Law and Order

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  With a heavy sense of despair, mixed with an incredible sense of freedom, Vincente viewed the town square of his childhood; despair because for one terrible moment the sight of the unchanged, unchanging, barren dusty landscape, the black-clad, dirt-stained women with their scarred heavy buckets lined up at the village fountain, which was their only source of water, the faint whiff of donkey manure, the dry dust of that existence, enveloped him, reached around his body and encompassed him in its possessive grip. But when the village priest, an old, shapeless, pock-marked man, his cassock greening with age, approached Vincente without recognition, respectfully, reverentially, bowing, nodding, hand extended in a form of blessing, then Vincente exulted. This was not his home. He was an American.

  In the next twenty-four hours, he visited incredulous cousins and uncles and aunts. Particularly, he was fascinated by the men cousins his own age. Twenty-eight or twenty-nine, they were defeated, scarred, lined, bitter, gap-toothed old men, already bent into the shapes they would forever bear.

  Vincente carried their faces and stunted destinies inside himself for all his life as a constant reminder of what he had escaped. After the war, he and Josefina regularly sent packages of food and clothing, and when they could, they sent money to his relatives and never forgot.

  There were times when Vincente was nearly overcome with terror at his good fortune. He opened his own small shop in the garment center and soon four people worked for him. Children arrived regularly, healthy and black-eyed and olive-skinned, girl after boy, boy after girl, fine, fat. His family filled the small clapboard house in Brooklyn which Vincente and Josefina’s brothers had built. There was a nice back yard for grapes and figs. On any late afternoon, weather allowing, Josefina’s father and his old men friends played boccie down the long alleys between the yards of their houses and they argued and laughed and hooted in old men’s voices. All of the children went to the Holy Visitation school and were taught by the pale Sisters. They learned religion and to love their country and to respect their parents and elders.

  Vincente took great pleasure in hearing the clear, sharp voices of his children as they crowded around his table, dark heads bent over heaping plates of food. They switched easily, naturally, without thought or effort from the Sicilian dialect of their parents and grandparents to the quick, pungent slang of Brooklyn and with just as much ease reverted to the musical singsong intonations as they memorized poetry which Sister had assigned.

  The oldest son, Ralph, was apprenticed at seventeen into the construction business and set to work with his uncles. When the Korean War started, Ralph enlisted in the Army and it hardly seemed possible to Vincente: the small boy a grown man.

  When the telegram came, followed by a letter from Ralph’s commanding officer, neither Josefina nor Vincente knew why their son had died or where this place Heartbreak Ridge was or why it was important enough for their son’s life. Vincente never really understood why the war was fought or why there was such bitterness in the country because of it. But beneath the terrible wound of his grief there was one tiny glowing sense of consolation; blood of his blood had been spilled for this country and whatever this country might exact of him or any of his flesh, it was a debt of honor, honorably to be paid.

  His daughters grew up and married neighborhood boys and stayed close to home for a few years, then began to move out to places on Long Island or out to Jersey.

  His sons went into the service, came out, went into Civil Service: one in the Department of Sanitation, one in the United States Postal Service, one in the Fire Department and Pete became a policeman. His second-oldest son built an addition to the house when Josefina died and moved with his wife and two sons from an apartment in Woodside and it was agreed without anything ever having been discussed that this would be their home with the old man.

  When his son Pete took a leave of absence from the Police Department and volunteered in the Army to fight for his country in Viet Nam, Vincente felt the old deep pride: yet another son willing to stand up and pay his debt to this great country. If the war and its issues were confusing, it was of little importance. What was important was that his son had respect for his country and its flag. It was Pete’s turn to go as his father had gone and as his brothers had gone before him. Vincente hugged and kissed his son and sent him off to war with God’s blessing on his head.

  A different son came home from Viet Nam, a stranger, with hollow, empty eyes, and beneath the ragged black beard, a bitter turned-down mouth that seemed to forget how to smile. He had some steel pins in his right kneecap which caused him some pain, but there was something terribly changed and unknown about this son and Vincente would never know him again.

  Harley Taylor glanced nervously down the length of the conference table, waiting for the men to settle themselves. He wondered if he’d ever get used to the mix of students; three-quarters of them were older than he was and even the younger ones, under twenty-six, seemed of a different order. He had taught two other classes at the John Marshall College of Criminal Justice, formal English literature classes, but when his students, for the most part working policemen, discussed the various reading assignments, somehow, mysteriously, the closeness of violence seemed to punctuate their every verbal disagreement. Violence to these men was for the most part not some latent, held-in, primitive memory but a very real, active, ongoing life-style. When they discussed the common, ordinary events of their everyday working lives, they made him feel somewhat sheltered and incompetent, even somewhat stupid, though Harley Taylor, at twenty-six, with a doctorate newly received from Harvard, was Phi Beta Kappa, a Fulbright scholar and a thoroughly respected member of the academic community. For when they opened up, these hard-mouthed, shrewd-eyed men, when they revealed what was behind their stiff masks, Harley could feel the small pale hairs along the back of his neck stand erect and the start of an involuntary shudder work its way down his spine.

  He looked down the table to the other member of the teaching team for this special, newly devised course. Mel Arden, the balding, middle-aged, pipe-fondling psychologist, radiated a controlled, anticipatory excitement. His intelligent dark eyes slowly circled the table without lingering on any of the men, yet they narrowed or widened momentarily as he made his incisive calculations. He cradled the bowl of his unlit pipe between thumb and forefinger, leaned back, stretched his neck muscles, let his head loll forward, then to one side, then back, then to the other side, then he remained still, chin toward chest, for a few seconds. Finally, yoga exercise completed, he looked up brightly, eager for the seminar to begin.

  When everyone who was assigned to the course had arrived and found a chair and settled down, a certain uneasy tension began to descend on the students and on Dr. Taylor. Not Dr. Arden; he merely returned inquisitive glances with a bland, expressionless countenance. After the shifting of bodies, shuffling of feet, scratching of heads, coughing, nose blowing, cigarette lighting and gum chewing had gone on almost beyond endurance, one of the men finally, in exasperation, addressed Dr. Arden.

  “Well, now what?”

  That was Patrolman Schultz, a large man with gray curly hair and deep shadows under his eyes.

  Dr. Arden seemed to enjoy the whole thing, to relish the discomforting curiosity and uncertainty and wariness of the men in this new situation. It was their first experience with a nearly unstructured course and it was by nature of an experiment.

  Dr. Arden shrugged easily. “Whatever you want,” he said. “You’ve all received copies of the reading list and the dates for discussion of each book.”

  They bent over the mimeographed reading list. Some consulted wristwatches; one or two nervously straightened edges of notebooks.

  “Well, we don’t have any book for discussion this week,” another man said. They all turned toward him as though for direction. “The class is scheduled for two hours, Dr. Arden. You intend to shorten the period today, since it’s the first meeting and we’ve nothing to discuss?”

  Again, the friendly but no
ncommittal shrug.

  “Could I ask a question?” someone in the middle of the table called out.

  “By all means.” That was Dr. Arden and Dr. Taylor, both together.

  A low tough voice, directed at the surface of the table but calculated to reach everyone in the room, asked incredulously, “Malcolm X is on a reading list of American authors? Is that what he was?”

  “Hey, we got some porno stuff on this list.” The man seated next to Dr. Taylor looked up accusingly, first at Dr. Taylor, then toward Dr. Arden.

  “Where? Hey, where, Bradley? Which ones? Maybe we could read them first?” The comedian of the class got an anticipated laugh from the others.

  Dr. Arden quietly commented, “That depends on what you consider porno, doesn’t it, Mr. Bradley?”

  Bradley’s face came up, he narrowed his eyes, his finger kept to the accused title. “Not what I consider porno, Dr. Arden. What the law considers porno. Hell, we raided a bookstore not more than two months ago and this here book was one of the books we confiscated.”

  “Yeah,” said the man next to him, “but I bet it got thrown out of court.”

  “Yeah,” Bradley answered caustically, “the courts really give us cooperation. They really make our job a pleasure.”

  “Well, Mr. Bradley, I trust you won’t find the rest of the list too offensive,” Dr. Arden said.

  “He’ll find number six offensive.” The voice was flat and deep, almost without inflection. He had long dark hair and the black beard which covered his cheeks and chin was neatly clipped and tended. He wore a light-blue turtle-neck sweater which emphasized the surprising light-blue eyes, incongruous in so swarthy a man. He turned those eyes fully on Patrolman Bradley. “It’s Hiroshima, by John Hersey.”

  “Why do you think Mr. Bradley will object to Hiroshima?” Dr. Arden asked. He leaned forward slightly, the bowl of his pipe hidden in his clenched hands. “Suppose you identify yourselves when you speak, gentlemen? You’re Mr. ...”

  “Peter Caputo. Patrolman Caputo. Or do we dispense with our rank and serial number?”

  “I think we ought to keep to civilian status, if that’s agreeable with everyone.” Dr. Arden looked at each one, waited for dissent or agreement, but no one said anything. “Well, Mr. Caputo, why your prediction?”

  Caputo’s eyes returned to Bradley, who moved uncomfortably under the force of the stare. Then he smiled, an upturning of thin lips inside the dark beard, and he moved his shoulders just slightly.

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said with a soft emphasis that made it clear he thought he was right.

  There was a curious tension in the room. It emanated not just from Patrolman Bradley, who leaned forward, stubbed a cigarette with great force into a dirty ashtray, then leaped up, ashtray in hand, and emptied it into a metal wastebasket. There were a few low exchanges, a few wisecracks, a couple of consultations of the reading list.

  “Who made up this list anyways?” a short-cropped man asked sharply. His chin rose slightly, his head went to one side to give force to the accusation of his question.

  It was exactly the tone of voice that Dr. Taylor had come to dread: the policeman voice, used to intimidate, badger, refute, deny, insist, demand. He’d seen them in day and night classes, middle-aged men unsuited and unaccustomed to being at the receiving end of instruction.

  “Why the hell don’t he come right out and say what’s on his mind if he wants to make a comment about the times he lives in? Why the hell do we have to wade through all this stuff and try to figure him out? Can you tell me, Dr. Taylor, I mean really tell me, why it’s essential for me to go through all this literature in order to qualify for my degree in police science?”

  “The well-rounded man, Mr. McCarthy, should have at least a familiarity with the past, a working knowledge of human nature as revealed in the great literary achievements of our predecessors, so that when confronted with changes in our society that seem unprecedented, beyond our comprehension, we can fall back into a certain assurance. We can perhaps expand our frame of reference. We can go hack more than two thousand years and discover that great scholars of the Greco-Roman era thought the world was going to hell, that the youth of the day—”

  “Well, Dr. Taylor, I’ll tell ya. I don’t have to go back no two thousand years. See, I can remember back when I was a kid, in the thirties and forties, when kids had respect. All a cop had to do was make his appearance on the block and the little wise guys would straighten out. One whack on the behind with a nightstick straightened out more potential murderers and thieves than all the books ever written.”

  The man with the short hair identified himself as a detective, name, John Cassidy.

  “The reading list, Mr. Cassidy, was made up by a committee of faculty members,” Dr. Arden said reasonably.

  “Pretty peculiar list if you ask me,” Mr. Cassidy said.

  “The selections might seem arbitrary, without cohesiveness,” Dr. Arden said mildly, deliberately ignoring the implications of the previous comment. He glanced at the list, then at the men around the table. “We range from Faulkner to Malcolm X, from Conrad to Mailer, from J. Edgar Hoover to Richard Rovere. Included are novels, books written by journalists, some by political activists; we’ve included some anthropology, psychology. In short, as the course name implies, a compendium, with hopes that reading any particular book might lead to an investigation of works that might possibly give another view of the same situation.”

  “You care to identify the people you refer to as political activists?” a polite gray-haired, gray-eyed man asked him quietly.

  Dr. Arden ran the stem of his pipe across his lower lip for a moment, smiled and shrugged his characteristic noncommittal, patient gesture. “That will be for all of you to decide. This will be the most totally open course you’ll probably ever be involved in. No grade, no exams, only pass-fail and the only qualification for passing is attendance. No pressure to contribute. Sometimes your very silence can make a statement. The readings merely represent a starting point for what we hope will be an exciting learning experience for all of us, faculty as well as student. This will be an entirely unstructured course, a creative experience for all of us.”

  A neatly groomed, white-shirted, dark-tied and -suited, closely cropped, clean-shaven, blandly polite man, middle thirties, raised his hand and waited for Dr. Arden to nod in his direction.

  “That isn’t exactly accurate, Dr. Arden, as I understand the term. You said the course would be unstructured. Well, it seems to me that it very definitely does have a structure and I’m not too sure if you’re being totally honest with us.” It was not put in the form of an accusation but as a polite, sincere, concerned inquiry.

  “Mr. ...?” Dr. Arden raised his brows.

  “Fraley. George Fraley.”

  “Mr. Fraley, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I was being a bit too broad in characterizing the seminar as unstructured. Let’s just say it will be interesting to see what form of structure tends to build around the seminar hours we spend together.”

  When it was suggested that each student introduce and identify himself, Fraley quietly stated that he was a special agent attached to the New York office of the F.B.I.; he was a senior at John Marshall; he expected to receive his degree in criminal justice in June.

  Seven of the men were seniors; Pete Caputo and Patrick O’Malley and the gray-haired detective assigned to the Manhattan D.A.’s office were juniors; two men were sophomores; two men were absent. They stayed together for an hour and twenty minutes, then by mutual consent they disbanded until the following week.

  As they stood up to leave, Pete Caputo’s right leg seemed to lock. He lurched forward unexpectedly into Patrick O’Malley, nearly knocking him over.

  In confusion, Patrick turned; in a split second he grabbed out and kept Caputo from hitting the floor. “Hey, you okay?” Patrick asked, thinking the man was passing out.

  “Hold on for a second, okay?” Pete Caputo, without explanation, leaning against P
atrick, bent over and with both hands clutched at his right knee and gave it a sharp jerk. There was an odd metallic clicking sound, then Caputo stood up. His dark face had gone darker with the exertion. “Okay,” he said tersely, “thanks.”

  There was something familiar about Caputo, something recognized, known, some connection Patrick felt instinctively. “You get the leg in Nam?” he asked quietly.

  Caputo seemed surprised, then, after a slight consideration, he nodded and said, “Yeah, over in Nam.”

  Patrick pulled his mouth to one side and said, “That’s some fucking old war, huh, buddy?”

  That was the beginning of their friendship.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  DEPUTY CHIEF INSPECTOR BRIAN O’Malley pushed the button down for a dial tone on his private line. Before he could dial, the light flashed on the extension and Sergeant Dickson’s voice announced through the call box on his desk, “Chief Pollack is on four, sir.”

  He hit the button, heard Dickson hang up before he said, “Good morning, Chief.”

  “Brian, a couple of things before I see the Man.”

  “Want me to come down?”

  “No, no, brief me over the phone. Hey, before I forget, that was nice coverage you got for those guys in Brooklyn last night.”

  Two narcotics detectives on a stakeout had spotted a man on the fire escape of the building they were watching. He was holding what appeared to be a package close against his chest and the two police officers, acting instinctively, positioned themselves directly below the man in time to catch the missile which he sent hurtling to the sidewalk.

  This “missile” turned out to be a two-month-old child; the man turned out to be a newly released psycho who had just cut his wife’s throat. One detective ran, infant in arms, to telephone for assistance while the second raced up the stairs to the roof and proceeded to keep the man from leaping from the ledge for the twenty minutes it took for the emergency squad to spread a net, into which the distraught man promptly jumped.