A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  Rendell watched as Sean and Ryan went home to bed. And he watched as Robert Jr., after being up all night, finally fell asleep on an oversize hospital chair, finding peace in the ebb and flow of that night as hope fell and rose and fell again. The mayor was there at 3:00 A.M., when the doctor told those gathered that Officer Hayes had a fighting chance of making it. He was there at 5:30 A.M., when the doctor burst in to say that Officer Hayes was about to go into cardiac arrest. He was there forty minutes later, when Officer Hayes was pronounced dead. He was there when the doctor awoke Bobby Hayes Jr. from his sleep to tell him that his father had died. And he was there when Officer Hayes’s wife, Joanne, after receiving a dutiful string of condolences, quietly mused aloud that in four days, four days, those three little boys with their daddy-boy looks and nubby brush cuts would have gathered round to celebrate Father’s Day.

  About an hour later Rendell went to a hotel ballroom to receive an award from the local branch of the Red Cross. He walked onstage with his familiar waddle. He looked tired, a little bit gray, not too different from the way he usually looked. There was supposed to have been a videotaped roast of the mayor, but given the events of the previous night, Rendell had insisted on its cancellation. He started off his remarks by apologizing for forcing such a sudden change in the program. He scratched his shoulder slightly, as if his usually infectious body language was spent and out of rhythm, and then he began to speak.

  “As I was standing here listening to all the things that the Red Cross does, and all the people—” Suddenly he stopped. Tears came to his eyes, and he dabbed at them with one of his fingers as if trying to stop any further flow. But he didn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because those tears still would have come. For the next ten seconds, he didn’t say a word, and then he continued.

  There are times people say, “You have to have the toughest job in the city.” You know, last night I just thought about how tough it is to be a policeman or a fireman, because no matter how tough it is for us in our jobs and whatever—the pressures we operate under—none of us leave the house in the morning and don’t know whether we’re coming back at night.

  It’s a gratuitous death; it has nothing to do with anything. It was needless, it was senseless. It was part and parcel of the fact that we have become such a violent society, part and parcel of the fact that there is less respect for law and order and for decency than there was, and they’re all tremendous challenges, and obviously as a mayor those are challenges which on a local level I have to address, but if you want to know a tough job, it’s that policeman or fireman.

  There are tough jobs all over the city, and we’re all trying. The thing that’s frustrating about my tough job are the things we can’t do. It’s not the things we can tackle and have the ability to try to change. Those aren’t the frustrating things because we can change them or try to change them. Last night as I was there for six, seven hours, it was enormously frustrating to me because there was nothing I could do.…

  When I look at some of the problems, like the violence, the violence-prone society—when I look at the problems of increasing lawlessness, the breakdown of family life, some of the things that have happened to American cities that really municipal government and the mayor and the city council and business leaders, no matter how properly motivated, can attack, those are where the real frustrations are.

  All of it doesn’t mean we stop trying. To the contrary, we redouble our efforts, and we’re all in it together.

  Not everyone realizes it, but it is the case.

  “There’s nothing more sickening, nothing,” said Rendell later that afternoon, staring out the window of his office into the courtyard of City Hall, somber and subdued, as if he were searching for something so far away that not even he had any idea of where it was—beyond the courtyard, where every afternoon the flutist looking for handouts played his haunting rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” beyond the spires of the skyscrapers built during the downtown boom of the 1980s and the three-story row houses built during the industrial boom of the early 1900s, beyond the leather and lace glory of South Street and the carcasses of the abandoned factories that once defined the very soul of the city, beyond the splendidly restored brick of Society Hill and the blocks that looked liked Dresden after the bombing. Was it the memory of the doctor gently jarring that little boy awake from his sleep to tell him his father had died? Was it the memory of the death of his own father when he was a young teenager—the call at school from his uncle telling him he had to come home, the ride on the subway with his chest pounding and his mouth dry, and then the news that his father, who had been perfectly fine that morning, who had played football in the park with him the previous Sunday, had died outside their apartment building in New York while hailing a cab.

  “Gratuitous, senseless, fucking violence,” he had said that afternoon in June as he stared out the window, still searching for that far-off point. Now, on a brisk November night, the scene was repeating itself.

  When the mayor himself arrived at the back entrance of Lankenau Hospital at about 8:55 P.M., both Buchanico and Cohen were there to meet him.

  “Another officer has been shot,” Cohen told Rendell as he got out of the car.

  “Oh God,” said Rendell.

  He went into the room where Officer Enoch’s family was waiting—his mother gently fingering the well-worn black cover of the Book of Psalms, his eight-month-old nephew clutching a cookie with thick and stubby fingers, his brothers, his sisters. Rendell, with one leg propped up on a chair like a football coach, made small talk with family members and tried to keep them going until the surgeon came out with the newest update. In the meantime, he received intermittent reports on the condition of the other officer who had been shot. Information was sketchy, but the shooting had taken place in front of an automatic teller machine on Spring Garden Street in the Fairmount section of the city, and the officer’s name was Stephen Dmytryk. He had been on the police force for fifteen years, was married, and had two children.

  “Head and shoulder,” said the mayor quietly, his voice trailing off so that it was difficult to hear.

  “The other officer OK?” asked one of Officer Enoch’s family members.

  “The officer was shot in the head and shoulder,” said Rendell.

  From around the table came a collective gasp. “Oh my God,” said one.

  Almost simultaneously the doctor who had performed the surgery on Officer Enoch came in to brief the family. He was dressed in a surgeon’s green gown, and the protective slippers he wore over his shoes were flecked with blood. “We’re all finished up,” he said. “He’s got a lot of injuries. He’s gonna be sick for quite a while.”

  Then he turned away to speak privately with the mayor and various police officials, this time in much more detail, outlining the path that the bullet had taken through Officer Enoch’s body—through his chest about an inch below the left nipple, taking away part of the liver, the pancreas, and the stomach and then lodging in the spinal column. Rendell asked about paralysis, and the doctor said that based on a neurological evaluation of the officer done right before the surgery, there were no indications of any.

  Just a day earlier the U.S. Conference of Mayors had held an emergency meeting on violent crime. Representatives of nearly thirty cities, including Philadelphia, had been at the Chicago meeting, the ostensible purpose of which was to develop a cogent and united strategy for pushing an effective anticrime bill through Congress. Its timing could not have been any more propitious, or more cruel, given that there had been thirty-four killings in Chicago the previous week alone, including the death of a four-month-old baby. But as at all gatherings of politicians, pungent self-congratulation quickly began to suffuse the room, and there seemed to be a built-in presumption that the mayors and police chiefs and staffers, just by the very act of their coming together in their dark suits and crisp uniforms, had somehow solved the problem, or at the very least sh
ould be given an enormous amount of credit for gathering together to try to solve it. Rendell himself, all too aware of what happens at virtually any meeting in which more than one politician is present (“a complete and total waste of time” was the operative phrase he used) had elected not to go, dispatching instead the city’s police chief, Richard Neal, and the mayor’s deputy chief of staff, Ted Beitchman.

  According to Beitchman’s summary memo, the mayor’s instinct had been right: the meeting had been a three-hour waste of time, the realities of urban crime and urban life taking a backseat to ego, starry-eyed ideas that would never pass muster in Washington, not to mention the endless jockeying for a sliver of the media spotlight. Roughly thirty suggestions on how to solve urban crime were made, ranging from the destruction of guns after court proceedings to the coordination of a nationwide campaign against the National Rifle Association, and that was before lunch. After lunch, Jerry Abramson, the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, presided over a press conference at which he introduced every single one of the fifty-odd mayors and police chiefs attending the meeting. After that, he enumerated all the suggestions that had been made, regardless of their merit. After that, he gave the floor over to San Francisco mayor Frank Jordan. Jordan in turn had a whole agenda of his own: when he got to the issue of curfews for underage children, according to Beitchman’s memo, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago “was heard to mutter not quite far enough under his breath, ‘This is bullshit.’ ” Fortunately the whole thing sank rather rapidly, and the good news about the conference, Beitchman wrote in his memo, was that “there wasn’t a line about [it] in the Inquirer, New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal.” But now, as Rendell stood outside a hospital fielding questions about the medical condition of two fallen police officers, the price of that rhetoric and posturing seemed greater than ever.

  In a macabre trading of information, he reported on the condition of Officer Enoch while reporters in turn gave him the latest updates on Officer Dmytryk. “This is a Wild West night,” said the mayor in response to a question. “There are far too many guns out there and far too many people who shoot their guns without fear.” As the impromptu press conference ended and Rendell turned around to go back into the hospital, police official James Golden quietly informed him of the condition of Officer Dmytryk. “A priest has been called for the officer,” he said.

  Rendell shook his head slightly and walked slowly into the brightly lit hallway of the hospital without saying a word, as ashen as the rumpled gray suit he wore. His brown eyes, usually sprinkled with the mirth of amusement or the explosive rage of too much to do and never enough time in which to do it, just looked tired and puffy. He shuffled back into the waiting room so he could stay with the members of Officer Enoch’s family until they could go up to the intensive care unit. Over the cooing and fidgeting of that little eight-month-old nephew, Rendell told the family about Officer Dmytryk. “[He] must be in bad shape because they have just called for a priest.”

  A brother of Officer Enoch’s came into the room, seething with anger. In the presence of the mayor, he tried to be polite, but the words spit out of him anyway. “A lot more can be done,” he said. “Drugs gettin’ out of control in this city, and nothin’s being done about it.”

  Rendell said nothing, and moments later he was given another update on Officer Dmytryk.

  He was dead.

  A few minutes later a nurse came into the room to take the Enoch family to intensive care. Enoch’s mother, her face soft and gentle, gazed at the mayor as he clasped her hand. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  “He’s gonna be fine,” said the mayor, bending over slightly, putting his arm around her shoulder almost as if she were a child. “It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be a short-term thing, but he’s gonna be fine.”

  And then off he went in the autumn night, racing away from one hospital emergency room to another. From his familiar place in the front passenger seat of the car, he called his wife, Midge, en route, letting her know, in a weary, barely audible voice, what had happened. Then he fell silent as the car sped through the spine of the city, down City Line Avenue, then onto the curving slope of the expressway that runs alongside the river, the flashing lights of the police escort spreading long and skeletal fingers of red and green over the gingerbread houses of Boathouse Row and the fallen majesty of the Waterworks and the pale-yellow marble of the art museum. The caravan pulled off the expressway and continued on its speeding path toward the hospital, down the flag-lined boulevard of Benjamin Franklin Parkway, built in the throes of the city-beautiful movement of the early 1900s to resemble the Champs-Élysées; past the grand gray façade of the free library, modeled after the palaces on the place de la Concorde; past the rounded brownstone eminence of the cathedral constructed in the mid-1800s to satisfy the religious needs of the burgeoning throng of Irish immigrants—the city so quiet, so still and immutable except for the sound of the sirens tunneling down the narrow streets like the gossip of the dead.

  Rendell peered out the car window, his shoulders slumped, the reflections of the boathouses and the art museum and City Hall spinning off the shadow of his face in a wash of red and green from the flashing police lights.

  He arrived at the emergency entrance of Hahnemann University Hospital around 10:15 P.M., getting out of the car wearily and then going past the reporters without a word. Once inside, he was given a briefing by police officials on what had happened—how there had been a stakeout of the cash machine because of a recent rash of robberies, how the two officers had witnessed a robbery and approached the suspect, how the suspect started firing, how Officer Dmytryk went down without ever getting a shot off, how he was hit twice in the chest and once in the head. “He was not responsive when he came in,” Deputy Police Commissioner Thomas Seamon told the mayor.

  The mayor in turn reduced the language to its most basic elements: “He was DOA.”

  After the briefing, Rendell went to a small, windowless room in the emergency wing of Hahnemann to meet with the officer’s wife and two children. Their eyes were red from crying, but in their faces was anger, the anger of how this could have happened and why it had happened and who in the name of God was finally going to do something about it. When the mayor came in, they barely looked up.

  “Did they get the trigger man?” asked Dmytryk’s son Stephen, his voice urgent and rapid, his hands turning open and shut, open and shut. “Did they get the trigger man?” he asked again, this time with an almost frantic edge.

  Rendell patiently, almost clinically, explained the circumstances of what had happened. He said that one of the suspects had been shot and killed by the police, and the other one had gotten away. “They’re gonna catch him,” he promised the family. “They’re gonna catch him.” And then he mused aloud over the issue of gun control and how it amazed him that there could even be debate in Washington over instituting a five-day waiting period before the purchase of a handgun. The family had no reaction, as if the mayor’s presence had become immaterial.

  “I want to see him one more time,” said Mary Ann Dmytryk of her husband. A social worker escorted her out of the room, leaving the mayor with the officer’s daughter, Stacy Ann. There was a slight pause, and then Rendell turned to her, struggling to retain some measure of composure. He spoke softly, with the same familial presence he had displayed when he had spoken to the mother of Officer Enoch just an hour earlier, but there was an urgency now. “As bad as it is for you, it’s gonna be worse for your mom, so you’ve got to help her.”

  He walked from the room into a hallway crowded with hospital workers and police officers leaning against the white walls. They looked at him, beseeching him with their eyes as if they expected him to do something. But he looked away, and for a split second it seemed as if Ed Rendell didn’t want to be the mayor anymore, didn’t want to be the one to supply answers when there were no answers, didn’t want to be the one overflowi
ng with optimism when there was nothing to be optimistic about, didn’t want to play the cheerful fool when there was nothing to be foolish about, didn’t want to be the one to tell a daughter that he was sorry her dad had died in the line of duty when the words seemed so empty and worthless. “Goddamn” was all he said as he walked down that hallway, his eyes filled with tears and his head still tilted toward those white walls so he didn’t have to look at anyone. “Goddamn.”

  At 11:00 P.M., Rendell left the hospital to go back home. The car went back past the cathedral, past the fountain at Logan Circle where a homeless person lay shrouded in a steam of vapor, back onto the Ben Franklin Parkway toward the shimmering majesty of the art museum with that marble as pale as champagne, then onto Kelly Drive where it hugs the east bank of the river. To the left, like a scene out of Norman Rockwell, were those gingerbread boathouses as jaunty as Christmas trees. To the right, like a scene out of the American city, were the crisscrossing lights of a dozen police cars searching the alleys and crevices of the night for someone who had just become a cop killer.

  Rendell was in the middle of his four-year term as mayor. If he ran for reelection and won, the job would be his until the third of January in the year 2000. There was a kind of inspirational and historic symmetry in that, in being the man who for better or worse would guide the city out of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. But as his driver dropped him off at home, it was obvious that the events of the night had cut deeply into his core. “If I have to go through any more of these,” he said to her, “I don’t think I want this job for another six years.” But the next day the mayor was back at work.