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:
“I don’t remember him,” said Karras.
“Tha’s why I’m tellin’ you, so you know.”
“Okay.”
“Hokay.” There was an awkward silence as Stefanos moved his face around with a thick hand. “It’s tough between a father and a son. Someday you gonna find out yourself.”
“Mom said you wanted to talk,” said Karras. “Something about your grandson.”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m gonna get to now.” Stefanos looked away. “His name is Nick, jus’ like me. I raised him myself. It don’t matter the nuts and bolts of it, either, that’s just the fact. I’m his father, and he’s my kid.”
“All right.”
“But I’m an old man. The world’s changed, and I don’t understand it so good anymore. It’s hard enough trying to talk to a son, but when you’re that far apart...”
“Is he in trouble?”
Stefanos spread his hands. “What the hell I know, huh? He comes home every night, his eyes are all red, he’s actin’ funny... I’m thinkin’, maybe he’s smoking that marijuana like all the kids are smoking it today. Maybe, what the hell I know, he’s on all kinds of drugs.”
It was Karras’s turn to look away. He tried to think of something smart to say, decided to go ahead and say something, opened his mouth to speak.
“Nick—”
“Mia stigmi,” said Stefanos, holding up one finger. “I’m not finished. Nick’s got this job, see? He’s a stock boy in some store uptown, unloads trucks, stacks televisions, carries air conditioners up and down stairs, like that. Works with a bunch of wise guys, I met ’em once, I figure they’re all on some kind of drugs in that store, too, the way they act. But it’s okay, it’s good to have a job, it teaches you things about life. And it keeps the boy off the streets. Now he tells me he’s leavin’. After July Fourth, gonna go down south and drive around with this friend of his he’s been hangin’ out with since high school. I ask him, ‘When you gonna be back, huh?’ and he’s tellin’ me, ‘I don’t know, Papou, gonna have an adventure and figure that out later on.’ An adventure. Sounds like he’s headed for trouble to me. Got a job, gonna start college in the fall, now he’s gonna give it all up and get in a car and go on and have an adventure. Now, he’s a good boy, and I’m not gonna tell you he’s not. But I don’t know, Thimitri, you gotta tell me the truth: am I trelos, worried about him like this?”
Karras looked at the confusion in the old man’s eyes. “No, Nick, you’re not crazy.”
“I was wonderin’, that’s all. I don’t know anybody I can trust to talk to who’s close to the boy’s age. I thought of you. You’re a little bit older, you gotta have some more sense.”
“It’s okay, Nick. I’m glad you called.”
“You’ll go see the boy? Set him straight?”
Set him straight. Now a guy who deals weed to high school kids is gonna set another kid straight.
Karras said, “Sure.”
Stefanos breathed out slowly. “Bravo, re. Efcharisto.”
“Parakalo.” Karras rubbed his hands together. “Where’s Nick work, anyway?”
“Place called Nutty Nathan’s, on Connecticut up there near Albemarle. Nutty Nathan’s, funny name for a store, eh?”
“I know the place. Used to be the old Sun Radio.”
“That’s right.”
“He on today?”
“Yessir.”
“I’ll go up there this afternoon,” said Karras. “See if I can talk with him then.”
Stefanos clapped Karras on the arm, then went to serve the two men at the counter another round of beers. The men were discussing a basketball player named Craig “Big Sky” Shelton, who had come out of Dunbar in ’75. Except to light another cigarette and move it back and forth to her lips, the woman who worked for Stefanos had not moved an inch.
Stefanos walked back, his feet padding along a rubber mat. Karras watched him wince as he bent forward, leaning his arm back on the counter.
“This work must be gettin’ kinda rough on you,” said Karras.
“Not so rough,” said Stefanos, smiling with his eyes. “Anyway, what the hell else I’m gonna do, eh?”
“I guess.”
“You guess. Well, I know. This is my place here. I been serving these same people here for forty years.” Stefanos lowered his voice. “Listen, you wanna hear somethin’? When they burned down this block, my place was the only one they left alone. Not even a rock through my window, katalavenis? People know me here, and I know them. All I’m tellin’ you is, I belong here.”
“Maybe so. Just be nice for you to relax a little, that’s all I was sayin’.”
“Ahhh,” said Stefanos. “What the hell I’m gonna relax for, huh?”
“I just thought—”
“I work,” said Stefanos. “That’s what a man does.”
Karras got off his stool. He shook Stefanos’s hand.
“Yasou, Thimitri.”
“Yasou, Nick.”
“You talk to my boy, hokay?”
“I will.”
Dimitri Karras walked around the jukebox player, who leaned against the wall counter now and appeared to be sleeping on his feet. Karras turned his head back, saw Nick Stefanos moving slowly, one hip higher than the other, toward the louvered doors.
“What about that psari, Costa?” yelled Stefanos.
“It’s workiiin’!” yelled Costa, his voice echoing off the pressed tin ceiling of the store.
Karras passed beneath a Blatz Beer clock with a smudged glass face centered above the door. The time was off by several hours, and the clock’s second hand had stopped. Karras opened the door and walked out to the street.
Sixteen
Nutty Nathan’s stood on the west side of Connecticut just south of Albemarle Street, a few doors up from a Hot Shoppes that served as the centerpiece of a small commercial strip bordering the neighborhoods of Van Ness and Forest Heights. Across the street was the broadcast house of a local television station, WMAL, and a block north of that was a small piano bar named La Fortresse, revered by D.C.’s serious drinkers for its generous liquor-to-mixer ratio.
Karras parked in a lot on the side of the building. Getting out of his car, he noticed a medium-sized man with muttonchop sideburns and a Fu Manchu mustache standing by the Dempsey Dumpster at the back of the lot, smoking a joint with one hand and holding a sixteen-ounce can of Colt 45 in the other. The man wore a loud gold sport coat and a matching gold patterned tie, and made no effort to conceal the malt liquor or the pot. He caught Karras’s eye, wiggled his eyebrows, raised the can in a salute.
Karras walked around the building to the front of the store. He looked in the wide window where several air conditioners blew streamers against the glass. He went inside.
An Ichabod Crane look-alike sat on a console and watched a row of televisions, all tuned to the same station. He turned his head and glanced at Karras at the sound of the door’s bell. The man was dead pale and had a frightening smile and wore a large wooden crucifix over his gold patterned tie and green shirt. His jacket was the same shade of gold as that of the man in the lot.
“Welcome to Nutty Nathan’s,” said the man. A tag clipped to his jacket read, “Hi, my name is Lloyd Danker.”
“Hi.”
“Something special for you today, sir?”
“Special? No, I don’t think so. I’m looking for Nick Stefanos.”
The man’s smile went away. “Try the Sound Explosion. All the way in the back.”