The cabbie had turned to face me, then spun back as we came up on Grand Central.
“Grew eight new stories on top since they started making that Viagra in there.”
He let out a howling laugh and slapped the steering wheel with his palm.
“Building got bigger!” he bellowed. “Oh man, I’ll tell you. Ain’t that something?”
“Yes,” I said dryly, “very good. Topical.”
“Getting bigger,” he cackled.
He caught his breath at Fifth.
“Pull over,” I told him. I saw the main branch of the Public Library to my left.
“What?”
“This is good enough.”
He was sputtering as I got out. “I ain’t moved The Daily god-damned News.”
I decided to enter the library via the main entrance, to pass by the stoic lions, head up white marble toward Bartlett’s portico. With the sun sitting high above the avenue, the steps were crowded with tourists, their backs arched, palms flat on stone, faces awash in the soothing rays as if they were lounging on the Piazza di Spagna. Midtown seemed fine now, with its customary business bustle—UPS trucks, delivery vans in front of upscale sandwich shops, a load-in at Pier 1, messengers scrambling, a few businessmen with briefcases chatting casually, the rush of taxis, their horns blaring. Meanwhile, around the corner, long concrete slabs protected Grand Central Terminal from suicide bombers. And downtown in TriBeCa, it was still as quiet as a hospital zone.
The air in Astor Hall was cool and I paused for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the sudden shade, though I could make my way to the Microform Room wearing a blindfold. I’d spent the better part of eight months there more than a decade ago digging through copies of the New York Herald, walking the long marble corridors, lost in thoughts of Tammany, Tweed, Connolly, my Marina and our little Gabriella, my suddenly bright life, my unexpected and promising future.
And, for much of the last 18 months, I’d spent Tuesday evenings, Thursday mornings and Saturday afternoons back with Bennett’s breathless Herald, with Bella in her quest for an environment for Mordecai Foxx. Those journeys uptown provided a welcome respite from all the reality that surrounded us after September 11, all the damnable living history, and, before that, gave me a sense of how my daughter worked and how much she had grown. “Not yet, Dad,” she’d say when I asked her if she needed help. But then I’d leave the security of the past to retrieve microfiche for her, buy her $15 credit cards for the printers, go to the bargain stores on 40th for strawberry bubblegum and another marble notebook—always a marble notebook, very precise. “Yes, thanks,” she’d say before plunging back into a 130-year-old newspaper on a flat gray screen. Then, when my usefulness dwindled to uselessness, I’d go over to room 108 and read last week’s glossy magazines, last month’s World War II, Allure, Cracked, anything; tried my hand, unsuccessfully, at Il Messaggero. And I sat in every chair in the vast Rose reading room with nothing but my thoughts to haunt me, at least until the silver towers came down. (“Perhaps, Terry, quiet contemplation is an environment that connotes achievement, that recalls memories I would call ‘action-oriented,’ and is far more beneficial than you might have imagined.” Harteveld, the shrink.)
“Bella, I’m not going to spend the summer staring at these murals,” I complained, pointing at Haas’s rendering of the old Times building. “I’ve memorized them, for Christ’s sake.”
I spent three hours one day in Nat Sherman’s, and was the only man in there who didn’t smoke cigars.
“Sir, might I interest you in a special?” asked a man who smelled of clove and impatience. “Leon Jimenes Number Five, natural wrap—”
“Beat it,” I declined.
“Dad, while we’re here,” Bella said as we ate Thai, picnic-style, under the summer leaves of the Fifth Avenue trees, “why don’t you start a project?”
“Beat it,” I said to the hectoring pigeon. Tough guy looked me dead in the eye.
“You could’ve just said, ‘No thanks,’” Bella huffed.
“I was talking to the pigeon.”
“You were talking to the pigeon,” she repeated. “OK, then …”
Eyes open, I passed the information desk. An ancient woman, dressed in a sea-green dress and a matching coral necklace, shone a charming smile. “Good morning to you, sir.”
“Yes, good morning,” I replied.
“And how is Gabriella?” she asked. Then she became serious, somber. “She is all right, I hope.”
I stopped; squeak, as my sneakers caught on the hard floor. “Yes, she’s fine, thanks.” It was a question everyone who lived below Canal had to answer.
Relieved, she said, “Lovely girl.”
“You bet.”
I reached Room 100 a minute later. Behind the counter was a woman who seemed familiar from every library I’ve ever been in: thin with flat, lifeless hair, perpetual turtleneck, eyeglasses on a handmade dope rope; patient smile, a seriousness that suggested her mission was to ensure learning with order.
She said, “Hey, where’s Gabriella?”
These were the glory days of The Daily News: screaming headlines; stark, gory photos; punchy writing on deadline by an army of crime reporters; Ching Chow, the Jumble, Sally Joy Brown’s “A Friend in Need”; ads with pudgy, pouting sex kittens for X-rated films “you won’t tell your neighbors about”; full-page spreads from Korvettes, Hearns, Alexander’s; Dick Young, Gene Ward on sports; Ed Sullivan’s “Little Old New York”; the total mutuel handle from Aqueduct, which gave the Jersey bookies the night’s number—all for 10 cents.
The April 11 edition carried photos from the previous night’s Oscars on the front page—Hackman, Jane Fonda; and 82-year-old Charlie Chaplin’s return from exile. The hed didn’t match: GALLO BURIED, TWO OTHERS CUT DOWN. And underneath it, in smaller, italicized type: JEWISH LEADER SLAIN; DIAMONDS GONE.
Page two had a big piece on the Vietnam War—B-52S STRIKE THEIR DEEPEST INTO THE NORTH—and on the opposing side, I learned that, after six mobsters had been ventilated during the past two weeks, Carlo Gambino was “seeking peace.” And I learned about Asher Glatzer.
Or maybe not: The two reporters on the story had gone immediately into overdrive, nearly turning a man who was the respected leader of the downtown diamond district, a beloved family man, into a one-dimensional stock character in his own story. They wrote as if they wanted to impress Spillane, and only the emotional outbursts of his friends saved Glatzer from vanishing amid the pumping adrenaline, the requirement to shock. The scent of fresh plasma that emanated from their prose couldn’t hide what Glatzer’s friends and colleagues felt.
“We’ve lost our father,” cried one unidentified man.
Nice summary quote, I thought. Might’ve meant more if we knew who said it.
“I cannot imagine what we will do now,” said Marion Rosenbloom, a clerk at Tri-County Jewelers. “He was everything to us. Everything.”
Much better.
The photo: Glatzer’s body in the litter-strewn, concrete stairwell of a subway station on Chrystie, under a sheet, near a crumpled brown paper bag, gum wrappers, cigarette butts.
“I blame myself,” said Ralph Glatzer, the victim’s son.
“He had not an enemy in the world,” commented Asa Dieskau, a fellow Bowery-based diamond merchant. “He could walk anywhere in this neighborhood without protection. It’s outrageous.”
I sat back. Glatzer was killed at about 5 P.M., the News said, before the day had faded to darkness, as workers moved along the busy streets to the subway that ran through midtown on its way up toward Harlem. Yet the News’s Night Owl edition, which hit the streets by 9 P.M., had enough on the diamond angle to run with it.
The lead: “At Chrystie Street near the Bowery, where the B and D lines end their journey through Manhattan, diamond merchant Asher Glatzer found death under a sharp blade. What likely began as robbery concluded in murder.”
I turned the plastic handle to advance the film, stopping to read Dondi,
then to see what the Knicks had done, and then I found the front page of the next morning’s paper.
SOLDIERS LAND IN PHU BAI NEAR DMZ was the headline; in itals below: “Teen Girl Quizzed in Glatzer Slaying.”
I spun to page three, TEEN QUESTIONED AS GLATZER IS MOURNED ran across the top, above a four-inch photo of two plainclothes cops hurrying a young girl toward the precinct house. Or so the caption said: One of the cops had thrown his raincoat over the girl’s head. She had on old-style high-top Converse sneakers, jeans and handcuffs.
“A female student at a Hell’s Kitchen high school was questioned today by police about the April 10 slaying of civic leader and diamond merchant Asher Glatzer.
“The student, whose name was not released by police, was brought into custody following a tip received early this morning.”
Had to be, I thought. They found Sonia less than 24 hours after Glatzer had been killed. But the cops didn’t know yet that she was 18 or the News wouldn’t have kept her name under wraps.
I followed the story to the inside of the tabloid. It shifted to a summary of the service at Riverside, and it carried the obligatory list of attending dignitaries: Lindsay stayed away, but two of his successors were there—then—City Controller Abraham Beame and Congressman Edward I. Koch.
A photo of Asher Glatzer with then-Senator Jacob Javits accompanied the piece. Both men wore tuxedos and confident if stoical smiles. A B’nai B’rith banquet in 1967, the caption informed, at the Plaza. Below, another photo: a woman in her late sixties wearing black, sobbing profoundly, supported by two men. The widow Glatzer, following the service.
I went back to the photo of Glatzer. A round man with gray hair, he seemed hardy for his age, with clear eyes and a broad chest.
With a flick of the wrist, I returned to page three. Sonia Salgado was as tall as one of the detectives who had her under the arms, but her legs were slender beneath floppy jeans and the alloy cuffs floated on her thin wrists. And when I closed my eyes, I saw her more than 30 years later on the floor of her apartment. I imagined she might have added a few inches to her waist during the decades in Bedford Hills, but she wasn’t particularly robust. I wondered if she could’ve wrestled Glatzer to the Chrystie Street station floor to rob him, if she could’ve ripped him open with those slight wrists and skinny arms.
Somebody thought she did. Twelve somebodies.
I went looking in Thursday’s paper for the commentary by a columnist, whoever the News had who ran with Breslin and Kempton—men who covered New York City as living history, whose 750-word pieces sang with wit, passion and a sense of justice. Surely, somebody was going to let the News readers know more about the high school senior who had been brought in, the girl who ditched more than a half-million in diamonds but forgot to toss the wallet.
Someone would have a snappy line about how quick the tip had come in.
The News was down on doves and peaceniks. They gave Agnew room on page two. They weren’t going to find balance in a story that had a dead rich man on one side, an immigrant teen on the other. This was great stuff. No need for temperance here.
But why should there be? Glatzer was a man of faith, a man who did his job, made friends, served his community. A man who struggled to make something of himself, who raised a family, built a business. Now he is forever remembered as victim, as a man who died as he lay in a pool of his own blood.
Somebody called in a tip. The cops moved fast. The wallet in her bedroom. In the basement, the bloody wrapper.
But the columnists—
There were no columnists. No Murray Kempton, Jimmy Breslin. Dream Street by Bob Sylvester, Monique in Paris, yes. But no one on Asher Glatzer’s death. Crime was handled on deadline by 25 hard-nosed reporters, masters of the declarative sentence.
HOODLUMS, NY was the hed above their story on page three: Two more gangsters had been gunned down, they told us. Somebody, they said, dumped Gennaro Ciprio in Brooklyn, Frank Ferriano in Manhattan. This gang war was sweet butter on hot toast for these guys. WE KNOW GALLO KILLER, COPS SAY. (Christ, Gallo got it in front of his kids.) And there’d been a gunfight at Grand Central; the brief caption ended with the phrase “the cop who shot him was wounded.”
I came to New York as a kid with my Uncle Eddie. I don’t remember the hail of bullets, the river of blood. I remember Jerry Lucas and Earl Monroe, Radio City and Prometheus at Rockefeller Center. The Checker cabs. Hot dogs at Gray’s Papaya. The sense of excitement, and my sense of wanting to be part of whatever it was that made this vital, energetic place so spectacularly unique, so relentlessly appealing.
In the world depicted by the News, someone had to pay and pay fast. Maybe it didn’t matter who.
GANG GIRL ARRAIGNED IN GLATZER SLAY.
The story had moved to page four.
“Police today said 18-year-old Sonia Salgado, a senior at DeWitt Clinton High School, was arraigned and charged with the first-degree murder of diamond merchant and civic leader Asher Glatzer.”
A photo from the DeWitt Clinton yearbook.
A sweet, bewildered girl, her black hair flipped up above her gangly shoulders. Simple flowered dress. A forced smile. Uneasy eyes.
The News found a teacher who claimed Sonia “ran with the wrong crowd.”
The gang.
“The smell of marijuana cigarettes was ripe as the police raided the girl’s tenement apartment at 572 West 36th Street.”
I put my finger on the screen. That’s interesting, I thought. Balance: Sonia Salgado was in the Drama Club.
Her mother, the News said, worked in the garment district.
Somehow they made it seem sordid.
I had my fill of it now. There was even a holdup in Moon Mullins.
“We’re grateful to the members of the New York Police Department who worked so diligently to bring our father’s killer to justice,” said Ralph Glatzer.
Guilty as charged.
I got back downtown by 1 P.M., hoping Leo had some warmed-over etouffée, crawfish gumbo, backbone stew, anything he could reheat on the old hot plate, its frayed wire stretched across the desk in his musty office. Living alone now, Leo still cooked the kind of meals he had enjoyed as a child in Louisiana, once served with a confident glee in his Cajun-Creole restaurant and now made for Diddio and me, while Leo pretended that what was in an old plastic container in the leaky beer cooler was left over from a meal he’d concocted for someone else. Someone who filled his hours away from his ramshackle bar with laughter, tenderness, possibility. Someone who could gently nudge him to manage his weight, which had ballooned to nearly 380 pounds; who would take his arm when he wheezed, coughed, grew red and then pale after the mildest exertion and tell him he was too important to her to settle for that kind of life. Diddio and I tried to help: dragged him to the doctor’s, invited him out, chided him, threatened him, told him we cared and didn’t want to see him go this way.
“I guess it’s not the same, D,” I said one evening. “You and me doing this.”
“Ain’t that a fact,” replied Diddio, running his fingers through his long hair.
As I approached the Tilt, I heard music, a romantic aria, resonating clearly despite the thickness of the reinforced green door. It was unmistakably Italian. Verdi, Donizetti? Bellini? I stopped, I put my hands on the door, I listened and I could feel the door vibrate with the power of the tenor’s tremulous voice. Accompanied by the faintest instrumentation—warm woods, the plucking of violin strings—he conveyed bravado, tenderness and a profound sadness within a phrase. I was captured.
To follow the motion of the music, I closed my eyes and leaned my weight against the door; if there was traffic behind me on Hudson, pedestrians crossing from shade to sunlight, another John Deere backhoe on its way to Vesey, I was oblivious to their presence, their mission. I was lost as strings rose up like feathers on a peacock, then receded mysteriously, as the tenor’s voice—Pavarotti, undoubtedly—broached, then shattered, the silence. I could feel the aria build confidently to its peak
yet never abandon its epic sense of tragedy. Silence again, and Pavarotti rose above the zenith—a new pinnacle of sorrow, of loss. He made his final, powerful declaration, but there was no crashing crescendo from the orchestra. Instead, woodwinds and strings entered solemnly, as if to carry the moment forward rather than abruptly end it.
I waited, I waited: I knew Leo was lost in memory, and I knew well that no one wanted to be pulled from that sacred space, at least not before it was time to move on, time to let go.
Leo’s memories were different than mine. I recalled what was. He remembered his dreams of what might have been.
Eleven years ago, I was awakened by a knock on the front door. Turning over, I looked to the clock on the nightstand, the red light in the deep darkness: 3:22.
“Terry?” Marina wore long nightgowns. This one was a pale yellow and it felt like silk. “It is your turn.”
I threw my bare legs over the side of the bed. “It’s not the baby,” I said, my voice cracking after hours of silence. “Not unless she snuck out.”
It was Leo.
The big man—going 275 then, with muscles across the shoulders, at the biceps—hung back at the bottom of the steps. He still had on his kitchen whites, an apron, his white, size 16EEE shoes. Under the stark streetlight, his uniform seemed illuminated.
“Loretta’s gone,” he said plainly.
“What?” I threw my arms together in front of me in a feeble attempt to ward off the February cold.
“The money’s gone,” he said. “Loretta’s gone.”
“Christ.”
“And listen here, I don’t want to talk about it with nobody,” he continued, his Louisiana singsong evident despite the harsh message. “You tell Marina, you tell Diddio. You tell whoever you want. Me, I’m leaving.”
“Leo, come in,” I said quickly. “Come in and sit down.”
He waved his big, wide hand and he shook his head. “I’m fucked,” he said. “The city is gonna take Big Chief’s. I found papers. …”
I went down the cold steps in my bare feet and I reached for him. But he backed away.
A Well-Known Secret Page 6