Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders
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pleading now.
“You told me what you know,” Lindstrom said. “You’re just a front man.” The .45 had been stolen from his room at the Nikko, not long after Rank had been there to visit. Two days later, the cops had caught the kids who had broken in trying to pass Lindstrom’s cash card, and the kids had started chirping about Asian gangs. They were black, so the cops hadn’t bought it. “I should have seen this coming,” he said.
“To think I once called China the last best hope,” Rank replied, giving the heavy wooden gate a push. Outside, the alley baked mutely in the sun.
Lindstrom shook his head and locked the Colt on safety. “Don’t give me your cut-rate historical theory, Al. Once you dig up a piece of history as nasty as all this . . .” He found he couldn’t finish the thought. Forty-fives were always so much heavier than they looked. As he stowed it in his backpack, he wondered if their design enhanced their tendency to make their own logic. “Living here, you should have learned that by now.”
“Wasn’t it I who always said you were a moralist?”
“You’ve been reading too much Malraux,” Lindstrom told him, slipping out the door and into the cobblestoned gutter. “He ended up working for guys like Burling, too.”
Rank’s gray, tufted eyebrows curled in on themselves, and then the gate groaned shut between them; Lindstrom heard Rank walking heavily away. The walls of the alley zigged and zagged toward the street, and a febrile sensation gripped Lindstrom like the onset of a drug. The noodle shop on the corner gave off a thick white steam. He hugged a brief notion of turning around, but his life seemed like a jungle through which he’d just come. Across the street from the Black Cat, the cabbie leaned against a crooked pole, spooning noodles from a bowl held closely to his chin. His face was tinted sickly green by the fiberglass awning of the shop. Raising his eyes, the cabbie recognized Lindstrom.
On the morning of burling’s departure for china, his building superintendent arrived at the door at five minutes past eight—as if late, Burling thought, for a party. He was a spry, thin black man with dime-store reading glasses riding the end of his nose. Toast crumbs clung to the gray wires of his mustache.
“Morning, Mr. Shepherd,” Burling said, and stood aside by his luggage while the super walked past him, still chewing.
Burling enjoyed their ritual of departure, and he told himself that Shepherd liked it, too. Going through the wide rooms above the park was so familiar to both men that it gave Burling the chance to bid a silent farewell to his possessions—favored things that he’d never had the energy to take overseas since Afghanistan. His yellowed collection of Roberts prints, his mother’s somber and tortured antiques, the 78s of the Big Bands and Gilbert and Sullivan stacked by the stereo, holding their music like strata of anthracite: these things were like an inventory of his life that it was time to reduce. Because of the surfeit of potential emotion, he couldn’t have managed the departure alone, so he was always left feeling he should do more for the super.
When Shepherd had murmured acknowledgment to the final item on his list, Burling hoisted his bags and he and the old man rode the elevator in silence. At the lobby, Burling restrained the door and Shepherd bumped his wash bucket over the gap, using the mop handle as a cane. His stiff legs shuffled across the marble floor. The entrance to the building gave onto Kalorama Road and across it, rows of embassies resembling French chateaux; seeing the figure of Shepherd silhouetted against them, Burling experienced an odd, reassuring sensation he couldn’t explain. Perhaps it was the strength he drew from being alone, his apartment battened down and all crises contained, or from the respectable elegance of a Washington street. For a moment, he imagined that the super sensed it, too, pausing as he did to sniff the scent of blossoms wafting on a mild breeze through the door. Burling set his suitcase down and checked the inside pocket of his jacket for his ticket and the storage voucher for his car. “Mr. Shepherd?”
The super stopped and bent around. “Oh, all right.”
Burling had noticed that Shepherd often replied to salutations with the wrong response; it made him uneasy, as if there were something vaguely subversive about their exchange. “I was just going to offer you my parking space, until I come back. I’m still going to be paying for it, and I thought it would be more convenient for you.”
Shepherd took his palm off the mop handle and pushed his Redskins cap backward, scratching his bald head, which was ringed with tiny coils of white hair. He seemed confused by Burling’s generosity, perhaps even insulted.
“Is something wrong with it?” asked Burling.
The old man’s eyes were steady and yellow. His cheeks worked in and out in folds. “Ain’t nothing wrong with it, nothing at all. Only seeing as there wasn’t a car in it this morning when I come out, I thought you already gone. So I put my car in there.”
In a flurry of denial, Burling jogged out the door and around to the alley. Shepherd’s Buick was there, next to the ripening dumpster, a pool of water beneath it from the morning’s washing.
“For heaven’s sake,” Burling said, looking around at nothing. “These bastards.”
Shepherd was leaning in the doorway that opened off his apartment, watching the pigeons approach his car. “They get your Benz?”
“I don’t even know who would want it. It’s old.”
“It don’t matter,” the super explained. “That car was top of the line in its day.”
“I’ll have to get a taxi,” Burling told him. “Excuse me, please.”
He helped himself through Shepherd’s apartment to the lobby. As he went through the small living room he noticed a picture of a black boy in knickers standing close to the leg of a uniformed man. Pausing to look at the photograph closely, Burling discovered Shepherd watching him from next to the television. The screen replayed the weekend’s news without sound.
“Is that you, Mr. Shepherd?”
The super grumbled as if the question were another item on Burling’s list, and Burling tried to sound less officious. “Where’d you serve?”
“France and the South Pacific . . . almost. I was in San Diego getting drunk when the Bomb saved my ass.” Shepherd’s chuckle turned into a wheeze. “That’s why I keep him up there.”
Burling followed the rheumatoid finger to a framed GI photograph of Truman, which hung on the wall above the set. “Good for you,” he said, thinking. He was about to tell this man . . . what? That he had been too young for the war? It struck him that Shepherd must be only five, six years his senior, while Burling had always thought of him as old.
His eye fell on Shepherd’s breakfast, which lay unfinished on the scuffed pink Formica. Had Shepherd forgotten their meeting? It was so unlike him that he must be slipping, the thought of which filled Burling with sudden, disproportionate grief. He was about to ask Shepherd more about Truman, but he had the police to call and a plane to catch and besides, the super wasn’t much for rebuttals. Sometimes they would have a passing discussion on the elevator about the NBA or some international crisis, on which Shepherd considered him an authority and therefore worthy of criticism, but the super always liked to say his piece and be done. Burling might repeat it later, at the Department of State, as the view of the man in the street.
“I’ll have to call now,” said Burling, and started for the lobby.
“Right you are,” he heard Shepherd say.
For the first two flights of stairs Burling felt surprisingly strong, for the last two he was winded. His legs grew weak, and he thought of his car in the hands of some crackhead or gangster in southeast DC, seat cranked back and speakers thumping that terrible bass. By the time he reached the door to his apartment, his heart was racing at a rhythm that seemed slightly unnatural, as if one of the cylinders were bad. He could feel it beating in the top of his skull. Inside, he paused uncomfortably in the stillness.
The windows were closed, and the rooms had already reached that overheated temperature he