George Pelecanos - Nick's trip

But something, some trouble maybe, made Big Nick decide to drift south and end up, with relatives again, in Southeast Washington in the thirties. He had brought some cash with him, and the cash staked him in a vegetable stand in the old Southeast Market. His life here was more austere, though reportedly he was a heavy drinker and enjoyed fairly high-stakes poker and occasionally games involving dice. One night, according to the story, he had a dream of his mother, alarming in itself, since Greeks in general did not believe it was likely to dream about the dead. In the dream she was behind the door of an apartment, and what he talked about with her is relatively unimportant. What he remembered when he woke up is that the number on the apartment door was 807.

The next day Big Nick put twenty bucks on 807 with a young numbers runner by the name of Louis DiGeordano. Little is known of DiGeordano’s history before that day except that he was a Sicilian immigrant of my grandfather’s generation who up to that point had not experienced the luck of Big Nick. He pushed a fruit-and-candy cart in the streets and lived near Chinatown in a two-room apartment with ten other relatives.

When the number hit, DiGeordano delivered the payoff to my grandfather. The hit was in the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars, a fortune in those days. The legend has it that when DiGeordano gave Big Nick the bankroll, my grandfather peeled off two thousand dollars and handed it to Lou. DiGeordano supposedly dropped to his knees (an embellishment, I think, that has been tacked on to the story over time), but my grandfather pulled him back up. It was a curious act of generosity that my grandfather never explained or claimed to regret.

Life after that took unexpected turns for both of them. My grandfather invested in a couple of downtown buildings and owned and operated a series of modest coffee shops until his death. He never flashed his money around, decreased his card playing over the years, and even quit drinking when I entered the picture. Lou DiGeordano opened his own carryout with the two thousand and began a loan-sharking business and an organized gambling operation that grew into a small, bloodless crime deodless empire in D.C. that lasted well into the sixties. Lou was still alive, but his business had deteriorated and had been run into the ground, as businesses usually are, by his son, a man named Joey.

Now, on this bright, biting Saturday in December, I was driving my Dodge Dart south on Georgia Avenue with the window down, letting in as much cold air as I could stand in a vain attempt to slap away my hangover, and I was on my way to see the DiGeordanos. The cigarette I was smoking tasted like the poison it was, and I pitched it out the window. I tried a breath mint, but that was worse, and it followed the path of the cigarette.

I pulled over and parked on Georgia just past Missouri, in front of an R amp; B nightclub and across the street from a Chevy dealership and a Chinese restaurant facaded as a pagoda. Next to the nightclub was a pawnshop and next to that was Geordano’s Market and Deli. The sign on the window was small, but there was a larger fluorescent sign below it advertising cold beer and wine to go. I walked around a man with mad black eyes who looked seventy but could have been forty. He was wearing a brown wool overcoat that was ripped open beneath both arms. The coat smelled, even with the wind behind us, of body odor and urine. The man said something unintelligible as I passed and entered Geordano’s.

A small bell sounded as the door closed behind me. The air was heavy with the tang of garlic and spice. I went by tall shelves stacked with small red-and-blue cans and large gold cans of olive oil. Past the shelves were two coolers stocked with beer, fortified wine and sweet sodas, and past that a row of barrels with clear hinged lids containing various types of olives and spiced peppers. The barrels were lined across a Formica counter on which sat an old register. Beyond the counter was a work area and the entrance to a back room of sorts. In front of the entrance was a chair and next to that a steel prep table on wheels. Dried beans were scattered on the top of the table, and next to the table sat a burlap sack half filled with the beans. An old man was sitting in the chair, and he was looking closely at the beans on the prep table before he pushed small groups of them into his hand and dumped them into another burlap sack. He looked up at me as I approached the counter. Thin pink lips smiled beneath a broad gray mustache.

“Nicky,” he said.

“Mr. DiGeordano.”

I walked around the counter before he could stand and shook his hand. His grip was still strong, but the flesh was cool, and the bones below it felt hollow. His aging was not a shock-he was in his mideighties, after all, and I had seen him at my grandfather’s funeral-but the frailty that went with it always was. He was wearing a brown flannel shirt buttoned to the neck and over that a full white apron. The apron had yellowed in spots, and there were reddish brown smudges of blood near the hemline where he had wiped his hands. He wore black twill slacks and black oilskin work shoes with white socks, an arrangement fashionable with kids sixty-five years his junior in some of the clubs downtown.

“I wasn’t sure if this was your place,” I said. “The name I mean. When did you drop the Di?”

“A couple of years ago,” he said in the high rasp common in Mediterranean males his age. “Only on the sign out front. No use making it touts. aking igher on our customers to remember our name than it already is. We still get some of the old-timers, but mainly what we get is neighborhood people. Beer and cheap wine is our main seller. You can imagine.”

I nodded and then we stared at each other without speaking. His eyes were brown and wet like riverbed stones. His hair was whiter than his mustache, full and combed high and then swept back. Deep ridges ran from the corners of his eyes to the corners of his mouth. The mouth was moving a bit, though he still wasn’t talking.

“What are you doing?” I said, glancing at the table.

“Checking the beans for rocks,” he said. “There’s always a rock or two in the bag. You have to go through them by hand. A customer breaks his tooth on a rock, you got a lawsuit, you lose your business.” He shrugged.

“Is Joey in? I’d like to talk to him if he has a minute.”

“Anything I can help you with?”

“Nothing that serious,” I said.

“In the office,” he said, and made a small backward wave with the point of his index finger. Then he yelled for his son.

Joey DiGeordano stepped out momentarily. He was rubbing his hands with a towel, and he looked at me briefly before he looked over to his father. Joey wore a dark suit and a blue textured dress shirt more poly than cotton, with a plain lavender tie that was tacked to the shirt by a pearl button. He was street slender, and his hairline was identical to his father’s, and it was pompadoured identically but was black and slicked with some sort of oil-based gel. The smell of a barbershop entered the room with him.

“Yeah, Pop.”

“This is Nick Stefanos.” Joey glanced my way again, this time with more interest. “Big Nick’s grandson.”

“How ya’ doin’,” Joey said in a tone that was inching its way up the scale toward his old man’s.

“Good,” I said. “You got a couple of minutes?”

“Sure,” he said, and jerked his head just a little. “Come on back.” I could feel the old man’s appraisal as we walked by.

I followed Joey through a long storage room Metro-shelved with dry goods into a wider room that housed a metal desk and a couple of chairs. On the desk was a phone and an empty plastic in-basket and not much else. A calendar that featured a topless blonde holding a crescent wrench hung over the desk. Beyond the desk was a narrow hall containing a small bathroom and beyond that a padlocked door that opened to the alley.