Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [29]
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” said George, bringing the barrel to his eye.
And I got a cuckold face-down in the sawdust of the Lorraine Tavern with a hole in the back of his head the size of a Kennedy half-dollar.
“When the bread and cheese was gone, we sipped hot tea from a thermos and Orlo asked if I knew how his father died.”
“Did you?”
The lovers had shared a long string of delicacies and deceit from the moment the frustrated teenager carried a bowl of steaming pig feet to the King of the Junkmen in her family’s diner nearly forty years ago. All that time together—a day here, half a day there—and still their tongues searched out every pebble of cartilage of their mythology.
Leini did not know how Orlo’s father had died.
“They had him up on the third floor, eaten up with cancer and crying for his mother,” he told her. “I was hiding in the hallway and saw him point to the window and say his dead brother was perched on the sill outside. They told me to go outside and play.”
When Eleini Leftafkis was a child of nine on the island of Samos, her parents shipped her to a couple with a prosperous diner at the end of Clinton Street, crying farewell with every intention of following just as soon as they could.
“Before you know it,” said her mintera
“Lickety-split,” said her pateras, practicing his English.
“We love you,” sobbed her ya-ya
And they meant it.
Today, all she knows about the deaths of her grandmother and her parents arrived in envelopes bordered in black, first one and then another. She has never seen their graves.
“A bus stopped in front of us but no one got on and no one got off,” said Leini, complaining about the fumes, saying how she missed the streetcars. “The driver couldn’t get the doors closed, like something was forcing them open. He’d yank the lever and they’d bounce back. He tried to force them but they just hung open.”
Staring into the space between, Leini saw herself on the altar of the Orthodox church, barely eighteen years old, saying yes to the man who’d been selected for her and “I’ll see you soon” to the man she loved.
I’ll do this, she’d told herself, the heart of her absent mother beating in her ears, I’ll do what they want and God will give me a life I can bear.
“Orlo wanted me to ride the bus home but the driver kept banging the doors, and before I could get on, a hinge snapped. The sound it made. Awful. It gave me a chill. It was twenty-nine degrees outside. So I started walking. The cold had worked its way inside the sleeves of my coat, right up to my collarbone. I just wanted to get away.”
She asked if she were guilty of anything and I told her the question was irrelevant.
“Well I am,” she said.
Orlo watched Leini hurry away but did not chase after her.
You cannot play the games this woman has played all her life—from the time she was traded to a barren couple in America for a couple dozen sewing machines—and be skittish.
Prim, perhaps; the world loves a mask.
But not skittish.
The bus and its broken doors had spooked her more than anything she could remember; more afraid, she said, than the heaving voyage that brought her over as a kid.
I took her story down like a court reporter, page after stenographic page of minutia that had nothing to do with the case.
“I walked fast,” she said. “When I hit Pratt Street I stopped to catch my breath, sorry I didn’t hop that bus. My knees were aching. Not a cab in sight.”
She stopped to watch a couple of tugboats nudge a Norwegian ship up against Pier 5 and moved on, pushing east against a cutting wind, head down, making time.
“I was hoping to catch George before he shipped out and tell him I was sorry.”
“For what?”
“For everything.”
Between the Inner Harbor and Little Italy, where organ grinders once kept their hairy beggars in an alley of sheds called Monkey Row, Leini turned toward a rough warren of warehouses and machine shops where heavy springs are forged and hawser line is coiled to the rafters.
A saloon on