A Prayer for the City (5 page)

The mayor in turn reduced the language to its most basic elements: “He was DOA.”

After the briefing, Rendell went to a small, windowless room in the emergency wing of Hahnemann to meet with the officer’s wife and two children. Their eyes were red from crying, but in their faces was anger, the anger of how this could have happened and why it had happened and who in the name of God was finally going to do something about it. When the mayor came in, they barely looked up.

“Did they get the trigger man?” asked Dmytryk’s son Stephen, his voice urgent and rapid, his hands turning open and shut, open and shut. “Did they get the trigger man?” he asked again, this time with an almost frantic edge.

Rendell patiently, almost clinically, explained the circumstances of what had happened. He said that one of the suspects had been shot and killed by the police, and the other one had gotten away. “They’re gonna catch him,” he promised the family. “They’re gonna catch him.” And then he mused aloud over the issue of gun control and how it amazed him that there could even be debate in Washington over instituting a five-day waiting period before the purchase of a handgun. The family had no reaction, as if the mayor’s presence had become immaterial.

“I want to see him one more time,” said Mary Ann Dmytryk of her husband. A social worker escorted her out of the room, leaving the mayor with the officer’s daughter, Stacy Ann. There was a slight pause, and then Rendell turned to her, struggling to retain some measure of composure. He spoke softly, with the same familial presence he had displayed when he had spoken to the mother of Officer Enoch just an hour earlier, but there was an urgency now. “As bad as it is for you, it’s gonna be worse for your mom, so you’ve got to help her.”

He walked from the room into a hallway crowded with hospital workers and police officers leaning against the white walls. They looked at him, beseeching him with their eyes as if they expected him to do something. But he looked away, and for a split second it seemed as if Ed Rendell didn’t want to be the mayor anymore, didn’t want to be the one to supply answers when there were no answers, didn’t want to be the one overflowing with optimism when there was nothing to be optimistic about, didn’t want to play the cheerful fool when there was nothing to be foolish about, didn’t want to be the one to tell a daughter that he was sorry her dad had died in the line of duty when the words seemed so empty and worthless. “Goddamn” was all he said as he walked down that hallway, his eyes filled with tears and his head still tilted toward those white walls so he didn’t have to look at anyone. “Goddamn.”

At 11:00
P.M.
, Rendell left the hospital to go back home. The car went back past the cathedral, past the fountain at Logan Circle where a homeless person lay shrouded in a steam of vapor, back onto the Ben Franklin Parkway toward the shimmering majesty of the art museum with that marble as pale as champagne, then onto Kelly Drive where it hugs the east bank of the river. To the left, like a scene out of Norman Rockwell, were those gingerbread boathouses as jaunty as Christmas trees. To the right, like a scene out of the American city, were the crisscrossing lights of a dozen police cars searching the alleys and crevices of the night for someone who had just become a cop killer.

Rendell was in the middle of his four-year term as mayor. If he ran for reelection and won, the job would be his until the third of January in the year 2000. There was a kind of inspirational and historic symmetry in that, in being the man who for better or worse would guide the city out of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. But as his driver dropped him off at home, it was obvious that the events of the night had cut deeply into his core. “If I have to go through any more of these,” he said to her, “I don’t think I want this job for another six years.” But the next day the mayor was back at work.

And so was the city.

L
ess than twenty-four hours before the new job became his and the grace of speculation gave way to crisis, David L. Cohen was ensconced in a suite of offices on the second floor of City Hall doing what he always seemed to be doing: sorting out the mess that had been unceremoniously handed to him by someone else. He was quite brilliant at it.

Municipal government in Philadelphia had never been known for the hum of its efficiency. It was Lincoln Steffens, in his oft-cited quote, who had once described the city as “corrupt and contented.” But even this sight seemed more peculiar than normal, as if occupying forces, finally realizing the futility of the war, had staged a midnight evacuation. Rooms that should have had furniture in them were barren. What few desks did remain had been emptied so that nothing was left, not even a paper clip. In the aftermath of the upheaval, a few items had been left behind. A half-filled
bottle of wine lay inside the drawer of one file cabinet, and given the fortune at the end of the administration of the city’s outgoing mayor, W. Wilson Goode, it seemed remarkable that the contents hadn’t been downed in one merciful gulp. A pile of binders in pale blue covers had been unceremoniously dumped on top of another file cabinet, as if whoever had put them there just hadn’t gotten around to throwing them into the trash. They seemed innocuous enough, binders that might contain press releases announcing ribbon cuttings and holiday street festivals and other events that so often had passed for earth-shattering milestones in the sputter of a city on the brink of bankruptcy. But as David Cohen thumbed through the binders, he discovered they contained something else altogether: the executive orders that Mayor Goode had enacted during his tenure. Many of them were still in effect. They still had a significant impact on the 1.6 million people who lived in the city. Cohen gave a short burst of laughter that sounded a little bit like a car alarm, rising out of nowhere in the silence of the office he was about to inherit. Then he just shook his head, his way of acknowledging that he was entering a world where rules of logic and reason did not have the remotest application, light years beyond the Peter principle or Murphy’s law or anything else commonly used to explain failure. Why had someone left the executive orders of the mayor of America’s fifth largest city in a heap on top of a file cabinet?

Why not?

Dressed in gray jeans, a plaid work shirt, and sneakers on a Sunday morning, Cohen labored methodically to restore some semblance of balance and order. With all the details to attend to before tomorrow’s mayoral inauguration at 10:00
A
.
M
. at the Academy of Music, he hadn’t slept in nearly seventy-two hours, and that was a literal calculation. But with the exception of a skin color that looked like instant oatmeal, he didn’t seem affected in the slightest. He went about his unpacking, unwrapping the little trinkets and memorabilia that he had brought with him from his former employer, the prestigious law firm of Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, where he had been a legend by the time he was thirty. But the phone kept ringing. And when the phone didn’t ring, the beeper he wore on his belt like a six-shooter went off. The mayor-elect, Edward G. Rendell, was calling with the breathless agitation of a child. He was supposed to give an inauguration-eve phone interview to one of the local radio stations, and he didn’t have the right number. Cohen had it at his fingertips, as if he had been expecting the call. He continued to unpack, delicately lifting each
item from the paper towel in which he had wrapped it—a tray for memos and correspondence, a little wooden box with a calculator inside—and arranging them in the room so they stood at perfect right angles. He seemed unfazed by the thick coat of grime on the windows, which looked as if it had been there since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or by the cockeyed view showing little more than the dark rumps of other buildings, or the way the air conditioner was held in place with a concoction of plywood, gray duct tape, and old rolled-up newspapers that had turned yellow. The scalded-brown color of the shades, as if someone had once tried to iron them flat, didn’t seem to bother him. Nor did the yap of the beeper at his belt. He just went on.

Little by little his office began to take shape. On the left was the framed picture of the man who had been perhaps the greatest inspiration in his life, former federal judge Joseph S. Lord III. Cohen had clerked for him after law school, in the early 1980s, and at the bottom of the picture was an inscription that said, “If every judge had colleagues like you, the law would approach perfection, and so would friendship.” On the ledge behind the desk were pictures of his two children, Benjamin and Josh. On the right were framed diplomas from Swarthmore College, from which Cohen graduated in 1977, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he had been among the top three in his class. Since law school, his only professional job had been at Ballard Spahr. He had loved it there, and up until the aberration that had landed him in the Dr. Seussian world of City Hall, where hallways stopped and stairways went nowhere, he had never shown the slightest inclination to leave. “I’d be crazy if I didn’t have a little bit of the feeling, Have I done the right thing here?” he said on this Sunday at the beginning of January in 1992. “There’s no doubt about that.”

Cohen then fell back to work, so deeply shrouded within the cocoon of the task at hand that he didn’t even seem to hear the questions of others, much less respond to them. He was like that for hours, but then, just as nighttime fell, he grabbed his coat and left the building. He headed west on Market Street until he came to a stunning skyscraper that took up much of the block of Seventeenth Street. He searched his wallet for his security card and inserted it into the neat little slot, whereupon a responsive and gleaming elevator whisked him to the forty-sixth floor. He got off the elevator and opened the doors to the Ballard Spahr law firm. He went to the corner office that was still his, but, with overtones of “Cinderella,” only until the stroke of midnight. After that, he would have no association with
Ballard Spahr, beyond memories and friendships. After that, he would draw a paycheck from the city of Philadelphia at a pay cut of well over $200,000 a year.

He began to pack up a few remaining things, but as he did, he was momentarily drawn to the window. It was a brisk and serene night with an unfettered view stretching west to the Schuylkill River and east down Market Street to City Hall. In the quiet splendor of that office, suffused with shades of cream and gray and beige, any decision to leave, even for lunch, seemed unfathomable. For someone like David Cohen, it was hard not to think something quite terrible had happened. Behind the veil of work and compulsion and perfection, he had gone mad.

By any stretch of logic, this office, so removed from all the trouble that routinely took place so far below, should have been his forever. “I am basically an extremely conservative, steady person,” he had said earlier in the day. “It would not have been shocking to me that I would have spent the rest of my life [at Ballard Spahr] and literally not left. That would not have been an unexpected result for me.” It was true that he had gone on a reduced schedule at Ballard to serve as campaign manager when Rendell had run for mayor the previous year, but even then he had managed to bill close to two thousand hours, and it had been assumed he would return to the firm full-time once the election was over.