Cops and Robbers

Prologue

I left the car on Amsterdam Avenue and walked around the corner onto West 72nd Street. With the heat the way it was, I was glad the Police Department let its people wear a shortsleeved shirt in the summer, open at the neck, but I could have done without all that weight around my middle. Pistol, holster, gunbelt, flashlight, one thing after another, all dragging down on my pants and giving me an uncomfortable bunched-up feeling around the waist. What I would have liked most of all right then would have been to take all my clothes off and just stand there in the street and scratch. But in a way that would have been more against the rules than what I had in mind.

At the corner of Amsterdam and 72nd is the Lucerne Hotel, one of the spots where the bar-flies live who hang out along Broadway. Broadway between 72nd and 79th streets is lined with those narrow little bars, and every one of them is the same; the same loud jukebox, the same formica-and-plastic fixtures, the same fake Spanish decorations, the same big-breasted Puerto Rican girl behind the bar. All the losers from the single-occupancy hotels in the neighborhood spend their nights with their elbows on those bars, mooning at the barmaids, and then at closing time going back alone to their rooms to dream great seduction scenes before going to sleep. Or, if they have the money, which they usually don’t, they take home with them one of the fourth-rate hookers who walk up and down Broadway waiting to substitute for the barmaids, who have lives of their own.

Along the block from the Lucerne to Broadway are a bunch of old buildings with small business on the ground floor and old-line tenants in the apartments upstairs; school-teachers’ widows, retired grocers, aging garment workers. The small businesses include a couple of bars, a delicatessen, a dry cleaner, a liquor store; the usual collection, each with its piece of red neon in the window. Schlitz. Hebrew National. Shirts Cleaned. It was ten-thirty at night, so most of them were closed now with just the neon and their night lights glowing. Except the bars and the liquor store, of course, and they weren’t very lively either, not on a hot midweek night in June.

Very few people were out tonight. A few kids ran around on the sidewalks, and cruising cabs ricocheted by at forty miles an hour, the drivers cooling their left elbows; everybody else was at home, in front of a fan.

The liquor store was midway to Broadway. When I reached it, one look through the window past the animated snowman display told me there were no customers in there; just the Puerto Rican clerk, reading one of those illustrated paperbacks in Spanish, and a pair of winos stocking shelves in the back. I unsnapped my holster flap and went in.

All three of them glanced at me when I pushed open the door. The winos went right back to work, but the clerk kept watching me, his face empty, like everybody when they look at a cop.

The place was air-conditioned. Sweat cooled on my back, where I’d been sitting in the car. I walked over to the counter.

The PR was as neutral as gray paint. “Yes, officer?”

I took out the pistol and pointed it generally at his stomach. I said, “Give me all you got in the drawer.”

I watched his face. For the first second or two, it was just shock, pure and simple. Then he made the switch of identities in his head — I was not a cop, I was a robber — and he clicked over to the new right response. “Yes, sir,” he said, very fast, and turned toward the cash register. He just worked here, it wasn’t his money.

In the back, the winos had stopped. They were standing there like a couple of part-melted wax statues, each of them holding two bottles of sweet vermouth. They were facing mostly toward each other, giving me their profiles, but they weren’t looking at anything in particular. They definitely weren’t looking toward me.

The PR was pulling stacks of bills out of the cash register and putting them on the counter; ones, then fives, then tens, then twenties. I grabbed the first stack left-handed and shoved it into my pants pocket, then switched the pistol to my left hand and did the rest with my right. Fives in my other pants pocket, tens and twenties inside my shirt.

The PR left the cash register open, and stood there with his hands at his sides, showing me he didn’t have any immediate plans. I switched the pistol back to my right hand and put it away, but left the flap open. Then I turned around and walked to the door.

I could see them reflected in the windows in front of me. The PR didn’t move a muscle. The winos were staring at me now. One of them made some sort of unfocused arm movement, gesturing with the vermouth bottle. The other one shook his head and the bottles in both his hands, and the movement died.

I left the store, and turned back toward Amsterdam. On the way, I closed the holster flap. Around the corner, I got back into the car and drove away.