Dog Bites Man

by James Duffy

. . .

  Now, a year and a half later, he had weathered a threatened New Year's transit strike; a police slowdown after his attempt (thwarted by the City Council) to name an Asian-American police commissioner ("'No Irish need apply' was discredited fifty years ago," the police union president had thundered); Italo-American outcries after he had attended the opening of Padrone, the latest Mafia movie (produced by one of his larger financial backers); a gay/Planned Parenthood rebellion after he had taken an "under study" stance to a proposal for condom machines in subway stations; a picket line of militant Catholics at City Hall protesting that same "under study" cop-out; and hundreds of messages, ranging from the chiding to the psychotic and only occasionally positive, on the Web site he had instituted at Gullighy's urging, www.hoaglandmayor.com.

  There had been some triumphs. The State Legislature, in Albany, had been remarkably passive when picking at appropriations benefiting the city, in part because Governor Foote's description of that august body as "hack heaven" had leaked to the press and canceled any effectiveness she might have had in leading an anti-city assault. And the metropolitan press (with the exception of The Post-News), led by Boyd and The Surveyor, gave the new mayor a free pass. Discreetly manipulated by Gullighy, they bought the line that the new mayor was a class act and that the city was the beneficiary of a sort of meritocratic noblesse oblige, with one of its most prominent intellectuals unselfishly serving them in public office.

  . . .

  The world, or at least the metropolis, assumed that all Eldon's problems and cares involved matters of high policy. They did not know about Amber Sweetwater, a political groupie who had offered her services as a scullery maid in exchange for a meager salary and a bed in the tiny serving pantry alongside the kitchen at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence. She performed valuable services as a dishwasher, recycling sorter and vegetable dicer for the marginally competent chef de cuisine (a semi-hysterical Hispanic gay—two points on the affirmative action scale) the mayor's staff had located.

  The chef, Julio, had barely kept his job after preparing something he called "puerco festivo" for a mansion dinner for a group of rabbis from Brooklyn whom Eldon hoped to mollify in their noisy crusade to get public school funding for their yeshiva. That evening had been saved by Amber, who, once Edna discovered pork on Julio's menu, hastily chopped up and assembled a vegetable plate of broccoli rabe, boiled cabbage, canned corn and beet salad. The rabbis were puzzled at the fare but nonetheless expressed satisfaction at having been invited to dine at the mayor's house (while not giving one inch on their money demands).

  Ms. Sweetwater had written Eldon soon after he was elected, seeking the job she had thought up herself. He was intrigued by her initiative and after an interview hired her, thus giving himself an anecdotal example of the kind of thrift he hoped to impose on local government. He had not consulted Edna before making his decision. A mistake. Her husband, coming from the university, was not bothered by Amber's small silver nose ring or the astrological tattoo on her left arm; Edna was. She was also suspicious: surely the girl's motive was to gather material for a book or perhaps to make a pass at her husband. And even though the new kitchen helper had averted the crisis with the rabbis, Edna had a complaint about her almost every day, which had the effect of turning Eldon into her defender. Having cut back on her medical practice, as planned, Dr. Hoagland was often in close quarters with Amber at the mansion, and the result was not salutary.

  This particular June morning Edna had groused at breakfast that Amber, enjoying the summer rays of sunshine the day before, had stretched out topless on the mansion lawn, "where everybody going by on the East River Drive could see her."

  "So what?" Eldon had replied, telling his wife that she really ought not to waste his time with such petty matters. He left the breakfast table in a foul mood, soon exacerbated by what he felt to be unusually inane and irrelevant questions at his weekly press conference.

  "What is your policy on serving hormone-treated beef in school cafeterias?" a petite journalism intern from one of the honor high schools asked.

  "That's a fine question, young lady"—be gentle with the young—"but I'll leave that one to the health commissioner and the schools chancellor to work out."

  "Do you agree that the Art of the Phallus show at the Guggenheim is pornographic?" This from a wire service hack often observed in the City Hall pressroom, feet up, perusing Hustler and its sister publications.

  "Haven't seen it."

  "Are you going to?"

  "Probably not."

  Gullighy, although standing behind the mayor in the Blue Room, nonetheless could tell that his boss's tolerance level was rapidly approaching, and declared the session finished.

  "I said when I took over that I'd have a weekly press conference," Hoagland grumbled to his aide as they parted at his office door. "In the interest of promoting openness. Not as a work opportunity for the feebleminded."

  . . .

  Once alone, Eldon called his old Princeton roommate Milford Swansea on his private line, to confirm their plan for dinner together that night.

  Swansea was known to one and all as Leaky, the result of an unfortunate bladder accident in the excitement of a spelling bee at St. Paul's School when he was nine years old. He had hoped desperately to shed the moniker when he entered Princeton, but it followed him then and had ever since, not least because "Milford" was a given name one could not do much with in the nickname department. (His mishap had occurred when he was asked to spell "farinaceous" and only he and one other student remained in contention.)

  Leaky and Eldon had been freshman roommates: Leaky the worldly Easterner in the lower berth of a bunk bed, which he had claimed after arriving early, and Eldon in the upper. They were an unlikely pair, the only obvious common bond being their tall, gangly physiques. The preppy Leaky came from old New York money, a trading and shipping fortune going back several generations; Eldon was a hick from Minnesota, son of the assistant foreman at the local Fosston grain elevator, and a scholarship student.

  To the great surprise of both, they hit it off and began a lifelong friendship, in contrast to many if not most of their classmates, who spent their upperclass years avoiding and disassociating themselves from the freshman roommates they had been arbitrarily assigned by the campus housing office.

  Both boys were intelligent and curious, and intellectually brave (or perhaps arrogant) enough to argue about and discuss the prime academic interests of the other—politics and history in Eldon's case, classics in Leaky's. They were also strangely compatible politically, Eldon the Midwestern populist and Leaky a liberal with a patrician WASP's social conscience. Together they closely followed the burgeoning civil rights movement, including the Supreme Court's monumental desegregation decision, handed down the year they graduated. They did so abstractly, since in the Princeton of their day there was nary a black to talk to and argue with about the subject; the only concrete arguments came from the good ole boys too much in evidence among their contemporaries, who assured them of the invincible truths that "nigrahs" were inherently inferior and, unless wrongly egged on by Red agitators, perfectly content with their lot. Eldon and Leaky's shared interest led them to spend a year together in the South after graduation, demonstrating, marching and persuading blacks to register and vote.

  Intellectual and political compatibilities to one side, their other shared interest was mild carousing. Not at the expense of their studies, but as a self-giving reward for hard academic work. Eldon, no stranger to robust drinking (mostly beer) back in Minnesota, had his taste refined by Leaky, who introduced him to the glories of a properly prepared martini.

  In their routine, Thursday night was for relaxing, sometimes in their room, more often at whatever local bar was willing to wink at the 21-year-old minimum drinking age; they anticipated by almost half a century the urban careerist yuppies' routine of blasting off on Thursday night, then coasting and resting through Friday in anticipation of the weekend. By the time they we
re juniors, they had learned to arrange their schedules so that they did not have Friday classes.

  Leaky and Eldon went their separate ways after Princeton and their year in the South, Eldon to his academic career, Leaky to a life as a "private investor," husbanding the family money and reading and rereading the classics. But they stayed in contact, with a wet evening here and there in Cambridge when Eldon was studying for his Ph.D at Harvard, or later in the Twin Cities, and then in New York.

  Eldon had earlier determined that Leaky was free that night. His wife, Carol, was in the Hamptons to confer with her gardener so they had agreed to meet at Leaky's apartment.

  The day's bombardment of pettiness was getting to the mayor and he looked forward to meeting his old roommate. By the time of his last appointment for the day, receiving a delegation of Bangladesh nuns in town to learn about the newest vaccination techniques, his tongue was figuratively if not literally hanging out as he anticipated his first double shot of Dewar's. It was going to be a good evening.

  THREE

  Eldon Hoagland emerged from 818 Fifth Avenue, the apartment house where Leaky Swansea lived, at 11:45 p.m. Their get-together had been a rambunctious success and the mayor, not to put too fine a point on it, was plastered. His principal bodyguard, Gene Fasco, a head shorter than Eldon, did his best to hold his charge on a steady course.

  Fortunately the late-night doorman was not to be seen. Just as well, as the tall figure being helped through the lobby toward the door would not have inspired civic pride or reinforced faith in the democratic selection process.

  Eugenio Fasco had been part of the Hoagland security detail during the campaign. Eldon had liked the policeman and, after the election, had requested that he and his partner, Thomas Nolan Braddock, be permanently assigned. A career officer ending his years in the department as a plainclothesman, Sergeant Fasco was happy with his new post and the not infrequent brushes with glamour that it entailed. Had he not shaken hands with, and been impulsively kissed by, Cameron Diaz? (He had not been quite certain of her identity, but his teenage son certainly was, adding that his aspirations were much more licentious than a mere buss by Ms. Diaz.) Or shaken hands, and even exchanged a few words in the mother tongue, with the president of Italy?

  Fasco had a reputation as a dutiful but nonetheless scrappy officer. It was true that if positions in the Police Department were allocated on the basis of brains, Fasco might have been on limited duty. But the mayor's protectors did not have to be rocket scientists, merely wide awake and always suspicious.

  The higher-ups in the NYPD Intelligence Division had been confident enough in Fasco's ability that they thought he could even handle a "full Arafat," departmental slang for a counterdefense against a terrorist threat (every three weeks), a credible terrorist threat (once a year), or an actual terrorist attack (none yet, leaving aside the messy 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center). Or the panic that occurred when a young Pakistani, detained by two foot patrolmen in City Hall Park on God knows what suspicion—sheer racism comes to mind—was found to have in his possession an architectural diagram of the building, complete with red-penciled arrows at crucial points. It turned out that the poor fellow, completely unarmed, was an Oxford-educated architectural scholar with a passion for studying spaces influenced by the Place de la Concorde in Paris. City Hall qualified, as the work of Joseph François Mangin, a collaborator on the design of the Concorde. The red marks were never explained, though closer police analysis showed that they all pointed to the location of the exceedingly rare rest rooms in City Hall. The wronged scholar brought a false arrest suit against the city that was settled for an undisclosed sum, so no attorney ever had a chance to determine what the bathroom red marks meant.

  Fasco's partner, Braddock, was an imposing black man. Tommy overshadowed both the mayor and Fasco when they walked together; Fasco insisted that if there ever should be a shooting on their shift it would be up to Braddock to throw himself in front of the mayor.

  While Eldon was inside Leaky's apartment, Fasco and Braddock had spent the waiting time seated in the mayor's unmarked black Chevrolet (the modesty and anonymity of the vehicle were security measures), discussing food, one of their few shared interests. Fasco had been convinced that all African-American fare was made with greasy pork, while Braddock believed that Italians ate only watery, tomato-laden pastas. Their nocturnal conversations had broken down, to some extent, their stereotypes. This night Fasco had been rhapsodizing to his skeptical colleague on the joys of preparing, and then eating, scaloppine alla capricciosa: "the veal sautéed, mushroom sauce with oregano, then cheese and ham on top—can't beat it." As his description reached a crescendo his cell phone rang, and Fasco heard a semicoherent pronouncement from the mayor himself, announcing that it was time to go home.

  The mayor had forbidden his herders to accompany him inside presumably safe New York apartment buildings. Having guards standing about with visible earphones and heavy-laden suits struck him as ostentatious and undemocratic. "This is not the Former Yugoslavia," he had declared.

  So now Fasco had to enter the building and take the handoff of his charge, who had been supported by Swansea to the foyer outside his apartment. The two inebriated Tigers were loudly bellowing a chorus of "Going Back to Nassau Hall" (the recessional for most drinking evenings they had together). Leaky asked Fasco if he would give him a receipt for his delivery.

  "It's all right, sir," the detective said gravely, ignoring the idiotic request. "Leave him to me."

  "I want a receipt," Leaky demanded again, but staggered back into the apartment without arguing further about it.

  As the pair approached the front door of 818 Fifth, Hoagland squared his shoulders and affected a drunk's notion of dignified, steady walking. This lasted for three steps, as Fasco prevented him from lurching forward, straight onto the marble floor of the lobby.

  Fasco had maintained telephone contact with his partner during his downward journey and now alerted him that Egghead—the mayor's code name—was about to burst onto the street.

  Braddock turned on the engine of the mayor's sedan and then jumped out to help Fasco, struggling to maneuver Eldon toward the car. But there was not a clear path from the entrance. Between was a shiny-coated, broad-shouldered black dog taking a luxurious, large-stream pee at the curb alongside the back door of the sedan. Fasco did not need this obstruction, so he barked at the tall youth holding the dog's leash to "move aside, buddy."

  The young man perhaps did not understand or, more likely, given the circumstances, was unable to move the dog. Fasco tried to maneuver his boss around the vigorously peeing canine, but despite his iron-firm grip, the mayor lost his balance and stepped on the dog's hind leg.

  The reaction was immediate. The dog yelped in pain, reared up, turned, sprayed urine on the mayor and bit his right calf, tenaciously locking his jaws on the First Citizen's pants and flesh.

  Eldon, brought to alertness by the incisors gripping him, shouted, "Son of a bitch! Off! Off!" as he struggled to get free of the enraged animal. It was unclear who was more deranged, biter or bitee.

  The dog's walker, meanwhile, tried to restrain the dog and to pull him away from the mayor.

  "Shouesh! Shouesh! Pusho! Pusho!" the young man shouted, to no avail.

  Fasco was equal to the task. He pulled his Glock automatic from its ankle holster and fired two shots in rapid succession at the salivating animal. It collapsed, then writhed, emitting fiendish howls, on the pavement. Fasco fired again and Braddock, getting into action, delivered the coup de grâce with a fourth bullet.

  Amid the hail of gunshots, the dog's walker took his leave, dashing across Fifth Avenue and scaling the low-level wall into Central Park.

  Fasco and Braddock were so intent on exterminating the dog that the youth's departure was of secondary interest. He was too fleet for them anyway, lost now in the dark recesses of the park.

  They shoved Eldon into the backseat of the sedan. Then, silently and simultaneously, t
hey both pointed to the dead animal. Without speaking they quickly wrapped its bloody remains and leash in a blanket and put the bundle in the trunk. And for good measure retrieved the four spent shells lying in the street.

  They took off into the night, eager to dispose of the two carcasses in their custody.

  FOUR

  After a stealth trip back to Gracie Mansion—no sirens, no flashing lights—Fasco and Braddock dragged Hoagland inside and upstairs to his bedroom. Called a "mansion," Gracie had actually been a modest Dutch burgher's residence and the interior rooms and stairways were small and narrow; manipulating the mayor's lanky frame up the stairs was not easy.

  By now Eldon was quiescent. Fasco had applied a tourniquet to his leg in the car, and while his pants leg was a torn, gory and soggy mess, the bleeding seemed to have stopped. Edna, sleeping apart in her own room (as she did on her husband's nights out with Leaky), had been awakened by the bumping and scraping and appeared in her doorway.

  "What happened this time?" she asked resignedly, spotting the blood.

  Fasco explained the encounter with the dog and that "we thought we'd better bring him home instead of to a hospital."

  "Good thinking," Edna said. "Don't need a picture of him looking like this on the front pages." She shuddered, thinking of her husband in the middle of the stab-wound victims, battered women, OD'd junkies and puking children that came to the city's emergency rooms at night. "Put him on the bed and let's have a look."

  Eldon started, apparently under the impression that he was being robbed. He offered noisy resistance as the two detectives and his wife tried to depant him.

  When they had done so, it was plain from Edna's professional examination that the mayor's bite was serious and the tooth marks were deep. She ordered Braddock to fetch the emergency kit she said was kept downstairs in the kitchen. Then she quizzed Fasco about the exact details of the attack, satisfying herself that the dog's actions were provoked by Eldon's clumsiness and not by a case of rabies; sending out the policemen on a mission to locate rabies vaccine could be avoided.