Part 28 (1/2)

'You know what it is,' he said, leaning forward, lowering his voice, as if we weren't the only two customers in the bar by now, just us and the bartender. 'I'll tell you what it is. It's n.i.g.g.e.rs.'

I didn't say anything.

'And spics. The blacks and the Hispanics.'

I said something about black and Puerto Rican cops. He rode right over it. 'Listen, don't tell me,' he said. 'I got a guy I been partnered with a lot, Larry Haynes his name is, maybe you know him - ' I didn't ' - and he's as good as they come. I'd trust the man with my life. s.h.i.+t, I have trusted him with my life. He's black as coal and I never met a better man in or out of the department. But that's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about.' He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. 'Look,' he said, 'you ever ride the subway?'

'When I have to.'

'Well, s.h.i.+t, n.o.body rides it by choice. It's the whole city in a nutsh.e.l.l, the equipment breaks down all the time, the cars are filthy with spray paint and they stink of p.i.s.s and the transit cops can't make a dent in the crime down there, but what I'm talking about, s.h.i.+t, I get on a subway and I look around and you know where I am? I'm in a f.u.c.king foreign country.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean everybody's black or Spanish. Or oriental, we got all these new Chinese immigrants coming in, plus there's the Koreans. Now the Koreans are perfect citizens, they open up all these great vegetable markets all over the city, they work twenty hours a day and send their kids to college, but it's all part of something.'

'Part of what?'

'Oh, s.h.i.+t, it sounds ignorant and bigoted but I can't help it. This used to be a white city and now there's days when I feel like I'm the only white man left in it.'

The silence stretched. Then he said, 'They smoke on the subway now. You ever notice?'

'I've noticed.'

'Never used to happen. A guy might murder both his parents with a fire axe but he wouldn't dare light up a cigarette on the subway. Now you got middle-cla.s.s people lighting their cigarettes, puffing away. Just in the last few months. You know how it started?'

'How?'

'Remember about a year ago? A guy was smoking on the PATH train and a PATH cop asked him to put it out, and the guy drew a gun and shot the cop dead? Remember?'

'I remember.'

'That's what started it. You read about that and whoever you are, a cop or a private citizen, you're not in a rush to tell the guy across the aisle to put out his f.u.c.king cigarette. So a few people light up and n.o.body does anything about it, and more people do it, and who's gonna give a s.h.i.+t about smoking in the subway when it's a waste of time to report a major crime like burglary? Stop enforcing a law and people stop respecting it.' He frowned. 'But think about that PATH cop. You like that for a way to die? Ask a guy to put out a cigarette and bang, you're dead.'

I found myself telling him about Rudenko's mother, dead of a bomb blast because her friend had brought home the wrong television set. And so we traded horror stories. He told of a social worker, lured onto a tenement roof, raped repeatedly and thrown off the building to her death. I recalled something I'd read about a fourteen-year-old shot by another boy the same age, both of them strangers to each other, the killer insisted that his victim had laughed at him. Durkin told me about some child-abuse cases that had ended in death, and about a man who had smothered his girlfriend's infant daughter because he was sick of paying for a baby-sitter everytime the two of them went to the movies. I mentioned the woman in Gravesend, dead of a shotgun blast while she hung clothes in her closet. There was an air of Can You Top This? to our dialogue.

He said, 'The mayor thinks he's got the answer. The death penalty. Bring back the big black chair.'

'Think it'll happen?'

'No question the public wants it. And there's one way it works and you can't tell me it doesn't. You fry one of these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and at least you know he's not gonna do it again. The h.e.l.l, I'd vote for it. Bring back the chair and televise the f.u.c.king executions, run commercials, make a few dollars and hire a few more cops. You want to know something?'

'What?'

'We got the death penalty. Not for murderers. For ordinary citizens. Everybody out there runs a better chance of getting killed than a killer does of getting the chair. We get the death penalty five, six, seven times a day.'

He had raised his voice and the bartender was auditing our conversation now. We'd lured him away from his program.

Durkin said, 'I like the one about the exploding television set. I don't know how I missed that one. You think you heard 'em all but there's always something new, isn't there?'