Slow Motion Riot (28 page)

Naturally, the downtown train stops
several times between stations, and this band of rowdy black kids keeps
swaggering back and forth between the cars, hanging from the straps and
menacing old people. Usually I just ignore gangs like this and read the
hemorrhoid ads. But today, they've got me in a rage. After talking to Charlie,
I'm in no mood for taking shit from anyone. I pick the one kid who seems to be
the leader and just start staring at him.

He's got about seventeen thin gold
chains wrapped around his neck. On his fingers, he has all these gold rings
with different colored stones. Even his mouth is full of gold, though from the
way the light hits his teeth, it looks like he's got a diamond implanted in one
of his front caps.

In short, he's wearing what I clear
after taxes. And I'm supposed to go back to my office and tell some little
motherfucker like him how to run his life.

No way.

For a while, he doesn't look back
at me because he's busy putting his face near an old lady's ear and shouting.
Then he notices me and smirks. I keep staring. He sits down on the bench across
from me and his six other friends sit down next to him. Softly at first, he
begins to tap out a rhythm on the edge of his seat with his index and middle
fingers. His friends start to tap along with him. He looks at me and starts
slapping the rhythm a little harder and a little more defiantly with his open
hands, and his friends join in after him. I just keep my eyes right on the
level with his. Finally he starts to beat the rhythm out with his fists and the
rest of them do the same, and it sounds like war drums echoing through the
stalled train.

I get up and walk over to him. For
a minute, I just stand above him without saying anything. The drumming starts
to die down a little. "You're annoying me," I say.

The drumming stops completely and
the leader kid just looks at me, with his mouth hanging open a little. "Oh
shit," one of his friends says. "My man Burn-hard Goetz."

They all laugh nervously as I go
back to sit down, and when the train starts moving again, they all move on to
another car.

I sit there simmering the rest of
the way. It's a free country, I think, as the train grinds to a halt at
125th
Street
and a fat guy with a steel drum gets on.
People like Charlie and Maria are grown-ups and they can do what they want, and
deal with the consequences. I just don't know why they have to do it on my watch.

I start going over my list of
clients in my mind to see which of them deserves to get their ass kicked. The
steel drum guy begins to play a calypso version of "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed
Reindeer." Right now, I feel like kicking his ass. Instead, I just glare at
him until he moves on to the next car. The one name that keeps coming back to
me is Richard Silver. Thinking about him makes me almost as anxious and
uncomfortable as thinking about Darryl. Probably because—besides Darryl—he's
the client who's most actively tried to undermine me and make me think twice
about what I'm doing with my life.

I'd like to give him something to
think about, but I'm not sure what pretext to use. That stuff his wife told me
about money laundering sounded a little nuts, but I'm sure he's been up to
something else. Then I remember he still hasn't done his community service
requirement, which is as good an excuse as any to go over and bother him at his
office.

The train pulls into the
Columbus
Circle
station; I get off and walk a couple of
blocks to his building on
Seventh Avenue
. Richard Silver
Associates is on the thirty-eighth floor, so I take the elevator up, flash my
badge at his puffy, blond secretary, and tell her to hold all his calls.

The secretary, who's in her
thirties and wears enough hair spray and makeup for a heavy metal band and
their road crew, buzzes him in his office while I stare at the white antiseptic
walls and the postmodern furniture.

Silver comes tearing out thirty
seconds later. But when he sees it's me, his face drops a little.

"Oh shit, I thought this was
somebody important," he tells the secretary with some disappointment in
his voice. "You almost gave me a heart attack."

"This is important," I
say, walking around him and going right into his office.

It's both more and less opulent
than I expected. He certainly has enough space—you could probably fit a
helicopter in the room. The southern view goes on for miles and miles. In the
distance you can see the
World
Trade
Center
's twin towers shimmering
like a pair of switchblades in the sunlight. But he hardly has anything in the
office, except a plain brown horseshoe-shaped desk, one big leather chair
behind it, and two small leather-and-wood chairs in front of it. It's not so
much cheap, as incredibly severe-looking. Sort of like Surviv-alist Chic. There
are only three pictures on the wall and just two books on the shelf behind him,
the telephone directory and The Power Broker, the biography of Robert Moses,
the builder who I always thought personally mutilated
New York
City
.

I'd say Richard Silver either just
moved in or he has a very odd sense of self-esteem. With the rent he's paying,
he can certainly afford more elaborate decorations. And then I look at the
ceiling over his desk and see he's got a gold mirror up there, so he can look
up and see himself. Why he'd want to do such a thing regularly, I couldn't say.

"So I guess I was just reading
about your department," he says, seizing the offensive as he strolls back
behind his desk. "How you've got an open-door policy for hoodlums. Right?"

He holds up his hands in mock
sympathy and then gives me that long, silent look where you can't tell if his
eyebrow is raised or not. I guess this is supposed to put me on the defensive,
but I'm too pissed for that today.

"Speaking of fuckups," I
say evenly. "I understand you still haven't been doing your community
service..."

"Ooooo, that's bad, huh?"
He sways playfully back and forth in his chair. "I haven't been brushing
between meals either."

"I'm glad you think this is
such a joke..."

"Well, really. I mean, did you
come all the way up here just to bother me about this? Instead of going out and
looking for these hoodlums you put out on the street. You could've called my
lawyer. Or the other guy who's supposed to be my probation officer should call
my lawyer."

This last part seems to stop him.
"Hey, that's right," he says, reaching for the phone and putting his
feet up on the desk, so they're right in my face. "You aren't even my
probation officer anymore. What the hell are you doing here anyway?"

The way he says that makes me grind
my teeth. I decide to taunt him back. "You know I saw your wife the other
day."

"Oh yeah?" he says,
feigning indifference while he looks at the phone and dials. "Did you fuck
her or anything?"

"No, I just talked to her
about this Goldman Resources."

I fully expect him to ignore me or
make another wisecrack, but instead he puts the phone down and gives me his
full attention. Only a muscle or two in his face have changed, but he looks
gravely serious now.

"She told you that, huh?"

I glance up at the mirror above his
desk and notice for the first time that he's got a little bald spot spreading
across the back of his scalp. "She told me all about it," I say.

He closes his eyes and takes a
breath. This is the last thing that I expected. I never for a second took what
his ex-wife said seriously. But he seems genuinely stunned. It's like we were
just sparring and I accidentally hit him with a knockout punch.

He presses a button on the phone
and tells his secretary to hold his calls for a half hour. Then he points to
one of the pictures on the wall.

"You know who that is?"
he begins.

The picture shows a slightly
younger, skinnier Richard Silver in a purple La Coste shirt with his arm around
an older man who has a big nose and skin the texture of a deflated balloon's.
They seem to be standing on the deck of a yacht.

"That's Jimmy Rose," I
say. "He was your partner, right?"

"That's right. I met Jimmy
years ago when he was leading the opposition to a housing project a number of
us in the council wanted to put in
Brooklyn
. Probably
before your time."

"I remember it, though,"
I tell him. "Sullivan Houses. It would've brought a lot of blacks and
Hispanics into the area..."

" 'Low-income families' is
what it said in the bill." He leans forward on his elbow.

"Whatever."

"I'm glad you remember it,
though. I thought it was an important project. So did Jimmy. He said supporting
it would kill me. Politically speaking, of course... So you know what I did?"

"You chickened out," I
say.

"I learned the value of
compromise. I saw the opportunity to do great things with Jimmy. So I
sacrificed a little bit of the present for the sake of the future."

I should be moving, but he's got
that smooth seductive sound going in his voice again. He gestures for me to
have a seat.

"Now, Steven," he begins
calmly. "Do you remember the little talk we had before about the
importance of having resources?"

"Sure." To my horror, I'm
beginning to see a little bit of the sense behind what he's been saying all
along, but I'm not ready to agree to anything.

"Well, Steven," he says,
"I'd like to talk to you a little bit more about that right now."

The Dodgers' pitcher threw a
curveball and Darryl Strawberry hit it foul down the first base line at Shea
Stadium. The ball bounced once in the dirt and went into the stands just
missing Richard Silver and his son, Leonard, in the first row.

"You should've caught it,
Dad," Leonard said.

"You catch it next time,"
Richard Silver grumbled.

The Mets were losing 2-1 in the
ninth inning and there were men on second and third with one man out. Most of
the Monday night crowd was still there and a mild breeze was blowing out toward
right field.

"You know your mother is causing
me a lot of problems," Richard Silver told his son.

"Watch the game," Leonard
said.

"You watch the game."

Valenzuela, the Dodger pitcher,
threw a fastball that came in a little bit below the letters on Strawberry's
shirt. But the umpire said it was inside, bringing the count to two balls and
two strikes. The pitcher shook his head in disgust and Scioscia the catcher
came out to the mound for a conference.

"What does she think she's
trying to do to me?" Richard Silver said, turning in his seat and taking a
bite of his son's hot dog.

"I don't know." His son
didn't look at him but kept his eyes on Strawberry taking swings just outside
the batter's box.

"You know I may end up in a
lot of trouble because of something she told someone." Richard Silver
stared at his son for a long time, but the boy didn't respond. "Do you
think that's right?"

"I don't know," his son
said as Strawberry stepped back in the box and the catcher went back behind the
plate. "Watch the game."

Strawberry hits the next one foul
down the third base line and it ricochets off the concrete steps a dozen seats
to the left of us.

"These are great seats,"
Andrea says. "Who gave them to you?"

"Just a guy," I say.
"Nobody you know."

She doesn't need to know anything
else about it. I put the cheese spread from Balducci's back into the picnic
basket she prepared.

"Did your folks used to take
you here when you were a kid?" she asks.

"No."

"I thought this was just
around the corner from where you grew up."

"No, I was born on the Grand
Concourse in the
Bronx
," I explain. "My
parents used to take me to a place called Freedomland when I was a kid."

"What was that?" she
asks, reaching into the basket to put some cheese on a cracker.

"It was like the
Disneyland
of the
Bronx
, you know." It's a strain to remember
what it looked like now. "I guess it wasn't anything special, but what did
I know? I was like this really unhappy little kid and I had the time of my life
at Freedomland; I remember all these little white kids running around with all
these little black and Puerto Rican kids. We all took the bus home and sang
songs together. Kinda like
City
College
but better."

"Sounds like fun."

"It's the best memory I had
growing up. In fact, I used to have this picture in my head of
New
York City
being like Freedomland, with all these
different kinds of people mixing and getting along."

I feel funny saying this after
talking to Charlie and Maria earlier today. I'm not so sure about the melting
pot now. I can't even bring myself to tell Andrea what's been going on with me,
because I'm still struggling to work out what it all means. All I know now is
that I don't want to give in to these bad thoughts I've been having.

"So what happened to
Freedomland?" Andrea asks as a jet passes overhead.

"I think it went
bankrupt," I tell her, "so they tore it down and put up
Co-op
City
, the big middle-income housing
complex. And all these Jewish people, like my parents, abandoned the Grand
Concourse, which was like this really nice strip where they'd been living, and
moved to
Co-op
City
.
Which left the Grand Concourse to these poor blacks and Puerto Ricans, who
couldn't do anything with it, so they burned it down along with the rest of the
South Bronx
. And eventually the old Jews like my parents
left the
Bronx
altogether. They ran away."

"You sound like you're ashamed
of them," she says.

I turn back to the game.
"Yeah, I guess I do."

Strawberry took a good swing at the
next pitch, driving it high and deep down the right field line. The crowd stood
and roared. The right fielder looked up. But at the last moment, the breeze
pushed the ball into the foul territory in the upper deck, twenty rows away
from where Detective Sergeant Bob McCullough was sitting with his family.

"Here's the best story I ever
heard about a guy who lost his own gun," said his father, Captain Willie,
sipping a Budweiser. "Johnny Riordan, used to be a sergeant at Midtown
South, goes over to Fitzpatrick's on
Tenth Avenue
and gets absolutely stewed."

"Christ, but Johnny could do
it too," said his daughter, Detective Katie McCullough, who had dark hair
and very fair skin.

Bob McCullough tried to ignore the
two of them and watch the game. But a sudden gust of wind blew up a little dust
storm around the pitcher's mound and they had to take a break on the field.
Captain Willie, a gray-haired bear of a man in his sixties, kept going with his
story about Johnny Riordan.

"Anyway," he said with a
belch. "Drunk as he is, Johnny manages to make it home. But when he wakes
up in the morning, he can't for the life of him remember where he put his gun.
He looks everywhere, but he can't find it. And his commander at the time was
Hicks, so he knew there'd be hell to pay if they found out."

"Oh sure," said Detective
Katie, slapping her knee.

Bob McCullough, whose father called
him "Little Bob," nodded along as though he were amused instead of
miserable. He hated it when the two of them traded war stories like this. And
to top it off, his left leg still hurt where the bullet grazed him on the night
of the shoot-out.

"So then Johnny comes up with
a plan to save his own ass," Captain Willie said. "He goes over to
the piers on the west side, finds a bum sleeping there, and throws him right in
the drink."

"He doesn't!" said
Detective Katie, with a shocked, delighted look.

"He does," said Captain
Willie. "And then Johnny jumps right in after him and saves him from
drowning. And in the next day's papers, it's HERO COP SAVES BUM for a headline.
So nobody minded it when Johnny said he'd lost his gun in the rescue."

Captain Willie and Detective Katie
threw their heads back and roared. Bob McCullough smiled weakly at them. His
father clapped him on the shoulder.

"So you see, you needn't feel
so bad about losing your gun to that nigger," his father told him with a
chuckle.

"Thanks, Dad," Bob
McCullough said as the Dodger pitcher finally began his next windup. "That
means a lot."

Watching the game on television
from the apartment in the Fortress, Darryl King sank down in his chair and put
his face on the palm of his hand.

"Damn," he said, watching
Strawberry. "How come they only got 'bout two niggers on this team?"

Strawberry wiggles his butt and
waves his bat around. Andrea laughs and points. "That's so cute," she
says, tugging on the binoculars I have around my neck. "I gotta see this."

I give her the glasses. "So
you're having a good time now, right?"

"Of course." She squeezes
my arm and looks through the binoculars.

"You like this," I say,
pointing at the seats and the picnic basket. "You like these nice things
in life that cost a lot of money."

She lowers the field glasses and
gives me that mildly perturbed look. "Steven," she says.
"There's nothing wrong with that."

"I wasn't saying there
was."

Strawberry steps out of the box one
last time and gives the third base coach a long look.

"Why's he doing that?"
Andrea asks me.

"So that the other team will
think the Mets have a play on," I say. "Like a suicide squeeze, you
know, a bunt for the runner to come home from third. But never mind. They're
not going to do that anyway."

"Why not?"

"Because that's Darryl
Strawberry up there," I say, pointing. "They pay him to go up there
and hit the ball out of the park."

The Dodger pitcher throws a high
fastball and Strawberry smashes it toward the gap between the shortstop and
third base. The crowd starts to yowl. But the shortstop scoops up the ball,
looks the runner back to third base, and throws Strawberry out at first by a
half step.

"Come on, let's go,"
Richard Silver said, rising out of his seat.

"There's one more out to
go," said his son, Leonard, trying to get the hot dog remains out of his
braces.

"They already blew their
chance," Richard Silver told him, as he moved toward the aisle. "When
an opportunity comes to you in life, you have to take it, otherwise it's gone
forever. I was just saying that to somebody recently."

"Who?"

"Never mind." Silver
pushed the blue Mets cap down over his son's eyes.

Leonard wasn't budging from his
seat. "We can't go now, Dad. Kevin McReynolds is up."

Richard Silver looked down the line
as the stocky left fielder settled into the batter's box. "He's a
bum."

"He's my favorite player,
Dad."

McReynolds swung at the first pitch
and popped it up behind home plate. The ball was a white dot against the black
nighttime sky. Scioscia the Dodgers' catcher threw off his mask and caught it
easily, ending the game.

"Better find another favorite
player," Richard Silver said, prodding his son to start moving toward the
exits. "By the way, is your mother seeing anybody now?"