the New Centurions (1971)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  "Tell me about it. But first, can I use your bathroom? I've got to wash. And can you fix me something to eat?"

  "Certainly, senor. Go through that door. What would you like to eat. Ham? Eggs? Bacon?"

  "We're going to talk about Mexico. I should eat Mexican food. How about _menudo__? You'd be surprised how long it's been since I ate _menudo__."

  "I have _menudo__," laughed the night man. "It's not excellent, but it passes."

  "Do you have corn tortillas?"

  "Of course."

  "How about lemon? And oregano?"

  "I have them, senor. You know about _menudo.__ Now I'm ashamed to give you my poor _menudo."__

  Serge saw that it was after four but he wasn't the least bit sleepy and he felt suddenly exhilarated yet relaxed. But mostly he was hungry. He laughed in the mirror at the grimy sweat-stained face and thought, God, how I'm hungry for _menudo.__

  Suddenly Serge popped his head out the door, his hands still covered with suds. "Tell me, senor, have you traveled a lot in Mexico?"

  "I know the country. _De veras.__ I know my Mexico."

  "Have you been to Guadalajara?"

  "It's a beautiful city. I know it well. The people are wonderful, but all the people of Mexico are wonderful and will treat you very good."

  "Will you tell me about Guadalajara too? I want to know about that city."

  "A pleasure, senor," chuckled the night man. "To have someone to talk to at this lonely hour is a pleasure, especially someone who wants to hear about my country. I'd give you free _menudo__ even if you were not a policeman."

  It was seven o'clock when Serge was driving home, so full of _menudo__ and tortillas he hoped he wouldn't get a stomachache. He wished he had some _yerba buena__ like his mother used to fix. It never failed to help a stomachache and he couldn't afford to be ill because in exactly six hours he would have to get up and be ready for another night. The news on the car radio indicated that looting and burning was expected to resume heavily today.

  Serge took Mission Road instead of the freeway and there on North Mission Road he saw something that made him brake sharply and slow to fifteen miles per hour and stare. Eight or ten men, one woman, and two small boys, were lined up at the door of a restaurant which was not yet open. They carried pots and pans of all shapes, but each pot was ample in size and Serge realized they were waiting for the restaurant to open so they could buy a pot of _menudo__ and take it home because they were sick or someone in the house was sick from drinking too much on Friday night. There was not a Mexican who did not believe with all his soul that _menudo__ cured hangovers and because they believed, it did in fact cure the hangover, and even though his stomach felt like a goatskin bag pumped full of the stuff, he would have stopped and bought some more to keep for later if he had a pot. Then he looked at his helmet, but the liner was too grimy from oil and soot to carry _menudo__ in, and he accelerated the Corvette and headed for his bed.

  He felt he would sleep better than he had in weeks even though he had seen the beginning of the end of things, because now that they had a taste of anarchy, and saw how easy it is to defeat the civil authority, there would be more and it would be the white revolutionary who would do it. This was the beginning, and the Anglos were neither strong enough nor realistic enough to stop it. They doubted everything, especially themselves. Perhaps they had lost the capacity to believe. They could never believe in the miracle in a pot of _menudo.__

  As he looked in the rearview mirror, the queue of forlorn Mexicans with their _menudo__ pots had disappeared, but in a few moments their spirits would be soaring he thought, because the _menudo__ would make them well.

  "They are not good Catholics," Father McCarthy had said, "but they are so respectful and they believe so well." _Andale pues,__ Serge thought. To bed.

  Chapter 20

  THE CHASE

  "GOOD THING THEY'RE too fucking dumb to make fire bombs out of wine bottles," said Silverson and Gus cringed as a rock skidded over the already dented deck lid and slammed against the already cracked rear window. A glass fragment struck the Negro policeman whose name Gus had already forgotten, or perhaps it was buried there among the ruins of his rational mind which had been annihilated by terror.

  "Shoot that motherfucker that..." screamed Silverson to Gus, but then sped away from the mob before finishing the sentence.

  "Yeah, those Coke bottles aren't breaking," said the Negro policeman. "If that last one would've broke, we'd have a lap full of flaming gasoline right now."

  They had been out only thirty minutes, Gus thought. He knew it was only thirty because it was now five till eight and still it wasn't dark and it had been seven-twenty-five when they drove from the parking lot at Seventy-seventh Station because it was written here on his log. He could see it. It had only been thirty minutes ago. So how could they survive twelve hours of this? They had been told they would be relieved in twelve hours, but of course they would all be dead.

  "Friday the thirteenth," muttered Silverson, slowing down now that they had run the gauntlet on Eighty-sixth Street where a mob of fifty young Negroes appeared from nowhere and a cocktail had bounced off the door but failed to burst. This happened after someone had cracked the side window with a rock. Now Gus stared at another rock which was lying on the floor at his feet and he thought, we've only been out thirty minutes. Isn't that incredible.

  "Some organization we got," said Silverson, turning back east toward Watts where most of the radio calls seemed to be emanating at the moment. "I never worked this crummy division in my life. I don't know my ass from pork sausage."

  "I never worked down here either," said the Negro policeman. "How about you, Plebesly? It is Plebesly, isn't it?"

  "No, I don't know the streets," said Gus, holding the shotgun tightly against his belly and wondering if the paralysis would fade because he was sure he could not get out of the car, but then he supposed that if they succeeded in breaking a fire bomb inside, his instinct would get him out. Then he thought of himself on fire.

  "They just tell you here's a box of thirty-eights and a shotgun and point out two other guys and say take a car and go out there. It's ridiculous," said Silverson. "None of us ever worked down here before. Hell, man, I worked Highland Park for twelve years. I don't know my ass from sliced salami down here."

  "Some guys got called down here last night," said the soft-spoken Negro policeman. _"__I work Wilshire, but I didn't get called down here last night."

  "The whole goddamn Department's here tonight," said Silverson. "Where in the hell's Central Avenue? There was an assistance call on Central Avenue."

  "Don't worry about it," said the Negro policeman. "There'll be another one any minute."

  "Look at that!" said Silverson, and aimed the radio car down the wrong side of San Pedro Street as he accelerated toward a market where a band of eight or ten men were systematically carrying out boxes of groceries.

  "Those brazen assholes," said the Negro policeman and he was out and running toward the storefront after the already fleeing looters as soon as Silverson parked. To his surprise, Gus's body functioned and his arm opened the door and his legs carried him, unsteadily, but still carried him, at a straight-legged lope toward the storefront. The Negro policeman had a tall very black man by the shirt front and palmed him across the face with his gloved hands which were probably sap gloves because the man spun backward and fell through the yawning hole in the plate glass, screaming as his arm was raked and bloodied by the jagged edge.

  The others scattered through back and side doors and in a few seconds only the three policemen and the bleeding looter stood in the gutted store.

  "Lemme go," pleaded the looter to the Negro policeman. "We're both black. You're just like me."

  "I'm not nothin' like you, bastard," said the Negro policeman, showing great strength by lifting the looter one-handed. "I am nothing whatever like you."

  A peaceful hour passed while they took their looter to the station and engaged in what had to pas
s for booking, but which required only a skeleton of an arrest report and no booking slip at all. This hour passed much too quickly for Gus who found that hot coffee knotted his stomach even more. Before he could believe it they were back on the streets, only now, night had come. The small arms fire was crackling through the darkness. He had fooled them for five years, thought Gus. He had almost fooled himself, but tonight they would know, and he would know. He wondered if it would be as he always feared, himself trembling like a rabbit before the deadly eye at the last moment. This is how he always thought it would be at the instant when the great fear came, whatever that fear was, which irrevocably paralyzed his disciplined body and brought the final mutiny of body against mind.

  "Listen to that gunfire," said Silverson as they were back on Broadway and the sky glowed from a dozen fires. He had to take several detours on their patrol to nowhere in particular, because of the fire engines blocking streets.

  "This is crazy," said the Negro policeman, who Gus knew by now was named Clancy.

  It is the natural tendency of things toward chaos, Gus thought. It's a very basic natural law Kilvinsky always said, and only the order makers could temporarily halt its march, but eventually there will certainly be darkness and chaos, Kilvinsky had said.

  "Look at that asshole," said Clancy, and shined his spotlight on a lone looter who was reaching through a window of a liquor store feeling for a quart of clear liquid that rested there, miraculously whole among the broken glass. "We ought to give that bastard some sidewalk surgery. Wonder how he'd like a lobotomy by Dr. Smith and Dr. Wesson?"

  Clancy was carrying the shotgun now and as Silverson stopped the car Clancy fired a blast into the air behind the man who did not turn but continued his probing, and when he reached the bottle he turned a scowling brown face to the naked light, and walked slowly away from the store with his prize.

  "Son of a bitch, we're whipped," said Silverson and drove away from the lonely snarling figure who continued his inexorable pace in the darkness.

  For another hour it was the same: speeding to calls only to arrive in time to chase fleeting shapes in the darkness as the Communications operators continued a barrage of help and assistance and looting calls until all calls were routine and they wisely decided that the main order of business would be protecting each other and surviving the night uninjured.

  But at 11:00 P.M. as they were scattering a group intent on burning a large food market on Santa Barbara Avenue, Silverson said, "Let's catch a couple of these assholes. Can you run, Plebesly?"

  "I can run," said Gus grimly, and he knew, somehow knew he could run. In fact, he had to run, and this time when Silverson squealed into the curb and fleeting shadows faded into darker shadow there was another shadow pursuing fleeter than the rest. The last looter hadn't gotten a hundred feet from the store when Gus overtook him and slammed the heel of his hand in the back of the looter's head. He heard him fall and grind along the sidewalk, and from the shouts he knew that Clancy and Silverson had grabbed him. Gus pursued the next shadow and within a minute he was streaking down Forty-seventh Street through the residential darkness after the second shadow and another shadow a half block ahead. Despite the Sam Browne and the strangeness of a helmet, and the baton clacking against the metal of his belt, he felt unencumbered, and swift, and free. He ran like he ran in the academy, like he still ran at least twice a week during his workouts, and he was doing the thing he did best in all the world. Suddenly he knew that none of them could stand up to him. And though he was afraid, he knew he would endure and his spirit ignited as the sweat boiled him and the warm wind fed the fire as he ran and ran.

  He caught the second shadow near Avalon and saw that the man was huge with a triangular neck that sloped from ear to shoulder but he was easy to sidestep when he made two or three halfhearted lunges toward Gus and then collapsed in a gasping heap without being struck by the baton that Gus held ready. He handcuffed the looter to the bumper bracket of a recently wrecked car that was squatting at the curb where the man fell.

  Gus looked up and the third shadow hadn't made another three hundred feet but jogged painfully toward Avalon Boulevard, looking often over his shoulder and Gus was running again, easy striding, loose, letting his body run as the mind rested, which is the only way to run successfully. The shadow was getting larger and larger and was in the blue glow of the street lamp when Gus was on him. The looter's eyes blinked back in disbelief at the oncoming policeman. Gus was panting but bounded forward still strong when the exhausted man turned and stumbled toward a pile of litter beside a smoldering building and came up with a piece of two by four. He held it in both hands like a ball bat.

  He was perhaps twenty, six feet two, and fierce. Gus was afraid, and though his mind told him to use his gun because that was the only sensible thing to do, he reached instead for his baton and circled the man who sucked and rattled at the air and Gus was sure he would cave in. But still the man held the two by four as Gus circled him. Drops of sweat plinked on the concrete sidewalk at his feet and his white shirt was completely transparent now and clung to him.

  "Drop that," said Gus. "I don't want to hit you."

  The looter continued to back away and the heavy wood wavered as more eye white showed than a moment before.

  "Drop that or I'll smash you," said Gus. "I'm stronger than you."

  The board slid from the looter's hands and clunked to the pavement and he caved and lay there gasping while Gus wondered what to do with him. He wished he had taken Silverson's handcuffs, but it had happened so fast. His body had just started the chase and left his mind behind, but now his mind had caught up with the body and was all together.

  Then he saw a black and white roaring down Avalon. He stepped into the street and waved it down and in a few minutes he was back on Santa Barbara and reunited with Silverson and Clancy who were astonished by his feat. They took all three looters to the station where Silverson told the jailer how his "little partner" had caught the three looters, but Gus still found that his stomach rebelled at coffee and would accept only water, and forty-five minutes later when they went back on the streets he was still trembling and perspiring badly and told himself, what did you expect? That it would now all vanish like in a war movie? That you who feared everything for a lifetime now would dramatically know no fear? He completed the night as he had begun it, quivering, at moments near panic, but there was a difference: he knew the body would not fail him even if the mind would bolt and run with graceful antelope leaps until it vanished. The body would remain and function. It was his destiny to endure, and knowing it he would never truly panic. And this, he thought, would be a splendid discovery in any coward's life.

  Chapter 21

  THE GOLDEN KNIGHT

  WHAT THE HELL'S GOING ON? Roy thought, standing in the middle of the intersection of Manchester and Broadway gaping at the crowd of two hundred on the northeast corner and wondering if they would break in the bank. The sun was still bright and hot. Then he heard a crash and saw that the group of one hundred on the northwest corner had broken in the windows of the storefronts and were beginning to loot. What the hell's happening, thought Roy, and gained little solace from the faces of the policemen near him who seemed as bewildered as he. Then they smashed the windows at the southwest corner and Roy thought, my God, a hundred more gathered and I didn't even see them! Suddenly only the southeastern side of the intersection was clear and most of the policemen were retreating to this side of the street except one stocky policeman who charged a pocket of six or eight Negroes with their arms full of men's clothing who were strolling to a double-parked Buick. The policeman struck the first man in the back with the point of the baton and brought the second one to his knees with a skillful slashing blow across the leg, and then the policeman was hit full in the face with a milk crate thrown from the crowd and he was being kicked by eighteen or twenty men and women. Roy joined a squad of six rescuers who ran across Manchester. They dragged him away and were pelted by a hail of stones and
bottles one of which struck Roy on the elbow and caused him to cry out.

  "Where do the rocks come from?" asked a gray-haired, beefy policeman with a torn uniform shirt. "How in the hell do they find so many rocks lying around in a city street?"

  After they got the injured man to a radio car, the dozen officers returned to the intersection through which all vehicle traffic had been diverted. Officers and mob watched each other amid the screams and taunts and laughter and blaring radios. Roy never knew who fired the first shot, but the gunfire erupted. He fell to his stomach and began to tremble and crawled into the doorway of a pawnshop holding both arms over his stomach. Then he thought of removing the white helmet and holding it over his stomach, but he realized how futile it would be. He saw three or four more radio cars roaring into the chaotic intersection as the crowds panicked and broke into and away from the confused policemen who were shouting conflicting orders to each other. No one knew where the gunfire was coming from.

  Roy stayed in the doorway and protected his stomach as the rumors came of snipers on every roof and that they were firing from the crowd and then several policemen began firing at a house on the residential street just south of Manchester. Soon the house was riddled with shotgun and revolver fire, but Roy never saw the outcome because a frantic policeman waved them north again and when he ran a hundred yards he saw a dead Negro blocking the sidewalk, shot through the neck, and another dead in the middle of the street. This can't be true, Roy thought. It's broad daylight. This is America. Los Angeles. And then he fell to his stomach again because he saw the brick hurtling end over end toward him and it shattered the plate glass window behind him. A cheer went up from thirty Negroes who had appeared in the alley to the left and a young policeman ran up to Roy as he was getting up. The young policeman said, "The one in the red shirt threw the brick," and he aimed coolly at the running Negroes and fired the riot gun. The blast took two of the men down. The man in red held his leg screaming and another in a brown shirt limped to his feet and was pulled into a mob of cursing looters where he disappeared as the looters scurried away from the young policeman with the riot gun. Then Roy heard two small pops and saw a tiny flash in the midst of the retreating crowd and the car window next to Roy shattered.