“You and me against the world.” My answer, unrehearsed, natural, surprises me on its way out. I used to say the same thing to my buddy Warren. I’m even more shocked that I mean it. “Get some sleep, Howie, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” His bed creaks as he rolls over and flicks his cigarette stub in the vague direction of our toilet. “You too, Danfrey.”
*
I’m in front of my parole board the next morning by nine a.m., and I hit the streets of the outside world before lunchtime. It’s been less than two months, but it seems like forever since I’ve seen the outside of Lorton Reformatory, and the world beyond its walls feels much different than the one I left. The keys that Agent Frain must have left me through inventory thankfully have a small tag with the address of my new home: 1206 P Street. Right on the border of the old Hell’s Bottom district.
1206 P Street is a sagging row home, one lonely window on one floor overlooking a narrow plank porch with more scars and holes than Frankenstein. And the inside is worse than the outside. My suitcase that I packed the night I met Frain has been placed in the corner of a sad-looking kitchenette: a slice of a room consisting of a few cupboards, an icebox, a cheap laundry stove, and a table. A single bed stands opposite the kitchen. One room. From the Danfreys’ mansion on Massachusetts Avenue to one room on the edge of the slums.
Speaking of the Danfreys’ fall from grace, I work up the nerve and call my mother on a nearby pay phone that afternoon. I give her the story that Agent Frain and I agreed to—that time in jail allowed me to really think. That I need some time away from home, to sort myself out, to figure out who I am and what I really want. Mother barely speaks, just gives me confused, punctured gasps that I know means she’s crying, and it’s the first time I feel shame’s sharp, familiar stab since I was booked down at Lorton. It’s also the first time I’ve ever been tempted to blow my cover. When we hang up, I miss her so bad it hurts.
Remember, you’re doing this for her, in one sense, I tell myself on the walk back home. To clear our name. To get revenge.
*
My walk to meet Howie at the Red Den on Friday is a blur of crippling nerves and adrenaline, and I find myself standing at the corner of M and 16th Streets before I realize I’ve arrived. The lot is a squat, two-story redbrick building with one large storefront window, and a wooden side door with a gold lettered sign, THE RED DEN. The faint whisper of jazz seeps out of the establishment’s walls, like a promise of a good night to come. I collect myself and open the door.
Inside is small, quaint, not at all what I was imagining from Howie’s description. There’s a narrow mahogany bar with a few stools dotted around it, and stocked liquor shelves towering above. Behind the bar stands one lone bartender, young and polished-looking in his coat-tailed jacket and pressed white shirt. The whole scene, the image of legality: just another run-of-the-mill drinking establishment. A premature panic starts ticking inside me, faint but steady, like a watch. “I’m sorry. . . .” I look around. “I’m here to meet a man named Win Matthews and his cousin, Howie.”
The bartender looks me up and down shamelessly. “Your name?”
“Alex Danfrey.”
The bartender waits a full minute before answering, while I stand here like a chump with my hands in my pockets. “Howie Matthews is already waiting for you downstairs, sir.”
“Downstairs—”
“Go ahead.” The bartender gestures behind me, to a small corridor on the left side of the joint’s single table. “Walk straight through that wall.”
I slowly walk to the end of the hallway, to the sheet of eggshell plaster that poses as a wall. I take another step closer and carefully reach to touch the plaster—
But my fingers pass right through it.
As I step through the wall, I’m hit with that feeling you get when you’re passing through a force field—that magnetic pull at your insides, like a strong internal storm—
And then I’m standing at the top of a staircase. I take the stairs two stories down until I arrive at a set of double doors, give a thrust with my shoulder to push them both open, and walk into a performance space the size of two banquet halls.
The space is two stories high, with a cement floor, gray cinder-block walls, and two hallway exits, one on each side. Nearest to my entrance are several small performance stages, each encircled by a cluster of benches. Beyond that, there’s a seating area of lounge chairs and tables, and beyond that, a long, elevated stage.
I scout around the wide space, looking for Howie, for anyone really. But it’s empty. Then I spot a lone shot glass resting on an end table in the seating area. It faintly glimmers red, evidence of sorcerer’s shine long gone.
I pick up the glass, as a young woman dressed in all black approaches me from one of the corridors off the performance space.