by Howard Fast
I went on, steadily, explicitly, spelling out everything I had discovered, laying out what proof we had, the material that Fran had dug up in the public library and all the rest of it. When I had finished, Johnson said, “Hold on, now. Don’t hang up. Tell me where you are right now and I’ll get a couple of our men over to guard you. Your life is in danger, if one quarter of what you say is fact.”
“What else is new?” I said. “I don’t want your men.”
“They’re good men.”
“No, sir. Absolutely not.”
“Will you hang in until I put my boss on?”
“I spoke to your boss before.”
“Lieutenant, for God’s sake, we must speak to you before this goes any further. Believe me. Now hang on.”
“No. If you’re setting up a trace, well, you should have thought of that when we began.”
I put down the telephone and stared at Fran. She said nothing, and then for a minute or so we sat and watched each other.
“Well?” I had to break the silence.
“Why didn’t you let them send a couple of men over?”
“At this point, I wouldn’t trust my own mother.”
“Oh, bullshit, Harry Golding. Bullshit compounded. That’s not why you wouldn’t let them send a couple of men to stand guard.”
“You think he believed me?”
“Harry, you’re a lieutenant with a great record and you accuse a precinct commander of grand larceny and murder—they’d have to be nitwits not to believe you. Anyway, I know why you rejected the protection. You have decided to kill Porfetto when he goes to the Waldorf tomorrow to be honored, just as we honor other pigs of his ilk, which is your nutty reasoning to justify what you intend to do.”
That really threw me. She lifted it out of the air with such certainty that it took a while before I was able to assure her that she was way off base.
“Harry! God damn you, Harry Golding, I’m your wife. Every time three or four Irish kids on our block decided to beat you up, who came to your aid? Who waded in with a baseball bat? You remember when Mickey Sullivan had you down on the street on your back and he was trying to put out your eyes with his ugly fingers? Who was it shoved my pencil sharpener into his back and told him it was a gun and that I’d fill him full of holes if he didn’t get up and hold up his hands, and then when he did, you let him have it right in the solar plexus, and there he was rolled up on the sidewalk, unable to speak or move, and we pulled his pants off and threw them into the garbage truck—”
I was laughing now, doubled over and laughing so hard I couldn’t stop, and she caught the laughter from me, and then both of us were doubled over, and I managed to say, “And he wasn’t wearing underwear. The schmuck was not wearing underwear.”
“Harry, don’t ever ask me how I know what you’re thinking. It’s too easy. It’s twenty-seven years since you robbed me of my good Catholic virtue, and when I confessed it to Father Brady, he said that I had condemned myself to a long, long stay in purgatory, by which I’m sure he meant our marriage—”
“You never told him it was a Jew?”
“Never! He was by the book. He would have had me burned alive. Oh, Jesus, Harry, danger brings it all out, doesn’t it. But you have to give up this crazy notion that you can kill Porfetto.”
“You’re sure that’s what I decided?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” We had stopped laughing now. “Well, you can’t. I’ll tell you something. I don’t read thoughts. When you came back here with your cop uniform, I figured it out. You started to plan it then, and now you figure you’ve got it all worked out, and you’re going to shoot Porfetto and then they’ll shoot you, and you’ll be a dead terrorist and we’ll all be safe. If that isn’t the nuttiest thing I ever heard of, I don’t know what is.”
“All right. You have to know sooner or later. I’m going to kill Porfetto. There’s no other way to stop this. He’s beyond the law, he has the White House snowed, God knows how many government officials he has in his pocket, and he has his own private army. His home base, Santa Marina, taught the world a new form of government—government by death squad—and it’s really taking on here. There’s only one way—”
“Become a one-man death squad?”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“Well, my darling Harry, let me put it to you another way. The truth of the matter is that you couldn’t kill a fly. Oh, I admit that you’re a tough cop, but only because you are able to convince everyone that you’re so tough by never raising your voice and by taking stupid chances that a really brave cop wouldn’t take in a hundred years, but you do it because you’re so scared that you figure that unless you do something really stupid, your job is down the drain. That’s a god-awful sentence for a lecturer on English lit, but it makes the point.”
“Thank you.”
“You going to get mad at me and have another fight, Harry?”
“Not tonight. We can’t afford it tonight. But if we ever come out of this alive, I’m going to set aside three days to be so damn pissed off at you I won’t even speak to you.”
“That’s nice.”
“Now listen to me. I’ve worked this out, and it’s not complicated. When the uniform’s on, a cop is a cop. Then—”
“Wait just one minute,” Fran interrupted. “Didn’t I hear you say that Toomey is in charge of a four-man uniformed detail that will escort Porfetto into the hotel?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Okay. Go on—tell me.”
“I have dark hair. We strip it with peroxide and make me a blond. Blond mustache to go with it. Cars go into the Waldorf on Fiftieth Street. There’s about thirty feet between where Porfetto leaves his car and the VIP elevators. Several steps up. Somewhere in that space, I’ll get a shot or two in. I’m the best shot at the house.”
“Harry, in seventeen years as a cop, until the past few days, you never fired a gun on the street, you never killed anyone, you never even wounded anyone. And now you tell me that you’re going to go up against that little army around Porfetto and get him. And Toomey won’t know you because your hair is blond. Harry, that’s crazy.”
“Sounds crazy, but it can be done.”
“No.”
“It has to be done.”
“No. No, no, no!”
“I’d think that after all these years, you’d have some faith in what I can and can’t do.”
“That’s just it. You can’t kill a man in cold blood, Harry, no more than I could. That’s for animals. We’re not animals.”
“No. Animals don’t murder their own kind. We’re something God spun off in a moment of great disgust.”
“Harry, that’s a terrible thing to say.”
“Is it? We get crazy over these death squads, but it’s all peanuts compared to the fifty million people who died in World War Two. Who taught these penny-ante, shithead dictators south of the border their trade? We send advisers down there to train them. We pour money into them. And then we tell everyone that they’re becoming more democratic day by day.”
“Harry, if you go on like that, you’ll make yourself sick. We’re both suffering from a kind of cabin fever, and if this keeps up we’ll be at each other’s throats. Now, listen to me. I wasn’t joking before. I made a decision, and it’s best for both of us. I’m going to Ireland. Either I’ll be with my children or near them, or I might as well be dead. I don’t care anymore. Someone has to tell Sean the whole story, and if this bastard Porfetto owns half of this country, he doesn’t own Ireland yet. And in Dublin, we can still have the upper hand. We have friends and family there and we have good connections with the police. Sean and the others are running about like chickens with their heads cut off, when they should be on the attack. And as for you—Harry, don’t you think I know what a weight I am? I’m the albatross around your neck—and even if what I said about your compassion is true, you’re still one of the most brilliant cops on the force. You don’t have to kill Porfetto. There are othe
r ways.”
“Fran, I can’t let you take off by yourself.”
“We’re a team of two, only two. What else can we do? Suppose the kids were in Israel. Wouldn’t you feel that they’d be safe if you were with them?”
What Fran didn’t realize, with all of her perception, was that from the moment I raised the question again, I was in agreement with her. I wanted her out of the way and out of the country, because whatever her arguments were against my trying to kill Porfetto, I rejected them. I intended to kill Porfetto the following night, and nothing would stop me.
I let Bill Hoffman know about Fran’s trip. He cashed another check for me, and our credit card would buy the ticket. I still put up a small measure of resistance, but finally gave in. I asked Bill to trust me, as difficult as it was becoming, and he simply said, “Some debts can be paid. Ours can’t.”
We packed a small suitcase for Fran, and then I drove her to the airport. I had the feeling that my life was at an end, that all we had built and planned and dreamed of was gone, collapsed and left in ashes. Perhaps Fran felt the same way, but as I held her in my arms there at Kennedy, she said, “I trust you, Harry. Make them believe you downtown. It’s the only way.”
The hotel room was cold and empty. I had never felt so much alone in all my life. I turned on the eleven o’clock news, and there was the station house, Toomey just entering and Lieutenant Harry Golding a few feet behind him, and the video reporter, who of course knew all about everything, saying that the good lieutenant had been suspended.
“This is the same Lieutenant Golding who, you will remember, made that life-is-stranger-than-fiction discovery of the stolen painting by Jan Vermeer.” The video reporter did not mean to suggest that the ghost of Vermeer had returned to steal the painting; it was merely his struggle for clarity that led him into a word morass. But he straightened things out and indicated that the suspension was not unconnected to the mystery of the stolen Vermeer. He tried then to get some words out of Keene, who came out of the station house, but Keene looked at him so coldly and disdainfully that the TV man backed off.
To hell with it, I thought. I turned off the TV and undressed for bed. It was about five o’clock in the morning in Dublin. I said a small prayer asking forgiveness from whoever it is that can give forgiveness for what I intended to do tomorrow.
Chapter 15
THAT NIGHT I slept little and poorly, perhaps two hours out of the whole night, but I dozed now and then, and out of many dreams, there was one I remembered. It was a latter-day reference to an incident that took place years before, when both kids were quite small. We had driven out west to do my three weeks of vacation time fitted into Fran’s open summer. College teachers have it better than cops, three months off. During the trip, we saw a good many wonderful sights in such places as Utah and Colorado and Arizona, and then we made a quick dash home. We were in Indianapolis, and I had to go to work the following morning, so I drove until the sun set and then I drove all through the night. Fran and the children slept, and I was trapped in that strange unreal world of nighttime highways. After midnight, the traffic fell off sharply, and by two in the morning, except for a very occasional car, I had the roads to myself. The whole world was bracketed in my headlights, an endless empty road that unfolded before me, mile after mile after mile. There was no other sound than the rush of the car and the breathing of my family. Even the towns we passed through were dark and unpopulated, but for the most part the great highway circled the towns. The world had gone away. The world had ceased to be, and all that was left was the tunnel of light my headlights drove into the darkness.
So in the dream, I had made up my mind to do a thing, and thereby, I had plunged into the darkness, without headlights, without a car around me, but naked into the eternal night.
At five o’clock in the morning, I awakened from this dream, trembling. We had stopped being excessively careful about our calls to Dublin. They knew about Dublin. They knew where the kids had been. So I put the call through the night operator at the Primrose Hotel, but it was almost two hours before the overseas operator could get through to the Dublin number, and during that time, I sat with the bedclothes drawn around me, cold and shivering with fear, and stoking the fear with all the grotesque images my mind could muster. When we got through, Sean’s wife, Mary, answered, and when I asked desperately whether Fran had gotten there safely, Mary said, “Ah, yes, poor dear.”
“Let me talk to her, please, Mary.”
“Would you want to awaken her, Harry? It’s never a wink of sleep the poor dear had on that airplane.”
“But she’s all right.”
“Oh, of course. But why did you let her come here? This is a place of danger for her. The school has closed up to let the lads get home for Easter, and the men are gone, and don’t ask me where.”
“Just the two of you—in that great place?”
“And a few kids who have no place to go, with their parents off to the four corners of the earth. But our doors are stout and we have a policeman or two lurking about. We’ll make out. Never you fear, Harry. We’re all safe. Only, this must stop.”
“Today, it will stop,” I told her. “And for Fran, I’m fine and I’ll do nothing foolish. Tell her that.”
I shaved and then I took a cold shower. Then I put on my police uniform, and I felt ridiculous. It was no good. I was not a policeman anymore, and the only thing on that uniform that maintained its validity was my medal for marksmanship. Out of a match that involved all of the midtown precincts as well as Manhattan South, I had finished first. Long ago, when Fran and I had just married, we had borrowed an old Ford and had driven up old Route 9W, and then inland on the barely paved roads of Greene County. On a dirt road there, we came across a group of state troopers who had set up targets and were practicing with their pistols. It was a lovely day, and we stopped there for a while and got out of the car to watch. I suppose no healthy young man could have been around Francesca with her flaming head of red hair and her skin like a butterfly’s wing without making a pass of some kind. In this case, the troopers gave us a drink of soft cider, and then one of them suggested that Fran try her hand at the target. She refused so winsomely that they had to include me in the invitation and one of them thrust his huge, heavy .45-caliber revolver into my hand. At that point in my life, I had never fired a revolver or any other kind of gun before. He showed me how to cock it, and I raised the heavy gun with no thought of holding it in two hands or trying to really aim it, and I pulled the trigger and hit the bull’s-eye on the target, which was sixty feet away. The hole in the black bull’s-eye was alone. No one else had hit the bull’s-eye, although there were a good many shots in the second and third ring. The troopers were certain it was a mistake, and they urged me to do it again, and I was kind of nettled and put off by their doubts, when they could have just clapped their hands and said, “Good shot, kid,” or something of the sort. I didn’t care whether I hit the target, or maybe I knew that if I tried, I’d hit nothing, probably not even the target; so I didn’t try, just looked at the target and then raised the gun and fired. Bull’s-eye again, twice in a row, and if you ever tried to hit anything, even the side of a barn, with a large-caliber revolver, you know what I mean. They wanted me to keep it up, but Fran pulled me out of it, whispering, “Harry, let’s get out of here. I don’t like it.”
She sensed that they were hostile, angry because a kid did something none of them could do, and she was afraid it would grow into something worse than these state cops saying that I was a vaudeville performer or some other kind of phony stage shooter. But that didn’t explain to me how or why I was able to do what I did, and this was a gift that had stayed with me. At pistol practice and in competition, I went through the forms and motions, the formal stance, the slight crouch, the two-hand hold—but all of that was to keep the others from regarding me as some kind of freak. I have since read of others who had that particular nasty gift, certain characters in the old West and some others too, and as
I said, it was the only part of my uniform that I felt was valid.
The uniform was not. I was no worshiper of uniforms, but the men who wore that cumbersome blue uniform had stood on the edge of civilization for a long time now, and if some of them were not very nice people, I had often wondered what this city would be without them. The cops don’t fashion the system and the cops don’t make criminals. The system makes the criminal, and then the cop is called in to put his life on the line, and if some of them are on the pad, it’s just amazing how few they are.
So after I had studied myself in the uniform and taken appropriate satisfaction in the fact that it had never been let out and still fit, even though a bit tight around the belly, I took it off and hung it back in the closet. My gray suit would do, and if I came out of it alive and not busted as a murderer, I would prefer that the job be laid on a civilian, not a cop—the job being the assassination of Alfred Gomez Porfetto. I knew all of the arguments against this kind of thing, because I had lived a long time with those arguments. I hate terrorism and I despise assassins. I once wrote a letter to the Times about the possibility of a New York police force without guns, but I didn’t have enough courage to sign the letter with my own name because I was afraid the men I work with would have eaten me alive. I guess that’s why the Times didn’t print it. And now I was working out in my mind the assassination of Porfetto.
Well, circumstances change, as I would tell my wife. It was no longer a question of why with me. It was something I had to do, and even the working out of the coming event was not so complex that I had to brood about it.
