Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re on the Upper West Side.”

  “Then gimme some money,” he says.

  “Paul, go up and ring the buzzer,” Alex tells his friend. “Wake my parents.”

  “Don’t go in there! Don’t go anywhere!”

  The man’s switched channels again. He suddenly seems angry and feral. He even crouches a little, like an animal sniffing the sidewalk between them. Getting ready to pounce.

  “You come to take her away. Right?! Well that ain’t gonna happen.”

  He reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a boxcutter with the edge exposed.

  “You touch my daughter or my wife, I’ll cut your fuckin’ balls off,” he says, grinding his teeth and advancing on the boys. “Fuckin’ little parasites.”

  His blade catches a glint from the streetlight as he holds it above his right ear.

  “Hey, Paul, forget the bell. Let’s get out of here,” says Alex, backing up slowly.

  But Paul is frozen. He’s too scared to take his eyes off the boxcutter. The homeless man’s grinding teeth begin to make a cracking noise.

  “What, you think I’d do a thing like that to my own daughter?!” he yowls, as if he’s indignant at some invisible interrogator. “How could you think a thing like that?”

  Without warning, he turns on Alex and the blade slices the air a foot or two from the end of the boy’s nose. It makes a sickening whoosh as it goes by and Alex feels his scrotum seize up like someone just grabbed it.

  “How could you think that?!”

  The man takes another step and kicks a green Heineken bottle that was lying on the sidewalk. It shatters and sprays glass on the front steps. He’s now less than a yard away from Alex. He smells so terrible that the air seems to die around him. Flies wouldn’t get near him. Oh shit, Alex thinks. He’s going to kill me. I’m gonna die without ever getting laid.

  He catches sight of Paul whimpering and cowering by the wrought-iron courtyard gate, and it occurs to him that this might be the last thing he’ll ever see.

  “What do you think I am? A fuckin’ animal?” the man shouts.

  Just then there’s a loud squeak and a wash of bright light from the top of the steps. Alex looks up and sees his father standing at the front door. For the first time in years, he allows himself to feel a full rush of love for the old man.

  “I thought I told you to get out of here.” Jake comes pounding down the steps, fists clenched.

  The man in the Yankees cap doesn’t pause to face him or pocket his boxcutter. He just turns and runs off toward the park, knocking over a plastic garbage can on the way.

  “You all right?” Jake says, coming down the rest of the stairs and putting an arm around his son.

  “Yeah, fine, Dad.” Alex squirms and shoots a sidelong glance at Paul. “Don’t make a big thing of it.”

  14

  How’s your boy doing?”

  The man coming up the front steps looks familiar, but Jake can’t quite place him. A stocky guy about his age—maybe a year or two older—with wheat-colored hair, a middleweight’s physique, and a drinking buddy’s face.

  “He’s all right, I guess,” says Jake, sweeping some more of the broken glass off the stairs. “Pretty shook up, at first. He’s never had anybody stick a knife in his face before.”

  The man exhales and shakes his head. “They’re taking over, aren’t they?” He looks beyond Jake’s shoulder at the exploded star of broken glass in the front-door window.

  It’s just after ten in the morning. Fragments of green glass sparkle in the sunlight. Jake sweeps them into a yellow dustpan and dumps them into a garbage bag. He still hasn’t figured out how the glass in the door got broken. Maybe John G. threw a rock at it before the boys came along.

  “Philip Cardi,” says the stocky man sticking out his left hand. “I’m doing some work rehabbing a couple of my man Thomas’s apartments across the street.”

  He points to a red Dodge van parked outside the town house on the south side. Jake remembers the buzz-sawing and the hammering he’s heard the last couple of mornings and everything starts to fall into place. He even recalls some vague discussion he had with Thomas, the pale, squinty-eyed landlord, about the legal complexities of converting his building into a small co-op.

  “Forgive me for intruding,” says Philip Cardi, running a hand through his close-cropped hair. “But when I heard about what happened to your boy and his friend last night, I had to come over.” He shields his eyes from the sun. “What are the police gonna do?”

  “I don’t know.” Jake sets the broom against the black iron rail for a moment. “We were up until three in the morning, waiting for a cop to show up and take a report. And then they say they’ll only take the complaint over the phone because they don’t have enough people on the shift to send one around. So now I’m going to have to go to the station myself and make sure they’re going to follow up and investigate.”

  “Ah, they don’t care.” Philip mops his brow with a red bandanna.

  “Yeah. Well. You didn’t see anything last night, did you?” Jake notices a particularly jagged shard near his feet. “I don’t suppose you live around here.”

  “Nah, I didn’t see anything. And neither did the people I was talking to. I’m from out on the Island. I got a place, Massapequa. Beautiful out there, you know. I got a pool in the back and I can barbecue every night in the summer. It kills me to see what they’ve done to the city. You know? I used to love it here. But now with all the dirt and the crime ... It’s starting to be like I get a headache every time I get on the LIE to drive in.”

  “I know what you mean.” Jake shakes his head. “I’m beginning to think I should’ve done the suburban thing too. For my kid, you know.”

  “Hey, children, they’re the most valuable things we’ve got.” Philip throws out his right arm and winces slightly. At first it looks like an aggressive gesture, but then Jake realizes it’s just an involuntary reflex.

  “I got two of them,” Philip says. “A boy that’s five and a girl who’s eight. And I swear if anyone ever laid a hand on either of them the way that bum tried to lay a hand on your son, I’d be right after him with a baseball bat and a crowbar. Botta beep, botta bing. His brains are on the sidewalk and that’s the end of your social problem.”

  “Botta beep, botta bing.” Jake laughs. “Hey, where you from anyway?”

  “Sixty-fourth Street in Bensonhurst.”

  “No shit. I grew up on Avenue X. Marlboro Houses.”

  “Hey...”

  They shake hands again, with a different feeling this time. It’s not the exact same neighborhood, but who cares?

  “Sixty-fourth Street, huh?”

  “Yeah, and Twentieth Avenue,” says Philip. “Right above the surgical supply store. You remember it?”

  “Sure. With the prosthetic arms and legs in the window.”

  “Where’d you go to school?” asks Philip Cardi.

  “John Dewey.”

  “Lafayette, Class of seventy. You hang around Eighteenth Avenue?”

  “I was down at Sweet Tooth’s about once a week,” says Jake, hearing himself slip into his old neighborhood attitude without feeling self-conscious about it for once.

  “My place was the Milano sports club on Seventy-third Street. Associazione Italiana. You ever go there?”

  Jake remembers the hard-eyed old men in their straw hats sitting in the lawn chairs out front, listening to soccer games from Italy on the radio. Through the front window, you could see the plaster saints and the local knock-around guys standing by the pool tables, brandishing their cues like Revolutionary War soldiers’ muskets. Not a place for a nice Jewish boy.

  “Eighty-sixth Street was more my turf,” says Jake.

  He finds himself hoping this doesn’t cost him any status. Twenty-five years later and he’s still worrying what people in the neighborhood think of him.

  “Hey, Brooklyn is Brooklyn,” says Philip Cardi, letting
him off the hook.

  “Brooklyn is Brooklyn.”

  “And we wouldn’t let the neighborhood go all to hell like they have up here. Am I right?”

  Jake nods, though he can’t help noticing this stretch of the Upper West Side still looks pristine, while Bensonhurst was full of vacant lots and graffiti-smudged walls the last time he drove through. No wonder he’s never taken Dana for a visit.

  “So your boy’s going to be okay?” Philip asks. “He need somebody to walk him to school this morning?”

  “Ah, he’s fine. He’s a stand-up kid.”

  Listen to this, Jake thinks. A stand-up kid. As if he’s suddenly inducted Alex into the Bensonhurst tribe.

  “Well, all the guy that did this to him needs is a little attitude adjustment,” Philip says, with a smile like a grimace. “You let me know if you want me to go with you, have a talk with him.”

  “A little attitude adjustment,” says Jake.

  Botta bing. He remembers Nunzi the Knuckle catching a beating outside a candy store on Twentieth Avenue because he’d been propositioning little boys in the bathroom. From then on, Nunzi wore a head bandage and kept his eyes to himself when you stood next to him at the urinal.

  “I’ll have to get back to you about that,” says Jake, with a deferential look. “I’m a lawyer, you know.”

  Philip throws up his hands as if he’s just touched a hot porcupine. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to suggest anything outta line. It just upsets me when I see the way our children have to grow up now.”

  A Ford Explorer jeep pulls up at the West End Avenue stoplight. Hardcore hip-hop blasts from its speakers, rattling the windows and shaking the tailpipes.

  An involuntary snarl forms on Philip’s lips. “What’d I tell you? They’re taking over. You can’t even walk down the street without having your ears assaulted. Makes me wonder why we fought a war overseas.”

  The light changes. The jeep pulls away. The sound of sparrows singing fades in.

  “You in Vietnam?” Philip raises his right hand, like he’s ready to give Jake a high five and bond with him at another level.

  “Ah, I had a deferment,” Jake mumbles. “I was in school, you know.”

  The hand hangs in the air, turns, and then goes back down to Philip’s side, as if it’s no big deal. Hey. Brooklyn is Brooklyn.

  “Do me a favor, will you?” says Jake, changing the subject. “Let me know if you talk to anybody who saw what happened last night. I came out a little late. And my boy and his friend, I don’t know if they could pick the guy out of a lineup.”

  “I’ll give you a holler if I hear anything,” says Philip. “By the way, you need a hand replacing that glass in your door?”

  “How much do you charge?”

  “It’s on the house.” Philip lifts his shoulders and drops them. “Hey. You’re from the old neighborhood. You got any other problems?”

  “Well we may be having some trouble with our chimney. I noticed soot coming out of the fireplace the other day.”

  “That could be serious.” Philip bites his top lip and cocks his head to the left. “You oughta let me have a look at it.”

  “You do chimney work too?”

  “I do everything.”

  Jake opens his hands. “Whenever you have time.”

  “You got it, buddy.” Philip starts to walk down the steps.

  Jake picks up his broom again. The stoop is mostly clean, except for five or six fragments that glint like mica. He thinks about Vietnam and wonders how he would have done in combat. There’s always been a little stab of guilt about not going. Just as he starts to wince, Philip Cardi calls out to him from the bottom of the steps.

  “Mr. Schiff,” he says. “Think about what I told you. About having a talk with the guy. I’d go with you. Whoever he is.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Jake lifts his broom. “Whoever he is.” Though even in the dim light, Jake is almost sure he recognized John G.

  “I’m not an educated man like you are,” Philip says, “but I remember something I heard in high school. I think it was from an English philosopher. He said all that evil needs to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”

  “Okay.”

  “So don’t do nothing.”

  15

  The sergeant has hair the color of Orange Crush and a complexion like a strawberry.

  “I want to follow up on a complaint,” Jake says.

  “Yeah, yeah.” The desk sergeant, who is named Lategano, moves some papers and puts his head down, so he’s looking up at Jake from the tops of his eyes. “What’s your problem?”

  “I made a call to the precinct last night because my son and his friend got attacked. I’m still waiting to hear back from someone about investigating.”

  The sergeant rolls up his mouth in boredom as Jake goes over the details of the incident one more time.

  “So you called in a report last night?” the sergeant interrupts, drumming his fingers on a beat-up math textbook near his phone.

  “Yes, that’s what I just said.”

  “So what do you want us to do now? It’s been reported.”

  Jake feels himself starting to flush. He’s a lawyer. He ought to know his way around the system better than other people. He’s taken cops like this Lategano apart on the witness stand a thousand times. So why is the sergeant talking to him as if he’s mildly retarded?

  “I just want to see if anything is being done,” Jake says. “Talk to people in the neighborhood. Maybe somebody saw something and can help make a positive I.D.”

  The sergeant picks his left ear like he’s never heard anything so stupid in his life. With great reluctance, he writes down Jake’s criminal complaint number and picks up a telephone receiver, which suddenly seems to weigh at least seventy-five pounds.

  “Yeah, gimme eight-three-eight-nine,” he mumbles into the phone. He flicks his eyes over at Jake. “You got a minute, right?”

  He turns away without waiting for an answer.

  Jake studies the community policing charts and the robbery beat maps on the green tiled walls. Again, he’s reminded that a precinct is not a place to relax or take your station in life for granted. A bull-necked detective wearing a crewcut and a yellow polo shirt leads a young black kid in a Bart Simpson T-shirt and handcuffs through the room. The kid is looking around, a little scared and a little curious. A newcomer to the system, Jake thinks. Over the next few years, he’ll learn to swagger and lie that he likes being in jail.

  Sergeant Lategano is still muttering into the phone and letting his eyes wander over the book on his desk.

  “Yeah . . . yeah . . . Really?” He looks over at Jake with new interest. “I didn’t know that.”

  Jake finds himself sitting up straight. As if he’s going to impress this timeserver.

  “What, were you falling asleep in class? The answer’s the Pytha-gorian theorem,” the sergeant says into the phone, looking down at the math textbook. “Do your own homework from now on. Good-bye.”

  He hangs up abruptly and gives Jake a bitter look. “Night school,” he says. “So the report says this might have been one of your wife’s patients who was bothering your kid. Is that right?”

  “We think so.”

  “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it,” the sergeant says.

  “What’re you talking about? A guy comes at my son with a razor and you’re not going to do anything about it?”

  “It’s simple harrassment,” the sergeant explains. “That’s only a violation. The lowest form of criminal complaint. It’d barely be worth giving the guy a desk appearance ticket if we could find him.”

  “What about the razor?” Jake says. “That should raise it to menacing. That’s a misdemeanor.”

  “What’re you, a lawyer or something?”

  “Yeah,” says Jake reluctantly, knowing his chances of getting any cooperation have just dropped off sharply.

  “So the report we have says it was a box cutter. You ought to know th
at isn’t classified as one of the eight deadly weapons.”

  “So what? He’s still waving it around like a weapon.”

  “Did he ask your son for money?”

  “No.”

  “Did he cut him?”

  “No.”

  “So it’s not robbery and it’s not assault and battery.” The sergeant leans back with his legs crossed and his pant cuff riding up his pale white calf. Case closed. “If this were your client, Counselor, and we were talking about arresting him, you’d be squealing like a stuck pig.”

  Jake works the muscles in his jaw, knowing it’s true. “What about disorderly conduct?”

  “For what?” the sergeant asks. “Taking a leak in the street? Come on. We’d have to lock up half the Borough Command every Saturday night.”

  “You mean to tell me this guy can stand outside our home threatening our child, and you’re not going to do anything about it?”

  The look of winter crosses the sergeant’s face, even as the window fans battle the humidity of August.

  “Mr. Schiff, you’ve studied the Constitution, right?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Well, so now I’m going to Fordham at night and I’m studying it—because you gotta have a degree or an African mother in this department now—and you know what I figured out?” The sergeant rocks back and folds his hands on top of his stomach. “That the laws were made by a bunch of lawyers trying to protect their own property. And then when they stole enough property, they began feeling guilty and started granting rights to the so-called disadvantaged. Which left it to your working stiffs in the militias and the police departments to keep those mopes in their place, so they wouldn’t rise up and try to reclaim some of those lawyers’ property. So you know what I think you ought to do, Mr. Schiff? I think you oughta get together with some of your lawyer friends and some of your wife’s psychiatrist friends and put the law back the way it was. Make it less confusing for everybody.”

  “Oh for crying out loud!” Jake erupts. “I’m supposed to wait around until this guy hurts someone? Jesus. What would you do if this was happening to you?”

  “Hey.” The sergeant draws back his head and a roll of stubbly fat appears under his chin. “I live out in Rockland County. I don’t have to worry about this shit.”