NINE

I had intended to head back to my house or to one of the stores’ offices to read through Maya Watson’s hate mail, but I didn’t feel like running into my brother Aaron. For all of his mishegas and obsession with the business, Aaron was an observant bastard and had recently commented on my weight loss and rather pale complexion. Besides, I had less and less patience for Aaron’s craziness these days. We were both getting old and old men get cranky. An indirect blessing of Sarah’s wedding was that I had three weeks off from work. No need, I thought, to risk having to lie to my big brother about the thing that was probably going to kill me. If he ever found out, he would just make me feel guilty for abandoning him and I already felt guilty enough for a thousand other things. And there was something else, something that stuck with me. Maya Watson had taken pains to mention how hard it had been for her and Alta at work.

I remembered how women cops were hazed and abused and basically tortured when I was on the job in the early seventies. It wasn’t trial by fire. It was trial by inferno—all of it done with the winking approval of the brass. They were going to show those broads that police work was man’s work. I remembered the stories Carmella told me about what she suffered through in uniform and then when she made detective. I’d witnessed some of it myself, how she was disrespected, disregarded, and treated, as she so indelicately put it, like pussy on the hoof. Most of the guys eventually came around, if grudgingly, but some never did. A few of them took it personally and made weeding women out of the job their own private crusade. The more isolated these guys got, the more determined they became. It took a long time for the NYPD to change, but it changed. Walk into Times Square and look around. The people in those dark blue uniforms with badges on their chests look freshly minted from the UN. They’re men and women. They’re Asian and Hispanic. They’re African-American, Arab-American, and the children of Russian immigrants. They’re Irish, Italian, and Jewish kids from the suburbs.

The FDNY was more like the Catholic Church. Change, when it came at all, came slowly, very slowly. During my days as a cop, the FDNY was almost entirely male, largely Irish, and if not quite a private club, then something pretty close. I’m no sociologist, but I think the pace of change had a lot to do with the way firehouses were set up. They’re small, close-knit units. Firemen live, eat, work, and sleep together for days at a time. Guys in a precinct can be close, but firemen are closer. Cops always talk about trusting other cops to have their backs, but trust between firefighters is even more crucial, because, let’s face it, it’s a more dangerous job. It was easy to understand how any foreign presence in a firehouse—most especially a woman’s—would be perceived as a threat.

As I adjusted my plans and my car’s direction in kind, I realized I was falling victim to the very thing I had vowed to avoid: linking Alta’s murder to Tillman’s death. Whether it suited me or not, if things were taking me in that direction, I had to follow. That’s the trouble with being a stumbler. I had no surefire methods to fall back on. So I drove down through the trench of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and up onto the Gowanus Expressway. Expressway, my ass! In New York City, there’s nothing express about expressways.

Finbarr McPhee’s Brass Pole was a famous tavern in the shadow of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. The joint had built its rep on two things: the biggest selection of Irish bottled and tap beers in all of New York City and the biggest collection of firemen east of the Mississippi. Just as there were cop bars, there were firemen bars. Finbarr McPhee’s—no one who knew better called it the Brass Pole—was top of the pops in this select group of public houses. Firemen came here to hang from all over the city and Long Island and they didn’t come for the Guinness, Harp, Smithwick’s, or Jameson Irish whiskey. They came to talk shop and swap war stories, sure, but mostly they came for the women.

That’s right, the women. Rock stars have groupies, but folks in uniform have a fair amount of their own. Shit, I knew a few sanitation guys who swore they had groupies too. I think the one exception to the rule of uniform attraction was traffic enforcement agents—meter maids as we were once wont to call them in the unenlightened days before men hired on. Everybody hates meter maids, Paul McCartney and lovely Rita notwithstanding. Although I did once have a date who asked to see my gun, it took a long time for me to come to terms with the attraction to the uniform. It was only later, when I was off the job for many years, that I came to see what the groupies were all about. The revelation was that the attraction wasn’t strictly about one thing.

Some of the women had the jones for the uniform or the perceived danger inherent in the job. They fetishized the trappings of the job: with cops it was the badge, the gun, the cap, the cuffs; with firemen it was the boots, the helmet, the axe. They got off on hearing the stories about life on the streets or responding to fires. But for some of the women, it was less about partying than pragmatism. It was about a solid future, a husband due fifty-two paychecks a year, medical benefits, and a killer pension. Because of their work
schedule, firemen could work second jobs. Every fireman I ever knew held down a side gig or owned part of a business. Yeah, it was the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and the world was barely recognizable to me anymore, but there were some things I hoped had remained constant. When I walked into Finbarr’s and saw the ratio of women to men, I was happy to see that not everything in the world had changed.

It was still relatively early, but the place was packed. A lot of the men were in their twenties and thirties, but not all. There were plenty of older shaved heads and gray hairs too. There were even some relics as old or older than myself. Imagine that. Some guys can just never let go of the job and drinking with the kids who were still working helped keep them connected. Cop bars were like this too and just like in cop bars, the young guys steered well clear of the old-timers. The young guys were there to drink and hit on women, not to listen to stories about how the job used to be back in the day or what happened ten or twenty or thirty years ago. The ages of women also spanned a wide spectrum. They were mostly young, pretty, and eager. But there were plenty of emotional battle scars on the faces of the older men and women. Mixed in with the smells of stout and whiskey, perfume and cologne, were the darker grace notes of disappointment and regret.

There was something else too, something that hovered like a shroud over the flirtatious smiles and touches, over the beery laughter and the too-loud music pumping out of the CD jukebox. It was a shroud like the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room that everyone fought to ignore, but everyone knew was there just over your shoulder. It was the wall of honor listing the names of the men who had died in the line of duty. It was 9/11. And if you listened just closely enough, you could still hear the echoes of the Twin Towers collapsing and the screams of the firefighters who died that day. My mind flashed back to the Halloween Parades after AIDS had cut a deadly swath through the gay community. How the parades went on and everyone tried to be happy, but whatever happiness people mustered only seemed to make the sadness that much worse.

On the way over, I hoped I’d catch a break like I had with Nick Roussis at the Grotto. That there would be a friendly face at McPhee’s, someone I knew from the job, the stores, or from having lived in Brooklyn my whole life. No such luck. There were a lot of familiar types, but not a soul I recognized. So I went for my next best option. I found the sourest, loneliest old-timer in the place and headed straight for him. He was over at the corner of the bar where it met the back wall. Everything about him, from his gray stubble to his untidy shirt and permanent sneer, screamed grumpy old prick. And if I needed any further proof, the empty barstool next to him was the only empty seat in the whole place.

“Fucking rap music,” I groused, pulling in next to him. “I can’t hear myself think. Whatever happened to real music like the Beatles or the Stones?” I made sure not to look at him and to seem like I was talking more to myself than to him.

I threw a fifty on the bar, caught the bartender’s eye, pointed at the Guinness tap, held up one finger, and waited. Guinness takes a while to pour properly, so I had time to get my new friend going if the line about the music hadn’t gotten his attention. Turned out I didn’t need the extra time.

“Fuckin’ A,” he said. “It’s not rap, it’s crap.” His voice was a boozy rasp: Bronx Irish with a heavy dose of Staten Island. “Used to play the bass in a band up in Pelham in the sixties. Man, we played the Beatles, the Four Seasons, even a little Motown. But, Jesus, this stuff! We used to get all the girls we could handle too.”

I turned to face him and offered my hand. “Moe Prager.”

He said his name was Flannery. He had a grip like a car crusher and breath like a distillery. I offered to buy him a drink and he didn’t say no. I had the barman bring him a Jameson while I sipped at my stout. My oncologist had warned me against drinking, but fuck me if I was going to be a monk. I had months of surgery, radiation, and chemo ahead of me and I was still probably a goner. I wasn’t going to be one of those poor schmucks who stopped living in order to die.

“What are you doing here, Prager? You don’t look like one of us.”

I knew what he meant. “Ex-cop, but some of my best buds were firemen and it’s been a long time since I was in here.” The former was a lie, but not the latter. I had been to McPhee’s before, a long long time ago. I’d also been vague enough to let Flannery’s imagination fill in the blanks.

“Cop, huh? Suppose it’s okay since you sprung for the drink.” He laughed at his own sense of humor and I pretended to.

“Yeah, I worked the Six-O in Coney Island with a firehouse right next door. We got on like lions and hyenas.”

“That good, huh?”

I laughed again, only this time I meant it. Cops and firemen had this inbred rivalry that went back forever and persisted to the present. Who were the bravest? Whose underpayment was more egregious? Who did the city shaft more often? Who could piss farther? It was like that.

By his third drink on me, Flannery had told me a few hundred war stories—at least it seemed that way—and had begun grousing about how the world and the job had changed and, in his opinion, not for the better. I subtly egged him on, though he didn’t really need any encouragement. Just when I was about to introduce the subject of Alta and Maya’s alleged dereliction of duty, Flannery made a trip to the bathroom. The business at the bar slowed down momentarily and I waved the barman over. I had him bring another round.

“So what’s my drinking mate’s story?” I asked the bartender—a guy about my age—when he brought the drinks.

“Flannery? He’s a pain in the balls, but make no mistake, the man’s a hero.”

“Him? Get the fuck outta here.”

“I shit you not. Remember how bad things were in the ghettos in the early ’70s?” he asked. “I was on the job then too, a ladder company in Brownsville. We used to get pelted with bricks and bottles on nearly every night run we made in them days. Trust me, it didn’t fill me heart with love for those people. We were targets for their anger. Flannery, after getting hit in the head by a brick, made the best rescue anyone ever saw. It’s fucking legendary. Singlehandedly saved five kids, their parents, and a cat from a kerosene heater blaze that lit up the building like tissue paper. Kept running in and out of a building he had no business going into in the first place. I know he can be a ornery bastard, but that bastard won the James Gordon Bennett Medal. That’s the highest honor the department bestows and it ain’t given out like Halloween candy. Just don’t mention it or tell him I told you. He hates talking about it. Okay, here he comes.”

Flannery sat back down beside me and made quick work of the Jameson. He nodded at the barman. “Big-mouthed son of a bitch bartender told you, didn’t he? About the medal, I mean. Don’t deny it. I seen that look on your face. I seen it plenty. How can a broken-down drunk slob like Flannery be a hero?”

“Don’t get mad at him. I asked about you.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll get on fine, you and me, as long as we don’t talk about that.”

That was my opening.

“Fine. Then let’s talk about something else.”

“Like what?”

Finally, a song I knew came on. “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” played and most of the crowd in Finbarr’s was singing along. I had to shout at Flannery to be heard.

“Like about the two EMTs that let that guy die in the city.”

I guess I was a little too successful at being heard. Before Flannery could say a word, a heavy hand slammed down on my shoulder and it stayed there. The guy attached to the other end of it walked around in front of me. He was twenty-five with dark red hair, a healthy mustache, and light blue eyes shot with blood. He had the look of a man who’d been drinking for a few hours and was spoiling to flex his beer muscles.

“What are you, another fucking reporter here to stir up the shit?”

“No, I’m a man having a private conversation,” I said, calm but serious. “Now if you don’t mind, please get your hand off my shoulder.”

“But I do mind, motherfucker!” He turned his attention on Flannery. “Don’t talk to this asshole. He’s looking to bury us.”

Flannery didn’t answer right away, but I was losing patience.

“Listen, I asked you politely to move your hand off my shoulder and got called a motherfucker for my trouble. Now I’m not asking, I’m telling you. Get your fucking hand off my shoulder.”

“And if I don’t?”

By now, the rest of the bar had stopped singing and focused their eyes on us. Not good. With an audience, there was no way for this guy to back down and save face. His friends started egging him on. Kick the old guy’s ass, Hickey. Come on, Hickey, fuck him up. And so it went.

I may have been an old man in his eyes, but I stopped taking shit from morons like Hickey when I was eight years old. And there was this other thing: I was carrying. My old .38 was holstered in the small of my back and I could have it sticking under Hickey’s chin in a second or two. I waited a beat to give him a chance to back off. He didn’t avail himself of the opportunity. No surprise there. So I reached around under my jacket, but my hand never made halfway to my holster. Flannery had a hold of my wrist and when he had hold of something, it stayed held. I looked his way and he shook his head no. I nodded that I understood and he let go. Before I could exhale, Flannery was out of his seat and had his left hand around Hickey’s throat.

“Listen, pup, what me and my friend choose to discuss is none of your fucking business. You ever interrupt me or lay a hand on a friend again and I’ll make sure you get your medical pension in a hurry. Do you take my meaning, son?” He squeezed a little tighter as he asked. Hickey nodded that he understood. “Smart lad. Now my friend and I are leaving. I turn around and even sniff you behind us, I’ll snap your arm off.” He let go of Hickey.

I thanked the barman and left the change as a tip. Outside, I asked Flannery why he stopped me from teaching Hickey a lesson.

“Because we police our own,” he said. “Now let’s find a place to do some proper drinking.”

And so we did.