Cynthia Manson (ed) (49 page)

In addition, New York in December is
crawling with boosters, dippers, yokers, smash-and-grabbers, bindlestiffs on
the mope, aggressive pros offering special holiday rates to guys cruising
around at dusk in station wagons with Jersey plates, pigeon droppers and
assorted other bunco artists, purveyors of all manner of dubious gift items,
and entrepreneurs of the informal branch of the pharmaceutical trade. My job is
to try and prevent at least some of these fine upstanding perpetrators from
scoring against at least some of their natural Yuletide prey—the seasonal
hordes of out-of-towners, big-ticket shoppers along Fifth Avenue, blue-haired
Wednesday matinee ladies, and wide-eyed suburban matrons lined up outside Radio
City Music Hall with big, snatchable shoulder bags full of credit cards.

I’m your friendly neighborhood
plainclothesman.
Very
plain clothes. The guy in the grungy overcoat and
watch cap and jeans and beat-up shoes and a week’s growth of black beard
shambling along the street carrying something in a brown paper bag—that
ubiquitous New York bum you hurry past every day while holding your
breath—might be me.

The name is Neil Hockaday, but
everybody calls me Hock, my fellow cops and my snitches alike. And that’s no
pint of muscatel in my paper bag, it’s my point-to-point shortwave radio. I
work out of a boroughwide outfit called Street Crimes Unit-Manhattan, which is
better known as the befitting S. C. U. M. patrol.

For twelve years, I’ve been a cop,
the last three on S. C. U. M. patrol, which is a prestige assignment despite
the way we dress on the job. In three years, I’ve made exactly twice the
collars I did in my first nine riding around in precinct squad cars taking
calls from sector dispatch. It’s all going to add up nicely when I go for my
gold shield someday. Meanwhile, I appreciate being able to work pretty much
unsupervised, which tells you I’m at least a half honest cop in a city I figure
to be about three-quarters crooked.

Sometimes I do a little bellyaching
about the department—and who doesn’t complain along about halfway through the
second cold one after shift? —but mainly I enjoy the work I do. What I like
about it most is how I’m always up against the elements of chance and surprise,
one way or another.

That’s something you can’t say about
most careers these days. Not even a cop’s, really. Believe it or not, you have
plenty of tedium if you’re a uniform sealed up in a blue-and-white all day,
even in New York. But the way my job plays, I’m out there on the street mostly
alone and it’s an hour-by-hour proposition: fifty-eight minutes of walking
around with my pores open so I don’t miss anything and two minutes of surprise.

No matter what, I’ve got to be ready
because surprise comes in several degrees of seriousness. And when it does, it
comes out of absolutely nowhere.

On the twenty-fourth of December, I
wasn’t ready.

To me, it was a day like any other.
That was wishful thinking, of course. To a holiday-crazed town, it was
Christmas Eve and the big payoff was on deck—everybody out there with kids and
wives and roast turkeys and plenty of money was anxious to let the rest of us
know how happy they were.

Under the circumstances, it was just
as well that I’d pulled duty. I wouldn’t have had anyplace to go besides the
corner pub, as it happened—or, if I could stand it, the easy chair in front of
my old Philco for a day of
Christmas in Connecticut
followed by
Miracle
on
Thirty-fourth Street
followed by
A Christmas Carol
followed by
March of the Wooden
Soldiers
followed by Midnight
Mass live from St. Patrick’s.

Every year since my divorce five
years ago, I’d dropped by my ex-wife’s place out in Queens for Christmas Eve.
I’d bring champagne, oysters, an expensive gift, and high hopes of spending the
night. But this year she’d wrecked my plans. She telephoned around the
twentieth to tell me about this new boyfriend of hers—some guy who wasn’t a cop
and whose name sounded like a respiratory disease. Flummong—and how he was
taking her out to some rectangular state in the Middle West to meet his
parents, who grow wheat. Swell.

So on the twenty-fourth, I got up at
the crack of noon and decided that the only thing that mattered was business.
Catching bad guys on the final, frantic shopping day—that was the ticket. I
reheated some coffee from the day before, then poured some into a mug after I
picked out something small, brown, and dead. I also ate a week-old piece of
babka and said. “Bah, humbug!” right out loud.

I put on my quilted longjohns and
strapped a lightweight. 32 automatic Baretta Puma around my left ankle. Then I
pulled on a pair of faded grey corduroys with holes in the knees, a black
turtleneck sweater with bleach stains to wear over my beige bulletproof vest
and my patrolman’s badge on a chain, a New York Knicks navy-blue stocking cap
with a red ball on top, and Army-surplus boots. The brown-paper bag for my PTP
I’d saved from the past Sunday when I’d gotten bagels down on Essex Street and
shaved last.

I strapped on my shoulder holster
and packed away the heavy piece, my . 44 Charter Arms Bulldog. Then I topped
off my ensemble with an olive-drab officer’s greatcoat that had seen lots of
action in maybe the Korean War. One of the side pockets was slashed open. Moths
and bayonet tips had made holes in other places. I dropped a pair of
nickel-plated NYPD bracelets into the good pocket.

By half past the hour, I was in the
Bleecker Street subway station near where I live in the East Village. I dropped
a quarter into a telephone on the platform and told the desk sergeant at
Midtown South to be a good guy and check me off for the one o’clock muster. A
panhandler with better clothes than mine and a neatly printed plywood sandwich
sign hanging around his shoulders caught my eye. The sign read, TRYING TO RAISE
$1,000,000 FOR WINE RESEARCH. I gave him a buck and caught the uptown D train.

When I got out at Broadway and
Thirty-fourth Street, the weather had turned cold and clammy. The sky had a
smudgy grey overcast to it. It would be the kind of afternoon when everything
in Manhattan looks like a black-and-white snapshot. It wasn’t very
Christmaslike, which suited me fine.

Across the way, in a triangle of
curbed land that breaks up the Broadway and Sixth Avenue traffic flow at the
south end of Herald Square, winos stood around in a circle at the foot of a
statue of Horace Greeley. Greeley’s limed shoulders were mottled by frozen bird
dung and one granite arm was forever pointed toward the westward promise. I
thought about my ex and the Flummong guy. The winos coughed, their foul breath
hanging in frosted lumps of exhaled air, and awaited a ritual opening of a
large economy-sized bottle of Thunderbird. The leader broke the seal and poured
a few drops on the ground, which is a gesture of respect to mates recently dead
or imprisoned. Then he took a healthy swallow and passed it along.

On the other side of the statue, a
couple of dozen more guys carrying the stick (living on the street, that is)
reclined on benches or were curled up over heating grates. All were in proper
position to protect their stash in the event of sleep: money along one side of
their hat brims, one hand below as a sort of pillow. The only way they could be
robbed was if someone came along and cut off their hands, which has happened.

Crowds of last-minute shoppers
jammed the sidewalks everywhere. Those who had to pass the bums (and me) did so
quickly, out of fear and disgust, even at this time of goodwill toward men.
It’s a curious thing how so many comfortable middle-class folks believe
vagrants and derelicts are dangerous, especially when you consider that the
only people who have caused them any serious harm have been other comfortable
middle-class folks with nice suits and offices and lawyers.

Across Broadway, beyond the bottle
gang around the stone Greeley, I recognized a mope I’d busted about a year ago
for boosting out of a flash clothes joint on West Fourteenth street. He was a scared
kid of sixteen and lucky I’d gotten to him first. The store goons would have
broken his thumbs. He was an Irish kid who went by the street name Whiteboy and
he had nobody. We have lots of kids like Whiteboy in New York, and other
cities, too. But we don’t much want to know about them.

Now he leaned against a Florsheim
display window, smoking a cigarette and scoping out the straight crowd around
Macy’s and Gimbels. Whiteboy, so far as I knew, was a moderately successful
small-fry shoplifter, purse snatcher, and pickpocket.

I decided to stay put and watch him
watch the swarm of possible marks until he got up enough nerve to move on
somebody he figured would give him the biggest return for the smallest risk,
like any good businessman. I moved back against a wall and stuck out my hand
and asked passers-by for spare change. (This is not exactly regulation, but it
guarantees that nobody will look at my face and it happens to be how I cover
the monthly alimony check. ) A smiling young fellow in a camel topcoat, the
sort of guy who might be a Jaycee from some town up in Rockland County, pressed
paper on me and whispered, “Bless you, brother.” I looked down and saw that
he’d given me a circular from the Church of Scientology in the size, color, and
shape of a dollar bill.

When I looked up again, Whiteboy was
crossing Broadway. He tossed his cigarette into the street and concentrated on
the ripe prospect of a mink-draped fat lady on the outside of a small mob
shoving its way into Gimbels. She had a black patent-leather purse dangling
from a rhinestone-studded strap clutched in her hand. Whiteboy could pluck it
from her pudgy fingers so fast and gently she’d be in third-floor housewares
before she noticed.

I followed after him when he passed
me. Then, sure enough, he made the snatch. I started running down the Broadway
bus lane toward him. Whiteboy must have lost his touch because the fat lady
turned and pointed at him and hollered “Thief!” She stepped right in front of
me and I banged into her and she shrieked at me. “Whyn’t you sober up and get a
job, you bum you?”

Whiteboy whirled around and looked
at me full in the face. He made me. Then he started running, too.

He darted through the thicket of
yellow taxicabs, cars, and vans and zigzagged his way toward Greeley’s statue.
There was nothing I could do but chase him on foot. Taking a shot in such a
congestion of traffic and pedestrians would get me up on IAD charges just as
sure as if I’d stolen the fat lady’s purse myself.

Then a funny thing happened.

Just as I closed in on Whiteboy, all
those bums lying around on the little curbed triangle suddenly got up and
blocked me as neatly as a line of zone defensemen for the Jets. Eight or ten
big, groggy guys fell all over me and I lost Whiteboy.

I couldn’t have been more frustrated.
A second collar on a guy like Whiteboy would have put him away for two years’
hard time, minimum. Not to mention how it would get me a nice commendation
letter for my personal file. But in this business, you can’t spend too much
time crying over a job that didn’t come off. So I headed east on Thirty-second
toward Fifth Avenue.

At mid-block. I stopped to help a
young woman in a raggedy coat with four bulging shopping bags and three
shivering kids. She set the bags on the damp sidewalk and rubbed her bare hands
as I neared her. Two girls and a boy, the oldest maybe seven, huddled around
her. “How much farther?” one of the girls asked.

I didn’t hear an answer. I walked up
and asked the woman, “Where you headed, lady?” She looked away, embarrassed
because of the tears in her eyes. She was small and slender, with light-brown
skin and black hair pulled straight back from her face and held with a rubber
band. A gust of dry wind knifed through the air.

“Could you help me?” she finally
asked. “I’m just going up to the hotel at the corner. These bags are cutting my
hands.”

She meant the Martinique. It’s a big
dark hulk of a hotel, possibly grand back in the days when Herald Square was
nearly glamorous. Now it’s peeling and forbidding and full of people who have
lost their way for a lot of different reasons—most of them women and children.
When welfare families can’t pay the rent anymore and haven’t any place to go,
the city puts them up “temporarily” at the Martinique. It’s a stupid deal even
by New York’s high standards of senselessness. The daily hotel rate amounts to
a monthly tab of about two grand for one room and an illegal hotplate, which is
maybe ten times the rent on the apartment the family just lost.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

She didn’t hesitate, but there was a
shyness to her voice. “Frances. What’s yours?”

“Hock.” I picked up her bags, two in
each hand. “Hurry up, it’s going to snow,” I said. The bags were full of
children’s clothes, a plastic radio, some storybooks, and canned food. I hoped
they wouldn’t break from the sidewalk dampness.

Frances and her kids followed me and
I suppose we looked like a line of shabby ducks walking along. A teenage girl
in one of those second-hand men’s tweed overcoats you’d never find at the
Goodwill took our picture with a Nikon equipped with a telephoto lens.

I led the way into the hotel and set
the bags down at the admitting desk. Frances’s three kids ran off to join a
bunch of other kids who were watching a couple of old coots with no teeth
struggling with a skinny spruce tree at the entry of what used to be the dining
room. Now it was dusty and had no tables, just a few graffiti-covered vending
machines.