The rat-faced gent in the corner twitched as he fiddled with his phone. Off-duty bellboy, by the look of him, but not one of the good joints, but one of the older hoteliers that had seen better days and were riding on lost reputations, peddling to old budget tourists from flyover country.
He looked around nervously, thumbing his early model iPhone while neglecting his Shoyu Ramen. The skim from the pork was congealing in a cold layer above the broth. He was waiting to meet someone.
That’s when she came in. Leggy and smart, she walked in crisply, the dark green Bloomingdale’s overcoat held tenuously over her mild frame. She walked with authority though, straight to the rat-faced bellboy, and didn’t even stop to order a bowl. She sat down, not unhappily, and confided with the nervous twitcher. Something was going down.
This couldn’t be a political play. This wasn’t some matter of horse trading or grand strategy, whispered conversations best left for the oiled mahogany walls of Old Ebbits or La Dip. This was something else; a push, a warning, a worry, a hustle. Some caper was being hatched and I had front-row seats to this single A minor league exhibition, right here in some seedy Ramen joint on the Hill. Lucky me.
I flopped down on the bar, throwing my weathered scarf and trench over the back of the chair. The coat had seen better days; it was threadbare and almost translucent in parts, but it got me out of a few scrapes – Minnetonka, St. Cloud, some angry monks at St. John’s. I owed it a bit of loyalty, I suppose.
The proprietor was glaring at me from over the Ramen bar’s steep horizon. This was a man whose dreams were crushed long ago, and had been reduced to the gravely sand of the promise of a waiting bottle and a Netflix library deep into the night. “Kitchen is closing in five,” he growled, his accent betraying more Korean than Japanese. “I’ll have what he’s having,” I motioned to the bellboy, whose rodent face blanched at the realization his existence had been acknowledged. The smart woman snapped into uncertain silence.
This wasn’t protocol, of course. Eavesdropping usually required more studious inattention. But this wasn’t a job, this was just some last-ditch effort at dinner, and besides – I figured if the conversation was as urgent as I felt it was, my interruption would only propel it further, not curtail it. I liked the occasional gamble, it’s true.
A young woman in a greasy black apron dropped a bowl of the house Shoyu Ramen in front of me. Probably the proprietor’s niece, or a cousin once removed. The food looked worse than the rat’s; the bowl was scalding and the broth lukewarm. It had been clearly microwaved. Two stars, I made my mental note. The bellhop and Bloomingdale’s resumed their hurried conversation, their voices beginning to elevate in urgency. I’d put it all on black, and the wheel came up black. I still had it.
“Absolutely not!” Bloomingdale’s involuntarily half-shrieked, drawing the room’s mild attention; I belatedly turned my head along with the last dregs of the night crowd, in feigned interest. Pretending to pretend interest so to seem I wasn’t interested. OK, yeah, I’m a pro.
Ratty’s face was cast downward in embarrassment, his face now a rich scarlet, lips pursed in a moderate rage. Bloomingdale’s’ left hand was in a half salute over her eyes, shielding her patrician profile; she had the sharp, hawkish chin of old DC money – the sort that grudgingly settled for Georgetown after an Ivy didn’t work out. Still too smart and too little hair product for lobbying – still Irish and Italian work – and instead feasted on “strategic communications.” You know the type.
“Mrs. Pembroke,” stammered Ratty in an audible whisper, loud enough for even these magnolia and cherry-blossom-clogged DC ears of mine to pick up. He mumbled some more, less comprehensibly, his face sinking further – another moment and it might drown in the now-ice-cold bath of his Ramen. Bloomingdale’s – or, it seemed, Mrs. Pembroke – shook her head vigorously, her very genuine pearls tinkling in polite applause.
“I’ll pay when it’s done,” she challenged, and stood up. She composed herself, her chin shooting straight out as she glided out the noodle bar. A thwack as an expensive umbrella extended and opened as the doorbell announced her egress. Ratty was despondent, but looked determined. He took a moment before dropping a crumbled, greasy 20 on the table and walked out himself, walking in the opposite direction the lovely Mrs. Pembroke had taken, the fresh, late winter rain pelting the trucker hat he had produced seemingly out of nowhere. A deal had been struck. Neither of them were happy about it, so it would get done – whatever it was.
***
This still wasn’t a job, and it sure wasn’t no dinner either. My own damn curiosity had dragged me here, after switching metro lines from bad to worse, enduring a delayed red line train, a rickety shuttle bus, and wasting way more time than I had planned. That was time I’d never get back and I couldn’t bill. The Hotel Royale, a run down concern on its last legs in the outer orbits of Foggy Bottom, stood quietly and unimpressively before me. The smells and sounds of a deep district morning announced themselves – trash tumbled by, blown by the whir of electric scooters and the occasional misled walking tour. The Royale’s building used to be a looker, but like so many pretty boys, Father Time, neglect, and fate had done their worst. Now, the Royale was just another roost for monument and memorial gawkers, with threadbare linens from the Pleistocene era and a “world-famous” brunch spread that would make even the grizzled district health department inspectors reach for the smelling salts. Still, I was running a hunch, betting that Ratty worked here. Something about our chat earlier had me wondering still.
I fished the stained 20 dollar bill Ratty had dropped on the table so casually in the Ramen bar. Just after he ducked into the pelting nighttime rain, I’d surreptitiously swapped his for something crisper on my way to the head, hoping, believing, something on there would give succor to my blasted curiosity. Unfolding it with one hand while draining the last of my second Asahi super dry, I’d found what I was looking for – the yellow, scribbled smudge of a counterfeit bill marker. Only a real garbage heap would be slashing twenties for fakes, and the Hotel Royale was their king. I wasn’t getting any richer, and the metro’s headaches would linger through Thursday at least, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel like I was on a hot streak.
I entered the ruined palace from a secondary entrance next to a revolving door that probably hadn’t circulated since the Clinton Administration. The lobby did have a certain grandeur – multi-layered chandeliers and elaborate light sconces and overlapping carpets on carpets – but one that had been buried under decades-worth of sediment from cigarette ash, drink spills, sneezes, and water damage. The place might have passed for one of those haunted joints you see on some TV documentary that’s only running after you’ve fallen asleep to something else, except I have it on good authority that there are establishments so mucky even ghosts won’t patronize. I wheedled up to the reception desk, where no one stood but a scribbled note was taped next to one of those old fashioned bells – “back in five.” I started dinging the bell.
After a few dings, a pair of watery, over made blue eyes flashed from the side of a door behind reception, left slightly ajar. Realizing I’d seen her, an improbably good looking woman sauntered from the back room, carrying all the charm and presence of a hourly rate motel clerk. Her luxurious blonde hair was clean, somehow, and fell richly over her creamy neckline that plunged into borderline inappropriate cleavage. “You’re not my type, honey,” she smirked, her scanning eyes and flirtatious demeanor actually suggesting a certain open mindedness on the topic. “Me neither,” I replied impassively, and truthfully. I try not to open the door to seedy hotel concierges – perhaps the limitation of a narrow imagination. She looked annoyed, apparently unused to the bored disinterest that looks etched on my face when it comes to matters of the heart. “Reservation?” She snapped, her head fussing with a large notebook; Christ, these goofballs weren’t even using the ancient computers they had lined up behind the desk.
“No, no reservation, uh, Madeleine,” I replied, taking note of the scratched name tag she wore dutifully over an otherwise well ironed if worryingly revealing navy dress. “It’s Maddie to my friends,” she countered, her terseness having fled as quickly as it had arrived, the sultry undertones of invitation again in her voice. Get it together, Maddie. She couldn’t have been older than 35 but she had the suggestive exuberance of a teenager; a little on the nose for someone right off the street. I’m not bad looking, I admit, and I clean up better than most; but here I was in my battered trench and a standard issue blouse and pencil skirt from the bargain pile at the bargain store. Not exactly choice material for chance encounters with lip-biting, blonde honeypots even at a third tier palace like the Royale. “Sure,” I offered, no more willing than I was before. “Maddie, right? I’m looking for one of your bellhops. Greasy fella. Friend of a friend; he dropped this the other day.” I held up the wrinkled 20. “We like to call him Ratty,” I added quickly. It did the trick. Her eyebrow shot up knowingly.
Maddie chuckled and sighed. “You must mean Rory, poor bastard, the guys here call him Weasel. He’s on his break so probably at the sundry store around the corner.” It all made sense now. Maddie wasn’t some improbably buxom woman on the hunt for a hard drinking female gumshoe clad in DC-grade polyester fast fashion, she was running her own op – right out of the Royale. Not a PI, but definitely an intel broker preying on the migrating herds of political hacks and Hill ne’er-do-wells that inevitably passed through this squalid place. She knew I was out of place, and thought to pounce. Wait, do I look like a lesbian? I shook the thought. Time to find Rory. “Thanks, Maddie, I’ll see you around,” I replied with a half smile and, why the hell not?, a little wink. Maddie’s face scrunched up in surprise as I pulled away from the reception desk towards the doors.
After almost making the mistake of trying the long-retired revolving door, I edged myself through one of the much too heavy single glass doors on its flank, the wind blowing the out swinging door against me as if to shut me in this trash pile and into Maddie’s conspiratorial clutches. I pushed myself through and half stumbled into the Royale’s grimy approach, the liminal half-space between the hotel’s collapsed grandeur and the reality of a DC that had long since moved on. Bits of rubbish blew around me in the gathering late winter breeze, baptizing the cracked sidewalks with yellowed, outdated band flyers, lost pet notices, and the inevitable candy wrapper and cigarette butt. If Maddie’s information was correct, Ratty – Rory – would be lurking nearby, up to whatever he was up to, and I had some time until he had to jump back in the clock. I trotted towards the sundry store at the end of the block; it was one of those immigrant situations – some poor bastard toting only a few bucks and visions of the American dream working themselves to the bone to pull together the scratch for a crumbling corner shop in Foggy Bottom’s furthest reaches.
The bars on the windows had likely conveyed; an artifact of a trend from a more dangerous, and more paranoid, time in the 1970s and 80s. It now looked out of place even in this pocket of disrepute in the State Department’s fabled hood, though its proximity to the Royale lent it a kind of symmetry. Its greasy panes, probably not cleaned since the bars were installed before Iran Contra, gave the spot a kind of secretive patina, as though its inner workings of cigarette and beef jerky transactions were purely on a need to know basis. A motley but fitting collection of hustlers, small time entrepreneurs, old man coffee drinkers, and on-break hotel help solicited aimlessly nearby – among them our friend Ratty, who was lighting a black and mild and speaking animatedly to a seated elder sipping on some pot-burned, industrial sludge that he’d bought inside. I ambled over, catching some of their attention and even a couple of whistles in lewd greeting. Lovely. Apparently I could clean up in this fetid armpit of the district if I wanted.
Mid-sentence, Ratty sucked on his putrid cigarillo, and turned his head to blow a broad fog of coal black smoke. It drifted across the congregation of miscreants, bathing the downtrodden parishioners in the sundry shop’s most sacred incense as they gathered in hardscrabble communion. His head turned, Ratty’s eyes widened at the sight of me, his jocular conversation with the old Ethiopian (or Eritrean?) man ceasing with great and abrupt prejudice. I strode forward; the liturgy fully interrupted, the attendance pulled apart to allow me procession. “You!” Ratty said, accusingly, before I could even introduce myself. “You were at the Asian place! You’ve been working for Galina this whole time!” His voice screeched with frustration and anxiety, though his shrill protests managed to stay just below a yell. The crowd leaned in. Today would be a fine edition of their customary office, and I was smack dab in the center of it, being accosted by a scared stiff, rat-faced bellboy on some not-job hunch in the tourist trail’s most cheeseball hinterland in the district. What was I doing? I steeled myself.
Ratty stuck a greasy, unhappy finger a hair’s length away from my nose; it slightly trembled. He wasn’t faking it. He was upset.
“I knew Galina wasn’t telling me everything,” Ratty, er, Rory growled dangerously. “I knew she was having me followed. Is this job even real? I’m really sticking my neck out for her for her little kink, you know!”
I’d stood blankly until that last comment, when I snapped into character. I grabbed him roughly by his lanky, extended sleeve and pulled him to the side away from the gaping rabble – as though I’d known who he was forever. The rest of the crowd dispersed, realizing the show was over. At least for them.
“Listen, Rory – or should I say Weasel?” I shot back in a severe, threatening whisper. His face flushed for a moment, and a touch of realization that he might be outclassed suddenly ran across his pinched, patch-stubbled face. “First – and remember – it’s Mrs. Pembroke to you, never Galina, got it?” Rory nodded glumly, his eyes widened and all his erstwhile bravado having long fled. “And second, of course Galina is having you followed, you think this is a game?”
“But you said never to call her…”
“Not you, idiot. I can because I have handled her special affairs for many years. And normally no one ever sees me or hears me or knows I even exist but you’re an idiot and a slob and an amateur, barely fit to help anyone!” I was getting into the groove. I didn’t know much, but I had plenty of material to work with at this point. “And I’ve been watching you, Rory. I know you have a dead end job and live in a dead end flop and lead a dead end life, and Galina is a tiny chance for you to run your trash can existence through the wash and hope it comes out as spun gold, pressed and starched.” Rory gulped audibly. He was on the ropes. Damn, I’m a pro. Loose filaments of my blonde hair fell over my face as I snarled at him, giving me an extra crazed look. Never underestimate the terrorizing fury of a pissed off hot blonde chick. Rory was silent. I pulled his crumpled 20 note out of my pocket and flapped it in front of his face. He shook his head. I pulled it flat with both hands. “This is the money you used to pay for the ramen the other night, and any half brained idiot could track you down with it.” He looked at the bill in confusion, not understanding but also daring not to contradict. I was in command.
“Here’s what we’re gonna do, Rory,” my tenor went quieter; still firm, but not unkindly. “You’re gonna take the rest of the day off, you had a bad sandwich at this pigsty – ain’t no one who wouldn’t believe that – and we’re gonna have a little heart to heart.” Rory nodded in vigorous assent.
A trickle of misty rain began. It was wet enough to give the block something of a handsomer sheen, but not enough to disperse the faithful in front of the rickety but well fortified sundry store. Rory was knee deep in something that he didn’t like, and it made him scared and nervous, but something kept him in it – money? Attraction? Despair? What was so compelling that brought this little man voluntarily to the edge of the abyss?
And what about me? This was still some weirdo extracurricular. There was no job, no contract, and not even a visible prospect of work yet. Just the faint hope based on the scent of the thing, which told me I had a role to play in this heist one way or another. Was I just play acting out my odd predilections? Am I just some kind of voyeur? A flash of doubt raced through my mind, wondering how the hell I’d gotten in so deep so quickly. Even so, I knew I couldn’t give it up. The rich fragrance of the intrigue surrounding this case was too ripe, and I knew that I’d pursue this thing even if I didn’t get a dime. My body acted in unison; my right arm extended for one of the local cabs speeding by – probably an unlicensed thing lurking on the fringes – and I stuffed Rory inside with a friendly pat.
He was going to tell me everything.
[Image Credit : Photo by Seele An on Unsplash]
by 
Kenzo Palagiano
Latest posts by Kenzo Palagiano (see all)
- A Gumshoe of Eastern Market - June 14, 2026
Good story, Kenzo. Great dialogue.