No matter what, I’ve got to be ready because surprise comes in several degrees of seriousness. And when it does, it comes out of absolutely nowhere.
On the twenty-fourth of December, I wasn’t ready.
To me, it was a day like any other. That was wishful thinking, of course. To a holiday-crazed town, it was Christmas Eve and the big payoff was on deck — everybody out there with kids and wives and roast turkeys and plenty of money was anxious to let the rest of us know how happy they were.
Under the circumstances, it was just as well that I’d pulled duty. I wouldn’t have had anyplace to go besides the corner pub, as it happened — or, if I could stand it, the easy chair in front of my old Philco for a day of Christmas in Connecticut followed by Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street followed by A Christmas Carol followed by March of the Wooden Soldiers followed by Midnight Mass live from St. Patrick’s.
Every year since my divorce five years ago, I’d dropped by my ex-wife’s place out in Queens for Christmas Eve. I’d bring champagne, oysters, an expensive gift, and high hopes of spending the night. But this year she’d wrecked my plans. She telephoned around the twentieth to tell me about this new boy friend of hers — some guy who wasn’t a cop and whose name sounded like a respiratory disease, Flummong — and how he was taking her out to some rectangular state in the Middle West to meet his parents, who grow wheat. Swell.
So on the twenty-fourth, I got up at the crack of noon and decided that the only thing that mattered was business. Catching bad guys on the final, frantic shopping day — that was the ticket. I reheated some coffee from the day before, then poured some into a mug after I picked out something small, brown, and dead. I also ate a week-old piece of babka and said, “Bah, humbug!” right out loud.
I put on my quilted longjohns and strapped a lightweight .32 automatic Baretta Puma around my left ankle. Then I pulled on a pair of faded grey corduroys with holes in the knees, a black turtleneck sweater with bleach stains to wear over my beige bulletproof vest and my patrolman’s badge on a chain, a New York Knicks navy-blue stocking cap with a red ball on top, and Army-surplus boots. The brown-paper bag for my PTP I’d saved from the past Sunday when I’d gotten bagels down on Essex Street and shaved last.
I strapped on my shoulder holster and packed away the heavy piece, my .44 Charter Arms Bulldog. Then I topped off my ensemble with an olive-drab officer’s greatcoat that had seen lots of action in maybe the Korean War. One of the side pockets was slashed open. Moths and bayonet tips had made holes in other places. I dropped a pair of nickel-plated NYPD bracelets into the good pocket.
By half past the hour, I was in the Bleecker Street subway station near where I live in the East Village. I dropped a quarter into a telephone on the platform and told the desk sergeant at Midtown South to be a goody guy and check me off for the one o’clock muster. A panhandler with better clothes than mine and a neatly printed plywood sandwich sign hanging around his shoulders caught my eye. The sign read, TRYING TO RAISE $1,000,000 FOR WINE RESEARCH. I gave him a buck and caught the uptown D train.
When I got out at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, the weather had turned cold and clammy. The sky had a smudgy grey overcast to it. It would be the kind of afternoon when everything in Manhattan looks like a black-and-white snapshot. It wasn’t very Christmaslike, which suited me fine.
Across the way, in a triangle of curbed land that breaks up the Broadway and Sixth Avenue traffic flow at the south end of Herald Square, winos stood around in a circle at the foot of a statue of Horace Greeley. Greeley’s limed shoulders were mottled by frozen bird dung and one granite arm was forever pointed toward the westward promise. I thought about my ex and the Flummong guy. The winos coughed, their foul breath hanging in frosted lumps of exhaled air, and awaited a ritual opening of a large economy-sized bottle of Thunderbird. The leader broke the seal and poured a few drops on the ground, which is a gesture of respect to mates recently dead or imprisoned. Then he took a healthy swallow and passed it along.
On the other side of the statue, a couple of dozen more guys carrying the stick (living on the street, that is) reclined on benches or were curled up over heating grates. All were in proper position to protect their stash in the event of sleep: money along one side of their hat brims, one hand below as a sort of pillow. The only way they could be robbed was if someone came along and cut off their hands, which has happened.
Crowds of last-minute shoppers jammed the sidewalks everywhere. Those who had to pass the bums (and me) did so quickly, out of fear and disgust, even at this time of goodwill toward men. It’s a curious thing how so many comfortable middle-class folks believe vagrants and derelicts are dangerous, especially when you consider that the only people who have caused them any serious harm have been other comfortable middle-class folks with nice suits and offices and lawyers.
Across Broadway, beyond the bottle gang around the stone Greeley, I recognized a mope I’d busted about a year ago for boosting out of a flash clothes joint on West Fourteenth street. He was a scared kid of sixteen and lucky I’d gotten to him first. The store goons would have broken his thumbs. He was an Irish kid who went by the street name Whiteboy and he had nobody. We have lots of kids like Whiteboy in New York, and other cities, too. But we don’t much want to know about them.
Now he leaned against a Florsheim display window, smoking a cigarette and scoping out the straight crowd around Macy’s and Gimbels. Whiteboy, so far as I knew, was a moderately successful small-fry shoplifter, purse snatcher, and pickpocket.
I decided to stay put and watch him watch the swarm of possible marks until he got up enough nerve to move on somebody he figured would give him the biggest return for the smallest risk, like any good businessman. I moved back against a wall and stuck out my hand and asked passers-by for spare change. (This is not exactly regulation, but it guarantees that nobody will look at my face and it happens to be how I cover the monthly alimony check.) A smiling young fellow in a camel topcoat, the sort of guy who might be a Jaycee from some town up in Rockland County, pressed paper on me and whispered, “Bless you, brother.” I looked down and saw that he’d given me a circular from the Church of Scientology in the size, color, and shape of a dollar bill.
When I looked up again, Whiteboy was crossing Broadway. He tossed his cigarette into the street and concentrated on the ripe prospect of a mink-draped fat lady on the outside of a small mob shoving its way into Gimbels. She had a black patent-leather purse dangling from a rhinestone-studded strap clutched in her hand. White-boy could pluck it from her pudgy fingers so fast and gently she’d be in third-floor housewares before she noticed.
I followed after him when he passed me. Then, sure enough, he made the snatch. I started running down the Broadway bus lane toward him. Whiteboy must have lost his touch because the fat lady turned and pointed at him and hollered “Thief!” She stepped right in front of me and I banged into her and she shrieked at me, “Whyn’t you sober up and get a job, you bum you?”
Whiteboy whirled around and looked at me full in the face. He made me. Then he started running, too.
He darted through the thicket of yellow taxi-cabs, cars, and vans and zigzagged his way toward Greeley’s statue. There was nothing I could do but chase him on foot. Taking a shot in such a congestion of traffic and pedestrians would get me up on IAD charges just as sure as if I’d stolen the fat lady’s purse myself.
Then a funny thing happened.
Just as I closed in on Whiteboy, all those bums lying around on the little curbed triangle suddenly got up and blocked me as neatly as a line of zone defensemen for the Jets. Eight or ten big, groggy guys fell all over me and I lost Whiteboy.