“No eat. No.”
Sherman couldn’t eat either. They went into the China Doll and the graveyard waitress, Lejing, brought them tea. Mariana seemed not to even notice.
“So,” Sherman said finally. He had to hear the rest.
“Yes.” She looked off at the mirrored wall. “Is why I shoot this man. Many times — Macedonia, Italy, United States — I dream I have a pistol, but no. I can do nothing.”
“But you got your hands on one tonight.”
“Yes. He come and hurt me again. Drunk, or he use the drugs. He close his eyes later and I think he sleep. I go bathroom. Come back, I step on his clothes on floor. Something hard. When I lie down, he wake up and go bathroom, close door.”
Sherman pictured LaPhonso on the crapper, in all his glory.
Mariana stared at her trembling hand on the tabletop. “So fast. I go touch hard thing under clothes. A pistol, after so many times I dream. This man, maybe he no kill my sister, but maybe yes. What I know, he is like these men everywhere. I take pistol, open door, shoot. Then think to kill myself, but — no.”
She stared at the mirrored wall again. Sherman wondered if she saw their reflections there or was only seeing what was in her head — LaPhonso toppling off the can, the back wall already bloody. The many other bad men. The sister who’d been murdered recently. The little sister murdered in Moldova. Lord only knew.
He still didn’t know what to do. He sympathized, he understood why she killed LaPhonso, but the bottom line was she’d killed a man, and he, Sherman Brown, was a police officer.
She might get off. There were no witnesses — a decent lawyer might get her off on self-defense. Then the authorities might get her back to Moldova.
He’d be through, of course. Not only off the force but dead, as soon as Antwain realized he hadn’t killed her.
Still… “I want to help you,” he said.
“No. My sister dead, my mother no expect see me again—”
“But she see you again.”
She turned away, staring out at lit-up H Street. Sherman wondered how it looked to her, this foreign place. He wondered how the capital of Moldova, where men sold human flesh at open-air markets, would look to him.
“I remember first night here,” she said. “Men take me in car and I see Washington Monument — something I see in book when I’m a girl. Now, I am here. Land of the free. I see people on street, I want to cry for help — ‘Save me! This no happen in United States, in Washington, capital of the world!’ But I can no scream. No one hear me outside. Feel I’m under the water, you understand?”
Sherman understood. Underwater, trying to be heard, and it was impossible. He remembered how he felt as a kid, the times he saw the nice part of D.C. Those people didn’t see a little black boy from Barry Farms, and if they did, they wouldn’t hear him — if he dared to speak. And he wouldn’t dare. Even as a teenager, a little bit of a player in Barry Farms, he wouldn’t talk to anyone in the D.C. you saw on TV. Show up, even, and people looked at you like they couldn’t wait to call the police.
Lejing appeared, exhausted. “Solly, Mista Sherman. We close.”
Sherman held out a hand to Mariana. “Let’s go.”
Without any idea where. No idea what he was going to do. Expecting a call from Felice any minute, when she woke up to go to the bathroom and realized he wasn’t there. It’s 4 in the morning. What’re you doing?
Thinking of Felice, little Cheri, the twins on the way. His career, his livelihood. Whatever he did, whatever he didn’t do, he was taking a big chance.
They were on the sidewalk, H Street, heading toward the Cutlass, when his cell phone rang. Caller ID told him it was Antwain.
“Officer Brown here.”
“Officer. Shit. Where you at, officer?”
“I’m here. You need me?”
“Wanna know whassup. Where that ho-bag at?”
“Where you think?” Sherman said. “Out You know what I mean?”
“I don’t know. How you think I know? Tell me.”
“She’s out, trust me.”
“Trust you, boy? Uh-huh.” Sherman heard him chortle.
“Listen—”
That was when the girl bolted in front of him, across the sidewalk, off the curb, lunging in front of a speeding Lexus, somebody probably high as the sky at 4 in the morning. Driver never had time to slow — Sherman heard the impact a split second before the screeching noise.
She flew up on the hood and across the windshield and ended up sprawled across the center line, a lane over.
Even as he ran to her, Sherman was looking around wondering who’d seen them together, wondering what to do. Save himself? Say he never saw her before, she came out of nowhere?
Blood running out her mouth, her pale face scraped raw from the pavement. No way she survived.
She hadn’t wanted to. So did it matter what he said?
He knelt beside her. Mariana from Moldova, in the capital of the world.
The names of the lost
by Richard Currey
Shepherd Park, N.W.
Liebmann locked the front door and walked through his store to the back. He propped the rear door open and picked up what was left of the boxes. He never had more than three or four boxes at the end of a day, most of them gone to the people who did not come in to buy liquor but for these sturdy weight-bearing cartons perfect for moving or for storage. Tonight there was a Wild Turkey box jammed into the corrugated white carton that Mogan David shipped in, both of those slipped into the wider brown flat that held a case of Iron City beer.
He carried the nested stack across the alley and lofted it into the dumpster.
It was November in the city of Washington and the dark came early and deep now. Liebmann paused in the falling cold, the same metallic chill he grew up with in Germany. Washington’s weather turned European in November, the same dank gray, skies lowered and closed and withholding. Just a few weeks until Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year. If the weather was never his favorite, it was Liebmann’s best season in business, the only liquor store for ten miles in any direction to stay open until midnight on New Year’s Eve. The liquor kept selling until the ball fell in Times Square on the little portable black-and-white TV he kept in his office. And he had no other place to go. If the second thought might have carried an element of dejection, Liebmann felt only a distant surge of something akin to melancholy: He was a businessman, he told himself, and business was good.
Down at the end of the alley a car clocked past on Kalmia Road, its headlights sweeping the misted gloom. He looked back into the glow spreading from inside his store, thinking that it would soon be 1968. He had been in America for twenty-two years, the owner of this liquor store for sixteen of them. One day to another and he was still here, surviving. He stood a moment longer in the chill before he went inside to close out for the day.
Liebmann was married once. His wife died. Cancer, in 1962. There was nothing anyone could do. He met her at the Shepherd Park public library on the corner of Georgia Avenue and Geranium Street. She caught his eye and he knew immediately that she was a survivor like himself. They talked for a few minutes in English and then he went to German and she smiled broadly. After a moment of shy quiet there on the steps of the library, she spoke the single word, Mauthausen. A camp in Austria. He understood that it was where she had been taken during the war.