Manhattan Mayhem

COPYCATS by N. J. Ayres

“The stinkin’ rat finks have our uniforms on! They’re sending our troops the wrong way!”

Voices didn’t travel far in the tree cover or under the sledgehammer sounds of explosions. Sergeant Sam Rabinowitz watched as Private Jacobs jumped out of the Jeep and tore up to him to say it again. “Hold on, Private,” Rabinowitz said.

“A truck driver just told me that!” Jacobs had been assigned a forward position to support an intersection with a fellow MP. Their squad’s mission was to direct Allied troop traffic south of the Belgian city of Bastogne.

Sergeant Rabinowitz ordered the squad to fall out. He knew rumors in wartime were often used as strategy by both sides. He had his men park their gear on snow and heaps of fallen branches, then permitted them to pop the hood of the Jeep so they could warm any drinkable liquids by setting their tin cups around the engine.

Rabinowitz sat with Maroney, the radioman, on a large low rock. Communication had been pretty well shot-static, then five words, then two, then static, then nothing. While Maroney worked, Rabinowitz slid his bayonet out of its scabbard on his belt, sliced off a hunk of salami he had in his pack, and offered it to Maroney before he cut a piece for himself.

Wet had entered a separation in Rabinowitz’s boot. The ache was almost smothered by numbness, a sign that it could turn to frostbite. He tried to ignore it. The whole platoon had suffered many more serious casualties than swollen toes in the advance along the eighty-mile front, later named the Battle of the Bulge for its geography.

Private Mike Kelley shoved back into the group from a piss run, along with another soldier they hadn’t seen before. The new man said he was headed back to the front after being separated from his squad. Sergeant Rabinowitz asked where he was from and a few other things, and then he turned his attention back to his communications grunt.

Within hearing distance of the sergeant, Private Kelley offered the new man his half tin of coffee. So, when the soldier smiled his thanks and tapped the bottom of the tin with a certain remark, it was all over. The soldier said, “Up your bottom.”

“Up your bottom” instead of “bottoms up.”

Private Jacobs never swore. He was raised Orthodox. But after subduing the German fink and stripping him of his stolen fatigues and tying his wrists and ankles, Izzy and Mike Kelley shuffled him ten yards out from the encampment and sat him on a fallen tree. Then Sergeant Samuel Rabinowitz cored out the enemy’s heart with the Colt Commando.38 that had belonged to Alfred Herschel Rabinowitz in World War I. Rocking from one foot to the other, Izzy said he wished he could have done the job. The führer himself had ordered any enemy soldier caught in a German uniform executed on the spot. What was good for the goose, Sergeant Rabinowitz said. His squad members went on with their business, but with a fresher fear in their eyes.

It was only five years earlier that Sammy Rabinowitz and Mike Kelley had sat in Izzy’s bedroom listening to the jazz guitar of Eddie Condon on twelve-inch 78s while putting together model airplanes, these boys whose fourteenth birthdays were all less than six weeks apart. Mike said Eddie Condon was deaf in one ear, and Izzy said he was crazy. How could he play like that, then?

Sammy’s model was a B-17 Flying Fortress his uncle with the shakes had given him. He also surprised Sammy with the latest issue of Model Airplane News. The other boys were jealous of Sammy’s good fortune and wouldn’t crack a page. Izzy just plopped the magazine on top of a beat-up issue of Air Trails on the bed next to the card table.

Izzy and Mike Kelley had only gliders to work on. Izzy told Sam they found the glider kits in the alley behind Mr. Gessel’s toy shop on Orchard Street. Mike sent Sam a shake of his head that Izzy didn’t see. It wasn’t the first time their friend had lifted something that wasn’t his.

The apartment was on the walk-up’s fifth floor, his bedroom window shoved up for air. The problem started when Izzy’s mother came home from work early from the laundry on Avenue B that afternoon. When she opened Izzy’s door and smelled what she smelled and then looked at the bottles on the table, she went bananas. The labels said Airplane Dope. To her, that was what Benny Goodman’s drummer got arrested for, that what’s-his-name Gene Krupa, who had sleepy eyes and regularly dropped his sticks in the middle of a song.

Izzy was sitting on the far side of the table. That meant he was out the door last, catching a volley of slaps on his head and shoulders from his mama. Even the sound of feet pounding down the stairs didn’t mute the noise from Mrs. Jacobs as she tore apart her son and daughter’s room, the little girl who had to sleep perpendicular at the foot of Izzy’s bed because her own room was so small. When the boys reached the sidewalk, Sammy spotted the glint of two glass bottles exiting Izzy’s window, scoring the clear blue sky while floating on the high wails of that meshuga woman.

The boys ran over to Tompkins Park and collapsed on the grass, laughing. That is, until Sammy Rabinowitz said what he stupidly said. “Izzy’s mother is a dope. Izzy’s mother is d-o-p-e-y!” He said it and said it, caught up in the giggles.

So Izzy naturally had to bust him one. Then Sammy busted him back but was quicker, turning Izzy’s nose and lips a meaty, swollen red. Maybe it was time. Maybe they had worn each other out from their differences before. From that day on, Isadore Jacobs and Sammy Rabinowitz avoided each other as much as they could, trading mild insults when they passed in school or on the street.

Seventh Precinct in the Lower East Side was the next-to-smallest precinct in Manhattan, but it was the neighborhood, and Sam was glad to walk a beat there when he was nineteen, watching out for old people and shopkeepers and little kids who played too long in the dim light of dusk. It’s where his father had been a cop and an older cousin, too, both in the 1920s.

Sam’s father died at age thirty-nine, when Sam was sixteen. His mother’s sisters were at the apartment after the funeral. His mom said to one of them she wanted to go be with Arnie, she couldn’t live without him. Sammy sat in a dark corner, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands until that moment. He raised his head up, and his mother caught his eye. “Oh, no, Sammy,” she said, “I didn’t mean it. I won’t ever leave you! Not for a long while, God willing.”

It was up to him then to find some way to bring in money to help. His mom sewed for people but had a problem with her legs and couldn’t sit very long. Sam made deliveries for shopkeepers all around the neighborhood. As time went by, he somehow didn’t get drafted, and he didn’t enlist. He wanted to be a cop, and that was it. Heroes and protectors had to be among civilians, too, didn’t they?

But lately, every time Sam-the-Cop Rabinowitz went into Katz’s Deli on the corner of Houston and Ludlow, not only did he see the walls covered with pictures of movie and theater people, but he also saw a single sign that ripped at his conscience: SEND A SALAMI TO YOUR BOY IN THE ARMY. It kept buzzing his brain when he was on the street.

All along the wall behind the food counter hung salamis, long and short, fat and thin, hanging by the ends of their casings, even during the days of rationing. There’s always a way to get around restrictions, especially if you live in the right city. The aromas from steaming bins of pastrami and corned beef and hot dogs on the grill drew in people from the sidewalk who didn’t even know they were hungry until then. That November of 1944, Sammy purchased four salamis and brought them home and asked his mother to send them to the troops. “What,” she said, “I should know how to do this?”

The next afternoon while on his beat, he made up his mind. He saw Izzy Jacobs and Mike Kelley through a window of a soda shop, each devouring a charlotte russe. Mike always set aside the maraschino cherry for the last bite.

Sam went in, rattled up a chair, and rode it in reverse with his arms on the back. As if no time had elapsed since graduation, he said, “Hey, guys,” and looked at his watch. “At three o’clock, I’m going down to the induction center to enlist. Who’s coming with?”

Neither Izzy nor Mike had walls to paint or deliveries to make or machines to stitch leather for shoes. Jobs were hard to come by. Bosses got away with paying women less than the men they replaced, and women were feeling the glow of their own paychecks for a change. Sam’s call to enlist was an easy persuasion. The three set off to the recruitment center.

At Camp Gordon training camp, southwest of Augusta, Georgia, the young recruits found another from their neighborhood: Tino Caruso. His house was at Avenue D and Sixth. That gave him a direct shot into the East River Park if he wanted, where there was no noise from kids playing stoop ball and stickball in the streets and girls playing potsie on sidewalks. Sam liked recalling a day he’d wielded a broom handle to smack a high-bounce spaldeen missile with such muscle it took out a basement window across from Izzy’s place: instant home run. But the tinkling glass and the holler from inside had all the kids running down Avenue C, right in the middle, weaving around cars whose drivers laid on their horns. It was all fun, but once in a while he’d like a walk in the park… maybe with a girl.

The boys all made it through Military Police Corps combat training. Sam got stamped sergeant because of his city police experience, brief though it was. Izzy and Mike did okay, too. Tino Caruso was a bit of a dawdler, the last one over the obstacles, the last one to hand in written work. They requested codeployment and were surprised when they got it.

On the third day south of Bastogne, Sergeant Samuel Rabinowitz trudged through two-foot snow alongside Private Caruso. Manhattan winters saw snow, yes, but here Sam’s bones quivered from the cold and the constant explosions and shrieks of strafing and the grind of engines above, which was not Allied cover but German Stutkas concealed by a white lid of clouds. The enemy had fuel to fly while Allied aircraft sat dry-docked on tarmacs with near-empty tanks. It was later learned that the English-speaking Germans in stolen uniforms did more than misdirect traffic and cut communication lines. They raided critical supply lines: rail cars, trucks, warehouses.

That day when Sam and Tino slogged along a barely visible road, they saw a high rock face ahead where they could take a breather. Just before reaching it, there was a crack and something grazed the right side of Sam’s face. He swiped at his cheek with the back of his glove, then saw Caruso stumble but regain his feet and point to what Sam had already judged was a sniper’s nest in a tree thirty yards away. In a flat two seconds, the shooter was meat on the ground. When Tino turned to say thanks, Sam understood that what had popped onto his cheek was the better part of Tino Caruso’s nose.

Caruso lived, of course. All the guys from the Lower East Side who codeployed lived. After the war’s end, they burrowed back to their neighborhoods. Sam stayed with his mother for the time being. She could use the help and he could save for the day, whatever that might be. He snagged a Seventh Precinct badge again, which didn’t happen for every former officer coming back from the war.

He was grateful but soon restless. He couldn’t help but think of a certain something: in the snowy woods of Belgium, he had ordered an enemy soldier wearing a hijacked American MP uniform to be shot for giving wrong directions and switching road signs to send soldiers off to nowhere. Not that Sam wanted to be making a decision like that today, but here, on wheeled or foot patrol, he spent his days slapping citations through drivers’ windows and writing up accident reports.

So much had changed. Conversations centered on labor disputes. Unionized longshoremen had picketed, forcing hundreds of jobs to go idle. Fifteen thousand city elevator operators refused to punch buttons to take people up to their apartments and offices. Then the tugboat crews struck. The Irish and Italians were fussing at each other more than ever, who knew over what. Many more Jews were moving on from pushcarts, succeeding in their small businesses and relocating their families to classier suburbs.

And small crime was thriving-if you could call it that. The top district attorney was trying to fight it, placing more undercover cops to bust up prostitution, the numbers games, the creeping narcotics trade. But as of now, Samuel Rabinowitz could only walk his beat, chalk tires to see how long a car had been parked at a space with a posted time limit, and keep an eye out for no-goodniks prowling for something to lift.

A year passed, and the better part of another. He took to going to temple after not attending for a long, long time. There he met a girl named Ruth. She loved him. He tried loving her.

One afternoon he and Ruth took a table at Katz’s Deli. It wasn’t until their order came that he noticed Izzy and his sister two tables over. The sister, holy joe, had she ever changed. She was what, seventeen, eighteen, now? Sally. That was her name. Sally. And there was that sign: SEND A SALAMI TO YOUR BOY IN THE ARMY. Yellow, just beyond Sally Jacobs’s light-brown, curl-sprung head. A crown it could be.

Sam brought Ruth over to say hello. Izzy invited them to sit, bring their food. The rest of the time at that table, Sam did not register Ruth in his consciousness at all.

Ruth saw. Afterward, Ruth complained. Ruth walked.

In a week Sam and Sally strolled streets together to look in windows, and one Sunday they went to a movie called Gentlemen’s Agreement. The story had a New York City journalist, Phillip Green, becoming Phillip Greenburg so he could understand anti-Semitism. Sam and Sally talked a lot afterward about the masquerade. She could never do it, fake who she was on whatever side, while he kept saying you do what you must for a cause.

And, of course, he thought about, but didn’t tell her about, the fake MP in the woods south of Bastogne sitting proudly on a fallen tree, chin up, spine straight, lips moving in praise to the God or führer he loved, so that her newest suitor, Sammy Rabinowitz, could aim a muzzle at his chest and blow out the young German’s heart.

Sam was off-duty, out of police uniform, and at another favorite place for breakfast, tearing into a bagel loaded with cream cheese and sliced salmon and onions, two kinds of pickles on the side. He picked up a newspaper from the seat of the chair opposite and was reading it when Izzy and Mike Kelley walked in. Sam rarely saw anyone from the old days. Now he’d seen Iz twice in two weeks.

Sally had told Sam her brother didn’t really like it that she was dating him. “Izzy can be funny about things,” she said. Iz thought Sam had it too easy. Easy-Sam’s father dead early, Sam out busting his hump for jobs to help out his mother, once in a smelly butcher shop.

Mike headed over to his table. He still sported a crew cut, his red scrub looking good atop a body that had gained the right weight. His pants bore a sharp crease, as always, and his shirt, you could go blind from the white. “They let you off the beat?” he asked. “Don’t they know you’ll just go stir up trouble?” Not too funny, but Mike always tried.

“They let a horse out of its stall sometimes,” Sam said. “What’s buzzin’, cousin?” Mike said he was selling furs out of his uncle’s shop in Stuyvesant.

Izzy, he could be Sad Sack from the comics, slouchy as he was. He gazed at the banner on the newspaper that Sam still held in his left hand and said, “Don’t tell me you read that piece of toilet paper.”

Sam shrugged and didn’t explain.

Izzy’s face pinched. He said to Mike, “Let’s order. We have things to do.”

They got their orders bagged. On the way out, Izzy gave Sam a look that should have bothered Sam, but the effort would take more energy than what his caffeine boost had yet imparted. Good old Mike: at least he mouthed a “sorry.”

Sam folded the newspaper and laid it on top of the next table, masthead boldly showing. It was his first look at the The Daily Worker, the rag that had disrupted more than one family and set of friends.

The next time Sam went out with Sally, she told him how crabby her brother was after seeing Sam in the deli. “It was that newspaper you were reading,” she said.

“He thinks I’m not serious about you, is all. I’ll go have a talk with him. When’s he home?” Her brother still lived with their mother, although they’d moved downstairs to the first floor. The next day on his lunch break, Sam rang the two-chime bell.

When Izzy opened, he paused and then said, “Get your filthy Commie feet out of here.” He leaned left, and Sam could see a yellow something move between the door hinges. The door opened wider so Izzy could show him he was gripping his old stickball bat.

“She’s safe with me, Izzy.”

“You like your stinkin’ knees? You like walking around in your cop suit? Tell you what. Keep walking. The direction you came from.”

Sam left, but for Izzy’s mother’s sake. She was sitting on the green couch by the front window, holding back the lace curtain. Sally told him their mother’s doctors said she’d had a nervous breakdown. The father lived a separate life two apartments over. Mrs. Jacobs’s gray hair hung in strings past the collar line. Her mouth was the shape of a staple.

Six months later, Sam got a transfer to the Ninth Precinct. He’d still be pressing the bricks for a while, but in a larger area. If things worked out, he was told, he might get to work investigations, with a small pay pop. He let that desire be known from the start, but he knew it could be a year before it happened.

Still, now each day on the way to the Ninth squad room, he’d be singing the latest song, maybe “Buttermilk Skies” or “Prisoner of Love.” And when he went to visit Sally in the apartment she took with a girlfriend and the girlfriend stepped out, he’d try singing to her like Dick Haymes did with “Till the End of Time,” he was that happy.

Sally had snagged a job as a telephone operator, and though she hated leaving her mother, she was tired of sleeping on the couch and needed time away from a needy parent. Her place was only twelve blocks away, and Mom would be all right with Izzy still at home. To make Sam laugh, she’d put on fake operator voices and tell him far-fetched stories. One night after doing that, he said, “You’re making a hurtin’ turtle out of me, if you don’t marry me.” First time he ever said it.

“Hurtin’ turtle? That don’t even rhyme,” she said, and then she got buried in laughter. It took two more proposals before he got her to say yes.

Sam’s sergeant called him in and told him there was a major hoodlum named Harry Gross putting the bite on dozens of storekeepers and bar owners. “If we don’t stop him, he’ll be mayor before we know it.”

A funny one, and Sam laughed but could see how true it could easily be. The sergeant said he was giving Sam a transfer. “Detective Brian Hirsch over in Investigation needs more men to bust this guy. There are written tests and a probationary period, of course, but then you’re good to go.” He said Sam caught Hirsch’s notice when Hirsch assisted an undercover officer in a numbers bust with two precincts involved, and Sam was one of two cops handling crowd control. Hirsch liked his deportment and, when he checked, his record. Sam didn’t even know who the detective was, but he gave his sergeant his thanks, along with his regrets. And when he left the building, he threw a kiss to the sky.

The weeks went by fast. Sam aced the tests; why wouldn’t he? He bragged to Sally. They talked about a wedding date for fall.

Detective Hirsch leaned in across the cluttered desk that wasn’t even his, wasn’t anybody’s, just a desk with everybody’s junk on it. This man who looked like Sam’s own father, with a hairline that was almost a memory and the rest of it Brilliantined so shiny it was close to blue; hazel eyes that could drill out any lie you ever thought you could get away with; and hands that should’ve belonged to a guy lifting wrestlers two at a time out over the ropes.

“Graft,” Hirsch said. “Too many of our guys got dirty hands. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t pin on this badge so I could have a side job taking cash from criminals. You with me on this?”

An easy yes from Sam.

“There’s a gonif who, shall we say, perpetrates persuasion for Harry Gross.”

Sam nodded and asked, “Knee-capping, rib-pounding, like that?”

“Knuckles, knives, kicks to the jewels,” Hirsch said. “Just like Gross doesn’t do it himself, this guy has gorillas, too. One of these days a client’s gonna get capped, and Gross and his henchmen will be candidates for the electric cure. I’d like to send a message to Gross before he gets any bigger for his britches. This gonif working for Gross; he wears scarves and floppy hats to conceal something that happened to his face. Spotters say you can tell because it’s waxy-like. The nose is not the same size every day. Some days he’s Jimmy Durante, some days he’s Pacific Islands.”

“Wait. A guy with a fake nose?”

“Right. He-”

Sam said it slowly: “Tino Carlo Caruso.”

Detective Hirsch said, “You know him?”

“I might.”

Not Tino, damn it. Not the Tino who got his crotch stuck on the barbed wire in basic because he slid under the wire instead of on his stomach. Was it the war? Was it what happened the day of the sniper? Or had Tino always been on the brink, and Sam just didn’t know it because the two weren’t reared in the immediate vicinity of each other? Cops on the take was one offense. But Tino, from the neighborhood-at least sort of-put an ache in Sam’s gut in a different way; as if Sam were somehow responsible for him, had been responsible for him on a Belgian road one toe-curling winter. That cursed day, Sam had told him to keep a glove clamped on his face until they reached a medic. Had Tino been saved for this?

The only thing impeding Hirsch’s plan now was that Sam knew Caruso. That meant no undercover on this plan.

All the same, Sam was getting ready for If and When. He pushed weights and ran track and was the first to split the leather on the gym’s new punching bag. He’d learned hand-to-hand in military training camp and underwent a skim of personal combat in police academy, yet every Sunday he paid an instructor in Chinatown for a private three-hour class in pa-kua, the Chinese battle art featuring eight animal movements. His favorites were the lion and the snake. His reflexes and timing were impeccable, and he advanced through the belt rankings quickly.

One Saturday morning, Sally got him to go to a new temple on Fourteenth that Izzy had joined. Sam pretended to like the droning lay cantor, the very young rabbi, the short ladies telling him how handsome he was. But it was hard for him to hear anything while in the pews because of Izzy, five rows up, reciting loudly, davening like a man with fumes on the brain during prayer. He didn’t know if Izzy saw him there.

Sally was taking classes at City College and had to study, so she and Sam necked in the car she’d just purchased and regretted already, and then he drove her home.

Sunday he took a bus to where Izzy worked at a tire store. Sam knew the street the shop was on. Parking was tight even up to the apron of the shop, and he had to approach between cars. Izzy was outside, signing a paper for a deliveryman who brought a tire that now leaned against Izzy’s shin. When the guy left, Izzy looked after the truck a moment, and then he took the tire to a car on the far side of the shop door. He unlocked the trunk with a key, lifted the trunk gate, and put in the tire; he shut it and looked around again. Sam was already stooped between cars. It was too noisy on the street to talk to him there. He would wait until Izzy was back inside.

A mechanic came in from the garage at the same time Sam pulled open the shop door and asked Izzy if that was the tire delivery. Izzy said no. The mechanic left grumbling.

When Izzy faced the front and saw Sam, he said, “You would come here?”

Sam waited a beat and then said, “Why’d you do a thing like that, Iz?”

Izzy tipped his head down, looked this way and that at the floor, then met Sam’s gaze and said, “Shut your face, oh-holier-than-thou.”

“Iz, Iz. You need extra dough? I can-”

“Not from you.”

“You can’t do that, Iz, come on.”

“Maybe it’s not what you think.”

“Maybe it is,” Sam said.

Did he have the thing right, though? What if Izzy intended to deliver the tire to someone else, and it was a different tire the mechanic was expecting?

A customer came in. Sam hung around reading wall charts and tire labels. The man paid a balance from work previously completed, telling Izzy to be sure to thank his boss again for letting him run a tab. When the customer was out the door, Izzy stayed behind the counter. He said, “I got one question.”

“Fire it up,” Sam said.

“Are you or are you not a stinkin’ rat-fink Communist?”

“Look, Izzy, that’s not it, and you know it. Some things, they just come to you. You don’t mean for it to happen. Sally and I love each other, we really do. It’s been a year. No. Seven months, two weeks, and three days I’ve known it was her. I’d like you to be my best man, Iz. Will you do that for us? Day before Valentine’s Day, Sally says, so I won’t forget the anniversary. Do that for us, Iz?”

The color dropped from Izzy’s face. He reached under the counter and brought up an oil-smeared tire iron, laid it on the counter slowly, and said, “How you like them apples, Sergeant?” Sergeant-with a level of contempt in his voice you’d expect from a bad stage actor. And sure, Sam would know about bad theater, because Sally had him take her to plays uptown, so they could claim some culture, too.

Like tonight. Tonight he and Sally would hop the subway, grab a dog off a cart, and go see Annie Get Your Gun. Afterward, they would steer around the corner to a hot spot for a drink. Sam’s mother had been helping Sally with a sewing project. She wouldn’t say what; he only knew it was a dress. On the subway, Sally held a giant shawl tight around her so Sam couldn’t see, but when they got off and she spread open the soft-cream shawl, the sight near knocked the wind out of him. The design bared the shoulders, pinched the waist, flowed down to a boat-collar moat at the top of the hips, and then drove a waterfall of ruby red to just below the knees. On her feet were black heels with red silk roses on the tops.

After the play and a short stop for cheesecake at the end of the block, they walked toward the subway. The air was perfect. You could see the stars even through the sign glare. Sam wished he could conjure the night to go on longer than the ten hours it was meant to be. But when he spotted a police call box two feet down an alley on the way to the subway, he apologized but said he wanted to phone in because Hirsch liked that.

When she saw him come back from the call box, Sally said, “You have to go now, don’t you? Go, baby. I can get myself home just fine.”

“Nope. I’ll take my goodnight kiss on the steps, thank you.”

He tried showing spirit the whole way to Sally’s place, but he knew his body odor was growing, and he kept his arms to his side. In front of her door he kissed her deeply, let her go in, and waved goodbye through the glass. Then he took himself to the scene of the crime: the old tenement apartments on Avenue C, where Sally’s brother Izzy and her mother lived. He didn’t know what was going on exactly, but he sure didn’t want her there.

Number 216.

Detective Hirsch threaded his way down the sidewalk and up the stoop, where barrier rope stretched across the front of the handrails. He showed his ID to the beat cop, then saw Sam approaching and waited. Other cops were keeping away the googly eyes and one female tenant coming home from a shift job. Nothing to see but cop cars on the street.

Inside was another matter. Inside was blood in moats along the hardwood floor between the walls and carpet. Speckled lampshades and pictures. A blotch of blood had soaked into the shoulder of the light-green couch near the window, where Mrs. Jacobs had held back the curtain the last time Sam saw her. The white doilies were off the headrest and one arm.

Izzy’s body lay in the kitchen. At the moment Sam came up, the photog was snapping a close-up of Izzy’s face, where a V-shaped cut had been made near his mouth all the way to the cheekbone. Detective Hirsch said that kind of slice was usually meant for chumps in prison, the scarring designed as a dead-sure label for a snitch. It was “off” to have it carved on a corpse. “You taking notes, Rabinowitz?”

Sam had his notebook out, but had only entered the brush-blood on the doorjamb of the apartment. His head felt full of gelatin. Those weren’t watery eyes, oh no. That wasn’t sour gag in his throat.

Iz. Stickball Iz. Model airplane Iz. Comrade-in-arms Private Isadore Jacobs. Soon to be brother-in-law Izzy. How could it be? Sam’s thoughts raced to Sally. How could she endure this? He held her in his mind as if he held her in his arms, as if the power could transfer. God help her if anyone told her before he did.

Detective Hirsch led Sam down the hallway to the bedroom, pointing out smears at elbow level. “He was dragging her. Look here at the marks on the floor,” he said, pointing to black marks. Old lady Jacobs always wore lace-up witch shoes with black soles.

In the room, Hirsch nodded toward the bed where Mrs. Jacobs lay on her stomach in the middle, head over the side as if searching for something that fell on the floor. Sam could see the side of her face, so he knew it was her, though her hair was tinted red, not the gray as he’d last seen it. Tinted because her mood had improved so much, and Sally had gone over and helped her mother do it, and they almost did it to her own.

Detective Hirsch said, “Come closer.” Sam did, near the legs of Mrs. Jacobs, and knew what he was supposed to see, and didn’t want to. Hirsch shone his flashlight on her flank, where pale red bruises had formed under smears of blood and feces.

When Sally buzzed to let Sam in, she was still in her nightgown. With Sam was Sally’s aunt, who lived in Brooklyn. Sally flicked her glance between them but didn’t need to say a thing to know she was about to absorb a horror. They guided her to the couch, and the two sat with Sally and then told her, and took turns cradling the child she became.

Sam was parked in a room by himself at the station, a closet that had been turned into a place where officers could write reports. Detective Hirsch wanted him to have no distractions. He told him to write down the name of every person he thought Isadore Hadwin Jacobs knew, from kindergarten to Krautland.

Izzy’s father had also been informed, of course, and was told to come to the station the next day for an interview, but Sam doubted he was involved.

Sam kept asking Detective Hirsch if he would please have someone check on Mike Kelley to make sure his friend was all right. Why wouldn’t he be? Sam asked himself, even as he kept seeing Mike and Izzy, Izzy and Mike in most every memory flashing in.

Because Sam’s mother had gone to Florida for a wedding of a childhood friend, he was able to bring Sally over to his apartment that night. They lay in his bed while she talked and cried, and then they got up and he fixed her something to eat, and they talked, and they lay back down and talked some more. Next to Sam’s bed was a pull-down shade with a chomp at the side. He didn’t remember how it got there. The moon filled it, and the gray shadows of its face seemed to be laughing at him. They slept. He woke with Sally kissing him. It didn’t take long before he entered her, and afterward he was saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and she was whispering, “No baby, I wanted you to, I wanted you to.”

She got up to go to the bathroom. Back in bed, she said she was bleeding. Again he said he was sorry. She said nothing this time.

Despite himself, he fell back to sleep. As dawn was glowing through the hole of the shade, he felt Sally’s warm breath and then her lips on his and heard her say, “Hold me again, Sammy; you have to hold me, or I can’t live.”

Pain from feeling helpless can be worse than from a thing over and done with, like watching a sick person die versus the death itself. Every day that passed without an answer to who killed Izzy and the mother slapped Sam in the face. He had his own precinct’s assignments, and Sally required much of his off-hours time, so he pestered the detectives in Precinct Seven every other day, until he suspected they conveniently weren’t there to answer. He’d seen Mike Kelley at the services and tried to talk with him, but all Mike did was walk around inside and outside like an ice pop with the color drained out.

A month to the day after the murders, two men in a basement game room on East Thirteenth were rubbed out. One was a gopher for the owner, the other a regular player. The owner lost only a finger from a pistol shot. He said he knew from the get-go it was mobsters imitating the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The dogs, he called them, wore fake cop uniforms, pretending to bust his joint. “I saw dirty shoes coming down the steps. Then this one mope had a button off. Our cops don’t dress like that.” Proud of NYPD cops even while he broke the law. He ordered them out with an unloaded shotgun from a shelf, and that he shouldn’t have done.

Detective Samuel Rabinowitz and a probie wrote it up, the probie drawing the scene with templates that had cutouts for arrows and rooms and bodies. Sam asked the owner if he could remember anything else. “Yeah, there was this one, hung back by the stairs. He had a crew cut and red hair. Very pale, like an albino. He was screaming while the shooter grabbed my money and Jimmy was moaning on the floor. I loved that Jimmy, like a son he was. I’m gonna make pig-slop out of them that did it, soon as I can.”

Was Mike Kelley the only redhead with a crew cut in the borough of Manhattan? Of course not. But Sam’s impulse was to go with what you know.

He took a jog off his assigned route after looking up the fur store Mike’s uncle on his father’s side owned. Mr. Kelley had to buzz him in-so many walk-away thefts going on, he explained. Mike was in the back; he’d get him.

Mike and Sam stood squeezed between two racks of furs. Sam’s nose itched. He barely even had to open his mouth when Mike, after being sure his uncle was out of earshot, said, “Not here, Sammy.” He told Sam to meet him in Tompkins Square Park. “That giant elm in the center? The one, you know, half of it’s dead from beetles? Nine o’clock. It’s dark by then.”

Under a light pole, the light further helped by a full moon, Sam eyed Mike’s boots as the men sat down on the bench. “Fancy wear there, partner.”

“Pampa boot. Cost a few pennies, yeah.”

He was going to comment on Mike’s shirt, too, but Mike beat him to it to criticize his own. “Hawaiian now? Stylish. Police work must be good to you.”

They nodded affirmative to each other and looked across the pathway at the silhouettes of a girl and guy making out on the grass. “You need to go break that up?” Mike asked. “Oh, you don’t have your badge on.”

“Mike. What you got to tell me?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“You wasn’t where?”

“That game room that got shot up. Somebody told me someone saw a redhead. It wasn’t me. I heard.”

“You seen Tino Caruso lately?”

Mike got up and went to the edge of the walkway. All of a sudden he started doing jumping jacks. He said for Sam to come join him and laughed stupidly.

Sam went over and grabbed him by the back of the collar and shoved him back onto the bench. “Izzy. What happened with Izzy? You know. I know you know.”

Mike’s face shone from a burst of July sweat. His eyelashes were pale smiles from the side. But Mike wasn’t smiling, and in a swift motion he lowered his head, and put his hands to his face, and silently sobbed.

Sam got it out from him. Tino Caruso had had Izzy wiped. The mother wasn’t supposed to be part of it. When Mike heard Mrs. Jacobs had been violated besides having taken a pistol shot to the back of the head, he disappeared for two days, later making an excuse that he tripped on a curb and knocked himself out, and spent those days in a hospital unidentified. That explained the bruises from banging his head against an alley wall, the reason his eyes were ringed in green and black. “He’ll bump me off too, he knows I talked to you.”

“Doesn’t he live around here? Why’d we come here, then?”

“Uptown, near Stuyvesant. He’s loaded now, from rip-offs. He works for a big guy named Harry Gross. Some he does on his own, on the side.”

“Why in hell did you get involved, Mike?”

“The take-down on Thirteenth, he made me come along. I swear I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“And why’d he do Izzy? Why carve up his face like that?”

“Tino didn’t do it himself.”

“I don’t care about that. I want the guy who did it. His name?”

“He goes by Hambone. Izzy flapped his yap about Tino’s new career. Somebody talked to somebody. That somebody was a cockroach. He told Tino. I’m scared like I never been, Sammy. What’ll I do?”

“You have to go down, Mike, you know that.”

“Pop me now, Sammy. They send me upriver, I’m meat for the taking.” Then he sank to his knees and cried so hard, no sound came out. Sam pulled him sideways and squeezed, telling him it would be all right, although of course it wouldn’t be. Again, nothing was the same. Nothing ever would be.

Sam walked Mike to the street, where they were going to go their separate ways. Then Mike said he was sure he saw Hambone’s car drive slowly by. Hambone, the muscle for Tino. The one who cut up Izzy and maybe got nasty with Mrs. Jacobs. A groan came out of Mike, right before he turned and puked in the grass.

Sam had his handkerchief out for him when he rose back up. “You’re coming with me.”

When he got Mike to the station, Detective Hirsch convinced the captain to put him in a safe house in Queens until he could be used in a courtroom for state’s evidence.

When he lifted his cigarette from the ashtray, Hirsch’s fingers made the cig look like a toothpick. Sam wished he had those damn fine weapons. He told Hirsch that Mike Kelley said that Tino meant the game room disaster to be strategic, to send a message to all his suckers.

“Tino’s IQ can’t lift a fly off a feather. I can locate him before anyone else can. The piece of dirt acting as his muscle is Fishel Gross, a nephew of mobster Harry. He goes by Hambone. Let me put the word out that I maybe want in on Tino’s action. We set it up, we take him down.”

Detective Hirsch raised his voice to tell Sam to stay out of it until he could put a team together. “For now, you’re under orders to cool it.” Sam left the meeting with an ache in his gut. He liked Hirsch. He liked the job, his brothers, his badge. Don’t do this, he kept telling himself.

He’d already found out from Mike that Tino’s routine on Thursdays after eating out was to go home, call up a girl, do their business, and have her gone by midnight so he could fall asleep reading Captain America comics with his Magnavox radio set to WMCA. Clockwork. Sam recalled that was the one thing Tino was good at.

The night air was stifling, windows open everywhere. Sam studied the building to locate where Tino’s window would be. He took the fire escape on the north side. Some people kept wooden sticks in the window so it would open only so far. Not Tino. He must feel invincible, Sam thought. He stepped through, not even a curtain or drape to push aside, right into his bedroom.

Tino’s weapon lay on the side table where anyone could lift it. Sam tucked the gun in his waistband and then leaned down to clamp a hand over Tino’s mouth. He almost drew back. The man slept with his nose on-Groucho glasses hooked to a nose, without the furry eyebrows. Did he wear those with his lady visitors? Maybe they thought it was cute.

He covered Tino’s mouth to wake him up, then made him sit in a chair. Tino, naked except for shorts, kept wrapping his torso with his arms as if he’d never been in a military shower. Sam told him he could put his clothes on in a minute. Sam sat on the edge of the bed with his gun on his leg and decided he wasn’t going to lay it all on Tino right there, right then, but he did say, “It wasn’t your nose you lost, Tino. It was your heart.”

Tino’s face was scarred beyond what the rifle bullet had done. He must have had some failed surgeries that affected his cheeks; hence, the casual comment about it looking waxy.

“You don’t know,” Tino said.

“I know plenty.” Sam stood and walked a few steps, faced him, and asked, “Were you always a creep, Tino? If not for the war, would you have ever killed a friend and molested an old lady?”

“I didn’t do any of that!” Tino’s eyes shifted just a fraction of a second.

That’s when Sam felt a shadow-pull, a flutter-fall of instinct, the way the mystery alert in the Belgian woods had given him the awareness to cancel the intent of a sniper.

Just so, here in Tino’s bedroom, from nowhere came the warning. Sam moved his back to the wall.

When Fishel “Hambone” Gross, in socks and shorts, took two steps in with a pistol out chest-high, Sam grabbed his forearm and, with the butt of his service revolver, chopped Hambone’s weapon out of his hand. Then he twisted the big man’s left arm back to force him down, kicking the firearm into the wedge of the door. But Hambone’s nickname held for a reason. He was big and stubborn.

Tino flustered about the apartment, tugging on pants and a pullover and finding a different nose in his top drawer, while Sam had to perform maneuvers to put the Hambone down, not wanting a fired round to pierce a wall or floor. At last, he fought handcuffs on him, but only after rendering a side-kick to his knee. To Hambone’s whining and prone figure, Sam said, “Nana korobi, ya oki,” and in English, “Seven times down, eight times up” but then added, “my ass!”

He asked Tino, still by the closet, “What, you have him sleeping over? Bad luck for him. Is there a woman in there, too? Any other surprises?” Tino shook his head no. Sam made the two men go into the living room and motioned them to sit in chairs. Hambone had to shuffle-hop to get there, groaning all the while from pain in his knee. People noises came up through the floorboards. Someone else banged on a wall, the demand from neighbors to settle down.

A glance around the room brought Sam to a telephone. He shifted his firearm to his left hand and picked up the receiver, but he’d been distracted by the noise and took too long to dial, and in a flash Hambone’s cuffed arms noosed Sam’s arms to his side.

Pain yet forced out Hambone’s groans, but he managed to haul Sam back to the bedroom and the open window. Sam tried tripping him on the way, but the irony of Hambone’s knee displacement and subsequent footfalls worked against him.

Even through the action, Sam saw Tino rise from the chair, quietly open the door, look back, and exit.

Wearing Officer Sam Rabinowitz like a bib, the two-man act tumbled backward through the opening. When they hit the fire escape grating, Sam used the jolt to rotate and free his arms. The big man struggled to his feet, bringing Sam with him. Handcuffed as he was, he clenched his hands like a club. Sam used a sweeping circular motion to divert the blow, and in so doing he cartwheeled Hambone over the low rail. He heard a splat, soon followed by a spiraling yowl from cats mating and a far-off siren’s wail.

Officers found the second body on the other side of the building, where the stairway to the roof deck had been the conduit to convey a forlorn Tino Caruso to his inglorious end.

The arguments weren’t serious between Sally and Sam about whether Honora should come before Isadora, or Isadora before Honora. Sally won out, saying it would be Honora, after her mother: Honora Isadora Rabinowitz. And she told the nurse in the hospital the next one would surely be a boy, and his name could be Aaron Samuel or even Aaron Alfred Samuel Rabinowitz.

Buds on a bunch of pussy willows tied with pink ribbon were a gift from Detective Hirsch. The stems sat in a clear vase on the sill. Sun shafts hit the glass and marbleized the wall and ceiling. When the nurse came in for Sally’s meds and saw the satisfied looks on the couple’s faces after the naming situation was settled, she said, “You two look happy as cats in a creamery.” And so it was, and so it continued to be for fifty more playful, worrisome, down and up years.

N. J. AYRES earned an MWA Edgar Award nomination for a story in another of Mary Higgins Clark’s anthologies (The Night Awakens, 2000). She has published three forensics-based novels featuring former Las Vegas stripper Smokey Brandon, a book of poetry, and numerous short stories. For over twenty years, Ayres (Noreen) wrote and edited complex technical manuals for engineering companies in Alaska, California, Texas, and Washington. Learn more at NoreenAyres.com.