“Let’s get in the rowboat,” the taller man, Sergeant Cohen, said. “It’s only about fifty yards out.”
At its narrowest point, the Harlem River was still almost a quarter-mile wide, about four city blocks across, and as the two cops squinted against the river wind, they could see a bulky shape entangled in tree branches near the middle of the river. The limbs were snagged up against some chunky ice floes.
“Time for a close-up,” the sergeant said.
Sergeant Cohen was in his forties, and his gray, ball-bearing pupils focused on the aluminum Columbia University rowboat at the water’s edge. The land part was operated by the Parks Department.
“Let’s go, kid,” the sergeant said to the patrolman. “The river’s half frozen anyway.”
PO Mulligan, twenty years younger, held the rowboat steady as Sergeant Cohen stepped in and squatted. Mulligan shoved off, jumping in as the rowboat skimmed in the direction of the submerged tree stump.
Mulligan pulled up his blue NYPD-monogrammed turtleneck. “Freezing,” he repeated, breathing evenly as he set the oars.
They could hear the distant crackle of radio broadcasts as he started rowing through the surface ice. The patrolman pulled on the oars, figuring the distance at a couple dozen strokes.
The radio sounds got louder, until out of the gray wash came the Harbor Unit, a twin-engine Detroit fast-boat, approaching from the Bronx side of the Third Avenue Bridge. Sergeant Cohen could make out two additional uniformed officers on board and figured it quickly: simultaneous calls and dispatch. Multiple calls must have come through 911 emergency, from both the South Bronx and Manhattan North precincts. Reports of a body snagged on a tree in the river.
The Harbor Unit had been docked on the South Bronx waterfront near Hunts Point and had taken aboard the cops from the Forty-Fourth Precinct when the dispatch went out. From the fast-boat they could see the two cops in the rowboat, out from the Manhattan side, rowing closer to the bulky shape now, which was looking more like a body as they approached. The NYPD boat cut its engines, maneuvering now as its arrival sent ripples though the chunks of ice.
Sergeant Cohen could see clearly as they came within ten feet: it was a body, with black hair, head and torso just under the surface of the water, its right arm raised, caught in the branches of the tree. Like he was a student, raising his arm in a classroom. The drag of the stump, and the ice floes that had drifted around it, had kept everything in place.
The Harbor Unit boat came about and bumped up against the ice, nudging the scene more toward the Manhattan side.
Overtime, thought Sergeant Cohen. Finally he was close enough to lift the head out of the water with his baton. Male, Asian, he thought. Twenty-something, maybe thirty years old. PO Mulligan worked the oars against the ice. A jumper? Or something else? There was no blood that he could see. “How’d he wind up in the river?” Cohen wondered aloud.
“Hey!” one of the blues on the Harbor boat deck yelled. “Whaddya think? Someone from your side? You had jumpers before …” He looked vaguely Hispanic and also wore the stripes of a sergeant.
Sergeant Cohen barked back, “Who knows? Could have been your side, too. Like the Bruckner, or Hunts Point. Plenty of vics from over there.”
The Harbor Unit skipper, a Nordic face, took a call over the boat radio.
There was a pause between the different cops, when all they could hear was the lapping of the currents against the ice and the whistle of the wind across the mouth of the bay. The Macombs Dam Bridge towered in the distance.
The second cop on the harbor boat, a white patrolman from the Four-Four Bronx Precinct, said, “Looks like a dead Chink to me.” His Latino sergeant agreed: “El chino.”
PO Mulligan countered, “Could be a Jap. Or Korean.” His Manhattan sense of diversity.
“They’re all the same,” the boat-deck patrolman said, shrugging.
“Asian,” Sergeant Cohen settled on.
“Whatever,” the Latino sarge said. “You want the case or not? All our dicks are working the club fire, anyway.”
All the cops had heard about it, an enraged partygoer had returned to the Happy World Social Club with a gun and a can of gasoline, and now thirteen Central American immigrants lay dead in the smoldering ruins.
“And besides,” the sarge continued from the deck, “the scene’s closer to your side of the river now.”
“Yeah, Manhattan.” The Bronx patrolman grinned. “There’s more Chinks in Manhattan anyways.”
“Come back, Harbor Two,” the boat radio crackled again.
“Negative, we don’t need scuba, copy?” the blond skipper answered. More static from the radio. “We’ve got an Asian in the water,” the skipper continued.
“Agent?” came from the radio. “What agent?”
“No, an Asian,” repeated the skipper.
“What agency? What agent, Harbor Two?”
“Negative.” The skipper paused on the open line, annoyed, when the Bronx patrolman yelled into the radio, “We got a dead Chink in the drink! Copy?”
“Oh,” responded dispatch drily. “Okay. Copy that. Ten-four.”
The patrolman smirked as his sergeant said toward Sergeant Cohen, “It’s all yours, Manhattan.”
“Wait for EMS, okay?” said dispatch.
“Copy that,” answered Sergeant Cohen. “Call the house,” he said to Mulligan. “Tell them we could use a Chinese, uh, Asian detective.”
North
THE BEATEN-DOWN LANDSCAPE of the Lower East Side flashed past the bus window as Jack’s cell phone sounded. It was a number he didn’t recognize, but he flipped open the phone and took the call.
“Detective Yu?” asked a female dispatcher.
“Correct,” Jack answered, keeping his voice even in the noise of the city bus.
“Report to Manhattan North,” she said under some static.
“Come back?” Jack quietly questioned.
“Report to One Hundred Twenty-Eighth Street and Lexington. East Hamilton Park.”
“Copy,” Jack answered, waiting. 1-2-8 and Lex.
“See Sergeant Cohen,” came the punch line, “Hamilton Heights precinct, copy?”
“Copy that,” Jack answered, anticipating the Union Square crossover in the distance. It had to be about a questionable death, he knew. But why assign a Manhattan South detective to something at the other end of Manhattan?
He watched the Ninth Precinct fade as the bus rolled north. At Union Square he dropped to the subway and caught a 4 train northbound; four stops on a twenty-minute bullet to Harlem and 125th Street.
The complexions of the passengers changed as the subway zoomed north of midtown, most people going in the opposite direction, more blacks and Latinos, minorities, bound for the Bronx.
Harlem? he wondered as the train thundered through the underground.
River
A TALL WHITE cop, a sergeant, was waiting for him at the gate to East Hamilton Park. Jack saw the insignia, with COHEN on his nameplate, and flapped open his jacket to show his gold badge.
“Detective Yu,” Sergeant Cohen acknowledged.
“What do you have, Sarge?” Jack asked evenly, preferring not to question the chain of custody or command involved until later, when they got to the Thirty-Second Precinct.
“In the river,” the sergeant said as he led the way to the shoreline.
Jack could see the Harbor Unit idling near the middle of the river. The wind kicked up as they went toward a metal rowboat bearing the Columbia University logo.
“After you,” Sergeant Cohen said.
Jack stepped into the rowboat, dropping smoothly into a wide stance to help level the boat before sliding forward and sitting down. Sergeant Cohen pushed off and hopped aboard as they drifted forward through the choppy water. The irony of it, Jack thought, a Jew rowing a Chinaman out to the middle of the Harlem River to take possession of the dead on its journey to the next life. That’s how Billy Bow would see it anyway.