Liebmann turned and crunched across the glass back to the cubicle office at the front of the store. He opened the desk drawer and returned the gun to its place. The kid made his way toward the door, slipped once and went down on one knee and grimaced as he caught himself with the heel of his hand. There was a blood smear on the floor when he lifted his hand away, black in the half-light.
Liebmann was no longer watching. He sat at the desk, his back to the room. “Get out,” he said, speaking toward the wall. “I never want to see you again. Nowhere. Ever. Never in this life.”
The kid paused near the office. “You just did all that to make me piss myself. Well, I did. Hope you’re satisfied.”
Liebmann did not answer.
The kid said, “Crazy fuck.”
Leibmann sat long after the kid was gone and the night’s silence regained. An occasional car hissed along the wet street outside. He sat in the dark and looked at the wall and marveled that no police had come, no fire truck, not a curious neighbor, nobody seemed to have heard a thing. Shepherd Park is not the neighborhood it once was, he thought. The idea brought no feeling one way or another. In the morning he would call the police and the insurance company to file the reports and pretend that he happened on the devastation when he opened the store in the morning. Just another morning coming to work, only this time to a bad surprise. He would describe his distress at what he discovered. Because what could anybody do? Besides, he could never explain. Or say why it happened, even if it was possible to carry it that far. Or why he had not called the police when he saw the lights in the store and heard the sounds of the damage being done. Now, looking at the wall, exhausted, vaguely ill, Liebmann knew he could not explain his shame to strangers. There had been a problem, and it was his, and he had taken care of it — he would leave it at that, in his own mind. He was not about to relate the way he had gone down under the heel of time, how a simple animal rage had blossomed against the ways his life was taken from him.
He had no language for that kind of story.
Three cops came, two uniforms with a plainclothes officer who picked around in the ruins, trying to protect his shoes. The uniforms glanced at the scene from the door and went back to sit in their cruiser at the curb out front.
“Any idea of the damages?” the officer asked.
“Not yet,” Liebmann said. “I need a few days. I have to inventory.”
“Right,” the officer said. “I understand.” He slipped, but caught himself against a shelf. “Damn. This is some kind of mess. Who would’ve done this?”
Liebmann was sweeping glass with an industrial push-broom. He said nothing.
The officer looked around with the expression of a man who needed to move on to some other part of his day. “No enemies, huh? No big fights with anybody? Upset customer?”
“No,” Liebmann said.
The officer shrugged. “Vandalism. It’s getting worse. We’re seeing more of it all the time. Tough to connect anybody to these things, though. Not unless you walk in on them red-handed.”
The insurance adjuster came a few hours later. Older than the cop, world weary, wearing black-frame eyeglasses and a tired off-blue suit. By the time he arrived Liebmann had swept paths through the glass. The floor was sugared with congealed liquor and the insurance man’s wing tips stuck and sucked to the floor as he walked. He had a clip-board. He looked closer and harder at the damage than the police officer had, made notes as he moved through the wreckage, then left his business card with Liebmann, mum-bling something about how sorry he was.
From time to time Liebmann’s sister would appear and speak in his dreams. He had never seen her again after that morning in their bedroom in the family apartment in Berlin. Outside on the street the Nazis had separated the males and females — he watched his mother and his sister led away. An officer was saying over a bullhorn that everybody was being relocated for their own safety, away from Berlin and the Allied bombing runs, and he watched his sister in her little brown shoes, holding his mother’s hand, walking off. Just before he lost sight of her, she turned back and smiled and waved.
Dreaming, Liebmann heard her voice lift in the open happiness of a child, speaking in a language he did not understand, that seemed more like bells heard at a great distance than any sort of words he might recognize. As she spoke, her tiny white face hung suspended in the opalescent air of his vision.
Neither the police officer nor the insurance adjuster noticed the bullet holes in the outside wall. Liebmann found them when he came to the store the next morning. They were there if somebody cared to look. But he knew nobody would.
Reports were filed. Liebmann hired a clean-up crew, and inventoried, and replaced the losses, and filed his receipts with the insurance company. He sold the pistol to a dealer at a gun show at the Armory for twenty-five dollars, and about six weeks later a check arrived from the insurance company for the damages. Business went on as usual. Thrived as usual. People still came in every day to get the boxes they wanted for storage, for shipping, for whatever they needed. A few of the regular customers offered consolation. Sorry about what happened, Jacob. Maybe it’s time to get out of here. Move up the road to Wheaton.
Liebmann nodded. Maybe, he said. Maybe I need to think about that.
Part II
Streets & Alleys
East of the sun
by Jennifer Howard
Hill East, S.E.
In that neighborhood, they said, you learned fast where trouble came from. All you had to do was keep your sense of direction and walk the other way. Hill East was still a little rough around the edges but most of the people wanted to be friendly. Stay away from the hot spots and say hello to everybody: That was the rule.
A month after we moved to Potomac Avenue we knew the places to avoid — mostly north and east, like the intersection of 17th and Independence, where the crackheads hung out, and the New Dragon, an all-night takeout joint over at 13th and C that sold liquor to go. You didn’t want to mess with the kind of people who patronized that joint. They didn’t go there for the food.
The Dragon was where the local pusher known as the Wheelchair Bandit did business. Having a disability didn’t make a person any more law-abiding than anybody else, apparently. Instead of a motorized chair, the Bandit had an old pit bull — I know it’s a cliché but it’s the truth — who used to pull him around when he wasn’t staked out for customers just outside the restaurant. Some people on the neighborhood listserv said you could hear the jangle of his keys — he carried at least fifty of them on a belt chain — and the panting of his dog before you saw the man himself. If you heard those sounds, they said, you’d better get yourself clear.
Nobody knew whether the food was any good at the New Dragon or whether in actual fact they even served any. Nobody moved to Hill East for the food anyway. Good pizza, decent Mexican, KFC — that pretty much covered the range. Thai takeout, if you were an office type with a little more disposable cash than the longtime residents, the federal workers and postmen and steady jobbers who’d bought their places forty years ago and couldn’t believe what those old houses — nothing fancy, just solid 1920s brick numbers with modest front porches and envelopes of land front and back — went for these days. Couldn’t believe their property taxes, either. They cashed in or they stayed put until they couldn’t afford to stay put any longer. I used to wonder, once in a while, where they went when they left.