Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [42]
“All Italian?”
He nodded, chewing, his mouth full of amaretto tiramisu. “Mostly.” He fished in his pocket and pulled out a printed schedule.
“So if it’s mostly Italian, how come they’re showing A Fish Called Wanda next Friday and not The Godfather?” Angie asked after reading it over.
Johnny licked whipped cream off his fingers. “The neighborhood would never go for The Godfather,” he said.
“Why not? It’s classic.”
“You know.” He tucked his hands in his armpits and tipped his chair back to rest against the formstone.
“What?” Angie said, comprehension dawning. “Too much like home movies?”
Johnny snorted. “Yeah. Everybody thinks we hang out on street corners with stupid meatheads named Vito saying ‘fahgedaboutit’ all day.”
Angie laughed out loud. “Does any rational person seriously believe that every Italian-American family has a mobster or a hit man somewhere on their family tree?”
“Stereotypes,” said her brother.
“Cultural bias,” said his sister, settling back to enjoy the movie. “Fahgedaboutit.”
Author’s note: When the seal pool at the National Aquarium in Baltimore closed for renovation in early 2002, Ike and Lady were sent to live at the Albuquerque Biological Park. Ike died several years ago, at the ripe old age of thirty-two, but Lady, now thirty, thrives in New Mexico
LIMINAL
BY JOSEPH WALLACE
Security Boulevard-Woodlawn
As always, the rabbi had spoken in calm, measured ones. If we could learn to see them, we’d recognize that our existence is full of liminal moments,” he’d said, “times when we’ve already left our previous life behind, but have yet to take the step into a new one. A liminal moment represents the space between an ending and beginning—a critically important gap, and of course potentially a very dangerous one.
That had been three days ago. Now Tania Blumen’s head banged against the motel’s bathroom wall, unloosing a blue-green flash deep within her skull. Pain followed after a respectful pause, radiating along her jawline and cheekbones like thunder pursuing a lightning bolt.
“God, I’m sorry, sweetie,” the man said to her, his voice wet, his hands grasping the waistband of her panties and tugging. Something stung her on the hip: his fingernail tearing her skin. “I didn’t mean to do that, I’ll never do it again, I promise,” he said. “If you’d just listened to me, trusted me … Didn’t you know this was going to happen? You must have known. I’m asking so little, and you’re making it so hard—”
Liminal moments.
Tania guessed this qualified as one.
“Room 213,” the teenage clerk at the Round Tripper Inn said. “Out that door into the courtyard, up the stairs on your right.” His eyes were on her face. “You need help, come back and ask.”
“The room,” Tania replied, “it says the number on the door?”
The clerk blinked. “Sure.”
“Then I’ll find it,” she told him.
“Oh, wait,” he called as she hoisted her bag over her shoulder and turned away. “I forgot to tell you.”
She looked back.
“Mr. Sims isn’t here yet. He called to say he’d be a little late.”
Tania stood still, thinking. Thinking: Still time to turn around. Still time to get on the bus and head back home.
And face Yoshi. And tell him she’d lost her nerve.
She went out into the courtyard.
Two bus rides, that’s all it took to get from Falstaff Road to Security Boulevard. Yet it was a different world.
Tania stood blinking in the milky spring sunshine, the pounding in her head competing with the ceaseless roar, like a river in flood, of the boulevard a block away. No one she knew would ever find her here. The people from her neighborhood didn’t work at the Social Security offices, those giant buildings that towered over the neighborhood like active volcanos. They didn’t shop at the Old Navy, rent movies at the Blockbuster, buy sandwiches at the Subway and cars at the Chevrolet dealership over there, with its giant plaster fox.
And they didn’t stay at the Round Tripper Inn.
But that was the point, wasn’t it?
The room was suffused with brownish light