Shame the Devil (6 page)

“Yeah, that’s true.” Karras thought of his old rehab group, where he had met Lisa. “I was never a smoker myself. But I used
to come out of my old group wanting to just throw my stinking clothes away.”

“The reason I thought of it,” said Stephanie, “was that my husband was in GA for a while. You know, Gamblers Anonymous. I
ever tell you guys that? Steve used to come home and say that everyone there smoked but him.”

Karras shifted in his seat. This part — the first mention of the spouse, or the best friend, or the son — invariably made
him uncomfortable. And Stephanie seemed to be the one who always kicked it off.

“What’d Steve like?” said Walters. “The ponies?”

“He liked any kind of action,” said Stephanie, “and May’s was a place where you could always place a bet. Numbers, the over-under,
horses… Steve liked it all.”

“So what sent him into GA?” said Wilson. “Must have been one special time where he hit the bottom, right? Always is.”

Stephanie pushed a strand of her shoulder-length chestnut hair behind her ear. Karras liked to watch her do that; she was
not a small woman, but her movements were graceful. And she had nice hands.

“It was this one weekend over the holidays. Must have been the Christmas of ninety-three. Steve had lost a bundle on the weekend
NFL play-off games, and then a couple hundred more on some college basketball game that same day. We had a family get-together
that night, Steve’s mother was there — this was the year before she passed away — and Steve got a little looped on whiskey.
Steve did like his Crown Royal.”

Wilson chuckled. “Charlie used to tell me, ‘We got this bartender, every night after he closes down the place, he dims the
lights and pours himself a drink — only one — out of this pretty-ass bottle he keeps up on the top shelf.”

“That was his routine.” Stephanie smiled. “Anyway, that night, it must have been midnight or so, Steve was really loaded.
He got on the kitchen phone with his bookie and tried to place a bet, letting him know that he was good for the losses he
had taken that afternoon. Well, this bookie wasn’t having any of it. Steve blew his cool, started screaming at the guy over
the phone. Then Steve glanced over and saw his mother sitting at the kitchen table, looking at him with something close to
disgust in her eyes. And Steve did look like hell that night — sweaty and red faced from the drink. I guess his mother shamed
him with that look of hers. On Monday morning he made a phone call and got himself into GA. And he never gambled again. He
was stronger than I thought he would be. He surprised me.”

“Those programs work,” said Walters, keeping it going. “Surrendering your will to a higher power. I’m telling you, it does
the trick.”

Thomas Wilson looked over at Karras, who wore a frown of agitation. Wilson believed in God himself. And he had real affection
for Bernie Walters. But Bernie never had the good sense to give that bullshit a rest.

“Ah, come on,” said Karras. “God didn’t help me kick cocaine. It was the love of a woman. It was living, breathing flesh.
I fell for Lisa and decided that I wanted to sleep next to her for the rest of my life. That to do that, I needed to live.
And then, when Jimmy was born, there wasn’t any question. I never even thought about coke again. But God? Gimme a break.”

“Where were we?” said Walters.

Stephanie tried to catch Karras’s eye, but he was staring ahead. Picturing his son alive, Stephanie knew. She’d come to recognize
that empty gaze of Karras’s face. Wilson looked at a spot on the floor between his feet and patted the shaved sides of his
face.

“Smoking,” said Karras. “Tonight’s theme.”

“Right,” said Wilson. “All right, here’s something. I can remember the first time me and my boy Charles bought a pack of cigarettes.
At the Geranium Market, up on the corner of Georgia and Geranium Avenue?”

“That place is still there,” said Karras.

Wilson nodded. “I don’t know who runs it now. But back then this Jewish guy had it. Man by the name of Schweitz. Yeah, kind
old guy. I told Mr. Schweitz the smokes were for my moms. He was friendly with my mother and he knew my mother didn’t smoke.
He sold them to us anyway, though. Probably knew we’d get turned off by it right quick. And did we ever. We took that pack
of Kools —
had
to be double O’s ’cause we
knew
that all the bad brothers smoked those — over to Fort Stevens Park, and don’t you know we smoked them right after the other.
I can still picture Charles, taking a pull off that stick, trying to blow rings, checking it out, lookin’ all cross-eyed and
shit.… Damn, what was that, almost twenty-five years ago? Anyway, right about then, both of us got sick. You should’ve seen
Charlie, huggin’ one of those Civil War cannons they have over at the fort.”

“Bet you never smoked again,” said Walters.

“Charles never did. But I did. See, I was never as smart as Charles. When I came back to D.C. after being away for a few years
and Charles saw me lightin’ up, he wouldn’t let up on me, calling me a fool and everything else he could think of in front
of the ladies. I stopped smoking soon after.” Wilson cleared his throat. “Charles always did look out for me like that.”

“It’s good to remember it,” said Walters. “That your friend loved you, I mean.”

“Yeah, we were like kin.” Wilson sat up straight. “Bernie?”

“Let me think.” Bernie Walters tapped ash off his cigarette. “Right. The first time I caught Vance smoking was at this dance
he was in charge of when he was in junior high. I don’t know what he had to do with it, exactly. He liked to put that kind
of stuff on — do the promotion, decorate the gym, all that. I went to pick him up, and I saw him standing outside with a couple
of his friends. They were passing a butt back and forth. I got pissed off, not because he was smoking but because of the way
he looked with that cigarette. He was holding it up, pitchfork style, the way some women do. I guess he was trying to be…
what do you call that, Professor?”

“Cosmopolitan,” said Karras.

“Right, like that magazine. So when I came up on the group, he knew he was busted. He took me aside and asked me not to yell
at him right there in front of his friends. Well, I gave him that much. But on the way home I really let him have it. Told
him he looked like a damn girl, smoking that cigarette.” Walters regarded the Marlboro between his fingers. “It was dark in
that car, but I could see the tears come into his eyes. It hurt him so much for me to call him a girl. Not that he was confused.
He knew who he was, even then. No, that wasn’t the problem; the problem was
me.
If I could have shown just a little understanding, it wouldn’t have been so rough on him, growing up the way he did. Hell,
he didn’t even like cigarettes. The only reason he tried smoking at all was because I smoked. He thought… I mean, can you
imagine what was going on in his head to do something like that? To smoke a cigarette to try and please your dad? You all
ever hear of such a thing?”

“The two of you got a lot of things straight before he died,” said Stephanie. “Don’t forget that.”

“We got some things straight,” said Walters.

For a while no one said a thing. Then Wilson said, “Dimitri?”

“Yeah.”

“Your turn, man.”

“My son was just five years old when he was murdered,” said Karras. “So forgive me if I don’t have any smoking stories for
you tonight. But if I think of any, I’ll let you know.”

FRANK FARROW TOOK
the last dinner plate from a gray bus tray and used an icing wand to scrape what was left of a rich man’s lunch into the
garbage receptacle by his side. He fitted the plate onto a stack of them and set the load down into the steaming hot water
of the soak sink in front of him. He used the overhead hose to rinse off the bus tray and dropped the empty tray onto the
floor, where the boy would come and pick it up.

Farrow had dumped silverware into a plastic container called a third. He dripped liquid detergent into the third, filled the
container with hot water, and capped it tightly with a plastic lid. He shook the third vigorously for about a minute, then
drained the container of suds and rinsed it out. The silverware was clean.

Farrow grabbed the bottle of Sam Adams he had placed on the ledge over the sink. Grace, the waitress with the howitzers, had
brought the beer in to him after lunch, told him it was on her for the good job he had done “turning those dishes” during
the rush. He watched her wiggle her ass as she walked out of the dishwasher’s room, and he whistled under his breath, because
that was what she wanted him to do.

He looked into the brownish water of the sink. The plates could soak for a while. He decided to go out back and have himself
a smoke.

He snatched his cigarettes off a high shelf, took his beer, and went to the doorway leading to the kitchen. Bobby, the faggoty
young chef who called himself an artist, was boning a salmon on a wooden cutting block. He was gesturing broadly with his
hands, describing the process to an apprentice, a kid from the local college who was struggling to stay interested. The other
kitchen help, black guys from the north side of town, were walking around behind Jamie the Artist, their hands on their hips,
their white hats cool-cocked on their heads, elaborately mouthing his words in mimicry, passing each other, giving each other
skin.

Farrow stood in the doorway watching them with amusement. When Bobby looked up, Farrow said, “Dishes are soaking. I’ll be
out back, catching a weed.”

“Okay, Larry,” said Bobby with a wave of his hand.

Larry. That’s what they called Farrow in this town.

There was a small alleyway off the back of the kitchen. The owners of the hotel had erected latticework along the edge of
the alley’s red bricks. A piece of lattice above, thin with grapevine, completed the camouflage and hid the alleyway from
the guests of the hotel who liked to stroll in the adjacent courtyard.

Farrow stood out here on his breaks, smoking, peering through the gaps in the lattice, watching the guests walk in the courtyard,
silently laughing at them, thoroughly hating them. Well-to-do white people. There wasn’t anything more pathetic. Khaki pants,
Bass Weejuns, outdoor gear, sweaters tied around the neck for those days when the weather was on the warm side but “unpredictable.”
They had come down here with their spouses for an overnight at the “quaint” bed-and-breakfast. They’d go “antiquing” around
the town, have a nice dinner, wrestle for a couple of minutes in the four-poster bed, go home the next day just as sad and
unsatisfied as when they arrived. The point was, they could tell their friends they had spent a quiet weekend on the Eastern
Shore. Farrow guessed it was all about making some kind of statement.

He’d look at the husbands, stepping out of the elevator of the Royal Hotel on their way to the dining room, their hands just
touching the round backs of their shapeless, overweight wives, and he’d see boredom in their eyes, and something like contained
desperation. For them, it had come down to this: They had to spend two, three hundred a night, and drive two hours from the
city, just to fuck a woman they no longer desired to fuck. When all the time they’d rather be getting their dick yanked by
some stocky Korean woman in a massage parlor for forty bucks.

Then there were the husbands with their trophy wives. These men thought that people looked at them with envy. But the truth
was, people looked at them and imagined wrinkled, bony old men struggling to stay hard inside of luscious young women.

Well, that was their problem, not his. But it was funny just the same.

He took a swig of his beer. The day was cold but not bitter. It felt good to be away from the heat of the sink.

Here in Edwardtown he was known as slow-witted Larry. Larry with the black-framed glasses who never met their eyes. Who had
gotten the job on the recommendation of Mr. Toomey, the electrician who serviced the Royal Hotel. Larry had never even filled
out an employment form.

“I’ll work for half pay if you give me cash money under the table,” said Larry to his boss, Harraway. Larry looked down at
his own shoes, chuckled in a humble, homespun way, and said, “Had a little trouble once with the IRS, you understand, and
they’re aimin’ to take most everything I earn for the rest of my life.”

“We can do that,” said Harraway. “I’m no fan of the government myself.”

Farrow had been down here in Edwardtown, a small Maryland city thirty miles south of Delaware on the Edward River, for two
and a half years. A liberal arts college sat on the northeast corner of the city limits. Outside of town, farmers rotated
soybean and corn while their wives worked at the local Wal-Mart, and crabmen made a modest living on the river.

The north end of town housed blacks and poor whites. The south end — nineteenth-century clapboard row houses on narrow cobblestone
streets — meant old white money clamped in rigor-mortised fists. The Royal Hotel was on High Street, one block away from the
river. As in every small town in the country, High Street was the area where the landed gentry had always resided.

This was the kind of people Farrow hated most. Strange that he would be down here now, washing their dishes.

This was only temporary, though, and when he thought about it rationally, Edwardtown had been the perfect place for him to
lie low. But now, he felt, it was time to make a move.

He hotboxed his smoke and dropped it on the bricks. He crushed the butt beneath his boot.

Farrow drove the hopped-up Taurus up High Street, took Kent Boulevard over along the campus, where that famous 1960s novelist
had tenure. Farrow spent much of his free time in the campus library, which stocked a good deal of worthy fiction. He had
read one of the famous writer’s early novels and had once seen him, a small bald man with tortoiseshell eyeglasses, crossing
the library floor. He had enjoyed the man’s book but felt in the end that the writer had been holding back, had not gone far
enough into that black rotted place that surely would have existed in his lead character’s mind.