Hardscrabble Road(17)
There were times when Beata wondered if Immaculata lived in a time warp, so that the world she saw looked a lot more like the one Dickens had seen than the one Beata did, but in this case, she supposed the woman was right.
Who else would they give the hat to, if not the police?
FOUR
1
There were people who had told John Henry Newman Jackman that he ought to quit his job as commissioner of police of the city of Philadelphia while he tried to unseat the present mayor in a primary challenge for the Democratic nomination, but none of those people were his friends, and none of them were his fellow police officers, and besides, he wouldn’t have listened to that kind of advice in any case. In Gregor Demarkian’s experience, Mr. Jackman rarely listened to advice of any kind, from anyone, on any matter. They’d first met when Gregor had come to Philadelphia as the FBI officer on a kidnapping case. If there was one thing Gregor was happy never to have to do again, it was to work kidnapping detail as a special agent of the FBI, complete with unmarked brown sedans parked on the side streets of nearly abandoned city districts, cold coffee in Styrofoam cups, and a partner who couldn’t stop whining about the way his wife treated his dog. There was a memory from the past, coming out of nowhere. Gregor didn’t think he’d thought of Steve Lillianfield in twenty years. And good riddance.
John Jackman, on the other hand, he’d thought of. Almost from the moment Gregor had resettled himself on Cavanaugh Street after the death of his wife and his retirement from the Bureau, he’d been watching John Jackman’s slow but steady rise up through a spider’s web of increasingly more important jobs to the place where he was now. Gregor couldn’t say it had never occurred to him that John might want to run for elective office. It had, but the office in question was, perhaps, president of the United States. That would suit him. The idea of John Jackman as mayor of Philadelphia was nearly…something.
Gregor knew, without having been told, that if he was going to talk to John after nine, he’d have to talk to him down at police headquarters. John was on a crusade to prove that he could run for everything—possibly even for the presidency, although he hadn’t mentioned it—while still being completely focused on his regular duties and completely effective as a commissioner of police. Gregor had no idea when he was going to campaign, or had been campaigning. John was nearly lunatic on the subject of making “personal” calls from his office. The history of police commissioners in Philadelphia wasn’t a pretty one. There had been a lot of corruption over the years. John had swept into that job promising to change all that, and he’d been behaving like a cross between Joan of Arc and Savonarola ever since. Still, he must have been campaigning sometimes, but that was political news Gregor did keep up with. The primary challenge was going very well. It was going so very well, the present mayor was not expected to survive it.
The cab pulled up in front of the tall, blank building that now served as police headquarters, and Gregor got out his wallet to pay the man. The cab hadn’t quite made it to the curb, which was solidly packed with parked cars. That meant that all the cars behind them were blocked from going forward until Gregor got his act together and his business done.
Gregor hurried. It was still cold, but not quite as cold as it had been this morning. He should have worn a hat anyway. He just wasn’t used to wearing one. He threw the cabdriver a small wad of bills that included a more generous tip than he might have given if he’d had time to think about it, and made the door in a run. The homeless people that he knew would be here later in the day were not here yet. He wondered where they had gone. The people walking up and down the sidewalks all had their coat collars turned up and their hands in their pockets. A sign on a store across the street said both 9:27 a.m. and 2 degrees F.
In the building, he stopped at the security desk and gave his name and destination. The guard looked through the notes on his clipboard and said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Demarkian. You’re going to Mr. Jackman’s office. Take the elevator.”
Gregor had no idea how else he could get to John’s office. He supposed there were stairs, but he’d never actually seen any. He got onto the elevator with two women, both African-American and both dressed in serious business suits. It was generally agreed that John had brought needed formality into the building and an end to what had become ritual complaints about the lack of African Americans on the police force and its support staff. The women were pretty, but not as pretty as John’s receptionist, who looked like she ought to take over for Naomi Campbell if Campbell ever decided to retire.