A Prayer for the City (3 page)

Realizing afterward that his impassioned pleas for help for the city had dissolved into the infinite netherworld of Washington rhetoric, Rendell had said angrily, “Where the fuck are they? Don’t they understand they have no choice?” As he boarded the Metroliner to return to the city, he took his customary seat in the dining car so he could spread out his endless piles of work on the table in front of him. His face wound tightly in a grimace, he dipped into his briefcase and, like some bad magician’s trick, pulled out one piece of paper after another after another—reports, invitations, summary memos of meetings, pleas for help from citizens who had run out of places to plead. But as the train spun by the rotting factories on the fringes of Washington and Baltimore and Wilmington, the work largely stayed untouched. Instead, the flash of panic eased, and Rendell mused aloud on the difference between him and his older brother, a corporate lawyer in Dallas: “He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. My best, or maybe my worst, trait is that I do suffer fools gladly.” He admitted that one of his great frustrations of being mayor was that his wife, Midge, kept dragging him to classical music concerts and operas. While he admitted to liking
Pagliacci
more than he ever could have imagined, he said that what he really dreamed about when he closed his eyes and listened to all that music was having a little earplug in his ear so he could listen to the Phillies without
anybody knowing why he had such a broad smile on his face. He also talked about his own political aspirations, and with the events of the day still sharp, he said he had absolutely no interest in becoming a U.S. senator, although he could clearly see why some might be attracted to it. “It’s an incredibly easy job,” he said. “They don’t do shit.”

And then shortly after Wilmington, with eight hours of work under his belt and at least eight hours more to go, he fell asleep. Sitting in that little booth in the dining car with his eyes sweetly closed and his head gently drooped to the side, he looked like a little boy who suddenly, midsentence, had just run out of steam, and were it not for the gentle rousings of the conductor when the train reached the Thirtieth Street Station, the mayor of Philadelphia might well have ended up in Newark.

He knew not to believe his clippings on those days when so much of his time seemed taken up not by what was good for the city but by the push and pull of what black politicians wanted and what white politicians wanted and what black politicians would do to make life a living hell for the mayor if they didn’t get what they wanted and what white politicians would do to make life a living hell for the mayor if they didn’t get what they wanted—the cycle of threat and extortion that had become the purest extract of modern politics, prompting him to blurt out to a political colleague, “Everything that goes on is a power struggle between black politicians and white politicians, and it isn’t because of what’s for the good of the citizens. It’s about who controls what project. I’m so fed up with this blackmail stuff that goes on I could just scream. I could just take a machine gun and shoot ’em all.” Or as he put it on another occasion, offering his own twenty-five-words-or-less job description, “A good portion of my job is spent on my knees, sucking people off to keep them happy.”

He knew it on the day the private line in his office began to ring repeatedly with emphatic and complicated complaints from citizens, which didn’t make any sense until he discovered that the number had inadvertently been published in one of the local phone books. Or the time his vigorous effort to lobby members of the city council on behalf of a vote crucial to the future funding of the city’s beleaguered school system was curtailed in midstream when one of them gasped in shock at the sight of a mouse running along one of the walls of his office. For most politicians, the presence of mice in the office might have been disconcerting. For Rendell, the rodents seemed to offer a certain comfort, symbolic of what it is
like to be the mayor of an American city. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They almost never come out to the center of the room.”

He knew not to believe his clippings the time he agreed to go up in a cherry picker with a rabbi to light a giant-sized menorah only to realize, as the cherry picker lifted them higher and higher, that the rabbi was wobbly, somewhat older than he had looked on the ground, and was wielding the blowtorch in such a way that it was becoming increasingly hard to ascertain just what was going to burst aglow with the spirit of Hanukkah, the mayor or the menorah. “The rabbi was sort of shaking a little bit. I was afraid he was going to slip, turn around, and set me on fire. Somewhere about sixty feet above, I said to myself, ‘I have to stop doing this.’ ”

But most of all, he had known it on November nights such as this one—a silent race through the city where nothing he did could make any difference. Up until the shots rang out, the night had had a sweet placidity. His round of appearances—a reception for Red Bell beer over at the Katmandu down on the Delaware, a series of painless speeches before the American Red Cross and at the annual Stephen Girard Award dinner, a quick stop at the Legg Mason open-house celebration high atop the shiny gleam of a downtown skyscraper—meant that he might actually get home before the usual witching hour of 10:00
P.M.

But then, just around 6:00
P.M.
, came the crackle of gunfire on a West Philadelphia street and reports that two Philadelphia narcotics officers had been shot during an undercover drug deal. One of the officers had suffered a relatively minor graze wound in the hand. But the other, a three-year veteran of the force named Dathan Enoch, had been shot in the left side of the chest and rushed to Lankenau Hospital just outside the city limits. As Enoch underwent surgery, members of his family began to gather in a makeshift reception room. High-ranking members of the police department arrived. And so did several members of the mayor’s office: David L. Cohen, the chief of staff, who, like Radar in
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, had the ability to be in the right place well before anyone even knew there was a right place; and Anthony Buchanico, a police sergeant in charge of security for the mayor.

Rendell himself was en route. In the meantime, about twenty people awkwardly milled about, speaking to one another in small and hushed circles, biding the time with trivial talk and small talk that never rose above the trace of a whisper, eyeing the cookies and soft drinks that had been laid out on a long white table but reluctant to take anything because it would
seem crass and uncaring, waiting for some glimmer to indicate that Enoch was not going to die. When unofficial word filtered into the room that he was going to make it, the relief was palpable—among the family members sitting around one of the tables in a silent knot, among the police officials who several months earlier had gathered outside a city church on a blue and windswept day to say good-bye to a fellow officer who had been killed in the line of duty during what should have been a routine traffic stop. There would also be relief for the mayor himself, who hated hospital scenes such as this in an almost pathological way, perhaps because they conflicted so terribly with his eternal sense of optimism and served as a brutal reminder of all that the city wasn’t, but perhaps also because they echoed the death of his own father when he was fourteen years old.

The mood of the room lifted with the news of Enoch’s recovery. Those gathered finally reached for the cookies and soft drinks without feeling guilty. And then came the crackle and pop over a small radio receiver that one of the officers carried, followed by the flat voice of a dispatcher:

“Officer down.…”

Buchanico, who had spent twenty-nine years as a police officer in the city, twenty-one of them in uniform, strained to hear the words as if they were some kind of macabre joke. How could another police officer be
down
in a different part of the city? Wasn’t the shooting of one officer enough of a sacrifice to the city tonight? He grabbed the radio and went outside so he could better hear the toneless words of the dispatcher.

There were more crackles and pops over the radio, then the words:

“Officer assist.”

And Buchanico knew what those words meant. The officer was in trouble, terrible trouble, going down, choking on blood and spit and fear on a shitty street corner somewhere, and right then and there, standing outside by himself, Buchanico knew what was going to unfold. He had been through these scenes before, too many times before, too many goddamn times, and they never, ever got easier, the panic and confusion and anger and frustration, the horror of an officer slipping away in a darkened city street, the horror of his family as they drove in a frantic rush to the hospital entrance and immediately knew from the avalanche of lights from the police cars and the television vans that they needed to start planning a funeral.

The moment Cohen had heard the initial call from the police dispatcher, he knew too that the officer was not going to make it. They had been lucky
with Enoch, and Cohen knew that in the city, luck never came a second time.

“These guys are getting their brains beaten in,” said Buchanico, his eyes welling with tears as he stayed outside and waited for the mayor to arrive. He knew how fellow officers felt about the mayor, how many of them felt rejected by him, how they hated him and didn’t fall for his charm and disarming self-deprecation for a second and were convinced that he was far more interested in the bright lights of
The New York Times
and
Good Morning America
than he ever was in standing up for the men in blue who had to put up with these streets night after night after night. In previous contract negotiations, the police had always done a little bit better than everyone else, gotten a little bit more. After all, they were police officers. But this administration—the Rendell administration—had been different, particularly with that bloodless prick Cohen as head henchman. The restoration of fiscal balance became more than just a campaign catchphrase, and the once sacrosanct police department had gotten starting salaries cut and paid holidays cut, just like everyone else who worked for the city. Buchanico knew that this latest round of shootings would only add to the fury of the officers in the department and would only enhance the mayor’s image as cold and calculating and obsessed with cementing his image as America’s mayor and favorite budget cutter. Buchanico felt some of that rage himself, particularly in a surreal moment such as this, in which two officers had been seriously wounded within hours of each other in different parts of the city. But he also knew there was another side.

Buchanico had seen it five months earlier, when Philadelphia Police Officers Robert Hayes and John Marynowitz had been shot during a routine traffic stop. Buchanico went to the Albert Einstein Medical Center, where both officers were in surgery. Marynowitz had been shot in the head and shoulder, and Hayes had been shot through the eye. The police sergeant knew that the mayor had to come to the hospital.

Rendell was furious when Buchanico came to his house to pick him up. It was late; he wasn’t even dressed, meaning he had to trudge upstairs to put that stupid blue-suit uniform back on. Buchanico remembered him as being livid the same way a big kid is livid when he is forced to do something
he desperately doesn’t want to do and can taste the very dread of it on his tongue. On the way to the hospital, Rendell said that he would just be in the way, that this was “no time for politicians,” that the only reason politicians showed up at events such as this was to grandstand before those television cameras with solemnity and stoicism so the public would think they actually gave a shit about something. When they neared the hospital entrance, Rendell insisted that the car lights be cut and they use a side entrance to avoid the media. And Buchanico knew what drove that anger, which really wasn’t anger at all but the pain of having to look into the eyes of the small children who belonged to these officers, with their nubby brush cuts and their rounded faces and their smooth cheeks, and somehow say something to them.

But the minute Rendell got to the hospital, all that anger evaporated as if it had never been there. As Buchanico watched, it was obvious the mayor intuitively understood the needs of those children better than anyone else, knew what to say to them, knew how to be playful with them, knew how to kibitz with them as if he lived down the block. During his career, Buchanico had seen a string of mayors come to hospitals to console families in times of tragedy. He had seen their awkwardness and their stiffness when they were trying to be heartfelt, but never had he seen anyone relate to those children the way Ed Rendell did.

Officer Hayes had three boys, and when one of them asked the mayor whether he really was the mayor, Rendell pulled out his city ID card as proof. When one of them went to the snack machine and got a package of Reese’s peanut butter cups, Rendell gave his immediate seal of approval with the words “good choice.” When another got a pack of gum, Rendell seemed incredulous. “Is that all you want?” When the children insisted on special
Jurassic Park
meals from McDonald’s, he immediately dispatched an officer to find an open McDonald’s at 2:00
A.M.
, and when the food arrived, he teased the children about their junk food snobbery because, after all, there had been an open Roy Rogers a lot closer. He told them about his own son, Jesse—the school he went to, the activities he was interested in. He never provided Officer Hayes’s boys with false hope. He promised no miracles. But as each minute ticked by, as those three little boys tried to cope with the swirl of what was happening, he provided them with the one thing they perhaps needed most—a friend who, as if by accident, also happened to be the mayor. The two youngest boys, Sean and Ryan, didn’t really understand what was happening, the mayor felt, and seemed to welcome the attention they were getting, and there was some mercy in that.
But the oldest boy, who was ten and named Robert Hayes Jr., after his father, was frightened, so terribly frightened.