George Pelecanos - Shame the Devil

At a stoplight just below Florida Avenue, he saw a woman pull a butcher’s knife from the trunk of her parked car and wave it wildly at a laughing man. A dozen ugly people in varying stages of decay stood outside a corner liquor store, huffing smokes and drinking from brown paper bags. Behind them, taped to the store windows, colorful posters depicted beautiful black models promoting malt liquor and menthol cigarettes. A guy with matted dreads walked toward Stefanos’s driver’s-side window, one hand slipped into a bulged jacket pocket. Stefanos locked his door.

The Capitol loomed dead ahead, crowning the street. On this particular winter day, the press and public were fixated on the alleged extramarital affairs of the sitting president and giving odds on his possible impeachment. It was the media event of the decade, the subject of sarcastic lunch conversations all across town. But few talked about the real crime of this city, not anymore: American children were undernourished, criminally undereducated, and living in a viper’s nest of drugs, violence, and despair within a mile of the Capitol dome. It should have been a national disgrace. But hunger and poverty had never been tabloid sexy. Beyond the occasional obligatory lip service, the truth was that no one in a position of power cared.

The man with the matted hair tapped on Stefanos’s window just as the light turned green. Stefanos gave the Dodge gas.

Nick Stefanos drove into Southeast and found a space on 8th Street. He walked toward the marine barracks, passing a real estate office, a women’s bar named Athena’s, an alley, and an athletic-shoe store fronted by a riot gate. He came to the Spot, a windowless, low-slung cinder-block structure in the middle of the strip. He pushed on the scarred green door and walked inside.

Hanging conical lamps and the light from a blue neon Schlitz logo colored the room. Stefanos hung his leather on a coat tree by the door and stepped off the landing into the bar area.

Ramon, the long-time busboy, was coming up from the cellar with two cases of beer cradled in his arms. Wisps of reefer smoke swirled behind him, the smell of it deep in his clothing. He was a little leering guy who wore a red bandanna on his head and scarred suede cowboy boots on his size-seven feet. Ramon stayed high throughout his shifts.

“Hey, amigo,” said Stefanos, flicking Ramon’s ear as he motored by.

“Ow. Chit, man.”

“Did that hurt?”

“ Maricon, ” said Ramon, showing capped teeth with his smile. “You lucky I got my hands full.”

“Yeah, sure. Better get those Buds in the cooler, though. Before you kick my ass, I mean.”

“I already got it all done. This beer is the last of it. The mixers, the liquor, the bev naps… everything’s all set up.”

“Thanks. I’ll get you later.”

Stefanos went toward the kitchen, passing the reach-through at the side of the bar. He could hear the radio, set on WPGC and playing the new Puff Daddy single, and the raised voices of Phil, James, and Darnell. Maria would be in there, too, making the salad special, quietly working on the presentation of the plates. Stefanos walked in under the bright fluorescents, stepping onto the thick rubber mats that covered the tile floor.

It was a small kitchen to begin with, way too small for what it had become. A stainless-steel prep table stood at the entrance, topped by dual steel shelves. The top shelf was lipped; live tickets were fitted into the lip in the order in which they came in. Beyond the prep table were two workstations, each capped by a steel refrigerator. The dishwashing station was located along the back wall of the room. On the shelf over the grill sat an Amana commercial microwave with a door that never closed on the first attempt. Over the sandwich bar sat the most important and most fought over component of any restaurant kitchen: the house boom box. Beside it, a Rudy Ray Moore poster, now gray with grease, had been taped to the wall.

Maria Juarez worked the cold end of the menu and James Posten, the grill man, worked hots. Their stations were on opposite walls, so that Maria and James’s backs were to each other while they worked lunch.

Darnell, the bar’s career dishwasher, had previously handled the lunch business himself, preparing the one daily special and placing orders on the reach-through, from which the day tender or the waitress would retrieve and serve them. In those couple of hours, Ramon would bus the trays in and wash dishes when he was able. But when the owner of the place, a smallish bespectacled man named Phil Saylor, had decided to expand the menu, he had hired Maria and James and made Darnell the expediter – the person who called out the orders, garnished the plates, and moved the lunches onto the reach-through. Since Ramon would be occupied out in the dining room with the extra table turnover, Phil had suggested they hire a new dishwasher, but Darnell, who had been washing dishes at the Spot since serving out an armed-robbery sentence at Lorton years earlier, wouldn’t hear of it. He took a small raise and told Phil he’d get to the dishes after the lunch rush was through. The popularity of the new menu had surprised everyone, though – it was previously assumed that the Spot’s regulars would not care to consume any substance that required chewing – and the three-hat arrangement with Darnell wasn’t exactly working out as planned. Since the new system had been put in place, there was often high confusion in the kitchen during the rush, and the dining room had run out of plates and silver more than once.

“A little late, aren’t you?” said Phil Saylor with halfhearted force, noticing Stefanos by the door. It was about as tough as the mellow Saylor got with his employees.

“I had an appointment,” said Stefanos, his eyes staying on Saylor’s, letting him know with his overly serious look that the appointment had to do with his “other” life. Saylor was an ex-cop, which explained the high percentage of plainclothesmen and uniforms among the Spot’s clientele. Phil was retired, but the profession had never entirely left his blood. Invoking his investigative gigs was a cheap way for Stefanos to reach Saylor, but it worked.

“Try to make it on time,” mumbled Saylor.

“I will.”

“Nick,” said James Posten, who sported a fox-head fur stole draped over his uniform shirt. “How you doin’, man?”

James wore eye shadow and carried a walking stick with an amber stone glued in its head. He went six-four, two eighty, and most of it was hard.

“James.”

“Ni,” said Maria Juarez. Her reddish lipstick clashed with the rinse in her shoulder-length hair. She was on the short and curvy side, with the worn, aging-before-her-time look of many working-class immigrant women across the city. When she smiled her lovely smile, the hard life and age lines on her face seemed to fall away.

“Hey, baby.”

“Check this out,” she said, pulling a locket away from her chest and opening it up for Stefanos to see. He went to her, looked at the photograph of her gorgeous five-year-old daughter, Rosita, cut to fit the locket’s oval shape.

“She’s beautiful,” said Stefanos, noticing the patch of discol-oration on Maria’s temple.

“She doing good in school,” said Maria. “The teacher say she smart.”

“How could she not be,” said Stefanos, “with a mother like you?”

“Ah, Ni!” she said, making a wave of her hand, then wiping her hands dry on her apron as she returned, blushing, to her salads.

Darnell removed his leather kufi and wiped sweat from his forehead. The knife scar running across his neck was pink against his deep brown skin. “You got business in here, Nick? ’Cause we’re trying to prepare for lunch.”

“Just, you know, stopped in to brighten everyone’s day.”