George Pelecanos - DC Noir

The soldier may as well have been evaluating the fate of two barnyard animals. After a moment he simply waved them forward with the barrel of his gun and stood aside in the doorway as they walked out.

Liebmann stayed aboard the bus past his stop on the return trip. He thought he might get off at the National Guard Armory in Silver Spring and go across the street for a cup of coffee at the diner before he walked back up Georgia, into the District and home to his apartment. Three teenaged boys got on at the Kalmia Road stop, shoving and jockeying past the driver and down the aisle.

Liebmann recognized one of them immediately. An episode at the store a month or so back. Today the kid had a couple of buddies along. Blue-collar kids, but with the open pink faces that marked them as suburban, maybe in from the white-flight neighborhoods out in Glenmont or Aspen Hill, in the city and drunk on the jolt of getaway freedom that came with crossing the District line and wandering loose where nobody cared who they were or where they were going.

The driver called them back for the fare and the tallest of the boys, the kid that Liebmann had thrown out of his store, swaggered to the front of the bus.

“Seventy-five cents,” the driver said, pointing at the coin box. The kid stretched it out, gazing at the side of the driver’s head. He leaned against the coin box, scratched his genitals, looked back to his friends for the designated response. They were piled into a seat across the aisle from Liebmann and snickered on cue.

“I thought it was a quarter to ride.” The kid had a blond crewcut, wore a white round-neck T-shirt under a black leather motorcycle jacket.

The driver brought the bus to a stop at a red light. “There’s three of you,” he said. “Twenty-five times three. Or is that too hard for you to figure?”

The kid looked away from his appreciative audience, back to the driver. “You got a smart mouth on you, don’t you?” he said.

The driver said nothing. Reached across to the lever on his right and pulled it to open the door behind the kid.

“Off,” he said.

“I’m not gettin off,” the kid said. “This ain’t my stop.”

It had been a Saturday night when one of Liebmann’s clerks spotted the same kid slipping a pint of vodka under the same leather jacket. The kid was eighteen — or had a driver’s license that said he was — old enough to buy in the District. But he was trying to steal a bottle.

The traffic light went to green.

The driver looked at the kid, waiting, and the kid said, “I told you. I ain’t getting off. I’ll get off when it’s my stop.”

A car behind the bus honked.

When Liebmann had asked for the bottle under his jacket, the kid said something about how he had to steal because of the “Jew prices” in the place. But he had given up the bottle and left, ambling out, making an elaborate show of being in no particular hurry, meeting the gaze of the store’s patrons with slack-jawed hostility.

The driver put the bus in neutral and set the brake and put on the safety flashers. The kid said, “You can’t put me off the bus, man. It’s against the goddamn law.”

“My goddamn bus. My goddamn law.” The driver’s voice was low and controlled. “Get off now, so’s I don’t need to do it for you.”

The kid backed toward the door, slipped on the top step and caught himself. “What you need to do, man, is kiss my white ass.”

“You just keep your white ass moving right out that door.”

The kid looked back into the bus. There were only a few riders. A man three seats in front of Liebmann held his gaze on the window, peering out, waiting for the episode to be over, to resolve itself in one way or another.

Liebmann stood and stepped into the aisle, watching the kid still standing at the front of the bus.

“Oh, now, look at this,” the kid said. “We got us a kike in the mix. You gonna kick my ass too, hymie? Come on up here and kick my—”

The driver was up and reached across and had the collar of the kid’s leather jacket. The kid sucked for air, rocked forward onto the balls of his feet. He struggled against the driver’s grip a moment, then stopped and hung there, his cheeks flaming.

“Get off the bus,” the driver said. “I won’t be telling you another time.”

“You best get your goddamn nigger hand off me.” The kid’s voice shook but he worked to hold the arrogance.

The driver let go and the kid stumbled backwards down the two steps to the curb. The driver squeezed the door closed, shifted into gear, and jerked the bus through the intersection

The kid lifted his arms and shot the air with both middle fingers as the bus roared past him.

Liebmann sat down again. Glanced across at the buddies, sitting sober now, hangdog cowboys left in the lurch.

The driver called back, voice booming. “Fifty cents, fellas. Hike it up here.”

The two filed up and dropped their coins and came back toward Liebmann, this time passing him to go all the way to the back of the bus, away from the other riders.

The driver brought the bus to a stop on the north side of the Armory in Silver Spring, and cut the motor. The two kids got off at the rear door and walked a few paces, then broke into a worried run and disappeared beyond the Armory building. The other riders left from the front.

Liebmann waited until everybody was off, then walked up and stood next to the driver. “I know that boy,” he said. “He came in my store. He tried to steal from me.”

“Little turd,” the driver said.

“I threw him out.”

“Looks like that’s all he’s good for,” the driver said. “Gettin thrown out of places. Little peckerwood son of a bitch.”

“I’m sorry.”

The driver heaved a sigh and looked up toward Liebmann. “No, man, I’m sorry. Sorry you got spoken to that way on board my bus.”

Liebmann shrugged slightly. There was a moment of silence between them.

“Are you off work now?” Liebmann asked.

“Yeah. Gotta park this thing, but I’m through for the day.”

“Then I will see you next time,” Liebmann said. “Let’s hope we get ourselves a nice quiet ride.”

After he got home, Liebmann sat in his apartment, at a window overlooking the street. He lifted the window in spite of the cold and pulled a kitchen chair close and sat with his coat on. The trees along Georgia Avenue were skeletal, black silhouettes in the endless afternoon. A few days after he had kicked the kid out of his store for trying to steal a bottle of vodka, Liebmann came to work to find the words JEWS SUCK SHIT spray-painted in red on the store’s front window.

He stood looking at the words painted unevenly on the glass, the morning traffic moving behind him. Thinking of it now in his apartment, he touched a point on his coat sleeve above the tattoo on his forearm. He always believed he could feel it there no matter how many layers were above it, the tattoo carved between his skin and the blood underneath.

The man who gave Liebmann the tattoo at Auschwitz was said to have once been the finest tattoo artist in Berlin. There was talk of his freehanding elaborate sailing ships and floral hearts and the names of mothers and lovers in elegant cascading script. But he was a Jew. Now branding his own people, one after the other, letters and numbers, working through the line. He was thin with a long face and beagle eyes and wire-rimmed glasses, and he never looked up, never looked at the faces of the people he marked, trading their names for numbers. Everybody knew he had no choice.

It was weeks later when the guards came to the dormitory and ordered everybody out.

Near dawn. The dormitory shouted awake and everybody made to stand outside in the crusted snow, freezing in rags. When this happened a prisoner was often singled out and led away. This time an SS major pointed at the tattoo artist. Two corporals pulled the man out of the group and pushed him around the side of the building. Within a few seconds came the sound of a pistol shot. A flat, dry snap echoing away into the dark forest beyond the wire.