As I took my first steps on patrol as a New York City police officer, heading out from the precinct onto East 156 Street toward the projects on Courtlandt Avenue in the South Bronx, a deep voice called out, “There’s a new sheriff in town!” We had been told that people would know we were rookies by the shine on our leather gear and the dim, soft expressions on our faces—people can smell new cop like they smell new paint. When I grinned bashfully and turned toward the voice, I saw it was speaking to us, but not of us. It belonged to a tipsy derelict in an enormous Styrofoam cowboy hat, half-swaggering and half-staggering down the street. I thought of the NYPD Department Values, which begins, “In partnership with the community, we pledge to protect the lives and property...” During our time at the Academy, we would recite it every day in Gym, just as my high school track team would say a Hail Mary before a meet. The partnership with the community had not begun as expected, but it might be said that education is an adjustment of expectations, and although I was done at the Academy, my education had barely begun.

I was assigned to Police Service Area 7, which covered the public housing in five South Bronx precincts: the 40th, 41st, 42nd, 44th, and the 46th, with the heaviest concentration in the Four-O and Four-Two. Like the word “precinct,” we used “PSA” to mean both our building and the area it served. On the first day, the PSA was hung with purple and black crepe bunting, for a cop from the command who had died of AIDS. We knew nothing beyond that fact, but as we waited in the muster room, a cop stormed in and began to yell at us: “I don’t give a fuck what these assholes say, Mike was a good guy and a great cop, so if you hear different you can tell them to fuck themselves from me!” He left as abruptly as he arrived. We were bussed up to his wake, where we barely knew what to say, even to each other. Such was our introduction to the inner life of the precinct—good-hearted if sometimes misguided, bound by duty and tradition and semi-private heartbreak—into which most of us did not rush to insinuate ourselves, knowing it would find a place for us in time.

We were met with amusement or abuse, equally unexpected and unprovoked: a lieutenant might hold roll call and scream at us as if we were late with the rent, or a sergeant would begin by saying, “Thanks for stopping by.” Some of the older cops watched over us and others looked down at us, and all of them told us how we’d missed out: on the greatest cops and the worst crime, and especially the Housing Police, “the best kept secret in the city.” Three months before, New York City had three separate police departments—Housing, for the projects; Transit, for the subways; and the NYPD—which were then combined by Mayor Giuliani in April 1995, into one department of nearly forty thousand police. Even our new station house—a state-of-the-art cinder-block cube, with plenty of lockers and a gym in the basement—was seen as a kind of rebuke; it was as if the old PSA, which had comprised a few rooms in the basement of a project, and was prone to rat infestations and floods, told an awful truth that we were too late to learn. We’d never know anything but the NYPD, and it was a bigger, stiffer, colder job, as we’d find out when we called to take a day off, or were on patrol and needed to knock down a door. We were little players, late for the game.

They told us things we didn’t need to hear, but often had no answer to what we asked:

Why do we call it the “four-to-twelve” shift, if it starts at three?

Why do we wear clip-on ties?

Where do we eat?

In fairness, the responses to these questions—“I don’t know”; “To avoid strangulation”; and “Good luck!”—may not have been any different from what I’d answer now.

We were like the equipment we carried: dangerously new. I’d put on my blue polyester slacks and shirt; black boots; an equipment belt for holster and gun; two magazines, each holding fifteen rounds of 9-millimeter ammunition; radio, mace, handcuffs, flashlight. The equipment belt was snapped to the uniform belt with four “keepers.” The bulletproof vest—“bullet resistant,” technically—is made of two double panels of a synthetic material called Kevlar, inside a cloth carrier that holds it around your torso like a lead X-ray smock. One cop wrote phrases from the Bible on his, “Yea, though I walk in the valley of the Shadow of Death...” Other cops wrote their blood type. The vest showed in the neck of the summer shirt, which has short sleeves and an open collar, but if your T-shirt showed above that, some bosses would yell at you, or write you up, or make you change. The shield was pinned to the shirt with a kilt pin, over a black cardboard backing that held the nameplate on the bottom and medals on the top. Some cops’ medals stacked up so high that the backing rose above their shoulders. The clips for the nameplates didn’t hold, and someone found that the stoppers of crack vials worked better. They were not hard to find. I kept a prayer card to the Archangel Michael, patron saint of police, in my hat. The uniforms made us look alike, as intended, and since I said little, I didn’t so much fit in as fade in.

We had a few weeks of field training, during which a cop named Vinnie Vargas led six of us around Melrose and Jackson Houses, adjoining projects a block away from the precinct. We worked as a group, at first—Paul Tannura, Matthew Goodman, Angel Suazo, Kim McLauren, Jose Velez, and myself—and then in threes, where McLauren, Velez, and I split off, and then with Velez alone. We wandered around, checking the parking lots and rooftops. Once a day, a sergeant or a lieutenant would raise us on the radio for the “scratch,” to sign our memo books and tell us we were doing great or awful work, arbitrarily it seemed. A three-car collision occurred before my eyes, and the job took me five hours to complete, listing the license, registration, and insurance information, taking statements and diagramming the positions of each car and everyone in it. When I finally got it down, I felt like I could have learned calculus and French. There were three or four radio runs a day, mostly for domestic disputes and stuck elevators, though in the evenings we would hear gunshots. We would run toward them, holding on to our radios and nightsticks so they wouldn’t fly out of our belts, and miss them so completely we were like kittens hunting a flashlight beam on the floor. In the precinct lunchroom one night, I heard shots and looked out the window to see two young men walking down the block toward me. We stared at each other and then, in unison, they pointed their thumbs back toward the projects. I nodded and went back to eating. The gunshots came from the drug dealers, at war or at play, but to wean a team of rookies on drug collars is a tricky business, and Vinnie decided against it. While this decision was prudent, it allowed the rampant crack and heroin trade to take place unobserved all around us; the dealers could have had snowball fights with the stuff for all we’d have noticed. The beat cop in Melrose-Jackson was named Scott Mackay, and I liked the way he handled himself, friendly or forceful as the circumstances demanded. I told him I thought the post was a little on the slow side and he laughed at me.

When field training was over, we crowded around the board in the muster room to find out our assignments. Any of us could be a Project Community Officer (PCO), a beat cop assigned to a particular project, or on a Target Team, one of five or six cops assigned to a sergeant, moving from project to project every few months, or in a squad car. Squad was the most sought-after, in that you rode instead of walking, and it fit our expectations of a grown-up, cop-like, lights-and-sirens deal. But I had a city kid’s indifference to cars—my driver’s license was only a few months old—and most PCOs and Target Teams had either Friday and Saturday or Sunday and Monday off, while the three squads—day tours, four-to-twelves, and midnights—worked a rotating chart of five days on, two days off, five days on, three days off, five days on, two days off, and so on, so that your weekends fell on the weekend only a few times a year. I wanted PCO and I got it: Post 151, Morris Houses in Claremont Village, in the Four-Two. A few cops said, “You’re in for it now. Watch yourself.”

Claremont Village was one of the largest projects we covered, and it combined Morris, Butler, Webster, and Morrisania Houses. There were thirty buildings, each between sixteen and twenty-one stories tall, set around courtyards and playgrounds. Like most public housing in New York City, its design was inspired by the chilly optimism of the forward-thinkers of the mid-century. For them, the tall towers and wide plazas were “cities of the future” that would supplant the stacked rows of stuffed tenements where the poor had lived for the past century. From a certain distance, or at a certain angle, you could see what they were getting at: you could walk through the grounds beneath shady aisles of sycamore and maple, past tidy lawns and playgrounds teeming with children. There would be families having cookouts, old ladies reading Bibles on the benches, pensive pairs of men playing chess. Armies of groundskeepers and janitors, as well as plumbers, carpenters, painters, and elevator repairmen, were employed to keep up the physical plant. Inside, many people kept immaculate and well-appointed apartments, and even some hallways were clean and cared for, decorated for holidays as festively as a window at Macy’s. But the semi-public spaces—the lobbies, halls, stairwells—were, more often than not, literal toilets. The debris of recreational annihilation was everywhere: condoms, crack vials, syringes, and shell casings; graffiti was cleaned constantly only to return at once, while bullet holes and scorch marks lasted longer. Multiple bodily functions took place in the elevators and rooftops, where you saw beer cans and smashed rum bottles amid pools of piss, piles of chicken bones beside heaps of shit. You learned not to lean against walls so roaches wouldn’t nest in your clothes. More than ten thousand people lived there, by my estimate, and maybe three thousand of them made it a ghetto.

There were many bad neighborhoods in New York, but the South Bronx was a byword for “slum.” There was no renaissance in its past, like Harlem, nor any signs of gentrification or renewal, as there were in parts of Brooklyn. “Fort Apache” was the nickname for the Four-One, just east of where I worked, though the Four-Two was used as the station house in the movie Fort Apache, The Bronx. Though the plotlines of interracial romance and police corruption were invented, the landscape of urban wasteland was not; “Fort Apache” was later known as “Little House on the Prairie,” because so much of the area had burnt down. My uncle Gerry had been a firefighter in the South Bronx in the 1970s, and he told me that they were busier than the London fire department during the Blitz. In Report from Engine Company 82, the firefighter Dennis Smith wrote that they responded to as many false alarms as fires, and a man from his company was thrown from the truck and killed while responding to a false alarm pulled by a nine-year-old boy. A sign was put up on the call box, telling of the death and the danger of false alarms, but a false alarm was called in later the same day, from the same box, so they took the sign down.

I was born in the Bronx, but my family moved just north, to Yonkers, when I was little. I’d taken my father’s old apartment in the Bronx seven years before, the “four rooms of gloom over an airshaft” where he’d grown up. It seemed like we owned the neighborhood: Uncle Eddie, a cop for thirty-three years, never left it, and Uncle Gerry’s last fire house was three blocks away, across the street from Uncle Nick’s office. Nick was a doctor who had married my father’s sister, Theresa, a nurse. When I was a kid, when we drove through Kingsbridge, my father would point out where Joe Louis and Mike Quill had lived, but what I remember most about the Bronx then was the windows of the abandoned buildings a mile to the south. The City had covered them with decals, of curtains and shades with flower pots, to suggest that happy families dwelt within instead of junkies and ghosts. Though the official motto of the Bronx was ominous enough, Ne cede malis—“Do not give way to evil”—one writer suggested that it should be, “Get out, schmuck, get out!” Our official flower was the corpse flower, a massive jungle plant so named because its bloom smells like rotting flesh. It was cultivated for the first time in North America in the Bronx, in 1937, and the borough president decided the eight-foot-tall prick-shaped flowers (Amorphophallus titanum) would prove an apt symbol for our future growth. However, the corpse flower might go for thirty years between blooms, which stink and die within days. I still can’t figure out what they were thinking.

For a long time, I kept to myself at work. I said hello to other cops but not much else. I always carried a book with me, slipping it under my vest or in a jacket pocket. When someone asked why, I’d say gravely, “You never know when nothing’s gonna happen.” Two other cops were assigned to Morris Houses, and six more to the other three projects that made up “the Village.” Most of them tended to stick together on patrol. Though I took to walking by myself early on, when I didn’t, I was with Angel Suazo and Osvaldo Rivera. We were all brand-new, and an odd threesome. Angel was Honduran, dark-skinned, and bald, an immigrant who had come here at the age of eighteen. His English was heavily accented and he was prone to saying things like “Cut me in half!” when he meant “Cut me a break!” He had been in the Army, and when I asked him what his assignment had been, he told me, “Communications.” Angel was unflinchingly cheerful, and nothing could dent his good humor: he laughed as hard as the jokers did at the jokes about his driving a gypsy cab or the INS coming to take him away. He also had a nose like a bloodhound—he could smell someone smoking a joint a block away—and he had a surprising nimbleness to him: once, a sparrow flew into a bodega and he caught it with his hands, then let it fly out unharmed. Osvaldo was Puerto Rican, and from the South Bronx. He never took his hat off, and smoked twice as much as I did, which is to say like two chimneys. When we walked, he sometimes liked to sing and to do voices from kung-fu movies. He wouldn’t say how old he was, called his wife constantly, and talked a lot about dogs. Though dogs weren’t allowed in the projects, half the people seemed to have pit bulls, and half the pit bulls seemed to be named Tyson, so there were plenty who needed his advice. Though Osvaldo lived in a building where dogs weren’t allowed, he owned an enormous German shepherd, which he would pack up into a duffel bag to take outside for walks. I asked him how the dog liked getting stuffed into a bag every day and he said he loved it—that he reacted like other dogs do when they see you pick up their leash. Both Angel and Osvaldo were serious family men and lived in the South Bronx. Whether from college liberalism or Irish sentiment, I had some measure of softness for the derelicts and delinquents of the neighborhood, but they had none, and their belief that these people should know better was good to hear.

In time, we took to each other, becoming a familiar sight around the projects: the black one, the brown one, the white one. Angel was quick to write tickets, I was quick to make arrests, and Osvaldo was quick to let us. I had started to learn Spanish the year before, but it fell to my partners to handle the rapid-fire and highly inflected dialects we heard—I would guess that our projects were slightly more black than Hispanic, with three white people that I knew of—and so my pidgin Spanish fell away. I did most of the paperwork, eagerly, as I wanted to master the Aided Cards, Complaints, Police Accident Reports, and Domestic Incident Reports that are the basic grammar of the NYPD. We did countless “vertical patrols,” taking the elevator up to the top, then splitting up to check the roof, radios down, guns drawn, hats backward at night so there would be no reflection, creeping out to see whatever we might find. And then we would walk it down, taking separate stairwells but meeting on each floor. We ran into dogfights, blow jobs, and enough sleeping bums to fill a warehouse. At first, I was inclined to leave them unmolested, but I began to think if I had to step over someone every morning when I left my house, I might feel differently, and the working people in the projects deserved the same consideration. I would leave them alone when the weather was terrible, or if they were fastidiously clean or had a plausible story, like a fight with the wife, that argued for a temporary stay. In truth, the ones who stank to high heaven also got a pass, arrest-wise, though I’d throw them out of the building. We took a lot of people in for trespass, which prevented a lot of robberies, I’m sure, and maybe a few rapes and murders as well. The trespass collar is the Swiss Army knife of the beat cop, especially in the projects, where the City is the landlord. Anyone who doesn’t have a good reason to be in a building probably has a bad one, and if you run into someone hanging out on a stairwell, the burden of proof falls on the mope.

We walked around and listened to the radio, with its scratchy hum of white noise and its string of coded calls and responses for lettered sectors and numbered posts, developing an ear for our own jobs, which a seasoned cop can hear, truly, in his sleep. “One-five-one, respond to a thirty-four on a female at one-four-five-eight Webster, four-Nora on the fourth, unknown weapons, advise when eighty-four...” And as we got to know the turf, the code might as well have been a telegram: “Ah, the Petersons again.” Because the woman assaulted at 1458 Webster, #4N, calls every payday, because her boyfriend hits the rum and then he hits her. Or the woman’s already called twice, today, and she perceives the assault in the minds of her upstairs neighbors, and no matter how much voodoo she sends at them, she can’t block out their mental beams. The radio is constant and chaotic, a montage of stray details, awful and comic facts:

“Respond to a woman in a room cornered by a large rodent...”

“Supposed to be a one-year-old baby with its head split open...”

“The perp is a male Hispanic, white T-shirt, blue jeans, possible moustache, repeat, possible moustache, K...”

“K” meant a radio transmission is over, the way the military and just about everyone else says “over,” and I don’t know if the NYPD has any argument for the difference beside difference’s sake.

“You okay, K?”

“A-OK, K.”

“Okey-doke, K.”

It is a code, after all, intended to mean nothing to most people. Codes, like good children, don’t talk to strangers. The official terminology has a forced flatness, a clipped neutrality that keeps a lifted-pinky distance from lurid circumstance. I heard a dispatcher revise a job for the patrol car assigned: “Be advised, unit, that domestic dispute is now coming over as a severed limb.” It was part of the general oddity of cop talk, its shotgun marriage of street slang and legalese. The raw talk of New Yorkers, criminals, victims, and cops themselves, was jury-rigged with the particularity of statutory phrases: “C/V states at T/P/O above perp called him a ‘bitch-ass punk’ and mooshed him, causing annoyance and alarm.” The abbreviations are for “complainant/victim” and “time and place of occurrence”; to moosh is to shove in the face, and is almost more insulting than a slap (here, the form would be bitch-slap or pimp-slap) because of the suggestion that there is no need to inflict injury. Naturally, cops pick up a lot of criminal vocabulary, especially in the drug trade, where the criminal words for things are the only words there are; you can call it a deck, or you can call it a “glassine envelope of a white powdery substance...alleged and believed to be heroin.” When crack was starting to be packaged in miniature heat-sealed plastic baggies the dealers called “slabs,” the official and legal term which arose to characterize them was “slabs.” It’s what happens in language naturally, as common speech becomes acceptable usage, but to make a rule of this kind of exception would lead to indictments that read, “...to wit, defendant did possess one mad fat rock of yayo.”

Most often, though, the babel of the city just mixed with police jargon in striking ways, as we struggled to express ourselves with bits of hand-me-down language that didn’t always fit. One would-be street lawyer protested what he took to be an “illegal search and seizure” of his cocaine by declaring it an “illegal circumcision.” (Now that’s a civil-rights nightmare for you, rogue mohels with guns.) A rookie cop I know had her own gift of phrase, once notifying the sergeant that a shooting victim had been “glazed by a bullet,” though fortunately, he only suffered from “harasserations.” And I overheard a cop recall, brightly, “Oh, sure, I was the first nonfatal shooting of 1994! In the keester!” The tone is intended to impress as exacting and detached, though the prefabricated phrases can sound cold-blooded and bombastic. When I hear cops refer to their “personal vehicle,” I want to grab them and shout, “Say, ‘my car,’ dammit!”

If the NYPD is less and less a fraternity, it will remain a kind of ethnicity, because ethnicity is defined by language. An arrest is a collar, but also a pinch; a perp can be a skell or a mope, depending on whether he’s a lowlife or a thug. A DOA is someone who’s gone EOT, end of tour. One under, two under, ten under, is an accounting of collars, but in Transit, a “man under” is not under arrest but under a train. After a stabbing or a traffic accident, you’d hear over the air, “Is he likely?” It was short for “likely to die,” and required the cop to make a crude wager of Likely or Not to summon Accident Investigations or a detective from the Squad to the scene. It gave many reports an unwarranted note of sarcasm: “Complainant states he was sleeping when his wife struck him with a two-by-four. Not likely.” Perhaps because of its paramilitary nature, the department has a fondness for acronyms, which vary from the flatfootedly functional to the downright cool: TNT, for the Tactical Narcotics Teams of the mid-1980s, is still the street name for any kind of drug cop, though the units were disbanded years ago. The Robbery Apprehension Module took the place of the Robbery Identification Program, which broadened the range of the Senior Citizens Robbery Unit. And thus SCRU begat RIP, and RIP begat RAM, with a certain loss of panache. We were learning to talk the talk.

We were also learning to walk the walk. We’d walk out the front of the precinct, beneath the green lights that have marked police stations since Wall Street was a wall, and head out to post. We would stop by the management as soon as we got up there, either if a sector car rode us up, or more often, if we took the bus from 156th Street and Melrose up to Webster and 170th. Morris Houses had a manager who was almost as new there as its cops, but Ms. Brockington was a formidable lady who enjoined everyone around her to work as hard as she did, to help tenants or to hound them, according to need. Her secretary, Sarah DeBoissiere, had been at Morris Houses for over twenty years, and she was as hard and elegant as a malacca cane. She smoked long, thin cigarettes and wouldn’t empty her ashtray so she could keep track of how many she’d had. She had assembled her own rogues’ gallery of problem tenants, and she had the benefit of counsel of her fiancé, the legendary Detective Irwin “Silky” Silverman, who had caught killers for almost four decades before he lost his lawsuit to overturn the mandatory retirement age of sixty-three. The problem families at Morris Houses were well known and well established, sometimes for generations, and though they wrought spectacular havoc, they had been, until recently, virtually impossible to evict. One family of brothers, the sons of a South Carolina minister, were estimated to have committed more than fifteen hundred violent felonies, and their eventual removal was through the criminal-justice system rather than Housing Court. The Housing Authority had begun to press for evictions of tenants who committed crimes, or to negotiate the exclusion of individual family members—for example, if an old woman had a nephew dealing crack from her apartment, she would have to sign a stipulation saying he was not permitted to return—and it had begun to have an effect. After catching up with Ms. Brockington and Sarah, we’d sit down for a cup of coffee and the newspapers, and then head out for patrol.

The tenants themselves were organized, at least to a degree, at least on paper. I don’t know how Morris Houses compared to other projects, but I would imagine that they were not the only ones where a few people were heroically dedicated to their communities, and where a few more helped when they could. Every building had a captain, though I didn’t know most of them, and the honorific may as well have been kept on the shelf like an old Little League trophy. Others, like Curtis Johnson, swept and mopped their lobbies themselves, even though they were cleaned every day. About a third of our buildings had tenant patrols of some sort: a few people would sit in the lobbies around a bridge table, with a pad for visitors to sign in, and we had to stop by to sign in and check the building. A few buildings were watched over by old women who did not look up from their Bibles and wouldn’t unless the Holy Spirit entered the lobby. But others had real organizations, with a dozen or more tenants working tightly scheduled hours, and it had a definite effect, at least during the time of the watch, and if there was drug activity during their off-hours, they were at least able to let us know about it—quietly, always. Though the neighborhood had been improving, there was no guarantee that this would continue, and most members of the Resistance were wisely unwilling to declare themselves.

The neighborhood was one where children had to walk through three different brands of crack vials in the lobbies, and most people, young and old, could tell the sound of gunshots from fireworks or a car backfiring: the hard, sharp crack, like a broomstick snapped cleanly in half. But because the shocks were somehow anticipated—you knew there would be bodies—the genuine surprise was how wholesome and ordinary many lives were there: the daily round of getting the kids ready for school and going to work, wondering if they’ll get another year’s wear out of their car or winter coat. Life in the projects can be just like it is in suburbia, except it takes place on busier streets and in smaller rooms. Sometimes it’s better, in the way that city life, when it’s good, is better than anywhere else. Once, I went to the roof of a project and saw a hawk perched on the rail; always, you see the city in the near distance, its towers and spires studded with lights, both stately and slapdash, like the crazy geometry of rock crystal. There were many days when you felt sorry for people who worked inside.

And it was a revelation to see how many people in the South Bronx liked cops. In safe neighborhoods, a cop is part of the scenery, and mostly you don’t have time to pay attention. Before I became one, I noticed cops like I noticed mailboxes, which is to say barely, unless I needed one. But on my beat, I noticed how people noticed me, and especially among certain classes of people—older people, young kids, single women, people dressed for work or church—they looked at me with positive appreciation and relief. I was proof that tonight, on this walk home, no one was going to start with them. Sometimes, they expressed it, which was nice. The classic antagonism was with guys on the street, in groups, from the age of thirteen or fourteen on up to around twenty, or older if they were unemployed. Sometimes they were only going to make noise, sometimes they threatened to make more than noise, and I meant the opposite to them; I was a suggestion, a sign, that this wild night’s not going to be, not as they hoped, not here. Sometimes they expressed themselves, too. There were those who saw us as their protectors, and those who saw us as their keepers, and both were right. Each group taught me how to be a cop.

Early on, I wanted to tell these pure strangers who would meet me with such strong feelings, whether grateful admiration or vein-bulging rage, “Hey, I just showed up here—relax! Maybe in a minute, or a year, you’ll have a reason to love me or hate me, but as of now, you don’t know me!” And I did remind people, with partial success, when they verged on losing control. But I began to understand the variety and potency of the guises in which I appeared to them—rookie cop, Irish cop, white cop, housing cop, ghetto cop, good cop or bad, stone-hearted or sympathetic or scared. It was like being a kind of celebrity, and it was hard to convince people that I was not like what was portrayed on TV, because I played still another role even as I explained it that I wasn’t. I was not myself, but the latest cop, loaded with symbolism, and a loaded gun. For them, for now, I was the system.

when i joined the nypd in 1995, it was nearly four times larger than the FBI and four-fifths the size of the total staff of the United Nations. There are more cops in New York than there are people in Beverly Hills. Most people think of a cop as a uniformed officer from a precinct, or a detective in a squad, but Patrol Services and the Detective Bureau are only two of nine in the NYPD. In addition to the seventy-six precincts, Patrol also includes School Safety, the volunteer Auxiliary Police, and the Special Operations Division, for Aviation, Harbor, Emergency Services, and Homeless Outreach. Detectives are assigned to two additional investigative bodies, Internal Affairs and the Organized Crime Control Bureau, the latter of which encompasses Narcotics, Auto Crime, and Vice. The Housing Police became the Housing Bureau, whereas the Transit Police was folded into the Transportation Bureau, which also includes Traffic Control, Highway Patrol, and the Mounted Unit. Personnel covers Applicant Investigation, the Police Academy, Medical Division, and Employee Management; Support Services has the Property Clerk, Fleet Services, Central Records, and Printing; and Criminal Justice runs Central Booking for each borough and serves as a liaison to the district attorneys, the courts, and the Mayor’s Office. I doubt if one cop in ten could name each bureau at the beginning of his career, and even fewer could at the end.

In terms of hierarchy, the Job was only slightly less complex: the ranks from police officer to sergeant, to lieutenant and then captain, were determined through civil-service tests, and beyond that—deputy inspector, inspector, and four grades of chief, each gaining a star up to the four-star chief of department—the positions were appointed. Detectives were semi-appointed, in that the gold shield was generally given after eighteen months in what was classified as an investigative assignment, most often in Narcotics or a precinct detective squad. Though detectives did not outrank anyone, they alone took responsibility for a case or a crime scene, and this special autonomy led them to be seen as apart from the general chain of command.

As in most American cities, crime in New York had risen in the postwar decades, steadily or in great waves, and there was a deepening belief that no police department could do more than slow the tide. But the Giuliani Administration, then in its second year, had brought a new vigor to the NYPD, under Commissioner William Bratton and his three chief lieutenants, Jack Maple, John Timoney, and Louis Anemone. Previously, it was felt that the expense of police resources on people who hopped turnstiles or pissed in public when the mayhem had risen to such levels was foolish, to say the least. But the new approach held that killers and robbers are no more respectful of the little laws than the big ones, and stopping someone for smoking a joint allowed you to search them for weapons and run them for warrants. Many a cross-country career of rape and murder ended with a casual drink in New York. The frequency of these “stop-and-frisk” encounters also changed the culture of how criminals carried their weapons: in the 1980s and early ’90s, many dealers would carry guns in their waistbands, and the decision to shoot someone—because he crossed into their territory, or he said something about their mother, or he looked at them funny, or just because—was a three-second decision. After Bratton, the dealers still had guns, but they were hidden under their beds or on rooftops, and the delay from impulse to act took five minutes or ten, allowing people to move and tempers to cool.

Just as revolutionary was the “Compstat” system, devised by Jack Maple, in which commanding officers were regularly called down to police headquarters to account for crime and arrest statistics. All were gathered in an auditorium as the data was projected on a large screen and examined in a forum that was often Inquisitional in tone:

“You’ve had robberies for the last four Fridays on the corner of 163rd and Tinton. Why don’t you have a steady post there?

“You have three burglaries at the same address. How many parolees live there?”

“Your last three homicides are drug-related. Why haven’t any search warrants been executed in your precinct for six months?”

As the last and least of police officers, my class was unaware of this revolution, which struck terror in the hearts of captains and chiefs. Compstat led to a slew of resignations and transfers for those who could neither deliver on improvements nor explain why they had not. It also gave them greater freedom to address their problems, and it effected a greater degree of cooperation between bureaus, as Patrol, Narcotics, and Detectives were obliged to share burdens and pursue solutions together. For ordinary cops, old and new, it meant that what we did would be noticed, with closer attention than ever before. We were also given to understand that each arrest counted, and that, in time, we might, too.

early in the tour, the cops in the village would ask each other, “You lookin’?”—which meant for a collar. Some cops never were; others, always. I was looking, almost all the time. In situations where an arrest was unavoidable, like a family assault where the perp was on the scene, a cop who wasn’t looking usually could raise one who was, over the air, but everyone got stuck sometimes. Cops collared for overtime, or for the pure pleasure of the hunt, or in the mostly-correct belief that their efforts would eventually be rewarded. The cops who didn’t like to collar thought that the day was long enough as it was, or they were uncomfortable with the combative nature of court, or because since the merger of Housing with the NYPD, we processed our collars not at the PSA but at the local precinct, where we were not always welcome. We were extra work for their desk officers, who had to inspect and sign our paperwork and were responsible for our prisoners, should they get sick or claim abuse in the cells. Our bosses were supposed to sign the paperwork, but since we might only have one sergeant to cover housing cops in five precincts, they often couldn’t come. Many of the DOs were famously irritable, and one was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, right and left or left and right—I’d forget which—so if he wanted to see you or hear you, you had to jump from side to side.

And the process itself is laborious—if, for example, you arrested a man for hitting his girlfriend with a tire iron, and then found a crack vial in his pocket, the paperwork would include a Domestic Incident Report, for follow-up visits by the domestic violence officer; a “61,” or complaint, which describes the offense, perp, and victim; and an Aided Card, which contains information on the victim and what medical attention she received, which are assigned numbers from the Complaint Index and Aided and Accident Index. The Aided number goes on the 61, and the 61 and Aided numbers both go on the On-Line Booking Sheet (OLBS), which provides more detailed information on the perp, and has to be handwritten, then entered into the computer, which generates an arrest number. You would have to type two vouchers, both of which have serial numbers that have to be entered on the 61 and the OLBS, for the tire iron and the cocaine, affix a lead seal to the tire iron and put the crack vial in a narcotics envelope in the presence of the desk officer, writing your name, shield number, and the date across the seal. A Request for Lab Exam (Controlled Substance and “Marihuana,” in the NYPD spelling) is also filled out and attached to the envelope. You would run a warrant check on the computer, take three sets of fingerprints (city, state, and federal), each of which has to be signed by the cop and the perp, then bring the perp up to the squad to be debriefed by detectives, who ask if he knows about and is willing to talk about other crimes.

Generally, detectives investigate specific past crimes, and the interrogation aims for a confession or other inculpatory statement. The classic interrogation, in which the detectives sweet-talk, bluff, and browbeat the perp into an admission of guilt, is seldom a part of what a patrol cop does. Patrol responds to all manner of events—drug sales, disturbances, lost children—and debriefings seek to elicit information on broader criminal activity. Some offenses—many sex crimes, most domestic violence—take place outside of any larger criminal context, due to their spontaneous or solitary nature; wife-beaters don’t usually join a wife-beaters’ club, and rapists don’t have a union. But most robberies and all drug sales are committed by members of felony society, from suppliers to fences, and all manner of partners in crime. They know people, know things. And with every arrest, you take the time to persuade them to share that knowledge.

The prisoner is then searched again (he’s been searched twice before, at the scene and at the precinct) and delivered to Bronx Central Booking, at Criminal Court, where he waits in a holding cell until he’s arraigned before a judge. At CB, you photograph your prisoner, attach one picture to the OLBS and another to a Prisoner Movement slip, and have the prisoner examined by EMS, interviewed by the Criminal Justice Agency for his bail application, and searched again before he’s in the system, out of your hands. You would then see an assistant district attorney to write up and swear to a document that is also called a complaint. The victim also must appear, unless he or she is hospitalized or some other extreme circumstance presents itself, or the case is dropped. The entire process usually takes six to eight hours, though it could easily be twice that, if a prisoner was sick, a computer went down, or there was a backlog at Central Booking or the Complaint Room.

The paperwork, procedure, and personnel add up to bureaucracy, which is famously wasteful or a necessary evil, sometimes both. Sometimes it reaches a nuanced complexity that is itself somehow sublime, like a martial art. Once I arrested a sixteen-year-old for burglary, whose recent birthday permitted him to be charged as an adult. Several months earlier, when he was fifteen, he’d stolen the keys to his elderly neighbor’s apartment, and he helped himself to her belongings when he saw fit, sometimes with the coerced complicity of her ten-year-old grandson. The grandmother had made dozens of calls to the police, who were only able to file Lost Property or Petit Larceny reports and never had probable cause for an arrest. She had even gone to her congressman to demand an end to the reign of terror by the little boy downstairs. Finally, she caught him, held him at knifepoint until we arrived, and presented us with the perp, and her house key, recovered from his pocket. I charged him with Burglary, Criminal Possession of Stolen Property, and Possession of Burglar’s Tools, to wit, the previously stolen key. The ADA reduced the charge to Attempted Burglary, and wanted me to re-arrest him as a juvenile, charge him with Petit Larceny for the theft of the key, and present him with a Juvenile Appearance Ticket at his arraignment in Criminal Court, as an adult, and release him on his own recognizance to his mother for the simultaneous Family Court case. Now, you’re thinking, simple enough, but does he get the same arrest number for the adult and juvenile charges? Can he be in the system with two different arrest numbers, or since they’re different jurisdictions, is the conflict irrelevant? To put it mildly, the ADA and the supervisor at Central Booking disagreed, and I was sent back and forth between them—“The District Attorney has the case now, we’re the ones who decide”; “You’re a police officer, and I’m a lieutenant, and you’ll do what I tell you if you like getting a paycheck”—for several hours, diverted by a search in Family Court for missing forms for the juvenile arrest. When I called my sergeant to ask what to do, he laughed and said, “That’s a good one! Let me know what they decide, maybe it’ll be on the lieutenant’s test.” I know a decision was made, because I did go home at the end of that day, but God help me if I can remember what it was.

When you arrest someone, it’s like a blind date. You spend a few hours with a stranger, a few feet apart, saying, “Tell me about yourself.” You ask, “How much do you weigh?” and, “Are you a gang member? Really! Which one?” So maybe I haven’t been on a blind date for a while. But you do hold hands, for a few minutes, as you take prints, rolling each fingertip individually, then four fingers together, flat, and the thumb, flat, at the bottom of the card. Three cards for adults, four for juveniles. You coat a plastic plank lightly with ink, rolling it from a pad, then take each finger—“Relax!”—and roll it, on the plank and then on the card. A lot of people try to help you, rolling the fingers themselves, which usually smudges the impression; sometimes that’s their intent. Crackheads often don’t have usable prints, with fingers burnt smooth from gripping the red-hot glass pipe. Junkies, coming down, can go into a whole-body cramp, and have hands as stiff as lobster claws. Perps collared for robbery or assault might have bruised, swollen, and bloody fingers. You try to be gentle, and you wear latex gloves.

When you print a perp, you’re close to him, and because you’re close, you’re vulnerable. You take off the cuffs, and you put your gun in a locker. Once, I was printing a guy as he found out he was not getting a summons, but instead going through the system. He’d been shouting abuse at the desk officer—an excellent way to prolong your imprisonment—in a routine street-guy, trash-talking way, when he was told, in effect, that he faced another twenty-odd hours in lock-up instead of less than one. And he became enraged, screaming curses and threats, and I wondered if he’d make a run at the desk, or worse, at me. But I was holding his hands and could feel them, how they were limp and loose as if he lay in a hot bath, as if his body was indifferent to the hatred in his voice. So I went on printing as he went on shouting, each of us concentrating at the task at hand.

in time, my class of forty or so cops began to make names for ourselves at the precinct, as workers or weirdos, or as passing casualties of circumstance. A perp flipped out on one of us, putting the cop’s head through a window in the precinct; two cops made an off-duty drug collar at a bar, when a man offered them peyote; another cop fired a round when a homeless man surprised her on a roof landing. News of goof-ups or great collars were eagerly circulated, and nicknames began to stick: Smiley, Wimpy, Stix. If I had made a name for myself, no one told me. During one roll call, as names were called and duties assigned—a regular post might be changed to guard a DOA or a hospitalized prisoner, to fill a seat in the sector car, or to drive the boss—I felt bad for one poor guy, who was plainly deaf or AWOL as the lieutenant bellowed his name, without reply:

“Coyne!”

“Coyne!”

“Coyne, where the fuck are you!”

As the curses and shouts escalated, I was looking down, blithely writing in my memo book, until I felt the lieutenant’s breath: “What the fuck is wrong with you, Coyne! Do you need to have your fucking head examined? Is this some kind of fucking game?”

“Um, I’m Conlon, not Coyne, sir.”

The lieutenant snarled and turned away, as if I’d put one over on him. Bobby Coyne was another tall, skinny, quiet Irish guy, and our loose resemblance gave the advantage of invisibility. Osvaldo had something of a similar experience, though it was far more disturbing. One day, he received a notification from Internal Affairs, ordering him to appear downtown in six weeks, with an attorney present. When he called to ask what it was about, he was refused an answer, presumably due to the sensitivity of the investigation. He had to sweat it out, waiting sleeplessly for the date, and when he finally went down, it emerged that they had sent for the wrong man. Another cop with the same name was wanted for questioning in the “Dirty Thirty” corruption scandal that had broken not too long before.

That kind of event seasons and shapes a cop, colors his view of the Job from the inside, its bureaucracy and office politics, what it wants and how it treats its own. My outlook on the interior life of the NYPD was from a peaceful and largely positive remove, in that I thought a great deal of a lot of the bosses and very little of just a few, but I knew that the worst I could expect from the latter was a random tongue-lashing or a boring assignment for the night. For that matter, I was largely unsupervised—the forty or so PCOs ostensibly had a sergeant, but there were so many of us, working different times in different precincts, that I didn’t even know who my sergeant was. When a cop makes an arrest, a sergeant is supposed to be called to the scene, but at first I didn’t know that, and later I felt I knew what I was doing, and often enough, no sergeant could be found. The Job for me took place not in the precinct but on the street, and it was the public dimension of police work that held my interest and inspired my confidence. An irritable lieutenant made me more nervous than checking a rooftop alone at midnight. I preferred the outhouse to the house.

And since I tended not to work with cops who were senior in rank or experience, I learned to take the initiative and make decisions on patrol, quickly developing a rhythm and a style, a sense for when to step up or step back, as the situation required. Good cops are method actors, in that they make a controlled use of their emotions, from empathy or anger, depending on whether the scene to be played is a conflict with a crowd or persuading an Emotionally Disturbed Person (EDP) to go to the hospital. Once, a woman called to say that her son, a well-built schizophrenic, had gone off his medication, and I was able to cajole him into the ambulance, saying that I believed him when he said his medicine didn’t work, but only the doctor could change it, and he didn’t want his mother to worry, did he? As he walked out, his mother clutched my arm and said, “Thank you, Officer, thank you so much, this is the first time he went without fighting the cops!”

The police work of action, of confrontation and force, the roundhouse punches and high-speed chases, is what makes both the movies and the news—and, now and then, means everything in real life, our real life, too. But what you say and how you say it comes into play far more often than anything you do with your stick or gun, and can prevent the need for them. If you talk a good game, you’re halfway there. A talker can do things, or undo them: I know cops who have talked would-be suicides from rooftops, and who have convinced raving gunmen to release child hostages. More often, you talk people into talking, only talking, instead of screaming and waving a knife. There are fighting words and the opposite, passwords that most people seem to have, some topic or tone that cuts them short or brings them down, reaches them through reason, decency, or shame. I once watched an eight-year-old boy silence a foul-mouthed drunk in a pizza parlor, by barking at him like a colonel: “Hey! There’s ladies here!”

You also have to listen. You believe most people when they call you, because the help they need is obvious—they’re hurt or sick, or they’ve had something stolen. And you encourage them to talk, so they can ventilate, or rant themselves through to some vital detail (my favorite witness: “He was tall! Five-ten! Maybe even five-twelve!”), or, sometimes, to give themselves enough rope. When a robbery victim told Angel, Osvaldo, and me that three white men in white suits broke into her apartment, locked her in the bathroom, and made off with her cigarettes, I felt I had to question her further before I put out an APB for the Bee Gees. Her English was poor and a great set of dentures floated in her mouth, like she was sucking on a lump of ice.

When I first suggested an ambulance come, she shook her head no. “Sometimes you don’t know if you’re hurt right away, the shock of it and all, it’s best to be safe and check. Are you under any kind of treatment right now, do you take any medicine?”

She nodded. “For the voices.”

You have to ask. The quality of information you get is only as good as you demand, vetted through repetition and playback, prodded along for further detail, probed for the soft spots in the story like dry rot in a wall. You learned to pitch your questions. You didn’t ask, “Do you have a gun in the house?” because in perp-logic, an honest denial is appropriate because it’s not his gun, he’s only holding it. You’d ask, “Is there a gun in the house?” or better yet, “Where’s the gun?” The built-in presumption saved time: if you ran a warrant check for someone with a common name like Jose Gonzalez, and there was a hit for a Jose Gonzalez of 123 Broadway, you wouldn’t ask, “Did you ever live on Broadway?” but “When did you move from 123?”

For all that, you should still expect to get it wrong sometimes. Or for it to get you wrong. When I went to testify for the Grand Jury after a rape collar, I was greeted by the ADA with the eight words I least wanted to hear: “You know he has an identical twin, right?”

I wanted to shout then, but I didn’t. Maybe I should have, for the practice. You have to be ready to shout, or at least show your teeth. On most jobs, I rarely came on strong at first, so I’d have something in reserve, to raise the ante, and in the daily confrontations with groups loitering in the lobbies or in front of my buildings, there was plenty of rehearsal for each manner, hard and soft. I never made an empty threat and I never let anyone make one to me: if someone said they were going to hurt me, no matter how unimpressive the speaker or the speech, they would wind up in handcuffs or I’d wind up with a profound apology. Though I never had to do much more than push someone against a wall, I gained an understanding of the old-time cops who broadcast a message of respect with a nightstick. When you walked a beat like mine, the perps got a quick sense of how much they could get away with, which was as much as you let them. Moreover, when you let things like that slide, you’re “setting up the next cop,” who may be less capable of handling a perp who’s now willing to take it to the next level. You couldn’t let a perp “hook” you, taking the bait and blowing up over his remarks about your race, your mother, or your putative boyfriend, because when you lose control, you risk losing everything, and the law and the Job will turn on a dime from ally to enemy. And even with your allies, you had to be careful: a cop from my class arrested a perp, who then threatened to kill him, and then reported it at our command. It was probably nothing, he thought, but he decided to be safe and at least put it on record. Once formal notice was made to the Job, however, an exhaustive series of countermeasures ensued: there were meetings and debriefings and directives as the Intelligence Division assessed the threat, after which the cop was moved to another post. Had that happened to me, I would have seen it as a defeat—it would be the perp’s post again, and mine no longer.

And it was becoming mine. The appeal of patrol is its spontaneity and variety, reacting to the rhythms of the street, with its long lulls and sudden convulsions, of pick-up jobs and radio runs that propel you into action, or interaction; into a foot pursuit, a dispute, a birth. No other post was as busy—I might answer a dozen or more jobs a day—and I had finally begun to master the territory, learning the players and the plays. I worked with Leo, the super at Morris, in putting up floodlights in a few areas favored by nighttime dealers. One day we had to check all the elevator cars for contraband, and a maintenance guy showed us how to surf the elevators, riding atop them as they shot up hundreds of feet through the shafts. Whenever I collared up, I went upstairs to the Squad at the Four-Two, to ask the detectives if they were looking for anyone in the Village. The detectives welcomed with open arms any rookie who wanted to do their work for them—except for Howie “the Hump” Denton, a cigar-chomping First Grader, who would make a show of taking the burglary or robbery complaint I gave him, crumpling it up, and bouncing it off my head—“Thanks, kid, mark this closed”—before looking at it, and I was like a mascot for two partners, Donovan and Duarte, who’d hand me a polaroid of a perp and say, “Go get ’em, tiger!”

Sometimes I got ’em, and sometimes they got me. The first ten-year-old rape victim I interviewed, I had to camouflage what I felt, and I don’t think I succeeded. When you interview the victim of a sex crime, you have to be specific. You ask, “Did he put his penis in your vagina? Did he wear a condom?” Any anxiety on your part communicates to the victim, and it can make them more ashamed, less trusting in you and hence less safe. You can’t flinch, even when you ask a little girl, “Do you know if anything came out of his penis?” The second ten-year-old rape victim I interviewed, I didn’t have time to feel anything: I had to get the description of the perp over the air, collect information on the victim, an adult relative, the paramedic, and the hospital, direct the sealing-off of the crime scene (one elevator, the fourth- through the eighth-floor stairs, where he led her at knifepoint), and brief the succession of detectives and superior officers as they arrived. An old family friend, Inspector Thomas Mullen, responded that afternoon, and I was proud of the casual confidence with which he asked me, “Whaddaya got, Eddie?” But when it was over, I only thought about going home.

“Whaddaya got?” That’s what the boss asks when he arrives at the scene, to make a decision or review one you’ve made. You gotta have a story, as they say. You tell him, I got a dispute, a matched pair of bloody noses, a shaky ID on a chain snatch. I got a lady with a stopped-up toilet who thinks I’m gonna help mop the bathroom. I got an order of protection that says I have to throw the husband out of the house, but he has custody of the three kids because she’s a junkie and they have nowhere to go. I have twenty-seven facts in front of me, too many and not enough, in a broken heap like they fell off the back of a truck that left yesterday. I have a mini-mob beating a man bloody. Pardon me, mob, but why? Because he tried to lure an eight-year-old boy down the alley, to tell him special secrets. All right then, mob, hold off a bit, let’s talk to the boy. The boy is found, he says it wasn’t him, it was his friend Jose, who left, without a last name or address....The beaten man refuses to press charges, just wants to go home, less a half-pint of blood, a few teeth, and now that he notices, his watch. All right, mob, your work is done here, now you can go chase Frankenstein into the burning windmill. Whaddaya got? I got nothing, Sarge, and plenty of it. Good work, Officer, I knew you had it in you.

You may only have seconds to take stock, to make a nearly instantaneous appraisal of a jumble of allegations, injuries, insults, histories, and relationships between neighbors, brothers, lovers, ex-lovers, lovers again, with roots of enmity as tangled and deep as those between Balkan tribes. You say, “No, I just need to know what happened today....” The outpouring of stories can move like a horse race, a hectic and headlong jostling for position, but all moving in the same direction, toward the same finish. Or it can end up like a four-car crash at an intersection, where all the drivers sped up to lay triumphant claim to the right of way. Brawls often conclude with such a profusion of contradictory stories that you simply take the losers to the hospital and the winners to jail. Legally, the difference between harassment, for which you cannot make an arrest unless it happens in your presence, and assault, is whether or not there is an injury or “substantial pain.” Certain bodily grievances are tough calls: a bruise, a gash, a good lump is clear evidence of an assault, but I’ve surveyed people with a flashlight, trying to find a scratch as if it were a dirt road on a map—“There it is—no, there!”—and had to come up with kind words to inform the victim that she hasn’t suffered enough.

When a woman named Tonya called, she seemed to qualify squarely on the side of assault. She was surrounded by female relatives who let out a steady stream of consolations and curses, all attesting to her assailant’s history of violence. His name was George, and he was the father of her baby girl. Tonya moved stiffly and was covered with scuffs and scratches, and her earlobe was notched from where an earring had been pulled out. I asked her about it, and she said, “Oh, that’s old,” and looking closer, I saw that it was, as were many of the marks on her. But then she lifted up her pant leg and showed a fresh red scrape that covered most of the kneecap, and the course was clear. I asked for a detailed description, and got one: “He’s about five-eight and two hundred pounds, a lotta muscles and a bald head. Gonna take a lot of you cops to lock him up, ’cause he on parole for armed robbery and he say he ain’t goin’ back for nothin’!”

“Does he have a weapon now?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised.”

We set out to canvass the neighborhood. When Angel spotted him on the street, I called him over. He was as described, not an enormous man but a substantial one.

“You George?” I asked, and he said that he was, in a clear, precise diction that was unusual for the street. He’d spent his time well upstate. I asked if he’d fought with Tonya and he laughed, with mild embarrassment, as if he’d found out they’d awakened the neighbor’s baby.

“Yeah, we did argue, over some stupid little thing.”

“Tell you what, take a walk with us up there, let’s straighten it out.”

The only thing to be straightened out was the “confirmatory identification,” a procedural nicety for which I was glad to have his innocent cooperation. His complete lack of concern was puzzling, and suggested that either her story or his mind was plenty shaky. Upstairs, Tonya made the ID, I discreetly put my location and condition—“Holding one”—over the air and asked George for a lengthy, time-killing version of events, as if there was more to be discussed. But even when plentiful reinforcements arrived, and his alarm became demonstrable as he caught on to what was happening, we wanted to talk. We wanted him in handcuffs, but we would talk. Given his strength and the dimensions of the cinder-block hallway where we were gathered, no one wanted a brawl. And he didn’t fight, but he didn’t give up, pulling back as someone tried, gently, to take his arm, and he began to shake, and to bellow, “I did not hit her!” and “I am not going back to prison!” We were tempted to believe both statements, but managed to coax him into restraints, though he continued to shout, calling for neighbors to find other friends, his sisters, to let us know what was really going on.

As we put him in the car, George told us that Tonya was a crackhead, that he had custody of their infant daughter, that he was angry at her because she left the baby alone, that her marks were from a fight she had yesterday, that many people saw her attack him earlier that day, and saw how he never raised a hand. One woman, who looked like a crackhead, said she’d fought Tonya last night; a man, who didn’t, said he’d seen George endure Tonya’s beating without protest. Denise, another baby-mother—George had two daughters, each a few months old—whom he referred to as his fiancée, stood by him, shaking her head in disapproval of Tonya. But I still had a complainant, an ID, a fresh injury, and no choice. And when George admitted he “might have knocked her down,” I didn’t feel bad about taking him in.

At the precinct, he was still convinced he could convince me: “She’s wrong, man, I’m telling you, you know she’s wrong!” I told him, “Look, she’s the mother of your kid, you roughed her up, and you know that’s wrong. If she’s a crackhead, you shouldn’t leave the baby with her. I hear what you’re saying, but she’s hurt and says you did it, so there’s nothing I can do. You got a story—tell your lawyer, tell the judge, you’ll probably be all right.” He nodded. George underwent profound changes in manner as his thoughts strayed wildly from dark reveries of injustice, where his voice would drop an octave (“She’s wrong!”) to civil, smart, and likable reason, to soft-voiced and agile menace, where you couldn’t tell if he was putting on a mask or dropping one: “I did time, man, time. I know people who rob every day, I know people sell guns, sell machine guns. I know people, sell you a grenade, man, I could help you out....”

I was interested. I told him so. But I didn’t want to get greedy, let the balance tip from buyer to seller. I knew if he meant it, he’d say it more than once, and for it to work, he’d have to be willing to keep talking when he wasn’t wearing my handcuffs. So I treated him with consideration—“You got change? I’ll get you a soda”—told him what to expect (seeing a judge within twenty-four hours; time served, probably, on the assault), and continued to process the arrest. As he predicted, Tonya dropped the charges, and she even came down to Central Booking to take George home. (“It isn’t right what he did, but he takes care of the baby, we’ll work it out....”) He was elated as he left, telling me, “I’m gonna get you a gun collar!” I laughed as he turned away, and said, “Give me your number,” watching to see his reaction. He hesitated, then turned and gave me his beeper number. “I’m telling you,” he said.

there are arrests that cops hope and train for like athletes, and in this felony Olympics, collars for homicides, pattern crimes, and drugs by the kilo are considered gold medals. They used to call it “the Door,” and if your name was on the bottom of an On-Line Booking Sheet for the Son of Sam or the French Connection dealers, it would open for you. Sometimes you can almost hear the lock click open: on a routine car stop or hallway patdown, you can feel that this perp will take you more places than the Commissioner would, even if you married his daughter. But the likelihood that things will go wrong with arrests seems to escalate with their importance: a baroque legal system, combined with the whims of chance, provides an inexhaustible source of misadventure. You feel like a diver on the platform who has just noticed that all the judges are Russian.

There had been a number of sexual assaults on elderly women who had been followed into their buildings and taken at knifepoint into the stairwells. A sketch was circulated, of a Hispanic man in his mid-twenties, with short dark hair and a slight moustache. Ten percent of the neighborhood might have matched the description, except for the fact that the rapist was supposed to have striking green eyes. There had been numerous panicked sightings, most of them entirely without value, but when a number of calls came over about a suspicious person lurking on the 12th, 15th, then 16th floor of the building where the last rape had occurred, Osvaldo and I ran there. In the lobby, two people claimed to have seen him, but when we began to speak to a third, the first two disappeared. The last witness said the man was banging on an apartment door on the 16th floor. We called for backup, and Osvaldo stayed to freeze the lobby while I went upstairs.

The elevator was crowded as we started up, thinning out as it stopped on each floor. After two young guys got out, the older man next to me said, “Those are the ones who robbed me last month.” I felt like I’d been slapped: how many empty stairwells I’d walked, how many hours on rooftops I’d waited, watching for the bad guys, to have this sudden embarrassment of riches thrust upon me. But the older man insisted that he hadn’t reported it then and didn’t want to now, and I didn’t push him like I might have, as the elevator reached the 16th floor.

At the apartment, a young woman told me, “My mom’s not here, but this guy was just banging on the door, asking for her. I don’t know him, I said she wasn’t here, and he tried to get in, he turned the knob and pushed.” She thought she had seen him before, in passing; her mother, whose name was Barbara, was similar in type to the other victims. Another neighbor, who had followed me to the door—she had called 911—was horrified to hear the story: she knew that the man used to go out with another woman on the floor, but she had called only because she’d seen him standing in a stairwell with a strange look on his face. We had a male Hispanic in his twenties with a moustache, who was familiar with the building, wandering around, acting bizarrely, and attempting to enter the apartment of an older woman. It looked better than good.

I went downstairs to get Osvaldo, and when a sector arrived I asked those cops to freeze the lobby. We went up for a vertical patrol, and when we reached the 16th floor, we came upon a man in the hallway. We walked toward him and he walked away, a little faster, though there was nowhere to go—“Hold on, boss, slow down”—and he broke into a run, and as we tackled him, he began to scream, “Barbara! Barbara! I love you! Help me! Someone get a video! They didn’t identify themselves as a police officer! Help!” He got something into his mouth and chewed it, and we got him down but for a long time we couldn’t get any further. We wrestled with him for what seemed like ages, he was limber and strong and sweat-soaked, slippery as a live fish; we tried to get him to spit out what he had in his mouth—it turned out to be cocaine wrapped in a dollar bill—and at one point, Osvaldo and I actually took a break, sitting on him, looking at each other and catching our breath. When we finally cuffed him up, his hands and mouth were bloody. He looked just like the police sketch, with the distinctive green eyes. We later found out that his ex-girlfriend, who lived on that floor, had thrown him out on the day of the last attack. When Sgt. O’Hagan arrived, he looked at him, and then he looked at us, and smiled. “It’s him. Definitely. You got ’im.” Visions of medals and promotions danced in my imagination, sustaining me through the long night ahead.

At the precinct, he collapsed, and he told the paramedics he’d ingested three grams of cocaine, half while he lurked in the stairs, half in the dollar bill while we wrestled him. At the hospital, his heart rate was 220 beats per minute, and they made him drink an electrolyte solution and eat activated charcoal, which made him drool black. He was handcuffed to the cot in the ER, while the midnight pageant of medical catastrophes were brought in: one Emotionally Disturbed Person, who bit clean through his tongue, clipping it into a precise impression of his upper teeth. Another EDP, an enormous drunk picked up from the streets, floating in and out of consciousness, writhed and thrashed as a little Filipino nurse tried to draw blood: “Now I prick you! Now I just prick you!” An old man threw up and another prisoner-patient, handcuffed to the cot next to him, kindly handed him the closest receptacle he could find—a plastic pitcher half-filled with urine, which splashed back as he vomited and made him vomit more. And a beautiful teenage Spanish girl, who had choked on cotton candy hours before at a carnival. Her problem was long gone, as were her once-worried friends, but she had been told to remain for examination. She was more than a little embarrassed.

“Well, I hope we all learned an important lesson about chewing our food.”

“Shut up.”

But she soon went home, and I was left with the wretched strangers. We’d made the arrest eight hours into the tour, and I waited with him at the hospital for another nine, and only then did I begin the arrest processing. I’d worked almost around the clock before Special Victims called to say that my perp had already been taken in for a line-up and had not been identified. In my mind, I began to rehearse the arguments: they were elderly victims, traumatized, maybe with bad eyesight...but it was pointless. In this kind of case, without an ID, there was often nothing to go on. And then, suddenly, I hated him. Throughout our ordeal, I’d felt nothing toward him, no contempt or anger, even when I fought with him, even though I believed he had done hideous, brutal things. Suddenly, I hated him, because he had changed; he was no longer a trophy, a magnificent and malignant catch, but some random asshole who had stolen an entire day of my life. He asked me mildly what he was being charged with and I told him. His tone was pouty when he responded, “Criminal trespass, isn’t that a little harsh, Officer?”

I just looked at him, but it must have been expressive. “Sorry,” he said, turning away. You can’t cry for every crime victim you come across; you can’t even cry for the awful ones, not if you want to work for twenty years, and often the way to catch someone is to want to, very much. A few days later, I saw him on the street, and he said hello. I didn’t. A few days after that, he beat up his girlfriend again, then disappeared. There weren’t any more rapes.

what can you say? most of the time, in the end, you say 90-X, 90-Y, or 90-Z. These radio codes give dispositions, meaning unfounded, unnecessary, or gone on arrival. The terse dispatch of them—“You can X that, Central”—can reduce an epic to a letter, scraping it clean of context, all the drama and the decisions. My uncle Eddie had been a cop for over three decades, and when I first looked at his memo books, I was surprised at how little they said, given the zany color of his stories. The jumpy, crabbed notations of “all normal” and “nothing to report” were barely less vivid than the occasional mention of a parking ticket issued or “three under arrest—burglary.” But in time, I came to appreciate the telegraphic brevity of the codes, which allowed me to finish stories I barely knew how to start. Angel and I once went to a 10-10, a possible crime, in this case a “dangerous animal condition.” The complainant was a woman on the 19th floor of one of my buildings, and a familiar caller. A stout, opinionated lady in her early fifties, she claimed to be the frequent victim of espionage on the part of her cable company, the Housing Authority, and several less terrestrial bodies, against which she protected herself by covering the walls and ceilings of her entire apartment with tinfoil. I sometimes wondered if it was a cop who had recommended it, to buy a few weeks’ peace while she busied herself with the defenses. I know it wasn’t a fireman, because the foil, which was tattooed all over with pentagrams, covered a thick layer of crisp and dry newspaper, mostly department-store circulars for men’s underwear.

“I need you to get rid of my cat, it attacked me, it’s crazy, it changed. I can’t have it here, it used to be so wonderful, it’s a mystical cat, you know, a Jewish cat. I tried everything, petting it, feeding it, throwing boiling water at it—nothing works, nothing!”

It was five in the afternoon, and our options were limited. Her son was with her, a large, shambling man in his early thirties who kept a weary and sheepish distance, meeting my eyes briefly when I looked to him, then shrugging and shifting aside. It was too late in the day to call the ASPCA for a pick-up. I doubted the cat was dangerous as much as I doubted the cat was Jewish, but the last thing I was going to do was call Emergency Services. When you call out the SWAT team for a kitten, other cops tend to bring it up now and then—one guy couldn’t talk on the radio for months without hearing meows in the background. She rambled on, “I would have called Augie to take it out, you know, Augie’s in the Mafia, he’d kill anyone for me, but he can’t do it now, he can’t, and the cat’s in my bedroom and I can’t go in....”

I began to tell her that the best thing to do was to confine the cat in another room and leave it alone, while I would make an appointment with the ASPCA to take it off her hands the next day. She would have none of it, and with one hand on a hip and the other slicing the air she let me know she had dealt with my type before: “You will take care of this now or I will call the Housing Authority! I will call your captain! I will call Jim Jensen at Channel Seven News! I will call Eyewitness News! Yes, I’m calling now, give me Eyewitness News!”

As she marched to the phone to punch random numbers, I sidled over to the son and said, “Listen, why don’t you shut it in another room?” He looked at me weakly, and his mother hung up the phone. “My son,” she hissed with dry distaste, “is mentally ill.” Silly me. Silly all of us.

Though I had decided our course by then, I thought I’d check the cat, to make sure it was in fact safe enough to remain in the apartment overnight. When I opened the door to the woman’s bedroom, I saw a small white cat lying on the bed. A brown patch of fur on its head did look something like a yarmulke, but otherwise neither its religious affiliation nor its menace was obvious. When I took a step toward it, however, the transformation was profound: the back arched, the ears flattened, the eyes narrowed, and it seethed and spat like a cobra on crack. This lady didn’t need a cop, she needed an exorcist. I withdrew and closed the door.

“Okay,” I said. “The cat has to go.”

From there, mother and son became my loyal aides-de-camp in the campaign that followed. A large piece of plywood was set up in the hallway to block access to the living room, and all doors were shut except for those to the mother’s room and a smaller, spare room beside it. The first phase would be to isolate and contain the cat in a secure area, and the second phase...the second phase would certainly commence when the first phase was brought to a successful conclusion. Angel kept mother and son stationed behind the barrier as I put on my gloves, picked up a broom, and reentered the bedroom. Again, the cat bared its teeth and swiped with its paws, coiling up on the bed to prepare for a leap, but as I came closer it bolted for the radiator, and the merry chase began: the cat dashed to the top of the cabinet and then to the radiator, and then under it, and then under the bed, paused to turn and fight, meeting the broom and tearing at it as I tried to herd it out to the door. Again and again, it would bolt and then turn and fight, and hiss and spit, its lithe swiftness as amazing as its hatred. Once more it fled between cabinet and bed before it charged me and I fell back, swinging the broom, before it dodged and sped into the hall. But before the cries of acclaim could erupt from behind the barrier, the mother and son fell back, too, as the cat raced to them, leaping up and over the plywood as they dropped it, and pursuing them into the living room, where the field of battle was greatly enlarged.

“Get back! Get back! I’ve got it!”

I picked up the barrier again and sent them behind it, and once more engaged the cat: its rage, speed, claws, and teeth against my broom, my paramilitary training, and a chorus of meows on the radio echoing in my head. Here, it had the couch, chairs, cabinets, and shelves, a windowsill with heavy drapes, and an entire kitchen for its guerrilla maneuvers, and it made use of all of them in its rounds of flight and fight. As I fought on without success, my supporters were galvanized, and the woman cheered me on and brainstormed: “I know! Fire! We’ll burn him out! All animals are afraid of fire!”

“Don’t you dare! Angel! Stop her!” I shouted, but as I swept the cat from beneath the drapes, he darted for the kitchen, and after reconnoitering atop the refrigerator, he dove to the floor and under the stove. I paused to think and to breathe. As far as I saw it, we were still in Phase One.

“Still out on that ten-ten, unit?” came the call over the radio.

“Still out, Central.”

Clearly, there was need for further revision of our strategy. The barriers were changed again, so that they led to the open door of the apartment. Once out, I figured, all of us—cat, crazies, Angel, and myself—would return to our better natures, and resume our lives on some kind of normal footing. Also, I didn’t care anymore. So I returned to the kitchen and lifted up the stove, where the cat, writhing beneath, had become coated with the grease of a decade of breakfast bacon and Easter hams. The broom seemed to hold no more terrors for the cat, and I wielded it less adeptly as I also had to hold up the stove. I had to escalate, and I gave it a few blasts of mace—the old kind, which was a kind of weak cousin to tear gas—and though it had no apparent effect on the cat, it drove me, choking, outside into the hall. As I gasped for breath, I saw with my reddened eyes the woman leap across the living room with a great cooking pot stuffed with blazing newspapers, the flames reflecting off the foil walls.

“All animals are afraid of fire!” she shrieked, and I bellowed “No!” and raced back inside. Angel ran in to take her outside, and though I stamped the pot out before the fire engulfed the apartment, I was now doubly choked by the acrid bite of tear gas and the unfurling plumes of smoke, which set off the fire alarms throughout the floor. Neighbors began to step out of their apartments to investigate. I sent them back inside.

“It’s all right, folks—the police are here, everything’s in hand, nothing to worry about.”

I was humbled and a little worried—if help arrived, I would have much to explain—but the woman was delighted. She called the police twice a week, and usually got a couple of guys who walked away a minute later, muttering about straitjackets; here, a hero had arisen who brought down forces of destruction that might well be commensurate with her perception of the threat. I had turned the place into Beirut, and she couldn’t be more grateful. I opened the windows until the air cleared, and I almost toppled the stove to sweep the cat out from its refuge. Ignoring the open door, it bolted over the barrier and fled back into the bedroom. There, it darted between bed and radiator again, as if to show that the learning curve for both cat and cop remained flat, before it took off for the window, and slipped outside to the ledge. And then, I had a revelation: a vicious cat could not be put up for adoption. No matter the provocation, the cat would have no day in court; my nemesis had no future beyond being drugged, bagged, and caged before being put down. I moved forward without thought, but as if guided by some mysterious force. As I put my hands on the window, the cat scrambled to turn and come at me, but lost its footing and dropped from sight. The woman called the precinct for weeks afterward, demanding to talk to the captain to tell him what great work I had done. But when the desk officer asked me what had happened, I just shrugged and repeated what I’d told the dispatcher when she asked about the job:

“Still out, on that ten-ten, unit?”

“Make that a ninety-Z, Central.”

The technical term for that kind of event is “clusterfuck,” and whenever I began to feel I had a handle on the Job, some cluster would break out, reminding me of how much I was unready for. The novelty of knocking on a door and calling out “Police! Open up!” had passed—Yeah, I mean me!—and I was comfortable on post, answering jobs, learning more faces and names. And in time, as I ran into cluster after cluster, I began to see them not as testimonials to how much I had to learn, but as proof that I never would get it all. And that was the better wisdom, because when a cop thinks there is nothing left to see, he may not take the trouble to keep his eyes open.

for the most part, the time you spend with people you tend to like and respect occurs when they’re at a very low point in their lives: they’ve just been robbed, or are having severe chest pains, or their husband is dead in the back bedroom. You are less the bearer of bad news than the proof of it. More often, you become bound up in lives that are dismal and messy: junkies who take too much, EDPs who won’t take anything for their pains. As you make the acquaintance of their broken minds and ruined bodies, you reluctantly invade their privacy, and you must vigilantly protect your own.

It can be troubling to be so intimate with these random strangers. And not just with criminals, though you see more of a person searching drug dealers (“Lift ’em. Arright, turn around and spread ’em.”) than you ever wished. There are matter-of-factly named “lift jobs,” for the elderly or ailing who have fallen down. I did one for a man who weighed more than 300 pounds, with two-thirds of it on the hips and legs, which were massively swollen and corrugated like Godzilla’s. He wore a short nightshirt with no underwear, and his bladder control was chancy at best. His condition was the result of having been told he had cirrhosis of the liver years before and saying, “Hell, I’m still gonna have a drink now and then.” Do you help him? Of course, you lift him up. Do you feel for him? All right then, move along now, nothing to see here, move along.

It was near the end of tour, and I was headed back to the precinct when an Aided case came over the air. Aideds are among the most frequent jobs, usually entailing an escort of EMS to the scene of an illness or injury. When Osvaldo, Angel, and I arrived in the apartment, I could tell from the smell why someone had called. Walking down the hall, past numerous, spacious rooms, the rank, ripe odor of a body grew stronger, and when an expressionless sixteen-year-old girl directed me to the last bedroom, I was thrown less by the sight of the still, frail old Puerto Rican woman in bed than by that of the four EMTs working around her. Two were crying.

The old woman was naked, lying face-down, stuck to plastic sheets, and her body made a crackling sound when she was unpeeled from them. She had once been a hefty woman, but she looked now less slimmed-down than deflated: her breasts were empty, pressed against her chest, and the bones of her hips and thighs were plainly visible, draped by loose, lifeless skin. Maggots crawled on her, inch-worming along, popping off like broken watch springs. There was rodent excrement in the bed with her, and examining her legs, one EMT said, after a horrified intake of breath, “Those are rat bites! Whoever did this to her should go to jail!”

The old woman let out a breathy moan as she was rolled over, feeling pain wherever her body was alive. And that’s why the EMTs, who see dead children and bodies in pieces as a matter of course, were brought to tears. This woman was dying, was in fact dead in lesser percentages, as maggots do not eat live tissue. And she didn’t live alone. I turned away and went to talk to the teenage girl: “Who takes care of this lady?”

“Well,” she huffed, in a long-suffering tone, “I’m the one who does most of the work.”

“Who lives here? How old are they?”

“Me and my sister and my grandmother. My sister’s twenty-three but she’s out now. I’m the one who does most of the work.”

“Can you tell me why you didn’t feed her?”

“She said she wasn’t hungry.”

“Why didn’t you call a doctor?”

“I’m the one that did.”

“Before now, why didn’t you call?”

“My mom said not to.”

Her mother lived in another part of the city. I told her to call her mother and tell her to go to the hospital. I asked how they lived, and she said her grandmother got checks, and her sister cashed them to run the household. I called a sergeant over and explained the situation in a rapid, dazed manner that made him look at me, carefully, before we all went downstairs. Ordinarily, EMS prefers to have a relative ride with the Aided, but when the teenager approached the ambulance, the no-longer-crying EMT told her, curtly, “You want to visit Grandma? Take the bus.”

Back at the precinct, it took a while to figure out how to write the complaint, aside from descriptions of rat bites and maggots. The girl was too young to be charged. And the offense was not clear; while there are many laws regarding the care of children, the elderly are less explicitly protected. I found a misdemeanor called “endangering the welfare of an incompetent adult,” and named the adult sister and the mother as perpetrators. The sergeant pointed out that there were checks coming in, so “investigate larceny” was added. And that, I realized without satisfaction, explained the family’s nearly homicidal neglect. The old woman was the keystone of a tidy edifice of subsidies: a large apartment, Social Security, welfare for the teenage girl. If she went to a hospital or nursing home, all these benefits would vanish from their pockets. People talk about living from paycheck to paycheck; this family almost let a woman die that way.

I found out later that detectives made arrests at the hospital. I was also told that the two sisters sometimes visited their grandmother in the nursing home where she was later sent, and were trying, without success, to bring her back home. Another cop’s mother worked there, and he told me, “And the old lady, she’s kind of nasty herself.” Sometimes, the victims are less sympathetic than the offenders. When a woman called to say that her thirteen-year-old son had locked her out of her house for hours, Osvaldo and I responded, and we told her we couldn’t knock down the door unless there was an emergency. She would have to pay for it, and we would have to wait until it was fixed. For more than an hour, we knocked, reasoned and threatened, fiddled with the locks. She had obtained a Family Court warrant that allowed her to call the police whenever she couldn’t control her son, and we would bring both parties to court, or the child to an overnight facility if court was not in session. It was a responsible act, on her part, but one of few, it seemed. We had ample time to find out about the family. “Is there someone he isn’t mad at, who could talk to him, get him to open the door?” “Oh, he’s not mad at me,” she said. I let it go. “Maybe a friend from school?” “I been tellin’ him to go to school since last year,” she said, adding that he stopped because the other kids beat him up. Asked why, she said that he wore makeup and women’s clothes. Osvaldo went to get a coat hanger, to see if he could work the chain off. The woman went on about her troubles, how the boy’s father had left her, how she worked, how the boy stayed out till dawn, how all kinds of adult men called him. She paused a moment, as if she’d just remembered, and said, “I had a three-year-old, she died. She was pretty.” She paused again, and said, “I wish that faggot never was born.” Osvaldo got the door open. The thirteen-year-old, a light-skinned black boy with hair dyed a sunny yellow, was asleep. He seemed genuinely asleep, and I hesitated, unwilling to take him to kiddie jail for being a sound sleeper. But he admitted that he heard us, pounding and shouting through the afternoon, and I told him to get some things together, that he was going to court in the morning. I saw by his bedside a list of about twenty names, all male, and all but a few with beeper rather than phone numbers. His mother showed us the warrant, then picked up a skimpy pair of gold satin shorts, held them up to her substantial waist, and said, “Who wears these? Not me!” What friendly or fatherly advice was there to offer? I didn’t peddle my ass when I was thirteen years old, young man, and now I have a cushy civil-service job....We drove downtown without saying much, and I haven’t seen him since. Another time, as I stood outside the management office, I saw that a middle-aged woman was staring at me, in the throes of indecision about whether to approach. I went over to her and asked if I could help. “My husband, he beats me, he beats me very bad.” I pressed her for details, telling her how even if I couldn’t make an arrest, she could get an order of protection, but she brushed me aside: “No, no, that’s all no good. My daughter, she says she’s just gonna get somebody to take care of him.” I told her that if he was beaten, he’d probably take it out on her anyway, and again, she saw I didn’t get it: “I don’t mean beat him up, I mean, take care of him. You know!” She raised her eyebrows, like she was letting me in on a sweet deal. “What do you think?” “Lady, you noticed I’m wearing a blue hat, badge, the rest? That I’m a cop? And you want to know what I think about having your husband killed?”

We parted before she could ask me to quote a price, each convinced that the other had only a flimsy grasp of reality. A few hours later, I responded to a call of a “violent domestic dispute,” and a cop named Anna Ramirez backed me up. A middle-aged man answered the door and allowed us in. He was in his underwear and seemed at ease, showing us around with a cavalier smirk. He was large and strong, and had a corrupt and military air, as if he were some tropical Presidente for Life. I didn’t like him, and Anna hated him. There was no one else in the apartment, but as we left, I noticed the woman’s picture on the wall. She was trying to win our argument, I think, saying, “Look at him. Look. If this one ended up dead, would you really come after me?”

The dead are commonplace for cops, and the sight of bodies never troubled me much, even from the beginning. My first murder was an awful one—an old man, on the floor in a hiked-up flannel nightshirt, who had been strangled, stabbed, and beaten, his arms bent into unnatural angles like chicken wings, and though I felt sorry for him, I wasn’t unduly troubled. Sometimes homicide victims have a peaceful expression, while deaths from natural causes can appear as horrific as the worst crime scenes: one elderly diabetic fell down, and apparently tried to crawl to the phone as he died of cardiac arrest. It looked like he had been picked up and smashed around the room: his face was contorted and his body was bruised all over; there were bloody handprints on the wall and long, slashing smears of blood and shit on the floor. The stillness of the dead transfixes me, reminding me that nothing living doesn’t move, not the deepest sleeper or a cat on the prowl, poised to leap. There is always some rhythm, some tremble or shift, that betrays animation. Only when that goes do they become motionless as photographs, as stones, and their meaning, like their movement, is only in what they inspire in those around them.

One old man lived alone, and died crumpled on the floor in the little alley between the bed and the wall, wearing a dirty shirt and no pants. His room was small and cluttered, and all his clothes were in old suitcases, or stacked beside them, as if he were packing for a long trip. There were two televisions, one old, one brand-new. A manic kitten darted amid the piles of clothes and rubbish around the body. Because he lived alone, we had to search for valuables, in the presence of a sergeant, and voucher them at the precinct. We found his discharge papers, false teeth, and stacks of pornography. The other cops left and I stayed. It was my turn to sit on the DOA, waiting for the ME to have a look, then the morgue crew to take him away. A man knocked at the door and said, “I took care of him, I’m his stepson. He wanted me to have the TV.”

I told him to get some proof, and until then he should take the kitten. He left and I turned on the television. Less than an hour later, he returned, with a lady friend. Both were roaring drunk, and demanded in unison, “We loved him! We was his family! Let’s have that TV!”

I closed the door on them and sat back down. There was a phone call. I waited, then picked it up, hoping that whatever friends or family he had, whoever cared for him, would not learn of his death by accident, from a stranger.

“Is Mr. Jones at home?”

“No, he isn’t.”

“Is this...Mrs. Jones?”

“No.” But thanks for asking.

“When will he be available?”

“No time soon.”

“When should I call back?”

“Can I ask who this is?”

“Mr. Jones had recently expressed an interest in our low-cost insurance policies, and...”

“He’s not interested.”

“And who, may I ask, is this?”

“The police. Mr. Jones is dead, that’s why I’m here.”

“Well, do you think—?”

“Dead.”

“There may be some—”

“Dead, dead, dead. He’s stuck to the floor six feet away from me, guy, no sale.”

“Have you considered whether you have all the coverage you need, Officer?”

I hung up and went back to watching television.



TWO

One night on patrol, I went to an Aided case, a medical call for help. A woman’s ankles had begun to bleed and would not stop, because of collapsed veins, she told me. She was in her early thirties and had nine children. Her feet bled like stigmata, as if there were no cause but grief. Her children ranged in age from newborn to young teens, in color from dark to pale, and together they looked more like a United Nations assembly than one little country. The ambulance took a long time to come, so my partner that day—an older cop whose steady partner was out—and I passed the time by talking with the kids, who gathered around us. A boy of eight or nine was mesmerized by us, by the sight of our blue uniforms, our cuffs and guns.

“Lemme see the handcuffs, lemme try,” he said. I handcuffed him— rear-cuffed, as per Patrol Guide, Section 114-08—and gave him the key. He tensed up for a moment, planning his strategy, then twisted himself around mightily before collapsing in a spasm on the floor, where he flopped about like a fish on a dock. The key went flying. I picked it up and handed it back.

“I bet you twenty dollars you can’t get out in one minute.”

“Three minutes,” came back the immediate counteroffer. I checked my wallet: I had a twenty-dollar bill, plus a couple of singles. I planned to give him a buck for the effort.

“Go ahead, three minutes.”

He sat down on the ground, drew his legs through his cuffed hands, bent his wrists perpendicular, and unlocked the cuffs. He had two minutes and forty seconds to spare.

“Want me to do it again?”

“No, I want you to shut up.”

The ambulance had come, and I handed him the money, suddenly realizing that I could now afford exactly one slice of pizza for dinner. He careened around the apartment, holding the prize aloft like a pennant, followed by his pack of siblings. We left, but he ran out into the hall after us, telling me his mother wanted him to give it back. He offered the money far more matter-of-factly than I would have managed at his age, rounding out a two-minute circuit of rags to riches to rags. And though I’ve never been much of a gambler, I wasn’t about to welsh on whatever his name was, the plucky little waif who’d taken me for a ride.

“No, a bet’s a bet. Tell your mother the police said you had to,” I said, and he was content that there would be no more argument. The reality of the win now seemed to set something off in him, and he attached himself to me, determined to unburden himself of all his knowledge before I got to the elevator. Random pronouncements left him with such a rising and urgent rhythm that they took on the fervor of prophecy:

“I’m gonna ride in a limousine...

“You better watch your back out there!

“Do you read the Bible? It says the world is gonna end pretty soon. Do you believe it’s gonna end? I do!

“The guy who sells crack in the lobby, his name is Roscoe, I can watch him and you can lock him up—and then you can come over for dinner!”

For days after, the older cop could not look at me without laughing. “You’re gone,” he said. “You’re done.” He was right, though he had no idea how right. Like my great-grandfather Paddy the Cop, I was gambling on job time. Taking after my uncle Eddie the Cop, I helped a poor kid out with a little cash, no matter if it was the last thing I’d intended. And as for a resemblance to my father, I may have to reach a bit—though I did gain an informant—but I put on my hat, and walked out into the evening, and was swept up in quiet awe at how this Job and this City can pull you in with its wreckage and wonders, unsatisfied with only one lifetime.

when i was a teenager, i stayed over at a friend’s house in Brooklyn. His grandfather, who had briefly served as police commissioner, lived with the family. The Commissioner was a massive and shadowed form in the corner, still as a statue, like a stone Buddha in an ancient temple lost to the jungle. He seemed old enough to know anything, and so I asked him if he knew my great-grandfather Sgt. Patrick Brown, who joined the NYPD a few years after Brooklyn joined the City, and who retired at the onset of the Second World War.

“Sure I knew Pat Brown,” he said, stirring. “He used to carry the bag on Atlantic Avenue.”

As my mother said when I dutifully reported this to her, “They were different times, back then.” The whiff of Capone-era rascality delighted me, in fact, much more than had I been told that he was straight and upright as a flagpole. I knew good cops all too well, and to have the other kind—at a safe distance—offered novelty and contrast, the glamour and danger of bootleg whiskey. When I became a cop and began to think about it again, I wasn’t proud—though it would be an exaggeration to say it kept me awake at night. Now, the memory is a curiosity, so remote from my own life that it has the discreteness of an object, like the “come-alongs” my father once showed me. They were wrist restraints, also called “nippers,” and cops carried them through the 1950s. Made of a short length of chain between two T-bars, they worked like handcuffs, except you had to hold on to them, and their coiled weight, dull steel gleam, and imagined history made them satisfying to look at and feel and wonder about. You wrapped them around one wrist and twisted, and though it left a perp one free hand, you could snap the bone in a second. Come-alongs depended on a cop’s control. They could do what good or harm you wanted, as long as you kept your grip.

I’d bet that many cops now wouldn’t even know that a bagman collects money, as an intermediary between the underworld and the upper—it is becoming a fragment of obsolete criminal slang, like “yegg” for safecracker or “betty” for picklock. For us, “the bag” is the uniform. Almost all I know about my great-grandfather is summed up in that simple, double-edged phrase, “the bag.” He spent thirty-three years on the job, mostly in uniform. The six years he lived afterward were occupied in the operation of a horse room in New Jersey. The transition from law enforcement to the sporting world, I am told, was not abrupt. Pictures of him show a handsome man, well-fed and well-tailored, a figure of overripe charm with a note of elegant menace. He looked like the kind of character played in movies by Brian Dennehy or Charles Durning, winningly fleshy, light on his feet, and quick with his hands. He seemed determined that his appearance reflect his place in the world, and if his attire was a little flashy but of good quality, bespeaking both gentleman and gangster, then it may have described him more truthfully than he intended. In fact, after he retired to the horse room, where bets were collected and paid as the teletype hammered out news from the track, the progression from crooked cop to upstanding criminal could be viewed as a step in the right direction, at least in terms of appearances.

When Patrick Augustine Brown was appointed to the New York City Police Department on June 8, 1907, he was obliged to purchase two bags, for summer and winter. The summer uniform consisted of a gray helmet, white gloves, a dark single-breasted tunic with a white leather belt, and trousers with a white stripe on the side. For winter, there were a blue helmet and greatcoat, with a double row of brass buttons. In better neighborhoods, the uniform was a thing of splendor, a fit garment for a figure of respect, and in poor neighborhoods it could make cops stand out like redcoats in a forest of angry Indians. At the time, hoodlums would wait on top of buildings and push the chimneys down on passing cops (although generally the noise gave the patrolman a chance to run), or overwhelm them and stuff them into coal boxes. These assaults were directed at the bag itself; at the dignity of office—though it could be argued that the other kind of bag represented just as pernicious a threat.

In his book Low Life, Luc Sante says the patrolman’s lot at the turn of the century was “a choice between starvation and extortion,” and Pat Brown did not go hungry. At his retirement dinner in 1940, the menu told of roast spring chicken with chestnut stuffing, rissole potatoes and “bisquit tortoni.” Though Brown retired as a sergeant, his dinner was attended by a number of inspectors and the Honorable William O’Dwyer, district attorney of Kings County, former cop and mayor-to-be. O’Dwyer had worked with Brown years before, and both careers testified to the fact that New York was a place where you could go as far as you liked, and maybe farther than you should. Or maybe it suggested that, at its worst, America offered a choice between evils.

O’Dwyer, a thoughtful, large-hearted man, was an Irish immigrant with the common touch. His goodwill and good fortune, his rise from Ellis Island to Gracie Mansion, made him an epitome of New World promise, and his canny but easygoing pragmatism made him a New York natural. “Lots of people would have us believe this town is loaded with thugs, racketeers, gamblers,” he said. “I said it’s a friendly city. It’s been friendly to me.” O’Dwyer’s friendliness extended to a pre-election meeting with gangster Frank Costello, and his decidedly incomplete success in the prosecution of Murder, Incorporated, nearly led to his own indictment. When a police-corruption scandal erupted involving a Brooklyn gambler named Harry Gross, Mayor O’Dwyer was hastily appointed Ambassador O’Dwyer and he finished his government service in Mexico City. O’Dwyer had an indisputable personal decency and a record of genuine achievement, but in his later years, in his retirement in the Southwest, he felt obliged to inform acquaintances that he was not, in fact, a fugitive.

Because Pat Brown left his wife and three children in near-poverty, he does not share in the amber glow of nostalgia in family memory. He married Catherine Moran on June 10, 1908, within a year of joining the NYPD. His former occupation is listed as “clerk.” I don’t know whether he delayed marriage until he secured his new job, or she fell for the young patrolman in his gray helmet and wing collar. They moved to 42 Butler Street, in Carroll Gardens, on the day of their marriage, and every few years they shifted to some other pleasantly middle-class row house in sedately striving neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Borough Park. They had my grandmother Anne, then Jack, and then Eleanor, and then there is a change of address, in 1926, to 1 Prospect Park West, a massive and stately apartment building beside Grand Army Plaza that would suggest a dramatic upswing of fortune—an inheritance, or a stock windfall—but if there was, Pat Brown did not share it. It was rumored that his sister Nellie, with whom they shared a house in Borough Park, inspired the breakup of the marriage. In the family legend, Nellie was a horrible woman—she buried three husbands and two children, because “God didn’t want her and the Devil wouldn’t take her”—who whispered to Pat that his wife “had visitors” while he was at work. There had been much more money than there should have been, and then suddenly, for his wife and children, there was very little indeed. My grandmother was finishing grade school when her parents separated, and plans to send her to an expensive Catholic boarding school on Long Island were put aside. Catherine found such work as she was able to, and when her children were grown—or considered themselves grown, as Eleanor married at sixteen—she would “tour the family,” staying with relatives when a child was born, making herself quietly useful, and then moving on, so as not to be too much of a burden. After Anne married, her mother lived with her. Neither Jack nor Eleanor had anything to do with their father again, and they lived strange and saddening half-lives, one leaving her husband and children forever, the other dwindling and drifting and dying young.

Pat Brown paid occasional visits to my grandmother, which she bore out of duty rather than love. My mother’s older sister, Ann Daly, recalls that when she was a little girl, he would “haunt us, two or three times a year. My mother would be cold to him but polite. He’d visit for maybe fifteen minutes. My grandmother would go to another room. I hid under the table.” She remembers him from below, the perspective of an anxious child: a diamond pinky ring on a manicured hand (“He had polished nails, but my grandmother didn’t”), stout legs in a chalk-striped suit, black shoes with white spats—ominous, glamorous, and incomplete. He would never be completed for his descendants, never known in full.

“Everyone loved him but his family,” Ann told me. “Even my father loved him—he knew he was a lot of baloney, a b.s. artist, everything was ‘big time’ and ‘big money.’ But he thought he was a wonderful guy, funny, generous, everything—and he’d ask my mother what the matter was. But she didn’t want anything to do with him. Pat Brown bent over backwards for your grandmother—he didn’t care about Jack and Eleanor—but she would have closed the door on him. He wasn’t invited to my mother’s wedding, September 22, 1929. Her brother Jack gave her away.

“He always had big, flashy cars—Cadillacs, I think—and his clothes, well, I wonder who his tailor was, because he wore nothing off the rack. He had to pay something like twelve dollars a month in support, which he did without question. That was about it, though. I remember in the thirties, he took my sister Dolores and me to a precinct Christmas party, it was for the poor children in the neighborhood.”

My mother’s recollection of Pat Brown is more vague and less critical. She barely knew her grandmother Catherine, who died in February 1941, after catching a cold when she went to see her son Jack off to the Army. A few months later, Pat Brown married a woman named Margaret Cramer—he never divorced Catherine, and had to wait to remarry if he intended to remain a Catholic—and there seems to have been a mild thaw in his relations with what was left of his family. In any case, he did make some effort to see more of them, and it was not prevented. Margaret grew especially fond of my mother. Where Ann Daly viewed Pat Brown through her mother and grandmother, as a man who wronged them by leaving, and wronged them again by coming back, my mother had Margaret to frame and filter the view. And since Margaret was so kind and decent, my mother believed that Pat Brown must have had those qualities too in some measure, at least in theory. Even so, when my mother spoke of him, her tone was restrained and avoiding rather than affectionate. He seems to have struck her as a man who showed the wear of a lifetime spent not going home after work, with the broad, brisk gestures of affability that appeal more to bartenders and waitresses than to young children. He died when she was eight, and she remembers him, without much certainty, as being partial to scotch and steak—my grandmother died when I was seven, and while I don’t remember what she would have ordered in a restaurant, my memories of her are vivid and warm.

My mother remained close to Margaret, and I remember visiting her as a child—she was a sweet old lady in Bay Ridge, who was related in some way that I didn’t understand. Her apartment was spacious and immaculate and looked like nothing had moved in thirty years. There was a dish of peppermint candy on a coffee table that stuck together into one big glom of sweets, so you had to wrestle it to break off a piece. That was fun, but there was nothing else for children there. After Pat died in 1946, Margaret married a retired inspector named John Sullivan, who also was recently widowed. Both couples had been good friends and childless. Sullivan lived only a few years longer, and so Margaret, who must have feared becoming an old maid, ended up a widow twice over, in a fairly short time. Margaret once told my mother that my father reminded her of Pat Brown; that he was a big man, handsome, and good company. When my mother told me, she made the kind of face she’d make if she had to eat the grubby, sticky candy, adding with some emphasis that she never saw any resemblance. She even said that Inspector Sullivan was a little more like him. Sullivan, of all people, her step-grandmother’s second husband. She put the compliment aside, like an unwanted gift.

This private antipathy colored their view of Pat Brown as a public servant: the distance allowed the family to look at his life as a cop from a cold distance, an aerial view without detail or context. Sonny Grosso, one of the heroes of the French Connection case, once told me that even a lousy cop does more good than an ordinary person, in spite of himself—even if he stands there like a scarecrow, he can stop fights and robberies and make old ladies feel safe. Pat Brown received no such benefit of the doubt: unaware of any of his accomplishments, indifferent to whatever explanations he might have offered for his choices, his family knew little of him and liked less. Had he stuck around, his days at work would have been the talk of the dinner table, and his troubles and jokes, his feats and foibles, would have been cherished threads woven into the family lore. And his gambling life, taking money from bookmakers and then becoming one himself, would likely have been glossed over, or else recast as a kind of quaint and rather comic, olden-time malarkey, as if he made moonshine in the bathtub. The world of corner bookies survived the era of the speakeasy, but both have an air of nostalgia; when you imagine them, it is in sepia tones, with a jazz soundtrack, more redolent of period charm than positive menace. Like most New Yorkers, my family did not believe that a glass of beer or a game of cards imperiled their souls, and there was something ugly and silly about those who insisted that they did. The prevalence of betting and drinking when both were banned—Ann Daly said that it seemed that “every empty garage had a teletype,” and “you got knocked over by the runners going down the street” as they delivered their slips—led to an increase in cynicism about law enforcement, but since that was the kind of enforcement the public seemed to want, the arrangement struck many as pragmatic rather than hypocritical. The fact of the matter was that Pat Brown was not respected at home, and so his career in the station house and the street was viewed with derision. His personal life shaped his public appearance, and those who were inclined to condemn him were amply accommodated. The divide between his work and his life, or rather the way he broke apart the pieces of his life, was an arrangement that allowed most memories of him to fall through the gaps. He was said to frequent a bar called McLaughlin’s on Flatbush Avenue, and to be friends with the undertaker Austin Moran. How many years have passed since Moran was a name to drop, or “the crowd at McLaughlin’s” was rich in meaning? McLaughlin’s may have been a favorite of cops, judges, gamblers, or Brooklyn Dodgers, or some combination of all of these—my aunt said it was “supposed to be a classy place, full of politicians.” Moran, I would guess, was a figure of middle-class respectability, as successful funeral directors tend to be, friendly with professionals and priests. Ann Daly recalls Pat Brown as prominent in Catholic laymen’s groups, and as she is devout herself—her daughter Patty is a nun—she held his own devotion against him: his practice and his profession were glaringly distinct. Maybe most people loved Pat Brown unless he gave them reason not to, but those who thought better of him have little to say now. You gotta have a story, and he never told us his.

On the single index card that constitutes Pat Brown’s entire surviving NYPD record, it states that he was punished three times and praised once, all in his early years. On February 29, 1908, he “failed to make report of ambulance case,” and one week later, he was cited for being “absent from post and in restaurant,” for which he lost five days’ pay. The next year, in September, he “did not properly patrol,” and lost another day. (Ninety years later, my command discipline for “improper patrol” cost me three days, so maybe the Job’s toughened up since then.) All three reprimands are in the same handwriting, which suggests that he was not a favorite of a particular sergeant or lieutenant. In October 1912, he stopped a runaway horse, for which he received a medal for Excellent Police Duty. The next three decades of service were unremarked upon.

If Pat Brown was troubled by anything in his life, there is no evidence of it. Though he did not see his children Jack and Eleanor, apparently by mutual agreement, his visits to his daughter Anne bespoke some confidence in a fuller restoration of relations. He lived at the St. George Hotel, the most fashionable in Brooklyn at the time, the seasonal residence of many of the Dodgers. Park Slope was nearby, as was McLaughlin’s, on Flatbush and Atlantic—He used to carry the bag on Atlantic Avenue....His horse room may have been up and running before he retired, perhaps in Jersey, perhaps closer. He took to frequenting the Copacabana, where he was known as “Paddy the Cop,” and he was friends with the comedian Joe E. Brown. He would die in January 1946, a few days after his old friend O’Dwyer was inaugurated as mayor.

When The Brooklyn Eagle broke the Harry Gross story in 1949, “Thank God your grandfather isn’t alive” became the household refrain. His partner in the horse room was sent to prison. The details of Pat Brown that survive in family memory are few and fragmentary, like the debris in a hit-and-run accident. I know that his parents survived the potato famine, which emptied Ireland of a quarter of its population; when he went to work in 1907, more than two million people a day went to nickelodeons, and when he retired in 1940, the Manhattan Project was under way. Because corruption was pervasive in certain eras, it can seem odd to observe that the prisons were filled and refilled, by and large, with people who belonged there. And year after year, cops died fighting the same gangsters who made their peace with the politicians. I know a little about how Pat Brown was a bad cop, but I don’t know how he was a good one; if he saved lives or took them, delivered babies or calmed angry crowds. There is that one decorated act of bravery, but I don’t know much more about him than the horse. Did he sleep well at night, dreaming of showgirls on his mattress full of money? Or did he sweat like O’Dwyer, and try to do good with one hand while the other strained against the come-alongs held by the gangsters in Brooklyn? I don’t think people change, too often or too deeply, but many are quick to adapt. Like his old friend O’Dwyer, Pat Brown escaped judgment but paid with his reputation, escaping fond and common remembrance as well.

i think my parents were meant for each other not because theirs was an especially happy marriage—though it was—but because they met through an undertaker called Charlie Le Chance. The name of the man had a peculiar music, vaudevillian but haunting, and he lived up to its billing. Le Chance, a friend of my father’s, worked as a freelancer for several funeral homes, and he either owned or had easy access to a hearse. There must have been a shortage of cars in my father’s circle in the Bronx during the fifties and early sixties, because the hearse saw a lot of social mileage. I heard a lot of Charlie Le Chance stories, and they all featured a corpse in the back seat. Either Charlie’s passenger would casually examine the back to find a post-mortem chaperone, or a friend would be given a lift somewhere, and told not to mind the cargo. After the friend’s protests were dismissed—“You’re the one who asked for the ride, pal”—Charlie would announce that he had a quick errand to run, and when he hopped out of the car, his return would be mysteriously delayed. The passenger would wait uncomfortably as the minutes passed, perhaps glancing back, and wonder if it was his imagination when he heard the body bag slowly unzip. The punch line can be imagined. In any case, Charlie was my parents’ matchmaker, and since he could bring together the living and the dead, I think of their marriage as almost an arranged one.

My mother’s name was Elizabeth Trust, and she was known as Betty. Betty Trust is not a musical name but it has an evocative flair, as sweet and warm and homey as a cake. Le Chance met her at a wedding, through another undertaker she was dating at the time. I don’t know if it was an all-undertaker affair, though more than one guest probably wondered where the flowers came from. When my mother broke up with her undertaker, she later told me, Charlie saw an opportunity for himself, having formed a wishful impression from the few facts he knew of her. “I was studying psychology, and had spent the summer in Europe,” she explained. “He assumed that ‘Free Love’ was next.” When it became clear that she was not the girl for him, he thought immediately of my father. He told each of them what he had in mind, and both seemed amenable to a meeting. It was not an obvious pairing, at least not for my mother, but then again, Le Chance was my father’s friend.

My father was fifteen years older than my mother, approaching forty as she had just passed twenty. They were old-fashioned and good-hearted people, both the most intellectually ambitious of their families, but at ease with those who were not. As an FBI agent and a doctoral student in psychology, probing the underworld and the unconscious, they must have had a touch of the exotic about them, though exoticism in the working-class Irish world—or half-Irish, in my mother’s case—was a large enough category, and could have included missing Mass or liking opera or living alone in Manhattan. Each had been engaged before: my father for several years, to a woman who kept postponing the date—in part, I was told, because my Uncle Gerry, a somewhat feral teenager, would join them in the new household. My mother broke off an engagement to a man who expected a more traditional wife than she was willing to become. My mother’s undertaker followed, and my father must have begun to wonder if he’d meet his own undertaker before he met his wife.

My father dropped by to see her at Columbia University, where she was studying, and they went out for coffee. It was the late fall of 1960, an era that is harder to picture than those that preceded and followed: hair was still short, but the more current men had stopped wearing hats, as President Kennedy would, at his inauguration a few months ahead. My father kept his hat—always—and it covered gray hair. He wore a trench coat, stood six-foot-two, and weighed just over two hundred pounds (I have his FBI files, and these facts were noted). When he met my mother on campus, the other students probably would have guessed she was meeting an uncle before they suspected a date. The political temper of Columbia was earnest and liberal, with pro- and anti-Communist factions, and though I am sure the campus supported Kennedy over Nixon in great numbers, many would have preferred Adlai Stevenson to either. My father admired Kennedy, on the strength of his war record and as an epochal advance for Irish Americans, though he disapproved of his playboy lifestyle, which even then was something of an open secret. He voted for Nixon, perhaps following the inclination of Cardinal Spellman, who was said to be furious at the prospect of losing his position as First Catholic. My mother voted for Kennedy. As a subject for contention, I don’t think presidential politics would have divided them any more than the fact that one was from the Bronx, the other from Brooklyn. They weren’t the kind of people who argued over these things any more than they were the kind who settled arguments by arm wrestling. It certainly wouldn’t come up on a first date.

Their first, proper dinner date was on the evening of December 15, at the Commuter’s Cafe, on Church Street in downtown Manhattan. The restaurant was owned by a close friend of my father’s, an Austrian immigrant named Joe Tretter, and two of his brothers. The choice was shrewd: the food was good, the price was right, and they would be treated with extreme consideration. My father would be comfortable and confident there, unlike anywhere else respectable enough to bring a date. To walk into a good restaurant, exchange pleasantries with the maitre d’, look at the menu, and order food—forget about wine—would have been an unnatural act, as alien to my father as flamenco or the Japanese tea ceremony. For many working-class New Yorkers, the most commonplace aspects of city life—restaurants, taxis, nightclubs—were as familiarly unreal as movies, and while you saw them every day, to find yourself in one could be traumatic. It may seem odd that headwaiters inspired more fear in my father than hijackers, but it doesn’t now, to me—you’re afraid of what you don’t know. The date went well enough, until the plane crash.

There were two plane crashes, in fact, or two planes that collided in midair, over Brooklyn, killing one hundred and twenty-nine people in the air and six more on the ground. One little boy lived for a day, after falling from the sky into a snow bank. At the Bureau, they call this kind of event a “special,” and the term can cover anything from a kidnapping to a jailbreak. Agents are pulled from their normal assignments to work on the incident. My father was working on railroad thefts and on my mother, though not necessarily in that order, but both had to be left alone for the moment. One special preempted another. He dropped her off at home and went to the crash site.

For the next several months, they went out once a week and regularly spoke on the phone. My mother thought he was a good man and enjoyed his company, but the relationship just seemed to amble along. When he picked her up for their next Saturday-night date, she told him that they had something important to talk about. As they drove, she told him that they should break it off—he was a nice guy, but things didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

“Oh,” he said. “I was going to ask you to marry me.”

My mother reconsidered her assessment of their progress, and told him she’d have to think it over. After she decided in the affirmative, she told her mother, Anne, who in turn told her husband, Bill, “We’re going to have a wedding in the family.” Bill assumed that it was his son, and said, “That dumb kid, he doesn’t have a nickel to his name, what is he getting married for?” Anne corrected him: “No, it’s Betty who’s getting married.” And Bill said, “To who?” My mother said it was the most impulsive thing she’d ever done, and it was all the more telling in that her life was not exactly lived on a whim. And so what Le Chance began, choice finished.

they were different times, back then. in 1961, there was more time—so it seems now—for everything. There was less variety in how things turned out: more people got married sooner and stayed married longer. As my mother explains it, to be engaged meant something less than it does today: it meant you might get married, and you’d decide as you went along, and wouldn’t date other people in the meantime. In that sense, it was a faster and less formal arrangement, which is not how I think of life then, when marriage was the substance and purpose of most women’s lives. It was a given, as the draft was for men, and if it scared you during the haircut and physical, you were proud of yourself when all the fuss was over. To worry about it too much, or to try to escape, was either a weakness or a luxury, and my parents’ backgrounds discouraged both.

My father met my mother’s parents, and they got on well—he was as much their contemporary as hers. That he had a fine mind, a good heart, and a sense of humor would have been quickly apparent, and the fact that he was a gentleman—and a large, armed one at that—would have made them feel sure that their daughter would be safe with him. They liked him a great deal as a man, but his job and his background gave him no natural advantage in their sympathies.

The term “Irish cop” didn’t have the same sentimental pull for the Trusts, in sum or in its parts, as it did for the Conlons. The Trusts were more Catholic than Irish, beyond even the obvious ethnic math of a match between Bill Trust and the former Anne Brown. St. Patrick’s Day was not a landmark on the calendar, and bagpipes did not stir any deep feelings of ancestral glory and strife. Union jobs and the civil service did not earn the nearly cultish devotion they did on the Conlon side. The Browns came over after the Famine of the late 1840s; it had been three generations since anyone had spoken with a brogue. As for the police, they were to be respected, always, but the Irish cop they knew best was no hero to them, as Pat Brown had a long career in the NYPD but a short one as a husband. Despite the fact that my father was a very different man, I wonder if to my mother, or to her mother, he felt like a throwback sometimes. They were past that, and things got better all the time.

The Trusts were more American than the Conlons, in that sense, more comfortable and more optimistic. My mother was the third of four children—Ann, Dolores, Betty, Bill. Her two sisters married businessmen, and her brother became one. The roll call of the five Conlons read down from the FBI, the NYPD, the Transit Authority, nursing, and the New York City Fire Department. It surprised me when my mother told me that her family didn’t have any more money than my father’s—her father was a bookkeeper for an oil company, his was a laborer for the phone company—though both had remained employed through the Depression. Both my parents loved their families, but my father’s childhood seemed one of confinement and loss, whereas my mother’s was of warmth and safety. Their lives were differently lit: the six Trusts had a bright apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where I can picture the family in the parlor, listening to Fred Allen on the radio. The seven Conlons lived in four small rooms at the back of a building on Kingsbridge Avenue in the Bronx, on the first floor over the alley. Sometimes an extra uncle took the kitchen floor. In the summer, the kids slept on the fire escape. They ate greasy legs of mutton and drank milk from jelly jars. My mother’s family fussed over birthdays and took vacations every summer; my father’s did neither. Later on, when we did celebrate his birthday, he accepted the custom with a dutiful confusion, as if he’d landed in Hawaii and we’d garlanded his neck with flowers. He’d raise his glass and say, “Happy Birthday, everybody.” When I picture each childhood, my mother’s has the genial formality of a sitcom from the 1950s, with amusing dilemmas resolved in twenty-six minutes; my father’s is like a newsreel from the 1930s, set against a backdrop of breadlines and war.

My father’s young life, which seems as remote to me as the war in which he fought, was related as a succession of sad facts and funny stories. He was the oldest in his family, and his parents had been dead for decades; all I knew of him was from his tales. But I knew my mother’s parents, and her sisters’ memories reached further back than hers. Her life was more lifelike to me, less a series of allegories than transparent memories without a moral, even, but also without a beginning or an end.

“Joe Daly would take us to see the Dodgers at Ebbets Field, and he’d always look so sharp in his porkpie hat...”

“When I was a little girl, you could ride the subway alone, even when you were eight years old, and they had wicker seats and windows that opened...”

“When we had a party, we’d gather around the piano and my mother would play...”

As I remember her, my grandmother Anne wore short-sleeved dresses and had large, freckled arms that shuddered rhythmically when she laughed and erratically when she didn’t. She wore a gold charm bracelet, which also shook, and narrow glasses on a chain. At our house, she played a dinky electric organ, coaxing out “East Side, West Side” and “Give My Regards to Broadway” in a sweet, nostalgic wheeze. She and my grandfather joked and played cards and drank red-white-and-gold cans of Rheingold beer, which was made in Brooklyn, and which you had to open with a “church key.” Their accents were old Brooklyn, and they sometimes said “terlet” and “erl” for “toilet” and “oil.” I can’t remember Anne being unhappy with us, or even ever being unhappy.

The blessedly ordinary life my mother led was her mother’s doing, for the most part. Anne Brown had come from a broken home, and so she made hers rigorously whole. At one time, Anne thought about becoming a lawyer, but she decided to stay in with her children. And though she was a talented musician as well, she only played at church and home. Her mother Catherine lived with her after Anne married, though she died when my mother was two. Anne’s brother, Jack, moved in after the war. Her younger sister, Eleanor, had a husband, who was also in the service, and three children. Eleanor patiently awaited victory and homecoming and then packed up and left, asking for nothing and offering less; more than half a century passed without a word from her. I’d heard of fathers who “went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back,” but I’d never heard of mothers doing that. “The war was hard on families,” my mother said, tactfully.

My great-uncle Jack was in show business for a while. He was a crooner in the thirties, singing sentimental ballads in the low, smooth style suitable for radio broadcast at the time. He was as handsome as a leading man, athletic and elegant, with fine, strong features. In one photograph, he shares a studio microphone with a brunette wearing white flowers in her hair. The brunette is as white as the flowers, with wide, dark lips, and she looks at the camera. Jack is tan, darker than the Cuban-style shirt he wears, his hair is slicked back to show a widow’s peak, and he looks down at the sheet of music. Her mouth is open, as if to sing “Ahh!” and his is half-closed, as if to sing “Ooh!” The sheet he holds is folded in thirds, and the only part of the title you can read is ER KNOW. Maybe it was “You’ll Never Know.” In the late thirties, Jack was married to a piano player named Marie, and they played the big nightclubs in Manhattan. When Marie became pregnant, Jack went into a fugue state and disappeared for six weeks, until he was found, emaciated, wandering in a bus station. Marie stood by him for years, until she discovered him with company in their hotel room; when she told my mother about it, more than fifty years later, the shock was so fresh and the telling so elliptical that my mother suspected it was something beyond ordinary adultery. I felt the same way, when Marie told me, because when she reached the climax, she halted and said she couldn’t, wouldn’t ever say what she had seen. But Marie was a professional entertainer, after all, and perhaps it was better to leave it at that: You’ll never know... After Marie left him, Jack took to drinking and declined from singer to singing waiter to waiter, and that’s when he moved in with his sister Anne. He died a few years later.

My mother’s young life strikes me as rich in every way except anecdote, which seems to need a degree of misadventure to thrive. As a teenager, she was bitten by a dog and had to suffer through the course of rabies vaccination, sixteen shots in the stomach. Aside from that, her life varied between things she liked and things she loved, and the majority fell into the latter category. She liked her neighborhood and she loved school; she loved her friends, she loved her family, and she loved her Church. Religion made her good, and it made her happy as well; it was a like a walled garden, where you were sheltered as you grew.

The Trust family had its share of calamity, to be sure, but even when it struck them, it seemed that they were shielded by some hidden and benevolent hand. From the 1950s on, at the end of every summer they went to the Pocono mountains for two weeks, first to a little bungalow colony in a town called Matamoros, and then to a hotel called Locust Grove. The other guests were like them, mostly Irish and Catholic and from Brooklyn, working-class and white-collar, for whom vacations were as new and American as highways. They sat, they swam, they played cards, then went for walks and began again. Every few minutes, someone would say, “Ah, what a delightful breeze,” or, “Smell that country air!” My grandparents put plastic shields on their noses, or zinc oxide, or both; my mother avoided the sun as much as she could. She could get sunburn from a flashbulb. She liked the country better than the beach—the sun was less severe, and you didn’t get sand in everything. When they swam, they went to the Delaware River, which by August is gentle, slow, and brown as tea, and you can walk across it in many places. Trees lean in over the banks, and you can put blankets down on the grass.

In the summer of 1955, the Delaware flooded. Heavy rains brought flash floods, and the river rose and swept its banks, taking from them houses, couches, horses, coffins. From the ridge in Matamoros where the Trusts were, they saw the flotilla pass by, a waterborne catalog of what people once had, like in the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz. The ridge itself had been cut off from the land, and the river gained wildly in its new course. Trees and tons of earth were torn up, and the water was half-mud and trash-ridden, running fast and hungry. The Trusts were atop their diminishing sliver of land, waiting with a rowboat to see if they would be forced to flee. Within hours, they’d gone from vacationers to refugees. I wonder if they thought that if they reached the sea, they might row back to Brooklyn.

The water rose, and with it came the decision to leave. The family boarded the boat, a hectic chorus of afterthought and advice: “You sit there!”

“Not there—there!”

“Is everyone here?”

“Gently! Gently!”

The boat was filled with canned food, jars of water, blankets wrapped in plastic bags, wallets, purses, money, and jewelry—all they could not bear to part with that would not kill them on their trip. As they put in, my mother was looking into their bag of provisions, when she leapt out and ran back to the house—

“Betty! Wait!”

“Betty! What is it!”

“Betty! Come back, you little—!”

“Bill!”

Moments later, she emerged from the house, and ran back to the boat. She took her place again and set the bag down as the boat eased into the water. I try to imagine that moment when the force of nature and the force of family met, and which promised the greater violence. She was asked to explain her actions.

“It’s Friday,” she said.

Asked again for clarification, she reminded them of the ban of meat on Fridays.

“We took the wrong soup. We had chicken noodle, so I had to go back in the house to get the tomato.”

If there had been a priest in the boat, he might have thrown her overboard, but as it was, her response was the only one that could not be gainsaid. I’m sure there was some comment, but what was even the risk of death next to the commandment of God? Circumstance did not permit further discussion. They set out upon the waters, then, and were spared the wrath of the flood, finding instead sanctuary on the far shores of the land, where they prospered and multiplied.

my father had a river in his childhood, too, and a mother. His mother’s name was Delia Laffey, though on some documents it was Della, and her age was a mystery as well. Delia was from County Mayo, twenty-odd miles away from the village where William O’Dwyer was born. Mayo, in the northwest of Ireland, is craggy and windswept, and the people were especially poor and Gaelic-speaking, which, in certain quarters, meant they were especially Irish. My grandmother came over as an indentured servant, just after the First World War, and on postcards she wrote home, the name is spelled Laife and Laffe before becoming Laffey, the Irish spelling suffering the same Anglo alchemy as that of her fellow immigrants from Naples or Kiev. No numbered address is given, only the family name in a village—more of a crossroads, really—that is alternately spelled Mohollogy and Mocollogan, a point on a map modified by place names almost as obscure: Tuam, Shrule, Ballinrobe, Mayo. Whatever shape the words took, Delia never had a problem making herself understood.

The river was the Hudson, dirty but still beautiful, gray as a battleship and as massive, flanked on its western shore by the tawny cliffs of the Palisades. Fifty Delawares could flow through its course. The sea washes up into it from the harbor with the tide, and over from the Harlem River, which is a tidal channel, flowing back and forth between the Hudson and the Long Island Sound. The Harlem River changes directions every six hours, running between Hell Gate and Spuyten Duyvil, Dutch for “Spit on the Devil” or “In Spite of the Devil,” each a tribute to the treachery of its currents. When my father was eleven or twelve, he and his friends had a little rowboat they played with, below Spuyten Duyvil, in the stretch between the rock face with a huge “C” painted on it, for Columbia University, and the railroad bridge that marked the edge of the Hudson. Inwood Hill Park is on one side, and wild land along the railroad tracks on the other, and the boys could imagine they were the pirates who had worked the river through their grandfathers’ days, or the Indians whose arrowheads still littered the hills of Inwood.

I don’t know how my grandmother Delia found out about the boat; whether my father mentioned it innocently, or his brother Eddie did out of revenge for not being taken along. I don’t know how well the boys could swim, if at all. Delia was from a part of Ireland where the fishermen could not, and their sweaters were knit in patterns to show which village they were from, so that their drowned bodies could be claimed if they ever washed ashore. She could have knit a “231st Street and Kingsbridge Avenue” sweater for my father, or she could have forbidden him to go boating. On the day the boys had planned the next river outing, she confined him to the house, leaving him to brood heavily on the injustice of it all. His mood did not lighten that evening, when he learned that the boat had capsized and two of his friends had drowned. My father was swept away, too, in wonder and dread, at the luck that mixed like the waters where the rivers met, pulling some under until their breath left them, sparing others to walk home to their mothers in the summer night. Delia must have seemed to have some power of fate in her, awesome in its love, awful in its cost.

My father also had a summer vacation, once. It was around the time that Delia sent him upstate with the Colored Orphans League, as I remember him calling the organization. The Boy Scouts were known as a Protestant group, and in her reckoning, he was better off as a white rarity than a Catholic one. Regardless, he had gone away grudgingly, and wanted only to go home. He was sent there with two vast cardboard suitcases of clothing that weighed more than he did; his mother anticipated that he would not spend much time doing laundry. She was right, my father told me: one suitcase remained unopened and the other was barely unpacked. I don’t suppose he sweated much: he spent most of his time as the scorekeeper when the other kids played basketball or baseball. On the bus trip back to the Bronx, he watched the alien greenery of the countryside give way to asphalt and brick, the heat and crowds of the city, the thrill of home. When he arrived back at his apartment, he dragged his suitcases up the stairs and eagerly banged on the door.

But instead of the familiar, foreign voice of his mother, the consoling brogue to which he was more accustomed than to his own accent, the people inside spoke a different language entirely. A Sicilian family lived there, and the exotic sounds and smells made the shock of his displacement all the more acute. “Little boy, those people, they move...”

Down the stairs he went, weak in the knees from his luggage and loss, and he sat down on the sidewalk, crying. For all I know—and all he knew—he would have stayed there until he died of hunger among his clean clothes. But another Italian passed by, a vegetable and fruit vendor in his horse-drawn cart, and asked him what was the matter.

“Little boy, don’t cry. You come with me, maybe we find them....”

And so my father got up beside the vendor and wiped his nose, and put his belongings with the lettuce and potatoes and strange things he’d never seen before, like eggplant and artichokes, and watched the streets anxiously as the horse shambled along. Their progress was painfully slow as they moved through the route, but the novelty of the horse ride and the revival of hope distracted him from his plight. And they had ridden less than half a mile before he saw his brother Eddie in the street, playing handball with a group of kids, new to him but clearly friends.

“Hey, Eddie! Where do we live?”

Eddie was in the middle of the game, and pointed to a five-story apartment house of tan brick, with the name “Vanity Court” painted on the transom. My father blurted out his thanks, grabbed his bags, and ran inside to pound on the door. When Delia answered, his rage and relief took over him, and he complained senselessly through his tears. She laughed and kissed him, and said, “Ahh, Johnny, we knew ye’d find us.”

Today, she would have been arrested. We might be doubly stunned, as my father was, by her apparent lack of feeling and her cold confidence in her son. But Delia had sailed to America in her teens; she knew no one, and she would never see her parents again. I don’t know if she expected to. Sacrifice was ordinary, and survival was its sometime reward. In Mayo, the famine was especially harsh, and memories of it were recent and fierce. When my parents visited her village, in the 1970s, they looked up the family records in the church and found that after Delia’s grandparents lost two children named Thomas and Bridget, they named their next two children Thomas and Bridget. You could see it as a commemoration and a forgetting at once. You moved on. Ireland then was both the Old World and the Third World, an economy in which sentimentality had little place. For my father, who was American-born, the divide between generations was compounded by culture, and he learned in time not to quarrel with it. Then again, she might have left a note.

A woman like my grandmother takes a war in stride. When Delia suspected it was coming, in the late thirties, she went to see Edward Flynn. Known as Boss Flynn, he had run the Bronx Democratic Party since the early twenties, as no one before or since. He represented machine politics not only at its most effective but its most progressive; he was one of the three or four men responsible, more than anyone else, for the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President, and he remained an influential advisor and backroom champion of the New Deal. Delia went to see him to pursue an appointment to West Point for my father, reckoning shrewdly that his education would amount to a kind of deferment, and that the Army would be more thrifty with the lives of its new elites than with those of ordinary enlisted men. I don’t know how she got in; Boss Flynn was atypical of those in his position in both his reputation for honesty and his inaccessibility—he was a lawyer, a cool-headed strategist rather than the smiling padrone handing out holiday turkeys. In any case, she did not secure the appointment, though I am impressed by the presumption of an immigrant woman demanding the best for her son, and by a politics that took immigrant women into account.

When she made decisions about her children, Delia was as hard and canny as Flynn, deploying her resources where they were needed most and could best succeed. I don’t wonder why she never asked, “Well, if you can’t take my Johnny at West Point, what about my Eddie?” Eddie had attended a series of high schools, and was asked to leave one because he rode a motorcycle down the halls. His education was exclusively in Catholic institutions, in the apt belief that he needed the discipline, and the rest of the kids followed suit. My father, she felt, could go it alone among the pagans. As he recalled his grammar-school graduation from St. John’s, when the Monsignor read the list of graduates and which high school they would attend—Cardinal Hayes, Fordham Prep, All Hallows for the boys; Sacred Heart, St. Catherine’s, Mount St. Ursula for the girls—the announcement of “Conlon” and “De Witt Clinton” was intoned like an obituary. The Monsignor did not shake his hand. My father did well at Clinton, and he graduated early; Delia had been right, no matter if it was little comfort at the time.

She was right about the war, too. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my father was enrolled at Manhattan College. In October 1943, he enlisted in the Marines. He went through boot camp at Camp Lejeune and Officer Candidates School, and was duly appointed second lieutenant. He continued his training and his education for the next year while stationed in Pennsylvania, before being moved to Los Angeles, in preparation for shipping out to the Pacific theater. Then Delia fell ill, with what was eventually diagnosed as liver cancer. She found this news extremely irritating, as she didn’t drink, and thought the neighbors would whisper that she was a secret tippler. Around Christmas of 1944, my father received word that she had days to live. His superiors were sympathetic, but unmoved: no leaves were to be granted. Despondent, he found himself in the Officers’ Club one night, where he met a Catholic chaplain. He confided in him, and as the details came out, the priest stopped him—he had been assigned to St. John’s in Kingsbridge, he said, and he knew Delia. He told my father not to lose hope, and that he would be in touch. Within days, my father’s leave was arranged, and he was home when his mother died, on New Year’s Day, 1945. His unit shipped out without him, to what would become the battle of Tarawa. His OCS class suffered the highest casualty rate in the history of the Marine Corps. Delia had saved him, again. And then she moved on, again, beyond where he could find her on a horse-drawn cart, much farther than she had gone in her first emigration.

my father married my mother because he liked her life, I think, and hoped to have a family that fate would treat more like hers than his own. Often enough, when he got a call from a relative, it was because there was trouble to be sorted out: someone needed a job or was in jail. When she got a call, it was because someone wanted to know if she could bring a casserole to a christening. For her, marriage would be a great continuation of life, remaking for herself what she had known in childhood. For him, it would be a change: if they moved while a son was away at summer camp, she would let the child know. When the river rose, it would bear them to safety, and take neither them nor their friends down to the bottom. They would pack the right soup. As for war, they would have to trust in God, as everyone would, but He seemed to show special favor to Betty Trust.

My father’s hopes were rewarded: they had nearly thirty years together, and five children, and even through the end of their years, they would take walks in the evening, holding hands. All the while, history happened: the Daily News headlines for each of our births tells of a million-dollar jewel heist at the Hotel Pierre (for Marianne); the ejection of a Cuban spy (for Stephen); a strike on the Long Island Rail Road (for Regina); a two-million-dollar drug raid (for me); and for Johnny, the oldest, on November 23, 1963, PRESIDENT IS SLAIN. My father spent his spare time reading about history, and he knew it well enough to keep it out of the house.

My parents didn’t always agree, but I can remember only one argument between them, when he wanted us to get in the car before she was finished cleaning up the kitchen. It might have lasted two minutes, and their voices were barely raised. My father could aggravate her with his devotion to garage-sale bargains, and with his near-fanatic habit of book-buying, which at one point inflicted structural damage on the house. My mother had enough trouble keeping order with five kids, but she said, “I’d like him to lose some weight, and to try going to the library instead of the bookstore for a while. But he doesn’t drink, smoke, gamble, or cheat, so how can I give him a hard time?” When you don’t make many mistakes—or when whole worlds of mishap are closed to you—you begin life better than if you were rich.

I can say they were meant for each other, regardless of fate or Le Chance, because they matched. Not only in that they were loving and loyal to each other, a true union in what they worked for and believed in, but because she was tireless and giving, running the house and pushing him to do things he wouldn’t have done on his own—which is to say, anything beyond sitting in his easy chair and reading. He brought the strange gift of his history, the sad facts and funny stories, the talent for wonder at the wild, wide life outside what little we thought we knew. Every marriage is a mixed marriage, joining two pasts for a new possibility. And one superstition was observed at their wedding, no matter if they were unaware of it. He was old, and she was new. The borrowed part was time, as all time is. The blue was in the blood.