Red on Red (10 page)

“Some people, they got it easy,” said Garelick, as if he’d spent his morning splitting timber. “The one, though—Paulie—I knew him as a cop. He was good. Two shoot-outs.”

“The other guy, Johnny T, he was no slouch, either,” added Napolitano. “A lot of gun collars. Good guy, too.”

“Fuck ’em both,” said Esposito, to general assent.

Nick thought about the codes of the place, like with the bedouins—my brother is my brother, and my cousin is my enemy, unless another tribe makes a claim on the well. The five men at the table would have gladly given blood for the two who had left, but Nick doubted that they could have sat together for fifteen minutes without an argument.

“Do you want menus?”

The waitress was in her early twenties, with a sweet, plain face and a top-heavy figure. Napolitano made a pretense of looking at her name tag—Marina—and Esposito didn’t bother with the pretense. The menus offered what they’d seen at every diner they’d ever gone to and ever would: eggs, pancakes, french toast; bacon, sausage, ham; orange juice and coffee. There was little else available, and nothing else was desired. There was no more need for menus than there was to pass out the lyric sheets to “Happy Birthday” before the cake arrived at a party.

“Yeah, we need menus.”

“Please.”

“Sure, we’ll have a look.”

Marina nodded and turned, and ten eyeballs took note of her retreat.

“Wouldja?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“No question.”

Nick looked around the table at the yearning gazes. As far as he knew, Napolitano was happy at home, and faithful to his wife; Esposito professed contentment but cheated at will; Garelick’s marriage was a prison from which he made no effort to escape, in either the short or long term. Perez was unattached, as far as Nick knew. It occurred to Nick that he understood nothing of human nature and relationships.

After Marina returned, the orders were placed, and she collected the menus. Garelick noticed the momentary lag in the palaver and took action. “She should have brought coffee, without asking. Anticipating needs is at the heart of all of the service professions. I didn’t get a real night’s sleep last night. Nine hours—I know, it isn’t bad—but I still think I’m owed, from past aggravations. How about you, Nick? You need coffee?”

The question was baited, all at the table knew, though it was unclear whether its intent was playful or pointed. Garelick had been one of the cavilers who’d warned Nick about Esposito at the beginning.

“Yeah, coffee. A lot, a helmet full of it.”

Garelick was pleased at the response. “A helmet isn’t such a bad idea for you, in and of itself.”

Esposito caught something of the implication and directed his own question to Perez. “How about you, Ralph? You got your helmet on, for the game? Or do you just carry around a pillow, for when you can’t stay awake?”

Conflict was constant, the “them” a given, sliding in scope and scale from the hordes on the horizon to the man across the table, next to you on the bench. The “us” was variable, but Napolitano had hoped to maintain solidarity at least through breakfast.

“Remember, Espo, when I had that shooting, what’s-his-name, the guy’s shot right in the balls? He was mistaken for his brother, who’d shot somebody else. Completely innocent, this guy, but it turns out he was a rapist. DNA hit, a month later—he was jumping out on joggers in Prospect Park. I was sure he knew who shot him, and he was holding back. You know, the usual thing, all lies and ‘Fuck yous.’ Fact was, he was blindsided. He wouldn’t have told us if he did know, but he didn’t. Remember, Espo?”

“I remember,” said Esposito, nodding with vigor, evidently seeing other relevance to the recollection. “You remember, Nap, how that ended, in the hospital?”

Napolitano’s smile was more rueful than Esposito’s. “Oh, yeah, now I do. Walking out—”

“Yeah, walking out, I ask the guy—remember, Nap?”

“God knows I do. I had a few meetings about it, was getting ready for a sit-down with the good people at the Civilian Complaint Review Board, until the DNA hit. When we’re leaving the hospital room, Espo turns to the guy and says, ‘I just got one more question for ya.’ The guy makes a face, like he’s gonna answer this one after all the others. Espo says, ‘Does it whistle when you piss?’ ”

Napolitano laughed almost as much as Esposito did, but Nick knew that if their satisfaction had been the same, they would have still been working together, as regular partners, and Nick would have been the odd man out. Perez laughed the hardest, glad to be included, and Garelick shook his head. “If they locked you in a room with a mirror,” said Garelick to Esposito, “it’d be half a day before you found out you were locked in a room.”

The food arrived, and conversation became desultory before falling
off altogether. Near the end of the meal, Garelick suddenly took on an animated look, and he finished quickly. He was more indulgent toward Perez than usual, in that he had so far refrained from any direct criticism during the course of the meal. When Perez had mopped the last bit of egg from his plate, he got up from the booth, took a newspaper from the counter, and headed to the bathroom. Garelick summoned Marina in some haste, for the check.

“As soon as you can, we gotta go,” he said to her.

“No problem.”

Napolitano pushed his plate back and smiled. “Are you new here? I haven’t seen you before.”

“Yeah, I’m new, but this is my last day. I’m just filling in for my sister. I’m going back to Greece tomorrow. I’m going back to college.”

“Really! My grandfather was Greek,” Napolitano said, perhaps truthfully. “All I remember, though, is ‘
kale nita
’—‘good night’!”

Marina nodded in appreciation. Garelick was oddly excited by her news, as if he had been relieved of the responsibility of paying her tuition. Nick knew he had some stratagem in mind.

“Well, good luck to you!”

Marina accepted Garelick’s vehement benediction with a slight blush, and when she left, the remainder of the party looked at Garelick, wondering what was afoot. He had a cunning expression as he took out a pad from his pocket.

“If I can prove that Perez is completely out of his mind, will you guys work with him, take him off my hands?”

“No.”

“Why would we do that? You want me to buy a car, if you can show it doesn’t run?”

“Would you lay off him? He’s a decent guy!”

Garelick was undeterred by the responses, and indifferent to the practical result of his experiment. He coughed and slid the notebook to the center of the table. “All of you are witnesses. I have written down a phone number that a complainant gave me. It’s disconnected. Nick, would you call, please, to confirm this?”

Garelick slid the pad over. Nick called and got a recorded message—not in service. He held the phone up for the table to hear, like a magician’s assistant.

“And we have our statement from Marina, a person whose credibility
we have no reason to doubt, that she will not be in this hemisphere by tomorrow. Are you with me so far?”

“So far.”

“You want to show something about the mental health of somebody at this table,” observed Esposito, “not including yourself.”

“Watch, listen, learn. I take out a new piece of paper.” He tore out a half-sheet from his pad. “We provide a name and a phone number, which we have demonstrated to be nonworking.”

He wrote in a bouncy cursive, attempting to seem feminine. After a pause, he changed the dot of the
i
in Marina to a heart.

“That’s it. Watch. Wait. Observe.”

Marina returned to place the check on the table, but Garelick took hold of it—“Hang on, wait”—and slipped a few bills inside the brown vinyl folder.

“We don’t need change.”

“Thank you!”

“Best of luck, Marina. We’re on our way here, too. Duty calls. The other guy, in the bathroom? He’ll be out in a minute, but we have to go. He dropped this piece of paper, from a homicide case, I think it is. Would you mind giving it to him?”

“No, not at all.”

The four of them slipped out of the booth, taking care not to appear desperate to leave, as Perez came out of the bathroom. He viewed the empty booth with dismay, but was reassured at the sight of Garelick waving to him from outside. As he walked toward the door, Marina intercepted him.

“You dropped something.”

Marina beamed so brightly that Nick wondered how much Garelick had tipped her. Perez opened the folded note and smiled at her. He winked at her as he left.

“Good thing you caught it,” Perez said.

Perez touched her shoulder as he left, with a lightness in his step. The joy in his face was so contagious that the other four detectives were nearly as childishly elated. As they drove off, Nick knew that he’d never feel sorry enough for Perez to risk spoiling the scheme, or rather—in this instance, at least—his conscience was no match for his curiosity. Sunlight, sleep, and whatever this was, Nick was glad to have started the day with them.

O
n the drive downtown, little was said; the meal had been heavy, the night long. Esposito said that driving helped to wake him up, and as much as Nick didn’t want to think about that, he didn’t like to drive. The wind took up the gray surface of the Harlem River in feathery ruffles, and the Bronx projects and apartments lined the palisade on the far side, like sentry towers. Nick saw Esposito regarding the projects darkly, as if there were a mile-long
BEWARE OF DOG
sign along the shoreline, warning trespassers of all kinds. When any ghetto cop got a glimpse of some other rough stretch of town—the South Bronx, Bed-Stuy, forget about Newark—they thought,
Now, this place is baaaaddd!
And all of a sudden Spanish Harlem or East New York seemed easy, like home. Highbridge rose above to the left, with its rocky slopes and hardy oaks. Allison used to say that she couldn’t believe Nick was a city kid, because what he liked best about the city was the country. Ah, the green woods of Gotham, sweet home.

Across the water were the East River islands, Randall’s, Wards, Roosevelt, adrift in history. No one had ever really figured out what to do with them. They had been workhouses, poorhouses, madhouses, places of quarantine. The names changed, following their shifting purposes—Blackwell’s Island became Welfare Island before it became Roosevelt Island. Though the lighthouse at the northern tip still stood, a haphazard bar graph horizon of concrete housing towers had taken the place of the Idiot Asylum and the Inebriate Asylum. At the southern end, the ruins of the smallpox hospital were lit up at night, the grand shell of a chateau, fenced off to keep tourists from being crushed by falling stone. It was the problem with islands—everyone wanted to get on them or no one did. To the right, where the skyscrapers of Manhattan rose, a square foot of
space might cost more than a square mile in Texas. On the little river islands, ideas went wrong, and money fell short, and then interest dwindled. But when they lit up the smallpox hospital at night, it looked like a palace.

“Why have you been staring at me?”

Nick laughed so hard he choked. “I was looking at Roosevelt Island.”

“Nobody ever looks at Roosevelt Island.”

“That’s true, but I was looking at Roosevelt Island.”

“It’s okay to admit it,” Esposito continued, the attention working through his system like caffeine. “As Garelick says, ‘Watch, listen, learn.’ ”

Esposito smiled with a theatrical self-satisfaction, raising an eyebrow, letting slip an amused sigh. It was an act and it wasn’t; he wouldn’t have joked like that a month ago. Nick tried to think how long had they worked together—was it five months? Esposito fished for a piece of gum from his pocket, and Nick knew he wanted a cigar. Espo knew himself well enough to laugh at his vanity, and he trusted Nick enough to show him that he wasn’t entirely kidding. Friendship can begin with likeness, a shared past, a shared taste—
You’re from Brooklyn? You like Sinatra?
—or it can begin with unlikeness, a thrilling difference. You think,
I’d never have thought of that joke. I could never sing like that, or have figured that out. Not only couldn’t I have done that, I wouldn’t have known how to begin
. A stranger can almost become a brother through a handful of these little epiphanies. They began to hit it off after one visit to an apartment where they’d heard a perp from a shooting might be staying. It was a cousin living there, with the name Garces, uncommon enough to have promise. There was no answer at the door, or at the neighbors’, or at the super’s. There were no names by the doorbells, or the mailboxes, a two–tiered row of them at the side of the lobby. Nick and Esposito strolled over, glancing around to see if anyone was watching, and Nick pried back one of the mailbox covers half an inch with his house key. He took the chewing gum out of his mouth, wadded it to the end of a pen, and slid it inside the little gap. With a quick pluck, out came a phone bill, addressed to a Fernando Garces. He slipped it back inside.

“This is the right place,” Nick said.

“That was a federal offense,” remarked Espo approvingly. “Did you make that up yourself?”