Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go (20 page)

“I can’t understand him,” she said, “when he’s talkin’ Greek.”

“I’ll get it for him,” I said, and moved around her.

I went to the kitchen, dark except for some gray light bleeding in from the screens of the back porch. Two cats scattered
when I walked in, then one returned and rubbed against my shin as I found the ginger ale and poured it into a glass. There were probably a dozen cats around the house, on the porch or in the dining room or down in the basement. Generations of them had lived here and out in the alley; Costa collected them like children.

The nurse sat in a chair in the foyer as I walked out of the kitchen. She fumbled in her pack for a cigarette. I struck a match and gave her a light.

“Thanks.”

“I’ll just go on up,” I said.

“There’s a metal cup by the bed. He probably needs to urinate. You might want to help him out. He won’t wear those panties from the hospital. You know I tried—”

“I’ll take care of it.”

I went up the stairs, made an abrupt turn on the narrow landing, and entered his room. Several icons hung on florid, yellowed wallpaper and a candle burned in a red glass holder next to the door. A window-unit air conditioner set on low produced the only sound in the room. Costa was in his bed, underneath the sheets. Even though he was covered, I could see that he had atrophied to the size of a boy.

“Niko,” he said.

“Theo Costa.”

I pulled a chair up next to the bed and had a seat. With my help, he managed to sit up, leaning on one knotty elbow. I put the glass to his lips and tilted it. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he closed his eyes and drank.

“Ah,” he said, his head falling back to the pillow, two bulged yellow eyes staring at the ceiling.

“You gotta take a leak now?”

“Okay.”

I found the metal cup on the nightstand, pulled back the covers on the bed. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Pustulated bedsores ringed the sides of his legs
and the sagging flesh of his buttocks. Freshly scrubbed patches of brown, the remnants of his own waste, stained the bed. I took his uncircumcised penis in my hand and laid the head of it inside the lip of the cup. Costa relaxed his muscles and filled the cup.

“Goddamn,” he said. “That’s good.”

I put the cup back on the nightstand and pulled the covers over his chest. He left his arms out and took my hand. The American flag tattoo on his painfully thin forearm had faded to little more than a bruise.

“Does it hurt much?” I said.

Costa blinked. “It hurts pretty good.”

“That nurse taking care of you?”

“She’s all right. Now, the one before, the other one?” He made a small sweep of his hand, as if the hand had kicked her ass out the door. “But this one, she’s okay. Has two kids; she’s raising them by herself. She’s a hard worker. This one, she’s okay.” Costa licked his blistered lips.

“You want some more ginger ale?”

“I’d like a real goddamn drink, that’s what. But I can’t. It hurts, after.”

“I’ll get you one if you want.”

“So you can have one, too, eh?”

“What do you mean?”

“You been drinkin’ already. I can smell it on you.”

“I had a beer on the way over. Can’t get anything by that nose of yours.”

“You got a nose on you, too, goddamn right.”

He laughed, then coughed behind the laugh. I waited for him to settle down.

“You know what?” he said. “I think I had a pretty good life, Niko.”

“I know you did.”

“I had a good woman, worked hard, stayed here in this house, even after everyone else got scared and moved away. You know, I’m the last white man on this block.”

“I know.”

“I did a few bad things, Niko, but not too many.”

“You talking about your brother-in-law, in Greece?”

“Ah. I don’t give a damn nothing about him. No, I mean here, in the old days, with your
papou
, before you were born. We got into some trouble, had a gunfight with some guys. Lou DiGeordano and a Greek named Peter Karras, they were with us. I was thinking of it this morning. Trying to think of the bad things I did. Trying to remember.”

“What happened?”

“It doesn’t matter. Your
papou
, he stopped that kind of business when you came to him. I stopped, too.” Costa turned his head in my direction. “You’re going to come into some money, Niko, when I go. You know it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your
papou
—everything he had, the money from the businesses, what he made from the real estate, everything, it’s going to come to you. I’ve been taking care of it, just like he had it in his will. I swear on his grave, I haven’t touched a goddamn penny.”

“I thought it all went to his son in Greece—my father.”

“
You
are your
papou’s
son. He felt it, told me so many times. He always said that the best Greeks were the ones who got on the boats and came to America. It was the lazy ones that stayed behind. He thought his own son was not ready to inherit his money.” Costa grimaced. “He was waiting for you to grow up a little bit before he gave it to you, that’s all.”

“I don’t want his money,” I said as a cold wave of shame washed through me.

“Sure you don’t,” he said. “But money makes life easier. Anyway, when the lawyers get through with it, and Uncle Sam, there’s not going to be much left, believe me. So take it. It’s what he wanted.”

Costa sucked air in sharply and arched his back. I squeezed his hand. He breathed out slowly, then relaxed.

“You better get some rest,” I said.

“I got plenty time to rest,” he said.

“Go to sleep, Theo Costa.”

“Niko?”

“Sir?”

“Enjoy yourself, boy. I can remember the day I stepped off the boat onto Ellis Island. I can still smell it, like I stepped off that boat this morning. It’s like I blinked my eyes and now I’m old. It goes, Niko. It goes too goddamn fast.”

He closed his eyes. Slowly, his breathing became more regular. Some time later, his hand relaxed in mine and he fell to sleep. Sitting there, I found myself hoping that he would die, just then. But he wasn’t ready. For whatever reason, he held on until the fall.

When the light outside the window turned from gray to black, I left the room and walked back down the stairs. I went to the dining room and found the liquor cabinet, near an ornate wall mirror covered with a blanket. Costa’s nurse sat at the dining room table, smoking a cigarette. I took a bottle of five-star Metaxa and couple of glasses and had a seat across from her. I poured her a brandy, then one for me. We drank together without a word, beneath the dim light of a chandelier laced with cobwebs and already shrouded in dust.

WHEN I RETURNED TO
my apartment, I saw that Lyla had left a message on my machine. I phoned her and she asked if I wanted some company. I told her that it might not be a good idea.

“What, have you got something else happening?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just a little tired, that’s all.”

“Maybe tomorrow night, huh?”

“Tomorrow’s looking kind of busy for me.”

“Nick, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I said, and shifted gears. “Hey, how’d it go with your editor yesterday?”

“It went all right,” she said, and then there was a fat chunk of silence.

“What happened?”

“It was about that day, after we had lunch. In Chinatown?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I had a few wines that day, if you remember, and then I went back to the office and finished off this story I was working on. Usually, I wait, go back to it, check it for style and all that. But I was on a deadline, so I turned it in right after I finished it.”

“And?”

“It was all fucked up, Nick. Jack gave me an earful about it, and he was right. It was really bad.”

“So what’s the mystery? You shouldn’t be drinkin’ when you’re writing copy, you know that.”

“That’s some advice,” Lyla said, “coming from a guy who stumbled in this morning after sunup and couldn’t even get out of his own pants.”

“That’s me, baby. It doesn’t have to be you.”

“Anyway, Jack hit me right between the eyes with it. Said I drink too much, that maybe I’ve got a problem. What do you think?”

“You said yourself, I’m not the one to ask. All’s I know, you wanted to be a journalist since you were a kid. I guess you’ve got to figure out what you want more. I mean, fun’s fun, but the days of wine and roses have to come to an end.”

“ ‘The Days of Wine and Roses’?” she said. “The Dream Syndicate.”

“That’s my line,” I said.

Lyla said, “Yeah, I beat you to it. I knew you were going to say it.”

“It only shows, maybe you been with me too long.”

“I don’t think so, Nick.”

“Lyla, I’ve really got to go.”

“You sure there’s nothing wrong?”

“Nothing wrong,” I said. “Bye.”

I had a couple of beers and went to bed. My sleep was troubled, and I woke before dawn with wide-open eyes. I dressed and drove down to the river, looking for a crazy black man in a brilliant blue coat. Nothing. I watched the sun rise, then drove back to Shepherd Park.

After I made coffee, I phoned Jack LaDuke.

“LaDuke!”

“Nick!”

“Get over here, man. Early start today.”

“Half hour,” he said, and hung up the phone.

I found my Browning Hi-Power, wrapped in cloth in the bottom of my dresser. I cleaned and oiled it, loaded two magazines, and replaced the gun in the drawer. Just as I closed the drawer, LaDuke knocked on my front door.

N
OTHIN’!” LADUKE SAID
as he hung up the phone in my apartment.

We had just called the first prospect from the classified section of
D.C. This Week
. LaDuke had done the talking, and he had put too much into it in my opinion, his idea of some swish actor.

“What’d he say?”

“Guy turned out to be legit. Some professor at Howard, doing a theatrical feature on street violence in D.C., trying to show the ‘other side,’ whatever that means. He was looking for young blacks males to play high school athletes sidetracked by drugs.”

“All right, don’t get discouraged; we’ve got another one here.”

LaDuke put his hand on the phone. “What’s the number?”

“Uh-uh,” I said. “I’m doin’ this one.”

I checked the number in the ad—this was the photographer, in search of healthy young black males—and pulled the
phone over my way. My cat jumped up onto my lap as I punched the number into the grid.

“Yes?” said an oldish man with a faintly musical lilt in his voice.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m calling about an ad I saw in
D.C. This Week
, about some photography you were doing?”

“That’s a pretty old ad.”

“I was at a friend’s place; he had a back issue lying around. I was browsing through it—”

“And you don’t sound like a young black male.”

“I’m not. But I
am
healthy. And I’ve done some modeling, and a little acting. I was wondering if you were exclusive with this black thing.”

The man didn’t answer. Another voice, stronger, asked him a question in the background, and he put his hand over the receiver. Then he came back on the line.

“Listen,” he said. “We’re not doing still photography here, not really. I mean, you got any idea of what I’m looking for?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I know what you’re doing.”

“How.
How
do you know?”

“Well, I just assumed from the ad—”

“An assumption won’t get you in. And like I said, that’s an old ad. You have a reference?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“If you know what’s going on, then someone referred you. No reference, no audition.” I didn’t respond. The man said, “If you’ve got no reference, this conversation’s over.”