Grief Street

by.
    “Thanks again,” I said. But I thought, Can I?
    On the subway uptown I reflected on Neglio’s warning me about the price of getting even with cops. Also I reflected on the morning’s likely tabloid headlines. What a story! Flash: upon one single, sacred day, the blasphemous murders of a rabbi observing Yom Hashoah and seven devout Catholics carrying out a Good Friday pageant. I could see the streamers: HOLY HORRORS! maybe, or SATAN STALKS MIDTOWN? Or even GOD TO HELL’S KITCHEN: DROP DEAD! Anyway, something worthy of punctuation.
    But I did not then know the half of it.
    Nor did I know of a gathering that would soon take place near my apartment house—in the dark and tiny hours of the Saturday morning before Easter, when finally Ruby and I were able to drift into troubled sleep.

Thirteen

    “ F or fighting back, this is what cops need. What’s right there in this room: friends.”
    “And what are friends for?”
    “Percentage.”
    “By which you mean to speak not of friends, but of the most powerful ally of all...”
    “Oh Jeez, there he goes again. For the love of God, pal, take a fucking drink.”
    “I tell you what friends ain’t for. Friends ain’t for sitting around here gawking like babes watching Oprah.”
    “Yeah, we ought to move!”
    “Hang another wreath?”
    “Doesn’t cut it anymore.”
    “How about this: my old lady was pregnant last time, she was real clumsy. Follow me?”
    “Pregnant ladies, they get into accidents.”
    “ Real cute—”
    “Gentlemen, gentlemen—!”
    “You’re supposed to be drinking. Who as’t you?”
    “Yeah!”
    “All of you— think! Think of the alternatives.”
    “Fuck you!”
    “Yeah, fuck you real good!”
    “Hold on... He’s saying there’s maybe another way.”
    “That’s what you’re saying?”
    “If you imbeciles will listen—”
    “Fuck you!”
    “Shut up and let him talk.”
    “At personal peril, you ignore sublime brutality.”
    “Talk fucking English!”
    “By which I mean, the powers of simple persuasion.”
    “What the fuck’s he saying?”
    “There is the old power of storytelling, genuine to this day, even as multitudes no longer wish to hear. But there is the modern power of manufactured myth—the press, you see. The journalists have constructed for themselves a chapel, a temple of fame, if you will, in which they put up and take down portraits all the day long and make such a hammering you can scarcely hear yourself speak... By the way, you’ve arranged it with that reporter?”
    “He bought it big time.”
    “Excellent... Now there is, of course, the one true power—”
    “All right, we all been listening polite to this crapola—”
    “Shut up, I said... Go on, say what you want.”
    “I speak of power here and now—a power beyond the dominion of heaven and earth.”
    “Oh, Jeez...”

Fourteen

    “ C ongratulations, Dudley, I’m looking at your Irish mug all over the cover of the Post... ”
    It was a scolding voice to rouse me from dreaming about a nun, of all fevered and troubling things. There was Sister Roberta, lingering in my muzzy view like an image in the after-burn of a switched-off television screen, a big-hipped woman with tuxedo black eyes and cloistered white skin; hovering in the dusty air of Father Creepy Morrison’s religion class, hotly warning us incorrigible boys against touching ourselves lest we cause the saints to weep.
    Truth to tell, I admired Sister Roberta’s exemplae vérité. She owned an imagination Hitchcock would have admired.
    There was a boy whose father, a diplomat, was transferred from Washington to a hardship post in the tropics. The boy had been taught to say three Hail Marys before he went to sleep. But one night, he was very tired and got into bed before he remembered. He forced himself to get out, and just as he welt down beside the bed, a snake slithered out from under lhe pillow—where his head had been a moment earlier.
    Screaming against the side of my sweating head was the telephone. I picked up the receiver to silence the scream, only to hear some ranting voice on a mobile phone unmercifully scolding somebody named Dudley.
    I yawned noisily into the phone, at the same time touching Ruby’s warm bare shoulder. Slumbering, she still smelled faintly of her blueberry soap. My eyes dropped shut again. I thought of Ruby and me making love under palm trees. (And also I thought, Here’s the difference between man and nun: only a nun would associate