Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  I get up and walk over to him. For a minute, I just stand above him without saying anything. The drumming starts to die down a little. “You’re annoying me,” I say.

  The drumming stops completely and the leader kid just looks at me, with his mouth hanging open a little. “Oh shit,” one of his friends says. “My man Burn-hard Goetz.”

  They all laugh nervously as I go back to sit down, and when the train starts moving again, they all move on to another car.

  I sit there simmering the rest of the way. It’s a free country, I think, as the train grinds to a halt at 125th Street and a fat guy with a steel drum gets on. People like Charlie and Maria are grown-ups and they can do what they want, and deal with the consequences. I just don’t know why they have to do it on my watch.

  I start going over my list of clients in my mind to see which of them deserves to get their ass kicked. The steel drum guy begins to play a calypso version of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Right now, I feel like kicking his ass. Instead, I just glare at him until he moves on to the next car. The one name that keeps coming back to me is Richard Silver. Thinking about him makes me almost as anxious and uncomfortable as thinking about Darryl. Probably because—besides Darryl—he’s the client who’s most actively tried to undermine me and make me think twice about what I’m doing with my life.

  I’d like to give him something to think about, but I’m not sure what pretext to use. That stuff his wife told me about money laundering sounded a little nuts, but I’m sure he’s been up to something else. Then I remember he still hasn’t done his community service requirement, which is as good an excuse as any to go over and bother him at his office.

  The train pulls into the Columbus Circle station; I get off and walk a couple of blocks to his building on Seventh Avenue. Richard Silver Associates is on the thirty-eighth floor, so I take the elevator up, flash my badge at his puffy, blond secretary, and tell her to hold all his calls.

  The secretary, who’s in her thirties and wears enough hair spray and makeup for a heavy metal band and their road crew, buzzes him in his office while I stare at the white antiseptic walls and the postmodern furniture.

  Silver comes tearing out thirty seconds later. But when he sees it’s me, his face drops a little.

  “Oh shit, I thought this was somebody important,” he tells the secretary with some disappointment in his voice. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “This is important,” I say, walking around him and going right into his office.

  It’s both more and less opulent than I expected. He certainly has enough space—you could probably fit a helicopter in the room. The southern view goes on for miles and miles. In the distance you can see the World Trade Center’s twin towers shimmering like a pair of switchblades in the sunlight. But he hardly has anything in the office, except a plain brown horseshoe-shaped desk, one big leather chair behind it, and two small leather-and-wood chairs in front of it. It’s not so much cheap as incredibly severe-looking. Sort of like Survivalist Chic. There are only three pictures on the wall and just two books on the shelf behind him, the telephone directory and The Power Broker, the biography of Robert Moses, the builder who I always thought personally mutilated New York City.

  I’d say Richard Silver either just moved in or he has a very odd sense of self-esteem. With the rent he’s paying, he can certainly afford more elaborate decorations. And then I look at the ceiling over his desk and see he’s got a gold mirror up there, so he can look up and see himself. Why he’d want to do such a thing regularly, I couldn’t say.

  “So I guess I was just reading about your department,” he says, seizing the offensive as he strolls back behind his desk. “How you’ve got an open-door policy for hoodlums. Right?”

  He holds up his hands in mock sympathy and then gives me that long, silent look where you can’t tell if his eyebrow is raised or not. I guess this is supposed to put me on the defensive, but I’m too pissed for that today.

  “Speaking of fuckups,” I say evenly. “I understand you still haven’t been doing your community service …”

  “Ooooo, that’s bad, huh?” He sways playfully back and forth in his chair. “I haven’t been brushing between meals either.”

  “I’m glad you think this is such a joke …”

  “Well, really. I mean, did you come all the way up here just to bother me about this? Instead of going out and looking for these hoodlums you put out on the street. You could’ve called my lawyer. Or the other guy who’s supposed to be my probation officer should call my lawyer.”

  This last part seems to stop him. “Hey, that’s right,” he says, reaching for the phone and putting his feet up on the desk, so they’re right in my face. “You aren’t even my probation officer anymore. What the hell are you doing here anyway?”

  The way he says that makes me grind my teeth. I decide to taunt him back. “You know I saw your wife the other day.”

  “Oh yeah?” he says, feigning indifference while he looks at the phone and dials. “Did you fuck her or anything?”

  “No, I just talked to her about this Goldman Resources.”

  I fully expect him to ignore me or make another wisecrack, but instead he puts the phone down and gives me his full attention. Only a muscle or two in his face have changed, but he looks gravely serious now.

  “She told you that, huh?”

  I glance up at the mirror above his desk and notice for the first time that he’s got a little bald spot spreading across the back of his scalp. “She told me all about it,” I say.

  He closes his eyes and takes a breath. This is the last thing that I expected. I never for a second took what his ex-wife said seriously. But he seems genuinely stunned. It’s like we were just sparring and I accidentally hit him with a knockout punch.

  He presses a button on the phone and tells his secretary to hold his calls for a half hour. Then he points to one of the pictures on the wall.

  “You know who that is?” he begins.

  The picture shows a slightly younger, skinnier Richard Silver in a purple La Coste shirt with his arm around an older man who has a big nose and skin the texture of a deflated balloon’s. They seem to be standing on the deck of a yacht.

  “That’s Jimmy Rose,” I say. “He was your partner, right?”

  “That’s right. I met Jimmy years ago when he was leading the opposition to a housing project a number of us in the council wanted to put in Brooklyn. Probably before your time.”

  “I remember it, though,” I tell him. “Sullivan Houses. It would’ve brought a lot of blacks and Hispanics into the area …”

  “‘Low-income families’ is what it said in the bill.” He leans forward on his elbow.

  “Whatever.”

  “I’m glad you remember it, though. I thought it was an important project. So did Jimmy. He said supporting it would kill me. Politically speaking, of course … So you know what I did?”

  “You chickened out,” I say.

  “I learned the value of compromise. I saw the opportunity to do great things with Jimmy. So I sacrificed a little bit of the present for the sake of the future.”

  I should be moving, but he’s got that smooth seductive sound going in his voice again. He gestures for me to have a seat.

  “Now, Steven,” he begins calmly. “Do you remember the little talk we had before about the importance of having resources?”

  “Sure.” To my horror, I’m beginning to see a little bit of the sense behind what he’s been saying all along, but I’m not ready to agree to anything.

  “Well, Steven,” he says, “I’d like to talk to you a little bit more about that right now.”

  54

  THE DODGERS’ PITCHER THREW a curveball and Darryl Strawberry hit it foul down the first base line at Shea Stadium. The ball bounced once in the dirt and went into the stands just missing Richard Silver and his son, Leonard, in the first row.

  “You should’ve caught it, Dad,” Leonard said.

&nbs
p; “You catch it next time,” Richard Silver grumbled.

  The Mets were losing 2–1 in the ninth inning and there were men on second and third with one man out. Most of the Monday night crowd was still there and a mild breeze was blowing out toward right field.

  “You know your mother is causing me a lot of problems,” Richard Silver told his son.

  “Watch the game,” Leonard said.

  “You watch the game.”

  Valenzuela, the Dodger pitcher, threw a fastball that came in a little bit below the letters on Strawberry’s shirt. But the umpire said it was inside, bringing the count to two balls and two strikes. The pitcher shook his head in disgust and Scioscia the catcher came out to the mound for a conference.

  “What does she think she’s trying to do to me?” Richard Silver said, turning in his seat and taking a bite of his son’s hot dog.

  “I don’t know.” His son didn’t look at him but kept his eyes on Strawberry taking swings just outside the batter’s box.

  “You know I may end up in a lot of trouble because of something she told someone.” Richard Silver stared at his son for a long time, but the boy didn’t respond. “Do you think that’s right?”

  “I don’t know,” his son said as Strawberry stepped back in the box and the catcher went back behind the plate. “Watch the game.”

  Strawberry hits the next one foul down the third base line and it ricochets off the concrete steps a dozen seats to the left of us.

  “These are great seats,” Andrea says. “Who gave them to you?”

  “Just a guy,” I say. “Nobody you know.”

  She doesn’t need to know anything else about it. I put the cheese spread from Balducci’s back into the picnic basket she prepared.

  “Did your folks used to take you here when you were a kid?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “I thought this was just around the corner from where you grew up.”

  “No, I was born on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx,” I explain. “My parents used to take me to a place called Freedomland when I was a kid.”

  “What was that?” she asks, reaching into the basket to put some cheese on a cracker.

  “It was like the Disneyland of the Bronx, you know.” It’s a strain to remember what it looked like now. “I guess it wasn’t anything special, but what did I know? I was like this really unhappy little kid and I had the time of my life at Freedomland; I remember all these little white kids running around with all these little black and Puerto Rican kids. We all took the bus home and sang songs together. Kinda like City College but better.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “It’s the best memory I had growing up. In fact, I used to have this picture in my head of New York City being like Freedomland, with all these different kinds of people mixing and getting along.”

  I feel funny saying this after talking to Charlie and Maria earlier today. I’m not so sure about the melting pot now. I can’t even bring myself to tell Andrea what’s been going on with me, because I’m still struggling to work out what it all means. All I know now is that I don’t want to give in to these bad thoughts I’ve been having.

  “So what happened to Freedomland?” Andrea asks as a jet passes overhead.

  “I think it went bankrupt,” I tell her, “so they tore it down and put up Co-op City, the big middle-income housing complex. And all these Jewish people, like my parents, abandoned the Grand Concourse, which was like this really nice strip where they’d been living, and moved to Co-op City. Which left the Grand Concourse to these poor blacks and Puerto Ricans, who couldn’t do anything with it, so they burned it down along with the rest of the South Bronx. And eventually the old Jews like my parents left the Bronx altogether. They ran away.”

  “You sound like you’re ashamed of them,” she says.

  I turn back to the game. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  Strawberry took a good swing at the next pitch, driving it high and deep down the right field line. The crowd stood and roared. The right fielder looked up. But at the last moment, the breeze pushed the ball into the foul territory in the upper deck, twenty rows away from where Detective Sergeant Bob McCullough was sitting with his family.

  “Here’s the best story I ever heard about a guy who lost his own gun,” said his father, Captain Willie, sipping a Budweiser. “Johnny Riordan, used to be a sergeant at Midtown South, goes over to Fitzpatrick’s on Tenth Avenue and gets absolutely stewed.”

  “Christ, but Johnny could do it too,” said his daughter, Detective Katie McCullough, who had dark hair and very fair skin.

  Bob McCullough tried to ignore the two of them and watch the game. But a sudden gust of wind blew up a little dust storm around the pitcher’s mound and they had to take a break on the field. Captain Willie, a gray-haired bear of a man in his sixties, kept going with his story about Johnny Riordan.

  “Anyway,” he said with a belch. “Drunk as he is, Johnny manages to make it home. But when he wakes up in the morning, he can’t for the life of him remember where he put his gun. He looks everywhere, but he can’t find it. And his commander at the time was Hicks, so he knew there’d be hell to pay if they found out.”

  “Oh sure,” said Detective Katie, slapping her knee.

  Bob McCullough, whose father called him “Little Bob,” nodded along as though he were amused instead of miserable. He hated it when the two of them traded war stories like this. And to top it off, his left leg still hurt where the bullet grazed him on the night of the shoot-out.

  “So then Johnny comes up with a plan to save his own ass,” Captain Willie said. “He goes over to the piers on the west side, finds a bum sleeping there, and throws him right in the drink.”

  “He doesn’t!” said Detective Katie, with a shocked, delighted look.

  “He does,” said Captain Willie. “And then Johnny jumps right in after him and saves him from drowning. And in the next day’s papers, it’s HERO COP SAVES BUM for a headline. So nobody minded it when Johnny said he’d lost his gun in the rescue.”

  Captain Willie and Detective Katie threw their heads back and roared. Bob McCullough smiled weakly at them. His father clapped him on the shoulder.

  “So you see, you needn’t feel so bad about losing your gun to that nigger,” his father told him with a chuckle.

  “Thanks, Dad,” Bob McCullough said as the Dodger pitcher finally began his next windup. “That means a lot.”

  Watching the game on television from the apartment in the Fortress, Darryl King sank down in his chair and put his face on the palm of his hand.

  “Damn,” he said, watching Strawberry. “How come they only got ’bout two niggers on this team?”

  Strawberry wiggles his butt and waves his bat around. Andrea laughs and points. “That’s so cute,” she says, tugging on the binoculars I have around my neck. “I gotta see this.”

  I give her the glasses. “So you’re having a good time now, right?”

  “Of course.” She squeezes my arm and looks through the binoculars.

  “You like this,” I say, pointing at the seats and the picnic basket. “You like these nice things in life that cost a lot of money.”

  She lowers the field glasses and gives me that mildly perturbed look. “Steven,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “I wasn’t saying there was.”

  Strawberry steps out of the box one last time and gives the third base coach a long look.

  “Why’s he doing that?” Andrea asks me.

  “So that the other team will think the Mets have a play on,” I say. “Like a suicide squeeze, you know, a bunt for the runner to come home from third. But never mind. They’re not going to do that anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s Darryl Strawberry up there,” I say, pointing. “They pay him to go up there and hit the ball out of the park.”

  The Dodger pitcher throws a high fastball and Strawberry smashes it toward the gap between the shortstop and
third base. The crowd starts to yowl. But the shortstop scoops up the ball, looks the runner back to third base, and throws Strawberry out at first by a half step.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Richard Silver said, rising out of his seat.

  “There’s one more out to go,” said his son, Leonard, trying to get the hot dog remains out of his braces.

  “They already blew their chance,” Richard Silver told him, as he moved toward the aisle. “When an opportunity comes to you in life, you have to take it, otherwise it’s gone forever. I was just saying that to somebody recently.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.” Silver pushed the blue Mets cap down over his son’s eyes.

  Leonard wasn’t budging from his seat. “We can’t go now, Dad. Kevin McReynolds is up.”

  Richard Silver looked down the line as the stocky left fielder settled into the batter’s box. “He’s a bum.”

  “He’s my favorite player, Dad.”

  McReynolds swung at the first pitch and popped it up behind home plate. The ball was a white dot against the black nighttime sky. Scioscia the Dodgers’ catcher threw off his mask and caught it easily, ending the game.

  “Better find another favorite player,” Richard Silver said, prodding his son to start moving toward the exits. “By the way, is your mother seeing anybody now?”

  55

  DARRYL KING WAS LOOKING at his own reflection in the windowpane that night as he talked on the phone to his girlfriend, Alisha Watkins.

  “I hate bagging up,” said Alisha, who was small-boned, seventeen, and the mother of Darryl’s two children. “I hate working. You know what I mean?”

  “You hate working,” Darryl King said on his end of the line. “You mean what you’re doing now?”

  “Yeah, I’m getting all drowsy from the fumes.”

  Darryl looked at the windowpane from a different angle and saw the reflection of his mother and his sister talking at the dining room table behind him. Women were always excluding him from the big plans now.