Robert Tanenbaum: Counterplay

“Where dogs would howl to lie, men and women and boys slink off to sleep,” said a voice at his side, “forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.”

Guma stopped and looked over at a dirt-encrusted, bug-eyed bald man who also stopped and stood grinning at him-whether from mirth or insanity, Guma could not tell. With a gaping hole where his teeth had once been and the disintegrating potpourri of indistinct clothing he wore, the man looked like he also could very well have been the moronic great-grandchild of some unfortunate genetic mix from the old Five Points denizens. “All that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here,” the stranger said and giggled.

Normally, Guma would have merely smiled and nodded to a man who’d done him no more harm than help recall an old passage from a story. You could not live most of your life around the streets of New York, especially working for the DAO, without developing a certain tolerance, even fondness, for the diversity of its huddled masses. But the man’s protruding yellow-green eyes and the idiot grin made Guma uncomfortable. “You know your Dickens,” Guma said, intending to pass by.

The man jumped back. Giving Guma a wide berth-to the point of rudely pushing other pedestrians out of his way-the madman circled around until he was safely behind, then ran off down the sidewalk, shouting as if he were being chased. “He knows Dickens! He knows Dickens! Beware! Beware!”

Guma shook his head as he watched the man disappear in the bobbing mass of heads. Then he noticed the suspicious glances from fellow New Yorkers and cautious stares of visitors, all trying to assess if he was part of the insanity. He supposed that dressed in comfortable but old sweat clothes and ratty Nikes-part of his on-again, off-again regime to “get back in shape”-and sporting a two-day growth of beard-part of his plan to shave as little as possible-he might have missed the “maturing but still virile” look he’d aimed for and achieved “eccentric old bum” instead. He decided to ignore the looks and hurry on.

Approaching the stairs leading to the building’s maw, Guma looked up and paused appreciatively. It was almost the twentieth century before the city fathers got up the nerve to raze the squalor that was Five Points and, in a sort of civic slap to the face of the evil done there in the past, built a courthouse across Franklin Street from the old Tombs prison. The Tombs got its name because the locals thought it looked like an Egyptian mausoleum; it was considered one of the worst prisons in the country for most of the century. Small wonder that the catwalk connecting the courthouse and prison over which prisoners passed was called the Bridge of Sighs.

Guma knew the history by heart and took pride in being able to recall its details. The city jail had been rebuilt several times and was now officially the Manhattan Detention Center, though it had retained its nickname through each of its incarnations. And it was still connected to the Criminal Courts building by an underground tunnel through which thousands of prisoners still sighed on their way to see the judge or return to their cells.

In 1941, the old criminal courts building also had been replaced with the current one. It housed the city’s Criminal and Supreme courts, Legal Aid, offices for the NYPD, the Department of Correction, the Department of Probation, and, on the eighth floor the Office of the District Attorney of New York County.

Climbing the stairs to the entrance, Guma began to labor. Once upon a time, before the cancer, he’d entered the building like he owned the place-a young, macho assistant district attorney with the New York DAO. Back then he’d been known as “the Italian Stallion”…feared by bad men, revered by women both good and bad…. At least that was his story and he’d stuck to it for the better part of thirty or so years.

“More like the ‘Sicilian Shetland Pony’ these days,” he grumbled as he arrived at the top of the stairs winded from the minor exertion. Maybe it’s metastasized to your lungs. He quickly shook off the dark thought. That’s thinking like a loser. You a loser, Guma?

The cancer had started as a constant ache in his gut; then there was blood in his urine, and finally a sharper pain that wouldn’t subside no matter how much whiskey he drank or pain pills he swallowed. He’d overcome a standing distaste for doctors, which returned when one told him that he had cancer. A very bad, aggressive cancer that would kill him soon if he didn’t take drastic measures, the man said. Those measures had included removing a few yards of his guts, followed by miserable bouts of chemotherapy that made him wish he were dead.

However, he’d survived what might have killed a less strong-willed individual, but it had also made an old man out of him. Sometimes the change was only outward. His once wavy black hair had turned white almost overnight, and the thickly muscled baseball player’s body had wasted into sagging skin and aching bones. On cool, wet days like this one, he could feel where he’d been laid open, his diseased parts removed, and then sewn back together.

Most of the time, he still thought like the Ray Guma of old-cocky, headstrong, and convinced that he was God’s gift to women. His mind was still as agile as ever, the biting wit razor sharp, even if he didn’t have as much energy for lengthy debate or even screwing as he had back in the day.

Yet, some days he had a hard time shaking the feeling that he was just biding his time until “the really bad news.” In fact, sometimes he felt like he was walking around inside the outer shell of a man he might have once been, but that man had taken a horrible beating and been left a frightened victim of a crime he couldn’t prevent. It surprised him. He’d always thought he would be the sort to scoff in the face of death, but it wasn’t the case. There were days when he was sure the pain in his abdomen was more than scar tissue tearing, or the shortness of breath a warning that the cancer had moved north.

Then at night, he’d lie alone in his bed, trying to tune in to what his body was telling him. But all he could hear would be his heart beating through the mattress: Doom-doom. Doom-doom. Doom-doom. On nights like that, he’d get up, dress, and go try to walk off the anxiety attacks that threatened to overwhelm him when surrounded by four walls.

The feeling never lasted, usually not even on those nights. The morning light would find him calm and contemplative, sitting on some park bench with the sun on his smiling face like some Italian Buddha, happily listening to the city launch into day mode. Then the pugnacious, womanizing street kid would reemerge ready to fight or make love, whichever came first…bad guys and good women beware.

Guma entered the Criminal Courts building and looked up at the big clock that hung down from the exact center of the two-story lobby. It was another impact of the disease that he rarely wore a watch anymore; he didn’t need anything telling him how much time was left in the day.

On time, he thought as he headed to the elevator to take him up to the eighth floor. He was thankful to have work. The cancer treatments had forced him to take a leave of absence, and he still didn’t have the energy for a full-time caseload. But Karp let him do what he could.

Of late, a period covering the past several months, he’d taken an interest in so-called cold cases-homicides that had gone unsolved and been shelved to await further development. The files-literally thousands of them-were kept in a corner of the basement. With the help of one of the old, retired NYPD detectives hired by Karp to work on special investigations, a tough old-school cop named Clarke Fairbrother, he’d started looking through the files for one that might have some hope of resolution.