Manhattan Mayhem (28 page)

And small crime was thriving—if you could call it that. The top district attorney was trying to fight it, placing more undercover cops to bust up prostitution, the numbers games, the creeping narcotics trade. But as of now, Samuel Rabinowitz could only walk his beat, chalk tires to see how long a car had been parked at a space with a posted time limit, and keep an eye out for no-goodniks prowling for something to lift.

A year passed, and the better part of another. He took to going to temple after not attending for a long, long time. There he met a girl named Ruth. She loved him. He tried loving her.

One afternoon he and Ruth took a table at Katz’s Deli. It wasn’t until their order came that he noticed Izzy and his sister two tables over. The sister, holy joe, had she ever changed. She was what, seventeen, eighteen, now? Sally. That was her name. Sally. And there was that sign: S
END
A S
ALAMI
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OUR
B
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. Yellow, just beyond Sally Jacobs’s light-brown, curl-sprung head. A crown it could be.

Sam brought Ruth over to say hello. Izzy invited them to sit, bring their food. The rest of the time at that table, Sam did not register Ruth in his consciousness at all.

Ruth saw. Afterward, Ruth complained. Ruth walked.

In a week Sam and Sally strolled streets together to look in windows, and one Sunday they went to a movie called
Gentlemen’s Agreement.
The story had a New York City journalist, Phillip Green, becoming Phillip Greenburg so he could understand anti-Semitism. Sam and Sally talked a lot afterward about the masquerade. She could never do it, fake who she was on whatever side, while he kept saying you do what you must for a cause.

And, of course, he thought about, but didn’t tell her about, the fake MP in the woods south of Bastogne sitting proudly on a fallen tree, chin up, spine straight, lips moving in praise to the God or führer he loved, so that her newest suitor, Sammy Rabinowitz, could aim a muzzle at his chest and blow out the young German’s heart.

Sam was off-duty, out of police uniform, and at another favorite place for breakfast, tearing into a bagel loaded with cream cheese and sliced salmon and onions, two kinds of pickles on the side. He picked up a
newspaper from the seat of the chair opposite and was reading it when Izzy and Mike Kelley walked in. Sam rarely saw anyone from the old days. Now he’d seen Iz twice in two weeks.

Sally had told Sam her brother didn’t really like it that she was dating him. “Izzy can be funny about things,” she said. Iz thought Sam had it too easy. Easy—Sam’s father dead early, Sam out busting his hump for jobs to help out his mother, once in a smelly butcher shop.

Mike headed over to his table. He still sported a crew cut, his red scrub looking good atop a body that had gained the right weight. His pants bore a sharp crease, as always, and his shirt, you could go blind from the white. “They let you off the beat?” he asked. “Don’t they know you’ll just go stir up trouble?” Not too funny, but Mike always tried.

“They let a horse out of its stall sometimes,” Sam said. “What’s buzzin’, cousin?” Mike said he was selling furs out of his uncle’s shop in Stuyvesant.

Izzy, he could be Sad Sack from the comics, slouchy as he was. He gazed at the banner on the newspaper that Sam still held in his left hand and said, “Don’t tell me you read that piece of toilet paper.”

Sam shrugged and didn’t explain.

Izzy’s face pinched. He said to Mike, “Let’s order. We have things to do.”

They got their orders bagged. On the way out, Izzy gave Sam a look that should have bothered Sam, but the effort would take more energy than what his caffeine boost had yet imparted. Good old Mike: at least he mouthed a “sorry.”

Sam folded the newspaper and laid it on top of the next table, masthead boldly showing. It was his first look at the
The Daily Worker,
the rag that had disrupted more than one family and set of friends.

The next time Sam went out with Sally, she told him how crabby her brother was after seeing Sam in the deli. “It was that newspaper you were reading,” she said.

“He thinks I’m not serious about you, is all. I’ll go have a talk with him. When’s he home?” Her brother still lived with their mother,
although they’d moved downstairs to the first floor. The next day on his lunch break, Sam rang the two-chime bell.

When Izzy opened, he paused and then said, “Get your filthy Commie feet out of here.” He leaned left, and Sam could see a yellow something move between the door hinges. The door opened wider so Izzy could show him he was gripping his old stickball bat.

“She’s safe with me, Izzy.”

“You like your stinkin’ knees? You like walking around in your cop suit? Tell you what. Keep walking. The direction you came from.”

Sam left, but for Izzy’s mother’s sake. She was sitting on the green couch by the front window, holding back the lace curtain. Sally told him their mother’s doctors said she’d had a nervous breakdown. The father lived a separate life two apartments over. Mrs. Jacobs’s gray hair hung in strings past the collar line. Her mouth was the shape of a staple.

Six months later, Sam got a transfer to the Ninth Precinct. He’d still be pressing the bricks for a while, but in a larger area. If things worked out, he was told, he might get to work investigations, with a small pay pop. He let that desire be known from the start, but he knew it could be a year before it happened.

Still, now each day on the way to the Ninth squad room, he’d be singing the latest song, maybe “Buttermilk Skies” or “Prisoner of Love.” And when he went to visit Sally in the apartment she took with a girlfriend and the girlfriend stepped out, he’d try singing to her like Dick Haymes did with “Till the End of Time,” he was that happy.

Sally had snagged a job as a telephone operator, and though she hated leaving her mother, she was tired of sleeping on the couch and needed time away from a needy parent. Her place was only twelve blocks away, and Mom would be all right with Izzy still at home. To make Sam laugh, she’d put on fake operator voices and tell him far-fetched stories. One night after doing that, he said, “You’re making a hurtin’ turtle out of me, if you don’t marry me.” First time he ever said it.

“Hurtin’ turtle? That don’t even rhyme,” she said, and then she got buried in laughter. It took two more proposals before he got her to say yes.

Sam’s sergeant called him in and told him there was a major hoodlum named Harry Gross putting the bite on dozens of storekeepers and bar owners. “If we don’t stop him, he’ll be mayor before we know it.”

A funny one, and Sam laughed but could see how true it could easily be. The sergeant said he was giving Sam a transfer. “Detective Brian Hirsch over in Investigation needs more men to bust this guy. There are written tests and a probationary period, of course, but then you’re good to go.” He said Sam caught Hirsch’s notice when Hirsch assisted an undercover officer in a numbers bust with two precincts involved, and Sam was one of two cops handling crowd control. Hirsch liked his deportment and, when he checked, his record. Sam didn’t even know who the detective was, but he gave his sergeant his thanks, along with his regrets. And when he left the building, he threw a kiss to the sky.

The weeks went by fast. Sam aced the tests; why wouldn’t he? He bragged to Sally. They talked about a wedding date for fall.

Detective Hirsch leaned in across the cluttered desk that wasn’t even his, wasn’t anybody’s, just a desk with everybody’s junk on it. This man who looked like Sam’s own father, with a hairline that was almost a memory and the rest of it Brilliantined so shiny it was close to blue; hazel eyes that could drill out any lie you ever thought you could get away with; and hands that should’ve belonged to a guy lifting wrestlers two at a time out over the ropes.

“Graft,” Hirsch said. “Too many of our guys got dirty hands. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t pin on this badge so I could have a side job taking cash from criminals. You with me on this?”

An easy yes from Sam.

“There’s a gonif who, shall we say, perpetrates persuasion for Harry Gross.”

Sam nodded and asked, “Knee-capping, rib-pounding, like that?”

“Knuckles, knives, kicks to the jewels,” Hirsch said. “Just like Gross doesn’t do it himself, this guy has gorillas, too. One of these days a client’s gonna get capped, and Gross and his henchmen will be candidates for the electric cure. I’d like to send a message to Gross before he gets any bigger for his britches. This gonif working for Gross; he wears scarves and floppy hats to conceal something that happened to his face. Spotters say you can tell because it’s waxy-like. The nose is not the same size every day. Some days he’s Jimmy Durante, some days he’s Pacific Islands.”

“Wait. A guy with a fake nose?”

“Right. He—”

Sam said it slowly: “Tino Carlo Caruso.”

Detective Hirsch said, “You know him?”

“I might.”

Not Tino, damn it. Not the Tino who got his crotch stuck on the barbed wire in basic because he slid under the wire instead of on his stomach. Was it the war? Was it what happened the day of the sniper? Or had Tino always been on the brink, and Sam just didn’t know it because the two weren’t reared in the immediate vicinity of each other? Cops on the take was one offense. But Tino, from the neighborhood—at least sort of—put an ache in Sam’s gut in a different way; as if Sam were somehow responsible for him,
had
been responsible for him on a Belgian road one toe-curling winter. That cursed day, Sam had told him to keep a glove clamped on his face until they reached a medic. Had Tino been saved for this?