“My first journey required the participation of others. I needed the rest of the world to react to my declarations of proud Judaism. The star, the tattoo, the pajamas, the name were all props meant to elicit responses. My growth, my self-discovery was a function of my reactions to those responses. And by confronting that daily friction, I was conditioning myself out of the shame and self-hatred of the assimilated Jew.
“This second journey has been a purely internal and personal struggle: Could I sustain my transformation without the participation of another soul? Could I be a proud Jew even if the rest of the world didn’t know I existed? Could I remain unassimilated in the midst of utter assimilation? We have all heard the cliche, ‘What a man believes in his heart, is what matters.’ That was what I needed to discover, what I believed in my heart. For this question to be answered, I needed to remove all external things from my life that might serve to give me reinforcement, that might elicit response. Until the moment you walked through my office door, I had been remarkably successful.”
“Hasn’t it been long enough for you to get your answer?”
“Yes and no, Mr. Prager. What I have come to realize is that the answer requires one last journey. At the instant of my death, I will know for sure.”
“A little late in the game, don’t you think?”
“It’s always late in the game for everyone. We’re all of us on several journeys at once, different journeys, yes, but we all get the answer to the same question at the same time. I am ready for that answer whenever it may come.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Bland.” I nodded, standing. “Be well.”
“And you, Mr. Prager. Although there is great value in being lost, try and find something in the meantime. There is no shame in comfort.”
As I walked back down the hallway toward the bingo parlor, his words rang in my head. Just as his words had stayed with me for the last twenty years, these would stay with me until the day I died. But unlike Mr. Bland nee Wannsee, I was not ready for that answer, whatever it was and whomever its deliverer might be.
Right now I had to focus on closing chapters in my life. And with the exception of Judas Wannsee, all the significant people connected to my time in the Catskills were dead. Karen Rosen and Andrea Cotter, my high school crush, were gone. Everyone from R.B. Carter-Andrea Cotter’s billionaire brother-to Anton Harder-the leader of the white supremacists-was gone.
Closing chapters, that’s what I was trying to do now, at least until I could think of a more inspired approach. When I was done reconciling the books, I’d take a look at the landscape and see who remained standing. One of them would be the man or woman behind the grave desecrations and the appearance of Patrick Michael Maloney’s ghost. And since I was already on Long Island, I decided to make one more stop. It would no doubt be an unpleasant one.
A middle-class hamlet with pretentions, Great River was tucked neatly between East Islip and Oakdale on Long Island’s south shore. For many years Great River had resisted the Gaudy-is-Great infection spreading wildly across the rest of the island, but just lately its ability to fend off the disease had weakened. Acre lots that had once sported comfortable colonials and solid split ranches had begun sprouting giant “statement” houses, beasts that featured design elements from styles as disparate as Bauhaus and French Provincial. But the house that had to have won the Good Housekeeping’s seal of disapproval boasted minarets, a faux moat, and scale model marble mailbox sculpted like the Pieta. In place of Michelangelo’s name, it read-in gold leaf I might add-Mr. Michael Angelos and Family. Visitors to the home were probably confused as to whether they should purchase a theme park pass or prayer cards.
A little further on, I turned right before the gates of Timber Point Country Club and parked across from the expanded L-shaped ranch that I’d visited once, eleven years earlier. The Martello house looked much the same now as it had then, but things had changed. Currently, the house belonged to Raymond Martello Jr., a Suffolk County Police sergeant. The house had once belonged to his dad. The father had been a cop too, NYPD, the captain in command of the 60th Precinct: my old house in Coney Island. I was ten years off the job by the time he was posted to the Six-O. Ray Sr. and me might not have known each other as cops, but we made up for lost time and got real well acquainted back in the late ’80s.
I strolled across the street to talk to the tanned, shirtless man kneeling to adjust an in-ground sprinkler head on his front lawn.
“You Ray Jr.?” I asked.
“Why? Who wants to know?”
“No fair. You asked two questions. I only asked one.”
He stopped what he was doing, gazed up at me, and got to his feet. Whereas Ray Martello Sr. had been a small, compact man, this guy was eye to eye with me. He was square-shouldered and ripped. He did the cop thing of getting in close to me-his nose nearly touching mine-and staring through me. He was checking me out and trying to intimidate me all at once. A sly, arrogant smile worked its way onto his face. I figured him for Martello’s kid. Had to be. Had the father’s looks and the same impudent style. I was feeling guilty about trying to get a rise out of him until I saw that fucking smile.
I noticed some rather intricate and unusually colored tattoos on his forearms, biceps, and delts. There were a series of Chinese characters on his left forearm done in bright red, not the usual dull blue. Both biceps were encircled by bands of blue-green barbed wire highlighted with that same bright red, but the tat that caught my attention was on his right delt. It was the head of a Peregrine falcon done in vibrant shades of black, dark and light brown, off-white, and hints of blue. The yellow around the beak and eyes was so real, I could almost imagine pricking my finger on the tip of its hooked bill. I shifted position slightly and observed that the falcon’s body and talons continued down his back. Here the work was even more skillfully executed, as the dappling on the bird’s belly, the texture of its feathers and the blending of shades was like nothing I’d ever seen. Well… that wasn’t true. I had recently seen something very much like it.
“Cop?” he asked, confident of my answer.
“Used to be. In the city. Nice ink work. Where’d you get it done?”
“Thanks.” He pointed to his forearm, then his bicep. “These here I got in A.C.”
“How about the bird? You get that done in Atlantic City too?”
“What are you, some kinda queer or something?”
“Or something,” I said. “I knew your dad a little.”
That wiped the arrogant smirk off his face and put a dent in his smart guy attitude. A city cop my age would know about what a corrupt piece of shit his father had been. In 1972, Raymond Sr., along with Larry McDonald and another thuggish cop I knew named Kenny Burton, had tortured and murdered drug kingpin Dexter “D Rex” Mayweather. Mayweather was king of the Soul Patch, the African-American section of Coney Island. But his execution wasn’t some noble act of misguided vigilantism done to rid the Coney Island streets of drugs. Rather it was done at the behest of Anello Family capo Frankie Motta in order to cover up an ill-conceived partnership between his crew and D Rex.
“Yeah, so you knew my pops, so what?”
“I was in Frankie Motta’s house the night he got shot.”
Martello Jr. blanched, then burned hot. His face did somersaults. It was as if a colony of beetles were under his skin, pulling his face this way and that. He knew who I was without asking.
“You got some set of balls showing up here, Prager.”
“You think?”
“I do. In fact, I think if you don’t get off my property pretty soon, I’m gonna have to shoot you for trespassing.”
“Your father tried to shoot me once and look where that got him.”
May weather’s murder remained unsolved until, seventeen years later, a low level dealer named Malik Jabbar was arrested by a very young and very ambitious detective named Carmella Melendez. During his interrogation, Jabbar claimed to know who had killed D Rex. That was all it took for things to unravel. Within weeks, Larry McDonald committed suicide, Malik Jabbar and his girlfriend were executed, and Carmella’s partner and another 60th Precinct cop, a Detective Bento, were gunned down in a Brooklyn bar.