“I sort of hate to say it,” Tony Ciffo was saying, “but I try my best not to get involved. Doesn’t sound so good, does it? Especially me being a cop. Well, maybe it’s best. I don’t know. What I do know for sure is that you can always count on the weirdest thing in the world happening once a day, at least.
“Did I ever tell you why I bought the car and started driving in from Brooklyn to work?
“Oh boy!” Ciffo slapped his head as he drove, up Park Avenue to where he would cross over at Eighty-sixth, aimlessly eastward, keeping an ear cocked for the radio calls.
“All the time, I used to take the subway. I took the D train, which is the line that the Guardian Angels call ‘The Zoo.’ Well, I used to ride at night a lot and the zoo was in full bloom then, I’ll tell you.
“One night, I’m going back home after eleven and after we cross over the bridge into Brooklyn, I’m one of three people in a car. There’s me at one end minding my own business. I’m in my street clothes. And down at the other end of the car are a skinny white woman and sitting across from her a big, beefy black guy who’s sort of growling or something.
“So I’m watching these two. And I know that sooner or later, unless the black guy is just a psycho who likes to make strange noises, I’m probably going to have to get involved. God, I’m groaning to myself, you know? Why in hell am I riding the subway? There’s no way I can be just a plain innocent bystander. I’m a cop and so I’m always on duty. That’s the law. I can’t just ignore something or I’m up on charges by Internal, see.
“Anyway, pretty soon the big guy gets up and stands in front of the woman and he starts yelling at her. Now I know what I have to do.
“So I get up and I walk over there and while I’m walking, the guy starts putting his hands on her shoulders and she’s really scared.
“I shout at him and he turns around and goes for something in his coat, which later turns out to be a knife. I took out my shield real quick and identified myself as a cop and told him to just relax and everything would be all right. I don’t like to get these guys any more tense than they already are.
“So then I do what you’re supposed to do, which is to put yourself physically in between the people in a situation like this. I’m standing now with my back to the woman, who is scared out of her mind, and this guy with a knife in his coat. Again, I tell the guy to just lay off, maybe come down to the other end of the car with me and talk about whatever’s on his mind. I’m real friendly with him, which usually sort of catches them off guard and works to the cop’s advantage.
“But this time, it’s no go. He starts swinging at me and I took a few pretty good shots. Thank God he didn’t use the knife. Well, he was a lot taller than me, but his swings were pretty wild and I missed most of them, so I figured I could do what had to be done.
“I start hitting back, which just infuriates the guy and so I had to sort of pound him pretty good. The guy is lying on the floor of the train against a door and pretty soon someone’s punching me in the back.
“It’s the woman! She’s screaming at me, ‘How dare you hurt my husband? How dare you hurt him!’ Jesus, I never figured for a minute they were together.
“That’s a true story. I swear. And that’s why I don’t take the subway in. No more, man. I just don’t want to know what’s going on sometimes.”
His partner, Jean Truta, reached across the front seat of the car and poked him in the ribs.
“What’s that for?”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“What?”
“I don’t mean about the D train. God, anything could happen and does. I mean, I don’t believe you when you say you don’t want to get involved. What a lie that is! You forget, I see you in action.”
Something white and wet hit the windshield.
“First snow of the season!” Ciffo said. “Christmas is coming. Oh boy, watch out!”
Jack Clark ended his tour at four, showered in the basement locker room and then walked from the precinct house over to Madison Avenue where a certain shop sold a piece of Moroccan art he figured on buying his wife that Christmas, if he could nick the price down a bit.
It was a clammy, windy sort of early winter day in New York, the sort of raw weather guaranteed to bring on influenza. You bundle up against the cold air and the dank humidity makes you sweat, so you open up a bit and then start shivering when the cold gets you again.
The outdoor air is bad enough, but coming as it does at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, it is particularly bad in combination with the routinely overheated shops. The jostling crowds are not what make New Yorkers tense and quarrelsome at this jolly season so much as the schizophrenic atmospheres of hot, dry stores and frigid mugginess outside.
For thousands, it is an intolerable season in New York, a city which does its absolute best to remind everyone that if you’re alone for the holidays you might as well dig yourself a nice little hole in the ground and say good-bye. Festive announcements ring everywhere—East Side, West Side and all around the town. It’s a wondrous time, a gorgeous plumpudding sort of time, if you have money in your pocket and maybe a little in the bank, if you have the love of some good people, a safe harbor of a home, if you have reasonable hopes, if you can live most of your days without fear. That eliminates several million New Yorkers in one way or another.
There is a side of the New York Christmas orgy that cops begin to dread on the day after Thanksgiving. While millions of brightly colored greeting cards float through the post office swearing peace and goodwill, while happy skaters at the Rockefeller Center picture-postcard rink glide rosy-cheeked past the gilded statue of Prometheus and the giant pine tree glittering with thousands of green and red and gold lights, there is an agony about to explode with grim repetition—the holiday blues, so-called.
Wives with long-standing grievances court danger when they nag their husbands; burglaries, the special concern of Jack Clark and his colleagues, will inevitably rise as single professional apartment dwellers spend less and less time in their flats, more time drinking, more time shopping; those who cannot cope with the disparity between television plenty and their own mean poverty begin staring sullenly at people on the streets, especially those with the brimming shopping bags, and they grow angrier as Christmas Day nears; the unemployed middle class nurse their shame, or bitterness if it’s been a while; the hungry are required to be grateful for the seasonal charity when encountered by newspaper reporters who specialize in what are called “human interest” stories; the lonely, who are legion, are ignored a little less than usual, but it doesn’t help much. Some of them can’t or won’t take it anymore.
It is the time of year when every cop in the city figures he’ll sooner or later see something nobody wants to hear about because as far as everyone seems to be concerned, the whole world is supposed to be wrapped up in ribbon and foil and candy canes.
Jack Clark calls it the time of year “when cops try to get in and out of the job without everything getting to them, which it can at Christmas; the time you have to keep thinking about whatever it is you have of a life outside the job, when you just want to do what you have to do at work and then get the hell home as fast as possible afterward.”
As Clark rounded the corner at Madison Avenue, an old woman he didn’t know, would never hear of, stood at a lace-festooned window four floors over an apartment house rear court that was clean and pleasant when she first came to America with her young husband.
She lived in the East Eighties, in a big old squat building in Yorkville, one of the first houses to become solid German during the big immigration of the 1920s. She used to grow roses in one spot down in the courtyard that drew a halfday’s sun. Children used to play down there, they used to sing songs in English, songs they learned in the American schools, and their German-speaking mothers would beam with pride.
The courtyard was a filthy place now. The old woman stared down at it through her windows, covered by an accordionlike web of rusted steel grating, with padlocks so big and heavy that she had trouble dealing with them on those rare days she was brave enough to open up and pretend she wasn’t living in a prison of sorts.
There was glass and rubbish all over the ground below, filth the super didn’t bother picking up because there was no use to his labors. The trash would return in a matter of hours. One day last week, she opened a rubbish can and a rat jumped out at her. She fell and cut her knee and it hurt her to walk back upstairs, write a note of warning for the back door and then walk all the way back up to her apartment. She noticed the day after that her note had been spray-painted with an obscenity.
Children were often in the courtyard these days, but they were not young children. They were teenagers, most of them less than sixteen. All of them smoked marijuana and played loud radios and cussed like the thugs they would become. On summer nights, the marijuana smoke would float up and through her windows and make her sick.
As she looked on this cold gray day down into her courtyard, one of the super’s two Doberman pinschers barked insanely, the beast’s breath crystallizing in the air. The dog barked on the exact spot where she and her late husband, Franz, had once taken coffee and crullers with the Sunday newspapers in the two wicker chairs they thought nothing of leaving outside for their use, just as everybody else in the building did. Last week, for the fourth time that year, her mailbox in the lobby had been pried open.
Well, it hadn’t much mattered. Long ago, she had had her Social Security check and her husband’s pension check mailed directly to her bank account. Only bills came now, and a dwindling number of letters from old friends at Christmastime. Her children knew only the telephone and none of them lived in New York and long distance was so expensive they would complain.
The day her mailbox was broken again was the day she tried to kill herself.
She drew a good full tub of hot water and put some oil into, it and eased herself in after stopping up the drain and the overflow slot. Her intention was to fall asleep and sink down into the water and she would drown in the warmth. But when the tenant down below, someone with a loud and thumping stereo that played from the moment he rose until well after midnight, complained about water seeping into his bathroom, the super was at the door. He marched right into the bathroom and shut off the water, then took hold of her arms and yanked her out of the tub all naked and wet and humiliated.
You can’t kill yourself if it means inconveniencing someone.
The dog had barked now for an hour, steadily, madly. The old woman walked slowly to her kitchen and took down a tin from on top of the refrigerator, inside of which was a key.
She walked back to the window, slid it open and shivered, then fitted the key inside the padlocks. It took her several minutes to twist them free. She pushed open the grates and a wet, nasty wind filled her apartment.
With more agility than she’d been able to summon in the past dozen years, the old woman stepped up onto a chair, then to the sill. Below was the degraded courtyard. Behind her was a spotlessly clean house. She’d used scouring powder to scrub the bathroom fixtures earlier that day. The dishes had been washed and dried and stacked. Fresh flowers were in a vase on top of an old upright piano.
No one knew what she thought as she stood on that sill, nor how long she remained there, although detectives from the Nineteenth PDU guessed it was long enough to take stock of her decision—several times over. It appeared she had shifted her weight from foot to foot, indicating that she had remained there on the sill for some time, maybe as long as half an hour.
It was easy enough to guess her motives, though, once her children were interviewed by the police. Her son said, “Mother told me, the last time I saw her, which was three months ago, that she got so lonely sometimes she thought about killing herself.”
Her son hadn’t known of the bathtub incident.
“I was making plans to come visit her,” he told police.
But he hadn’t telephoned his mother. It was to be her surprise.
She left no note, no word and no inconvenience this time. She simply jumped, silently, to her immediate death.
Jack Clark had never seen her before. A short, heavy woman with thick white hair and yellowed skin. Her eyes were bad, one of them bouncing around out of control, the other filmed with cataracts. She had a man’s torn brown topcoat on and a rag around her neck to keep out the chill air. And she had only one mitten, which she wore alternately, one hand and then the other.
She was chanting something. Clark couldn’t hear the words yet over the traffic noise and the chatter of holiday shoppers like himself who crowded Madison Avenue in the upper Sixties. The thing that was unmistakably pathetic about her was that she knelt, knees pressed against the cold, hard pavement, with a brass cup full of pencils thrust out in whichever hand wore the mitten.
He was a half block away when he noticed her, when she turned her head and he saw that face, the injured eyes and the constantly moving mouth, set in a smile that didn’t belong. He stopped for a moment, then started again.
Clark walked slowly toward her. Others, he noticed, walked quickly by. A few stopped to inspect the pencils, some of them dropped a coin into the cigar box on the pavement in front of her knees.
She kept right on chanting. As he got closer, Clark heard the words “Merry Christmas to us, one and all … Merry Christmas to us, one and all … Merry Christmas …”
New Yorkers are confronted every day with a huge assortment of grotesqueries on the streets, everything ranging from the simply objectionable to the horribly pitiful to the deranged screamers and mumblers. Even this latter group knows enough to stay away from the tonier districts of the Upper East Side. But every so often, someone like the white-haired woman on her knees with a brass cup set up on a corner like Madison and Sixty-eighth and everyone just tried to cope with it as best they could. It was inconvenient, but one couldn’t escape everything in the city, after all.
As if in a trance, Clark found himself walking straight past the woman on her knees, like the overwhelming majority of holiday shoppers. Nobody would fault him for ignoring her. Certainly she wouldn’t; she couldn’t even see him. Besides, she wished everyone a Merry Christmas, whether they bought her pencils or no.
Now he was almost a block past her and he couldn’t remember taking the steps. In another block, he’d be at the shop dickering over the price of a Moroccan objet d’art. Morocco! He thought of the exotic little back streets of Casablanca, full of cafés and beggars and forbidden pleasures. In the tourist districts, there was a popular wisdom about beggars. You shouldn’t put a single dirham in even one grimy hand because then the whole mob of them would follow you around. It occurred to Clark in Morocco that that was pretty ugly nonsense and so he defied it. He would travel the little back streets and make a habit of putting a little something into every beggar’s hand or cup. And he was always thanked for his generosity.
All it cost him now to turn around and start walking back to the old woman on her knees wishing peace and goodwill with no guarantee of even simple civility was a momentary wave of embarrassment. It proved a false embarrassment at that, anyway. No one cared that Jack Clark went back to the blind woman and dropped a fiver into her cup any more than they cared he had passed her up the first time.
He felt better than he had in days.
“It doesn’t hurt us to take the attitude once in a while, ‘Hey, I’ve got it and this guy doesn’t, so I’ll give him something,’” Clark reasoned.
For a change, he’d done something about someone’s misery that didn’t involve busting anyone. For a change, he’d come across someone who had found the way. Too often, especially at Christmastime, he had to deal with people who lost their way, like the lonely old woman on the sill.
The 10-19 came over the radio in the last hour of their tour. Officer Ciffo pulled the squad car over to the corner of Park Avenue and Seventy-eighth.
The district radio dispatcher often cannot afford the time necessary to broadcast assignments requiring lots of detail. In those nonemergency cases, a 10-19 is issued, meaning the squad is requested to telephone the precinct desk at the very earliest opportunity.
“Got a dime?” Ciffo asked as Officer Truta gathered up her pad and opened the passenger door.
“Yeah, but give me one of yours anyway,” she said. “I’m always coming out on the short end of these things.”
“Here’s a quarter, kiddo. Knock yourself out.”
Ciffo watched her dial the station-house number in the phone booth, knowing what they were likely to face in a few minutes. She made some notes and returned to the car.
“So we’ve got a DOA possible, right?”
“Yeah,” Truta said, closing the door. She read the address of a high rise on East Seventy-second Street between Second and First avenues.
“Jesus H. Christ, what did I tell you?” Ciffo said. “It’s starting, all right. ’Tis the season to be jolly and all that. What’s with this one?”
“She’s sixty-eight, lives alone, had heart surgery a few months ago. Her son up in Albany has been trying to call her for the last three hours and all he gets is a busy signal and he’s out of his mind with worry. He even had the super go up to her apartment and knock on the door and call him back. The super said he didn’t hear anything. He asked him to go into the apartment and he said he couldn’t do that without the police—”
“So here we go.”
“—so here we go. We’re supposed to call him collect up in Albany the minute we get inside that apartment and find out what’s what.”
The snow fell heavier, pelting the windshield of the squad car. Tony Ciffo, thirty-five years old, thought about the day not far off when his own mother would die.
At the apartment building, the staff was waiting for the police. The super, two porters, the doorman, a security guard. There were also several tenants.
“A good building,” Truta said. “The people stick together here.”
Ciffo got out of the car, heavily, like he weighed twice what he did. He worked himself up into a smile.
“Hi, how are you doing?” he said to the doorman who let him and Truta in.
The tenants who had gathered started twittering. Ciffo took his hat off and said, “Listen, folks, we’ll let you all know, okay? Right now, we have to get up there quick, so why don’t you wait right here and when we come down, we’ll let you know. Help us out, okay?”
Then to the super, “Let’s go.”
Ciffo smiled at the small group of worried people in the lobby as the elevator doors shut and the super pressed the button to the eleventh floor.
“Mrs. Rotare was the nicest lady I ever had in this building and that’s the truth,” the super said. His name was Freddy. “All the time, she’s got something nice to say to you, even when it’s a big problem in her apartment I got to take care of.
“She had her little weird points, like everyone does. You get to see a lot of weird things about people when you’re a super.” Freddy thought a second, then added, “When you’re a cop, too, right?”
“Right,” Ciffo said. He looked at his watch.
“Like every time she tossed her daily stuff down the hatch,” Freddy went on, “it was mostly wine bottles and astrology magazines. Who knows? She never hurt anybody anyway, not like some people I could mention live here in the building.
“Jeez, I’m going to miss old Mrs. Rotare. Who knows what’ll move in after her. Some of these people who get in here, man-oh-man, I’m telling you …”
Freddy let the image fade away as the elevator door, at long last, opened to the eleventh-floor corridor. Ciffo stepped out of the car, followed by Truta, who still wore her hat. A woman somewhere in her thirties carrying a black plastic garbage bag and dressed in a powder-blue terry-cloth robe and slippers let out a little scream when she saw the officers.
The woman in the robe dropped the garbage bag, spilling egg shells and coffee grinds and unidentifiable bits of tissue paper all over the carpeted floor. Something liquid and milky splashed on her ankles.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered loudly. “Who are you coming after?”
“You been behaving yourself?” Ciffo asked her.
She blinked. “Me?”
“Yeah, we’re the heat.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Truta said to her. “You’ll just encourage him.”
Freddy didn’t know what to think. “You always take this stuff so light?”
“We’re not taking anything light,” Ciffo said. “We’re trying to keep our heads straight. You’d know how it is if you’ve been on this kind of call more than once.”
They stopped in front of the last apartment door at the east end of the corridor.
Ciffo knocked. Nothing.
“Okay,” he said to Freddy, “open it up.”
The super took out his passkey and slid it into the lock, then stepped back, like he expected something to leap out the door at him.
Ciffo and Truta took deep breaths and proceeded slowly through the door.
“I smell bread,” Ciffo said.
“Yeah,” Truta agreed.
There was a small kitchen off the vestibule. Ciffo poked his head around the corner. The aroma of cinnamon and raisins filled the vestibule. Truta looked over his shoulder. They both stared at a sweet-faced, white-haired woman about five feet tall. She had square wire-rimmed eyeglasses, a violet and yellow flower-patterned apron around her ample waist and a quizzical look in her bright brown eyes.
“Yes?” she said.
Ciffo and Truta blinked.
“Um, are you all right?” Truta asked the old woman.
“Speak up,” Mrs. Rotare said.
“She says,” Ciffo asked, walking into the kitchen like he was visiting his mother’s house, “are you feeling all right, sweetheart?”
“Well, I’m just fine,” she said to Ciffo. “How are you, son?”
“Couldn’t be better. Do you know why we’re here?”
“No,” she said. “But I don’t suppose you’re going to hurt me, are you?”
“Naw, don’t you worry, darling,” Ciffo said. He draped an arm around her shoulders and she giggled. “Listen, tell me something, will you? Your son up in Albany has been trying to reach you on the telephone for hours. Something wrong with the phone?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mrs. Rotare said.
“Well, let’s just go and look, okay?”
“Certainly, Officer.”
Ciffo and Truta followed her to a living room running wild with chintz and doilies. There was an aqua-colored telephone on a stand near an enormous Queen Anne chair, one of the models the New York Telephone Company calls a “designer phone.” The designer was French, apparently, with a fascination for ersatz brass curlicues.
“Oh look at that,” Mrs. Rotare said. “I see the problem right there. Look, the cord is unplugged. See that?”
“Listen, darling, why don’t you sit down and call up your son?” Ciffo said.
“Speak up, won’t you?” Mrs. Rotare said.
Ciffo raised his voice. “I said, why don’t you call up your son? He’s waiting to hear from you.”
“Oh, he was calling for me? Yes, you said that. You’ll forgive me, but I’m a little surprised.” Mrs. Rotare touched at her hair in several places and sat down on the chair next to the telephone. “He always gets nervous if I’m not right here when he calls, but I can’t always be sitting next to this thing waiting, can I?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, I am, half the time anyway.”
“Mrs. Rotare,” Officer Truta asked, “the super knocked on your door and you didn’t answer. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I was either sleeping or I was in the kitchen and couldn’t hear.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re all right,” Truta said.
“Thanks, honey.”
“Well, maybe we’d better go now,” Ciffo said.
“Do you have to?” Mrs. Rotare sat with her hands folded in her lap. “I just made some bread, you know. You could have some. Would you like that?”
“Well, we have a great big city out there, you know. Lots of bad guys.” Ciffo laughed and so did Mrs. Rotare.
“Yes, well. Maybe another time?”
“Sure. Meanwhile, give me your telephone number,” Ciffo said, taking his pad out of his pocket. “I’m going to call you up once in a while and see how you’re doing.”
“Oh! Oh, I’d like that.” She gave him the number and he left, with Truta following him into the hallway.
Mrs. Rotare caught Truta by the sleeve. Out of Ciffo’s earshot, she asked her, “Will he really call me?”
“He really will, yes.”
Ciffo was through for the night and, as was his custom after a safe tour, he looked up at the sky and said a little thank-you when he hit Sixty-seventh Street in an off-duty status. He tightened his collar and walked west, to where his Renault Fuego was parked, next to a pile of construction materials in the next block.
The snow had stopped, leaving a fresh white dusting that made the streets slippery. Good and clean, though. Street-lamps made amber pools of light on white sidewalks. It was a good night to be grateful that all was right in the world, at least for yourself; it was a good night to be on your way home.
There was a silver Ford Grenada parked just behind Ciffo’s Fuego. It was Keenan’s car. And inside it, there was Keenan, more white-faced than usual, shivering, alone and, Ciffo guessed, probably drunk.
Ciffo groaned. “Jesus H. Christ, you can’t win. I stop taking the subway and I buy a car and now this.”
He rapped on the window. Though his eyes were wide open, Keenan jumped like he’d just been awakened.
Keenan fumbled with the window knob, managed to crack open a slit and said, “Hiya, Tony. How was the tour, pal?”
“How long you been sitting there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What tour did you work today?”
“The middle.”
“So you were off at eight. What, you visit the dolly or something?” Keenan didn’t respond.
“How long you been sitting in a cold car there?”
“I don’t know.”
Ciffo groaned again. “Come out of there,” he said.
“Yeah, all right,” Keenan said. “I get it. You think I’m stinking drunk, right?”
“I know you’re stinking drunk.”
“So what the hell?”
“So you live in Riverdale, that’s what. You don’t think you’re going to drive up there, do you?”
“Of course not.” Keenan slammed his shoulder against the inside of the driver’s door, a difficult way to open up a car. It then occurred to him to try the catch and the door opened. He stepped out into the street, somewhat indignantly. “There, now here I am, a fine upstanding citizen indeed. And I’m knowing that drinking and driving don’t mix, Officer.”
Keenan belched softly. “Oh hell, Tony, I was waiting here anyway to get myself straight. I was planning on either sobering up, falling asleep or freezing to death, whichever came first.”
“Give me your damn keys.”
Keenan obeyed and Ciffo locked up the Ford.
“Let’s go,” Ciffo said, taking Keenan’s elbow and steering him around to the passenger side of his own car. “You need some straightening up, all right. What’ll it be, your place or mine?”
“What do you take me for? That’s a filthy suggestion. Besides, you’re not my type.”
“Jesus H. Christ, just get in the car.”