George Pelecanos (9 page)

"My goddamn bus.
My
goddamn law."
The driver's voice was low and controlled. "Get off now,
so's I don't need to do it for you."

The
kid backed toward the door, slipped on the top step and caught himself. "What
you need to do, man, is kiss my white ass."

"You
just keep your white ass moving right out that door."

The
kid looked back into the bus. There were only a few riders. A man three seats
in front of Liebmann held his gaze on the window, peering out,
waiting
for the episode to be over, to resolve itself in one
way or another.

Liebmann
stood and stepped into the aisle, watching the kid still standing at the front
of the bus.

"Oh,
now, look at this," the kid said. "We got us a kike in the mix. You gonna kick
my ass too,
hymie
? Come on up here and kick my--"

The
driver was up and reached across and had the collar of the kid's leather
jacket. The kid sucked for air, rocked forward onto the balls of his feet. He
struggled against the driver's grip a moment, then stopped and hung there, his
cheeks flaming.

"Get
off the bus," the driver said. "I won't be telling you another time."

"You
best get your goddamn nigger hand off me." The kid's voice shook but he worked
to hold the arrogance.

The
driver let go and the kid stumbled backwards down the two steps to the curb.
The driver squeezed the door closed, shifted into gear, and jerked the bus
through the intersection

The
kid lifted his arms and shot the air with both middle fingers as the bus roared
past him.

Liebmann
sat down again.
Glanced across at the buddies, sitting sober
now, hangdog cowboys left in the lurch.

The
driver called back, voice booming.
"Fifty cents, fellas.
Hike it up here."

The
two filed up and dropped their coins and came back toward Liebmann, this time
passing him to go all the way to the back of the bus, away from the other
riders.

* *
*

The
driver brought the bus to a stop on the north side of the Armory in Silver
Spring, and cut the motor. The two kids got off at the rear door and walked a
few paces, then broke into a worried run and disappeared beyond the Armory
building. The other riders left from the front.

Liebmann
waited until everybody was off, then walked up and stood next to the driver. "I
know that boy," he said. "He came in my store. He tried to steal from me."

"Little
turd," the driver said.

"I
threw him out."

"Looks
like that's all he's good for," the driver said.
"Gettin
thrown out of places.
Little peckerwood son of a
bitch."

"I'm
sorry."

The
driver heaved a sigh and looked up toward Liebmann. "No, man, I'm sorry. Sorry
you got spoken to that way on board my bus."

Liebmann
shrugged slightly. There was a moment of silence between them.

"Are
you off work now?" Liebmann asked.

"Yeah.
Gotta park this thing, but I'm through
for the day."

"Then
I will see you next time," Liebmann said. "Let's hope we get ourselves a nice
quiet ride."

After
he got home, Liebmann sat in his apartment, at a window overlooking the street.
He lifted the window in spite of the cold and pulled a kitchen chair close and
sat with his coat on. The trees along Georgia Avenue were skeletal, black
silhouettes in the endless afternoon. A few days after he had kicked the kid
out of his store for trying to steal a bottle of vodka, Liebmann came to work
to find the words JEWS SUCK SHIT spray-painted in red on the store's front
window.

He
stood looking at the words painted unevenly on the glass, the morning traffic
moving behind him. Thinking of it now in his apartment, he touched a point on
his coat sleeve above the tattoo on his forearm. He always believed he could
feel it there no matter how many layers were above it, the tattoo carved
between his skin and the blood underneath.

The
man who gave Liebmann the tattoo at Auschwitz was said to have once been the
finest tattoo artist in Berlin. There was talk of his freehanding elaborate
sailing ships and floral hearts and the names of mothers and lovers in elegant
cascading script. But he was a Jew. Now branding
his own
people, one after the other, letters and numbers, working through the line. He
was thin with a long face and beagle eyes and wire-rimmed glasses, and he never
looked up, never looked at the faces of the people he marked, trading their
names for numbers. Everybody knew he had no choice.

It
was weeks later when the guards came to the dormitory and ordered everybody
out.

Near dawn.
The dormitory shouted
awake and everybody made to stand outside in the crusted snow, freezing in
rags. When this happened a prisoner was often singled out and led away. This
time an SS major pointed at the tattoo artist. Two corporals pulled the man out
of the group and pushed him around the side of the building. Within a few
seconds came the sound of a pistol shot.
A flat, dry snap
echoing away into the dark forest beyond the wire.

The
two corporals and the major came back around the side of the building as if
they had been to the latrine or were returning from a smoke break. They ordered
everybody back inside. Liebmann filed into the dormitory and lay down on the
pine slat that passed for his bed. He realized that he did not know the tattoo
artist's name, and now the man and his name were lost with all the others,
disappeared. Liebmann repeated his own name to himself, over and over, Jacob
Liebmann, Jacob Liebmann, suddenly convinced that doing so might stand as some
sort of protection, an incantation prayed to all the names of the lost gone
silent in a thousand forsak nights, in the trackless abandoned last winter of
the war.

Liebmann
walked the streets of Shepherd Park. It was after midnight, in the week between
Christmas and New Year. A gentle snow had fallen earlier in the day, leaving a
half-inch dusting on the rooftops and cars and in the trees.

When
Liebmann could not sleep he often gave up on the effort, got up and dressed and
went out to walk the silent world. The cover of snow left the night even
quieter, and he turned south outside his building, crossed Georgia Avenue and
followed several blocks down to Fern, turned right to track the fenceline of
the grounds of Walter Reed, the sprawling army hospital. Turned into the
residential area on 13th Street and saw the snowfall had spangled shrubbery and
porch railings and fences. The houses were mostly dark, a lamp here or there in
a living room or behind an upstairs bedroom curtain. As he rounded up toward
the corner where Alaska Avenue met Georgia, he saw lights moving inside his
tore

He
approached the intersection of Georgia and Alaska Avenues and Kalmia Road, and
then stopped directly across from the front windows of his store. Lights
flicked and darted somewhere inside. Liebmann was at first confused,
then
he understood--flashlights. In the quiet out on the
street, even at his distance, he heard glass shattering, as if somebody was
breaking one bottle with another.
And laughter.

Someone inside smashing bottles and laughing.

Later,
Liebmann would not remember any thought or specific plan as he cut around the
rear of his store to edge in close to the wall. The glass plate in the back
door was punched out. He crouched and eased through the opening, taking care to
avoid the shards around the edges of the frame. He stood and saw three figures
in a furious pleasure, flinging pints and fifths of whisky and vodka and gin
against the wall, wailing and hooting when a bottle hit and exploded. One of
them swung something sideways into the shelves, scattering bottles that popped
like firecrackers as they hit the floor and burst.

A fierce alcohol reek, overheated, sick and pungent, the fouled
sweetness everywhere.

The
three carried on, oblivious to Liebmann, who moved into his office and found a
key on the ledge over the door and unlocked the lower left desk drawer. He took
out the little pistol, pushed the safety off, and stepped back out into the
store. He held the gun straight up over his head at arm's length and squeezed
the trigger.

The
sound inside his store was nothing like the flat snap a Luger made in the open,
frosted air of Germany--this was contained thunder, the sudden combustion of
something unbridled and wild.

The
three figures startled and crouched and froze where they were, faces ratcheted
toward him. Liebmann stepped forward, crunching broken glass, felt the floor wet
and precari-

Two
of them bolted, slipping and flailing as if they were on ice, making their way
for the door. One of them fell, sliding on the floor, riding the glass, yelping
in pain.

Liebmann
ignored them to come within ten feet of the kid with the crewcut. The kid was
wearing the motorcycle jacket. A baseball bat dangled in his right hand.

"You
just couldn't do it," Liebmann said. "Mind your own business. Leave me alone."

The
kid stared a moment, the same slack-jawed insolence as when Liebmann kicked him
out of the store, when the bus driver tossed him off the bus. Then he said,
"I'm outta here, man." He started to move.

Liebmann
lifted the pistol into view, holding it up beside his face, pointed at the
ceiling. "Not so fast. I thought maybe we have a little talk."

The
pistol gave the kid pause but he worked quickly back into his moody swagger.
"So, what, you gonna shoot me?
For this?
We was just
havin a little fun."

"It
was you who painted the words, yes?"

"What
words?"

Liebmann
lifted the pistol and fired into a wall. The kid hunched backward, cried out,
dropped the bat, and lifted his hands as if to shield himself.

"The
words," Liebmann said, after the echo of the gun blast subsided.
"Red paint.
The front window."

The
kid
straightened,
let his hands move back to his
sides. "So what if I did?" He started to work his way across the glass.

Liebmann
pointed the pistol directly at the kid, tracking him as he moved. The kid kept
a few yards between himself and Liebmann and said,
"You can't
do nothin crazy here, man.
We
was
just screwin
around."

Liebmann
shifted the pistol to the right of the kid and fired again, this time into the
wall. He moved the barrel a degree and fired again. A case of Coca-Cola hissed,
spitting and fizzing and boiling over. Moved the barrel and fired again. The
kid was howling now, hands over his face, knees going soft.

Liebmann
fired into a flank of Alsatian whites, Rieslings, and Gewurztraminers. The rack
of bottles ignited and blew apart in glittering spray, silvered glass and
golden wines showering into the aisle.

The
echo and reverberation of the gun was everything now, throbbing against the
walls and ceiling, otherworldly, pure and untrammeled and wanton. The sound had
severed something in Liebmann.

The
kid was sobbing and sagged to his knees on the floor. "Crazy motherfucker," he
said, heaving, all his imagined power drained away. "You're gonna kill me,
right?"

A
car passed outside, headlights searchlighting the room, the extent of the
damage visible for several seconds. The floor gleamed with spilled and flooding
booze and the jeweled light of shattered glass.

Liebmann
looked back to the kid, held his gaze a long moment. Finally he said, "You do
not deserve to die. You are not worthy of such an honor." His voice shook when
he spoke. He was breathless, tainted in some way that was just coming to him.
He lowered the pistol to his side.

"You're
stone crazy, ain't you?" the kid said.
"Crazy Jew."

Liebmann
gazed at the boy for another moment, and then said, "Go. Get out."

The
kid lurched to his feet, slipping, working for purchase on the wet floor.

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."