He swung his arms, as if to a military band, marched toward Twenty-Second Street as if on parade. If eleven o’clock at night was at least theoretically a dangerous time to be out, let the crooks and bad men beware: Terrible Teddy was armed with both a police whistle and a revolver. He secretly hoped some fool of a criminal (criminals were stupid, he insisted) would try something. Action — he was a man of action!
He was aware of a horse-drawn wagon heading downtown. Somebody sat on the box. The rig-out didn’t look criminal and so didn’t interest him, and he barely looked at it before returning to thoughts of himself as governor; what he saw from the corner of an eye registered only as Sheeny with a wagon. Of no interest to a commissioner of police.
He walked on, glanced at his watch, thought that the beat policeman was thirty seconds late. Another deadhead! Another time-server, another—
A large bulk in heavy blue wool rounded the next corner, his truncheon spinning on its strap as if he were giving a display of fancy stick-work. He would be Irish. They were all Irish; that was part of the trouble: they stuck together; they owed more to their common Irishness than they did to law and order; they were the creatures of Irish politicians, who got them their jobs and paid for their funerals, and they were the pawns of the Sons of Erin and the Hibernian League and Tammany Hall. The only thing that could have been worse, to Roosevelt, was if they had been Italian. A few Italians had been let into the force, doubtless bringing the Black Hand and other criminal societies with them, because it was well known that all Italians were criminals. Trying to turn them into policemen was like making a bed for the fox in the henhouse and expecting it to lay eggs.
“Sure, and it’s Mr. Roosevelt hisself!” The Irish accent was probably laid on thick for his benefit; the beat cops knew it annoyed him. The man seemed so jovial that Roosevelt wondered if he had been warned. Or was drunk.
“You’re a minute late, officer.”
“Aw, I was having a bit of a waterworks in an alley, your Eminence. Hard to concentrate on the police work if your bladder’s screaming for a drizzle.”
“Report.” Roosevelt moved himself close enough to sniff the man’s breath.
“Ah, very much a great deal of the usual tonight, Commissioner. Staying alert, being vigilant, preventing crime.” The man seemed to blow his breath out with greater force to make sure Roosevelt got its pungent cabbage-with-onions scent.
“That’s what the handbook says you ought to be doing. When I say ‘Report,’ I don’t want my own words recited back to me, man. I mean, tell me what’s happening!”
“Oh, sure it’s very quiet. Cold, not many of the bad boys and girls on the streets. And this is a decent neighborhood, gentlefolk all, most of them tucked up in their beds by now. I been checking the locks on the businesses with rigor; all well and good there. Cautioned one young swell was three sheets to the wind and headed for a rap on the head by some lushworker and his pockets emptied if he didn’t go home, so I put him in a hack and sent him on his way.”
“You’d better have found him a night in jail.”
“Indeed, indeed, but that’d of meant me walking him to the station and leaving the streets without police protection, so I used me better judgment and let him go. And isn’t it that we’re supposed to be preventing crime more than punishing it? Oh, and I met you, Mr. Roosevelt, which is a high point of the evening and will go in my report for sure.”
Roosevelt grunted in disgust. “Well, you’ll simply waste more time, standing here jawing at me. Good night to you.”
“Indeed, indeed, and to yous, your Honor.”
The fat cop went off whistling and spinning his stick. Roosevelt, deflated by the triviality of the encounter — not quite what Prince Hal found when he made the round of the campfires before Agincourt — turned right and walked back to Fifth Avenue and right again and so headed home.
The wagon that the Commissioner had hardly noticed made its plodding way down Sixth Avenue, its driver seeming to nod over the reins. At Fourteenth Street, it picked an erratic route by side streets down to that over-romanticized area called Greenwich Village, now a louche resort of the down-and-out, the bohemian, and a good many of the Italians who were part of the latest tidal wave to break over New York. Respectable brownstone houses clustered near the bottom of Fifth Avenue and Washington Square (although the original families had already moved farther north), but south and east there was squalor. It was a village in name only, bleeding into the Bowery to the south and the new tenement area that bulged into the East River in that direction. It had been a village when Washington was president; now, the city had engulfed it, eaten it, digested it, excreted it as a slum.
The wagon made its slow way down Bleecker Street, then east until it was in the Bowery itself — the Bouwerie, as it had once been when the Dutch were there, now a bower no longer. Paved, built on, decayed, fallen from whatever grace neighborhoods achieve, it was at night the home of the preyed-on and the predator — rats and feral cats; men who staggered when they tried to walk and slept where they lay when they fell, and men who turned out the pockets of the fallen and would steal even their shoes while they slept. By day, it had its pool halls and its dime museums, its Yiddish theaters and its saloons and its scams and its whores, as well as its businesses and its churches, its almost new buildings with their cast-iron fronts and their hydraulic elevators, its mission for the destitute and its police stations, whose gas lamps burned in the dark like the last hope of any honest citizen mad enough to wander there.
The old man on the wagon seemed not of the place, neither predator nor prey. The horse clopped on; the old man’s head stayed down. When, however, he reached a short alley that offered its dark opening like a narrow mouth to Elizabeth Street, he glanced aside down the alley but did not stop. At the next corner, however, he turned right again, then left to go south on Mott Street until he passed a beat policeman going slowly north. The old man glanced aside with only his eyes. The policeman opened his dark lantern and shone it on the wagon.
“Shalom, Mr. Policeman.”
“And the same to you. You’re in a rum neighborhood, Ikey; they’ll kill you for the rags in the wagon, much less the horse.”
“I am careful. Thank you.”
They turned away from each other. The policeman dropped the flap of his lantern. The wagon went on but turned left at the corner, then moved faster as the old man flicked the reins on the horse’s back. The horse did nothing so noticeable as trot, but the wagon was moving now a good deal faster than the policeman on his parallel track. It went back up Elizabeth Street, slowed opposite the mouth of the same alley, and made a half-circle in the street so as to stop with the wagon blocking the alley.
The old man got down. He almost ran into the alley; muffled sounds came out — nothing more, perhaps, than a rat, the scrape of a trash can. Then the old man hurried back and, with surprising agility, lifted a bundle of rags from the wagon bed and half-staggered with it back into the alley.
Now the sounds were furtive, unclear — the trash can again, the old man’s wheeze, a grunt as if at some effort. Then a silence. Something soft falling. A couple of thuds.
The old man came out, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. He carried some of the rags, threw them into the wagon, and lifted out a burlap bag that looked wet in the dim light of a distant lamp. A strong stench of manure was carried on the breeze that blew dirt and a days-old newspaper along the pavement. The sack went with him into the alley; no sound, then a soft fall of something, a rustle, silence, then footsteps as the old man came out, threw the now empty sack into the wagon and climbed up behind the horse and touched it into motion. Forty-five seconds later, the street was empty.