Stefanos looked down at the sleeve of his gray-checked Robert Hall, first sold in 1956. “Classic Clothing, out on Benning Road.”
“Like I said, Salvation Army.”
“We can’t all be stylin’ like you.”
“Tell you somethin’ I do know. You never gonna see a brother wearing dead man’s clothes, no matter how low he gets.” Malone smiled. “Check out our boy now.”
McGinnes had the couple backed up near the door. “Remember,” he said, grinning stupidly, “the Sharp’s only going to be on sale for so long. So, so long.”
“So long,” said the husband.
“Come here,” said McGinnes, bending toward the stroller and pinching the baby’s cheek a little too roughly. The boy’s eyes bugged out in surprise. “Cutelilcocksucker you got there. You know it?”
“Thank you,” said the husband.
“Thank you,” said McGinnes, still smiling.
McGinnes went to the counter to take his medicine from his friends while the couple left the store.
“Putz,” said McGinnes.
“Nice close,” said Malone.
“You couldn’t close your fly when you first came to work here — that is, till I put you through school.”
“Now I close it real good. Woulda closed those punjabi mothafuckers, too, if you hadn’t gone and taken my up.”
“It might have been your up, if you hadn’t been dialing up one of your freaks from the Sound Explosion back there.”
Stefanos closed his eyes. He was nursing an alcohol-heavy cokeover, and he didn’t feel much like joining in. Their bickering, it was putting a dull ache to his head. That and the electric orange-and-gold signage hung throughout the store.
Stefanos answered the phone ringing on the wall.
“Nutty Nathan’s, the Miser Who Works for You. Nick Stefanos speaking.” He listened and said, “Dimitri, how you doin’, man?”
By the time Stefanos got off the phone, Andre Malone had drifted and McGinnes was putting fire to a one-hit stash pipe he used on the floor. McGinnes took a deep draw, held it in, and blew the smoke into a refrigerator by the cashier’s stand.
“Who was that?”
“Guy I know named Dimitri Karras. Called to see if we’d shadow some off-duty cop. Follow him, see where he’s going, report back, like that. There’s a C-note in it for us. You interested?”
“Yeah, but I gotta make a few deals here first.”
“And I want to see the game.”
“Maryland?”
“Yeah. You know that kid Freddie, always standing out on the sidewalk, watching ball on the sets in the window?”
“Kid wears that bandanna?”
“Yeah. He’s a big Bias fan. I told him he could come inside today, watch it with me.”
“This Karras guy say it was okay to get to it later?”
“He said it was cool.”
“You got the address of the tail?”
Stefanos patted his breast pocket. “Right here.”
“I’m in.” A middle-aged black man approached from the Connecticut Avenue sidewalk. “You don’t mind if I take this jive turkey, do ya, Jim? One of my B-backs, anyway.”
“To hear you tell it, they’re all your B-backs, Johnny.”
“I’m serious. Was in here a month ago looking for a set. You know I never forget a customer’s face.”
“Yeah, I know. Go ahead.”
Stefanos watched McGinnes greet the man, lead him quickly to the Sharps. He’d start the customer on a high-end piece, step him down, tell him he didn’t need “that much set,” become his friend and confidant. Maybe it would work and maybe not. Stefanos knew one thing: McGinnes would sell someone a Sharp television set before the day was done.
“You say this TV’s got a good picture?” said the black man.
“Good ain’t the word,” said McGinnes, smiling broadly. “Ass-kickin’, booty-whippin’ be more like it.”
“Your boy up for it?” said Marcus Clay.
“He and his partner have work to do first. Gonna be a few hours till they can get to it. I told him we’d drop the hundred off at the store later on.”
“You know where the store is?”
“Yeah.”
It’s right across the street from where I cop my blow.
Karras put his arms through the sleeves of his jean jacket. “I’m outta here for a while, Marcus. Check back in with you later.”
“Where you off to, man?”
“See my mom.”
“Tell her I said hello.”
Karras said, “I will.”
Dimitri Karras drove slowly down winding lanes cutting through closely cropped acres of lawns and parked his car along the curb toward the rear of the grounds. He got out and walked across the grass, careful not to step on the stone markers or the freshly filled graves. The names on the markers went from Irish to Italian to almost exclusively Greek. It took a little searching, as it always did, but soon he found his parents, separated for so long but now lying next to each other in death. A joint marker memorialized their lives.
Karras took the daisies he had purchased from a roadside stand and placed them in a shallow cup set above Eleni Karras’s name. She had always kept fresh flowers in their kitchen, cut from the narrow garden she maintained in their backyard. Karras pictured her standing in the kitchen, her back against the sink, her arms crossed, a crooked smile on her face as she watched him eat. There’s no greater pleasure for a Greek mother, thought Karras, than to feed her only son.
Karras spread the daisies and used his hand to brush brown grass shavings off her name. He closed his eyes and pressed his thumb to his two adjacent fingers, touched his forehead, his right shoulder, his left shoulder, and his chest. When he was finished doing his stavro he said a silent prayer.
“Oh, yeah, Ma,” said Karras, opening his eyes. “Marcus says hey.”
He brushed debris away from his father’s name. His father, Peter Karras, was killed in 1949, shot to death while killing others in the office of a loan shark named Burke. Dimitri, a baby at the time, remembered nothing of his father, not even his smell. When Eleni realized she was dying from the tumor eating at her brain, she asked Dimitri to exhume her husband’s body from the Brentwood Cemetery in Northeast, where Spartan-Americans were buried in numbers, and bring the remains out to Montgomery County’s Gate of Heaven, this clean, green place with the pruned, shade-giving trees, where there were no malt liquor bottles and used rubbers strewn about the grounds. Toward the end, holding her bird-claw hand, he had promised that he would.
He had made other promises as well. That he would find a nice yineka, marry her, have children, discover the riches of parenthood that she claimed she had found while raising him. That he would go back to school, become a professional, be a good anthropos, set down roots.
He hadn’t kept those promises, of course. And now he didn’t know if he could.
Instead, he’d sold his mother’s Northwest home for a healthy profit and received a nice insurance disbursement as the sole beneficiary of her will, gone out and bought the BMW, taken a Hawaiian vacation, and purchased his apartment. Spent money freely in bars, and on clothes and girls and cocaine. He still had plenty, enough to keep a single man with no attachments flush for a very long while.
Karras ran a hand above his lips, wiped at something running from his nose. He looked at the blood smudged on his forefinger and rubbed it off on his jeans.
Karras turned and walked across the grass toward his car, the navy blue Beamer shining in the sun.
Andy Murphy lived in a brick rambler off upper 14th, near the Walter Reed Hospital. In his front yard a group of miniature stone angels faced a small Jesus statue encircled by a wire halo, the word Son written in cursive across a wreath. Murphy kept fresh flowers year round in a squat vase behind the shrine.