“No last name?” he said.
“Ryan,” she said. “See you guys,” she said to the boys, and this time moved several paces from the table before she was stopped again by Carella’s voice.
“Miss Ryan, would you look at this picture, please?” he said, and removed the photo from his notebook. The girl came back to the table, looked at the picture, and said nothing.
“Does he look familiar?” Carella asked.
“No,” she said. “See you,” she said again, and this time she walked swiftly from the table and out into the street.
Carella watched her going, and then handed the photograph to the blond boy. “How about you?”
“Nope.”
“What’s your name?”
“Bob.”
“Bob what?”
“Carmody.”
“And yours?” he asked the boy with the beard.
“Hank Scaffale.”
“You both live in the neighborhood?”
“On Porter Street.”
“Have you been living here long?”
“Awhile.”
“Are you familiar with most of the people in the neighborhood?”
“The freaks, yeah,” Hank said. “I don’t have much to do with others.”
“Have you ever seen this man around?”
“Not if he really looked like that,” Hank said, studying the photo.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s dead in that picture, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, well, that makes a difference,” Hank said. “The juices are gone,” he said, and shook his head. “All the juices are gone.” He studied the photograph again, and again shook his head. “I don’t know who he is,” he said, “poor bastard.”
The responses from the other young people in the room were similar. Carella took the photograph around to the five other tables, explained what he was looking for, and waited while the dead man’s frozen image was passed from hand to hand. None of the kids were overly friendly (you can get hit on the head by cops only so often before you decide there may not be a basis there for mutual confidence and trust), but neither were they impolite. They all looked solemnly at the picture, and they all reported that they had not known the dead man. Carella thanked them for their time and went out into the street again.
By five o’clock that afternoon he had hit in succession two head shops, a macrobiotic food store, a record store, a store selling sandals, and four other places catering to the neighborhood’s young people — or at least those young people who wore their hair long. He could not bring himself to call them “freaks” despite their apparent preference for the word; to his way of thinking, that was the same as putting an identifying tag on a dead man’s toe before you knew who he was. Labels annoyed him unless they were affixed to case report folders or bottles in a medicine cabinet. “Freaks” was a particularly distressing label, demeaning and misleading, originally applied from without, later adopted from within in self-defense, and finally accepted with pride as a form of self-identification. But how in hell did this in any way lessen its derogatory intent? It was the same as cops proudly calling themselves “pigs” in the hope that the epithet would lose its vilifying power once it was exorcised by voluntary application. Bullshit. Carella was not a pig, and the kids he’d spoken to this afternoon were not freaks.
They were young people in a neighborhood as severely divided as any war-torn Asian countryside. In the days when the city was young, or at least younger, the neighborhood population had been mostly immigrant Jewish, with a dash of Italian or Irish thrown in to keep the pot boiling. It boiled a lot in those days (ask Meyer Meyer, who lived in a similar ghetto as a boy, and who was chased through the streets by bigots shouting, “Meyer Meyer, Jew on fire!”), and eventually simmered down to a sort of armed truce between the old-timers, whose children went to college or learned New World trades and moved out to Riverhead or Calm’s Point. The next wave of immigrants to hit the area were United States citizens who did not speak the language and who enjoyed all the rights and privileges of any minority group in the city; that is to say, they were underpaid, overcharged, beaten, scorned, and generally made to feel that Puerto Rico was not a beautiful sun-washed island in the Caribbean but rather a stink hole on the outskirts of a smelly swamp. They learned very rapidly that it was all right to throw garbage from the windows into the backyard, because if you didn’t the rats would come into the apartment to eat it. Besides, if people are treated like garbage themselves, they cannot be castigated for any way they choose to handle their own garbage. The Puerto Ricans came, and some of them stayed only long enough to earn plane fare back to the island. Some followed the immigration pattern established by the Europeans: they learned the language, they went to school, they got better jobs, they moved into the outlying districts of the city (where they replaced those now-affluent Americans of European stock who had moved out of the city entirely, to private homes in the suburbs). Some remained behind in the old neighborhood, succumbing to the deadly grinding jaws of poverty, and wondering occasionally what it had been like to swim in clear warm waters where the only possible threat was a barracuda.
The long-haired youths must have seemed like invading immigrants to the Puerto Ricans who still inhabited the area. It is easy to turn prejudice inside out; within every fat oppressor, there lurks a skinny victim waiting to be released. The hippies, the flower children, the “freaks” if you prefer, came seeking peace and talking love, and were greeted with the same fear, suspicion, hostility, and prejudice that had greeted the Puerto Ricans upon their arrival. In this case, however, it was the Puerto Ricans themselves who were doing the hating — you cannot teach people a way of life, and then expect them to put it conveniently aside. You cannot force them into a sewer and then expect them to understand why the sons and daughters of successful Americans are voluntarily seeking residence in that very same sewer. If violence of any kind is absurd, then victims attacking other victims is surely ludicrous. Such was the situation in the South Quarter, where the young people who had come there to do their thing had taken instead to buying pistols for protection against other people who had been trying to do their thing for more years than they could count. In recent months, bikies had begun drifting into the area, sporting their leather jackets and their swastikas and lavishing on their motorcycles the kind of love usually reserved for women. The bikies were bad news. Their presence added a tense note of uneasiness and unpredictability to an already volatile situation.
The Puerto Ricans Carella spoke to that afternoon did not enjoy talking to a cop. Cops meant false arrests, cops meant bribes, cops meant harassment. It occurred to him that Alex Delgado, the one Puerto Rican detective on the squad (in itself a comment) might have handled the investigation better, but he was stuck with it, and so he plunged ahead, showing the picture, asking the questions, getting the same response each time: No, I do not know him. They all look alike to me.
The bikie’s name was Yank, meticulously lettered in white paint on the front of his leather jacket, over the heart. He had long frizzy black hair and a dense black beard. His eyes were blue, the right one partially closed by a scar that ran from his forehead to his cheek, crossing a portion of the lid in passing. He wore the usual gear in addition to the black leather jacket: the crushed peaked cap (his crash helmet was on the seat of his bike, parked at the curb), a black tee shirt (streaked white here and there from bleach-washing), black denim trousers, brass-studded big-buckled belt, black boots. An assortment of chains hung around his neck and the German iron cross dangled from one of them. He was sitting on a tilted wooden chair outside a shop selling posters (LBJ on a motorcycle in the window behind him), smoking a cigar and admiring the sleek chrome sculpture of his own bike at the curb. He did not even look at Carella as he approached. He knew instantly that Carella was a cop, but bikies don’t know from cops. Bikies, in fact, sometimes think they themselves are the cops, and the bad guys are everybody else in the world.