Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [73]
My mother was awake and beamed when she saw me enter the room. I knelt at her side and felt her forehead. Clammy, but not feverish. Not a bad sign.
“How are you doing, Ma?” I said softly.
“Better now that you’re here. How are you?”
She heard my story with a mixture of shock and reproach, the latter for getting mixed up in such a “crazy situation.”
“I’ve been in them before and I managed to get out of them. And this one didn’t even involve me going to prison.”
She held my gaze, the light in her eyes blazing. “Just promise me you’ll continue to stay out of them.”
I held her hand. “That I can promise,” I said, the man who always tempered promises with realistic expectations, because it wasn’t just what she wanted to hear: it was the truth.
My mother died three days later. It wasn’t easy, but I know she passed in peace and suffered a lot less by the end than beforehand. I still work at Pern’s, and I work hard and Sam trusts me with more tasks. I’m moving out of my basement apartment soon, and Sal’s set me up with a girl he knows, someone “from the neighborhood.” I haven’t seen Rabbi Brenner and don’t expect I will unless he comes into the shop to buy something. Sometimes I wonder how Beryl’s doing, but I try to keep from thinking of her.
It’s a start. Not much, perhaps, but in this town I’ll take whatever I can get.
PART III
The Way Things Never Were
AS SEEN ON TV
BY DAN FESPERMAN
Fells Point
The Baltimore of Branko’s dreams was a killer’s paradise, a bleak landscape of wet streets after dark. To his mind, it was the one city in America where even a restless soldier fresh from the wars might feel at home, patrolling the long, deep trenches of its row-house streets, entire blocks walled off by bricks the color of mud. Someone who was handy with weapons could get mighty comfortable there, and that certain someone, of course, would be Branko.
Like most Europeans, he tended to embellish any fantasy involving America with touches of the Wild West. Thus, he saw himself ruling Baltimore in the manner of a desperado, careening over the potholes and sewer grates in an old nag of a Crown Vic, riding the range to the clip-clop of gunshots.
The endings to these flights of fancy never varied. Word of his murderous exploits would filter down through desk sergeants, cop reporters, and neighborhood gossips, and inevitably make its way to a script writer for Homicide, the television show that had first brought Baltimore to Branko’s attention. The resulting episode would make Branko a legend, because who could possibly resist the exotic lure of his tale: Branko Starevic, the Balkan hit man who traveled 5,000 miles for a single commission.
Imagine the disappointment, then, of Branko’s first real view of Baltimore as his plane circled to land at BWI. It was a Friday afternoon in October, and the sunlight on the fall foliage below was almost shocking in its luminescence. Flak bursts of orange and yellow were everywhere, overflowing from parks and hillsides, assaulting streambeds and riverbanks, and spilling from the cracks of neighborhoods. When the big jet looped out across the bay, the glare from the water almost blinded him. He shifted in his seat to see clean white sails in formation. A ribbon of trestled highway passed beneath them. Then the towers of downtown winked smartly as if to seal the jest, and in quick succession Branko spied a tall-masted ship at harbor, two big stadiums, and more highways, teeming with cars, coursing arteries of a place that looked disturbingly vital.
He fidgeted uncomfortably, the airline lasagna from three hours earlier executing a barrel roll, then he shut the plastic shade in disgust. For ages he had looked forward to this moment, anticipating a gloomy approach through factory smoke and low clouds. He had expected to behold a city rendered in the colors of a bruise—once upon a daylight dreary, as he pondered weak and weary—yes, he knew Poe