Bowling Night is a Task Force institution.
A mandatory attendance, no-excuses-accepted night when the men tell their wives and girlfriends that they’re going bowling with the guys.
It’s the team leader’s privilege—some would call it his duty—to call Bowling Nights as a way of letting off steam, and when a cop gets shot at, that’s a lot of steam.
A brother cop gets killed, you don’t talk about it; a cop has a near miss, you have to talk about it—get it out, laugh about it, because tomorrow or the next day you’re going to have to go down another stairwell.
They do 10-13s frequently—the name comes from the radio code for “officer needs assistance”—where they coop up somewhere and party, but Bowling Night is something different: dress sharp, no wives, girlfriends, or even gumars, none of the usual cop bars.
Bowling Night is strictly first class, all the way.
Sheila, with the perspicacity of a Staten Island cop wife, once said, “You don’t go bowling. That’s just a cover to pig out, get drunk and fuck cheap whores.”
That isn’t true, Malone thought as he walked out the door that night. It’s a cover to dine out, get drunk and fuck expensive whores.
Levin doesn’t want to come.
“I’m beat,” he says. “I think I’ll just go home and chill.”
“This is not an invitation,” Malone says, “it’s a summons.”
“You’re coming,” Russo says.
“You’re part of the team,” Monty said, “you make Bowling Night.”
“What do I tell Amy?”
“You tell her you’re going out with your crew, don’t wait up,” Malone says. “Now go home, clean up, dress nice. Meet us at Gallaghers at seven.”
Corner table at Gallaghers on Fifty-Second.
Russo looks extra sharp tonight—slate-gray suit, custom-tailored white shirt, French cuffs, pearl cuff links.
“You hear the shot?” Russo asks.
“Not until later,” Levin says. “That’s the funny thing. I didn’t hear it until later.”
“Man, you fucking tackled that asshole,” Russo says. “Sign this guy up for the Jets.”
“The Jets tackle?” Malone asks.
It goes on like that, making Levin talk, making him take some credit for being brave, for surviving.
“Thing is,” Malone says, “you’re probably good for life now.”
“What do you mean?” Levin asks.
Montague explains, “Most cops don’t get shot at their entire careers. You did, and it missed. Odds are you never take another shot, you walk away unscathed after twenty, pull your pension.”
Malone fills their glasses. “Here’s to that!”
Russo asks, “Remember Harry Lemlin?”
Malone and Monty start to laugh.
“Who was Harry Lemlin?” Levin asks. He loves these old stories, and he’s not even pissed that they fined him a hundred bucks for wearing a shirt with buttons on the cuffs.
“French cuffs,” Malone told him. “When the team goes out, we go out in style. We make an impression. French cuffs, cuff links.”
“I don’t own any cuff links.”
“Buy some,” Malone says, taking a hundred out of Levin’s wallet.
Now Levin asks again, “Who was Harry Lemlin? Tell me the story.”
“Harry Lemlin—”
“Never Say Die Harry,” Monty says.
“Never Say Die Harry,” Russo says, “was a comptroller in the mayor’s office in charge of making the budget look somewhat legit. And he was hung. Those stallions they put out to stud? They look at Harry, they hang their heads in shame. Harry’s dick arrived at meetings two minutes before the rest of him did. Okay, so Harry is a regular at Madeleine’s, this is back in the day she does most of her business at the house.”
Malone smiles. Russo is going into storytelling mode.
“Anyway, back then it was, what, Sixty-Fourth and Park. So Harry, he starts taking Viagra. Best thing that ever happened according to him. Penicillin, polio vaccine, fuck that—Harry is in love with the blue pill.”
“How old was he?” Levin asks.
“You gonna let me tell the story?” Russo asks, “or keep interrupting me? Kids these days.”
“I blame the parents,” Monty says.
“That’s another hundred,” Malone says.
“Harry was sixtysomething, I dunno,” Russo says, “but fucking like he’s nineteen. Two girls at a time, three, he’s a steam engine. Girls are tag-teaming, he’s wearing them out. Madeleine, she doesn’t care, she’s making money, and the girls, they love him, he’s a big tipper.”
“Tipped by the inch,” Monty says.
“How come Monty doesn’t get fined?” Levin asks.
“That’s another hundred.”
“So this one night,” Russo says, warming up to the story, “the three of us are out doing a stakeout on this coke dealer’s place, and we get a call on Malone’s private phone from Madeleine. All upset, crying, ‘Harry’s dead.’ We go running over there and sure enough, there’s Harry, in the sack, hookers standing around him weeping like he’s Jesus or something, and Madeleine says, ‘You have to get him out of here.’
“No shit, we think, because this is going to be a major embarrassment, the comptroller found naked at one in the morning in the rack with a brace of call girls. We gotta move the body. First problem is getting Harry dressed, because he had to go two eighty and there is, shall we say, an obstacle in the way.”
“An obstacle?” Levin asks.
“Harry’s soldier is still standing at attention,” Russo says, “ready for duty. We’re trying to get his boxers on, never mind his trousers, which are a little tight to begin with, and there’s this flagpole to contend with . . . and it ain’t going down, whether it’s the pill or rigor mortis, we don’t know, but . . .”
Russo starts laughing.
Malone and Monty start laughing, too, and Levin, he’s having a great time. “So what did you do?”
“The fuck could we do?” Russo asks. “We keep wrestling, we get clothes back on him—his pants, his shirt, his jacket and tie, everything, except he has major wood poking out, I swear it’s getting bigger, like his dick is Pinocchio and just told a lie.
“I go down, twenty the doorman to go for a smoke and I guard the lobby. Monty and Malone heft this guy into the elevator and we drag him out the side door into our car, which is no easy task.
“So Harry’s propped up in the front seat like he’s drunk or something and we drive all the way downtown to his office. A hundred for the security guard, back in the elevator, we set him down in his chair behind his desk like he’s this dedicated employee burning the midnight oil.”
Russo takes a sip of his martini, signals for another. “But now what? What we should do is just get the fuck out of there, let them find him in the morning, but we all like Harry. Very fond of the guy, and we don’t have the heart to just let him sit there rotting, so . . .
“Malone here calls the desk sergeant at the Five. Makes up this bullshit about walking past the building, seeing lights on, thought he’d go up to see his old friend Harry, blah, send a unit.
“The uniforms come up, then the duty ME. Takes one look at Harry, says, ‘The guy’s heart exploded.’ We nod, like yeah, isn’t it sad, he was overworked, then the ME says, ‘But it didn’t do it here.’ We’re all like, ‘What do you fucking mean?’ and he goes into some long explanation about lividity and morbidity and that he didn’t shit his pants and what’s more, the deceased has a hard-on like a battering ram, and he’s looking at us like ‘what’s going on,’ so we take him aside and tell him.
“‘Look,’ I say. ‘Harry tapped out in the saddle and we want to spare the widow and the kids the embarrassment. Can you work with us on this?’
“‘You moved the body,’ he says.
“We confess.
“‘That’s a crime,’ he says.
“We agree. Malone here, he tells the guy we’ll owe him a solid, do the right thing, and the doc he says, ‘Okay.’ Writes it up like Harry died at his desk, a faithful servant of the city.”
“Which he was,” Monty says.
“Absolutely,” Russo says. “Except now we have to go to Rosemary, tell her her husband has passed. We drive over to their place on East Forty-First, ring the bell, Rosemary, she’s in a robe and curlers, we tell her. She cries a little, she makes us all some tea, then . . .”
Russo’s martini arrives.
“She wants to see him. We tell her why don’t she wait until tomorrow, we made the ID, it’s not necessary, but no. She wants to see her husband.”
Malone shakes his head.
“So, okay,” Russo says. “We go to the morgue, show our shields, they slide Harry out of the drawer, and I have to say they did their best. They had him covered with sheets, blankets, but no . . .
“Tent pole. Like you could hold a revival meeting under there. The circus, I don’t know—elephants, clowns, acrobats, the whole nine yards—and Rosemary, she looks and she says . . .”
They all start laughing again.
“Rosemary, she says, ‘Look at Little Harry—never say die.’
“She was proud of it. Proud that he died in the saddle, doing what he loved to do. We’re getting hernias lugging this horny bastard around, and she knew all about it all the time.
“Calling hours? You know sometimes the wiseguys, they have to have closed caskets? They had to close Harry’s casket from the waist down. Rosemary said send him to heaven ready.”
Monty lifts a glass. “Here’s to Harry.”
“Never say die,” Malone says.
They clink their glasses.
Then Russo looks over Levin’s shoulder. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“Don’t turn around,” Russo says. “At the bar. It’s Lou Savino.”
Malone looks alarmed. “Are you sure?”
“It’s Savino and three of his crew,” Russo says.
“Who’s Lou Savino?” Levin asks.
“‘Who’s Lou Savino?’” Russo says. “Are you kidding me right now? He’s a capo in the Cimino family.”
“Runs the Pleasant Avenue crew,” Malone says. “He has an open warrant out. We gotta take him.”
“Here?” Levin asks.
“What the fuck,” Russo says, “do you think IAB would think, it got word we were in the same place as a mobster with an open warrant and we let him walk away?”
“Jesus,” Levin says.
“It has to be you,” Malone says. “He hasn’t made us yet, but if one of us gets up, he’ll bolt like a rabbit.”
“We’ll back you, kid,” Russo says.
Monty says, “Be polite.”
“But firm,” says Russo.
Levin gets up. He looks nervous as hell, but he walks to the bar where Savino is having drinks with three of his guys and their gumars. If they’re sitting in the main room of any restaurant, they always want to be seen with beautiful women; if it’s just the men, they’d be in a private room.
Whether or not to have women at dinner on Bowling Night has long been a topic of discussion in Malone’s team. He could argue it either way—on the one hand, it’s always nice to have a lovely woman by your side at dinner. On the other hand, it’s too showy. A group of well-known detectives out to an expensive dinner is borderline as it is; to be more ostentatious with call girls is another thing.
So Malone has vetoed it. He doesn’t want to rub it in IAB’s faces, and besides, it’s a good chance for the men to talk. The restaurant is noisy, the chance of getting a wire in remote, and even if IAB did, the sound would be so murky and confused that you could deny it was even you. The tape would never make it through the evidentiary hearing.
Now he and his team watch Levin approach Savino. “Excuse me, sir?”
“Yeah, what?” Savino doesn’t look too happy to be interrupted, especially by someone he doesn’t know.
Levin shows his badge. “You have a warrant. I’m afraid I’ll have to place you under arrest, sir.”
Savino looks around at his crew and shrugs, like What the fuck is this bullshit? He turns back to Levin and says, “I don’t have no warrant.”
“I’m afraid you do, sir.”
“Don’t be afraid, kid,” Savino says. “Either I have a warrant or I don’t, and I don’t, so you don’t got to be afraid of nothing.”
He turns his back on Levin and signals the bartender for another round.
“This is a thing of beauty,” Monty says. “A beautiful thing.”
Levin reaches behind him for his cuffs. “Sir, we can do this like gentlemen, or—”
Savino whirls on him. “If we were gonna do this like gentlemen, you wouldn’t be interrupting my social evening in front of my associates and my lady friends, you . . . what are you, Italian? Jewish?”
“I’m Jewish, but I don’t see what—”
“—you kike, hebe, Christ killer motherfucker, you—” Savino looks over his shoulder, sees Malone and yells, “Ball buster! You ballbuster!”
Levin turns around to see Malone and Russo practically falling out of their chairs and Monty’s shoulders heaving up and down in laughter.
Savino slaps Levin on the shoulder. “They’re goofing you, kid! What is this, fucking Bowling Night, right? You got some coglioni on you, though, coming up on me like that. ‘Excuse me, sir’ . . .”
Levin walks back to the table. “Okay, that was embarrassing.”
Malone notices he takes it well, though, he’s laughing at himself. And the kid went—three mob guys in front of their women, and the kid went. It says something.
Russo raises his glass. “Here’s to you, Levin.”
“Was that really Lou Savino?” Levin asks.
“What, you think we hired actors?” Russo says. “No, that’s him.”
“You know him?”
“We know him,” Malone says. “He knows us. We’re in the same business, only on different sides of the counter.”
The steaks arrive.
Another rule of Bowling Night—you order steak.
A big red juicy New York Strip, a Delmonico, a Chateaubriand. Because it’s good, it’s what you should have, and if you’re in the same restaurant as wiseguys you want to be seen eating meat.
Cops fall into two categories—grass eaters and meat eaters. The grass eaters are the small-timers—they take a cut from the car-towing companies, they get a free coffee, a sandwich. They take what comes, they’re not aggressive. The meat eaters are the predators, they go after what they want—the drug rips, the mob payoffs, the cash. They go out and hunt and bring it down, so it’s important that when the unit is out as the Unit, it dresses tight and eats steak.
It sends a message.
You think it’s a joke, but it’s not—they’re literally looking to see what’s on your plate. If it’s a cheeseburger, guys are talking about it the next day. “I saw Denny Malone at Gallaghers the other night and he was eating, are you ready for this? Hamburger.”
The wiseguys will think you’re cheap or broke or both, and either one sends a message to their reptilian brains that you’re weak, and the next thing you know, they’re trying to take advantage of that. They’re predators, too; they cut the weak out of the herd and go after him.
Malone’s steak is great, though, a beautiful New York Strip cooked rare with a cold red center. Instead of the baked potato, he went with big cottage fries and a pile of green beans.
It feels good to cut into the steak, to chew it.
Substantial.
Solid.
Real.
It was the right decision to call Bowling Night.
Big Montague digs into a sixteen-ounce Delmonico, his concentration thorough. In a rare revelation, he once told Malone that he grew up in a household where meat was a rare treat; as a kid he ate his breakfast cereal with water instead of milk. And he was a big kid, always hungry. Monty should have been a street thug; his size made him the perfect bodyguard and enforcer for some mid- to high-level dealer. But he was too smart for that, Malone thinks. Monty’s always had the ability to see around the next corner, know what’s coming, and even as a young teenager he saw that the dope-slinging life led to a cell or a coffin, that only the guys at the top of the pyramid made the real money.
But he observed that police always ate.
He never saw a hungry cop.
So he went the other way with it.
Those days, the Job sucked down black candidates like salt peanuts. You were AA, had two legs and could see beyond your thumbs, you were in. They didn’t expect a black candidate to have an IQ of 126, though, which is what Monty tested. Big, brilliant, black, he had “detective” written all over him from day one.
Even the cops who hate blacks give him his props.
He’s one of the most highly respected cops on the Job.
Now he looks tight in a midnight-blue tailored Joseph Abboud suit, powder-blue shirt, his red tie obscured by the linen napkin tucked in at his neck. Monty ain’t gonna take a chance on staining a hundred-dollar shirt, he don’t care what it looks like.
“What you looking at?” he asks Malone.
“You.”
“What about me?”
“Love you, man.”
Monty knows this. He and Malone don’t do that jive brothers-from-another-mother, ebony-and-ivory bullshit, but they are brothers. He has a brother who’s an accountant in Albany, another doing a fifteen-to-thirty in Elmira, but he’s closest to Malone.
Only makes sense—they spend at least twelve hours a day together, five or six days a week, and they depend on each other for their lives. It’s no cliché—you go through that door, you never know. You want your brothers with you.
Just as there’s no question that being a black cop is different, it just is, that’s all. Other cops, except his brothers here, look at him a little different, and the “community”—as the social activists, bigmouthed ministers and local politicians laughably call the ghetto—see him either as a potential ally who should help them out, or as a traitor. An Uncle Tom, an Oreo.
Monty don’t care.
He knows who he is: he’s a man trying to raise a family and get his kids the fuck out of the “community”—that community who’ll rob each other, cheat each other and kill each other for a nickel bag.
While his brothers at this table would die for each other.
Malone once said that you should never partner with anyone you wouldn’t leave alone with your family and all your money. You did that with any of these men, when you came back, your family would be laughing and there’d be more money.
They order dessert—mud pie, apple pie with big wedges of cheddar cheese, cheesecake with cherries.
After that, coffee with brandy or sambuca, and Malone, he decides he needs to even things up a little for Levin, so he says, “Never Say Die Harry was great, but you want to talk dead bodies, though . . .”
“Don’t do it,” Russo says. But he starts laughing.
“What?” Levin asks.
Monty’s laughing, too, so he knows the story.
“No,” Malone says.
“Come on.”
Malone looks at Russo, who nods, and then says, “This was back when Russo and me were still in bags down in the Six. We had this sergeant—”
“Brady.”
“Brady, who liked me,” Malone says, “but for some reason hated Russo. Anyway, this Brady, he liked to drink, and he used to have me drop him off at the White Horse so he could get a load on and then pick him up later, bring him back to the house, he could sleep it off.
“So this one night, we get a DOA call, and in those days, a uniform had to stay with the body until the ME came in to call it. It’s a bitter cold night, subzero, and Brady he asks me, ‘Where’s Russo?’ I says, ‘On his post.’ He says, ‘Get him over there on the DOA.’ It sounds nice, right? Get Russo out of the cold, indoors, but Brady knows that Phil here . . .”
Malone starts laughing again. “Back then, Russo was terrified of dead bodies.”
“Scared stiff, so to speak,” Monty says.
“Fuck the both of you.”
“So I try to talk Brady out of it,” Malone says, “because I know Russo’s a total pussy about this and might faint or something, but Brady ain’t havin’ it. Has to be Russo. ‘You tell him to get his fuckin’ ass over there and stay with the body.’
“It’s a brownstone over off Washington Square, the body’s in bed on the second floor and it’s clearly natural causes.”
“This old gay guy,” Russo says. “Owned the whole brownstone, lived alone, had a heart attack in bed.”
Malone says, “I leave Russo there and go back to sit outside the White Horse. Brady comes out, he’s half in the bag, he tells me drive him over to the DOA’s house. He’s been out of the bar, what, five seconds, and he’s in the car hitting a flute—”
“What’s a flute?” Levin asks.
“A Coke bottle filled with booze,” Monty says.
“We drive by,” Malone says, “Russo’s standing on the stoop, freezing his balls off. Brady goes ape-shit, screaming at Phil, ‘I told you to stay with the body, asshole! You march your ass inside, upstairs and stay there, or I’ll write you up.’ Russo goes back in, we go back to the bar.
“I’m sitting out there, a call comes over the radio, a 10-10, shots fired, and I hear the address. It’s the same address as the DOA residence!”
“What the fuck,” Levin says, delighted.
“What I’m thinking,” Malone says. “I run into the bar, find Brady and say, ‘We got a problem.’ We go racing over there, run up the freakin’ stairs, and there’s Russo, with his gun drawn, the DOA is sitting bolt upright in the bed, and Phil here has put two rounds into his chest.”
Malone’s laughing so hard now he can barely get the words out. “What happened is . . . gas starts moving around inside the body . . . and they do weird things . . . this one sat straight up . . . scared Russo . . . so bad . . . he puts two in the guy’s chest . . .”
“I’m looking at the freaking undead!” Russo says. “The fuck am I supposed to do?!”
“So now we got a real problem,” Malone says, “because if that guy wasn’t dead, Russo has not only discharged his firearm, he’s looking at a homicide charge.”
“I’m scared shitless,” Russo says.
Monty’s shoulders are shaking as he chuckles, tears running down his cheeks.
Malone says, “Brady asks me, ‘You sure this guy was dead?’ ‘Pretty sure,’ I say. He says, ‘Pretty sure? What the fuck is that?!’ I say, ‘I dunno, he had no pulse.’ And he sure as shit didn’t have a pulse after Russo put two in his heart.”
“So what did you do?” Levin asks.
Malone says, “The duty ME is Brennan, the laziest fuck ever to occupy the position. I mean, they gave him the job so he couldn’t work on live people. He comes over, takes in the situation, looks at Russo and says, ‘You shot a dead guy?’
“Phil’s shaking. He says, ‘So the guy was dead?’ ‘You kidding me?’ Brennan says. ‘He croaked three hours before you shot him, but how the fuck am I going to explain two rounds in his chest?’”
Monty dabs at his cheek with his napkin.
“This is where, I have to say, Brady earns his stripes,” Malone says. “He says to Brennan, ‘That’s going to involve a lot of work on your part. Reports, an investigation, you might have to testify . . .’
“Brennan says, ‘How about we just call it even?’ The wagon comes, we bag the guy up, I deem it natural causes, Russo here gets new underwear.”
“Amazing,” Levin says.
Lou Savino and his party get up to leave. Savino nods to Malone, who nods back.
Fuck IAB.
If the mobsters don’t know who we are, don’t show us respect, we’re not doing our jobs.
The bill comes to over five bills, or would if they were charged.
The waitress, she delivers the check, it comes to zero. But she delivers a check in case they’re being watched. Malone lays a credit card down, she takes it back, he pretends to sign it.
They leave two hundred in cash on the table.
You never, ever stiff a server.
For one thing, it’s not right. For the other, once again, the word gets around that you’re cheap. What you want, you walk into a place, a server sees you and says, “Give me that party.”
That way you always get a table.
And if you’re not with your wife, no one is going to notice or remember.
You never stiff a server or take change for a twenty whether you’re at a bar or a bodega.
That’s for grass eaters, not Force detectives.
It’s just the cost of doing business.
You can’t deal with it, go back on patrol.
Malone calls for the car.
Bowling Night they always get a town car and a driver.
Because they know they’re going to get shit-faced and no one wants to blow their gig on a DUI if some rookie patrolman writes it up or calls it in before knowing what’s what.
Half the wiseguys in New York own car services because it’s easy to launder money through them, so they have no problem getting one comped. Of course the driver is going to tell his boss every place they went and what they did, but they don’t care. That’s as far as it’s going to go—no driver is ever going to rat them to IAB or even admit they were in his car. And who gives a shit some mobster knows they get drunk and laid—they know that already.
And the car service knows better than to send them some Russian or Ukrainian or Ethiopian—it’s always a goombah who knows the score, knows to keep his ears open and his mouth shut.
Tonight’s driver is Dominic, a fiftysomething mob “associate” who’s had them before and knows he’s going to get tipped out big, likes having guys in Armani, Boss and Abboud get in and out of his car. Is going to get right next to the curb so his clients’ Guccis, Ferragamos and Maglis don’t get wet. Gentlemen who treat his car with respect, aren’t going to puke in it, eat smelly fast food, fill it with dope smoke, get into fights with their women.
He drives them up to Madeleine’s on Ninety-Eighth and Riverside.
“We’re going to be a couple of hours at least,” Malone tells him, slipping him a fifty, “you want to get dinner.”
“Just call me,” Dominic says.
“What is this place?” Levin asks.
“You heard us talk about Madeleine’s,” Malone says. “This is Madeleine’s.”
“A brothel?”
“You could call it that,” Malone says.
“I don’t know,” Levin says. “Amy and I are, you know, exclusive.”
“You put a ring on her finger?” Russo asks.
“No.”
“So?” Russo says.
“Look, I think I’ll just go home,” Levin says.
“It’s called Bowling Night,” Monty says. “Not Bowling Dinner. You’re coming in.”
“Come upstairs,” Malone says. “And hang out. You don’t want to get laid, okay, you don’t want to get laid. But you’re coming with us.”
Madeleine owns the whole brownstone but is very discreet about what goes on in there so the neighbors don’t get their noses out of joint. Most of her business these days is off-location anyway; the house is just for small parties and special guests. She doesn’t do the old “lineup” anymore; the men preselect online.
She greets Malone personally at the door with a kiss on the cheek.
They came up together; she was still taking dates when he was in uniform. She was walking home through Straus Park one night, some asshole decided to hassle her and this uniformed cop shall we say, “intervened,” brought his nightstick down on the jerk’s head and then gave him a few shots to the kidneys to emphasize his point.
“Do you want to press charges?” Malone asked her.
“I think you just did,” Madeleine answered.
They’ve been friends and business associates ever since. He protects her and sends business her way; in return she comps him and his team and lets him look at her black book to see if she has any clients who might be useful. Madeleine Howe’s house is never raided, her girls never threatened or harassed—at least not for long and never twice—and never stiffed.
And on the rare occasion when a girl goes rogue and tries to blackmail one or more of the clients, Malone takes care of that, too. He pays her a visit, explains the legal ramifications of what she’s trying to do, and then describes what the women’s jail is like for a very attractive, spoiled girl like herself and explains that if he has to handcuff her it is likely the last bracelet she will ever receive from a man. She usually takes the proffered airline ticket instead.
So the men in Madeleine’s black book—the high-roller businessmen, the politicians, the judges—whether they’re aware of it or not, also get protection from Da Force. They don’t see their names splashed across the front page of the Daily News and they also don’t get stupid. More than once, Malone and Russo have had to go talk to some hedge fund manager or rising political star who’s fallen in love with one of Madeleine’s escorts and tell him that’s just not the way it works.
“But I love her,” one would-be gubernatorial candidate told them. “And she loves me.”
He was going to leave his wife and kids—and career—to start a coffee roasting business in Costa Rica with a woman whose name he thought was Brooke.
“She’s paid to make you feel that way,” Russo told the guy. “That’s her job.”
“No, this is different,” the guy insisted. “It’s the real thing.”
“Don’t embarrass yourself,” Malone said. “Man up here—you have a wife and kids. You have a family.”
Don’t make me put her on the phone and tell you you have a dick like a golf pencil and bad breath, and that she tried to get Madeleine to send someone else the last time.
Now Madeleine welcomes them in and they take the little elevator upstairs to a tastefully furnished apartment.
The women are gorgeous.
Which they should be, at two thousand dollars a date.
Levin, his eyes bug out of his head.
“Easy there, College,” Russo says.
“I’ve selected your dates,” Madeleine says, “based on your previous preferences. But for the new guy, I had to guess. I hope Tara will make you happy. If not, we can go back to the book.”
“She’s beautiful,” Levin says, “but I’m not . . . partaking.”
“We can just have a couple of drinks and a good conversation,” Tara says to Levin.
“That sounds great.”
She leads him over to the bar.
Malone’s date calls herself Niki. She’s tall and leggy with a throwback Veronica Lake hairstyle and ice-blue eyes. He sits with her, has a scotch alongside her dirty martini, talks for a few minutes and then she takes him into one of the bedrooms.
Niki wears a tight black dress with a deep décolletage. She peels the dress down and off, revealing the black lingerie that Madeleine knows he likes without him asking for it.
“You want anything special?” she asks.
“You’re already special.”
“Maddy said you were a charmer.”
She starts to take off her stiletto heels but Malone says, “Keep them on.”
“You want me to undress you, or—”
“I’ll do it myself.” He gets out of his clothes and puts them on the hangers that Madeleine has provided so her married clients don’t go home with wrinkled suits. He takes his pistol and puts it under the pillow.
Niki gives him a look.
“You never know who’s going to come through the door,” Malone says. “It’s not a kink. If it bothers you, I’ll ask for someone else.”
“No, I like it.”
She gives him a two-thousand-dollar fuck.
Around the world in eighty minutes.
Afterward, Malone gets dressed, puts the gun back into its holster, and leaves five one-hundred-dollar bills on the side table. Niki puts her dress back on, takes the money and asks, “Buy you a drink?”
“Sure.”
They go back out into the living room. Monty is there with his date, an impossibly tall black woman. Russo isn’t finished yet, but that’s Russo.
“I eat slow, I drink slow and I make love slow,” he’s said. “Savor.”
Levin isn’t at the bar.
“Did the newbie bail on us?” Malone asks.
“He went to a room with Tara,” Monty says. “In the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘I can resist everything but temptation.’”
Russo finally comes in with a brunette named Tawny who reminds Malone of Donna. Classic, Malone thinks, the guy cheats on his wife with a woman who looks like his wife.
A few minutes later Levin comes in looking a little drunk, a lot sheepish and totally fucked out.
“Don’t tell Amy, okay?” he says.
They crack up.
“‘Don’t tell Amy’!” Russo says, wrapping his arm around Levin’s shoulder. “This kid, this fucking kid, he goes Batman on a Jamaal in a vertical and misses a bullet. Then he breaks the gym set out on him. Then he goes to cuff Lou Savino in front of his women and his crew in the middle of Gallaghers, then he wets his dick in thousand-dollar pussy, comes out and says, ‘Don’t tell Amy’!”
They all crack up again.
Russo kisses Levin on the cheek. “This kid! I love this fucking kid!”
“Welcome to the team,” Malone says.
They have another drink and then it’s time to go.
The women come with them up to 127th and Lenox.
A club called the Cove Lounge.
“Why do you listen to that moolie music?” Russo asks Malone on the way up there.
“Because we work with moolies,” Malone says. “Anyway, I like it.”
“Monty,” Russo asks, “you like this hip-hop shit?”
“Hate it,” Monty says. “Give me some Buddy Guy, BB, Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King.”
“How old are you guys?” Levin asks.
“Yeah, who do you listen to?” Malone asks. “Matisyahu?”
They pull up outside the Cove. The line outside sees the limo and looks for who gets out, expecting a hip-hop star. They see two white guys get out and they don’t like it.
Then one of them recognizes Malone.
“It’s the cops!” he yells. “Hey, Malone! Motherfucker!”
The doormen let them right in. The Cove is done in blue and purple light pulsing in beat with the music.
The other color is black.
Counting Malone, Russo, Levin and their dates, there are exactly eight people in the club who aren’t black.
They get stares.
But they get a table.
The hostess, a beyond beautiful black woman, leads them straight to the raised VIP section and sits them down.
Four bottles of Cristal come a minute later.
“Compliments of Tre,” the hostess says. “He said to tell you your money doesn’t spend here.”
“Tell him thank you,” Malone says.
Tre doesn’t officially own the club. The twice-convicted rapper/record producer couldn’t get a liquor license with a rocket launcher, but he owns the club. Now he literally looks down at Malone from a raised platform in the VIP section and raises his glass.
Malone raises his back.
People see it.
It chills things out.
If the white cops are good with Tre, they’re good.
“You know Tre?” Niki asks, impressed.
“Yeah, a little bit.”
The last time the Job wanted to talk with Tre, Malone brought him in personally. No handcuffs, no perp walk, no cameras.
Tre appreciated the respect.
Started to throw some security work to Malone, who does it himself or with Monty if it’s important. The more routine stuff he passes to other cops in Manhattan North, who are grateful for the money.
And Tre gets off on having racist cops as employees. Was sending them out for coffees and cheesecake and shit until Malone got wind of it and put a stop to it. “They are New York City police officers, there to protect your ass. You want a snack, send one of your flunkies.”
Now Tre comes down and slides in next to Malone.
“Welcome to the jungle,” he says.
“I live here,” Malone says. “You live in the fucking Hamptons.”
“You should come out sometime.”
“I will, I will.”
“Party with us,” Tre says. “The missus likes you.”
His black leather jacket has to go a couple of grand, the Piaget watch a lot more.
There’s money in the music, in the clubs.
“Black or white,” Tre says, “all money spends green.”
Now he asks Malone, “Who’s going to protect me from the police? Young black man can’t walk the streets anymore without getting shot by a cop, usually in the back.”
“Michael Bennett got shot in the chest.”
Tre says, “I hear different.”
“You want to play Jesse Jackson,” Malone says, “have a ball. You have some evidence, bring it on in.”
“To the NYPD?” Tre asks. “That’s what we would call a whitewash.”
“What do you want me to do, Tre?”
“Nothin’,” Tre says. “I’m just giving you a heads-up, is all.”
“You know where to find me.”
“I do.” Tre goes into his pocket, comes out with a cigar-sized blunt. “In the meantime, let this make you well.”
Gives him the blunt and leaves.
Malone takes a sniff. “Jesus fuck.”
“Light up,” Niki says.
Malone lights up, takes a hit and passes it to Niki. It’s primo shit, Malone thinks. Then again, coming from Tre, what else would it be? A sweet, mellow high—energizing—more sativa than indica. The blunt gets passed around the table until it hits Levin.
He looks at Malone.
“What,” Malone says. “You never smoked weed?”
“Not since I came on the Job.”
“Well, we’re not telling anyone.”
“What if I get tested?”
They laugh at him.
“No one told you about the Designated Pisser?” Russo asks.
“What’s that?”
“Not what,” Monty says. “Who. Officer Brian Mulholland.”
“That guy who sweeps up the locker room?” Levin asks. “The House Mouse?”
Most precincts have one—a cop who’s not fit for street duty but shy of retirement. They keep him inside, cleaning up, running errands. Mulholland was a good cop until he answered a call and found a baby who’d been “dipped”—held in a bathtub of scalding water. After that, he hit the bottle but it hit him back harder. Malone persuaded the captain at the Three-Two to keep him on the Job, hide him as the House Mouse.
“He’s not just the House Mouse,” Russo says, “he’s also the Designated Pisser. You get notice of a Doyle, Mulholland pisses into a baggie for you. Your piss is a hundred proof, but you test clean for dope.”
Levin takes a hit and passes it.
“Brings up another story,” Malone says, looking at Monty.
“Fuck all of you,” Monty says.
“Montague here,” Malone says, “had his PT coming up. And he isn’t exactly, shall we say, ‘undernourished.’”
“And your mamas,” Monty says.
“I mean, Monty can’t walk a mile,” Malone says, “never mind run one in the required time. So what he does is, he—”
Monty holds up a hand. “There was a rookie, a handsome and distinguished young African American gentleman, who shall go nameless—”
“Grant Davis,” Russo says.
“—who had been a track-and-field standout at Syracuse University,” Monty says.
“He had a tryout with the Dolphins,” Malone says.
“This was a double opportunity,” Monty says. “One, for me to pass the PT, and two, to prove that the Job cannot tell one black man from another, and furthermore, doesn’t care to.”
Malone says, “So Monty uses his big-dick gold-shield swag to convince this rookie to take Monty’s ID and run the test for him. The kid was scared shitless, which apparently made him run faster because . . . he broke the departmental record for the mile.”
“I didn’t think I needed to tell him to slack off a little,” Monty says.
“But no one catches on,” Malone says.
“Proving my point,” says Monty.
“Until,” Malone says, “some genius at One P decides he’s going to improve the relationship between the Fire Department and the Job by holding a friendly little . . . track meet.”
Levin looks at Monty and grins.
Monty nods.
“This commander has the records pulled and sees that Detective William Montague has a time in the mile akin to an Olympic athlete and figures he has his man,” Malone says. “The brass at One P start laying down money with their brethren of the Fire Department.”
“Those knuckle draggers take the bets,” Russo says, “because a few of them know the real William J. Montague and figure they have a sure thing.”
“Which they do,” Malone says. “Because there’s no way we can sub the fake Monty for the real Monty in front of all those cops and firemen who know him. Monty goes into training—which means one less cigar a day and easy on the barbecue sauce, and the big day rolls around. We show up in Central Park and the Fire Department has a ringer—a probie from Iowa who was the Big Ten champion in the mile. I mean, this kid—”
“White boy,” Monty says.
“—looks like a freakin’ god,” Malone says. “He looks like a Greek sculpture, and Monty, he shows up in plaid Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt hanging over his gut and a cigar in his mouth. The commander takes one look at him and about shits himself. He’s all, like, ‘What the fuck did you do? How much could you fucking eat in one month?’ The brass have thousands on this race, and they are pissed.
“They go to the starting line. The pistol goes off and for a second I think the commander shot Monty. Monty, he takes off—”
“If you can call it that,” Russo says.
“—gets five strides,” Malone says, “and topples over.”
“Hamstring,” Monty says.
“The Fire baboons start jumping up and down,” Malone says, “cops are cursing, handing their money over. Monty’s on the ground holding his leg, we’re laughing our asses off.”
“But didn’t you guys lose a lot of money?” Levin asks.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Russo asks. “I got my cousin Ralphie on the Fire Department to lay our money down against Usain Bolt-Down-His-Food over here, so we cleaned up. And the commander walks away totally disgusted, I hear him say, ‘One slow nigger in Harlem, and he’s mine.’”
Levin looks at Monty to see how he takes “nigger.”
“What?” Monty asks him.
“You know, the N-word,” Levin says.
“No, I don’t know the ‘N-word,’” Monty says. “I know ‘nigger.’”
“And you’re okay with it?”
“I’m okay with Russo saying it,” Monty says. “I’m okay with Malone saying it. Someday I might be okay with you saying it.”
“How does it feel to be a black cop?” Levin asks Monty.
Malone winces. This could go either way. Monty could blow, or he could get professorial.
“How does it ‘feel’?” Monty asks. “I don’t know, how does it feel to be a Jewish cop?”
“Different,” Levin says. “But when I show up, Jews don’t hate me.”
“You think blacks hate me?” Monty asks. “Some do. Some call me a Tom, a house nigger. But the truth is, whether they say it or not, most black people think that I’m trying to protect them.”
“How about inside the Job?” Levin asks, not letting it go.
“There are haters on the Job,” Monty says. “Haters are everywhere. At the end of the day, though, most cops don’t see black and white, they see blue and everyone else.”
“But by ‘everyone else,’” Levin says, “most people think we mean ‘black.’”
It gets quiet, then they all get that stupid high smile you get from powerful weed. That blunt gets them fucking blasted. Then they’re up and dancing. Which is a surprise to Malone, because he doesn’t dance. But he is now, bopping with Niki in the thick crowd of clubgoers, the music throbbing through the veins in his arms, swirling around in his head, Monty ultracool, black man cool beside him, even Russo up and dancing, they are all fucked up.
Dancing in the jungle with the rest of the animals.
Or the angels.
Or who could tell the fucking difference.
They drive Levin home, down to West Eighty-Seventh off West End. His girl, Amy, doesn’t look too thrilled when they carry her semiconscious boyfriend to the door.
“He got a little over-refreshed,” Malone says.
“I guess so,” Amy says.
Cute-looking girl.
Dark, curly hair, dark eyes.
Smart looking.
“We were celebrating his first collar,” Russo says.
“I wish he’d called me,” Amy says. “I like to celebrate.”
Good luck, smart Amy, Malone thinks. Cops celebrate with other cops. No one else understands what you’re celebrating.
Being alive.
Taking down bad guys.
Having the best job in the world.
Being alive.
They toss Levin on the sofa.
He’s out.
“Nice to meet you, Amy,” Malone says. “I’ve heard a lot of nice things.”
“Same,” Amy says.
They dispatch Dominic to take the women back and then roll down Lenox Avenue in Russo’s car, with the stereo blasting and the windows open, singing along with N.W.A. at the tops of their lungs.
Searching my car, looking for the product
Thinking every nigga is selling narcotics.
Driving down this old street, this cold street, past the tenements, past the projects.
Malone hangs out the front window.
I don’t know if they fags or what
Search a nigga down and grabbing his nuts.
Russo lets out a demonic laugh and they all shout—
Fuck tha police
Fuck tha police
Fuck tha police
Fuck tha police!
Rolling through the jungle.
Stoned, drunk, high.
Through the hard gray of early dawn.
Yelling to the few startled people on the sidewalks—
Fuck tha police
Fuck tha police
Fuck tha police
Fuck tha police!
I want justice!
I want justice!
All together now—
Fuck you, you black motherfuckersssssssss!!!!!