Law and Order

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  Arthur Pollack was about five feet nine inches tall, and since he stooped a bit, he looked smaller than he was. He was thin, gray-faced, hollow-chested, and at a certain angle, he appeared to be cross-eyed. He looked like someone who had just recovered from a terrible illness and his slow, lazy smile seemed an indication of a random happiness at just being alive. He was the kind of guy people generally tend to underestimate.

  In Arthur Pollack’s case, it was a mistake.

  During a vigorous class in physical education, the instructor blew his whistle for a five-minute break. Francis Kelly, last man in the class, called after one recruit came down with the mumps, dropped to his stomach beside Brian.

  “Christ,” Brian complained, “they’re going to kill off half of us before they’re finished. I thought I was in good shape, but now I think I’m dying.”

  Francis Kelly propped up his chin on his folded arms and stared in amazement. “Hey, Brian, look at your little buddy.”

  Several people, including the instructor, were looking at Arthur Pollack. Arthur Pollack, his thin body in perfect balance, the baggy gym shorts sagging, the laces of his high sneakers dangling, was standing on his head. His head balanced comfortably on his folded arms while the rest of his body rose into the air as casually as he could stand on his feet.

  His eyes were closed and there was a faint, silly smile on his lips. The instructor, hands on wide hips, glowered at the spectacle as though it somehow offended him. The weary recruits were grateful that there was something, other than themselves, to distract him. They formed a semicircle and waited. Pollack sighed; it was a peaceful dreamy sound.

  Brian watched uncomfortably. He was a nice guy and Brian didn’t share the general anticipation.

  The instructor winked at his audience and extended his soft-soled shoe and pushed steadily against Pollack’s buttock. His body swayed slightly, his arms moved fractionally. Instead of toppling over, which is what he was supposed to do, Pollack merely adjusted his body to the change in balance. He also opened his eyes and scanned, in surprise, the hairy legs which surrounded him. He inhaled, closed his eyes, brought his knees down to his chin and neatly flipped himself through the air. He landed on his feet, face to face with the instructor. Rather, Pollack’s face was on the level of the instructor’s chest.

  “Wadda you, a fucking acrobat?” the instructor asked. Without waiting for an answer, he declared, “This here rest period is over. Now, since you’re so well rested an’ all, you and me can demonstrate some holds and throws.”

  The instructor, a bulging man named Murphy, went through a few holds, in slow motion, without hurting Pollack, who held himself loose and easy and went with the toss. His face, normal gray again after the healthy flush from standing on his head, was unconcerned.

  “You do them holds on each other,” Murphy told them, “and you be nice and careful not to hurt nobody. First, though, let’s test this guy’s memory.” He returned to Pollack and everyone had the same thought: Here it comes. “Do you remember what I told you yesterday to do when a guy comes at you from behind?”

  Pollack shrugged and rubbed his nose and nodded vaguely, uncertain.

  “Well, I think we oughta practice because it’s especially important for you little guys. Shit, some big guy’s gonna see you and think he can take you easy as hell. He’s not impressed when he sees you, right?” As he rambled on, moving away from Pollack, distracting him with the wandering chatter, he suddenly grabbed Pollack, who seemed to forget what to do with his hands and legs. He ended flat on his back on the mat. Murphy looked down at him and grinned. “See, that’s why a little guy gotta learn better than the big guy because the little guy ain’t got no weight. Okay, kid, gimme your hand and I’ll help you up.”

  Pollack remembered what to do with his hands, his legs, his body. The coordination was perfect, quick, graceful, stunning, almost flashy. Murphy, unprepared, was sent sprawling into the crowd of recruits. Pollack was on his feet instantly, leaning over Murphy.

  Murphy glared up at him. “You sonuvabitch. You tricky, sly little bastard. I was going to help you up.”

  Pollack shook his head in boyish innocence. “Gee, Mr. Murphy, I’m awfully sorry. I thought you were going to demonstrate that second fall you showed us yesterday. You called it something...I don’t remember.” Pollack closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the left eye was turned in slightly toward his thin blade of a nose. “ ‘The helping-hand toss’ you called it.”

  Immediately, Brian O’Malley said, “That’s right, Mr. Murphy. That’s what you showed us.”

  “Yeah, Mr. Murphy, you warned us about falling for the offered hand,” someone else said.

  Several hands reached down to Murphy and he flung a heavy arm at them and he ignored Arthur’s offered apology.

  Brian felt a warm glow of pride; the other guys moved from easy mockery to easy admiration for Pollack. The guy was small but he sure had balls.

  “Get out the goddamn mats,” Mr. Murphy roared. “You need nursemaids to tell you what to do. Bunch a’ fucking wise guys, huh? Well, I’ll make policemen outta you guys yet, if I gotta sweat you dry to do it.”

  Later, over a beer, Arthur Pollack brushed aside their compliments somewhat guiltily.

  “Well, in a way I wasn’t fair to poor old Murphy,” he confided. “You see, I worked in a circus for nearly three years. That’s how I saved enough to put myself through college.”

  Arthur Pollack had been, among other things, one-third of a trio who called themselves Wynken, Blynken and Nod. “I was Nod, always began by sleeping while standing on my head. On a high wire. It got so that I really could get some rest that way. And the wire wasn’t all that high by New York standards, but, boy, they loved us in Iowa.” He slurped beer, ordered more, laughed.

  “I also worked out with a muscle man named Grunto the Great. Poor guy was practically a Neanderthal. Really, not retarded, but an actual throwback. But a very gentle man if he liked you. I used to read him stories because of course he didn’t know how to read. He loved fairy tales and the poor guy used to cry real tears every time I read ‘The Snow Queen’ to him. He’d sob and sniff but plead with me to continue. Once, I tried to change it around, to give the story a happy ending, but he got very upset, very disoriented and confused about the whole thing, so I went the whole way with it every time, let him have his good old cry and all.” Pollack shook his head in wonder. “Here was a guy used to bend steel bars in his bare hands, and he cried at a fairy tale. Isn’t it a funny world?”

  Pollack was an orphan, twenty-three years old. He had traveled all over the country with the circus. He had sold patent medicine in Tennessee and Kentucky; had done a song-and-dance routine for a short time in a Jersey burlesque house; spent a season as a waiter and house comic in the Catskills; worked as a counselor in a children’s camp; served as a group leader at the Educational Alliance, teaching English to elderly immigrants; spent five years getting his bachelor’s degree from City College; and looked forward to a long and successful career as a police officer.

  “Of course,” he told Brian and Francis Kelly, “the trick is to keep taking those exams. There’s no point at all in planning to remain a patrolman. Just figure it this way, in twenty years, who’ll he at the top?” He spread his arms to include them. “Us!”

  “That’s okay for you,” Francis Kelly said morosely. Arthur Pollack made him feel very sheltered and inexperienced. “You got a college degree and all. But what the hell, lots of us didn’t even get a high-school diploma.”

  “Francis, I’m surprised at you,” Arthur said. “Guys like you, and you, too, Brian, you put too much emphasis on academic degrees. Hell, I’m impressed by the number of guys without college who got on the list, and near the top, too.” He tapped his index finger on his forehead and beamed at them. “You got it up here, native intelligence, something no time spent in a classroom can give a man. You guys got something going on up here. You beat out an awful lot of contenders. Don’t sell yourselves
short, buddies, we’ll all go to the top together!”

  At graduation, Pollack walked off with most of the awards for scholarship, proficiency with firearms and physical achievements. No one begrudged him. He was one of the most universally liked of the graduates.

  Brian O’Malley was given the shield his father wore as a patrolman and was told, with a firm handshake by the Commissioner, that he had a lot to live up to.

  Francis Kelly was assigned to the 23rd Precinct in Harlem. Pollack, who lived two blocks away from the 9th Precinct on Clinton Street, was assigned to a precinct in Washington Heights.

  Brian O’Malley was assigned to the 9th Precinct. He was assigned to work his first round of tours, four to twelves, with Patrolman John Tiernan, who was forty-six years old and had eighteen years on the job.

  “The first thing is,” Patrolman Tiernan told him bluntly, “forget all the shit they taught you at the Academy. Bunch of fucking schoolteachers, them guys. Book smart, yeah, but they don’t know fucking-a nothing when it comes to the street.”

  Patrolman Tiernan knew his streets intimately, and as he sauntered along, he spoke almost nonstop, identifying, instructing, advising.

  “What you do is, see, you get to know your sector. Who’s who, if you know what I mean. Let ’em see you, let ’em get to know your face, and let ’em get to know you, if you know what I mean.”

  He tapped his baton on the metal doorframe of a jewelry store, peered through the glass window, then jerked his head for Brian to follow. “Come on in and meet old Hymie.”

  The jeweler was a small straight man with a lined pink face and clear blue eyes and a wide smile which revealed square yellow teeth. He switched off the gooseneck lamp and rolled the jeweler’s eyeglass between his fingers. “So, Patrolman Tiernan, you brought me a new policeman, so young they make them now.” He nodded at Brian and the yellow teeth gleamed in what seemed more a grimace than a smile.

  “This here’s Patrolman Brian O’Malley.” To Brian he said, “Hymie got some nice stuff here, kid, and he’ll give you a good deal, you should wanna buy something.”

  The jeweler waved his hand expansively. “A nice watch, a ring for the girl. You’re not married yet? Ah, when the time comes, I got a nice diamond ring; I can do something special for the boys in blue. Patrolman Tiernan can tell you that.”

  “Okay, Hymie, we’ll be seeing you.”

  They walked along Delancey Street until Tiernan stopped in front of a tiny, dirty storefront. “Let’s go meet Gyppy Lee Sung.”

  The Chinese restaurant was a hole in the wall. It contained three battered tables, a collection of mismatched chairs. Plaster chipped from the walls and ceiling. The smell of clothing being ironed came at them from the small back room, along with an assortment of cooking smells.

  “Old Gyppy Lee lives back there with his family. Jeez, the guy has seven or eight kids.” Tiernan turned to the nodding proprietor. “How many you got now, Gyppy?”

  The skin was stretched so tightly over Gyppy Lee’s face that when he grinned, it was like looking at a death mask. He nodded brightly. “Got seven or eight now, that’s right, plenny kids, plenny nough now.”

  “Gyppy, show Patrolman O’Malley here where they almost took your head off during the tong wars.”

  The Chinese came toward them and nodded brightly. “Oh, very bad time then. Good time now, no make trouble now, everything fine.” He came close to Brian, who towered over him. “You want to see? Here, you look see.” He held his head back and exposed his throat. There was a thick, ropy scar which extended from somewhere behind his right ear across his throat. Gyppy Lee pulled his undershirt down along his left shoulder. The sound he made was something like a laugh. “They make almost good job, nearly take off arm, see. Oh, very bad time then, yes, good time now.”

  “Okay, Gyppy, you keep your nose clean now. And you feed Patrolman O’Malley here when he gets hungry, okay?”

  “Anytime, anytime, you come, Gyppy Lee feed real good.”

  The air outside the shop, by comparison, was clean and fresh. “Gee, do you really eat there? It looks like a ptomaine den.”

  “Naw, you gotta learn, kid,” Tiernan told him. “Gyppy Lee’s wife does the cooking and it’s really good. Not like the chop-suey crap. See, it’s one of the places you get to know about. Now, the average guy, he sees what Gyppy’s place looks like, he don’t go near it. But a lotta people, you know,” Tiernan winked and nodded for emphasis, “a lotta important people, they come down on a Saturday, Sunday, and they get a real feed here, for a buck, a buck-ten. Now what you do is, you feel like eating Chink, you let Gyppy Lee take care of you. And you toss him, say, a quarter, or a half dollar,” Tiernan said. “What the hell, the guy got seven or eight kids. Not too often, you understand. You don’t wanna abuse the guy’s hospitality.”

  Tiernan expounded on the tong wars, which had occurred farther downtown, out of the precinct, but had, on occasion, spilled over to the streets of the 9th.

  “I’ll tell you this, though,” Tiernan said. “Them Chinks keep it all in the family. They’re pretty tough bastards; don’t let all the noddin’ and bobbin’ fool you. Jesus, just a couple years ago, there was a lot of dead Chinamen lining the streets of Chinatown. Hatchets and knives them bastards used too. Jesus, buckets a’ blood when they got done with each other. But they’re settled down real nice now, and you don’t get no lip from their kids, neither.”

  They turned the corner to Sheriff Street and walked down to Rivington Street, which was lined on both sides, as far as they could see in either direction, with pushcarts. Old men and women guarded an assortment of wares with surprisingly quick, hard hands which snatched from prospective customers or idlers alike.

  Women of all ages, dragging children of all sizes, foreign-looking older people, all of them speaking an assortment of languages, filled the street: browsed, handled, measured, argued, purchased or moved on.

  Brian felt a curious excitement. There was a pace, a vibration, emanating from the tenement-enclosed street which spoke of a life and raw vitality that he wanted to understand with the easy familiarity which Tiernan displayed. He had a fleeting sense of despair that he would never be able to absorb, understand, categorize, sort out and see through the general commotion of merchandise and human beings, which was essential so that he could distinguish the normal from the police-unusual. It all blended into a noisy, directionless, patternless landscape and his eye moved from the street upward, along the tightly ranged, small-windowed tenement buildings which stood as walls overseeing the constant activity.

  Women, heavy-armed, heavy-jawed, sat and leaned on window sills and watched. From their windows, crowded onto small lines of cord attached from window frames to the edge of fire escapes, laundry dripped gray bubbles of water, unnoticed, to the street below. Brightly patterned chenille bedspreads were spread along railings of fire escapes, to catch the small breeze or pale sunshine.

  Pigeons flew overhead in sudden sweeps of activity from nearby rooftop coops; occasionally a stray gray feather drifted to the sidewalk. More often, their droppings hit the sidewalks and wagons and shoulders and laundry with random splatterings. Women turned angry faces and shook furious fists skyward. Others ignored the violations as though they hadn’t occurred.

  Small children sat, framed within the windows of their home, looking down as though at a spectacle. Others sat with feet resting on the iron slatted fire escapes, watched over by older sisters who warned against the treacherous stairway opening through which children might tumble to their deaths.

  Tiernan pushed a hard elbow into Brian’s upper arm. There was a tightening, a change in the patrolman’s face and in his entire body. He seemed to grow taller, harder. His chin lifted and he peered from beneath half-closed lids. His eyes, which were clear and pale, focused with the intensity of sun-glinted icicles through the crowded streets directly to the target of his sudden interest.

  There was a group of boys, dark-haired, dark-eyed, tawny-skinned and muscular,
sprawled on the steps of a tenement halfway down the block They all wore orange-and-purple-satin jackets inscribed with the name of their club, “The Warriors-SAC.” As the policemen approached the steps, the boys fell silent. They pulled themselves from easy stretched positions, which blocked the stairway, into huddled sitting positions and they studied their heavy-toed sneakers or their burning cigarettes or their dirty fingernails.

  Tiernan spoke to Brian but his eyes never left the boys. He tapped his baton into the palm of his hand and spoke as though the boys were deaf and blind.

  “Now these little bums are never up to any good. See them jackets they got themselves decked out in?” He extended his stick, lightly flipped it along the open edge of a jacket. The boy inside the jacket didn’t move or raise his head.

  “Not one of these little punks ever did a day’s honest work in his life, but they managed to get together ten dollars and fifty cents each to get these shit rags custom made.” His voice rose slightly and he turned to Brian. “How about that, O’Malley, you ever get yourself a custom-made jacket for ten dollars and fifty cents? Real class, ain’t they, orange and purple? What’s that, the guinea national colors?” he asked the boys. Tiernan reached forward swiftly, grabbed a handful of jacket and jerked a boy to his feet. “I asked you a question, Angelo. Didn’t I ask you a question?”

  The boy mumbled something and Brian saw Tiernan’s arm pivot down quickly. Without releasing the boy, he jammed a hard elbow into his stomach. The boy gasped softly.

  “This here little bastard is Angelo DiSantini. If there’s any trouble in the neighborhood, you just look for Angelo. Right, Angelo?”

  Angelo DiSantini wet his lips nervously. He glanced at Brian, then at Tiernan and shrugged. “I didn’t do nuthin’.”