DC By the Book

Excerpt: I arrived early. I'd never been to this cafe at Twenty-second and G in the middle of the university campus, although I'd often walked down the street on my way to meet Eva at Daisy's Coffee and Sweets. But this place I'd never noticed, a slip in the wall between two buildings, nothing to define it except for a dark red door, CAFE ROUGE written in purple letters across the top. Victor Duarte must have chosen the place for its darkness. I could barely see my way across the crowded room, with its polished wooden tables and booths lit by low-wattage lamps with green glass shades hanging over he middle of the tables. I chose a booth in the corner, self-consciously alone, checking the room to see if I'd been noticed. I pulled out the menu that was stuck behind the salt and pepper, holding it under the dim light. A limited menu, handwritten--sandwiches, fried fish, chili, beer, wine, coffee. A cover charge at night for live music. I could barely see the clientele, although I judged from the muted, earnest conversations that they were mainly graduate students. Probably older students came to this cafe, which was why I didn't know of it--degree candidates in business and law, working students who went to school at night, students who had careers.

Excerpt: Today is my brother's twenty-seventh birthday... My mother would prefer to recognize the day of my brother's murder. It's in her character, just as it's in my father's to celebrate the day of Steven's birth, to slip over the evening of April 4, when my only brother was shot on the steps of the George Washington University Gelman Library, where he was studying for his law exams. My father likes to think the years will continue to accumulate to Steven, although our memory of him is locked in at twenty-five. I understand the feelings of both my parents and neither of them. It's the way with parents--just as you think you know them, they slide away like mercury breaking into slippery bits that would take endless patience to reassemble. -- HISTORICAL CONTEXT --> The Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library may seem an unlikely place for a murder, but George Washington University’s proximity to DC’s halls of power makes it an ideal novelistic setting for a potential political assassination. GW first moved to this neighborhood---close to the White House but far enough west to allow for expansion---in 1912. The school occupied just one building then, the old Rose’s Industrial School on G Street’s 2000 block, replaced by Bell Hall in 1934. A pharmacy that remains at 21st and G, run by 1890 graduate Lucien Quigley, was the campus’s social center in an era when this neighborhood was largely industrial. “When the lights went out at Quigley’s at ten o’clock,” wrote GW’s first university historian, “darkness locked the street up for the night.”