Authors: DC Noir
George Pelecanos (7 page)
"Mol--?"
"Moldova.
My country."
It
sounded familiar, but only vaguely. Sherman felt stupid.
"Your
first time in Washington?" he said.
"Nation's capital?"
And felt stupider yet.
"Capital
of the world," she said. "Is what we learn in
school.
We study English language and much about United States."
"How'd
you end up here?"
She
shrugged. "Why you ask? Man say you kill me. So?"
"I'm
not going to kill you," Sherman said. "I'm police, not a killer."
No
reaction. Maybe she didn't believe him.
At
a loss, he asked her again how she happened to get to the U.S. from..."Moldavia?"
"Moldova."
"I
don't even know where it is," Sherman said.
"Is far.
You know Romania?
On other side.
Far."
They
sat there for most of an hour, under the streetlight, while she told her story.
She said Moldova was one of the old Soviet states, one of the poorest countries
in the world. In their capital, she said, men who worked in hospitals had been
arrested for chopping up corpses and selling the flesh as meat at open-air
markets. She grew up in a village called Droki, in a little house where the
electricity rarely worked--her and two sisters and their mother, after her
father drank himself to death. She quit school at fourteen and worked in a
beetroot factory. Two years ago, when she was seventeen, an aunt in a
neighboring village sold her out--told her about job opportunities abroad and
dropped her off for an interview, supposedly, but the "interviewers" were
Albanian gangsters who locked her up with some other girls and later drove them
across Romania and Serbia to Macedonia, where they were locked in little rooms
in back of a kafane, a club--like the Sunbeam, Sherman imagined--and forced to
service twenty, thirty men every night.
Slaves.
After
sixteen months she was saved by a man who bought her and took her to the
authorities. The authorities arranged her passage back to Moldova. She got home
only to find the Albanian Mafia had not only snatched her sister Nataly but
murdered their little sister Lena, who had witnessed the snatching. Nataly had
been gone for nearly a year. Their mother had received a single card from her,
which said she'd been taken to Italy and forced into prostitution.
Sherman
tried to take it all in. You thought growing up in Barry Farms was tough?
She--Mariana--said
she'd gone to Albania then, last year, and asked to go to Italy as a
prostitute, "my only hope to find my sister." She was sold at an auction and
put on a speedboat across the Adriatic at midnight with other illegal
immigrants. Gangsters in Italy took her first to a beautiful seaside town
called Rimini and then many other places. Everywhere, she showed a picture of Nataly,
but no one knew her.
The
life was brutal, as in Macedonia. Threats, beatings, torture. When one girl was
suspected of talking to the polizia the men gathered all the others, tied the
"bad" one in a chair, pulled her tongue out with pliers and sliced it off.
Mariana saw girls killed for no reason than to put the fear in the others.
Three girls killed themselves.
Sherman
was sweating, hearing it. He started the Cutlass and ran the AC.
She
said she was finally reunited with her sister. The gangsters had murdered a
Nigerian girl and believed Mariana might go to a priest about it. One night
they took her to a warehouse and produced Nataly--with a knife at her throat,
and did Mariana still want to talk to the priest?
To
get them out of Italy, away from the authorities, the gangsters flew them to
Mexico. Then they were trafficked into the U.S. and sold again. Eventually they
were brought to D.C.
"Together,
at least," she said. "But they take me one place, Nataly another. I no see her.
Sometime I hear something, but I no see her."
Sherman
didn't know what to say. He sure as hell didn't know what to do. He couldn't
take her to a police station--no telling who might be connected with LaPhonso or
LaPhonso's people. If he took her to any authority at all, including the FBI's
human-trafficking unit, he was asking for trouble--he'd have to say how he
happened to know her, have to tell about the Sunbeam. He'd immediately be put
on administrative leave and would probably wind up out on his ass. It was
illegal for a cop to work anyplace that served alcohol--aside from the dealing,
prostitution, and everything else at the Sunbeam. The MPD brass looked the
other way if you wanted to take your chances, but if things blew up they'd hang
you out to dry.
That
was the best-case scenario. It would get a lot worse if they found out LaPhonso
was dead and Sherman hadn't reported it.
And
beyond the authorities, there was Antwain. Sherman would be as good as dead
when Antwain found out he hadn't taken this girl somewhere, straight from the
club, and murdered her.
This girl.
Mariana.
From Moldova.
Her life more
harrowing than Sherman's, LaPhonso's, Antwain's.
"At
this place they lock me in the room," she was saying, "and I know what I must
do.
Every day, every night.
And this man--this man--"
"LaPhonso?"
"--he
come
sometime, too, and I must do for him.
Anything.
Sometime he
want
this and
this and I say no and he hit me, hurt me. Sometime I want him to kill me. I'm
dead inside, so no matter.
Except for my sister.
I
live for my sister. I know she live for me."
She
told it with no emotion at all.
Spooky, as if she dead
inside.
Except Sherman didn't believe she was. This girl could be saved,
if he only knew how.
"Now,"
she said, "is okay I die. No matter. You kill me, is okay."
Sherman
didn't understand. "I'm not going to kill you. And you just said you need to
live, for your sister."
"No.
Dead, my sister."
"Dead?
You said..."
"Yes,
dead.
A girl come from the other place and say
they
kill a girl for nothing. I know is Nataly--hair, scars on the hand where men in
Italy burn her with cigarette. Yes. And now, why I live? They kill me?--okay.
You kill me?--okay."
Jesus.
"I'm
not going to kill you," Sherman said. "Let's go in the restaurant and figure
out what to do with you. Eat if you want."
"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.
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.