“Look, if you have something to say…”
“Patience, patie…”
Carella hung up.
Arthur Brown was just walking in, easing a man in handcuffs through the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside. Both men were black, an inappropriate bit of labeling in that Brown was actually the color of his surname, and the handcuffed man with him was the color of sand. African-Americans would have been a misnomer, too; the man with Brown had been born in Haiti, and Brown had been born right here in the good old U.S. of A., which made him a native son and not a hyphenate of any stripe or persuasion.
Yankee Doodle Brown was what he was, six feet four inches tall, weighing two hundred and twenty-four pounds—this morning, anyway—and looking high, wide, and handsome in a trench coat he’d worn because it had still been raining when he’d left the house this morning. The man with him was five-six, five-seven, in there, wearing green polyester slacks, a matching green windbreaker, and scuffed black loafers with white socks. His eyes were green; lots of French blood in him, Brown guessed. So far, the man had spoken only French, which Brown didn’t understand at all.
“What’ve you got?” Carella asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Brown said. “Man was turning a Korean grocery store upside down, throwing fruit and vegetables all over the place, I just happened to be passing by in my car.”
“Lucky you,” Carella said.
“Oh, don’t I know it?” Brown said, and took off the man’s handcuffs.
“Eux, ils sont débiles,”the Haitian said.
“Empty your pockets,” Brown told him. “Everything on the desk here.”
“Doesn’t he speak any English?” Carella asked.
“Not to me he doesn’t. Your pockets,” Brown said, and demonstrated by reaching into his right-hand pocket and taking from it his keys and some change, and putting these on the desk, and then pulling the pocket inside out. “Empty your pockets on the desk here. Understand?”
Being a police officer was getting to be very difficult in this city. Years ago, most of your foreigners coming to live in this city were white Europeans; for the most part, the only foreign languages you had to contend with were Italian, Spanish, Yiddish, and German. Nowadays, the immigrants were mostly black, Hispanic, and Asian. Back then, if you booked anyone Hispanic, nine times out of ten he was from Puerto Rico. Nowadays, anyone with a Puerto Rican heritage was usually a second-or third-generation American who spoke English without a trace of accent. The ones with the heavy Spanish accents were the new-comers, most of them from the Dominican Republic or Colombia. Well, that wasn’t such a problem; a lot of working cops had picked up at least a little Spanish over the years, and besides there were hundreds of cops on the force whose grandparents had come here from Guayama or San Juan and you could always count on them translating what some guy was machine-gunning in his native tongue.
But what’d you do when you came up against somebody speaking French, the way this Haitian guy was? Brown had no idea whether this was pure French or bastardized French or even the patois some of them spoke, which not even a Parisian could understand. All he knew was that he couldn’t make out a word the guy was saying. He was used to not understanding what half the people they dragged in here were saying. What were you supposed to do, for example, when you got somebody in here from Guyana? In the old days you chatted up a black man, you found out he had people in Georgia or Mississippi or South Carolina, he’d been “down home” for the holidays, or to see his sister in a hospital in Mobile, Alabama, whatever. Nowadays, you talked to a black man, you found out his relatives were in New Amsterdam or Georgetown, and he spoke a kind of English you could hardly understand, anyway. One out of every four blacks in this city was foreign-born. One out of every four. Count ’em. You got some of them from Guyana, they didn’t talk English at all, they spoke a Creole patois it was impossible to decipher. You got some of those East Indians from Guyana, they spoke either Hindi or Urdu, who the hell on the police force could understand those languages? Not to mention the Koreans and the Chinese and the Vietnamese, who they might just as well have been speaking Martian.
You took the number-seven subway train from Majesta into the city proper, you saw a third-world country on it every morning. The host on one of the city’s nighttime talk shows dubbed the number seven “The UN Express.” The immigrants riding that train didn’t know what the hell he meant. The mayor said on the radio that the city’s dramatic population change could be considered a glorious experiment in the racial forces of manifold coexistence in a continually changing kaleidoscope of cross-cultural opportunity. The people he was talking about didn’t know what the hell he meant, either. Not even Brown knew what the mayor meant.
All Brown knew was that in the old days, a person came here from a foreign country, he planned to stay here, earn a living here, raise a family here, learn the language they spoke here, become a citizen—in short, make some kind of investment in this city and this nation. Nowadays, the immigrants you got from Latin America and the Caribbean preferred remaining citizens of their native lands, shuttling back and forth like diplomats between countries, supporting nuclear families here and extended families in their homelands. This meant that the city’s largest immigrant groups were showing little if any interest in joining the mainstream of American society. Shoot a dope dealer in a neighborhood composed largely of immigrants from Santo Domingo, and the flags that came out in protest were red, white, and blue, all right, but they weren’t the Stars and Stripes, they were the flags of the Dominican Republic. No wonder so many walls in this city were covered with graffiti. If it ain’t our city, then fuck it.
The man from Haiti was carrying a green card that identified him as Jean-Pierre Chandron. Brown wondered if the card was a phony. You could buy any kind of card you needed for twenty-five bucks, sometimes less. You could also buy a bag of heroin for a mere five bucks these days and a puff of crack for seventy-five cents! The Six-Bit Hit, it was called. You couldn’t buy a candy bar for six bits anymore, but you could start frying your brain for that amount of cash anytime you took a notion. What they did, they passed the crack pipe through a slot in a locked door after you dropped in your cash in quarters or even in nickels and dimes. Only thing they wouldn’t accept was pennies cause they were too bulky; otherwise, money was money.
In much the same way that big manufacturers dumped their merchandise at ridiculously low prices in order to infiltrate new markets, the dope peddlers in this city were now dangling their bait to the uninitiated. Lookee here, man, you can fly to the moon for a scant six bits, wanna try, wanna buy, wanna fly? Or if you prefer heroin, we now have shit so pure you’d think it was virgin. You can snort it off a mirror, man, same as you do with coke, it’s that pure. You don’t have to worry about no needle, man, no fear of getting the old HIV, you can inhale this shit, man, and it’s only a nickel a bag, how can you refuse? The days of the dime bag are dead and gone, come join the party! The nickel bag is back, man, rejoice and carouse!
“Why’d you go berserk in that store?” Brown asked the Haitian.
The telephone rang.
“Eighty-Seventh Squad, Car…”
“Please don’t hang up again,” the Deaf Man said. “I’m trying to be of assistance here.”
“I’ll just bet you are.”
“I’m trying to prevent a catastrophe of gigantic proportions.”