evoking a bygone era.
Presently she arrived at her destination: 3128 R Street NW. A two-story brick carriage house hunkered at the corner of the property; the roof of the main house was visible behind an ivy-covered wall.
As instructed, she rang the bell marked SERVICE.
28
Seede and Jamal were sitting at the window counter of a carryout joint on U Street, nursing cups of coffee. In the downtime between breakfast and lunch the place was deserted. The owner was busy in the storeroom.
Across the street, a scruffy white man turned the corner at Ninth and headed west on U, muttering to himself as he went. His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of his olive drab overcoat, his head was bent into the blustery wind. He moved gingerly, as if his knees hurt, as if he was walking on eggs.
“There he go,” announced Jamal, tapping his fingernail on the glass. There was a mixture of pride and wonder in his friendly basso profundo, like a tour guide at a ghetto franchise of Lion Country Safari. He tapped the crystal of his counterfeit Rolex Oyster. “Exactly 10:20. Same as every morning.”
Seede checked his own watch, playfully awed. “You da man, Mr. Alfred.” He chucked Jamal on the shoulder of his three-piece suit, this one a burnt sienna pinstripe.
Jamal placed his right hand over his heart and bowed his head, a display of graciousness common among Arab men, something he’d picked up at Club Gemini. “From each according to his abilities, my brother.”
The carryout in which they were sitting was called Ma’s Place. It was owned by a mutual friend. To Seede and Jamal, he was known as Wayne Tony. To others he was known variously as Anthony Wayne, Wayne Anthony, Tony Morgan, Tony Wayne, Morgan Anthony. The first time Seede asked for his phone number, Wayne Tony thought for a second, then rattled off ten digits. “Write it down in pencil,” he’d advised.
From what Seede had gathered over the years, Wayne Tony was the ancestor of freed slaves from North Carolina who had migrated north after the Civil War. He’d attended American University on scholarship but never graduated. He’d sold real estate and fine vintage sports cars—restored Nash-Healeys and MGs. He’d worked as a news cameraman and as a paralegal. He’d owned a store in Georgetown offering pricey antiquities from Morocco. He’d exported used copy machines to South Africa, factory-second T-shirts to Nigeria, previously owned Toyotas to Central America. He’d imported Mexican diazepam and black tar heroin, Colombian cocaine (through Dominican middlemen), Jamaican marijuana, Afghani hashish. Given a little advance notice, he could procure for you a driver’s license or a passport, a handgun, a crew of illegal immigrants to remodel your kitchen, one thousand pounds of frozen chicken wings, a homeless couple with a newborn baby to caretake your construction site.
Wayne Tony’s current pet project was this soul food carryout called Ma’s Place, set in a three-story townhouse on the nine hundred block of U Street NW, a few steps down from sidewalk level. Named for his mother, a retired public school teacher, Ma’s Place catered to the lunch crowd associated with nearby Howard University, the historic seat of black learning, and Howard University Hospital, six blocks northeast. During the Jazz Age, this portion of U Street had bustled with hotels, clubs, and other establishments, most of them black owned, all of them grown up around the centerpiece of the storied Lincoln Theatre and Colonnade, which itself was now boarded, the plywood covered with gang graffiti and concert posters, many of them featuring bands that played go-go, the homegrown musical genre that employed plastic paint buckets and metal trash can tops in the rhythm section. A group of investors was said to be planning to purchase the theater for restoration, part of a comprehensive redevelopment scheme for this segment of U Street, which jazz singer Pearl Bailey once called “the Black Broadway.”
At least that’s what Wayne Tony had heard. With Ma’s Place, he was hoping to get in on the ground floor of a future that still seemed far distant. By dusk the block was given over to the heroin trade; Wayne Tony lowered the riot shutters. No one around at night had money to spend on food.
From their vantage point in the front window, Seede and Jamal watched as the scraggly white guy—known in the neighborhood as Larry the Pharmacist—made his way slowly westward across the bleak urban tundra, slew-foot in canvas high-top sneakers, his ratty ponytail whipping behind him like a ship’s pennant in a stiff blow. He passed Lou-Ella Tailor … Aida’s House of Beauty … a Rastafarian-owned bakery with a poster of Haile Selassie in the front window. Pieces of newspaper and trash blew down the sidewalk like tumbleweeds.
“So what do you think?” Seede asked Jamal.
“Go ask him.”
“What should I say?”
Jamal took a sip of his coffee. “Just tell him I wanna see him and that I’m waiting in here.”
“He won’t mind?”
“As long as he got a place to do his business he cool.”
“Here’s okay?”
“Just go,” Jamal said. This time his basso profundo was not so friendly.
29
Sojii passed through the curtain of colorful glass beads that hung inside the doorway of Mystic Eye Books, followed closely by Jim Freeman.
The air inside the store was thick with the morning’s ritual offering of burnt sage; candles twinkled throughout. New Age music—synthesizer and tabla drum—noodled along the cramped and dusty aisles. There were display tables of personal altar supplies, incense and aromatherapy oils, amulets and charms, lifelike synthetic skulls (with and without trepanation holes), and tourist-quality novelties (parking meter Buddhas, alien key chains, mood rings). A pantheon of deities, fierce and beatific, of every size and material, presided over all—Vishnus and Satans, Quan Yins, Marys, and Hatshepsuts. According to a sign above the cash register, if they didn’t have your particular god or goddess in stock, they’d special order.
Sojii’s long hair was tied up in a bun beneath one of Seede’s old watch caps. She was wearing one of Freeman’s winter coats, a down parka he’d purchased some years ago for a romantic getaway to the Catskills—he’d never forget the look on the night clerk’s face when he and Tom arrived to claim their heart-sh
aped tub. Sojii’s backpack was slung over her left shoulder. It sagged with the weight of its cargo.
Freeman was dressed in what he liked to call his Realtor drag—navy blue blazer, gray worsted slacks, silk rep tie, tasseled cordovan loafers. The belt of his leather-trimmed Cortefiel trench coat was fastened into a loop behind his back, as prescribed in the latest issue of GQ magazine, known among his friends as “the gay Bible.” He pointed toward a glass display case, indicating a foot-high statuette—a voluptuous female with a mane of wild red hair, wielding a trident, wearing only a black face mask and a black body harness. “What is she, the goddess of S and M?”
“Celt,” Sojii said authoritatively. “Dragons, wizards, goddesses—they use a lot of that kind of imagery.”
“Weren’t the Celts the ones who wore the hoods like the Ku Klux Klan?”
“Those were druids. They were priests.”
“The ones who built Stonehenge?”
“Actually, they found Stonehenge already built. Nobody knows who built it.”
Freeman shuddered voluntarily. “That kind of stuff always gives me the creeps.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Unsolved mysteries, strange coincidences, the unknown.” He sang the theme of The Twilight Zone. “Do do do do …”
“Sometimes, the known can be even creepier.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like the fact that a lot of the Celtic beliefs were absorbed into Christianity.”
“Weren’t the Celts, like, pagans?”
“Yes.”
“So how is it that Christianity could absorb their beliefs—didn’t they end up burning a lot of pagans at the stake?”
“They wanted converts so they borrowed stuff that was familiar. Most of the key dates from the Celtic year were assimilated into the Christian calendar, the one we use now. Their celebration of winter solstice—they called it Yule—became Christmas. Their celebration of the spring equinox became Easter. They called it Eostre.” She spelled it out for him.