The Big Blowdown
George Pelecanos
To Pete Frank and Alice Frank
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following individuals who were of help in the writing of this book: the staff of the Washingtoniana Room of the Martin Luther King Memorial Library in Washington, DC, Jim and Ted Pedas; James Boukas; Gordon Van Gelder; Sloan Harris; and Emily. A special thanks to my parents, Pete and Ruby Pelecanos.
Prologue
Washington, D.C
1946
Peter Karras dreamed. He dreamed of his Murphy bed, and a plate of his mother’s beans me selina. He could smell the richness of the food, see the brown around the black-eyed peas and stewed tomatoes and the pale-green celery as if he were sitting at the old table at 5th and H. He dreamed of sirens and Jimmy Boyle, Boyle in his blue uniform, looking down on him with concern. He watched the white moon, saw lights color it and swirl across the sky. He dreamed he had raised his head and looked at his leg. He dreamed the foot at the end of it was flattened, without shape, smashed into a swollen mound on the stones, twisted in a funny kind of way. In between the dreams came blackness, in the blackness came naked screams.
“Jimmy,” said Karras.
“I’m here, pal.”
It was Boyle again, in uniform, crouched over him, back in the dream. The siren was loud in this dream. Boyle held his hand. They were in a small space, and someone was in the space with them, someone wearing white. They were moving, rocking back and forth.
“We’re on our way to the hospital,” said Boyle.
“The hospital.”
“Yeah.”
Karras’s mouth was awfully dry. “How does it look for me?”
“Huh?”
“Turn your good ear my way, Jimmy.” Boyle did it. “I said, how is it?”
“You’re gonna make it.”
“I asked you how it was, Jimmy.”
Boyle lowered his eyes.
Karras had a sudden shock of pain that arched his back. Boyle squeezed his hand until the shock receded. The one wearing white blotted a rag on Karras’s head.
“We’re almost there, pal,” said Boyle.
Karras licked his lips. “How’d you get in on this?”
“My beat.” Boyle smiled sadly. “You got lucky, I guess.”
“Luck. I’m lousy with it, Jimmy.”
The ambulance made a severe turn. Boyle steadied the gurney, yelled something at the driver. He looked back down at Karras.
“Who did this to you, Pete?”
Karras thought of Joe Recevo, the image of the Mercury pulling away, clear and pounding in his head. “I got yoked, that’s all. Some guys jumped me. I didn’t see their faces. Maybe you ought to ask the old-timer that runs the market.”
“We will.”
Karras looked at his friend, smiled at the rolls of fat spilling over the collar of Boyle’s shirt.
“You put on a few pounds, Jimmy.”
Boyle blushed. “Aw, hell, Pete, you know I like to eat.”
“I know, chum. I know.”
The driver cut the siren as the ambulance slowed.
“Pete,” Boyle said. “When I found you, you were talkin’ Greek. Mana mou, mana mou, you kept sayin’. What the hell was that?”
Mana mou. Karras looked away. He had been calling out for his mother in that alley. So that’s what a tough guy like him did when things got real good and rough.
“Crazy talk,” said Karras, “that’s all it was.”
The ambulance stopped, and Boyle patted Karras’s hand. “All right, pal. Now they’re gonna fix you up.”
The back doors opened. A couple of guys leaned in, grabbed the gurney. They lifted him out into the night air, the smells and sounds of the city strong and then gone as he was pushed through a set of swinging doors.
Karras stared at the white rush of ceiling overhead.
“Joe,” he said.
Karras went to sleep.
One
Washington, D.C
1933
1
Peter Karras learned to swim one afternoon at the tail end of a heat wave in early June. The heat had come upon D.C. like a bad dream and had killed several old-timers and a few who were not so old. Two had succumbed from it the day before.
The first was a tourist from San Francisco, a Swede in his middle years who collapsed at the corner of 2nd Street and Virginia Avenue, dead of an exploded heart before he hit the sidewalk. The second was a crewman on the SS Veedol, which was tied up that summer at the Alexandria docks. The young man had stood on the gunwales and leaped into the Potomac in an effort to cool down, despite the fact that he knew he could not swim. The crewman, whose name was Elridge Kruse, plunged into the water and went straight and swiftly to the bottom. A witness told the papers that Kruse went down so quickly it looked as if his pockets had been filled with stones.
Karras wiped sweat from his brow and tried not to show his discomfort while quickening his step. He was trying to keep pace with Steve Mamakos, a corner around town who was becoming well-known in the boxing ranks. Mamakos was not much taller than Karras but thicker to the tune of thirty pounds, with a squat build and a nose that one could see had already been hit. Karras was eleven years old to Mamakos’s sixteen, the difference between a boy and one who is nearly a man. The difference showed as they walked side by side.
Mamakos could fight; he favored his right, possessed a good sense of the ring, and had moderate quickness in both hands. Far from a technician, he was rather a straight-up boxer, with few tricks in his arsenal. On paper, his deficiencies seemed overwhelming: He dropped his left too often, rarely used it, and pawed with it when he did use it. His true strength — and it was a strength, indeed — was that he could take three to land one. Some guys who knew something about it said that Mamakos could go all the way.
In the Boy’s Club at 5th and G, Mamakos and his trainer, “Buster” Brown, had spent the better part of the morning teaching Karras how to box. Mamakos had barely pulled his punches, and once, when Karras had been hit dead in the nose, Karras’s eyes teared up, and the room tilted in front of his face. The only thing he cared about then was that Mamakos not mistake his tears for the crying kind. Peter Karras didn’t mind that Steve Mamakos didn’t pull up; hell, he was proud of it. And proud to be walking next to him now.
Mamakos had the change for the streetcar, but Karras preferred to walk, and the two of them went downtown and across the Mall and into the neighborhoods and alleys of Southwest, where Negroes watched them pass but did not meet their eyes. Soon they had reached the fruit and vegetable stands and fish vendors that lined the Washington Channel along Maine Avenue. They were just walking, with the vague idea of getting to the water, where they thought that there might be a breeze. Their shirts were soaked through as they crossed the road.
Along the waterline, restaurateurs and cooks, shopping for their evening menus, picked through the produce of the vendors’ carts. Karras recognized Lou DiGeordano, standing behind his fruit cart, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. DiGeordano, short and wire thin, with a black moustache and a high black pompadour, used his thumbnail to pick food from his teeth. Karras’s father knew DiGeordano, claimed that he ran numbers on the side.
DiGeordano lived in the same area of Chinatown as Karras, at 5th and H. His apartment building, all three floors of it, housed strictly Italians, the way it worked, as people usually drifted to their own kind. Joe Recevo, Peter Karras’s best friend, lived in that building with his folks. So did the Damiano and Carchedi families; Karras went to Catholic school with a couple of the kids.