The Strangler (9 page)

15

Joe was the man of the moment. He had rescued the girl from the clutches of the Mad Strangler, wrestled with the very monster itself—and he’d had the extraordinary good fortune to be photographed in his hour of high heroism. (The incident took place a few blocks from Newspaper Row on Washington Street, where several papers maintained their city rooms.) There was still the matter of attaching a name to the suspect and then finding him, but at least the cops had a description now. Joe received a commendation from the commissioner. True, this was the same commissioner Joe had humiliated a few weeks before on national television, but to Joe the rescue erased everything that had gone before. He presumed he would be rehabilitated. He informed Brendan Conroy that his first choices for reassignment would be Homicide or maybe Alvan Byron’s new Strangler Bureau. Neither would happen.

One night Conroy showed up at Station Sixteen before last half to tell Joe, “You’ve been resurrected.” But the resurrection was incomplete. Joe was restored to detective, but in Station One, in the North End. The precinct covered parts of downtown and the North and West Ends. But the West End had already been reduced to a construction site, for the most part. And the North End was small and insular; it tended to police itself, without interference from outsiders like the Boston PD. Joe told Conroy he did not want the assignment. It was a step backward. “Now, don’t be stiff-necked, boyo,” the old man advised. “It’s a detective bureau. This is the way back. Take it.”

And so Joe found himself in plain clothes again, standing before a narrow shopfront in the old West End, near North Station. The big plate glass window had been smashed, and the hole covered over with plywood sheets. Only a transom remained to identify the place, in gold lettering:

MORRIS WASSERMAN • 26 • DELICATESSEN GROCERY

Moe Wasserman’s little deli was on the ground floor of one of the few remaining tenements in the area, on one of the few remaining open streets, tethered to the city by a single road that led out to Causeway Street. Joe knew the place. He remembered that missing window. It had been decorated with gold lettering, too, in English and Jewish, and near the door cardboard signs had been taped to it advertising the lunch specials. Sometimes there would be a line out the door at lunchtime. But Joe did not know from Jewish food, and what did he need it for anyway? He knew what he liked. Besides, he’d probably go in there and say the wrong thing. So he had never tried it. Ricky would have tried it. Ricky would have strolled in there and come out gibbering Jewish and munching on a kosher pickle and doing the hokey-pokey and been elected mayor of Jerusalem, because that’s how things went for Ricky. Not Joe. Joe had to work for things.

The shop was closed, permanently, and Moe Wasserman himself had to come unlock the door for Joe and show him in. Wasserman was thin and tired-looking, handsome but dingy, sixty-five or so. Joe liked him before he had even opened the door. He liked all Jews, he thought. Twenty years before, as a nineteen-year-old Marine, Joe had marched across France into Germany with the Fourth Armored Division and he had seen things. He had seen things. In France he thought he had seen it all in the fighting in the forest, nothing could shock him anymore. Then in Germany he saw what the Germans had been up to. He didn’t like to think about it. Joe had figured out that every country needed its niggers and in Europe of necessity the niggers had been white. Growing up Daley, it had been an article of faith that the Irish were Englishmen’s niggers. From that traditional ethnic underdog-ism, it had been a short leap to pro-Semitism. Even before the war, Joe’s dad had openly admired Jewish boxers and gangsters, the local booze-runners like Charlie “King” Solomon and Louie Fox. Weren’t the Jew-gangsters just looking out for their people the same way the Gustin Gang looked out for the Irish? And hadn’t Hitler taught everyone, finally, the need for niggers everywhere to look out for themselves, to punch back? Joe was inclined to lend his muscle to the cause. His little brother Michael stirred the same feeling in Joe: There were people who just did not like to throw punches, and it was the duty of guys who did to punch back for them, because if you didn’t, if you just stood by and let it happen, then you were guilty too. In a world that killed its niggers, you had to take a side. You had to stand up.

For his part, Moe Wasserman did not seem to care much what the hulking detective thought about Jews or the war or anything else. He let Joe in and shuffled around flicking the lights on, revealing the destruction in the shop. It was worse than Joe had expected. Everything smashed. The floor strewn with shards of glass, kitchen equipment, furniture. The old man, too: he had a bandage on his right cheekbone, a gauze patch held with white tape, and purplish bruises on his face. On the floor, someone had broomed open a path through the wreckage from the front door to a door at the back.

Wasserman saw the cop survey it all and he shrugged. “It hasn’t been cleaned. I picked up the food, that’s all. You don’t wash a sock before you throw it out. So.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what went on here, the whole story, start to finish.”

“The whole story? What story? This is the story. Look.”

“Well, any information you can tell us, Mr. Wasserman.”

“Eh, you won’t catch them. Personally”—he made an apologetic gesture, a flip of the hand that said
Forgive me for saying so, but
…—“I’m surprised you’re even here.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’re not from the West End, are you, Detective…?”

“Daley. Joe.”

“Detective Daley. You’re not from around here.”

“I’m from Dorchester.”

“You haven’t been a policeman around here for long, either.”

“I’ve been a cop fifteen years.”

“But not here.”

Joe frowned. This was echt Boston:
here
did not refer to the region or even the city;
here
meant this neighborhood, these few blocks. To a West Ender, Dorchester might as well have been Greenland. “No,” Joe admitted, “not here.”

“No. Because I would have seen you. Well, so let me be the one to fill you in, Detective. There haven’t been cops here for a long time. Garbagemen neither; they let the garbage pile up in the street. Why? Because they want to say the West End was a ghetto, it was ‘blighted.’ So what did they do? They stopped cleaning it up, they pulled out the cops, they didn’t fix the roads. That’s how they put the rabbit in the hat, see? They make a ghetto, then they say, ‘Look, a ghetto! Let’s tear it down.’ It’s business. I understand. I’m in business too. But let’s be honest in this here.”

“I’m here now and I’m a cop.”

“Yes. I suppose.” The old man sighed dismissively.
You must be some boob of a cop to get sent here now.

“Well, look, alls I can do is try. And I promise you I’ll try. But I can’t do anything if you won’t even talk to me.”

“An honest man, heh? Alright, my friend, we’ll try. Here it is: Couple weeks ago, December two, I’m up in my apartment in bed. This is maybe eleven, midnight. I hear a car drive up. Everything’s quiet around here now, it’s empty at night, sounds carry. So, I hear a car.”

“What kind of car?”

“Don’t know. I was looking down at it from the window, my bedroom window upstairs. I got an apartment above the store. It was a four-door, dark color, maybe blue, maybe black, that’s all I can see. Four guys get out, big guys with bats. I seen them come up the sidewalk and one of them takes his bat and he smashes my window.”

“Did you call the cops?”

“Course I called the cops. What else am I gonna do? What difference does it make? The cops don’t come; I told you. So these guys, they smash my window and they climb right in the front of the store and they just go through it with their bats and they break it all up. They broke everything. I mean, I got insurance, but what am I gonna…? You know how long this place has been here? Thirty, forty years. My father had it. So I get dressed and I go running down to the shop. I figure, if it’s money they want, so what? I’ll give it to them, at least they won’t smash up the whole thing. Because there’s nothing here to steal. What are they gonna take, a corned beef? I go down and I tell them, ‘Just take the money, here it is, what else do you want?’ But they don’t want the money. They just want to smash everything. So that’s what they did. They smashed me, too—not with the bats, thank God. There was money right out on the floor; they smashed the cash drawer. They didn’t even take it. All they had to do was bend down and pick it up. But no. They couldn’t be bothered.”

“Four guys?”

“Four guys.”

“Can you describe them?”

“All the same, I guess. Big
shtarkers,
maybe not as big as you, shorter. But big, strong guys. One guy, the guy in charge, he might have been Italian, that one: dark skin, thick hair, scar on his face like this.” He dragged a finger down his cheek. “Wolves.”

“Wolves?”

“That’s what they were. Wolves.”

“They say anything?”

“Yeah, ‘get out, get outta here.’ Jew this, Jew that, Jew bastard, kike, that kind of stuff. Eh. But that was the main thing, just ‘get out.’”

“You knew what that meant, ‘get out’?”

“Of course I knew. You think these guys just took it upon themselves to come out and smash up an old man’s little shop just for kicks? Think, my friend. Somebody paid ’em. Cheaper than a lawyer. Course they’ve got lawyers working on it, too.”

“Who paid them, you think?”

“Farley Sonnenshein. The Redevelopment. The city. It’s all the same. This is valuable real estate all of a sudden. Too valuable for a schnook like me. See, I own the building, so they can’t move me out so easy. And I ain’t giving it away for fifty cents on the dollar like the rest of them. I fight ’em. I’m a pain in the ass. That’s what it comes down to, Detective. I’m what you call a pain in Farley Sonnenshein’s ass, and he wants it to go away. But guess what? I’m not going away.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“What am I gonna do? I’m gonna give him a pain in his ass like a hemorrhoid till the day he dies or he pays me what he owes me.”

Joe walked through the empty West End toward Cambridge Street. He passed abandoned buildings for a block or two, then bare dirt blocks, then the streets themselves disappeared and there was only gritty hard mud. The air was warmer than usual, the second straight day of mild December weather. Demolition debris was everywhere, scraps of brick and steel and concrete. Wet slush. The melting made a soft trickling sound, audible beneath the city noise, like a faucet dripping in the next room.

Wolves, the old man had called them. Wolves.

Joe had seen wolves. In Germany there had been a camp—Ohrdruf—outside a town called Gotha, where Joe had stepped on something, a twig maybe. He had looked down to see a human finger, shriveled, half buried by the weight of Joe’s boot. He thought: They are wolves, all Germans, every last one of them. He would feel no mercy for them. He swore it.

Then Joe had gone on to Berlin, where he was stationed for several months before shipping out. He remembered the thousands of notices fluttering like bird feathers everywhere in the city, on buildings and trees, covering the enormous cylindrical pillars on street corners: messages for people who had vanished. He remembered the pipes and radiators clinging like vines to the walls of bombed-out buildings. He remembered a summer night with his pals outside a club called the Rio Rita, all of them drunk. Walking, they came upon a group of Russians, the squat brown Mongolian types with dirty smock-like uniforms, standing over a woman, waiting their turn while one of them raped her. On the ground, the woman had turned her head and, between the Russians’ boots, she gazed out at the GI’s. Her face was impassive, a mask which shook with the rhythmic jarring of her rapist’s pumping hips. Joe took a step but his buddies held him back.
Leave it alone, Joe, not our fight, fucking bastards, too late, happens every day in this fucking place…
So they stood there. They let it happen. They were in the British sector, ducking the MP’s outside a club that had been declared off limits; they didn’t want trouble, not when they were so close to shipping out. Still, they could have stopped it. Maybe they figured there was a kind of justice in it—who were the wolves now and who the niggers? But Joe did not see it that way. He was still a cop’s son, and he figured Berlin was where you glimpsed the truth of things, of life unpoliced, and all he wanted was to get the hell out.

Almost twenty years later, Joe could see that woman’s face as clear as day and still feel ashamed.

“Hey, cop.”

On a corner near Cambridge Street a half dozen kids loitered. A few city blocks still survived here, just north of the police station, the city reemerging, knitting itself back into existence after the void of the empty West End site.

Joe had been feeling addled by the morning’s events, the smashed-up shop, the suggestion that cops had been complicit somehow in the West Enders’ betrayal, and the fog of memories from the war. But those punks, those two words—“Hey, cop”—belted him back into the here and now.