The Sweet Forever
- Автор: Пелеканос Джордж
- Серия: D.C. Quartet #3
- Год: 1998
- Язык: английский
- Год: Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN: 978-0-316-69109-3
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Sweet Forever». Краткое содержание книги:
“Feel like taking a ride?”
“Sure,” said Clay. “Drivin’ me crazy, sittin’ around here with nothin’ to do.”
Karras parked the BMW at the intersection of 17th and Irving in Mount Pleasant, and he and Clay walked up 17th, where they cut into an alley. Karras had visited Big Nick Stefanos once since Stefanos had asked him to counsel his grandson ten years back. Karras knew that the residents of the row houses on Irving used the alley as their primary entrance. Four houses deep into the alley, he saw Big Nick’s house.
Karras knocked on the front door. Through the windows he and Clay saw an old man coming slowly toward them, leaning on a cane. Two locks were undone, and the door swung open.
“Mr. Stefanos?”
“Yeah?”
The old man squinted, his milky, glaucomic eyes staring past Karras’s shoulder. He had lost all of his hair except for a few strays combed across the spotted dome of his scalp. He had lost a few inches of height as well, though none of the immensity of his hands. His thick horn-rimmed glasses hung crookedly on his large nose.
“Dimitri Karras.”
The old man showed his wide-open smile. “O yos tou Panayoti Karras?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Pete Karras’s son. Got a friend with me, Mr. Stefanos.”
“Marcus Clay.” Clay reached out and took the old man’s hand. Stefanos shook it.
“Ella,” he said, making a come-on gesture with his free hand. “Come on in. I was jus’ makin’ a little cafe.”
They entered a room that had been a sleeping porch, now finished off with paneled walls. An old couch covered with afghan blankets sat next to a green leather recliner patched with duct tape. The television played on a stand set against the wall. Steve McQueen was engaged in a card game with Eddie Robinson onscreen.
“Have a seat,” said Stefanos. “You two want coffee?”
“That would be good,” said Karras as he and Clay took a seat on the couch.
“Watch a little TV if you want. Playhouse Five, they used to run Randolph Scott Westerns on Sunday afternoons. No more. But McQueen, he’s all right. Makes a pretty good cowboy, too.”
“We’re okay,” said Karras. “Take your time.”
Stefanos returned ten minutes later with a tray of three tiny cups and saucers, the cane hooked over his forearm. They didn’t rise to assist him.
He placed the tray on a small end table by the couch. They helped themselves as Stefanos took his cup and saucer and settled in the recliner.
Clay looked in his painted ceramic cup, small as a doll’s set. The cup was half filled with something thick and black as tar. He took a sip of bitter caffeine.
“What brings you here today?” said Stefanos, looking toward the sunlight coming through the porch windows.
“Wanted to drop this by,” said Karras, leaning forward and pressing a folded bill in Stefanos’s big hand. “I owe your grandson some money. Good excuse to come by and see how you were doin’. I was visiting my mother today, and I thought of you.”
“Where’s Eleni, Gate of Heaven?”
“She and my father both.”
“Uh. Me, I’m gonna be in Brentwood, with all my friends.” Stefanos slipped the bill into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. “What is this, so I can tell Niko, in case he calls.”
“Hundred dollars.”
“C-note, huh?” Stefanos grinned. “What’d he do to earn it?”
“Followed someone for me and Marcus.”
“Him and that bufo friend of his, McGinnes, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Goddamn joker.” Stefanos turned his head. “You see Niko, or just talk to him on the phone?”
“I saw him the other night.”
And I fed his nose with some high-octane flake.
“How’d he look to you?”
Wired. All twisted up inside.
Karras said, “He looked good.”
“He ain’t happy,” said Stefanos. “He married this Amerikanitha, she’s always pushin’ him to work harder, climb the ladder, get more serious, like that. I raised him, you know; he’s like my son. He is my son. I’m worried about him.”
“Gotta find his own way,” said Karras.
“Young people today, they’re so set on makin’ chrimata, like the money is the whole point. It ain’t the money. It’s the journey, katalavenis?”
“Sure, I understand.”
“It’s enjoying what you do, every goddamn day.” Stefanos drank some of his Turkish coffee. “Aaah. Anyway, what you up to, re?”
“I work for Marcus here.”
“O Mavros?”
“Ne.”
“What kinda work you do, Clay?”
“Own a few record stores, Mr. Stefanos.”
“Call me Nick.”
“Okay. Nick.”
“Bravo. Good to own your own business, eh?”
“Yes, it is. Little nerve rackin’ when payroll comes due every week. But, yeah, it’s good.”
“Had my own place on Fourteenth and S.”
“I know the place. Nick’s Grill.”
“Right!”
“You and me had a good talk one day, when I was a kid.”
“Hope I treated you okay.”
“You did.”
Stefanos smiled crookedly. “Yeah, nothin’ like havin’ your own place. ’Specially from where I came from, just a stone hut in the mountains, to having a store of my own. Just to put my key in the door, to my place, every day... it was somethin’.”
“You make it sound easy,” said Clay.
“Not always.” Stefanos frowned. “There was this one time, these men came and tried to shake me down in my own grill. Your father was there, Thimitri; this must have been, I don’t know, nineteen forty-nine. Goddamn, almost forty years ago. O patera sou, and Costa, and a man named Lou DiGeordano. And this big mavros named Six, bouncer I had at the time. I remember the way I felt, that these men were going to take away a piece of my business, something that I had built up with my own hands and sweat.”
Clay looked at the old man. “How’d you handle it, Nick?”
We slaughtered them like animals in the back of the store. We killed them with machetes and pistolas and cut them into pieces.
Stefanos placed his cup and saucer on the end table. “We convinced them to leave us alone.” He looked in the direction of Clay. “It was important to send them a message. You know what I’m talkin’ about, Clay. You got a business yourself.”
“Yes,” said Clay.
Karras drained his coffee. “We better get goin’, Nick.”
“Hokay, boy. Appreciate you lookin’ out for Niko.”
“Sure thing.”
“Nice seeing you,” said Clay, taking the old man’s hand. “We’ll find our way out.”
“Good meetin’ you, Clay. Thimitri.”
They left him there on the porch, staring at the blurred images on the television screen. He listened for the door and their footsteps going down the iron stairs to the alley.
Nick Stefanos closed his eyes. He smiled slowly at the pictures running through his head: blond women in flowered dresses, men in pinstriped suits and felt hats, a crisp white apron, a cold bottle of Ballantine ale, a shiny Buick Roadmaster, red and black chips and face cards spread on green felt, bacon sizzling on a hot grill, a ceiling of stars over Meridian Hill Park, warm breezes drifting off the water at Hains Point... wide, clean streets, running through a city of promise forever gone.