the New Centurions (1971)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  "That's a screwed-up syllogism," said Serge. "But you can't blame the ignorant bastards. They've seen a thousand movies that prove you can wing a guy or shoot a gun out of his hands. What the hell, you can't blame them."

  "Just a pile of plankton dumped in a sea of concrete, eh, Gus?" said Roy.

  "I guess I don't really regret the job," said Gus. "I guess I think I know something that most people don't."

  "All we can do is try to protect ourselves," said Roy. "We sure as hell can't change them."

  "And we can't save them," said Gus. "Nor ourselves. Poor bastards."

  "Hey, this conversation is getting too damned depressing," said Roy suddenly. "The riot's over. Better days are coming. We're having a swimming party tomorrow. Let's cheer up."

  "Okay, let's try to catch a crook," said Serge. "A good felony pinch always lifts my spirits. You used to work this area, didn't you Gus?"

  "Sure," said Gus, straightening up and smiling. "Drive west toward Crenshaw. I know where there's some drop-off spots for hot rollers. Maybe we can pick up a car thief."

  Roy was the first to see the woman waving to them from the car parked near the phone booth on Rodeo Road.

  "I think we got a citizen's call," said Roy.

  "That's okay, I was getting tired driving around anyway," said Serge. "Maybe she has an insurmountable problem we can surmount."

  "It got dark fast tonight," Gus observed. "A couple of minutes ago I was enjoying the sunset and now, bang, it's dark."

  Serge parked beside the woman who squirmed out of the Volkswagen awkwardly and shuffled over to their car in her bedroom slippers and bathrobe which fought to conceal her expansive largeness.

  "I was just going to the phone booth to call the cops," she puffed, and before he was out of the car Roy smelled the alcoholic breath and examined the red face and weedy dyed red hair.

  "What's the problem, ma'am?" said Gus.

  "My old man is nuts. He's been drinking and not going to work lately and not supporting me and my kids and beating hell out of me whenever he feels like it and tonight he's completely nuts and he kicked me right in the side. The bastard. I think he broke a rib." The woman writhed inside the bathrobe and touched her ribs.

  "You live far from here?" asked Serge.

  "Just down the street on Coliseum," said the woman. "How about coming home and throwing him out for me?"

  "He your legal husband?" asked Serge.

  "Yeah, but he's nuts."

  "Okay, we'll follow you home and have a talk with him."

  "You can't talk to him," the woman insisted, getting back inside the Volkswagen. "The bastard's crazy tonight."

  "Okay, we'll follow you home," said Roy.

  "Breaks the monotony, anyway," said Gus, as they drove behind the little car and Roy put the shotgun down on the floor in the back and wondered if they should lock it in the front when they went in the woman's residence or would it be alright here on the floor if the car doors were locked. He decided to leave it on the floor.

  "Is this neighborhood mostly white?" asked Serge to Gus.

  "It's mixed," said Gus. "It's mixed clear out to La Cienega and up into Hollywood."

  "If this town has a ghetto it's the biggest goddamn ghetto in the world," said Serge. "Some ghetto. Look up there in Baldwin Hills."

  "Fancy pads," said Gus. "That's a mixed neighborhood too."

  "I think the broad in the VW is the best pinch we'll see tonight," said Roy. "She almost creamed that Ford when she turned."

  "She's loaded," said Serge. "Tell you what, if she smashes into somebody we'll just take off like we don't know her. I figured she was too drunk to drive when she waddled out of that car and lit my cigarette with her breath."

  "Must be that apartment house," said Gus, flashing the spotlight on the number over the door as Serge pulled in behind the Volkswagen which she parked four feet from the curb.

  "Three-Z-Ninety-one, citizen's call, forty-one twenty-three, Coliseum Drive," said Gus into the mike.

  "Don't forget to lock your door," said Roy. "I left the shotgun on the floor."

  "I'm not going in," said the woman. "I'm afraid of him. He said he'd kill me if I called the cops on him."

  "Your kids in there?" asked Serge.

  "No," she breathed. "They ran next door when we started fighting. I guess I should tell you there's a gun in there and he's nuts as hell tonight."

  "Where's the gun?" asked Gus.

  "Bedroom closet," said the woman. "When you take him you can take that too."

  "We don't know if we're taking anybody yet," said Roy. "We're going to talk to him first."

  Serge started up the steps first as she said, "Number twelve. We live in number twelve."

  They passed through a landscaped archway and into a court surrounded by apartments. There was a calm lighted swimming pool to their left and a sun deck with Ping-Pong tables to the right. Roy was surprised at the size of the apartment building after passing through the deceiving archway.

  "Very nice," said Gus, obviously admiring the swimming pool.

  "Twelve must be this way," said Roy, walking toward the tile staircase surrounded by face-high ferns. Roy thought he could still smell the woman's alcoholic breath when a frail chalky man in a damp undershirt stepped from behind a dwarfed twisted tree and lunged toward Roy who turned on the stairway. The man pointed the cheap .22 revolver at Roy's stomach and fired once and as Roy sat down on the stairway in amazement the sounds of shouts and gunfire and a deathless scream echoed through the vast patio. Then Roy realized he was lying at the foot of the staircase alone and it was quiet for a moment. Then he was aware that it was his stomach.

  "Oh, not there," said Roy and he clamped his teeth on his tongue and fought the burst of hysteria. The shock. It can kill. The shock!

  Then he pulled the shirt open and unbuckled the Sam Browne and looked at the tiny bubbling cavity in the pit of his stomach. He knew he could not survive another one. Not there. Not in the guts. He had no guts left!

  Roy unclamped his teeth and had to swallow many times because of the blood from his ripped tongue. It didn't hurt so much this time, he thought, and he was astonished at his lucidity. He saw that Serge and Gus were kneeling beside him, ashen-faced. Serge crossed himself and kissed his thumbnail.

  It was _much__ easier this time. By God, it was! The pain was diminishing and an insidious warmth crept over him. But no, it was all wrong. It shouldn't happen now. Then he panicked as he realized that it shouldn't happen now because he was starting to know. Oh, please, not now, he thought. I'm starting to know.

  "Know, know," said Roy. "Know, know, know, know." His voice sounded to him hollow and rhythmic like the tolling of a bell. And then he could no longer speak.

  _"Santa Maria,"__ said Serge taking his hand. _"Santa Maria...__ where's the goddamn ambulance? _Ay, Dios mio...__ Gus, he's cold. _Sobale las manos..."__

  Then Roy heard Gus sob, "He's gone, Serge. Poor Roy, poor poor man. He's gone."

  Then Roy heard Serge say, "We should cover him. Did you hear him? He was saying no to death. No, no, no, he said. _Santa Maria!__"

  I am not dead, Roy thought. It is monstrous to say I am dead. And then he saw Becky walking primly through a grassy field and she looked so grown up he said Rebecca when he called her name and she came smiling to her father, the sun glistening off her hair, more golden than his had ever been.

  _"Dios te salve Maria, llena de gracia, el Senor es contigo..."__ said Serge.

  "I'll cover him. I'll get a blanket from somebody," said Gus. "Please, somebody, give me a blanket."

  Now Roy released himself to the billowy white sheets of darkness and the last thing he ever heard was Sergio Duran saying, _"Santa Maria__," again and again.

  The End

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joseph Wambaugh, a former LAPD detective sergeant, is the _New York Times__ bestselling author of sixteen prior works of fiction and nonfiction, many of which have been adapted for the big and small screen, i
ncluding _The Onion Field__ and _The Choirboys__. He is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and lives in Southern California.

  WHOEVER FIGHTS MONSTERS

  AN APPRECIATION OF JOSEPH WAMBAUGH

  THERE IS A BEDROCK TRUTH that resides in the heart of this book. And that is that the best crime stories are not about how cops work on cases. They are about how cases work on cops. They are not about how the cops work the streets. They are about how the streets work the cops. Procedure is window dressing. Character is king.

  This is a truth we learn when we read the work of Joseph Wambaugh. No assessment of this novel or the other work of this policeman turned writer can conclude that he is anything other than one of the great innovators of the crime novel. Wambaugh brought the truth with him when he left the police department for the publishing house.

  A century after its first inception the crime novel had moved from the hands of Edgar Allan Poe to the practitioners of the private eye novel. More often than not, these tomes told the story of the loner detective who works outside of the system he distrusts and even despises, who must overcome obstacles that often happen to be the corrupted police themselves. It fell to Wambaugh, with his stark and gritty realism, to take the story inside the system to the police station and the patrol car where it truly belonged. To tell the stories of the men who did the real work and risked their lives and their sanity to do it. And to explore a different kind of corruption--the premature cynicism and tarnished nobility of the cop who has looked too often and too long into humanity's dark abyss.

  Wambaugh used the crime novel and the lives of his character cops as the lens with which he examined society. Within the ranks of his police officers he explored the great socio-economic divide of our cities, racism, alcoholism and many other facets of the rapidly changing world. He used cops to make sense of the chaos. And he did it by simply telling their stories. The episodic narrative of this book and those that followed became his signature. And along the way he gave us looks into the lives of characters like Serge Duran, Roy Fehler, and Bumper Morgan, full blooded and flawed, and placed them on the sunswept streets of Los Angeles. His first two books, _The New Centurions__ and _The Blue Knight,__ are perfect bookends that offer the full scope of police life and Wambaugh's power. The former traced three officers through the police academy and their early years on the job. The latter traced a veteran officer's last three days on the job. No one had ever read books like these before. They were the mark of a true innovator.

  It is important to note that Wambaugh wrote his first books while still on the job. The detective sergeant did the real work by day while pounding out the made-up stuff at night on a portable Royal typewriter. His family had to sleep through the clatter. The results were uncontested as some of the most vivid police prose ever put on paper. Wambaugh opened up a world to the reader, a world no one outside of those who did the real work had ever seen before. Cop novelist Evan Hunter called it right on the money in the _New York Times__ when he said, "Mr. Wambaugh is, in fact, a writer of genuine power, style, wit, and originality who has chosen to write about police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general."

  A hundred years ago the philosopher Friedrich Nietz-sche warned us that whoever fights monsters should take care not to become a monster himself. He reminded us that when we stare into the abyss that the abyss stares right back into us. So then these are the poles that hold up the Wambaugh tent. These are the battle lines that every cop faces and Wambaugh so intimately delineates in this book and others. He writes about how cops shield themselves, medicate themselves, and distract themselves from the view of the abyss. Think of it in terms of a physics lesson. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So then if you go into darkness then darkness goes into you. The question is how much darkness has gotten inside and what can be done about it. How can you pull yourself back from the edge of the abyss. In this book, and all of his books, Joseph Wambaugh tells us the answers.

  --Michael Connelly