Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

8

On Sunday morning, Cotton Hawes went to church in the rain before reporting to work.

When he came out, it was still raining and he felt much the same as he’d felt before the services. He didn’t know why he expected to feel any different; he’d certainly never been washed by any of the great religious fervor that had possessed his minister father. But every Sunday, rain or shine, Cotton Hawes went to church. And every Sunday he sat and listened to the sermon, and he recited the psalms, and he waited. He didn’t know exactly what he was waiting for. He suspected he was waiting for a bolt of lightning and an earsplitting crash of thunder that would suddenly reveal the face of God. He supposed that all he really wanted to see was a glimpse of something that was not quite so real as the things that surrounded him every day of the week.

For whatever else could be said about police work — and there were countless things to be said, and countless things being said — no one could deny that it presented its practitioners with a view of life that was as real as bread crumbs. Police work dealt with essentials, raw instincts and basic motives, stripped of all the hoop-dee-dah of the sterilized, compressed-in-a-vacuum civilization of the twentieth century. As he walked through the rain, Hawes thought it odd that most of the time consumed by people was spent in sharing the fantasies of another. A thousand escape hatches from reality were available to every man jack in the world — books, the motion pictures, television, magazines, plays, concerts, ballets, anything or everything designed to substitute a pretense of reality, a semblance of real life, a fantasy world for a flesh-and-blood one.

Now perhaps it was wrong for a cop to be thinking this way, Hawes realized, because a cop was one of the fantasy figures in one of the world’s escapes: the mystery novel. The trouble was, he thought, that only the fantasy cop was the hero while the real cop was just a person. It seemed somehow stupid to him that the most honored people in the world were those who presented the fantasies, the actors, the directors, the writers, all the various performers whose sole reason for being was to entertain. It was as if a very small portion of the world was actually alive, and these people were alive only in so far as they performed in created fantasies. The rest of the people were observing; the rest of the people were spectators. It would not have been half so sad if these people were viewing the spectacle of real life. Instead, they were observing only a representation of life, so that they became twice-removed from life itself.

Even conversation seemed to concern itself primarily with the fantasy world, and not the real. Did you see Jack Paar last night? Have you read Doctor Zhivago? Wasn’t Dragnet exciting? Did you see the review of Sweet Bird of Youth? Talk, talk, talk, but all of the talk had as its nucleus the world of make-believe. And now the television programs had carried this a step further. More and more channels were featuring people who simply talked about things, so that even the burden of talking about the make-believe world had been removed from the observer’s shoulders — there were now other people who would talk it over for him. Life became thrice-removed.

And in the midst of this thrice-removed existence, there was reality, and reality for a cop was a hand severed at the wrist.

Now what the hell would they do with that hand on Naked City?

He didn’t know. He only knew that every Sunday he went to church and looked for something.

On this Sunday, he came out feeling the same as when he’d gone in, and he walked along the shining wet sidewalk bordering the park, heading for the station house. The green globes had been turned on in defense against the rain, the numerals “87” glowing feebly against the slanting gray. He looked up at the dripping stone façade, climbed the low flat steps, and entered the muster room. Dave Murchison was sitting behind the desk, reading a movie magazine. The cover showed a picture of Debbie Reynolds, and the headline asked the provocative question What Will Debbie Do Now?

He followed the pointing arrow of the DETECTIVE DIVISION sign, climbed the metal steps to the second story, and walked down the long, dim corridor. He shoved through the gate in the slatted railing, tossed his hat at the rack in the corner, and went to his desk. The squadroom was oddly silent. He felt almost as if he were in church again. Frankie Hernandez, a Puerto Rican cop who’d been born and raised in the precinct neighborhood, looked up and said, “Hi, Cotton.”

“Hello, Frankie,” he said. “Steve come in yet?”

“He called in about ten minutes ago,” Hernandez answered. “Said to tell you he was going straight to the docks to talk to the captain of the Farren.”

“Okay,” Hawes said. “Anything else?”

“Got a report from Grossman on the meat cleaver.”

“What mea — oh yeah, yeah, the Androvich woman.” He paused. “Any luck?”

“Negative. Not a thing on it but yesterday’s roast.”

“Where is everybody, anyway?” Hawes asked. “It’s so quiet around here.”

“There was a burglary last night, grocery store on Culver. Andy and Meyer are out on it. The loot called in to say he’d be late. Wife’s got a fever, and he’s waiting for the doctor.”

“Isn’t Kling supposed to be in today?”

Hernandez shook his head. “Swapped with Carella.”

“Who’s catching, anyway?” Hawes said. “You got a copy of the duty sheet around?”

“I’m catching,” Hernandez said.

“Boy, it sure is quiet around here,” Hawes said. “Is Miscolo around? I’d like some tea.”

“He was here a little while ago. I think he went down to talk to the Captain.”

“Days like this... ,” Hawes started, and then let the sentence trail. After a while, he said, “Frankie, you ever get the feeling that life just isn’t real?”

Perhaps he’d asked the wrong person. Life, to Frankie Hernandez, was very real indeed. Hernandez, you see, had taken upon himself the almost impossible task of proving to the world at large that Puerto Ricans could be the good guys in life’s little drama. He did not know who’d been handling his people’s press relations before he happened upon the scene, but he did know that someone was handling it all wrong. He had never had the urge to mug anyone, or knife anyone, or even to have a single puff of a marijuana cigarette. He had grown up in the territory of the 87th Precinct, in one of the worst slums in the world, and he had never so much as stolen a postage stamp, or even a sidelong glance at the whores who paraded La Vía de Putas. He was a devout Catholic whose father worked hard for a living, and whose mother was concerned solely with the proper upbringing of the four children she had brought into the world. When Hernandez decided to become a cop, his mother and father approved heartily. He became a rookie when he was twenty-two years old, after having served a four-year hitch in the Marines and distinguishing himself in combat during the hell that was Iwo Jima. In his father’s candy store, a picture of Frankie Hernandez in full battle dress was pasted to the mirror behind the counter, alongside the Coca-Cola sign. Frankie’s father never failed to tell any stranger in the store that the picture was of his son Frankie who was now “a detective in the city’s police.”

It hadn’t been easy for Hernandez to become a detective in the city’s police. To begin with, he’d found a certain amount of prejudice within the department itself, brotherhood edicts notwithstanding. And, coupled with this was a rather peculiar attitude on the part of some of the citizens of the precinct. They felt, he soon discovered, that since he was “one of them” he was expected to look the other way whenever they became involved in police trouble. Well, unfortunately, Frankie Hernandez was incapable of looking the other way. He had sworn the oath, and he was now wearing the uniform, and he had a job to perform.

And besides, there was The Cause.

Frankie Hernandez had to prove to the neighborhood, the people of the neighborhood, the police department, the city, and maybe even the world that Puerto Ricans were people. Colleagues the likes of Andy Parker sometimes made The Cause difficult. Before Andy Parker, there had been patrolmen colleagues who’d made The Cause just as difficult. Hernandez imagined that if he ever became chief of detectives or even police commissioner, there would be Andy Parkers surrounding those high offices, too, ever ready to remind him that The Cause was something to be fought constantly, day and night.

So for Frankie Hernandez, life was always real. Sometimes, in fact, it got too goddamn real.

“No, I never got that feeling, Cotton,” he said.

“I guess it’s the rain,” Hawes answered, and he yawned.

The S.S. Farren had been named after a famous and honorable White Plains gentleman called Jack Farren. But whereas the flesh-and-blood Farren was a kind, amiable, sympathetic, lovable coot who always carried a clean handkerchief, the namesake looked like a ship that was mean, rotten, rusty, dirty, and snot-nosed.

The captain of the ship looked the same way.

He was a hulk of a man with a three-days’ beard stubble on his chin. He picked his teeth with a matchbook cover all the while Carella talked to him, sucking air interminably in an attempt to loosen breakfast from his molars. They sat in the captain’s cabin, a coffin of a compartment, the bulkheads of which dripped sweat and rust. The captain sucked at his teeth and prodded with his soggy matchbook cover. The rain slanted outside the single porthole. The compartment stank of living, of food, of human waste.

“What can you tell me about Karl Androvich?” Carella asked.

“What do you want to know?” the captain said. His name was Kissovsky. He sounded like a bear. He moved with all the subtle grace of a Panzer division.

“Has he been sailing with you long?”

Kissovsky shrugged. “Two, three years. He in trouble? What did he get himself into since he jumped ship?”

“Nothing that we know of. Is he a good sailor?”

“Good as most. Sailors ain’t worth a damn today. When I was a young man, sailors was sailors.” He sucked air between his teeth.

“Ships were made of wood,” Carella said, “and men were made of iron.”

“What? Oh, yeah.” Kissovsky tried a smile that somehow formed as a leer. “I ain’t that old, buddy,” he said. “But we had sailors when I was a kid, not beatniks looking for banana boats so they can practice that... what do you call it... Zen? And then come back to write about it. We had men! Men!”

“Then Androvich wasn’t a good sailor?”

“Good as most until he jumped ship,” Kissovsky said. “The minute he jumped ship, he became a bad sailor. I had to make the run down with a man short in the crew. I had the crew stretched tight as it was. One man short didn’t help the situation any, I can tell you. A ship is like a little city, buddy. There’s guys that sweep the streets, and guys that run the trains, and guys that turn on the lights at night, and guys that run the restaurants, and that’s what makes the city go, you see. Okay. You lose the guy who turns on the lights, so nobody can see. You lose the guy who runs the restaurant, so nobody eats. Either that, or you got to find somebody else to do the job, and that means taking him away from another job, so no matter how you slice it, it screws up the china closet. Androvich screwed up the china closet real fine. Besides, he was a lousy sailor, anyway.”

“How so?”

“Out for kicks,” Kissovsky said, tossing one hand upward in a salute to God. “Live, live, burn, burn, bright like a Roman candle, bullshit! Every port we hit, Androvich went ashore and come back drunk as a fish. And dames? All over the lot! It’s a wonder this guy didn’t come down with the Oriental Crud or something, the way he was knocking around. Kicks! That’s all he was looking for. Kicks!”

“A girl in every port, huh?” Carella said.

“Sure, and drunk as a pig. I used to tell him you got a sweet little wife waiting for you home, you want to bring her back a present from one of these exotic tomatoes, is that what you want to do? He used to laugh at me. Ha, ha, ha. Big joke. Life was a big joke. So he jumps ship, and he screws up the chocolate pudding. That’s a sailor, huh?”

“Did he have a girl in this city, too, Captain Kissovsky?”

“Lay off the captain crap, huh?” Kissovsky said. “Call me Artie, okay, and I’ll call you George or whatever the hell your name is, and that way we cut through the fog, okay?”

“It’s Steve.”

“Okay. Steve. That’s a good name. I got a brother named Steve. He’s strong as an ox. He can lift a Mack truck with his bare hands, that kid.”

“Artie, did Androvich have a girl in this city?”

Kissovsky sucked air through his teeth, maneuvered the matchbook folder around the back of his mouth, and thought. He spit a sliver of food onto the deck, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know.”

“Who would know?”

“Maybe the other guys in the crew, but I doubt it. Anything happens on this tub, I know about it. I can tell you one thing. He didn’t spend his nights sitting around holding hands with little Lulu Belle or whatever the hell her name is.”

“Meg? His wife?”

“Yeah, Meg. The one he’s got tattooed on his arm there. The one he picked up in Atlanta. Beats me how she ever got him to come up with a ring.” Kissovsky shrugged. “Anyway, she did get him to marry her, but that don’t mean she also got him to sit home tatting doilies. No, sir. This kid was out to live! No doilies for him. Doilies are for the Sands Spit commuters, not for the Karl Androviches. You know what he’d do?”

“What?” Carella asked.

“We’d pull into port, you know. I mean here, this city. So he’d wait like two weeks, living it up all over town, shooting his roll, before he’d call home to say we were in. And maybe this was like about two days before we were going to pull out again. Buddy, this kid was giving that girl the business in both ears. She seems like a nice kid, too. I feel a little sorry for her.” He shrugged and spit onto the deck again.

“Where’d he go?” Carella asked. “When he wasn’t home? Where’d he hang out?”

“Wherever there are dames,” Kissovsky said.

“There are dames all over the city.”

“Then that’s where he hung out. All over the city. I’ll bet you a five-dollar bill he’s with some dame right now. He’ll drop in on little Scarlett O’Hara or whatever the hell her name is, the minute he runs out of money.”

“He only had thirty dollars with him when he vanished,” Carella said.

“Thirty dollars, my eye! Who told you that? There was a big crap game on the way up from Pensacola. Androvich was one of the winners. Took away something like seven hundred bucks. That ain’t hay, Steve-oh. Add to that all of January’s pay, you know we were holding it until we hit port, and that adds up to quite a little bundle. And we were only in port here two days. We docked on the twelfth, and we were shoving off on the fourteenth, Valentine’s Day. So a guy can’t spend more than a grand in two days, can he?” Kissovsky paused thoughtfully. “The way I figure it, he started back for the ship, picked up some floozie, and has been living it high on the hog with her for the past month or so. When the loot runs out, Androvich’ll be home.”

“You think he’s just having himself a fling, is that it?”

“Just running true to form, that’s all. In Nagasaki, when we was there, this guy... well, that’s another story.” He paused. “You ain’t worried about him, are you?”

“Well... ”

“Don’t be. Check the whorehouses, and the strip joints, and the bars, and Skid Row. You’ll find him, all right. Only thing is, I don’t think he wants to be found. So what’re you gonna do when you latch onto him? Force him to go back to Melissa Lee, or whatever the hell her name is?”

“No, we couldn’t do that,” Carella said.

“So what the hell are you bothering for?” Kissovsky sucked air through his teeth and then spat on the deck. “Stop worrying,” he said. “He’ll turn up.”

The garbage cans were stacked in the areaway between the two tenements, and the rain had formed small pools of water on the lid of each can. The old woman was wearing house slippers, and so she stepped gingerly into the areaway and tried to avoid the water underfoot, walking carefully to the closest garbage can, carrying her bag of garbage clutched to her breast like a sucking infant.

She lifted the lid of the can and shook the water free and was about to drop her bag into the can when she saw that it was filled. The old lady was Irish, and she unleashed a torrent of swear words that would have turned a leprechaun blue, replaced the lid, and went to the second garbage can. She was thoroughly drenched now, and she cursed the fact that she hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella down with her, cursed the lid of the second garbage can because it seemed to be stuck, finally wrenched it free, soaking herself anew with the water that had been resting on it, and prepared to toss her bag into it and run like hell for the building.

Then she saw the newspaper.

She hesitated for a moment.

The newspaper had been wrapped around something, but the wrapping had come loose. Curiously, the old lady bent closer to the garbage can.

And then she let out a shriek.