01 The Big Blowdown Read online

  THE BIG BLOWDOWN

  George Pelecanos

  First published in 1996

  For Joey Recevo and Pete Karras, two kids from one of Washington’s rougher neighborhoods, the easiest work to find after the war is all criminal—providing a little muscle for a local boss. But Karras is soft on his fellow immigrants, and the boss can’t let his mob get soft, so one of his boys gives Karras a painful lesson. Three years later, it’s the same mob that figures big Nick Stefanos’s grill needs protection—and this decision will once again bring Joey and Pete face-to-face. In this final confrontation, the two of them will find the meaning of friendship, the heart of honor, and the cost of both. Powerfully told, elegantly wrought, The Big Blowdown is a knockout.

  “He is among the finest ten or twelve novelists working in the U.S. today…[A] Balzacian figure so intent upon rendering this nation’s whole ramshackle, impossible urban life over the past half-century.”

  —James Sallis, from his introduction

  “Pelecanos’s books get into your blood like a shot and a beer after a third shift. Definitely my favorite writer working today.”

  —Peter Farrelly, author of Outside Providence

  “A snazzy Lincoln Zephyr of a novel.”

  —Les Whitten, The Washington Post Book World

  “Bold and broad-shouldered, a crime epic filled with passionate characters and the gritty life of the street…Pelecanos lifted me from my chair and hurled me right into the mean D.C. streets of the 1950s. Bravo!”

  —T. Jefferson Parker, author of The Blue Hour

  “One of those writers whose books I would never miss.”

  —Harlan Ellison, author of Slippage

  “To miss out on Pelecanos would be criminal.”

  —Barry Gifford, author of Wild at Heart

  “A charged page-turner…With stylistic panache and forceful conviction, Pelecanos delivers a darkly powerful story of the American city.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Pelecanos writes hard-boiled prose full of music and pain, like he just might be in charge of saving his characters’ souls. The Big Blowdown is his ‘Once Upon a Time in D.C.’—a big book with drive and savagery, and elegance too.”

  —Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

  “If you haven’t experienced the novels of George P. Pelecanos, then you’re missing out on one of the more refreshing, straight-from-the-gut talents to come down the dark alley in quite some time. He writes the kind of crime fiction that, like that of David Goodis or Jim Thompson (or, more recently, Barry Gifford or James Ellroy) is defined by the darkness of the American soul.”

  —Douglas E. Winter, Cemetery Dance

  “Pelecanos gets the period details just right…The picture Mr. Pelecanos paints of Washington’s past is compelling. Furthermore, he has a gift for fast-paced action and vigorous characterization.”

  —Judy Frank, The Washington Times

  “Karras and Recevo are the fathers and uncles of the young men whose 1970s rage and frustration made earlier Pelecanos books like Nick’s Trip and Shoedog so intensely enjoyable. They live in a haze of cigarette smoke, popular music, and movies, making believe they’re gangsters…The Big Blowdown is like a modern David Mamet take on one of those old George Raft-Steve McNally films where a cowardly hoodlum gets a chance at redemption and goes down in a blaze of glory. Pelecanos is too skilled a writer to deny his source material, instead, he brings it up to the level of violent art.”

  —Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune

  “It’s easy to see The Big Blowdown as just another throwback to the noir/gangster tradition. Plenty of action, sex, and gore. And melodrama. But there’s heart, too. Which is what lifts this novel above its genre.”

  —David Delman, Philadelphia Inquirer

  “It’s when the paths of the characters start to converge that the novel explodes…What’s left is a tableau of futility and heroics set in a darkly sinister section of a city in turmoil.”

  —Ken Moore, Naples Daily News (Florida)

  “A fine achievement.”

  —David Dodd, Library Journal

  “A powerful, evocative story filled with stomach-turning violence and a vision of reality that’s as sharp and dangerous as ground glass…It’s stark, menacing, terrifying, violent, gut-wrenching—and perfect of its kind. Vintage Pelecanos.”

  —Emily Melton, Booklist

  “Pelecanos brilliantly captures the darkly debonair ambience of the 1940s…perfect of its kind.”

  —Booklist

  Also by George P. Pelecanos

  A Firing Offense

  Nick’s Trip

  Shoedog

  Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

  King Suckerman

  The Sweet Forever

  To Pete Frank and Alice Frank

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following individuals who were of help in the writing of this book: the staff of the Washingtoniana Room of the Martin Luther King Memorial Library in Washington, DC, Jim and Ted Pedas; James Boukas; Gordon Van Gelder; Sloan Harris; and Emily. A special thanks to my parents, Pete and Ruby Pelecanos.

  THE BIG BLOWDOWN. Copyright © 1996 by George P. Pelecanos. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Design by Nancy Resnick

  Edited by Gordon Van Gelder

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pelecanos, George, P.

  The big blowdown / by George P. Pelecanos.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-14284-6 (hc)

  ISBN 0-312-24291-3 (pbk)

  Stefanos, Nick (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 3. Immigrants—Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 4. Washington (DC.)—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3566.E354B54 1996

  813’.54—dc20

  95-53148 CIP

  First St. Martin’s fin Edition: September 1999

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Introduction

  Each moment of our life, each action we take, celebrates both our own uniqueness and the extent to which we manage to abridge that uniqueness in forming connections to others. Similarly, the greatness of any writer may lie in his capacity to confront contradictions within himself: to express among other things, out of the well of his absolute individuality and that of his characters, the many ways in which we are all alike.

  Having written that, I peer out into yet another spectacular Arizona sunset (so far away from this world according to Pelecanos), sip coffee, put down my pen.

  George Pelecanos now has published seven novels of rare ambition and complexity. And though you are not likely to find him listed among today’s hot tickets—on the approved canon of properly serious young writers, say, or in line for foundation grants—he is among the finest ten or twelve novelists working in the U.S. today. So what do I say here? I’ve been given a bean-shooter, six hundred words, to stand against a lion.

  Do I write about the Pelecanos who started off playing such games with conventions of the detective genre, wearing them inside out, sleeves ripped off, nothing underneath? Or the one who wrote a lean, classically noir book just to see if he could do it? About the dedicated chronicler of inner-city Washington, D.C.? The Balzacian figure so intent upon rendering this nation’s whole ramshackle, impossible urban life over the past half-century?

  Or about how all these are curiously one?

  I recall, s
ome years back, the much-trumpeted arrival of a new novel from one of our “A” list writers, and a single calm voice floating to the surface. By book’s end, this reviewer said, the protagonist’s self-absorption and self-pity, his fear that any break in the day’s routine could lead to unspeakable dread from which he’d never recover, may well come to seem like the American experience, rather than the circumscribed experience of the white suburban male; maybe nobody more than a provided-for white guy could be so certain that his crises were those of the world.

  It’s not a charge ever likely to be leveled on George Pelecanos as he goes quietly about his work.

  He writes of immigrants, of blacks, of the young, of all the damaged and disadvantaged and discarded shut away in rented rooms or shuttled aside into bars and diners reeking of stagnant time till, their moment come round at last, they erupt, burn furiously, and expire.

  He works hard and shows a rare dedication to that work, continuing with each book to go after what eluded him, what he may have missed the last time out, writing, through the lives of some of its meanest citizens, the whole history of this strange new land, this America where we have murdered ourselves into democracy. True to self and material, he’s burrowed in and found direction in the work itself, letting it grow organically, following where it takes him. He’s become, in Isaiah Berlin’s phrase, both the fox that knows many things and the hedgehog that knows one thing deeply.

  At its heart all art asks the same question: How should we live, and how counter the self-destructive nature of ourselves and our history? And at the heart of each Pelecanos novel, that is the theme.

  An old friend, Mike Moorcock, recently wrote me that sometimes these days he feels like Big Mama Thornton at an Elvis retrospective. So it is with George Pelecanos. He’s the real thing, a powerful and intensely original writer who calls his own tunes and makes us all, bears and people and, yes (as Flaubert said), sometimes the stars alike, dance to them.

  You are about to read The Big Blowdown, a novel of rare and spectacular achievement.

  Treasure this book and its author.

  I do.

  —James Sallis

  Phoenix, Arizona

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  Washington, D.C.

  1946

  Peter Karras dreamed. He dreamed of his Murphy bed, and a plate of his mother’s beans me selina. He could smell the richness of the food, see the brown around the black-eyed peas and stewed tomatoes and the pale-green celery as if he were sitting at the old table at 5th and H. He dreamed of sirens and Jimmy Boyle, Boyle in his blue uniform, looking down on him with concern. He watched the white moon, saw lights color it and swirl across the sky. He dreamed he had raised his head and looked at his leg. He dreamed the foot at the end of it was flattened, without shape, smashed into a swollen mound on the stones, twisted in a funny kind of way. In between the dreams came blackness, in the blackness came naked screams.

  “Jimmy,” said Karras.

  “I’m here, pal.”

  It was Boyle again, in uniform, crouched over him, back in the dream. The siren was loud in this dream. Boyle held his hand. They were in a small space, and someone was in the space with them, someone wearing white. They were moving, rocking back and forth.

  “We’re on our way to the hospital,” said Boyle.

  “The hospital.”

  “Yeah.”

  Karras’s mouth was awfully dry. “How does it look for me?”

  “Huh?”

  “Turn your good ear my way, Jimmy.” Boyle did it. “I said, how is it?”

  “You’re gonna make it.”

  “I asked you how it was, Jimmy.”

  Boyle lowered his eyes.

  Karras had a sudden shock of pain that arched his back. Boyle squeezed his hand until the shock receded. The one wearing white blotted a rag on Karras’s head.

  “We’re almost there, pal,” said Boyle.

  Karras licked his lips. “How’d you get in on this?”

  “My beat.” Boyle smiled sadly. “You got lucky, I guess.”

  “Luck. I’m lousy with it, Jimmy.”

  The ambulance made a severe turn. Boyle steadied the gurney, yelled something at the driver. He looked back down at Karras.

  “Who did this to you, Pete?”

  Karras thought of Joe Recevo, the image of the Mercury pulling away, clear and pounding in his head. “I got yoked, that’s all. Some guys jumped me. I didn’t see their faces. Maybe you ought to ask the old-timer that runs the market.”

  “We will.”

  Karras looked at his friend, smiled at the rolls of fat spilling over the collar of Boyle’s shirt.

  “You put on a few pounds, Jimmy.”

  Boyle blushed. “Aw, hell, Pete, you know I like to eat.”

  “I know, chum. I know.”

  The driver cut the siren as the ambulance slowed.

  “Pete,” Boyle said. “When I found you, you were talkin’ Greek. Mana mou, mana mou, you kept sayin’. What the hell was that?”

  Mana mou. Karras looked away. He had been calling out for his mother in that alley. So that’s what a tough guy like him did when things got real good and rough.

  “Crazy talk,” said Karras, “that’s all it was.”

  The ambulance stopped, and Boyle patted Karras’s hand. “All right, pal. Now they’re gonna fix you up.”

  The back doors opened. A couple of guys leaned in, grabbed the gurney. They lifted him out into the night air, the smells and sounds of the city strong and then gone as he was pushed through a set of swinging doors.

  Karras stared at the white rush of ceiling overhead.

  “Joe,” he said.

  Karras went to sleep.

  ONE

  * * *

  Washington, D.C.

  1933

  Chapter 1

  Peter Karras learned to swim one afternoon at the tail end of a heat wave in early June. The heat had come upon D.C. like a bad dream and had killed several old-timers and a few who were not so old. Two had succumbed from it the day before.

  The first was a tourist from San Francisco, a Swede in his middle years who collapsed at the corner of 2nd Street and Virginia Avenue, dead of an exploded heart before he hit the sidewalk. The second was a crewman on the SS Veedol, which was tied up that summer at the Alexandria docks. The young man had stood on the gunwales and leaped into the Potomac in an effort to cool down, despite the fact that he knew he could not swim. The crewman, whose name was Elridge Kruse, plunged into the water and went straight and swiftly to the bottom. A witness told the papers that Kruse went down so quickly it looked as if his pockets had been filled with stones.

  Karras wiped sweat from his brow and tried not to show his discomfort while quickening his step. He was trying to keep pace with Steve Mamakos, a corner around town who was becoming well-known in the boxing ranks. Mamakos was not much taller than Karras but thicker to the tune of thirty pounds, with a squat build and a nose that one could see had already been hit. Karras was eleven years old to Mamakos’s sixteen, the difference between a boy and one who is nearly a man. The difference showed as they walked side by side.

  Mamakos could fight; he favored his right, possessed a good sense of the ring, and had moderate quickness in both hands. Far from a technician, he was rather a straight-up boxer, with few tricks in his arsenal. On paper.

  his deficiencies seemed overwhelming: He dropped his left too often, rarely used it, and pawed with it when he did use it. His true strength—and it was a strength, indeed—was that he could take three to land one. Some guys who knew something about it said that Mamakos could go all the way.

  In the Boy’s Club at 5th and G, Mamakos and his trainer, “Buster” Brown, had spent the better part of the morning teaching Karras how to box. Mamakos had barely pulled his punches, and once, when Karras had been hit dead in the nose, Karras’s eyes teared up, and the room tilted in front of his face. The only thing he cared about then was that Mamakos not mistake his
tears for the crying kind. Peter Karras didn’t mind that Steve Mamakos didn’t pull up; hell, he was proud of it. And proud to be walking next to him now.

  Mamakos had the change for the streetcar, but Karras preferred to walk, and the two of them went downtown and across the Mall and into the neighborhoods and alleys of Southwest, where Negroes watched them pass but did not meet their eyes. Soon they had reached the fruit and vegetable stands and fish vendors that lined the Washington Channel along Maine Avenue. They were just walking, with the vague idea of getting to the water, where they thought that there might be a breeze. Their shirts were soaked through as they crossed the road.

  Along the waterline, restaurateurs and cooks, shopping for their evening menus, picked through the produce of the vendors’ carts. Karras recognized Lou DiGeordano, standing behind his fruit cart, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. DiGeordano, short and wire thin, with a black moustache and a high black pompadour, used his thumbnail to pick food from his teeth. Karras’s father knew DiGeordano, claimed that he ran numbers on the side.

  DiGeordano lived in the same area of Chinatown as Karras, at 5th and H. His apartment building, all three floors of it, housed strictly Italians, the way it worked, as people usually drifted to their own kind. Joe Recevo, Peter Karras’s best friend, lived in that building with his folks. So did the Damiano and Carchedi families; Karras went to Catholic school with a couple of the kids.

  “Hey, Karras Jr.,” said DiGeordano, as Karras walked in front of the cart.

  “Mr. DiGeordano,” said Karras with a nod, as he and Mamakos passed.

  They walked behind DiGeordano’s cart and had a seat on the edge of the bulkhead, their legs dangling over the side. A rowboat was tied off on a piling to their right. The water was not so clean here as it was downriver at Mount Vernon and at Marshall Hall.

  “Hot,” said Mamakos.

  “Damn hot,” said Karras, happy for the chance to curse in front of Mamakos but wincing at the sound of his own high voice.