DC Noir

The confidential informant by George Pelecanos

Park View, N.W.

I was in the waiting area of the Veteran’s Hospital emergency room off North Capitol Street, seeing to my father, when Detective Tony Barnes hit me back on my cell. My father had laid his head down on the crossbar of his walker, and it was going to be awhile before someone came and called his name. I walked the phone outside and lit myself a smoke.

“What’s goin’ on, Verdon?” said Barnes.

“Need to talk to you about Rico Jennings.”

“Go ahead.”

“Not on the phone.” I wasn’t about to give Barnes no information without feeling some of his cash money in my hand.

“When can I see you?”

“My pops took ill. I’m still dealin’ with that, so… make it 9:00. You know where.”

Barnes cut the line. I smoked my cigarette down to the filter and went back inside.

My father was moaning when I took a seat beside him. Goddamn this and goddamn that, saying it under his breath. We’d been out here for a few hours. A girl with a high ass moving inside purple drawstring pants took our information when we came in, and later a Korean nurse got my father’s vitals in what she called the triage room, asking questions about his history and was there blood in his stool and stuff like that. But we had not seen a doctor yet.

Most of the men in the waiting room were in their fifties and above. A couple had walkers and many had canes; one dude had an oxygen tank beside him with a clear hose running up under his nose. Every single one of them was wearing some kinda lid. It was cold out, but it was a style thing, too.

Everyone looked uncomfortable and no one working in the hospital seemed to be in a hurry to do something about it. The security guards gave you a good eye-fuck when you came through the doors, which kinda told you straight off what the experience was going to be like inside. I tried to go down to the cafeteria to get something to eat, but nothing they had was appealing, and some of it looked damn near dirty. I been in white people’s hospitals, like Sibley, on the high side of town, and I know they don’t treat those people the way they was treating these veterans. I’m saying, this shit here was a damn disgrace.

But they did take my father eventually.

In the emergency room, a white nurse named Matthew, redheaded dude with Popeye forearms, hooked him up to one of those heart machines, then found a vein in my father’s and took three vials of blood. Pops had complained about being “woozy” that morning. He gets fearful since his stroke, which paralyzed him on one side. His mind is okay, but he can’t go nowhere without his walker, not even to the bathroom.

I looked at him lying there in the bed, his wide shoulders and the hardness of his hands. Even at sixty, even after his stroke, he is stronger than me. I know I will never feel like his equal. What with him being a Vietnam veteran, and a dude who had a reputation for taking no man’s shit in the street. And me… well, me being me.

“The doctor’s going to have a look at your blood, Leon,” said Matthew. I guess he didn’t know that in our neighborhood my father would be called “Mr. Leon” or “Mr. Coates” by someone younger than him. As Matthew walked away, he began to sing a church hymn.

My father rolled his eyes.

“Bet you’d rather have that Korean girl taking care of you, Pops,” I said, with a conspiring smile.

“That gal’s from the Philippines,” said my father, sourly. Always correcting me and shit.

“Whateva.”

My father complained about everything for the next hour. I listened to him, and the junkie veteran in the next stall over who was begging for something to take away his pain, and the gags of another dude who was getting a stomach tube forced down his throat. Then an Indian doctor, name of Singh, pulled the curtain back and walked into our stall. He told my father that there was nothing in his blood or on the EKG to indicate that there was cause for alarm.

“So all this bullshit was for nothin’?” said my father, like he was disappointed he wasn’t sick.

“Go home and get some rest,” said Dr. Singh, in a cheerful way. He smelled like one them restaurants they got, but he was all right.

Matthew returned, got my father dressed back into his streetclothes, and filled out the discharge forms.

“The Lord loves you, Leon,” said Matthew, before he went off to attend to someone else.

“Get me out this motherfucker,” said my father. I fetched a wheelchair from where they had them by the front desk.

I drove my father’s Buick to his house, on the 700 block of Quebec Street, not too far from the hospital, in Park View. It took awhile to get him up the steps of his row house. By the time he stepped onto the brick-and-concrete porch, he was gasping for breath. He didn’t go out much anymore, and this was why.

Inside, my mother, Martina Coates, got him situated in his own wheelchair, positioned in front of his television set, where he sits most of his waking hours. She waits on him all day and sleeps lightly at night in case he falls out of his bed. She gives him showers and even washes his ass. My mother is a church woman who believes that her reward will come in heaven. It’s ’cause of her that I’m still allowed to live in my father’s house.

The television was real loud, the way he likes to play it since his stroke. He watches them old games on that replay show on ESPN.

“Franco Harris!” I shouted, pointing at the screen. “Boy beast.”

My father didn’t even turn his head. I would have watched some of that old Steelers game with him if he had asked me to, but he didn’t, so I went upstairs to my room.

It is my older brother’s room as well. James’s bed is on the opposite wall and his basketball and football trophies, from when he was a kid all the way through high school, are still on his dresser. He made good after Howard Law, real good, matter of fact. He lives over there in Crestwood, west of 16th, with his pretty redbone wife and their two light-skinned kids. He doesn’t come around this neighborhood all that much, though it ain’t but fifteen minutes away. He wouldn’t have drove my father over to the VA Hospital, either, or waited around in that place all day. He would have said he was too busy, that he couldn’t get out “the firm” that day. Still, my father brags on James to all his friends. He got no cause to brag on me.

I changed into some warm shit, and put my smokes and matches into my coat. I left my cell in my bedroom, as it needed to be charged. When I got downstairs, my mother asked me where I was going.

“I got a little side thing I’m workin’ on,” I said, loud enough for my father to hear.

My father kinda snorted and chuckled under his breath. He might as well had gone ahead and said, Bullshit, but he didn’t need to. I wanted to tell him more, but that would be wrong. If my thing was to be uncovered, I wouldn’t want nobody coming back on my parents.

I zipped my coat and left out the house.

It had begun to snow some. Flurries swirled in the cones of light coming down from the streetlamps. I walked down to Giant Liquors on Georgia and bought a pint of Popov, and hit the vodka as I walked back up Quebec. I crossed Warder Street, and kept on toward Park Lane. The houses got a little nicer here as the view improved. Across Park were the grounds of the Soldier’s Home, bordered by a black iron, spear-topped fence. It was dark out, and the clouds were blocking any kinda moonlight, but I knew what was over there by heart. I had cane-pole fished that lake many times as a kid, and chased them geese they had in there, too. Now they had three rows of barbed wire strung out over them spear-tops, to keep out the kids and the young men who liked to lay their girlfriends out straight on that soft grass.

Me and Sondra used to hop that fence some evenings, the summer before I dropped out of Roosevelt High. I’d bring some weed, a bottle of screw-top wine, and my Walkman and we’d go down to the other side of that lake and chill. I’d let her listen to the headphones while I hit my smoke. I had made mix-tapes off my records, stuff she was into, like Bobby Brown and Tone-Loc. I’d tell her about the cars I was gonna be driving, and the custom suits I’d be wearing, soon as I got a good job. How I didn’t need no high school diploma to get those things or to prove how smart I was. She looked at me like she believed it. Sondra had some pretty brown eyes.

She married a personal injury lawyer with a storefront office up in Shepherd Park. They live in a house in P.G. County, in one of those communities got gates. I seen her once, when she came back to the neighborhood to visit her moms, who still stays down on Luray. She was bum-rushing her kids into the house, like they might get sick if they breathed this Park View air. She saw me walking down the street and turned her head away, trying to act like she didn’t recognize me. It didn’t cut me. She can rewrite history in her mind if she wants to, but her fancy husband ain’t never gonna have what I did, ’cause I had that pussy when it was

I stepped into the alley that runs north-south between Princeton and Quebec. My watch, a looks-like-a-Rolex I bought on the street for ten dollars, read 9:05. Detective Barnes was late. I unscrewed the top of the Popov and had a pull. It burned nice. I tapped it again and lit myself a smoke.

“Psst. Hey, yo.”

I looked up over my shoulder, where the sound was. A boy leaned on the lip of one of those second-floor, wood back porches that ran out to the alley. Behind him was a door with curtains on its window. A bicycle tire was showing beside the boy. Kids be putting their bikes up on porches around here so they don’t get stole.

“What you want?” I said.

“Nothin’ you got,” said the boy. He looked to be about twelve, tall and skinny, with braided hair under a black skully.

“Then get your narrow ass back inside your house.”

“You the one loiterin’.”

“I’m mindin’ my own, is what I’m doin’. Ain’t you got no homework or nothin’?”

“I did it at study hall.”

“Where you go, MacFarland Middle?”

“Yeah.”

“I went there, too.”

“So?”

I almost smiled. He had a smart mouth on him, but he had heart.

“What you doin’ out here?” said the kid.

“Waitin’ on someone,” I said.

Just then Detective Barnes’s unmarked drove by slow. He saw me but kept on rolling. I knew he’d stop, up aways on the street.

“Awright, little man,” I said, pitching my cigarette aside and slipping my pint into my jacket pocket. I could feel the kid’s eyes on me as I walked out the alley.

I slid into the backseat of Barnes’s unmarked, a midnight-blue Crown Vic. I kinda laid down on the bench, my head against the door, below the window line so no one on the outside could see me. It’s how I do when I’m rolling with Barnes.

He turned right on Park Place and headed south. I didn’t need to look out the window to know where he was going. He drives down to Michigan Avenue, heads east past the Children’s Hospital, then continues on past North Capitol and then Catholic U, into Brookland and beyond. Eventually he turns around and comes back the same way.

“Stayin’ warm, Verdon?”

“Tryin’ to.”

Barnes, a broad-shouldered dude with a handsome face, had a deep voice. He favored Hugo Boss suits and cashmere overcoats. Like many police, he wore a thick mustache.

“So,” I said. “Rico Jennings.”

“Nothin’ on my end,” said Barnes, with a shrug. “You?”

I didn’t answer him. It was a dance we did. His eyes went to the rearview and met mine. He held out a twenty over the seat, and I took it.

“I think y’all are headed down the wrong road,” I said.

“How so?”

“Heard you been roustin’ corner boys on Morton and canvasing down there in the Eights.”

“I’d say that’s a pretty good start, given Rico’s history.” “Wasn’t no drug thing, though.”

“Kid was in it. He had juvenile priors for possession and distribution.”

“Why they call ’em priors. That was before the boy got on the straight. Look, I went to grade school with his mother. I been knowin’ Rico since he was a kid.”

“What do you know?”

“Rico was playin’ hard for a while, but he grew out of it. He got into some big brother thing at my mother’s church, and he turned his back on his past. I mean, that boy was in the AP program up at Roosevelt. Advanced Placement, you know, where they got adults, teachers and shit, walkin’ with you every step of the way. He was on the way to college.”

“So why’d someone put three in his chest?”

“What I heard was, it was over a girl.”

I was giving him a little bit of the truth. When the whole truth came out, later on, he wouldn’t suspect that I had known more.

Barnes swung a U-turn, which rocked me some. We were on the way back to Park View.

“Keep going,” said Barnes.

“Tryin’ to tell you, Rico had a weakness for the ladies.”

“Who doesn’t.”

“It was worse than that. Girl’s privates made Rico stumble. Word is, he’d been steady-tossin’ this young thing, turned out to be the property of some other boy. Rico knew it, but he couldn’t stay away. That’s why he got dropped.”

“By who?”

“Huh?”

“You got a name on the hitter?”

“Nah.” Blood came to my ears and made them hot. It happened when I got stressed.

“How about the name of the girlfriend?”

I shook my head. “I’d talk to Rico’s mother, I was you. You’d think she’d know somethin’ ’bout the girls her son was runnin’ with, right?”

“You’d think,” said Barnes.

“All I’m sayin’ is, I’d start with her.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“I’m just sayin’.”

Barnes sighed. “Look, I’ve already talked to the mother. I’ve talked to Rico’s neighbors and friends. We’ve been through his bedroom as well. We didn’t find any love notes or even so much as a picture of a girl.”

I had the photo of his girlfriend. Me and Rico’s aunt, Leticia, had gone up into the boy’s bedroom at that wake they had, while his mother was downstairs crying and stuff with her church friends in the living room. I found a picture of the girl, name of Flora Lewis, in the dresser drawer, under his socks and underwear. It was one of them mall photos the girls like to get done, then give to their boyfriends. Flora was sitting on a cube, with columns around her and shit, against a background, looked like laser beams shooting across a blue sky. Flora had tight jeans on and a shirt with thin straps, and she had let one of the straps kinda fall down off her shoulder to let the tops of her little titties show. The girls all trying to look like sluts now, you ask me. On the back of the photo was a note in her handwriting, said, How U like me like this? xxoo, Flora. Leticia recognized Flora from around the way, even without the name printed on the back.

“Casings at the scene were from a nine,” said Barnes, bringing me out of my thoughts. “We ran the markings through IBIS and there’s no match.”

“What about a witness?”

“You kiddin’? There wasn’t one, even if there was one.”

“Always someone knows somethin’,” I said, as I felt the car slow and come to a stop.

“Yeah, well.” Barnes pushed the trans arm up into park. “I caught a double in Columbia Heights this morning. So I sure would like to clean this Jennings thing up.”

“You know I be out there askin’ around,” I said. “But it gets expensive, tryin’ to make conversation in bars, buyin’ beers and stuff to loosen them lips…”

Barnes passed another twenty over the seat without a word. I took it. The bill was damp for some reason, and limp like a dead thing. I put it in the pocket of my coat.

“I’m gonna be askin’ around,” I said, like he hadn’t heard me the first time.

“I know you will, Verdon. You’re a good CI. The best I ever had.”

I didn’t know if he meant it or not, but it made me feel kinda guilty, backdooring him the way I was planning to do. But I had to look out for my own self for a change. The killer would be got, that was the important thing. And I would be flush.

“How your sons, detective?”

“They’re good. Looking forward to playing Pop Warner again.”

“Hmph,” I said.

He was divorced, like most homicide police. Still, I knew he loved his kids.

That was all. It felt like it was time to go.

“I’ll get up with you later, hear?”

Barnes said, “Right.”

I rose up off the bench, kinda looked around some, and got out the Crown Vic. I took a pull out the Popov bottle as I headed for my father’s house. I walked down the block, my head hung low.

Up in my room, I found my film canister under the T-shirts in my dresser. I shook some weed out into a wide paper, rolled a joint tight as a cigarette, and slipped it into my pack of Newports. The vodka had lifted me some, and I was ready to get up further.

I glanced in the mirror over my dresser. One of my front teeth was missing from when some dude down by the Black Hole, said he didn’t like the way I looked, had knocked it out. There was gray in my patch and in my hair. My eyes looked bleached. Even under my bulky coat, it was plain I had lost weight. I looked like one of them defectives you pity or ridicule on the street. But shit, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it tonight.

I went by my mother’s room, careful to step soft. She was in there, in bed by now, watching but not watching television on her thirteen-inch color, letting it keep her company, with the sound down low so she could hear my father if he called out to her from the first floor.

Down in the living room, the television still played loud, a black-and-white film of the Liston-Clay fight, which my father had spoke of often. He was missing the fight now. His chin was resting on his chest and his useless hand was kinda curled up like a claw in his lap. The light from the television grayed his face. His eyelids weren’t shut all the way, and the whites showed. Aside from his chest, which was moving some, he looked like he was dead.

Time will just fuck you up.

I can remember this one evening with my father, back around ’74. He had been home from the war for a while, and was working for the Government Printing Office at the time. We were over there on the baseball field, on Princeton, next to Park View Elementary. I musta been around six or seven. My father’s shadow was long and straight, and the sun was throwing a warm gold color on the green of the field. He was still in his work clothes, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His natural was full and his chest filled the fabric of his shirt. He was tossing me this small football, one of them K-2s he had bought me, and telling me to run toward him after I caught it, to see if I could break his tackle. He wasn’t gonna tackle me for real, he just wanted me to get a feel for the game. But I wouldn’t run to him. I guess I didn’t want to get hurt, was what it was. He got aggravated with me eventually, lost his patience and said it was time to get on home. I believe he quit on me that day. At least, that’s the way it seems to me now

I wanted to go over to his wheelchair, not hug him or nothing that dramatic, but maybe give him a pat on his shoulder. But if he woke up he would ask me what was wrong, why was I touching him, all that. So I didn’t go near him. I had to meet with Leticia about this thing we was doing, anyway. I stepped light on the clear plastic runner my mother had on the carpet, and closed the door quiet on my way out the house.

On the way to Leticia’s I cupped a match against the snow and fired up the joint. I drew on it deep and held it in my lungs. I hit it regular as I walked south.

My head was beginning to smile as I neared the house Leticia stayed in, over on Otis Place. I wet my fingers in the snow and squeezed the ember of the joint to put it out. I wanted to save some for Le-tee. We were gonna celebrate.

The girl, Flora, had witnessed the murder of Rico Jennings. I knew this because we, Leticia and me that is, had found her and made her tell what she knew. Well, Leticia had. She can be a scary woman when she wants to be. She broke hard on Flora, got up in her face and bumped her in an alley. Flora cried and talked. She had been out walking with Rico that night, back up on Otis, around the elementary, when this boy, Marquise Roberts, rolled up on them in a black Caprice. Marquise and his squad got out the car and surrounded Rico, shoved him some and shit like that. Flora said it seemed like that was all they was gonna do. Then Marquis drew an automatic and put three in Rico, one while Rico was on his feet and two more while Marquise was standing over him. Flora said Marquise was smiling as he pulled the trigger.

“Ain’t no doubt now, is it?” said Marquise, turning to Flora. “You mine.”

Marquise and them got back in their car and rode off, and Flora ran to her home. Rico was dead, she explained. Wouldn’t do him no good if she stayed at the scene.

Flora said that she would never talk to the police. Leticia told her she’d never have to, that as Rico’s aunt she just needed to know.

Now we had a killer and a wit. I could have gone right to Detective Barnes, but I knew about that anonymous tip line in the District, the Crime Solvers thing. We decided that Leticia would call and get that number assigned to her, the way they do, and she would eventually collect the $1,000 reward, which we’d split. Flora would go into witness security, where they’d move her to far Northeast or something like that. So she wouldn’t get hurt, or be too far from her family, and Leticia and me would get five hundred each. It wasn’t much, but it was more than I’d ever had in my pocket at one time. More important to me, someday, when Marquise was put away and his boys fell, like they always do, I could go to my mother and father and tell them that I, Verdon Coates, had solved a homicide. And it would be worth the wait, just to see the look of pride on my father’s face.

I got to the row house on Otis where Leticia stayed at. It was on the 600 block, those low-slung old places they got painted gray. She lived on the first floor.

Inside the common hallway, I came to her door. I knocked and took off my knit cap and shook the snow off it, waiting for her to come. The door opened, but only a crack. It stopped as the chain of the slide bolt went taut. Leticia looked at me over the chain. I could see dirt tracks on the part of her face that showed, from where she’d been crying. She was a hard-looking woman, had always been, even when she was young. I’d never seen her so shook.

“Ain’t you gonna let me in?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong with you, girl?”

“I don’t want to see you and you ain’t comin’ in.”

“I got some nice smoke, Leticia.”

“Leave outta here, Verdon.”

I listened to the bass of a rap thing, coming from another apartment. Behind it, a woman and a man were having an argument.

“What happened?” I said. “Why you been cryin’?”

“Marquise came,” said Leticia. “Marquise made me cry.”

My stomach dropped some. I tried not to let it show on my face.

“That’s right,” said Leticia. “Flora musta told him about our conversation. Wasn’t hard for him to find Rico’s aunt.”

“He threaten you?”

“He never did, direct. Matter of fact, that boy was smilin’ the whole time he spoke to me.” Leticia’s lip trembled. “We came to an understandin’, Verdon.”

“What he say?”

“He said that Flora was mistaken. That she wasn’t there the night Rico was killed, and she would swear to it in court. And that if I thought different, I was mistaken, too.”

“You sayin’ that you’re mistaken, Leticia?”

“That’s right. I been mistaken about this whole thing.”

“Leticia—”

“I ain’t tryin’ to get myself killed for five hundred dollars, Verdon.”

“Neither am I.”

“Then you better go somewhere for a while.”

“Why would I do that?”

Leticia said nothing.

“You give me up, Leticia?”

Leticia cut her eyes away from mine. “Flora,” she said, almost a whisper. “She told him ’bout some skinny, older-lookin’ dude who was standin’ in the alley the day I took her for bad.”

“You gave me up?”

Leticia shook her head slowly and pushed the door shut. It closed with a soft click.

I didn’t pound on the door or nothing like that. I stood there stupidly for sometime, listening to the rumble of the bass and the argument still going between the woman and man. Then I walked out the building.

The snow was coming down heavy. I couldn’t go home, so I walked toward the avenue instead.

I had finished the rest of my vodka, and dropped the bottle to the curb, by the time I got down to Georgia. A Third District cruiser was parked on the corner, with two officers inside it, drinking coffee from paper cups. It was late, and with the snow and the cold there wasn’t too many people out. The Spring Laundromat, used to be a Roy Rogers or some shit like it, was packed with men and women, just standing around, getting out of the weather. I could see their outlines behind that nicotine-stained glass, most of them barely moving under those dim lights.

This time of night, many of the shops had closed. I was hungry, but Morgan’s Seafood had been boarded up for a year now, and The Hunger Stopper, had those good fish sandwiches, was dark inside. What I needed was a beer, but Giant had locked its doors. I could have gone to the titty bar between Newton and Otis, but I had been roughed in there too many times.

I crossed over to the west side of Georgia and walked south. I passed a midget in a green suede coat who stood where he always did, under the awning of the Dollar General. I had worked there for a couple of days, stocking shit on shelves.

The businesses along here were like a roll call of my personal failures. The Murray’s meat and produce, the car wash, the Checks Cashed joint, they had given me a chance. In all these places, I had lasted just a short while.

I neared the G.A. market, down by Irving. A couple of young men came toward me, buried inside the hoods of their North Face coats, hard of face, then smiling as they got a look at me.

“Hey, slim,” said one of the young men. “Where you get that vicious coat at? Baby GAP?” Him and his friend laughed.

I didn’t say nothing back. I got this South Pole coat I bought off a dude, didn’t want it no more. I wasn’t about to rock a North Face. Boys put a gun in your grill for those coats down here.

I walked on.

The market was crowded inside and thick with the smoke of cigarettes. I stepped around some dudes and saw a man I know, Robert Taylor, back by where they keep the wine. He was lifting a bottle of it off the shelf. He was in the middle of his thirties, but he looked fifty-five.

“Robo,” I said.

“Verdon.”

We did a shoulder-to-shoulder thing and patted backs. I had been knowing him since grade school. Like me, he had seen better days. He looked kinda under it now. He held up a bottle of fortified, turned it so I could see the label, like them waiters do in high-class restaurants.

“I sure could use a taste,” said Robert. “Only, I’m a little light this evenin’.”

“I got you, Robo.”

“Look, I’ll hit you back on payday.”

“We’re good.”

I picked up a bottle of Night Train for myself and moved toward the front of the market. Robert grabbed the sleeve of my coat and held it tight. His eyes, most time full of play, were serious

“Verdon.”

“What?”

“I been here a couple of hours, stayin’ dry and shit. Lotta activity in here tonight. You just standin’ around, you be hearin’ things.”

“Say what you heard.”

“Some boys was in here earlier, lookin’ for you.”

I felt that thing in my stomach.

“Three young men,” said Robert. “One of ’em had them silver things on his teeth. They was describin’ you, your build and shit, and that hat you always be wearin’.”

He meant my knit cap, with the Bullets logo, had the two hands for the double l’s, going up for the rebound. I had been wearing it all winter long. I had been wearing it the day we talked to Flora in the alley.

“Anyone tell them who I was?”

Robert nodded sadly. “I can’t lie. Some bama did say your name.”

“Shit.”

“I ain’t say nothin’ to those boys, Verdon.”

“C’mon, man. Let’s get outta here.”

We went up to the counter. I used the damp twenty Barnes had handed me to pay for the two bottles of wine and a fresh pack of cigarettes. While the squarehead behind the plexiglass was bagging my shit and making my change, I picked up a scratched-out lottery ticket and pencil off the scarred counter, turned the ticket over, and wrote around the blank edges. What I wrote was: Marquise Roberts killed Rico Jennings. And: Flora Lewis was there.

I slipped the ticket into the pocket of my jeans and got my change. Me and Robert Taylor walked out the shop.

On the snow-covered sidewalk I handed Robert his bottle of fortified. I knew he’d be heading west into Columbia Heights, where he stays with an ugly-looking woman and her kids.

“Thank you, Verdon.”

“Ain’t no thing.”

“What you think? Skins gonna do it next year?”

“They got Coach Gibbs. They get a couple receivers with hands, they gonna be all right.”

“No doubt.” Robert lifted his chin. “You be safe, hear?”

He went on his way. I crossed Georgia Avenue, quick-stepping out the way of a Ford that was fishtailing in the street. I thought about getting rid of my Bullets cap, in case Marquise and them came up on me, but I was fond of it, and I could not let it go.

I unscrewed the top off the Night Train as I went along, taking a deep pull and feeling it warm my chest. Heading up Otis, I saw ragged silver dollars drifting down through the light of the streetlamps. The snow capped the roofs of parked cars and it had gathered on the branches of the trees. No one was out. I stopped to light the rest of my joint. I got it going, and hit it as I walked up the hill.

I planned to head home in a while, through the alley door, when I thought it was safe. But for now, I needed to work on my head. Let my high come like a friend and tell me what to do.

I stood on the east side of Park Lane, my hand on the fence bordering the Soldier’s Home, staring into the dark. I had smoked all my reefer and drunk my wine. It was quiet, nothing but the hiss of snow. And “Get Up,” that old Salt-N-Pepa joint, playing in my head. Sondra liked that one. She’d dance to it, with my headphones on, over by that lake they got. With the geese running around it, in the summertime.

“Sondra,” I whispered. And then I chuckled some, and said, “I am high.”

I turned and walked back to the road, tripping a little I stepped off the curb. As I got onto Quebec, I saw a coming down Park Lane, sliding a little, rolling too fast. It was a dark color, and it had them Chevy headlights with the rectangle fog lamps on the sides. I patted my pockets, knowing all the while that I didn’t have my cell.

I ducked into the alley off Quebec. I looked up at that rear porch with the bicycle tire leaning up on it, where that boy stayed. I saw a light behind the porch door’s window. I scooped up snow, packed a ball of it tight, and threw it up at that window. I waited. The boy parted the curtains and put his face up on the glass, his hands cupped around his eyes so he could see.

“Little man!” I yelled, standing by the porch. “Help me out!”

He cold-eyed me and stepped back. I knew he recognized me. But I guess he had seen me go toward the police unmarked, and he had made me for a snitch. In his young mind, it was probably the worst thing a man could be. Behind the window, all went dark. As it did, headlights swept the alley and a car came in with the light. The car was black, and it was a Caprice.

I turned and bucked.

I ran my ass off down that alley, my old Timbs struggling for grip in the snow. As I ran, I pulled on trashcans, knocking them over so they would block the path of the Caprice. I didn’t look back. I heard the boys in the car, yelling at me and shit, and I heard them curse as they had to slow down. Soon I was out of the alley, on Princeton Place, running free.

I went down Princeton, cut left on Warder, jogged by the front of the elementary, and hung a right on Otis. There was an alley down there, back behind the ball field, shaped like a T. It would be hard for them to navigate back in there. They couldn’t surprise me or nothing like that.

I walked into the alley. Straight off, a couple of dogs began to bark. Folks kept ’em, shepherd mixes and rottweil with heads big as cattle, for security. Most of them was inside, on account of the weather, but not all. There were some who stayed out all the time, and they were loud. Once they got going, they would bark themselves crazy. They were letting Marquise know where I was.

I saw the Caprice drive real slow down Otis, its head-lights off, and I felt my ears grow hot. I got down in a crouch, pressed myself against a chain-link fence behind someone’s row house. My stomach flipped all the way and I had one of them throw-up burps. Stuff came up, and I swallowed it down.

I didn’t care if it was safe or not; I needed to get my ass home. Couldn’t nobody hurt me there. In my bed, the same bed where I always slept, near my brother James. With my mother and father down the hall.

I listened to a boy calling out my name. Then another boy, from somewhere else, did the same. I could hear the laughter in their voices. I shivered some and bit down on my lip.

Use the alphabet, you get lost. That’s what my father told me when I was a kid. Otis, Princeton, Quebec… I was three streets away.

I turned at the T of the alley and walked down the slope. The dogs were out of their minds, growling and barking, and I went past them and kept my eyes straight ahead. At the bottom of the alley, I saw a boy in a thick coat, hoodie up. He was waiting on me.

I turned around and ran back from where I came. Even with the sounds of the dogs, I could hear myself panting, trying to get my breath. I rounded the T and made it back to Otis, where I cut and headed for the baseball field. I could cross that and be on Princeton. When I got there, I’d be one block closer to my home.

I stepped up onto the field. I walked regular, trying to calm myself down. I didn’t hear a car or anything else. Just the snow crunching beneath my feet.

And then a young man stepped up onto the edge of the field. He wore a bulky coat without a cap or a hood. His hand was inside the coat, and his smile was not the smile of a friend. There were silver caps on his front teeth.

I turned my back on him. Pee ran hot down my thigh. My knees were trembling, but I made my legs move.

The night flashed. I felt a sting, like a bee sting, high on my back.

I stumbled but kept my feet. I looked down at my blood, dotted in the snow. I walked a couple of steps and closed my eyes.

When I opened them, the field was green. It was covered in gold, like it gets here in summer, ’round early evening. A Gamble and Huff thing was coming from the open windows of a car. My father stood before me, his natural full, his chest filling the fabric of his shirt. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. His arms were outstretched.

I wasn’t afraid or sorry. I’d done right. I had the lottery ticket in my pocket. Detective Barnes, or someone like him, would find it in the morning. When they found

But first I had to speak to my father. I walked to where he stood, waiting. And I knew exactly what I was going to say: I ain’t the low-ass bum you think I am. I been workin’ with the police for a long, long time. Matter of fact, I just solved a homicide.

I’m a confidential informant, Pop. Look at me.

First By Kenji Jasper

Capital of the world by Jim Patton

Chinatown, N.W.

Two in the morning, a steamy Saturday night in July, Sherman Brown was standing by the jukebox in the notorious Sunbeam Lounge, wondering what the hell he was doing here. With a wife, a little girl, twins coming, and no way to live anywhere near the District on a cop’s pay, the idea was to earn some nice money, short-term, for a down payment on a house in peaceful Howard County, Maryland. But still, a D.C. cop — a good cop, who liked to think of himself as a good — moonlighting as a bouncer in a dive like this? He wasn’t the first, wouldn’t be the last, but—

A gunshot. Marvin Gaye was wailing from the jukebox, a dozen or so brothers were whooping as the girl onstage humped the pole, but Sherman knew he’d heard a shot. A Metro cop heard plenty of them. Anyone who grew up in a project like Barry Farms had heard plenty. This one came from in back, the other side of the plain brown door Sherman had never passed through.

Tyrone, behind the bar, heard it. So did Antwain, the whale, who’d been up near the stage ogling the girl and stood there now with his mouth hanging open. Some of the brothers had heard it — they were getting up from their tables and streaming out. The girl stopped humping the pole.

LaPhonso, the boss, wasn’t around. He’d been in and out as always — keeping an eye on things, going in back with one of the girls for a while, stepping outside to get high or do some kind of business.

Sherman crossed to Tyrone at the bar — Antwain right beside him, all 300 pounds. “Where’s LaPhonso?”

“Ain’t seen him in a while,” Tyrone said.

“You got a key so I can check it out? Or you want to check it?”

Antwain butted in — “Naw, man. You the law. You gettin paid. Go on.”

Sherman eyeballed him. He never liked mouth from a punk, 300 pounds or not.

“Go on. The Man ain’t here,” Antwain said, “and when he ain’t here, I’m The Man.” He told Tyrone, “Give him the key, dawg.”

Tyrone handed it over.

“Go, boy,” Antwain said.

Sherman wanted to hurt him — this whale, this punk, calling Sherman Brown boy. But not now. He turned and headed toward the anonymous door. He heard Antwain right behind him, the labored breathing.

The door opened to a dim hallway. Approaching the first door on the left, Sherman reached for the Glock 17 holstered under his shirt at the small of his back. In the room he found crackhead Donita, one of the strippers, blowing a cornrowed brother called Junebug. They hadn’t heard anything, or didn’t care.

In the next room a short, stocky guy called Cannonball was humping the new girl called Golden. No sign of any shooting here. Sherman pulled the door shut and went back the other way, Antwain close behind him, wheezing.

In the first room at the other end, a girl he’d never seen was on the bed clutching the sheet up under her chin, scared, as if she’d seen or at least heard something — a white girl, dark hair, foreign-looking. Sherman had heard about foreign girls back here who never appeared out front.

“You all right?”

“Ho-kay. Ho-kay,” she said, nodding furiously. Foreign, definitely. Sherman wasn’t sure she understood him.

Approaching the last door, he heard someone rattling the knob from inside, then working a key in the lock. Had to be LaPhonso.

“Yo, LaPhonz!”

Quiet, then. The key no longer working the lock.

“Boss!” (What LaPhonso liked to be called, though Sherman could rarely bring himself to say it.)

Nothing.

“Whoever you are! I got my piece and I’m coming in!”

He turned his key in the lock and opened the door a crack. There was someone there. A girl — a pale shoulder, an arm, part of a slip or negligee.

She backed up, whoever she was. “Sorry!” She too had some kind of accent, and sounded shaken.

The cordite smell told Sherman the shot had been fired in here. He raised his Glock and eased the door open with his left foot. “What’s going on? You got a gun in here?”

The girl stared at him, wide-eyed. Behind her was a king bed and a pile of clothes on the floor — sandals, denim shorts, purple polka-dot boxers, and a wad that looked like the wife-beater T-shirt LaPhonso had been wearing tonight.

The girl pointed off to her right. Sherman, unable to see over there from the hallway, eased into the room.

There was a gun on the floor, probably a .38, near a closed door. Sherman picked it up, jammed it in his waist-band and turned to the girl. “What happened?”

She stared with the wide eyes, didn’t say anything.

“Who’s in there?” Sherman said.

“Who where, man?” — Antwain, out in the hall.

Sherman went to the closed door and pushed it open. It was a little bathroom, nothing but an old toilet and sink — and The Man, LaPhonso Peete, sprawled on the floor, dead as a flat rat. Brain matter all over the wall behind the toilet, blood pooling under his head.

“What the fuck?” — Antwain right behind Sherman now. “Bitch!”

“Chill, man,” Sherman said.

“Who you tellin chill, boy? Bitch kilt my nigga! You dead bitch. Gimme that,” he told Sherman, meaning the Glock.

Sherman wasn’t about to.

Antwain glared. “You gonna take her out, then.”

Out of his mind.

“You hear me, nigga? You been gettin fat here. You wanna keep that cabbage rollin in? You take this bitch out, I get ridda this here” — jerking a thumb toward LaPhonso’s corpse, an inconvenience — “and we back to normal tomorra, nobody know nothin.”

Sherman shook his head. It couldn’t work. Besides, he was a police officer and this was a murder, even if LaPhonso had been nothing but a piece of garbage.

Yeah, you gonna do her,” Antwain said. “Then she ain’t tell nothin bout our business. Do her or we gonna do yo ass.”

Sherman looked over at the girl in her slip — pale and thin, but with a pretty face and something in her eyes.

“All right, then,” he told Antwain, and told the girl, “Come on. Get some clothes on.”

A few minutes later he had her out in his old Cutlass. Now what? Antwain wouldn’t believe he’d blown her away unless there was proof. He’d want to see the body.

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.

The war had left him appalled by firearms. He abruptly realized he could not imagine using this one.

He was forty-one years old and felt twice that age most of the time.

He did not own a car, had never thought to buy one, although he could easily afford anything on the road. He walked where he needed to go, or took the streetcar and later the bus. He ate most of his meals next door at Jimmy’s Café or sometimes at Crisfield’s, just over the District line in Silver Spring. And after the nights when images of his sister and parents came back too plainly in his dreams, he would take the longer walk to the synagogue on 16th Street and sit in the back and try to locate comfort in the rituals of his people.

On Sundays, the only day he closed the store, Liebmann rode the bus without any particular destination, his excursions a way past the dismay that could still run under his thoughts at any given moment, memory rivering through and working, down beneath the ordinary rhythms of his shopkeeper life.

On this Sunday in the middle of November, he crossed the street to catch the downtown bus, stepped up and greeted the driver and dropped the fare, and found his seat midway back. He preferred sitting on the right side of the bus although he could not explain the preference. Washington’s decline slid past the smeared window, the boarded store-fronts of Petworth and the catastrophe of Shaw, the choked streets around Howard University gone to every manner of destitution and loss.

The bus wheezed into downtown and hit the turnaround at Federal Triangle and gave up the last two passengers. Liebmann kept his seat. The driver scouted back down the aisle, picking up trash and the crumpled transfers left on seats or tossed on the floor. He stopped and sat in the seat across from Liebmann.

“Mr. Liebmann,” he said. He sighed heavily as he lowered himself against the red vinyl. He was a big man, overweight from the hours passed behind the wheel.

“How are you today, my friend?” Liebmann asked.

“Not too bad,” the driver said. He was perhaps fifty years old and had the practiced mix of resentment and acceptance that Liebmann noticed in many of the black men who lived in the neighborhood. “You out for your weekly pleasure trip?”

Liebmann said yes.

“Well,” the driver said, “that’s good. ’Course, for me it’s the same as ever. No pleasure about it. The job I do. I’m just happy the damn rain’s let up.”

The Nazis came when Liebmann was seventeen. His family lived in Berlin, in a yellowing apartment building filled with other Jewish families. Later, after his family was lost, he would wonder that his and so many other families continued to live together, in the same neighborhoods, the same buildings, huddling on the same streets, long after they understood what the Nazis were doing, after so many others had been taken.

He had not understood then what little his father or any of the fathers could have done — Germany’s borders closed and the jobs gone and the food gone and the possibility of hiding or shelter or refuge little more than fragrant wishes and the net pulling tighter day by day. The SS finally came in 1943, at dawn, stomping up the stairwells of the building, pounding on doors and shouting, and the staccato barking of the leashed shepherds in the hallways.

Liebmann roused his sleeping sister, gesturing that she hurry, get up and dress. For some reason he was afraid to speak, as if talking would give them away to the soldiers already in their building and moving room to room. He struggled quickly into his clothes, his half-top boots left untied when he heard the front door of the apartment give way and his father objecting and a louder voice ordering them out, downstairs, into the street. He heard something break — a dish or glass — and the door of his bedroom swung wide. The SS trooper standing there seemed massive but he was not much older than Liebmann. He was holding some sort of machine gun across his chest. The gun was black and gleamed with oil. The soldier stood easily, calm, expressionless, looking first at Liebmann and then his sister, still in her nightgown, only eleven years old.

The soldier may as well have been evaluating the fate of two barnyard animals. After a moment he simply waved them forward with the barrel of his gun and stood aside in the doorway as they walked out.

Liebmann stayed aboard the bus past his stop on the return trip. He thought he might get off at the National Guard Armory in Silver Spring and go across the street for a cup of coffee at the diner before he walked back up Georgia, into the District and home to his apartment. Three teenaged boys got on at the Kalmia Road stop, shoving and jockeying past the driver and down the aisle.

Liebmann recognized one of them immediately. An episode at the store a month or so back. Today the kid had a couple of buddies along. Blue-collar kids, but with the open pink faces that marked them as suburban, maybe in from the white-flight neighborhoods out in Glenmont or Aspen Hill, in the city and drunk on the jolt of getaway freedom that came with crossing the District line and wandering loose where nobody cared who they were or where they were going.

The driver called them back for the fare and the tallest of the boys, the kid that Liebmann had thrown out of his store, swaggered to the front of the bus.

“Seventy-five cents,” the driver said, pointing at the coin box. The kid stretched it out, gazing at the side of the driver’s head. He leaned against the coin box, scratched his genitals, looked back to his friends for the designated response. They were piled into a seat across the aisle from Liebmann and snickered on cue.

“I thought it was a quarter to ride.” The kid had a blond crewcut, wore a white round-neck T-shirt under a black leather motorcycle jacket.

The driver brought the bus to a stop at a red light. “There’s three of you,” he said. “Twenty-five times three. Or is that too hard for you to figure?”

The kid looked away from his appreciative audience, back to the driver. “You got a smart mouth on you, don’t you?” he said.

The driver said nothing. Reached across to the lever on his right and pulled it to open the door behind the kid.

“Off,” he said.

“I’m not gettin off,” the kid said. “This ain’t my stop.”

It had been a Saturday night when one of Liebmann’s clerks spotted the same kid slipping a pint of vodka under the same leather jacket. The kid was eighteen — or had a driver’s license that said he was — old enough to buy in the District. But he was trying to steal a bottle.

The traffic light went to green.

The driver looked at the kid, waiting, and the kid said, “I told you. I ain’t getting off. I’ll get off when it’s my stop.”

A car behind the bus honked.

When Liebmann had asked for the bottle under his jacket, the kid said something about how he had to steal because of the “Jew prices” in the place. But he had given up the bottle and left, ambling out, making an elaborate show of being in no particular hurry, meeting the gaze of the store’s patrons with slack-jawed hostility.

The driver put the bus in neutral and set the brake and put on the safety flashers. The kid said, “You can’t put me off the bus, man. It’s against the goddamn law.”

“My goddamn bus. My goddamn law.” The driver’s voice was low and controlled. “Get off now, so’s I don’t need to do it for you.”

The kid backed toward the door, slipped on the top step and caught himself. “What you need to do, man, is kiss my white ass.”

“You just keep your white ass moving right out that door.”

The kid looked back into the bus. There were only a few riders. A man three seats in front of Liebmann held his gaze on the window, peering out, waiting for the episode to be over, to resolve itself in one way or another.

Liebmann stood and stepped into the aisle, watching the kid still standing at the front of the bus.

“Oh, now, look at this,” the kid said. “We got us a kike in the mix. You gonna kick my ass too, hymie? Come on up here and kick my—”

The driver was up and reached across and had the collar of the kid’s leather jacket. The kid sucked for air, rocked forward onto the balls of his feet. He struggled against the driver’s grip a moment, then stopped and hung there, his cheeks flaming.

“Get off the bus,” the driver said. “I won’t be telling you another time.”

“You best get your goddamn nigger hand off me.” The kid’s voice shook but he worked to hold the arrogance.

The driver let go and the kid stumbled backwards down the two steps to the curb. The driver squeezed the door closed, shifted into gear, and jerked the bus through the intersection

The kid lifted his arms and shot the air with both middle fingers as the bus roared past him.

Liebmann sat down again. Glanced across at the buddies, sitting sober now, hangdog cowboys left in the lurch.

The driver called back, voice booming. “Fifty cents, fellas. Hike it up here.”

The two filed up and dropped their coins and came back toward Liebmann, this time passing him to go all the way to the back of the bus, away from the other riders.

The driver brought the bus to a stop on the north side of the Armory in Silver Spring, and cut the motor. The two kids got off at the rear door and walked a few paces, then broke into a worried run and disappeared beyond the Armory building. The other riders left from the front.

Liebmann waited until everybody was off, then walked up and stood next to the driver. “I know that boy,” he said. “He came in my store. He tried to steal from me.”

“Little turd,” the driver said.

“I threw him out.”

“Looks like that’s all he’s good for,” the driver said. “Gettin thrown out of places. Little peckerwood son of a bitch.”

“I’m sorry.”

The driver heaved a sigh and looked up toward Liebmann. “No, man, I’m sorry. Sorry you got spoken to that way on board my bus.”

Liebmann shrugged slightly. There was a moment of silence between them.

“Are you off work now?” Liebmann asked.

“Yeah. Gotta park this thing, but I’m through for the day.”

“Then I will see you next time,” Liebmann said. “Let’s hope we get ourselves a nice quiet ride.”

After he got home, Liebmann sat in his apartment, at a window overlooking the street. He lifted the window in spite of the cold and pulled a kitchen chair close and sat with his coat on. The trees along Georgia Avenue were skeletal, black silhouettes in the endless afternoon. A few days after he had kicked the kid out of his store for trying to steal a bottle of vodka, Liebmann came to work to find the words JEWS SUCK SHIT spray-painted in red on the store’s front window.

He stood looking at the words painted unevenly on the glass, the morning traffic moving behind him. Thinking of it now in his apartment, he touched a point on his coat sleeve above the tattoo on his forearm. He always believed he could feel it there no matter how many layers were above it, the tattoo carved between his skin and the blood underneath.

The man who gave Liebmann the tattoo at Auschwitz was said to have once been the finest tattoo artist in Berlin. There was talk of his freehanding elaborate sailing ships and floral hearts and the names of mothers and lovers in elegant cascading script. But he was a Jew. Now branding his own people, one after the other, letters and numbers, working through the line. He was thin with a long face and beagle eyes and wire-rimmed glasses, and he never looked up, never looked at the faces of the people he marked, trading their names for numbers. Everybody knew he had no choice.

It was weeks later when the guards came to the dormitory and ordered everybody out.

Near dawn. The dormitory shouted awake and everybody made to stand outside in the crusted snow, freezing in rags. When this happened a prisoner was often singled out and led away. This time an SS major pointed at the tattoo artist. Two corporals pulled the man out of the group and pushed him around the side of the building. Within a few seconds came the sound of a pistol shot. A flat, dry snap echoing away into the dark forest beyond the wire.

The two corporals and the major came back around the side of the building as if they had been to the latrine or were returning from a smoke break. They ordered everybody back inside. Liebmann filed into the dormitory and lay down on the pine slat that passed for his bed. He realized that he did not know the tattoo artist’s name, and now the man and his name were lost with all the others, disappeared. Liebmann repeated his own name to himself, over and over, Jacob Liebmann, Jacob Liebmann, suddenly convinced that doing so might stand as some sort of protection, an incantation prayed to all the names of the lost gone silent in a thousand forsak nights, in the trackless abandoned last winter of the war.

Liebmann walked the streets of Shepherd Park. It was after midnight, in the week between Christmas and New Year. A gentle snow had fallen earlier in the day, leaving a half-inch dusting on the rooftops and cars and in the trees.

When Liebmann could not sleep he often gave up on the effort, got up and dressed and went out to walk the silent world. The cover of snow left the night even quieter, and he turned south outside his building, crossed Georgia Avenue and followed several blocks down to Fern, turned right to track the fenceline of the grounds of Walter Reed, the sprawling army hospital. Turned into the residential area on 13th Street and saw the snowfall had spangled shrubbery and porch railings and fences. The houses were mostly dark, a lamp here or there in a living room or behind an upstairs bedroom curtain. As he rounded up toward the corner where Alaska Avenue met Georgia, he saw lights moving inside his tore

He approached the intersection of Georgia and Alaska Avenues and Kalmia Road, and then stopped directly across from the front windows of his store. Lights flicked and darted somewhere inside. Liebmann was at first confused, then he understood — flashlights. In the quiet out on the street, even at his distance, he heard glass shattering, as if somebody was breaking one bottle with another. And laughter.

Someone inside smashing bottles and laughing.

Later, Liebmann would not remember any thought or specific plan as he cut around the rear of his store to edge in close to the wall. The glass plate in the back door was punched out. He crouched and eased through the opening, taking care to avoid the shards around the edges of the frame. He stood and saw three figures in a furious pleasure, flinging pints and fifths of whisky and vodka and gin against the wall, wailing and hooting when a bottle hit and exploded. One of them swung something sideways into the shelves, scattering bottles that popped like firecrackers as they hit the floor and burst.

A fierce alcohol reek, overheated, sick and pungent, the fouled sweetness everywhere.

The three carried on, oblivious to Liebmann, who moved into his office and found a key on the ledge over the door and unlocked the lower left desk drawer. He took out the little pistol, pushed the safety off, and stepped back out into the store. He held the gun straight up over his head at arm’s length and squeezed the trigger.

The sound inside his store was nothing like the flat snap a Luger made in the open, frosted air of Germany — this was contained thunder, the sudden combustion of something unbridled and wild.

The three figures startled and crouched and froze where they were, faces ratcheted toward him. Liebmann stepped forward, crunching broken glass, felt the floor wet and precarious.

Two of them bolted, slipping and flailing as if they were on ice, making their way for the door. One of them fell, sliding on the floor, riding the glass, yelping in pain.

Liebmann ignored them to come within ten feet of the kid with the crewcut. The kid was wearing the motorcycle jacket. A baseball bat dangled in his right hand.

“You just couldn’t do it,” Liebmann said. “Mind your own business. Leave me alone.”

The kid stared a moment, the same slack-jawed insolence as when Liebmann kicked him out of the store, when the bus driver tossed him off the bus. Then he said, “I’m outta here, man.” He started to move.

Liebmann lifted the pistol into view, holding it up beside his face, pointed at the ceiling. “Not so fast. I thought maybe we have a little talk.”

The pistol gave the kid pause but he worked quickly back into his moody swagger. “So, what, you gonna shoot me? For this? We was just havin a little fun.”

“It was you who painted the words, yes?”

“What words?”

Liebmann lifted the pistol and fired into a wall. The kid hunched backward, cried out, dropped the bat, and lifted his hands as if to shield himself.

“The words,” Liebmann said, after the echo of the gun blast subsided. “Red paint. The front window.”

The kid straightened, let his hands move back to his sides. “So what if I did?” He started to work his way across the glass.

Liebmann pointed the pistol directly at the kid, tracking him as he moved. The kid kept a few yards between himself and Liebmann and said, “You can’t do nothin crazy here, man. We was just screwin around.”

Liebmann shifted the pistol to the right of the kid and fired again, this time into the wall. He moved the barrel a degree and fired again. A case of Coca-Cola hissed, spitting and fizzing and boiling over. Moved the barrel and fired again. The kid was howling now, hands over his face, knees going soft.

Liebmann fired into a flank of Alsatian whites, Rieslings, and Gewurztraminers. The rack of bottles ignited and blew apart in glittering spray, silvered glass and golden wines showering into the aisle.

The echo and reverberation of the gun was everything now, throbbing against the walls and ceiling, otherworldly, pure and untrammeled and wanton. The sound had severed something in Liebmann.

The kid was sobbing and sagged to his knees on the floor. “Crazy motherfucker,” he said, heaving, all his imagined power drained away. “You’re gonna kill me, right?”

A car passed outside, headlights searchlighting the room, the extent of the damage visible for several seconds. The floor gleamed with spilled and flooding booze and the jeweled light of shattered glass.

Liebmann looked back to the kid, held his gaze a long moment. Finally he said, “You do not deserve to die. You are not worthy of such an honor.” His voice shook when he spoke. He was breathless, tainted in some way that was just coming to him. He lowered the pistol to his side.

“You’re stone crazy, ain’t you?” the kid said. “Crazy Jew.”

Liebmann gazed at the boy for another moment, and then said, “Go. Get out.”

The kid lurched to his feet, slipping, working for purchase on the wet floor.

Liebmann turned and crunched across the glass back to the cubicle office at the front of the store. He opened the desk drawer and returned the gun to its place. The kid made his way toward the door, slipped once and went down on one knee and grimaced as he caught himself with the heel of his hand. There was a blood smear on the floor when he lifted his hand away, black in the half-light.

Liebmann was no longer watching. He sat at the desk, his back to the room. “Get out,” he said, speaking toward the wall. “I never want to see you again. Nowhere. Ever. Never in this life.”

The kid paused near the office. “You just did all that to make me piss myself. Well, I did. Hope you’re satisfied.”

Liebmann did not answer.

The kid said, “Crazy fuck.”

Leibmann sat long after the kid was gone and the night’s silence regained. An occasional car hissed along the wet street outside. He sat in the dark and looked at the wall and marveled that no police had come, no fire truck, not a curious neighbor, nobody seemed to have heard a thing. Shepherd Park is not the neighborhood it once was, he thought. The idea brought no feeling one way or another. In the morning he would call the police and the insurance company to file the reports and pretend that he happened on the devastation when he opened the store in the morning. Just another morning coming to work, only this time to a bad surprise. He would describe his distress at what he discovered. Because what could anybody do? Besides, he could never explain. Or say why it happened, even if it was possible to carry it that far. Or why he had not called the police when he saw the lights in the store and heard the sounds of the damage being done. Now, looking at the wall, exhausted, vaguely ill, Liebmann knew he could not explain his shame to strangers. There had been a problem, and it was his, and he had taken care of it — he would leave it at that, in his own mind. He was not about to relate the way he had gone down under the heel of time, how a simple animal rage had blossomed against the ways his life was taken from him.

He had no language for that kind of story.

Three cops came, two uniforms with a plainclothes officer who picked around in the ruins, trying to protect his shoes. The uniforms glanced at the scene from the door and went back to sit in their cruiser at the curb out front.

“Any idea of the damages?” the officer asked.

“Not yet,” Liebmann said. “I need a few days. I have to inventory.”

“Right,” the officer said. “I understand.” He slipped, but caught himself against a shelf. “Damn. This is some kind of mess. Who would’ve done this?”

Liebmann was sweeping glass with an industrial push-broom. He said nothing.

The officer looked around with the expression of a man who needed to move on to some other part of his day. “No enemies, huh? No big fights with anybody? Upset customer?”

“No,” Liebmann said.

The officer shrugged. “Vandalism. It’s getting worse. We’re seeing more of it all the time. Tough to connect anybody to these things, though. Not unless you walk in on them red-handed.”

The insurance adjuster came a few hours later. Older than the cop, world weary, wearing black-frame eyeglasses and a tired off-blue suit. By the time he arrived Liebmann had swept paths through the glass. The floor was sugared with congealed liquor and the insurance man’s wing tips stuck and sucked to the floor as he walked. He had a clip-board. He looked closer and harder at the damage than the police officer had, made notes as he moved through the wreckage, then left his business card with Liebmann, mum-bling something about how sorry he was.

From time to time Liebmann’s sister would appear and speak in his dreams. He had never seen her again after that morning in their bedroom in the family apartment in Berlin. Outside on the street the Nazis had separated the males and females — he watched his mother and his sister led away. An officer was saying over a bullhorn that everybody was being relocated for their own safety, away from Berlin and the Allied bombing runs, and he watched his sister in her little brown shoes, holding his mother’s hand, walking off. Just before he lost sight of her, she turned back and smiled and waved.

Dreaming, Liebmann heard her voice lift in the open happiness of a child, speaking in a language he did not understand, that seemed more like bells heard at a great distance than any sort of words he might recognize. As she spoke, her tiny white face hung suspended in the opalescent air of his vision.

Neither the police officer nor the insurance adjuster noticed the bullet holes in the outside wall. Liebmann found them when he came to the store the next morning. They were there if somebody cared to look. But he knew nobody would.

Reports were filed. Liebmann hired a clean-up crew, and inventoried, and replaced the losses, and filed his receipts with the insurance company. He sold the pistol to a dealer at a gun show at the Armory for twenty-five dollars, and about six weeks later a check arrived from the insurance company for the damages. Business went on as usual. Thrived as usual. People still came in every day to get the boxes they wanted for storage, for shipping, for whatever they needed. A few of the regular customers offered consolation. Sorry about what happened, Jacob. Maybe it’s time to get out of here. Move up the road to Wheaton.

Liebmann nodded. Maybe, he said. Maybe I need to think about that.