he gave it up when your parents sent you to him.”
“I miss him,” I said.
“He would be proud of you,” Costa said. Like most immigrants he equated my white collar with success.
“I’m doing fine,” I said.
“It’s time you found another woman.”
“I’m not against the idea.”
“The girl you’re with. She’s Jewish?”
“Yes. She’s my friend, like I told you.”
“Friends, okay. And the Jews are good people, very smart in business. But it’s not good to mix, you found that out. Marry a Greek girl.”
He finished his drink and poured two more shots. A gray cat with green eyes did a figure eight around my feet then jumped up onto my lap. Costa reached across the table and picked it off me, tossing it to the other side of the room.
“How is it here in the neighborhood now, Theo?”
“Not too bad,” he said, and shrugged. “When Toula was alive, I worried more. They took her purse once, when she was walking home with groceries.” His eyes were a faded brown and watery, more from long afternoons of drinking than from bitterness.
“It’s not the same town it was,” I said.
“You don’t even remember how good it was,” he said, suddenly animated. He pointed a finger at my chest. “When I first came here, your papou and me swam in the Potomac on hot summer afternoons. Now it’s so dirty, I wouldn’t even throw a photograph of myself into that river.”
I laughed as he finished his shot. I turned the bottle around on the table and read the label.
“Five star, Costa?”
“Yes. Very good.”
“Do you think you’ll go back to Greece?” I asked, wondering why anyone would remain a prisoner in a house like this, in a city where the only common community interest was to get safely through another day.
“No, I plan on dying here. Believe me, Niko,” he said, without a trace of irony, “there is no place in the world like America.”
LATER THAT DAY LEE and I drove down to Southwest and walked along the water, checking out the yachts in the marina. Continuing west, we ended up at the fish market on Maine Avenue.
Most of the good fish had been picked over by that time of day. I bought some squid, at one forty-nine a pound, from a cross-eyed salt who was attempting to stare at Lee. We took it back to my apartment.
After removing the ink sacks and the center bone, I sliced the squid laterally into thin rings, and shook them in a bag with a mixture of bread crumbs, garlic, and oregano. Then I fried them in olive oil in a hot skillet.
We ate these with lemon and a couple of beers as we watched the first half of the Skins game. For the second half we napped together on the couch in roughly the same arrangement as the night before. We woke as the afternoon light was fading. I drove her back to her car at the store and kissed her good-bye.
Back in my apartment I warmed some soup on the stove. From the television in the living room I heard the stopwatch intro to 60 Minutes and felt that familiar rush of anxiety, announcing that my weekend was ticking away.
Two hours later I dialed the international operator and reached Greece. For the next ten minutes I was shuttled around to various women who worked the switchboards. Finally I reached my mother at her home in a village near Sparta. I had last spoken to my parents on the day my grandfather died.
We spoke superficially about our lives. She ended most of her sentences with, “my boy” or “my son.” I tried not to confuse the ethnic inflection in her voice with concern or, especially, love. As our conversation pared down to awkward silences between pleasantries, I began to wonder, as I always did, why I had called.
I turned in early that night but lay in the dark for quite a while before I finally went to sleep. Though I forced myself to wake several times during the night, I was unsuccessful in stopping Jimmy Broda from haunting my dreams.
SIXTEEN
I WAS NEARLY done shaving my weekend stubble when Ric Brandon called early Monday morning. He instructed me to change my plans for working on the Avenue and report to the office.
I finished shaving and undid my tie, switching from an Italian print to a wine and olive rep. I changed my side buckle shoes to a relatively more conservative pair of black oxfords that had thin steel plates