Baltimore Noir

much time. I wanted to spend as much of what was left of it with her.

I turned the key and walked upstairs to her bedroom. My cousin Sal had spent the morning there and his wife Theresa usually picked up whatever slack we couldn’t.

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 as well, from a translated copy lent by a friend at the beginning of his Baltimore fixation.

The weak and weary part he had cold. Branko had been traveling for twenty hours, a low-budget itinerary from Sarajevo via Zagreb, Frankfurt, and JFK, with lengthy layovers at every stop.

Here is what the passport control officer saw as Branko lumbered forward with his overnight bag and his documents (his boss, Marko Krulic, had fixed the visa with a cooperative consular officer, paying twice the amount Branko would be earning for the commission): He was a tall man, about 6’3', with the rangy build and sharp cheekbones of those Slavic toughs the NBA favors for their Euro guile and rigid fundamentals. Pale skin with the translucence of boiled cabbage. He wore a black leather jacket, too large and with too many silver buckles. His black pair of acid-washed jeans sported a label no American had ever heard of, and his lank black hair was a longish version of a style from 1957.

But it was Branko’s eyes that prompted the passport officer to ask a few extra questions, just before they took his prints and snapped his photo. It wasn’t the bleached-out blue that demanded your attention; it was their chilly quality, as if he were staring up at you through an inch of frozen pond. The war had done that for him, the war and all its enthusiasms of killing on the run, house by house.

Krulic, his commander, was now his boss, and in the manner of most war profiteers he had diversified into the multiple rackets of peacetime-drugs, stolen cars, bootleg designer wear, and duty-free vices of every ilk. Branko was a hired gun, and the target in Baltimore had only recently to Krulic’s attention. It seemed that war-crimes investigators in The Hague had finally made their way down the pecking order to Krulic and were struggling to collect evidence. Krulic knew something that they didn’t: that the most incriminating witness now lived in the States, having made his way to an apartment on the fringes of Fells Point back in ’98.

Branko had to have the job the moment he heard about it. Dubbed episodes of Homicide were an obsession, and he felt he knew the entire cast by name. He spoke just enough English to believe he would be able to engage them in witty conversation, should he happen across them in a bar. And, who knows, now maybe he would.

Krulic was aware of Branko’s television addiction, but figured that a killer was a killer. His bigger worry was Branko’s inexperience with handguns. Most local jobs were dispatched with AK-47s or RPGs.

“You won’t be able to just blow up his house, you know,” Krulic had said. “Well, not unless you can arrange some sort of gas leak. But be tidy, be smart.”

To Branko, being smart meant carrying out the deed in such a fashion that, one day, he would settle down on his couch before his Soviet-made television to see his exploits immortalized by the actors he knew and loved. Perhaps the killer-the one modeled after him-would even have a fling with Melissa Leo, or at least a flirtation. He liked it when she talked tough, although he suspected from the clothes she wore that maybe she didn’t like boys. But surely, he had thought, he scanned the credits of an episode only two nights before his departure, some of those writers must be yearning for a breakout idea. Well, he was about to give them one.

These were the contents of Branko’s pockets and overnight bag as he exited customs: two changes of clothes, a toothbrush, $50 in cash, a credit card (he was under strict orders to use it only to rent a car), a fake New Jersey driver’s license, the address for a homeless shelter where he was supposed to sleep, a telephone number for a contact who would supply his gun, a Fells Point address for a bar called Flip’s, and a return ticket to Sarajevo, reserved for Sunday. That gave him only two nights, but he was a fast worker.

The target was Dusko Jevic. Branko knew only that the man worked at Flip’s, at 1900 Aliceanna Street, where he supposedly swabbed floors, hauled garbage, killed rats, and did a little bouncing. His name was pronounced