Pete Hamill - Brooklyn Noir

Marty stopped talking and moved down the bar when Frank returned.

“What’d Darby O’Gill say to you?” he asked.

“He told me you were drunk,” I said, “and that you didn’t like spics.”

Frank widened his eyes. “Coming out with revelations like that, is he? Hey, Martin,” he yelled, “next time I piss tell him JFK’s been shot!” He drained his whiskey, took a sip of beer, and turned his attention back to me. “Listen. Early on, when I first started on the job — years back, I’m talking — there was almost no spades in the department; even less spics. I was the only spic in my precinct, only one I knew of in Brooklyn. I worked in the seven-one, Crown Heights. Did five years there, but this must’ve been my first year or so.

“I was sitting upstairs in the squad room typing attendance reports. Manual typewriters back then. I was good too, fifty or sixty words a minute — don’t forget, English ain’t my first language. See, I learned the forms. The key is knowin’ the forms, where to plug in the fucking numbers. You could type two hundred words a minute, but you don’t know the forms, all them goddamn boxes, you’re sitting there all day.

“So I’m typing these reports — only uniform in a room full of bulls, only spic in a room full of harps — when they bring in the drunk.”

Frank paused to order another shot, and Marty brought one for me too. I was hungry and really needed to step outside for some air, but I wanted to hear Frank’s story. I did want to know how he thought we were similar, and I hoped he would talk about the photo. He turned his face to the ceiling and opened his mouth like a child catching rain, and he poured the booze smoothly down his throat.

“You gotta remember,” he continued, “Crown Heights was still mostly white back then, white civilians, white skells. The drunk is just another mick with a skinfull. But what an obnoxious cocksucker. And loud.

“Man who brought him in is another uniform, almost new as me. He throws him in the cage and takes the desk next to mine to type his report. Only this guy can’t type, you can see he’s gonna be there all day. Takes him ten minutes to get the paper straight in the damn machine. And all this time the goddamn drunk is yelling at the top of his lungs down the length of the squad room. You can see the bulls are gettin’ annoyed. Everybody tells him to shut up, but he keeps on, mostly just abusing the poor fuck that brought him in, who’s still struggling with the report, his fingers all smudged with ink from the ribbons.

“On and on he goes: ‘Your mother blows sailors… Your wife fucks dogs… You’re all queers, every one of you.’ Like that. But I mean, really, it don’t end, it’s like he never gets tired.

“So the guy who locked him up gets him outa the cage and walks him across the room. Over in the corner they got one of these steam pipes, just a vertical pipe, no radiator or nothing. Hot as a motherfucker. So he cuffs the drunk’s hands around the pipe, so now the drunk’s gotta stand like this” — Frank formed a huge circle with his arms, as if he were hugging an invisible fat woman — “or else he gets burned. And just bein’ that close to the heat, I mean, it’s fuckin’ awful. So the uniform walks away, figuring that’ll shut the scumbag up, but it gets worse.

“Now, the bulls are all pissed at the uniform for not beatin’ the drunk senseless before he brought him in, like any guy with a year on the street would know to do. The poor fuck is still typing the paperwork at about a word an hour, and the asshole is still at it, ‘Your daughter fucks niggers. When I get out I’ll look your wife up — again.’ Then he looks straight at the uniform, and the uniform looks up. Their eyes lock for a minute. And the drunk says this: ‘What’s it feel like to know that every man in this room thinks you’re an asshole?’ Then the drunk is quiet and he smiles.”

Marty returned then, and though I felt I was barely hanging on, I didn’t dare speak to refuse the drink. Frank sat silently while Marty poured, and when he was done Frank stared at him until he walked away.

“After that,” he continued in a low voice, “it was like slow motion. Like everything was happening underwater. The uniform stands up, takes his gun out, and points it at the drunk. The drunk never stops smiling. And then the uniform pulls the trigger, shoots him right in the face. The drunk’s head like explodes, and he spins around the steam pipe — all the way — once, before he drops.

“For a second everything stops. It’s just the echo and the smoke and blood on the wall and back window. Then, time speeds up again. The sergeant of detectives, a little leprechaun from the other side — must’ve bribed his way past the height requirement — jumps over his desk and grabs up a billy club. He lands next to the uniform, who’s still holding the gun straight out, and he clubs him five or six times on the forearm, hard and fast, whap-whap-whap . The gun drops with the first hit but the leprechaun don’t stop till the bone breaks. We all hear it snap.

“The uniform pulls his arm in and howls, and the sergeant throws the billy club down and screams at him: ‘The next time… the next time, it’ll be your head that he breaks before you were able to shoot him. Now get him off the pipe before there’s burns on his body.’ And he storms out of the room.”

Frank drank the shot in front of him and finished his beer. I didn’t move. He looked at me and smiled. “The whole squad room,” he said, “jumped into action. Some guys uncuffed the drunk; I helped the uniform out. Got him to a hospital. Coupla guys got rags and a pail and started cleaning up.

“Now, think about that,” Frank said, leaning in toward me and lowering his voice yet again. “I’m the only spic there. The only other uniform. There had to be ten bulls. But the sergeant, he didn’t have to tell anybody what the plan was, or to keep their mouth shut, or any fucking thing. And there was no moment where anybody worried about me seeing it, being a spic. We all knew that coulda been any one of us. That’s the most on-the-inside I ever felt. Department now, it’s a fucking joke. Affirmative action, cultural-diversity training. And what’ve you got? Nobody trusts anybody. Guys afraid to trust their own partners.” He was whispering, and starting to slur his words.

I began to feel nauseated. It’s a joke, I thought. A cop’s made-up war story. “Frank, did the guy die?”

“Who?”

“The drunk. The man that got shot.”

Frank looked confused, and a bit annoyed. “Of course he died.”

“Did he die right away?”

“How the fuck should I know? They dragged him outa the room in like a minute.”

“To a hospital?”

“Was a better world’s all I’m saying. A better world. And you always gotta stay on the inside, don’t drift, Danny. If you drift, nobody’ll stick up for you.”

Jesus, did he have a brogue? He certainly had picked up that lilt to his voice that my father’s generation possessed. That half-accent that the children of immigrants acquire in a ghetto. I had to get out of there. A few more minutes and I feared I’d start sounding like one of these tura-lura-lura motherfuckers myself.

I stood, probably too quickly, and took hold of the bar to steady myself. “What about the picture, Frank?”

He handed it to me. “Martin is right,” he said slowly, “let it lie. Why do you care who she was?”

“Who she was? I asked who she is Is she dead, Frank? Is that what Marty meant by letting the dead rest?”

“Martin… Marty meant…”

“I’m right here, Francis,” Marty said, “and I can speak for myself.” He turned to me. “Francis has overindulged in a few jars,” he said. “He’ll nap in the back booth for a while and be right as rain for the ride home.”