had called from the office to say he might be late, to worry about dinner, he'd catch a hamburger something. She wondered if he might be walking into danger again, there was so much danger there.
There was a time when the shield me something.
You said, "Police," and you showed the and you became the shield, you were everything shield represented, the force of law, the power law, this was what the shield represented. The represented civilization. And civilization meant body of law that human beings had created themselves over centuries and centuries. To themselves against others, to protect against themselves as well.
That's what the shield used to mean.
Law.
Civilization.
Nowadays, the shield meant nothing.
the law was overwritten with graffiti, scrawled in blood of cops. She felt like calling the President the telephone and telling him that the weren't about to invade us tomorrow. Tell him enemy was already here, and it wasn't the Russians.
The enemy was here feeding dope to our kids and killing cops in the streets.
"Hello, Mr. President?" she would say. "This is Teddy Carella. When are you going to do something?”
If only she could speak.
But, of course, she couldn't.
So she sat waiting for Carella to come home, and when at last she saw the knob turning on the front door, she leaped to her feet and was there when the door opened, relief thrusting her into his arms and almost knocking him off his feet.
They kissed.
Gently, lingeringly.
They had known each other such a long time.
She asked him if he'd like a drink... Fingers flashing in the sign language he knew so well... and he said he'd love a martini, and then went down the hall to say hello to the kids.
When he came back into the living room, she handed him the drink she'd mixed, and they went to sit on the sofa framed in the three arched windows at the far end of the room. The house was the sort Stephen King might have admired, a big Victorian white elephant in a section of Riverhead that had once boasted many similar houses, each on its own three or four acres of land, all dead and gone now, all gone. The Carella house was a reminder of an era long past, a more gracious, graceful time in America, the gabled white building with the wrought-iron fence all around it, a large tree-shaded corner plot, no longer all those acres, of course, those days of land and luxury were a thing of the dim, distant past.
He sat drinking his gin martini.
She sat drinking an after-dinner cognac.
She asked him where he'd eaten putting snifter down for a moment so that she could free use of her hands and he watched her r, fingers and answered in a combination of voice sign, said he'd gone to a little Chinese joint Culver, and then he fell silent, sipping at his his head bent. He looked so tired. She knew him well. She loved him so much.
He told her then how troubled he was by murder of the priest.
It wasn't that he was religious or anything..
"I mean, you know that, Teddy, I haven't inside a church since my sister got married, I don't believe in any of that stuff anymore...”
... but somehow, the murder of a man of God..
"I don’t even believe in that, people themselves to religion, devoting their lives spreading religion, any religion, I just don't in any of that anymore, Teddy, I'm sorry. I you're religious. I know you pray.
Forgive me. sorry.”
She took his hands in her own.
"I wish I could pray," he said.
And was silent again.
And then said, "But I've seen too much.”
She squeezed his hands.
"Teddy... this is really getting to me," he said.
She flashed the single word Why?
"Because... he was a priest.”
She looked at him, puzzled.
"I know. That sounds contradictory. Why should the death of a priest bother me? I haven't even spoken to a priest since.., when did she get married?
Angela? When was her wedding?”
Teddy's fingers moved: The day the twins were born.
"Almost eleven years ago," he said, and nodded.
"That's the last time I had anything to do with a priest. Eleven years ago.”
He looked at his wife. A great many things had happened in those eleven years. Sometimes time seemed elastic to him, a concept that could be bent at will, twisted to fit ever-changing needs. Who was to say the twins were not now thirty years old, rather than eleven? Who was to say that he and Teddy were not still the young marrieds they'd been back then?
Time. A concept as confusing to Carella as was that of... well, God.
He shook his head.
"Leave God out of it," he said, almost as if he'd spoken his earlier thoughts aloud. "Forget that Father Michael was a man of God, whatever that means. Maybe there are no men of God anymore.
Maybe the whole world...”
He shook his head again.
"Figure him only for someone who was.., okay, not pure, nobody's pure, but at least innocent.”
He saw the puzzlement on her face, and realized she had misread either his lips or his sloppy signing.
He signed the word letter by letter, and she nodded and signed it back, and he said, "Yeah, think of him that way. Innocent. And, yes, pure, why not? Pure of heart, anyway. A man who'd never harmed human being in his entire life. Would never have dreamt of harming anyone. And all at once, out the night, out of the sunset, into his peaceful g there comes an assassin with a knife.”
He drained his glass.
"That's what's getting to me, Teddy. On Year's Eve, I caught a baby smothered in her crib that was only five months ago, what's today, the twenty-sixth of May, not even five full And now another innocent. If people like.., like... people like that are getting killed.., if the.., if the.., if nobody gives a damn anymore.., if you kill a baby, kill a priest, kill a ninety-year-old grandmother, kill a pregnant woman...”
And suddenly he buried his face in his hands.
"There's too much of it," he said.
And she realized he was weeping.
"Too much," he said.
She took him in her arms.
And she thought Dear God, get him out of this job before it kills him.
Seronia and her brother were eating pizza in a joint on The Stem. They had ordered and devoured one large pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni, and were now working on the smaller pizza they'd ordered next. Seronia was leaning forward over the table, a long string of mozzarella cheese trailing from her lips to the folded wedge of pizza in her hand, eating her way up the string toward the slice of pizza. Hooper watched her as if she were walking a tightrope a hundred feet above the ground.
She bit off the cheese together with a piece of the pizza, chewed, swallowed and washed it down with Diet Coke. She was very much aware that the white guy throwing pizzas behind the counter was watching her.
She was wearing an exceptionally short mini made to look like black leather. Red silk blouse with a scoop neck. Dangling red earrings.
Black patent pumps. Thirteen years old and being eyed up and down by a white man shoveling pizza in an oven.
"You shoonta lied to him," she told her brother.
"He fine out why you was on. "Leventh Street, he be back.”
"You the one say they was nothin' to lose," I-looper said.
"That dinn give you no cause to lie.”
"I tole him basely d'troof," Hooper said.
"No, you lied about Fat Harol'.”
"So whut? Who gives a shit about that skinny li'l fuck?”
"Sayin' as how he do crack. Sheee-it, man, he a momma's boy doan know crack fum his own crack.”
Hooper laughed.
"Sayin' as how he wenn to a crack house, bought hisself a nickel vial.
An' paintin' yourself like a...”
"It was true we wenn t'church t'gether, though, me an' Harol"" Hooper said.
"I doan do no dope," Seronia said, imitating brother talking to Carella, "an' I doan run dope none a'these mis'able dealers comes aroun' tryin' a'spoil d'chirren.”