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

drinking when I entered the picture. Lou DiGeordano opened his own carryout with the two thousand and began a loan-sharking business and an organized gambling operation that grew into a small, bloodless crime empire in D.C. that lasted well into the sixties. Lou was still alive, but his business had deteriorated and had been run into the ground, as businesses usually are, by his son, a man named Joey.
    NOW, ON THIS BRIGHT, biting Saturday in December, I was driving my Dodge Dart south on Georgia Avenue with the windowdown, letting in as much cold air as I could stand in a vain attempt to slap away my hangover, and I was on my way to see the DiGeordanos. The cigarette I was smoking tasted like the poison it was, and I pitched it out the window. I tried a breath mint, but that was worse, and it followed the path of the cigarette.
    I pulled over and parked on Georgia just past Missouri, in front of an R & B nightclub and across the street from a Chevy dealership and a Chinese restaurant facaded as a pagoda. Next to the nightclub was a pawnshop and next to that was Geordano’s Market and Deli. The sign on the window was small, but there was a larger fluorescent sign below it advertising cold beer and wine to go. I walked around a man with mad black eyes who looked seventy but could have been forty. He was wearing a brown wool overcoat that was ripped open beneath both arms. The coat smelled, even with the wind behind us, of body odor and urine. The man said something unintelligible as I passed and entered Geordano’s.
    A small bell sounded as the door closed behind me. The air was heavy with the tang of garlic and spice. I went by tall shelves stacked with small red-and-blue cans and large gold cans of olive oil. Past the shelves were two coolers stocked with beer, fortified wine and sweet sodas, and past that a row of barrels with clear hinged lids containing various types of olives and spiced peppers. The barrels were lined across a Formica counter on which sat an old register. Beyond the counter was a work area and the entrance to a back room of sorts. In front of the entrance was a chair and next to that a steel prep table on wheels. Dried beans were scattered on the top of the table, and next to the table sat a burlap sack half filled with the beans. An old man was sitting in the chair, and he was looking closely at the beans on the prep table before he pushed small groups of them into his hand and dumped them into another burlap sack. He looked up at me as I approached the counter. Thin pink lips smiled beneath a broad gray mustache.
    “Nicky,” he said.
    “Mr. DiGeordano.”
    I walked around the counter before he could stand and shook his hand. His grip was still strong, but the flesh was cool, and the bones below it felt hollow. His aging was not a shock—he was in his mideighties, after all, and I had seen him at my grandfather’s funeral—but the frailty that went with it always was. He was wearing a brown flannel shirt buttoned to the neck and over that a full white apron. The apron had yellowed in spots, and there were reddish brown smudges of blood near the hemline where he had wiped his hands. He wore black twill slacks and black oilskin work shoes with white socks, an arrangement fashionable with kids sixty-five years his junior in some of the clubs downtown.
    “I wasn’t sure if this was your place,” I said. “The name I mean. When did you drop the
Di
?”
    “A couple of years ago,” he said in the high rasp common in Mediterranean males his age. “Only on the sign out front. No use making it tougher on our customers to remember our name than it already is. We still get some of the old-timers, but mainly what we get is neighborhood people. Beer and cheap wine is our main seller. You can imagine.”
    I nodded and then we stared at each other without speaking. His eyes were brown and wet like riverbed stones. His hair was whiter than his mustache, full and combed high and then swept back. Deep ridges