He went on like this: “This city is a disgrace! It’s a disgrace! You aren’t safe here! And who cares? Does anybody care? Everything breaks down, and nobody gives a God damn! Everybody’s in the union! Teachers on strike, subways on strike, cops on strike, sanitation on strike. Money money money, and when they work do they do anything? Do they teach? Don’t make me laugh! The subways are a menace, they’re a menace! Sanitation? Look at the streets! Big raises, big pay, and look at the streets! And you cops1 Gimme gimme gimme, and where are you? Your apartment gets robbed, and where are you? Some dope addict attacks your wife in the street, and where’s the cops?”
Up till then we ignored him, the both of us; like he was a regular part of the city noise. Which in a way he was. But then he made a mistake, he overstepped himself. He reached out and tugged at my elbow, and he yelled, “Are you listening to me?”
They’re not going to start grabbing me. I turned around and looked at him, and he was so amazed he went back a step. The city had finally noticed him. I said to him, “I’m coming to the conclusion you fell coming up those stairs and broke your nose.”
It took him a second to work it out, and then he back-pedaled some more, and yelled, “You mustn’t care much about keeping that badge of yours.”
I was about to tell him what he could do with the badge, pin first, but he was still backing away, and the hell with him. I turned back and helped Paul with a fat old lady who was having trouble climbing because of bad ankles. But I kept thinking about what the guy had said.
4
It was a hot sunny day, and they were both in Joe’s backyard. Where the barbecue was in Tom’s backyard, Joe had put in a pool; one of those above-the-ground pools, four foot high and ten foot across. They were both drinking beer, Joe was in a bathing suit and Tom was in slacks and shirt, and Joe was trying to fix the pool filter. The damn thing was always getting screwed up one way another, it was about the most delicate machine ever made. It sometimes seemed as though Joe spent his entire summers fixing the pool filter.
They’d lived next door to one another for nine years now. Tom had bought his house first, eleven years ago, and when Joe wanted to move out of the city after Jackie was bom it happened the house next door to Tom was just going on the market. Back then, they’d both been in uniform, and sometimes even partnered. They’d known each other for years, liked one another, it seemed they ought to make good neighbors. And they did.
The houses weren’t the greatest in the world, but they were livable. They were in a development put up right after the war, back when the notion of curving streets was still new. They had three bedrooms, all on one floor, and a smallish attic that a lot of the guys in the neighborhood had converted to a fourth bedroom. Fortunately, neither Tom nor Joe had families big enough to need that, and neither intended to have families bigger than they already had, so they could keep their attics as attics, and fill them with all that junk everybody gradually collects through life, that nobody has any use for any more, but that nobody wants to throw away.
The houses weren’t bad. They were old enough to have been built before plastics were really big, which meant they were constructed fairly well, mostly of wood. They had clapboard siding that had to be painted every few years, they had half-basements for the utilities, the backyards were a pretty good size, and there was a detached one-car garage at the rear of each and every property. Gravel driveways separated the houses and defined the property lines, and every house in three or four blocks in all directions looked exactly the same, except for color of paint job or any special additions or changes that anybody might have made. Neither Tom nor Joe had made any special changes, so they both had the original basic house, just the way it had come from the architect’s drawing board; only a little older.
Most people put up fences along the sides of their backyards, mostly to keep little kids inside, but Tom and Joe hadn’t done that Between Tom and his neighbor on the right there was a basket-weave wooden fence put up by the neighbor, and between Joe and his neighbor on the left there was a chain-link fence covered with vines put up by that neighbor, but between their own two yards there was nothing but the remains of a hedge planted by some previous owner of one of their houses. The hedge had big gaps in it where they walked back and forth all the time, and they could never agree who was supposed to keep it trimmed, so nobody did, and it was gradually dying. And taking years to do it.
In every single house in the development that either of them had ever heard of, the kitchen linoleum was all cracked and buckled. In a lot of houses, including both of theirs, the basement leaked.
They hadn’t done any more talking about the robbery idea since that one time in the car, but they’d both been thinking about it. Not that it was real, not that they thought they would actually commit a major robbery somewhere, but just that it was nice to daydream about a possible way of getting themselves out of this grind.
Joe wasn’t thinking about the robbery idea at the moment, mostly because his mind was taken up with the problem of the pool filter, but Tom’s mind was ticking along on the subject, and all at once he said, “Hey.”
Joe was sitting cross-legged on the ground, surrounded by hoses and washers and nuts. He put a double handful of parts down, wiped his face with his hand, drank beer, looked over at Tom, and said, “What?”
“What do you think the Russians would pay for him,” Tom said, “if we kidnapped their ambassador?”
Joe squinted at him in the sunlight. “You serious?”
“Why not? Profitable and patriotic both.”
Joe thought about it for a couple of seconds, and then he looked all around the backyard and said, “Where the hell are we going to keep the Russian ambassador?”
Tom looked off toward his own yard next door. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s a problem.”
Joe shook his head and went back to the pool filter. Tom drank some more beer. They both thought their thoughts.
Tom
The squeal was at a junior high school; they’d found a missing teacher, dead.
It was about eleven in the morning, a cloudy day that promised rain for later on. Ed and I drove over in the Ford and parked in the school zone out front. It was one of the old gray stone school buildings, three stories high* looking more like a fortress than a place for kids. A concrete-covered play yard was on the right, surrounded by eight-foot-high chain link fence. Nobody was in it.
A recent fad among the kids has been to write nicknames on walls and subways and all over the damn place in either spray paint or felt-tip pen, both of which are very tough to get rid of, particularly from a porous surface like stone. The fad is for a kid to write his name or his nickname or some magic name he’s worked out for himself, and then under it write the number of the street he lives on. “JUAN 135,” for instance, or “BOSS ZOOM 92,” that kind of thing.
The fad hit the school building. As high as a child’s arm could reach, the names and numbers were scrawled everywhere on the walls, in black and red and blue and green and yellow. Some of the signatures were like little paintings, carefully and lovingly done, and some of them were just splashed and scrawled on, with runlets of paint dripping down from the bottoms of the letters, but most of them were simply reports of name and number, without flair or imagination: “Andy 87,” “Beth 81,” “Moro 103.”
At first, all of that paintwork looked like vandalism and nothing more. But as I got used to it, to seeing it around, I realized it gave a brightly colored hem to the gray stone skirt of a building like this, that it had a very sunny Latin American flavor to it, and that once you got past the prejudice against marking up public property it wasn’t that bad at all. Of course, I never said this to anybody.
Inside, we went to the principal’s office, and he said he’d show us where the body was. Walking down the corridor with us, he said, “The room was a girl’s lavatory, but all of the plumbing is out of it now. That’s as far as they got with the modernizing plan.” He was balding, about forty, wi
th a moustache and hom-rim glasses and a slightly prissy manner, as though he were more sinned against than sinning.
We got curious stares from the teen-agers we passed, so apparently the news wasn’t general yet about the discovery of the teacher’s body.
Ed said, “Why didn’t you report her missing?”
“So many of these younger teachers,” the principal said, “they’re apt to take two or three days off without warning, we didn’t think a thing of it. Another teacher noticed the smell this morning, that’s why she happened to look.”
I said, “We’ll want to talk to her. The other teacher.”
“Of course,” he said. “She’s in the building at the moment. With Miss Evans, what we think happened, a group of them must have decided to rape her, and took her in there. At some point she must have fought back. I don’t think they brought her in there with the intention of killing her.”
Intentions didn’t matter, if she was dead. None of us said any more, until the principal stopped and pointed at a door and said, “She’s in there.”
I went to the door as Ed said to the principal, “What about her family? You try calling her at home?”
I opened the door and took a step in, and the smell hit me in the face. Then, in the dim light through the dirty translucent windows, I saw her lying on the floor over against the green wall. Plaster showed white where they’d pulled the sinks out She’d been there for a week, and there were rats in the building. “God,” I said, and backed out, and slammed the door.
The principal was answering Ed’s question, saying, “She lived alone in—” Then he noticed, and said, “Oh, Fm terribly sorry! I should have warned you, I suppose.”
Ed took a step toward me, looking worried. ‘You okay, Tom?”
I waved my hand at him, to keep back away from the room. “Leave it for the ambulance.” I could feel the blood draining out of my head, a sensation of coldness in my arms and feet.
The principal, still prissy but bewildered, said, “I’m really very sorry. I took it for granted you were hardened to that sort of thing.”
I pushed past the two of them, needing to get outdoors. Hardened to that sort of thing. Jesus H. Christ!
5
They had the midnight-to-eight shift that week. It's the quietest of the three shifts, but at eight o’clock in the morning, driving home eastward into the rising sun, a man’s eyes feel covered with sand and he thinks his stomach will never be comfortable again.
Joe left the station first and got the Plymouth out of the lot and drove down the block to double-park across the street from the precinct house. He had to wait ten minutes before Tom came out, looking disgusted, and slid into the passenger seat.
Joe said, “What’s the problem?”
“Little talk from the Lieutenant,” Tom said. “Some damn thing about narcotics.”
“What about it?”
Tom yawned, fighting it, and gave an angry shrug. “Anything you pick up, be sure you turn it in. The usual noise.”
Joe put the Plymouth in gear and started through the maze crosstown and downtown to the Midtown Tunnel. “I wonder who they caught,” he said.
“Nobody from this house,” Tom said. He yawned again, giving in to it this time, and rubbed his face with both hands. “Boy, am I ready for sleep.”
“I got me an idea,” Joe said.
Tom knew at once what he meant. Looking at him, interested, he said, “You do? What?”
“Paintings from a museum.”
Tom frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“Listen,” Joe said. “They got paintings in those museums, they’re worth a million dollars each. We take ten, we Bell them back for four million. That’s two million for each of us.”
Tom’s frown deepened. He scratched the side of his jaw, making a sound like sandpaper. “I don’t know,” he said. “Ten paintings. They’d be as tough to hide as my Russian ambassador.”
“I could put them in my garage,” Joe said. “Who's gonna look in a garage?”
“Your kids would wreck them in a day.”
Joe didn’t want to give this up, it was the only idea he’d managed to come up with. “Five paintings,” he said. “One million apiece.”
Tom didn’t answer right away. He chewed the inside of his cheek and brooded out at the traffic and tried to figure out not only what was specifically wrong with the paintings idea, but also a general rule to live by, to guide his thinking on the subject of the robbery. It was a way of taking it seriously and yet not taking it seriously at the same time. Finally he said, “We don't want something we have to give back. Nothing we have to keep around us or hide for a while. We want something with fast turnover.”
Reluctantly, Joe nodded. “Yeah, I guess you're right,” he said, admitting it. “We’re not in a position for that kind of thing.”
“That’s right.”
“But we don’t want cash. We talked about that.”
Tom nodded. “I know. Everybody keeps serial numbers.”
Joe said, “So it isn’t that easy.”
“I never said it was.”
They were both quiet for a while, thinking it over. They were practically to the tunnel when Tom spoke up again, restating the rule he’d worked out earlier; narrowing the range of it, refining it. Gazing out the windshield, he said, “What we want is something we can unload fast, for big money.”
“Right,” Joe said. “And a buyer. Some rich person with a lot of cash.”
They were about to enter the tunnel. “Rich people,” Tom said. He was thinking very hard. They both were.
Joe
There were camera crews from two of the television news programs that showed up to cover it. The way we handled that, Paul and I were the first car that reacnea tne scene after the call came in, so Paul got interviewed by the one crew and I got interviewed by the other.
I wasn’t nervous at all. I’d never been interviewed personally on television before, but of course I’d watched the news sometimes when other guys did it, at the scene of an explosion or a big water-main break or something like that. Three times I’d seen guys I actually knew in real life being interviewed. Also, sometimes while taking a shower I’d run a fantasy kind of interview in my head, the questions and the answers and all, and how I’d hold my face. So you might say I was pretty well rehearsed.
The way they set things up for the interview, they put the camera so it was facing the building, so the building would show behind me and the interviewer while we were doing our thing. It was one of those huge office buildings being constructed there, and the hardhats kept steady working away at it all through the interview. One of their number had got himself killed, but that had only held their interest for maybe five minutes. Where money is concerned, you keep your mind on the job, you get it done.
These buildings are going up all over town, big glass and stone boxes full of office space. Practically none of them have apartments in them, because who wants to live in Manhattan? Manhattan is a place you work in, that’s all.
The buildings have been going up ever since the end of the Second World War. Good times, bad times, boom, recession, it doesn’t matter, they just keep going up. For the last ten years or so, most of them have been on the east side of midtown, Third Avenue and Lexington Avenue, around there. The first thing you know, they’ll give Third Avenue a classier name, the way they did with Fourth Avenue when the big office buildings went up on it and it was turned into Park Avenue South.
Anyway, that’s the section where most of the new buildings are concentrated, but there’s others going up all over the place. The World Trade Center way downtown* Sixth Avenue across from Rockefeller Center. And a couple up in my precinct, including this one where they’d just had the death and where I was going to get myself interviewed.
A guy I was talking to in a bar a couple of years ago said it was his opinion that the main characteristic of New York is that it’s going through all the phases of the phoenix at once. You remember readi
ng about the phoenix in high school? That’s what he said New York was; but all at once. New York is living, and it’s on fire, and it’s dying, and it’s ashes, and it’s being reborn, all at the same time and all the time. And boy, those buildings look it, coming up out of brick rubble where yesterday’s buildings were knocked down, coming up new and clean and pretty, and every once in a while killing somebody along the way.
The interviewer was a light-colored spade, with a moustache. You could see he thought he was the hottest thing in Bigtown. He and the director and the sound man and a couple other people fussed around a while, getting everything set, and then they started the interview. Somebody had written a little lead-in paragraph for the interviewer to say, and he had it on a clipboard he held in his other hand. The hand without the microphone, I mean. He had it on the clipboard, but he’d memorized it, because once he started talking he never looked at the clipboard at all.
Here’s how it went: ‘Tragedy struck today at the site of the new Transcontinental Airlines Building on Columbus Avenue when a worker fell thirty-seven stories within the uncompleted building to his death. Patrolman Joseph Loomis was among the first at the scene.” Then he turned to me and said, “Officer Loomis, could you describe what happened?”
I said, "The decedent was a full-blooded Mohawk Indian employed in putting the steel framework of the building up. What they call working the high iron. His name was George Brook. He was forty-three years of age.”
The interviewer had been looking me straight in the eye the whole time I talked, as though I was hypnotizing him. As soon as I stopped, he whipped the microphone from my mouth back to his and said, “What apparently went wrong, Officer Loomis?”
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 Page 4