The Sniper's Wife(7)

Willy had walked such streets as a beat cop, fresh out of the academy, both proud and nervous to be in uniform, conscious of the heavy .38 bumping his hip, and honing the sarcastic, tough-guy demeanor he’d used defensively at home and which would become his trademark. He instinctively sought the company of the rougher crowd at the precinct, the guys who bent the rules and made sure the law was enforced to their own best advantage—the bullies and braggarts who in later years would turn his stomach and rank among his favorite targets.

It seemed so long ago now, before he went to Vietnam, before the booze he began sharing with those same men became more than a social habit, before he fled to Vermont, got married, and hit bottom.

There had been good times during his short stint as a New York cop, times of redemption and grace when his actions had benefited others. Why those moments hadn’t guided him instead of being mere oases, he didn’t know. Nor did he fully remember why he’d left to enlist, although there was a typical perverseness to joining a wrongheaded war everybody knew was a defeat in the making, and which even the right-wingers were hardpressed to defend. When Willy landed in Vietnam, the fall of Saigon was barely a year away.

But there were other reasons pushing him to leave, too. Not just his own tension-filled family dynamics, but larger, cultural ones. New York in the late thirties, when his parents arrived from Europe, was the most powerful, influential city on Earth. Then, over the next forty years, hundreds of neighborhoods were gutted by expressways and gargantuan building projects. The autocratic Robert Moses and his urban renewal cronies sacrificed a city of people to a future devoted to the automobile, disturbing the intricacy of a living human tapestry and encapsulating huge numbers of displaced poor inside towering clusters of bland, geographically marginalized housing units that served as thinly disguised penitentiaries. The postwar economic expansion challenged the concept of centralized urban powerhouses like New York, and with startling speed the city went broke, garbage piled up in the streets, and the fuse began to burn. It became a city to abandon, and Willy took the hint.

He was in the East Village section by now, going strong, no longer mindful of the night air, watching how both the architecture and the mood had changed from that of just a few blocks earlier. This was the fringe of old New York, where numbered streets became names, and the strict grid pattern slowly yielded to the quirky remnants of an agrarian past, where waterways and farm-tomarket paths marked the way people traveled hundreds of years ago. The city of neighborhoods began opening before him, the buildings becoming lower, older, more eccentric in design, their ground floors occupied by a bazaar of mom-and-pop outlets selling everything and anything. This was where the opposition to Moses and his road builders had finally succeeded, and made of New York one of the few big cities in the U.S. without a freeway splitting the downtown in two.

There was the inevitable dark side, of course, and ample evidence of decay. As he neared the Lower East Side—a slum virtually from its inception—where Mary had last lived, this transition grew exponentially, until at last all that was left, up and down her actual street, was a grimy, silent, commerce-free backwater of urban depression: a home for rats, cockroaches, and humanity’s rejects.

Willy stood across from his late ex-wife’s address and thought back to how often he’d gone to buildings similar to this, both here and in Vermont’s grittiest corners, knowing that all he would find would be hopelessness personified.

For a man who pretended he’d lost the habit, this was way too much thinking. Willy took a deep breath and crossed the street.





Chapter 3





The security in Mary’s building was poor, no great surprise. Willy punched ten of the call buttons above the row of dented, graffiti-decorated mailboxes, got an atonal chorus of mixed replies over the loudspeakers, and at least one person who merely hit the buzzer opening the front door lock.

He decided to reconnoiter first, climbing to the third floor to find the apartment number he’d seen in the lobby under Mary’s name, reacquainting himself with the familiar smell of poverty that clung to the walls like fresh paint. One flight up, however, he was stopped by an elderly woman who stepped out from behind her door.

“You ring downstairs?” she asked, her voice sharp and her jaundiced eyes narrowed. “Somebody rang.”

He put on a surprised expression. “Me? No. Why?”

She ignored the question. “I don’t know you.”

He reached into his back pocket with feigned boredom and flashed his Vermont badge too fast for her to read it. It didn’t actually look much like a New York detective’s gold shield, but it was the right color, and he had the right attitude.