Free Nick's Trip by George P. Pelecanos Page A

resulted from the new government’s disorder and indifference after the Greek War of Independence. He had every good intention of returning to Sparta, but as it happened his wife died from tuberculosis and his son was raised by relatives in the village. His son eventually married another young woman in the village and out of that union I was born. My parents sent me to the States at a very early age with the intention of joining me ina year or two, but again, as things happen, they never made it. Consequently I was raised by my grandfather in D.C. Having never known my parents, I can almost truly say that I’ve never missed them, though I’m sure some eager psychiatrist could bleed me dry with a lifetime of sessions and related explanations as to why I’ve become this person that I have.
    Big Nick spent Prohibition living with relatives and driving a bootlegger’s truck in upstate New York. I imagine he was also some sort of a strong-arm man, as he had the bulk, and I’ve heard several old-timers claim that he was quick with his clubbish hands. He himself told me, without remorse and in fact with a bit of light in his eyes, that he had done some “bad things” in those years to get by. I know he packed a pistol; an Italian .22 had blown up in his face around that time and given him a lifelong scar on his cheek, which explained his fondness for American firearms, witnessed by the fact that he carried a pearl-handled .38 Smith & Wesson in his jacket pocket until he died. There is a photograph of him in my possession that says more about those years than he ever could. He is in a dark, wide-lapelled pinstriped suit, and he’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The hat is pulled down over one eye. There is a young blonde wearing a floral-print dress in the edge of the photograph, obviously an American woman, and she is looking up at him and laughing. It’s easy to guess from his cocksure grin why that young man never returned to the village.
    But something, some trouble maybe, made Big Nick decide to drift south and end up, with relatives again, in Southeast Washington in the thirties. He had brought some cash with him, and the cash staked him in a vegetable stand in the old Southeast Market. His life here was more austere, though reportedly he was a heavy drinker and enjoyed fairly high-stakes poker and occasionally games involving dice. One night, according to the story, he had a dream of his mother, alarming in itself, since Greeks in general did not believe it was likely to dream about the dead. In the dream she was behind the door of an apartment, and what he talked about with her is relatively unimportant. What he remembered when he woke up is that the number on the apartment door was 807.
    The next day Big Nick put twenty bucks on 807 with a young numbers runner by the name of Louis DiGeordano. Little is known of DiGeordano’s history before that day except that he was a Sicilian immigrant of my grandfather’s generation who up to that point had not experienced the luck of Big Nick. He pushed a fruit-and-candy cart in the streets and lived near Chinatown in a two-room apartment with ten other relatives.
    When the number hit, DiGeordano delivered the payoff to my grandfather. The hit was in the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars, a fortune in those days. The legend has it that when DiGeordano gave Big Nick the bankroll, my grandfather peeled off two thousand dollars and handed it to Lou. DiGeordano supposedly dropped to his knees (an embellishment, I think, that has been tacked on to the story over time), but my grandfather pulled him back up. It was a curious act of generosity that my grandfather never explained or claimed to regret.
    Life after that took unexpected turns for both of them. My grandfather invested in a couple of downtown buildings and owned and operated a series of modest coffee shops until his death. He never flashed his money around, decreased his card playing over the years, and even quit