Slow Motion Riot (3 page)

Just as I'm getting into the
paperwork, the phone on my desk rings.

"Sending a new client to see
you," Roger the guard says.

Most P.O.s like to go out to the
waiting room to meet clients; I think it's easier just to send them straight
back here. This time, though, I get a strong premonition that Darryl King is on
the way. The headache I've been trying to ignore all morning begins to slam away
at the base of my skull. I remember what Tommy Markham said about Darryl
snatching things from his desk, so I clear off all my papers, remove my
glasses, and turn in my chair to face the doorway.

Richard Silver walks right in
without knocking.

"It's like a zoo, your waiting
room," he says, like he's already in the middle of a conversation.
"Some black guy just came up to me with his eyes rolling back into his
head and asked if I could spare any change."

"What'd you say?"

"I told him to shine my
shoes."

"You got kind of a mean mouth
for an old civil rights guy," I tell him, knocking dust balls off my desk.

He exhales and looks impatient.
"I'm not a racist if that's what you're trying to suggest," he says,
fixing the knot of his yellow Hermes tie. "This is my city too, and I
don't like getting hit up for change every goddamn time I leave the
house."

The first thing I notice about
Richard Silver is that he's a lot bigger than he looked on TV. The image I'd
always had of him was as a skinny guy with his tie loosened and a jacket slung
over his shoulder, cooling down the streets over the long, hot summers. It
isn't just that he's gotten a bit of a paunch since then. He has massive
forearms like a wrestler's beneath his tailored suit.

"Since you mention it, perhaps
my language was inappropriate with the young man," he says. "Shall I
go out there and apologize?"

I can't tell if he's being
sarcastic. The small birthmark above his right eyebrow makes it look like the
brow is perpetually raised in skepticism. A little unnerving, but probably very
effective in negotiations across a conference table.

"Why don't you have a
seat?" I ask.

He gets a faraway, annoyed look,
like a fly is buzzing in his ear. "This gonna take long? I got other
appointments."

"Tell me about it," I
say, pointing to the empty chair.

Silver walks around the chair
twice, surveying it as though he's considering buying it. Then he stops and
glances back at me with his head cocked and a half smile. Very, very slowly he
begins to lower himself into the chair. Finally sitting down, but only on his
own terms.

"So what do you want from
me?" he asks brusquely.

Beautiful. For six weeks, I've been
writing letters and leaving messages asking him just to keep his appointment
with me. Almost anybody else would get hauled back in front of the judge for
acting this way. Instead, he's sitting here like he's on the shoeshine throne
and I'm on the footstool.

"Keep your shirt on," I
tell him as I look for the papers I put under my desk when I thought Darryl
King was coming.

I grew up thinking Richard Silver
was a hero. As a city councilman in the 1960s, he was known in the city's
poorest communities as "the Enabler." If the community needed garbage
trucks or youth programs, he enabled them. I remember my fourth-grade social
studies teacher telling us that he prevented the city from burning down in the
riots and that we all owed him a debt.

But he changed. First he withdrew
his support for a controversial housing project that would've brought
low-income people into a middle-class part of
Brooklyn
.
There was a term in Congress and then he left government for a brief whirl
through the nightclub business in the late seventies. He wound up opening a law
practice, where his main clients were corporations and developers looking for
big city contracts. The press celebrated his million-dollar deals and he became
a fixture at society dinner parties. Then he suddenly fell from grace.
Convicted of a crime so surprising and tawdry that people who'd once clamored
to sit next to him denied having ever laid eyes on him. His friend and partner
in the scheme, Jimmy Rose, once a great political reformer himself, died of
cancer a short time later.

So now I figure I ought to treat
Silver the way I'd treat any other client in off the street. I get out my
worksheet and ask for a birth date and current address. Silver hesitates when I
get to the marital status question. "You better put that I'm still
married, okay?"

On a first visit I wouldn't give
another client a hard time on that, so I let it go. "What do you do for a
living now?" I ask.

"I'm a consultant."

"What does that mean?"

"I consult," he says,
loosening his tie. "Y'know. People come to me with ideas. I say, 'This is
great' or 'Hey, this stinks.'"

"They pay you a lot of money
for this?"

"Well, what do you call a lot
of money?" he says, giving me the full eyebrow effect.

He's almost daring me to get into a
fight with him. I start squeezing the blob of Silly Putty I keep in the pocket
of my windbreaker for just such occasions.

"So who consults you?" I
ask.

"Private companies." He
gives the picture of the beach landscape a searching look, like his client list
is on it.

Before he can explain, I get
distracted by some whispering out in the hall. A couple of the probation
officers from next door, probably, with their ears to the wall. It figures
everyone in the office would get excited about a big deal like him coming in.
It's like the first Cadillac rolling into a poor neighborhood.

I go over to the wall and bang on
it. "Beat it!" I yell. "Don't you have work?"

"Why don't you sell tickets
while you're at it?" Silver says with a smile as they scurry away.

I pick up my pen and papers.
"What was I saying?"

"Present employment, stuff
like that," Silver reminds me, peeking at his gold Rolex.

"I'll get back to that,"
I say, holding the pen's cap in my mouth while I write Silver's name on top of
a sheet of paper. "Part of your sentence is two thousand hours community
service ..."

"Yeah, well, we'll see about
that."

I check a document on my desk.
"My concern," I say, "is that you perform that community service
and you do not associate with individuals who were involved in your original
offense."

He gets a dark, brooding
expression. "Jimmy Rose has been dead a year. What do you want me to do?
Raise him from the grave so I can ignore him?"

"I'm just doing my job,"
I say sharply. "Maybe if you'd returned my phone calls or letters, we
wouldn't have to go through all this and I wouldn't be looking at a potential
violation."

He doesn't say anything for a long
time. He just stares at me. There's something strong and a little scary in his
gaze. Like he's done some truly merciless things in his life and hasn't wasted
a lot of time worrying about them. I can't afford to look away. It's like an
encounter with a wild animal: If you let him see your fear, you're dead. A half
minute crawls by.

"You were a lawyer," I
say evenly. "You know how it works. If you don't want to cooperate, I have
to go back to the judge and tell him you're violating the terms of your
probation and he should consider giving you a stiffer sentence."

Silver looks like he's about to
start laughing. "Oh that is such bullshit," he says. "Whaddya
think? They're gonna send me to jail because I didn't talk to you?"

"Maybe not, but I can run you
up some legal bills trying."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah."
Silver leans forward in his chair so he's right in my face. He has creases and
marks I didn't notice from a few feet away. A deep scar runs from the edge of
his chin to the top of his throat. It's as if his face has kept a record of all
things he managed to keep out of his written file.

In what first seems like a fatherly
gesture, he reaches over and puts his hand on my arm. Then his fingers start to
dig into the tendons just above my elbow, and the pain makes me wince.

"All right, you wanna play
hardball," he says in a surly voice. "Fine. I been out of government
a while, but I still know people. And they know people you work for. So I'd
just watch it."

I peel his fingers off my arm and
give him a long hard look. "Oh yeah?" I say. "Go ahead. Your
friends can do whatever they want. It doesn't matter. I'm already a probation
officer. I can't go any lower than that."

A long silence passes. Silver gives
me a wary look, like he's seeing me for the first time. The current in the air
has subtly changed direction. Both of us move our chairs back a little.

"What the hell is that?"
he says suddenly.

"What?"

"That." He points to the
blackboard, where the man I drew for Ricky is still sucking on his turnstile.

"It's a visual aid," I
say sheepishly.

"A visual aid? It looks like
homosexual pornography."

"Well, that's because you
don't know what I'm doing here."

"Oh okay... What are you doing
here?" he says like a card shark looking for an angle.

"Come on. I'm not gonna play
games."

"Who's playing games? I'm
interested." His manner has changed in the last few seconds. He's smiling
now and sounding solicitous. "You're asking me a lot of questions about my
personal life. Aren't I entitled to know something?"

He cuts me off before I can
protest. "You embarrassed?"

"No, I'm not
embarrassed," I say, pushing my fingers into the Silly Putty.

"So what kind of accent is
that, anyway? You from
Astoria
or
something?"

I give the ceiling a thoughtful
look, but I can't think of a reason not to answer. "
Flushing
,"
I mutter. Most people can't even tell I'm from
Queens
.

"I'm from
East
Elmhurst
myself," Silver tells me. "What street did you
grow up on?"

"
Blossom
Avenue
."

There's something a little
disarming about the way he's looking at me. "
Flushing
High School
?" he asks.

"Yeah, that's right," I
say, putting up my hand to redirect the flow of conversation.

"We used to play you in
football. It was a good team."

"Yeah, I guess..."

"You go home much?"

"Sometimes," I say,
trying to get back on track. "Anyway. .."

"Your name's Baum,
right?" he says, closing one eye in concentration. "I knew a guy
named Baum once. Maybe he's related to you. What does your dad do?"

My fingers begin molding the Silly
Putty into the shape of brass knuckles. "Never mind," I say quietly.

Silver's eyes widen a little.
"What're you so touchy about? Something the matter with your dad?"

That's the thing about a guy like
Silver. He just works on you until he finds your sore spot. "Nothing's the
matter with my dad." I light a cigarette. "We're talking about you
anyway."

"Of course," Silver says,
nodding seriously. "Community service. Is he in jail or something, your
father?"

I blow a gust of smoke out of the
side of my mouth. "Cut it out," I tell him.

"Okay. I just like to know who
I'm dealing with, that's all." He leans his head back and smiles slightly,
obviously filing away the information for another day. "You know who you
remind me of?" he says, turning to look at the small Dylan poster on my
wall. "Some of the young guys we used to have doing the community action
programs in the sixties. Good people. Did terrific work."

"Is that so?" I say,
starting to take notes. While I write down something about what a manipulative
prick Silver is, I think about how it would've been nice to know more about
that era.

"Yeah," he says, crossing
his legs. "Yeah, those were great programs. The antipoverty councils, the
rehabilitation centers. A lot of young guys just like you running them..."

"Yeah?"

"Sure... too bad we had to cut
all their funding and kick them all out on the street..." He grins and
rocks back in his chair. A nice shot, I have to admit. Just his little reminder
that he once held the strings over guys like me.

"Well, Richard, we've come a
long way since then," I say, putting my glasses back on. "So why
don't I just go over the conditions of your probation with you once before you
go?"

"Awwwwwww, get busy! Get busy!
Get busy! Get busy!"

That fucking song again. All summer
long it'd been driving Detective Sergeant Bob McCullough nuts. Everywhere he
went he heard it. In the tenement stairwells, the school courtyards, and
outside, on the street corners. You couldn't get away from it. Not even here,
in the detective bureau of the 25th Precinct. Some yo-yo turned on the radio
and there it was again. The ceaseless mechanical hip-hop beat, the screeching
sound like faulty windshield wipers in the background, and the frantic voice
shouting over and over again: "Get busy! Get busy! Get busy!"

Now he was never going to get any
work done. He sat with his two meaty arms suspended over the small old manual
typewriter, like he was about to give it a good beating. But the noise kept
getting between him and the keyboard. File cabinets getting banged around. A
sound like an elephant stampede coming up the stairs. Some black kid, handcuffed
to a chair, bitching that he hadn't eaten in eight hours. Across the room, some
black lady telling two uninterested detectives how her son got mugged. Another
cop yelling at a real estate broker on the phone. And a car alarm going off in
the parking lot downstairs.

Detective Sergeant McCullough
closed his eyes and tried to shut it all out. He still pictured himself as a
trim young greyhound leaping across rooftops to chase criminals. But in some
obscure way he sensed that he was turning into one of those jowly older guys
you always saw huffing and puffing up a stairway. All of a sudden he was forty.
For years he'd been looking over his shoulder, expecting to see somebody
patting him on the back for all his good work. But his last promotion was a couple
of years ago and that transfer to the homicide task force looked like it was
never going to come through now. No one was going to notice him unless he made
the extra effort. Even his looks were starting to fade a little. There was
getting to be more gray than blond in his hair and for the first time in his
life he was having to comb it carefully to look presentable. His wife told him
he was too old to get away with looking like he'd just rolled out of bed. The next
thing you knew she'd be talking crazy about taking the kids and moving in with
her mother again.

He glanced up at the clock. Almost
eleven o'clock
and he still hadn't heard back
from the guy at The New York Times's op-ed page. He'd sent them three of his
best pieces the week before, "Police Brutality: A Political
Football," "Let's Go Auto: In Defense of Police Carrying Automatic
Weapons," and " 'Have a Nice Day, Officer': On Better Community Relations."

He fixed his holster strap and
pounded the typewriter space bar. Writing was like getting sick, he thought
sometimes. First he'd get infected by the idea. Then he'd go around for days,
thinking about and talking about nothing else. It'd just get worse and worse,
until he tried to sweat the sickness out into fifteen hundred words,
double-spaced on six sheets of paper. But he'd only feel better once he got one
of these fucking things published. It was just a matter of time, he told himself.

The two detectives across the room
started telling the black lady how much paperwork her case would generate and
how little chance there was of catching her son's mugger. The cop yelling at
the real estate broker on the phone started kicking blue paint chips off the
wall. And the song on the radio kept going, "Get busy! Get busy!"
like it was telling McCullough to work harder.

What more could he do? Everyone
knew these pieces he wrote were good. Even his wife. What she never understood
was why it was so important to get his name in the paper. But then she didn't
know what it was like to sit at a press conference and watch the Chief of
Detectives, or the borough commander, or some other fat fuck get up and take
credit for an investigation you'd devoted six months of your life to, like the
rooftop sniper at the Polo Grounds houses or the Schomberg rapist. And she didn't
know what it was like to get laid off during the fiscal crisis and realize you
couldn't depend on the department to take care of you. And worst of all, she
didn't know what it was like to grow up in a family where everyone made
detective, including your baby sister, and you had to practically get a fucking
movie made about your life before they thought you were anybody special.

The "Get Busy" song
finally ended and the car alarm downstairs stopped yowling. McCullough looked
at the black pushbutton phone on his desk and wished it would just ring. Why
couldn't those people at the Times give him what he wanted? What he needed. To
be recognized. To be reckoned with. The desire was like a gnawing in his heart.
It'd mean so little to them and so much to him.

Across the room the two detectives
had finally convinced the black lady it wasn't worth her while to have them
file a report about her son's mugging. After she left the room, they whooped
loudly and gave each other a high-five.

McCullough gingerly rolled a fresh
piece of paper into the typewriter. He'd have to try to write another piece, he
thought sadly. He glanced around the room, looking for inspiration.

The cop who'd been talking to the
real estate broker slammed the phone down and began cursing. He got a beer out
of the refrigerator and threw it against the wall. The car alarm downstairs
went off again. Another song came on the radio, even more annoying than
"Get Busy." This one was called "Gettin' Paid."

McCullough put his hands up to his
head and started rubbing his temples. All this racket going on, how was a man
supposed to stand out?