King Suckerman
- Автор: Пелеканос Джордж
- Серия: D.C. Quartet #2
- Год: 1997
- Язык: английский
- Год: Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN: 978-0-316-69590-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «King Suckerman». Краткое содержание книги:
Karras passed long-closed businesses, charred buildings, decaying projects, apartment houses now shells. Bars covered rock-shattered windows; slogans like “Say It Loud!” had been spray painted on plywood boards. Little had been rebuilt or reopened for the last eight years, since the fires and looters had ravaged the strip.
But Karras knew that 14th and 7th and all the other burned-down D.C. avenues had been sacrificed for something else. Things had changed, in the same way that a hard summer rain can clear the streets.
Eleni Karras had said that Stefanos’s grill stood on the corner of S. It was there, marked by a rusted blue oblong sign encircled by mostly broken lightbulbs. The sign, in red lettering, read “Nick’s.” Karras parked his Ghia out front and walked into the restaurant.
Nick’s was a run-down lunch and beer house with eight stools lined up against a counter. Behind the counter were a grill, sandwich board, soda fountain, two huge coffee urns, and a couple of coolers holding sodas, ice cream, and bottles of beer. Apparently there had once been some booths built in against the wall — you could still see the outlines where they had been removed — but they had been replaced by a narrow bracketed Formica counter where customers could stand while they put away their food and drink. Where the counter ended, an unplugged pinball machine was pushed against the wall. Beyond the pinball machine, just before an entrance to a back room, stood a jukebox. A black man holding a sixteen-ounce can of beer leaned against the jukebox, studying the selections. An Ohio Players number came from the juke.
Karras had a seat on a stool cushioned in a red color so faded it had gone to pink. A crisscross of duct tape kept the plastic on the stool from tearing any further.
“Nick,” said a uniformed woman with a deeply creased walnut brown complexion. She was on the other side of the counter, leaning on it, smoking a cigarette and holding an unopened pack of Viceroys in her free hand. She did not approach Karras or even look in his eyes.
Two other black men with graying hair sat at the counter drinking from cans of Schlitz. Both of them had cigarettes going, too.
“Can’t really bring myself to vote for a man from Georgia,” said the man closest to Karras.
“What,” said the other. “You gonna vote for that big block of nothin’, Mr. Gerald Ford? Least that peanut farmer gonna bring somethin’ new to the party.”
“Ain’t none of ’em gonna bring nothin’ new,” said the first man. “Anyway, I can’t trust a man who smiles like that all the time.”
The woman behind the counter stepped into her flat-heeled shoes and walked over to a set of swinging louvered doors that led to the kitchen. “Nick,” she said over the top of the doors. “Got a customer out here.”
“You too busy to serve him, baby?” said the first man, nudging his partner.
“On my break,” said the woman. “If you had a job, you’d know what that was.”
The men laughed. The woman returned to her spot, dragged deeply off her cigarette.
Karras pretended to study a grease-filmed Manne’s Potato Chip sign — “Yeah, Manne!” — on the wall directly in front of him. That sign must have been hung there on the opening day.
A medium-sized man who had once been a big man pushed through the swinging doors. His chest sagged now and his shoulders slumped, and he walked with a slow, rolling gait. But his hands and wrists gave away his former size. There were a couple of Band-Aids on his fingers and smudges of dried blood on his yellowed apron. He saw Karras and smiled.
“Thimitri Karras, eh?”
“Yessir.”
“Yasou, re!”
“Mr. Stefanos?”
“Nick. Tha’s me.”
Nick Stefanos shook Karras’s hand. The hand was leather, and he still had a grip.
“Lemme look at you, boy.” Stefanos stood back, smoothed back an errant gray strand of hair from an otherwise bald dome. His face was as loose and fleshy as an old dog’s, flecked with age spots, with a faded pink scar on the right cheek.
“So how do I look?”
“Like your mother.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“You’re a handsome boy, though, don’ get me wrong. Just like your old man.”
“Thanks.”
Stefanos turned his head toward the kitchen. “Hey, Costaki!” he yelled. “Ella tho, re!”
A short, low-slung Greek with a wild head of gray hair and a thick, graying mustache burst through the doors. He was holding a carving knife tightly in his fist. His other hand was slick with grease and bits of meat.
“What the hell you want, Niko, I’m cuttin’ up a little lamb!”
“C’mon over here, Costa. Say hello to Thimitri Karras, o yos tou Pete Karras.”
Costa issued a lopsided grin, wiped his hand off on his apron, extended the hand to Karras. “Miazi ti mitera tou,” he said to Stefanos.
“That’s what they tell me,” said Karras.
Costa said, “So what can I get you, Karras? On the house!”
“Nothing, thanks. I just ate.”
“Got a nice meatloaf—”
“I ate, thanks.”
“Where you eat, huh?”
“Had a sub up at Eddie Leonard’s.”
“Eddie Leonard’s,” said Costa with disgust. “Might as well eat dog shit.”
“He said he don’t want nothin’, Costa,” said Stefanos.
“I’ll have something, Costa,” said the man closest to Karras. “Make me up a fish sandwich to go, will ya?”
“Anything on it?”
“Just hot sauce.”
“I got some nice summer tomatoes, Nick jus’ sliced ’em up this morning—”
“Just hot sauce, man. You gettin’ deaf in your old age?”
“Hokay, vre mavroskilo. Comin’ right up.”
“Sopa, re,” said Stefanos.
The men at the counter looked at each other and grinned.
Karras watched the interplay between the two Greeks. Costa had just called the man a black dog, and Nick had told Costa to shut his mouth. They must have been doing the same dance down here for about a hundred years.
“Go make the man’s sandwich,” said Stefanos.
“I’m goin,” said Costa, who looked as if he had just sucked on a lemon.
“What,” said Stefanos. “You got a problem?”
“Me?” said Costa. “I don’t give a damn nothing.” Costa went back toward the kitchen, turned back his head. “You take it easy, young fella.”
“Yeah,” said Karras. “You, too.”
Karras tented his fingers on the counter. An electric fan in a high corner of the room blew dust and smoke around the place but did little to dispel the heat. The restaurant was kind of dark, too; a couple of high lights had gone out and had not been replaced. Well, that made sense. Which one of these old birds was gonna get up on a ladder to change a bulb?
“Thanks for comin’ down.”
“Tipota,” said Karras with a shrug. He wanted to be outside, under a clear sky, breathing clean air.
“It is something,” said Stefanos. “Young man like you, nice day like this, you wanna be doin’ somethin’ else, I know.”
“You helped my family out plenty. So I’m here. Like I said, it’s nothing.”
Stefanos rested his forearm on the counter, leaned forward. “O patera sou, he was some kind of man. I don’t just mean about him bein’ a war hero. No sir, I don’t just mean that. I mean about other things, too. He never even knew the kind of man he was.”