“You should have heard the language he used,” Garry said.
“At this rate, he won’t make commissioner before he’s sixty,” Gregor said.
Jackman sat down again. “You remember the sex-abuse thing, a couple of years ago, with the old Archbishop and all that jazz?”
“Trobriand Islanders remember the sex-abuse thing,” Gregor said.
“Yeah, well. The commissioner,” Jackman stared at the door, as if he expected the commissioner to burst in at any moment. “The commissioner,” he repeated, “seems to think we look like we’re picking on the archdiocese. And he doesn’t want to look like we’re picking on the archdiocese. And that’s especially true because Boardman was one of the plaintiffs in the sex-abuse case. So, the bottom line is, the commissioner wants to hire you.”
“I think I’ve already been hired by the archdiocese.”
“Did they pay you any money?”
“Of course they didn’t pay me any money.”
“Well, then,” Jackman said, “you weren’t really hired. So go over to the precinct with Garry here, and listen to Lou Emiliani, and come on board. You’d rather work for us than for that son of a bitch anyway. And we won’t tie your hands.”
“Unless you say no,” Garry Mansfield said pleasantly.
Gregor leaned forward and turned off the television set. It had gone to a commercial for Pampers, which was the kind of thing he could never watch without getting confused.
2
Gregor had expected that the precinct that housed the police who covered St. Anselm’s and St. Stephen’s would be one of the better-kept ones in the city. The neighborhood was one of the more expensive ones, and all the houses Gregor had been able to see when he walked around the two large churches, hoping to get some sense of direction, had been well kept and devoted to the use of a single tenant. He had failed to reckon with the perversity of Philadelphia street life. New York was supposed to be changeable, but next to this, New York was a model of consistency. No wonder so many of the really rich people here had moved out to the comfort of the Main Line. There was this street with the two churches on it, and the row houses with their polished front doors and gleaming windows. Two streets over, the row houses looked as if they were disintegrating into sand and the one vacant lot was full of garbage and people who huddled over a fire they had made in a tin can. Junkies and drunks: even when Gregor was growing up here, fifty years ago, there had been junkies and drunks, but they had called the junkies “hopheads.” In those days, it had all been marijuana and cocaine. If heroin happened, it happened out of sight, and drugs in general were restricted to the musicians who blew through after a week or two in New York or Detroit. That was one of the great attractions of going to hear jazz on Saturday nights. All the fraternity boys from the University of Pennsylvania tried it. If they were really rebels, they actually bought themselves a joint and smoked it in the alleys in the back before they joined their girlfriends at their round tables and tried to pretend that it didn’t matter that they were the only white people in the room. Maybe because Gregor had never been a fraternity boy, or had a hope in hell of becoming one, he hadn’t tried it. He had been in the Army before he smoked his first marijuana cigarette, and then he hadn’t liked it much, and hadn’t gone back to try it again.
Still, he had come into the black neighborhoods of this city to hear music when the only place you could hear real jazz was in the storefront cabarets that were supposed to be “for coloreds only”—except that this was Philadelphia, so nobody had been willing to come right out and say it. God only knew, there had been enough in the way of neighborhoods that were “for whites only,” although nobody had been willing to say that, either. And then, as now, the real skids were always the most integrated parts of town. Alcoholism was color-blind. The old men sleeping off the shakes on park benches and heating grates were any color at all, or no color, and they were so far beyond caring that even an official policy of apartheid would not have mattered. Gregor wondered how the South Africans had managed that, or if they had even bothered to try: the community of bums. Could you have a community among people who could barely speak without slurring their words, or who wanted nothing more than another bottle of booze and oblivion?
Garry Mansfield was leading him up the stairs of the precinct house. At the top, standing in the half-opened front doors, was a man who looked like he might have been Black or Hispanic or Asian or all three. He was in an ordinary business suit, but he was all cop. Gregor wondered if they gave them walking lessons the way they gave those to debutantes, except instead of walking with books on their heads they’d be required to walk holding a steel baton stretched out behind their backs, so that they would learn to strut properly.