Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  They veered north, bucketing up the West Side Drive. Ahead of them the long, graceful span of the George Washington Bridge loomed lacy and luminescent above the river. Somewhere at Seventieth Street the copter’s engines whined as the craft curved right and headed eastward toward the park. Turning through a wide arc, the centrifugal force tilted Mooney sidewards, sending his stomach upward into his chest. Defasio seated directly to his left appeared to sag rightward and across him.

  The chopping of the blades and the heat of the cabin were taking their toll. With each rise and descent of the craft, Mooney had grown queasier. At the last turn over the park, he’d tasted the sour chyme of his partially digested supper. At the same moment a grayish pallor spread across the characteristically pink flush of his cheeks.

  Hovering above the West Side of New York, bucketing low over the rooftops with nothing but a thin aluminum skin between himself and the concrete pavements several hundred feet below, Mooney felt himself the butt of some cosmic amusement. Once again the plaything of the gods—particularly with the door of the craft open only a few feet to the right of him.

  Out that door a police officer by the name of Ramirez peered straight downward into the green-orange neon sheen. He was scanning the rooftops through powerful infrared night surveillance equipment. To his left a stolid, young black man by the name of Youngblood piloted the copter impassively.

  Youngblood seldom spoke. Ramirez chattered incessantly, mostly into the helmet microphones linked up to the radio patrol cars and the rooftop stakeout teams working below. At the moment it was 10:16 P.M., and the helicopter was coasting low over the rooftops between Eighth and Ninth in the Fifties.

  “I got what looks like a pair of suspects on a roof on Fifty-third, just east of Ninth. Lemme see now.” He checked the street map spread out on his lap. “Looks like 366 West Fifty-third. Would you give us a check on that and call back?”

  Ramirez clicked off his radio and shot a toothy grin back at Mooney. “Probably nothin’, but we gotta check it out. Right, Lieutenant?”

  “Right,” Mooney gasped. Waves of hot, fumey air wafted through the open door, battering his face and making a tuft of dark hair dance crazily upon his skull.

  “There’s the Felt Forum,” Defasio shrieked wildly. He’d been going on in that fashion ever since they’d started two hours ago, like a tour guide, pointing out landmarks.

  “Wonderful,” Mooney muttered. He’d begun to regret that he’d insisted upon coming. Surely Defasio could have handled this part of the operation himself, while he might just as well, and far more profitably, have stayed below with one of the radio reconnaissance cars.

  He could well imagine the barrage of scornful jibes he’d incur at the hands of his colleagues at Manhattan South had he taken such a course. Even more troubling, Mooney was suddenly paralyzed with doubt. The cabin radio began to buzz and crackle. Ramirez flicked it on. At once the small space filled with the scratchy static of voices from one of the radio cars below. “On your query, 366 West Fifty-third—your party on the roof was just a guy and n dame ballin’. We chased ‘em off and sent ‘em home.” Ramirez flicked off the radio, glanced back at Mooney and smiled. “That’s life, ay, Lieutenant? You lose one, you lose one.” Ramirez thought that was immensely funny. Mooney scowled as the copter momentarily lurched, suddenly tilted ponderously forward like a harbor buoy rising on a swell.

  “Lotta ballin’ on the rooftops,” Defasio said. “That makes five tonight alone.”

  “It’s the season,” Mooney muttered. “Warm weather gets their blood up.”

  Ramirez nodded in agreement. “In my time we used to screw in the basement. Never the roof.”

  “There’s the UN,” Defasio wheeled and gazed back.

  “Little too public for me.” Ramirez popped a wad of gum into his mouth and proceeded to chew. “To exposed like, you know? I’d never drop my drawers on a rooftop. Ain’t that right, Youngblood?” The pilot muttered some barely audible reply.

  Mooney’s stomach rumbled as the pall settled more oppressively upon him.

  “Well,” Ramirez went on with unflagging good cheer, “so far we got us a man training a pigeon, a man with binoculars watching ladies undress, another guy barbecuing chicken illegally, and five separate couples screwing, one of which was a pair of queens. How much longer you wanna keep this up, Lieutenant?”

  Mooney was none too anxious to prolong the agony. “Another half hour. Till all the theaters are out and the streets get a bit emptier.”

  Ramirez flashed his toothy grin. “You’re the boss, Lieutenant.” Once again he poked his telescopic night-scanner outside the door. “What d’ya say we hit the Forties, Youngblood? Start between Tenth and Eleventh and work east.”

  The copter yawed. Mooney glared down at the shimmering grid of streets and avenues as the earth whirled past below him.

  46

  “I see no sign of filariasis.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Positively. Where’d you ever get such an idea? Bancroftian filariasis is virtually unknown in North America.”

  “I picked it up in Asia. In the army.”

  ” ‘Nam?”

  “Thailand and then Vietnam.”

  The doctor who had just examined Watford shot him a quick, inquisitive smile. “Me too. What years?”

  “Seventy-two and seventy-three.”

  “What outfit?”

  “Eleventh Armored Cav.”

  “You’re kidding. Me too. I was in Medivac.” The doctor, whose name was Ramsay, was a dapper little man with a pelt of shiny black hair that lay flat and slick as a wet otter’s across his bullet-shaped head. The smile still wavered in his eyes, followed by something like puzzlement. “But that couldn’t have been seventy-two to seventy-three. The Eleventh Cav only got there in seventy-four.”

  Watford had been lying on his back on an examination table. Attired in a dingy white examination gown, he gazed up at the doctor with a glow of gratitude upon his face. “You’re right. I came with the Third Armored in seventy-two and seventy-three. I was transferred later to the Eleventh Cav.”

  “What unit?”

  “The 345th Helicopter Reconnaissance.”

  “Helicopter?” Dr. Ramsay’s puzzlement appeared to deepen. “Eleventh Cav had no helicopter detachments.”

  “That’s right.” Watford lay there unflapped and smiling. “That’s how I was transferred from the Third Armored to the Eleventh Cav.”

  “Oh. But then you had to be there after seventy-three.”

  “Well, I guess I was there also in seventy-four. The early part.”

  The physician folded his arms inside his capacious white coat and peered down at the patient. Watford had been admitted on an emergency basis that evening, with acute pelvic pain and running a high fever. The doctor was smiling but he appeared troubled. His small onyx eyes ranged up and down the length of his patient, observing, registering, collating, diagnosing.

  “Where was your filariasis diagnosed? Here or there?”

  “There. Base hospital.”

  “Army medics?”

  “That’s right.”

  Ramsay swiped the side of his nose and sniffed. “Offhand, I’d say they were crazy. Aside from some high fever and headache, I see nothing here consistent with such a diagnosis. No sign of lymphatic obstruction. There is some swelling around the pelvis, and possibly a small varicose nodule in the vicinity of the groin. But nothing at all consistent with the scrotal lymphedema we find in filariasis. Take it from me, Mr. Watford, you don’t have any filariasis.”

  “But the doctor …”

  “Forget it. Soon as you put most army doctors into a tropical setting, they start talking exotic pathology, about which most of them know nothing. We did have a couple of men in ‘Nam walk in out of the jungle with classic Bancroftian filariasis. A handful at most. We’d knock most of it out with antibiotics in fourteen days. You’ve got no filariasis, Mr. Watford. You’ve got something, but I’m not sure what.�
��

  The doctor scratched the back of his head and swiped his nose again. All the while the restless beady eyes swept up and down the length of Watford’s gowned figure. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “You’re running a helluva fever. Forty-one degrees centigrade. There’s a tachycardia. Not at all unusual with that kind of fever. I find a subcutaneous abscess with some splenomegaly.”

  “What’s that?” Watford’s head rose slightly from the table.

  “Enlargement of the spleen. I can’t say I like that. This swelling in your pelvis …” The doctor’s finger pressed down gently in the area of Watford’s groin, causing him to wince. “Some kind of bacteremia. You haven’t eaten anything that’s made you sick recently? Something spoiled? Shellfish, possibly?” Watford shook his head negatively in response to all queries.

  “You haven’t swallowed anything nonorganic? Metal or anything like that?”

  “Why would I do a thing like that?” Watford beamed. There was something arch about him, an impish child harboring some delicious secret.

  “It’s almost as if”—the doctor went on, pondering aloud to himself—“as if some foreign agent had been inadvertently introduced to the system.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Who said you did it?” Ramsay grew peevish. “Let’s have another look at that swelling.”

  Watford’s gown was hiked above his flaccid, milky thighs while the doctor probed carefully in the region of the pelvis. “Spread your legs, please.” Docile as a child, Watford obeyed, and the doctor continued his probing in the tender swollen area between thigh and scrotum. At the point of greatest tenderness, the small, darting eyes of the physician detected a tiny circle of inflammation. While Watford held his breath, Ramsay peered down and examined the area closely. “There appears to be a little puncture here,” he said with an air of slightly heightened curiosity. Something slightly chary had entered his voice and the beady eyes fixed Watford sharply. “You know anything about that?”

  “How would I know anything about it?” Watford’s heart had begun to accelerate in his chest.

  Ramsay shrugged. “Probably just some kind of insect bite.”

  “I don’t remember any bite in that region. Wouldn’t I remember being bitten there?”

  “Sometimes it happens while you’re sleeping. II the toxins are virulent enough, the bites go into abscess. Sometimes they burst. I’ve seen bites go into peritonitis.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” Ramsay remarked. He appeared preoccupied with some other matter. “I guess we ought to keep you here a couple of days and watch you. At least till that fever comes down. In any event, just to rule out forever the filariasis nonsense, I’d like to do some blood workups on you. Your eyes …” He leaned forward and rolled the lower lid of Watford’s eye down, noting instantly the pale, milky white of the inner lining of the lid. “Whatever else is bothering you, I’ll wager you’re anemic, too.” Ramsay rose and scribbled something onto Watford’s chart. “Bacteremia we can handle,” he said. “That goes also for anemia, subcutaneous abscess, and even filariasis, if it does turn out you’ve got yourself a dose of that. What does trouble me, Mr. Watford, are all those needle tracks on your arms and legs.”

  47

  Hot blasts of exhaust. Nauseous waves of fumes. Mooney sick and green, huddled in the rear of the cabin, trying not to hear Defasio pointing out sights, and the chatter of Ramirez buzzing back and forth with the surveillance teams below. For Youngblood’s almost metaphysical silence, the detective was eternally grateful.

  It was Mooney’s second night in the helicopter. They’d been skimming rooftops up and down the West Side for nearly two hours. He vowed he would not go up for the third night. Unsentimental. Remorselessly realistic, like any good handicapper, he knew the odds were off and he’d bet the wrong pony. Let Dowd and Mulvaney have their victory. He would slip gladly off with neither fuss nor fanfare. No need to endure the charade for yet another night. “Want half a hero?”

  Mooney looked up to see a hand flapping a sausage and pepper wedge beneath his nose. Defasio was attached to the other end of it, a thin gash of marinara sauce streaking his chin. “I can’t eat all this. Shame to let it go to waste.”

  The smell of oil, garlic and Parmesan hit Mooney like a fist. Something approaching a belch rose in his throat, bringing with it a jet of sour lava he was barely able to suppress. “Will you take that goddamned thing out of my face?”

  Defasio appeared hurt. The pencil line of sauce on his chin made him look silly and oddly tragic, like a clown. “Don’t you want any supper?”

  “No, goddamn it. I’m on a diet. And even if I wasn’t, I’d eat a mile of the Jersey Turnpike before I’d put that thing in my mouth. Now for Chrissake stop waving it at me.”

  Gloomily, Defasio wrapped the hero sandwich in its oily papers, rebagged it and stuck it beneath Ins seat.

  “Go wipe your face off,” Mooney added cruelly, then tapped Ramirez on the shoulder. “Anything going on down there?”

  “They got some junkie shootin’ up at 424 West Fifty-first Street. Wanna see him?”

  “How old is he?” asked Mooney.

  Ramirez chattered into the radio, then leaned back. “Fifteen.”

  “He got anything up there with him? Stones? Blocks? Stuff like that?”

  Again Ramirez chattered into the radio. When he turned back to Mooney his expression told all. “Just the hash, Lieutenant.”

  “Tell ‘em to take him down to Juvenile Court and book him for the night.”

  The engines droned on. The air, as well as the mood in the cabin, grew worse. When Ramirez was not chattering on the radio, he crooned Puerto Rican love songs. Mooney smoldered to himself while Defasio, slumped listlessly in his seat, sat staring out at the evening sky.

  When the helicopter turned at Sixty-third Street and started back downtown, Mooney closed his eyes and tried to forget his anger and disappointment. For a while he concentrated on Fritzi. He had a vision of her and himself seated at a quiet table, eating prime beef and drinking imported ale.

  In the next moment, the scene shifted to a paddock, painted a fresh bright white and spanking clean. Mares ran with their new foals. The air was clear, the grass green and there was the sharp resinous scent of pine and fir.

  Mooney could not say why the scene moved him to such anger. Had it something to do with the landscape? Too idyllic? Too pristine? Too fraudulent? Unpeopled and untrafficked? An illustration for a child’s book. More probably, it was the horses themselves. Their nobility and unselfconscious grace; magnificent power tempered with godlike gentleness. And the colts, sportive and frolicking, banging into the paddock rails, stumbling and starting up; unpracticed grace; the seed of champions—striving beyond all else for perfection. Nothing else was like that in life.

  “What d’ya say we go down?” Defasio’s voice intruded upon his reverie. Mooney reopened his bleary eyes and the paddock and horses were suddenly gone. In its place was the square back of Youngblood’s head and Ramirez’s amused stare. Mooney could see they thought he’d been sleeping.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “A little past eleven,” Defasio replied.

  “Where are we?”

  “Right over the Fifty-third Street heliport,” Ramirez said, looking hopeful. For a moment Mooney entertained the idea of one more pass over the sight. But by that time he had little heart for it. He leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “You can take her down now,” he said.

  On the ground again at Fifty-third Street and the East River, a Manhattan South patrol car picked them up and ran them over to the precinct house where the night’s catch awaited them.

  “What d’ya got for us, Corelli?” Defasio asked the desk sergeant when they limped in shortly after midnight.

  “It’s all lined up and waitin’ in the back. How d’ya want ‘em, Mooney? Separately or en masse?”

  “Together—line ‘em up. Let
’s get this over with fast.”

  There was a total of eight in the lineup room when they got there. It took Mooney approximately forty minutes to chat briefly with each and finally discharge them all as harmless. The peeping Tom with his powerful Japanese binoculars they knew for years and viewed with affection as almost an old friend. The three winos, each plucked from a different site, had all sought rooftops as refuge from the harshness of the streets below. If you had to be unconscious from alcohol for a number of hours, it was safer to be so on a rooftop than undefended in an alley or a park somewhere.

  A fifth was a bag lady by the name of Seraphina. She’d set up housekeeping on a tar roof nine stories above the city. The sixth was an amiable Neopolitan gentleman with handlebar mustaches. He’d been apprehended on a rooftop trapping and barbecuing pigeons for his supper.

  The last two were a couple—one, the black superintendent of a West Side cold-water, walk-up, and his companion, a white lady. A slatternly creature with bleached hair and pasty skin, she was mortified at having been caught in flagrante delicto. She pleaded with Mooney to release her without further delay. Her husband, she explained, was a musician. He worked at night, but he would be home shortly. It would not go well for her if she was not there when he arrived.

  It was all harmless and curiously depressing—this catalog of little sins and shabby, unheroic transgressions. When Mooney dismissed them with a disgusted wave of his hand, he thought he spied Corelli smirking.

  “Will you be wantin’ the helicopter again tomorrow evenin’, Lieutenant?” the beefy man asked. His voice reeked with sarcasm.

  It had been Mooney’s intention to call it quits that night. But the smirk on the desk sergeant’s gaze was a bit more than Mooney could choke down. He looked across at Defasio, who was watching him intently, as though he’d never seen him before. Then he looked back at Corelli. “You bet your ass I do. Have it ready for me by eight P.M.”