'Excuse me,' a man said, 'are you all right?'
He was standing alongside the table. Tall. Brown eyes. Dark hair. Craggy good looks. Perhaps thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old. Wearing a brown overcoat and brown gloves. Obviously just leaving the restaurant Obviously concerned about Eileen's tears.
'I'm fine,' she said to him, turning her head away, drying her eyes.
He leaned over the table. Gloved hands on the table.
'Are you sure?' he said. 'If there's any way I can help . . .'
'No, thank you, that's very nice of you,' Eileen said, 'but I'm okay, really Thank you.'
'As long as you're all right,' he said, and smiled, and turned swiftly the table and began walking toward-
'Hey!' Eileen yelled and shoved back her chair, knocking it over. 'Hey, you!'
She was on her feet and running, shoving past a waitress carrying a trayload of sandwiches, throwing open the front door and racing after the man, who made an immediate right turn on the sidewalk outside. Teddy could not hear Eileen shouting, 'Police, stop!' but she did see the man as he came past the restaurant's plate glass window, and she did see Eileen come up fast behind him, both of them running, and she saw Eileen leap at the man in a headlong tackle that sent something flying out of his gloved hand, and only then did she realize that the something was a woman's handbag, and the handbag was hers.
They went down in a jumble of arms and legs, Eileen and the man, rolling over on the sidewalk, Eileen on top now, her right arm coming up, no gun in her hand, her gun was still in her shoulder bag on the floor under the table. Her right fist was bunched. It came down hard on the side of the man's neck. The man stiffened as if a nerve had been struck. A uniformed cop was suddenly on the scene, trying to break them apart, Eileen screaming she was on the job, which Teddy did not hear but which she guessed the officer understood because all at once his gun was in his hand and he was cuffing the man on the sidewalk and having a nice friendly chat with Eileen who just kept nodding at him impatiently.
She picked up Teddy's handbag from where it lay beside the handcuffed man. The cop wanted the bag. Eileen was telling him no, shaking her head. The conversation seemed to get very heated. Eileen began using her hands, the bag in one hand, both hands waving around in the air. Finally, she turned away from the cop, the bag still in her hand, and skirted back for the restaurant, automatically shooing away the crowd that had gathered outside, a holdover from the days when she herself had been a uniformed cop.
She came back to the table.
'How do you like that guy?' she said, shaking her head in amazement.
Teddy nodded.
She was thinking how strong Eileen had been, how brave and-
But Eileen, noticing everyone looking at her, flushed a red the color of her hair, and said in embarrassment, 'Could we get out of here, please?'
And to Teddy she suddenly seemed like a little girl standing in front of a mirror in her mother's dress and shoes.
* * * *
In Calm's Point, there was a Jamaican neighborhood called Camp Kingston. In Riverhead, the Jamaican section was called Little Kingston. In other parts of the city, there was a Kingston North and even a Kingston Gulch, though how that name had originated was anyone's guess. Here in the Eight-Seven, the Jamaican section ran for several blocks from Culver Avenue to the River Harb, where what was still officially called Beaudoin Bluff was now familiarly called Kingston Heights. In any of these neighborhoods, whenever a cop broke up a street fight and asked the participants where they were from, the proud answer was 'Kingston.' Not a single Jamaican in this city was from Montego Bay or Savannala-Mar or Port Antonio. Every Jamaican in this city came from Kingston. The Capital, man. The same way every Frenchman in the world came from Paris. Mais je suis Parisien, monsieur! The raised eyebrow. The indignant tone. Kingston, mon, where you tink?
Kling had not been in this part of the precinct since it was Puerto Rican. Before that, it had been Italian. And before that, Irish. And if you went back far enough, Dutch and Indian. But there was no sense of history in these streets. There was merely a feeling of a transient population inhabiting a decaying slum. The buildings were uniformly gray here, even though there was red brick beneath the ageless soot. The streets had been only partially cleared of snow; in this neighborhood - as was the case in most of the city's ghettos - garbage collection, snow clearance, pothole repair, and most other municipal services were provided at a rather leisurely pace. The streets here looked dirty at any time of the year, but particularly so during the winter months. Perhaps because of the soiled snow. Or perhaps because it was so goddamn cold. In the summer months, for all its poverty, a slum looked extravagantly alive. During the winter, the deserted streets, the vain bonfires in vacant lots, the wind sweeping through narrow gray canyons, only exaggerated the ghetto's meanness. Here is poverty, the ghetto said. Here is dope. Here is crime. Here is only the thinnest thread of hope.
The mayor seemed not to know that the snow up here hadn't been cleared yet.
Perhaps because he rarely went to dinner in the 87th Precinct.
337 South Eustis Street was in a line of tenements on a street that dropped swiftly toward the river. There was ice out there today. The sky over the high rises in the next state glowered with clouds threatening more snow. Kling walked with his head ducked against the fierce wind that blew in over the choppy gray water. He was thinking that what he'd hated most as a patrolman was a family dispute, and here he was a detective about to march into somebody's house to settle a marital problem. Call used to come in over the radio, 10-64, Family Dispute, a non crime incident, and the dispatcher would almost always tag it with 'See the lady,' because it was usually the wife who'd called 911 to say her husband was batting her around the apartment. Today, he was about to see the man; it was Dudley Archibald who'd made the complaint about his wife Imogene.
He entered the building.
The stench of urine.
He wondered if there was a building in the entire 87th Precinct that did not stink of piss in the entrance hallway.
Broken mailboxes. Jimmied for the welfare, Social Security or Medicare checks.
A naked light bulb overhead. Miraculously unbroken and unscrewed; victimizers normally preferred waiting in the dark.
An inner door with a missing doorknob. Stolen for the brass. You unscrewed enough brass doorknobs, you sold them to the junkman, you picked up the five bucks you needed for your vial of crack.
Kling put his palm flat against the door, a foot and a half above the hole left by the missing doorknob, shoved the door open, came into the ground-floor vestibule, and began climbing.
Cooking smells.
Alien.
Exotic.
Tile floors on the landings. Cracked, chipped, faded, worn. But tile nonetheless. From a time when the city's North Side was flourishing and apartments here were at a premium.