The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  Something you learn in the detective game: Everything deadly turns funny eventually. One evening Liz Smith was doing her TV gossip column. She deadpanned: “We’ve just learned that Claus von Bülow was a ring bearer in Hermann Göring’s wedding. I know it’s boring,” she said, “but we get so few social notes from the Third Reich these days.”

  THE LONELINESS OF the private eye is not the same as God’s. One may only guess whether or not God is lonely in his uniqueness. He may be so removed from the concept that he has no idea (does God have ideas?) what loneliness means, or what companionship means, for that matter, or the love or contempt of others. But the private eye, whose distinction of privacy applies equally to his clients and his nature, he does know loneliness. Earlier in his life, he has been with others—a wife, friends, the police force itself—and, for one reason or another, he now finds himself alone. And he discovers that he prefers to be alone, for only in aloneness can he pursue and judge purely. He is not godlike in this, after all. He is the god who interferes.

  Read Sam Spade’s speech at the end of The Maltese Falcon, when he tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy that she is “going over” for shooting Miles Archer, Sam’s partner. Brigid cannot believe that Sam means it. She loves him and he loves her, she says. Be that as it may, Sam tells her, the practical truth is that if he protects her she will have something to hold over him for the rest of their lives, and one day, if she fears he might betray her, she might shoot him, too. But that is not the main reason for turning her in. When a man’s partner is killed, he says, he has to do something about it. There’s a code about such things. So over goes Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

  And here, you see, is where Sam’s loneliness comes in. Had he not been a solitary man making that decision, who knows what he would have done with his loving, lovely murderess? He might have consulted an outsider, who might have advised him to choose love over honor. It’s been done. He might have paid attention to an outside world that often does value love over honor. He might have wanted to fit into a larger society where questions of love and honor are easily and intentionally confused. But Sam Spade was all by himself, which is the only place for the straight shooter.

  SIGNS OF PROGRESS, I suppose—all these shiny new apartment buildings in the East Twenties and Thirties. The entrances look like Egyptian tombs, each building rising like a rocket thirty stories and more, and flipping the sky the bird. They stand in place of the vacant lots we played in as kids, and of the vacant tenements with the plywood eyes. And nostalgie de la boue is silly, though I cannot help but wonder where all the poor people went during this spectacular urban redevelopment. The rich stay rich, and the homeless constitute a sect of their own. But the poor, the simple poor, used to have a place around here as well. Even Gramercy Park had its share, in the days of genteel poverty and elbow patches and rehemmed dresses. Everything we see in the world stirs something in us. Don’t you think so, pal? I am moved by the shiny new buildings as I once was moved by the pitch of a tar roof. I am moved by the young women successes caressing their iPhones, as I was moved by their grandmothers leaning out the windows, with their deflated breasts on the rotted sills, and shrieking for their dogs to come home. The trees remain as they were, I think. Many of the same trees. I am moved by them as well, and by their branches, which now tilt downward.

  A pigeon commands my attention. Yet I am not zeroing in on it, because that would require conscious exclusivity. A detective learns how to look at things. I wish to see the pigeon, so I do. But there is another kind of attentiveness, a shamus attentiveness that simultaneously takes in the pigeon and all that surrounds the pigeon. Pigeon history and anthropology. The genealogies of pigeons worldwide. I apply dual focus, of far and near objects. I see the pigeon, and I also see where he is going and where he has been. To achieve this sort of sight, I empty my mind and grow accustomed to the dark.

  Later, if the moon is shrouded, you may be able to see the National Arts Club, its sandstone blocks glowing dimly like old leather. Gothic. Mournful. The stone-guarded windows, the facades of mausoleums.

  Or, turn to the little red brick town houses on the west side of Gramercy Park, standing like Napoleonic soldiers, like lifeguards with swimmers’ bodies, short and muscular, tidy little houses, where some of my friends lived. The father of one was a ham operator. He had an elaborate radio setup and he was happy to show us kids how it worked—a little too happy, if you’d asked me. First staticky, then clear, the radio was like the ones I’d seen in spy movies. The son did not seem interested in his father, the spy. But it was my business to take note of such people. I was also curious about the boy who lived next door to him. Big kid, a galoot, he had a nervous tic of holding his face in his hands and molding his flesh, the way one kneads dough. Something going on there? On this cold night, the little red brick town houses are neat as pins, with their wrought-iron New Orleans fences and their empty window boxes. Go and admire them. You are only human.

  THE PLACES WE leave go on being themselves after we leave them. Imagine that. They do not drown in creeks of tears at our departure. They do not apologize for being so dull and cruel, or whatever the reasons we gave for our leaving them. They do not even notice that we left. Knowing this does not affect our decision, of course. We were bound to be exiles, and we have stuck to our guns. Good riddance, we say. The deserted places say nothing. The world does not change according to the way we see it.

  The people we leave go on being themselves after we leave them. Imagine that. And all the influence we exerted upon them, all the delicate maneuvers we pulled off, go away in a trice. Cavafy tells us that the Poseidonians, after centuries of mingling with the corrupting Tyrrhenians and Romans, forgot the Greek language, which they had spoken for centuries before. Only an annual festival recalled the Greek presence, which once had been ubiquitous and deep. Do the people we leave hold a residual festival for us? I doubt it. They merely become the barbarians we always suspected they were before we left. Why do we leave anything? Yet we leave everything.

  EXCEPT AFGHANISTAN, OF course. One never leaves Afghanistan. In Moby-Dick, old Melville listed his headlines—GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES, WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL, and BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN. He chose Afghanistan because it has always seemed the most faraway place on earth, perhaps at times to the Afghans themselves. In 1851, when Moby-Dick was published, presidential elections must have seemed equally remote to the average citizen; thus by arranging his items on the bill, Melville was also posing a question: What could the story of one solitary citizen possibly have to do with the big and violent doings of the world? The connections between Ishmael’s Afghans and presidents are rarely seen until too late, least of all by the Ishmaels who go about their solitary businesses deliberately to avoid the big and violent doings.

  Ishmael minimized the significance of his adventure, yet that turned out to offer as grand a contest, as bloody a battle as any. It was the essential journey—the pursuit of the nemesis. The Moriarty. It was not Ishmael’s nemesis being pursued, but he was on the ship, as tied to the pursuit as if he had dreamed it up himself. If Ishmael learns anything from his mad ride with Ahab, it is the detective’s truth, and the writer’s—that no performance is solo, that the one thing you may be sure of is that every human decision, no matter how slight or peculiar, is within reach of every other such decision, as near as Afghanistan. In 2011, we still are in Afghanistan. We are about to hold a presidential election. Call us Ishmael. The street connects us like a hyphen.

  SEE FOR YOURSELF. Once in a while in my wanderings, I will pass someone who looks both familiar and strange, as if his face were a concoction of features that at once suggested the categories of physiognomy and his inimitable peculiarity. Such a person could be hailed as a long-lost friend one has never met, but there is no name, no identifying label, for someone like that. Nothing would come of the greeting anyway, unless he had reached the same conclusion about me. I would toss him a warm hello, only to be
rebuffed, high-hatted. We are so close to being anything but strangers to one another. Yet not so close ever to act on the thought.

  In the blazing window of an electronics store on Thirty-second and Lex, eight flat-screen TVs show a Republican presidential debate. All the candidates, including the women, wear dark blue, which makes the line of them look like the sea at night. Their blue line effects a horizon. The women wear colorful scarves, the men wear colorful neckties. As I watch them, a small Latino in a Yankees jacket and a brown wool cap walks up to stand beside me at the window. After a minute, he asks, without turning to me, “What they say?” “Beats me,” I tell him. “Beats me,” he repeats, as if my answer were a translation.

  “TURN DOWN THAT boom box!” I shouted to a group of boys loping down Broadway. I was walking with our children.

  “Why do you hate our music?” the boys shouted back.

  “I don’t hate your music,” I said, smiling. “I hate you.” They laughed and turned up the volume.

  Truth is, I love Latin music. I find it thrilling, though I do not have a Latin bone in my body. But I can play a rumba on the piano, and a samba and a tango. And I can dress up like José Greco, black hat and all, which I did once in a while at home, to no family reactions whatever, not so much as a stare. On the street, whenever Latin music came blaring from a radio, I would improvise a dance. Spin aggressively. Snap my fingers like castanets. Clap my hands above my head. Flamenco me. Mortified again, the children would stage-whisper, “Dad!” and tug at my clothing to make me stop. “You’re embarrassing us,” they said.

  They were right. I ought to have behaved with more decorum. Yet secretly, I think, they enjoyed my dance. And embarrassment is thrilling in its way.

  SHIT! MY FATHER did things like that—jumping up from his chair and bleating lines from show tunes, accompanied by a clumsy soft-shoe. Only in his case, these outbursts of entertainment were joyless, as if he were assaulting the silence in his home, which he himself had instituted. Once in a rare while a hapless distant relative, in the city for a couple of days, would call and ask to come over for a visit. He would not have bothered had he known that my father’s mind had exiled all his relatives, seen and unseen, beyond Siberia.

  One Sunday, my father’s nephew, a pleasant gentle young man, phoned asking if he might drop in to say hello. He had just come from Buffalo with his new and happy wife. For over an hour, we made small talk in the living room—all except my father who, in his dark three-piece suit, sat on the bench in front of the bookshelves, saying not a word, even when directly addressed. Instead, in a low and ghostly key, he whistled the entire score of “Wish You Were Here.”

  WHEN I WAS on my own in the vast apartment, little things drew my attention. A small square inkwell of my father’s, in which the black ink had dried on the inside of the glass, effecting a little wall of hieroglyphics. A maroon fountain pen beside it, with a tiny gold lever to draw in the ink. Photographs here and there. My father, mother, and I (age three) sitting on a low stone wall in Chatham, where my parents had rented a sea captain’s cottage. My parents strolling on the boardwalk in Atlantic City on their honeymoon—my dad in a black winter coat and a derby, holding a pair of suede gloves in his right hand; my mother in a slim fur coat and heels with bows and a gardenia corsage on her left shoulder. A snapshot of my mother and her sister, Julia, when they were counselors in a summer camp upstate; their flirty smiles. My father at sea in a white suit, on a boat to Honduras, where he served as ship’s doctor one summer. He rests his arms on a railing, and looks away.

  Faces and figures in the paintings. When my parents first moved into 36, they had nothing to put on the many high walls. They went to Gimbels, which was holding a sale on unpacked crates of hundreds of oils and watercolors, acquired yet never viewed by William Randolph Hearst on one of his manic buying sprees. Among the Hearst artworks in our home was a portrait of a French farmer, with ruddy cheeks and poorly drawn hands; an English landscape showing a boy and girl ascending a hill toward a castle that looked a bit like Leeds; and several moody Italian scenes of decaying structures, walls, and houses, from the late seventeenth century. The canvases were cracked like stale cake. My favorite was that of a dark bridge over a rushing river with alpine mountains in the background and a black leafy tree reaching out over the water like an old man’s hand. Fishermen in a canoelike boat examined what looked like corpses covered in sheets.

  In a little corner of the bookshelf the radio sat, and I beside it in the late afternoons and early evenings before bedtime—the polished box-cathedral issuing the stories that thrilled my heart. Mr. and Mrs. North. The Shadow. Boston Blackie. The FBI in Peace and War. The Inner Sanctum. The Green Hornet, on which the manservant Kato had his nationality changed from Japanese to Filipino immediately after Pearl Harbor. The Whistler, which opened with eerie whistling and a portentous voice announcing, “I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night.” And Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. All the crime stories presented to me in my corner of the bookshelf. The scary music. The silly music. Mr. Keen’s theme song—“Some Day I’ll Find You.” The Shadow and a tracer of lost persons. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” I curled up like a comma.

  While commandeering every surface in the place were ashtrays. Small round glass ashtrays. Square ashtrays, bordered in leather to lend them men’s-club elegance. On the side tables, coffee tables, the kitchen table, the dining room table, the dinette table. Fatal furniture. My father smoking cigarettes, cigars, and a pipe. My mother smoking Chesterfields, promoted as the “women’s cigarette” after the war, as opposed to manly Camels. Watching the ashes grow longer and longer. Cleaning out the ashtrays, and replacing them, as smoke ghosted through the rooms of the apartment. Smoking in easy chairs, in cars, in offices, in bed. LSMFT, Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. I’d walk a mile for a Camel. The Marlboro Man. Old Gold. Ashtrays. Ashtrays. All fall down.

  IF YOU GIVE a poor man money, he is bound to look improved—happier, more alive, more substantial all around. It is not the same for streets. I approach Fourteenth between Third Avenue and Union Square East. When I wasn’t heading north on my boyhood detecting prowls, I walked down to Fourteenth. Suspects left and right. Men’s clothing stores no one seemed to shop in; a boxing gym where once I watched Floyd Patterson work the light bags; a bowling alley, pretty much of a dive, that sold Yogi Berra’s Yoo-hoo chocolate water drink, and where I brought Ginny on our first high school date on a snowy night in March. That she took to the place proved her a gamer. In those days, the alley still employed pin boys, wizened kids from the poorest areas below Fourteenth Street, who earned nickels dodging gutter balls. Everything on Fourteenth Street bespoke the life of the run-down. But life.

  Today, only the Con Ed building remains unchanged among business enterprises geared for the upper crust. The buildings are much bigger, taller, the renovated street merely a broad aisle for merchandise. On the south side, a P.C. Richard & Son is flanked by two NYU buildings. On the street level of the NYU building closer to Third is a Trader Joe’s and a separate Trader Joe’s Wine Shop. On the street level of Con Ed is a Raymour & Flanagan furniture store, and across Irving Place from Con Ed, a two-towered apartment house offering a Chipotle restaurant, a Subway sandwich shop, a UPS store, and a Food Emporium, opposite a Walgreens. Brand names of modern America. One may furnish one’s apartment in a tower, acquire a Sub-Zero in which to stock food, load up on good wine, get enough Advil and antidepressants to survive the day, seek higher education at night, and never leave Fourteenth Street.

  In 1854, on the site of the Con Ed building, the four-thousand-seat Academy of Music opera house was erected, flourishing there till it was taken down in 1926. In 1927, the Academy of Music movie theater was put up across the street, where Trader Joe’s is now. It had three thousand seats and tiers of balconies and royal boxes. When the kids of our neighborhood were not heading up to the Loew’s Lexington on Fifty-first or west to Eighth Avenue and the RKO on
Twenty-third, we came here. My parents took me to Marx Brothers revivals at the Academy of Music when I was five and six. When I was older, I would go by myself. I saw House of Wax, the first 3D movie, with Vincent Price. It included a sort of juggler-barker who stood outside the wax museum and promoted it by hitting a rubber ball attached to a paddle by an elastic band. The ball shot straight at the audience. Everyone ducked. The movie was okay as a thriller, but not much of a mystery.

  Where the P.C. Richard & Son appliances gleam under fierce lights these days, stood Luchow’s, the famous German restaurant, with its sauced-up meats and Oompa Band and big, glorious tannenbaum at Christmas. In the 1890s Diamond Jim Brady proposed to Lillian Russell in Luchow’s, offering the musical theater star one million dollars if she’d marry him. He brought the money in a suitcase. Russell turned him down. My father said that Luchow’s had been a “Nazi hangout” during the war. I tried to picture that—Nazis in uniform lounging around the restaurant, elbows on the bar, just hanging out.

  Meanwhile, tonight, the ones who work for a living stoop and lift at a loading ramp at Trader Joe’s, hauling cartons on rollers as if they were hauling carts of coal in Pennsylvania or gold in Brazil. They deposit their shadows at the side of the ramp. They are muscular, black, biblical. I have no strength left in my arms. But they could haul a house, a pyramid if they had to. What wouldn’t I give, I think as I edge past them on the sidewalk, and they apologize for being in my way. I shrug to indicate that I am in theirs. And then—and such things happen in New York—the tallest one, with a tattoo of lightning on his neck, unbidden in the quickening cold, begins to sing “Someone to Watch Over Me,” in a bass so earthy, it seems to rise from the roots of a nearby oak. I stop in my tracks, and listen to the song until the end, when I reach for an imaginary glass and raise it to toast the man.