Lieberman's Day by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Author:Stuart M. Kaminsky [Kaminsky, Stuart M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0020-7
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2012-12-14T20:03:00+00:00

Six P.M.

ONE GLASS OF RUM. That was all Raymond drank and he drank it slowly, sitting at one of the tables at the Biabou Restaurant on Division Street, being sure to eat all of his bean soup and sandwich.

Others around him, all black, many with the accent of the Islands, ate chicken or fish, drank, and laughed amid photographs of the white Monastery of the Ancient Order of St. Benedict, a steel-drum band on the docks greeting tourists, and the Coroni Swamp, where he had seen oysters growing on trees, crabs crawling on branches, and pink-white egrets plucking shrimp from the shallow, murky waters. The one photograph that he did not like and that he was always careful to have behind his back and out of sight when he ate at the Biabou was of a street in the old section of Port of Spain, with its red-rusted roofs and wooden fence. It was like the street on which he had spent the first twenty-one years of his life. It was an image that he had been painfully erasing during the ten years he had spent in the United States, the last eight years of which were as an illegal alien.

Raymond knew that he would have to return to work soon, that he would need to act as if nothing had happened, that he would need to blend in and wait.

He looked at the book propped open before him to ward off conversation. The problems of Sammy Glick seemed less than meaningful.

Raymond felt very tired. Was it yesterday, only yesterday when he had not yet committed a violent crime, had not yet killed one man, possibly two?

He needed another rum, but the Biabou served no liquor, only food. You had to bring your own bottle and Raymond had done just that, but it was a bottle he had taken from the apartment, a bottle with but two small servings left in it, and it was now empty and he was still feeling pain.

“You not eatin’ enough,” Henriette said, standing over Raymond, who looked at a couple at the next table trying to get their children to eat.

“I’m not hungry,” said Raymond.

Henriette, large, young, very black, and dressed in colorful Islands pink and red, shrugged. Like many other girls from the Islands she had a fancy for Raymond, but even if he were not worrying for his life, Henriette wouldn’t interest him, never had. Too young, too round, happy outside, ready, he was certain, to weep at the slightest cause. Raymond could not abide crying women—or crying men for that matter.

“You want me to take de bowl?”

“Take the bowl,” said Raymond.

“What happened to your friend?” Henriette asked, cleaning away the dishes.

“Friend?”

“Big fella. You know. George, from Trinidad. You come in with him few days back.”

“Just someone I ran into,” Raymond said uncomfortably, trying to coax a few more drops from his bottle of rum. “No friend of mine.”

“No matter to me,” Henriette said, shrugging again. “Mama and Doc-Doc said they seen

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