“You just don’t get it,” she whispered. “Do you?”
Vera Gardner watched Karras limp along the sidewalk until he was out of sight. She finished buttoning her blouse, tucked the blouse into her skirt.
20
Mike Florek slid the last of the dishes into the basin filled with steaming hot, soapy water. He gathered up the tail of his apron, used it to wipe the sweat from his face.
“I’m gonna let these ones soak for a while,” said Florek.
“Hokay, boy,” said Costa.
Florek rubbed his hands dry. Costa stood by the prep table, running the edge of a machete against a whetting stone. Next to the stone, a leather sheath lay on its side. The scrape of the blade against the stone had been ripping through the kitchen since after lunch.
“Where’d you get that, anyway?”
“From Karras. One of those Filipinos gave it to him in the war. It’s a good knife. Now I’m gonna make it real good. Real good and sharp, goddamn right.”
Florek heard a dull thud come from the second floor. That would be Toula, Costa’s wife, calling him from their apartment upstairs, stomping her heavy black shoe on the wood floor.
Costa went to the door in the kitchen that opened to a straight flight of narrow stairs, he opened the door, yelled up into the black, got a two-minute reply that sounded like bloody murder.
“Scaseeeee!” screamed Costa, ending the conversation. He slammed the door shut, then walked across the kitchen, his hair going off in all directions, a crooked smile on his animate face.
It had taken Mike Florek a couple of days to get used to things at Nick’s. Costa and Nick were friends, he could see as much in their eyes, but the stranger off the street wouldn’t have known it. They were at each other’s throats all the time, parrying, constantly looking for an opening in which to place the knife. And Costa could not stand in that doorframe — he was incapable of it — without yelling at his wife, and getting the fury of her verbal wrath in return. It drove Florek crazy at first, all this wasted, meaningless emotion. But after a while he began to look forward to hearing the warm current of affection in their raised voices, their loud spontaneous laughter that came quick as fire and resonated off the high, pressed-tin ceiling of the grill. He liked the way their thick hands punctuated their speech, the way Costa and Nick rolled their Rs, the strange, almost clumsy grace in the way they moved. And there was Karras, a cripple gone gray before his time, a Greek with no accent, a steady, unemotional man, not like Costa or Nick. Florek liked him fine, but Karras was a harder man to get to know.
Costa sheathed the machete, put it on a high shelf, grabbed a serrated knife and a two-pronged fork from a metal drawer beneath the table, went to a roast beef he had recently withdrawn from the oven and placed atop a cutting board. He licked his thumb, stuck the fork into the beef, began to slice the meat. Costa softly sang a tune in Greek as the slices of meat curled off and fell to the wooden board.
Nick Stefanos came through the swinging doors, a knife in one hand and a tomato in the other. He looked at Costa slicing the meat, moved his lips like he was going to speak, took a second to chuckle to himself and enjoy the moment before he opened his mouth.
“Siga, vre,” said Stefanos.
“I’m goin’ slow, Niko,” said Costa.
“You’re bein’ too rough with it.”
“No, I’m not.”
“What’re you tryin’ to do, kill it again? It’s already dead!”
“Ahhh. What the hell’s the difference, anyway? I make a nice roast beef, cook a nice steamship round like this, these niggers, all they want me to do is throw it on the grill with some onions, put a bunch of hot sauce all over it, goddamn!”
“Hey, Nick,” said Florek. “You need some help out front?”
“Yeah, go ahead and watch the counter. I’m gonna slice up the tomatoes came in this morning. Karras ought to be in any minute.”
Florek refolded his apron, turned the wet part inward, tied it tight around his waist. He went out to the front of the house, Costa and Nick’s laughter trailing behind. The Negro with the records, who Florek now knew as a man named Oscar Williams, sat at the end of the counter with a friend, both of them drinking beers. A uniformed cop sat in one of the booths, sipping a cup of coffee.
“A coupla more beers down here, youngblood,” said Oscar Williams.
Florek drew two Nationals from the cooler, served them, put a couple of hash-marks on Williams’s check. Williams handed Florek a record from the boxful that rested next to his stool.
“Here ya go, man, put this one on the box.”
Florek placed the record on the platter, let it spin. He snapped his fingers to the now-familiar piano style, the way it rolled fluidly against the rest of the arrangement.
Williams’s friend looked at Florek going with the beat. “You like this one, huh?”
“I like it fine. What do they call this?”
“They call it race music,” said the friend, nudging Williams. “This one here is Fatha Hines.”
Williams said, “It’s called ‘boogie-woogie,’ youngblood.”
“What’s that?”
Williams spread his large hands. “Boogie-woogie? Why, boogie-woogie ain’t nothin’ more than plain old blues, played eight-to-the-bar.”
Florek didn’t ask what that meant, didn’t really care. He liked the sound, liked all the records, in fact, that Oscar Williams brought into Nick’s. It wasn’t just somebody reading music off a sheet, singing by rote. These people felt something when they played it and when they sang it, and they made you feel it, too.
Florek grabbed the coffee pot off the burner, went out to the booths, refilled the policeman’s cup. The cop thanked him for his trouble, leaned against the wood. Florek walked back around the counter, replaced the coffee pot, found some dirty glasses and put them in the bus tray. Nick’s revolver, a pearl-handled .38 Smith & Wesson, lay next to the bus tray on its side. The gun was never moved from its spot, and Florek was careful not to touch it.
Stefanos had come back out and was standing over the sandwich board, slicing the tomato that he held in his hand. Florek had never seen a man who could do it that quickly and without waste. Not that he did it cleanly every time — Stefanos always had cuts on his meaty hands where the knife had slipped. You could count on seeing Nick, every day, with odd pieces of tape hanging off his fingers; tape and bandages, and streaks of blood smudged across the lap of his apron.
“Hey, Nick,” said Williams’s friend. “What the number was yesterday?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” said Stefanos. “I don’t play ’em no more.”
“You don’t need to,” said the friend, and he and Williams laughed. “If I had your money, I’d throw mine away. Anyway, you fixin’ on havin’ one of those lucky dreams of yours, don’t forget to let us know.”
Stefanos did not respond. He picked up another tomato, began to slice it thin.
“You hear about Lady Day?” said Williams to his friend.
“Yeah, they caught her last night in Frisco with that opium in her room. Got her dead to rights!”
“You think she did it? Her manager said it was some kind of plant.”
“What her manager said don’t matter no way. They gonna get that girl whether she guilty or not. Shoot, boy, you ought to know that.”
The record had stopped. Florek went to the radio, pushed its plug into the wall. “Dance Party” was on WOOK, and Williams head-motioned Florek to let it ride. Florek wanted to hear more about this opium thing, but he decided to leave the men alone. Oscar Williams always had a good selection of Billie Holiday’s records on hand. Opium or no, that Holiday gal, she could really sing.