A Twist of the Knife

by Stephen Solomita

  “That’s him. For shit sake, Rita, don’t look at him. Jesus, just when I gave up. Now, listen carefully. After we park the car, you just walk along with me like you know what you’re doing. I don’t even wanna glance his way until we’re right on top of him. He’s a tough kid and he don’t know I’m on to him, so he won’t give up his dirt too easy. No, I don’t think he’ll run, but if he cuts out, I’ll just get him another day.”

  Suddenly, Rita understood that he was talking to himself, that he was getting himself ready for action the way a fighter works up a sweat while still in the locker room. For a moment she was afraid, but then she became intrigued. She wanted to find out how it would end.

  Moodrow continued the patter, gesturing broadly. He appeared lost in conversation, aware only of himself and Rita, until he came abreast of the small figure on the stoop. Then, with no warning, he turned on Willie Colon, hands on hips, and growled. “What the fuck you think you’re looking at?”

  For a second, Willie reverted to the infant attacked for the first time by an enraged father, fists raised, mouth twisted into a snarl, then he came to himself and played the street kid. “Nothin’,” he said quietly. “I don’t look at nothin’.”

  “You saying I’m nothing?” Moodrow demanded, face reddening. “Get up against the fucking wall, you little cocksucker.”

  Willie Colon, propelled by a push from one of Moodrow’s huge fists, allowed himself to be pinned against the iron railing that ran up the stoop. He was afraid and greatly bewildered by the cop’s sudden, furious attack, but as he had nothing illegal in his possession and he had been subject to harassment of one kind or another all his life, he felt it was far wiser to submit than to struggle, especially considering that this particular cop towered over him like some fairy tale giant. He expected nothing more than a quick frisk and a kick in the ass, figuring the cop was out to impress his girlfriend. He certainly didn’t expect the plastic bag filled with glistening white powder which Moodrow pulled, as if by magic, from the front pocket of Willie’s jeans.

  “What’s this, Willie?” Moodrow asked, his anger seeming to change over to joy.

  Willie looked at the sergeant uncomprehendingly, totally confused by the turn of events.

  “What’s this?” Moodrow repeated. “Looks like we got ourselves a little dope dealer.”

  “I never seen that before, man,” Willie protested. “That shit ain’t mine.”

  “Then who does it belong to?” Moodrow asked quietly. “And how did it get into your pocket?”

  “Somebody put that shit…” Willie stopped suddenly, caught in the obvious dilemma imposed by the situation. It was simply unacceptable for a fourteen-year-old street kid to accuse a cop of planting dope, so Willie made the prudent move—he stood mute. He had been on the street for a long time and began to feel a street revelation swelling up in him. The cop wanted something from him. If not, he would have arrested him without all the fanfare. In the back of his mind, though he never took his eyes off Moodrow’s fists, he was already deciding what he would or would not trade in order to get out of the situation.

  Rita, initially shocked by the fury of Moodrow’s attack on what she perceived to be a defenseless child, got over her surprise just about the same time Willie got over his. She began to realize that she was watching an elaborate negotiation, a charade that had to be played through in order to discover the ending. Rita nodded as Moodrow’s voice rose still higher.

  “You little faggot,” Moodrow roared. “You fucking pato cunt. I’ll break your head if you say I put that shit on you. Get down those stairs.” Moodrow yanked the boy down a short flight leading to what had once been the basement apartment. Rita followed, flinching as Moodrow kicked the door open and pushed Willie through. The small windows had not been covered and their eyes adjusted to the dim light quickly. The first room was fairly large and completely bare. Bits of rubble, pieces of wall and ceiling, covered the floor, except in one corner, where a narrow mound of broken concrete ran along the back wall. All three recognized it for what it was—a grave.

  Surprisingly, Willie was the first to speak. “Say, man, what you got me for, anyways?” he whispered.

  Moodrow pulled his eyes away from the heaped rubble, willing himself to the business at hand. “If you call me ‘man’ one more time, you little scumbag, I’m gonna break the middle finger on your right hand. You know my name. Use it.” Willie responded by continuing to stare at the grave across the room and Moodrow, cursing the turn of events, made one more bid to get the boy’s attention. “You know how much time you could get for this?” He held the bag up to Willie’s face. “This ain’t no juvenile bust. This ain’t no slap on the wrist from some fag social worker. This is a goddamn adult felony and you’re going into the men’s detention block on Riker’s Island. You got a chance with kids your own age, but I’m gonna talk to a friend of mine who’s a sergeant of corrections and we’re gonna put you in a cell with four, giant, nigger faggots and they’re gonna fuck your asshole all day and night. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  Willie nodded, his attention once again focused on the cop. He felt a sudden thrill of understanding. He was being dealt with as a man for the first time in his life and, although he didn’t really believe Moodrow would plant heroin on him, he was indeed terrified by the prospect of being made into a jailhouse punk. There were many stories of young kids being tried as adults for certain crimes, of children being incarcerated with adult felons when they were too young to defend themselves. Not happy stories at all and when Willie finally answered, he didn’t have to force the fear into his voice. “I don’t know what you want, Sergeant Moodrow. I don’t know what to say.”

  Moodrow waited just a moment, fixing the child with a blank stare, as if trying to make up his mind about something. Finally, he spoke. “What’s the captain’s fucking name?”

  “The captain?”

  “Yeah, my captain. The captain of the precinct.”

  “Captain Epstein, you mean?”

  “That’s right. Captain Epstein. Now tell me what kind of name is Epstein? C’mon. Let’s go.” Moodrow, in his impatience, reached out to Willie.

  “It’s a Jew name. He’s a Jew.”

  “And what do you think a Jew captain is gonna do when you lead a bunch of asshole kids in throwing rocks at his fucking people? Whatta you think he’s gonna do?

  Relief flooded through Willie, flushing out the fear. This was going to be easy. Just a moment before, he had been convinced that Moodrow was going to ask him to set up his brother, who was dealing heavily. “I guess he gonna get mad.”

  “Yeah,” Moodrow mimicked. “He gonna get mad. And then he comes and busts my balls. And I gotta take it because of some punk asshole kid like you. Some Puerto Rican piece of subhuman shit. Well, I swear to Jesus Christ I’m gonna put your ass in jail for the next ten years. And don’t tell me you ain’t the leader. You’re right on top and, so help me God, I ain’t gonna put up with it.” Moodrow paused, looking around for some way to bring home the seriousness of the threat.

  “Look,” Willie cried, interrupting the sergeant’s train of thought. “I let up on that shit, Sergeant. I don’t care about them stupid Jews no way at all.”

  “And what about this?” Moodrow held up the small bag.

  Willie hesitated, then took the bait. “We forget about that?”

  “Just like that? No, I don’t think so.” Moodrow smiled. “I tell you what, tough guy. You go dig up that pile of concrete over there.” He pointed to the grave. “Let’s see what’s underneath.”

  Rita saw the fear in the boy’s eyes. Saw the adult leave and the child take over again.

  “That’s a grave, man,” Willie whispered, lifting the back of his hand to cover his mouth. Instinctively, he began to back away.

  “My name ain’t ‘man,’ you little punk. Didn’t I tell you what my name was?” Moodrow yelled, advancing on the boy.

  “Don’t make me do it. Please don’t make me do it.” He bega
n to cry, a small stifled whimper and Rita reached out to restrain Moodrow. He seemed to notice her for the first time and regarded her with puzzled eyes. He felt himself torn between his business with Willie and his need to show Rita what it felt like to be a cop “Here,” he said. “Watch it. Watch this.” Quickly, his eyes darting back and forth from Rita to Willie, Moodrow began to tear the mound apart, flipping chunks of concrete as if they were foam movie props, releasing the smell of death until it filled the basement.

  Rita cried out as the body began to emerge, a long, low groan of understanding. The head was twisted almost completely around and there were small, white maggots in the mouth and eyes. The flesh seemed folded on itself, like candlewax exposed to a sooty flame, but the coolness of the basement had kept the decay to a minimum.

  Willie began to make the sign of the cross from his head to his waist to his shoulders, over and over again. “Jesus Christ,” he cried out, at last. “That’s Enrique Hentados, man. That thing is Enrique Hentados.”

  Moodrow stopped, his fury suddenly spent. He stared at Willie. “Say again.”

  “That’s Enrique Hentados.”

  Desire flowed through the cop’s eyes. They seemed happy, almost joyful, but he kept his voice hard. “That’s gonna be Willie Colon if you fuck me up one more time. Now get out of here.”

  Willie didn’t waste a second. He spun on his heel and flew up the stairs. Moodrow waited until the child was out of sight, then turned to Rita. “Go back to the car. Pick up the radio and press the button on the side of the microphone. Say, ‘Car 205 calling precinct.’ Then let go Until someone comes on. Probably Bob Pellegrino. Tell him Sergeant Moodrow is in the basement at 165 Clinton with a dead body. We need a crime team down here right away. Tell him there is no danger. Can you do that?”

  “OK, I can do it.” Like Willie Colon, Rita was eager to get out of that basement, away from the sight and smell of Enrique Hentados. Moodrow, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to be alone with the body, to examine the situation in private. He waited patiently for Rita to disappear, then returned to the rigid corpse and removed several more chunks of concrete, exposing the body completely. He went quickly through the pockets, finding nothing in the pants, cursing softly, then pulling two orange ticket stubs from an inside jacket pocket. Smiling to himself, he noted the name of the Ridgewood Theatre just before slipping them into his own pocket. Now the medical examiner would show up, complaining of the inconvenience, and the crime team would sweep the area for clues that would only be filed away. A remote crime. A minor annoyance on a Tuesday evening. Suddenly, he felt guilty. He had put Rita through more than he had ever intended. Suppose she left him, disgusted by the brutality? Well, he would make it up to her. He would put Epstein off for a few more days and they would take a little vacation. He knew people in Atlantic City. They would gamble, get drunk, make love. For a moment he was lost in the fantasy, but then, as he heard the scream of the approaching sirens, habit took over and he began to consider the death of Enrique Hentados.

  8

  IN 1950, THE WILLIAMSBURG section of Brooklyn, a mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood, stood face to face on its south and southeastern borders with the tense, black poverty of Bedford Stuyvesant. It was here, with Flushing Avenue as the border line, that the youth gangs of the 50s met to enact the rituals of passage that make a ghetto child into a man. They rarely used guns in 1950, content to batter and stab each other with baseball bats and chains and knives. In those days, car antennas (universally called aerials) could be snapped off a fender with one quick tug, like crushing an empty beer can. They made a singing sound, these aerials, as they whipped toward the flesh of an opponent. In schoolyard, on a dark night, they were completely invisible, almost magical.

  The eastern and western ends of Williamsburg were heavily industrialized and supported businesses as large as the Knickerbocker and Schaefer Breweries and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, or as small as the individual warehouse-trucking operations on Heyward Street. These businesses formed the employment base for the Williamsburg community, a base that shrank continually. The three decades following World War II saw both breweries, the Navy Yard, and fifty other businesses close their doors forever, leaving Williamsburg with only a smattering of single-owner, garage operations—warehouses with virtually no heat in winter, no ventilation in summer and, most of all, no unions at any time.

  Greenpoint, Brooklyn, lay directly to the north of Williamsburg. It was a working-class neighborhood, mostly Polish and Italian, into which the Puerto Rican community of Williamsburg expanded throughout the 1960s, pushing, little by little, along Kent and Wythe avenues, until it occupied all the area from the East River to McGuinness Boulevard. This was not accomplished without bloodshed, as the indigenous population fought tooth and nail to save their wives and children from the ultimate indignity of having to associate with Spanish-speaking human beings.

  But the Puerto Ricans had little choice. They were forced to expand because of pressure by still another ethnic group which began to move into Williamsburg in the early 1950s. Hasidic Jews, drawn by the strength of their leader, Rabbi Schoenberg, began to arrive in America shortly after World War II. At first, they settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they found help from the long-established Jewish population. But the Lower East Side was too crowded, rents were high in the small area that remained Jewish, and jobs were scarce. Besides, there were a great many Jews living there who did not follow Mosaic Law. These were Jews who ate bacon and whose children routinely dated gentiles. The rabbi had seen Jews like these in Europe. There was nothing new here. Nevertheless, he led his people on one last journey. He led them two miles across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn, into a neighborhood where there were no Jews of any kind.

  These were wild-looking people. Dressed in ill-fitting black suits and white shirts without ties, they seemed to wear their black overcoats all the time, summer and winter. Thick, untrimmed beards and long earlocks combined with centuries of imposed isolation to create an insularity which the local population found entirely offensive. The Hasidim went to their own schools, shopped at their own stores, bought only kosher food and first and foremost, in a community where jobs were already scarce, offered employment to each other. The women shaved their heads on the day of their marriages. They wore long dresses and thick, opaque stockings, resulting in a general appearance which can only be called asexual, a certain and deadly insult to the young Spanish girls and their macho boyfriends.

  So, the Jews came under immediate attack. The ghetto criminals of Williamsburg and Bedford Stuyvesant saw them as unarmed and therefore helpless, as traditional Jewish victims. What they didn’t understand was that these people had no place to go back to, that their entire world had been destroyed, first by Adolf Hitler and then by Joseph Stalin and that, if necessary, they would have no choice but to die on the streets of Brooklyn. And the predators made still another error, another miscalculation based on ignorance. These people, these Jews, had seen their husbands, wives, parents, and children murdered by the butchers of Germany. They had seen their families shot and stabbed and bludgeoned to death. They had seen humans eaten by dogs. They had seen German soldiers throw living infants into burning ovens and they would not be intimidated by an eighteen-year-old kid with a Saturday night special.

  After a time, they began to prosper. They bought up the small warehouses and established factories manufacturing sweaters and blouses. They purchased the row houses along Penn, Rutledge and Heyward streets. Schools were built and temples and even a grand, single-family home for the rabbi, the only one for miles around. It had a lawn with real grass, surrounded by a white wrought-iron fence and, to the Hasidim, gave the distinct air of a people prepared for a long stay. If they could not go back to Eastern Europe, if they could not make the Yiddish world come alive in its own garden, they would do their best to see it blossom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

  Yet, over the next twenty years, the friction never died down, though
it most often showed itself as a competition for political patronage. From the Puerto Rican point of view, the Hasidim had committed two unpardonable transgressions. First, they truly felt themselves to be superior to their darker, gentile neighbors and, second, they made no attempt to disguise their feelings. By the time Ronald Chadwick met his maker, the city of New York had been trying to mediate the dispute for thirty years, but aside from physically separating the combatants in time of actual battle there was little the city could do. Still, the politicians never gave up. There were votes on those streets, block votes, and thus the citizens had to be appeased. The action of the city over the Robert Wagner Homes was a perfect example of both the dilemma and the solution. The homes contained two hundred heavily subsidized apartments. Brand-new units, they represented the only city-funded housing in nearly a decade, and the war for occupancy began even before the old buildings resting on the site were demolished.

  The most common charge was that, since everyone knows that all Jews are rich and that these apartments were clearly meant for the poor, the Jews should be excluded. This accusation led to the establishment of a special, though unofficial, fitness board to ensure that only the poorest of the poor would be considered. The Hasidic community, on the other hand, agonized over their vulnerability should they be forced to live door to door with the volatile Hispanics. The city responded by recruiting almost every Jewish housing cop in the city to serve as patrolmen at the Wagner Homes.

  The negotiations went on for two years. There were dozens of community planning board meetings in which great arguments were made, in Yiddish and Spanish, as well as English. Finally, a bargain was struck, as all parties had known would happen, in which the apartments were divided evenly and Jews and Puerto Ricans and even a few blacks shared each floor. All that remained was for the politicians to make their ritual observances, to consecrate the holy ground while at the same time getting their pictures in the papers. The date for the grand event was set for Sunday, April 1, at 10:00 AM. The mayor, the president of the City Council, the borough president, Representative Herman Gonzalez and Rabbi Schoenberg, himself, would all appear. There would be speeches and media people galore and, just to make sure there was a nice crowd, a small block party was planned for the afternoon.