Grief Street

quiet in our beds for an hour.
    I turned to say something to her. But she had fallen asleep. Then so did I, like a dead man.

Thirty-seven

    M y own sleep was brief, but sound.
    For the first time in days, I did not dream of the crime of forgetting. Nor of chilling nuns’ tales, nor writers’ riddles, nor odd socks in the dusty drawers of Hell’s Kitchen, nor of being swallowed into hell under bat wings.
    For the first time in days I awoke refreshed; remembering and seeing, thanks to Father Gerald Morrison, and thanks to Ruby.
    I felt like a detective in more than name only. For I could now see what people were doing, most of them anyway. One sighting would lead to another, and soon I would see them all. In the cases of some, I could see what they had been doing for years.
    In the script of Grief Street, here was the opening a hermit told me to seek:
    Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Are you forgetting how it was back there in the starving fields of the other side °f the ocean...
    …Sure I remember first hearing the promises. But you’d do well to remember this: promises are made to be broken, even American promises.
    And here, it struck me like a bolt as I lay atop the hospital bed, was the answer to why an opening is so hard to find: in appearance, it may be the very opposite of open.
    Oh, I tell you—if you hadn’t gone and become a copper, you be one of us wild-hair Jesuits.
    What is life and liberty in the American sense? Or as the mysterious playwright asked in his work, what is it supposed to be? Is it not, in a country of abundance, the promise to all of our daily human needs: food and clothing and shelter—and daily meaning as well as daily bread? And if we should forget this, as a society, what becomes our fate? Streets running in blood?
    With his soup kitchen, Rabbi Paznik kept the promise of food.
    With their Good Friday pageant, seven marchers remembered for us all the promise and meaning of life-giving sacrifice.
    With his dead table, Father Declan promised clothing.
    With her refuge for battered women. Sister Roberta promised shelter.
    All of them were struck down by something evil and wild out there. But there is wild goodness, too. Who but a rodef shalom and a doubting Catholic besides to force the devil to doubt in himself?
    It was now just going dark. And time was growing short. Lives, too, if I did not act quickly.
    I picked up the telephone on the bedside table and dialed the special number. Ruby slept, the best medicine for her.
    “Mr. Mayor,” I said when he answered in an excited voice. “Listen carefully, here’s what I need you to do. First—you find Inspector Neglio, tell him I worked up a hunch thanks to a lunatic imagination. He’ll know what that means. Tell him I’ll be taking down the so-called Ghost Killer tonight. Got that?”
    “Sure do!”
    “Tell Neglio to bring some muscle uptown—two or three officers, along with himself. I want these guys on a round-the-clock watch over my wife here at Roosevelt Hospital-You hear me?”
    “Yes.”
    “I want Neglio personally. Along with cops he knows I can trust.”
    “What’s wrong with your wife?”
    “She got mugged. By rabid cops.”
    “Jesus!”
    “I’m waiting here at Roosevelt Hospital, room nine-oh-four. I want to see action inside of a half-hour.” No sense in dealing with anybody but the top man, I figured.
    “You got it,” said the top man.
    “When you’re done scrambling a crew for my wife, then you’re going to do it all over again. In this case, you’re going to find one more cop I can trust—a rookie by the name of Tyrone Matson, out of the Manhattan Sex Crimes Squad. You give him this special number, tell him to call you back from a secure phone.”
    “Got it.”
    “Tell Matson I want him for one-man backup duty. Tell him plainclothes—skelly style.”
    “Skelly?”
    “He’ll know what I mean. Tell Matson he should come with a PTP in a bag.”
    “Pee-tee-pee?”
    “Point-to-point radio. He’ll know what I mean. Tell him he should keep his mouth shut—especially around King Kong Kowalski and his running buddies.”
    “Where do you want this Officer Matson to back you up?”
    I told the mayor where, and when. Then I rang off. Twenty-eight minutes later, two big cops I remembered from my days in the bag came clattering up the hallway all out of breath. Krai and Souza were their names, and I remember them being right cops. Both of them were detectives, now assigned to the