My first post was temporary, filling in at a precinct in Queens that was a few men short. They had me walking a beat and functioning as an over-qualified school crossing guard, and I was just beginning to get the hang of it when I was given a permanent assignment to the 78th Precinct in Brooklyn, and partnered with a veteran patrolman named Vincent Mahaffey.

  I’d spent most of my life in the Bronx, and the rest of it in Queens, and I’d ventured into Manhattan enough to find my way around, especially in the part of it where numbered streets and avenues kept it simple. So of course they posted me to Brooklyn.

  Well, that’s where Vince was, at the Seven-Eight, and had been ever since they gave him a badge and a gun. And I’ve come to believe he’s what got me a posting in Park Slope. Because there were a couple of cops, starting with Stan Gorski and including one or two of my instructors at the academy, who evidently saw something in me.

  That I’d make a decent cop, I guess. And something else—that I might have the potential for more than pounding a beat and twirling a nightstick.

  If I did, it would show up way quicker with Mahaffey as a senior partner. He’d supply a rich postgraduate education, teaching me the things they hadn’t gotten around to on East Twentieth Street.

  I’d also be learning lessons they’d just as soon have me skip, but that was part of the package, wasn’t it?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I know Vince is in some of the books. They don’t get underway until I’ve put in my papers and walked out on my wife and kids and found a hotel room at Fifty-seventh and Ninth and pretty much settled into an essentially unsettled existence.

  By then I’d largely lost touch with Vince. I’d left him and the Slope behind when they gave me a gold shield and assigned me to the Sixth Precinct, which was on Charles Street in the West Village. (It moved to a newer building a couple of blocks away on West Tenth, but by then I’d given the gold shield back to them. And the old Charles Street stationhouse got a gut rehab and a new life as an upscale apartment house. With a new name, Le Gendarme.)

  So Vince wasn’t a part of my post-NYPD life, but in some of the books I refer back to incidents when I was still on the job, and I know he came up a few times. The seasoned cop, with a dark view of the world around him and the people who live in it, and a sense of rough justice that doesn’t always go by the book.

  I suppose that’s fair enough. Vince taught me what the rules were, and which ones you had to follow if anybody was looking.

  This was a long time ago, and while I’ve always prided myself on my memory, in recent years it’s dimmed a bit, and I’ve come to regard it as unreliable. There are incidents of which I have no recollection, although it’s indisputable that they occurred, and there are others for which my memory has proved artful, doing some editing and rewriting.

  I remember my first meeting with Vince, and the look on his face as he took my measure. There was skepticism, and a degree of relief—I stood up straight, I didn’t drool, I was the right color. Maybe I’d turn out to be all right, maybe I’d even do him some good. Time would tell.

  Early on, there was a test. We were an hour or two into our shift when he pulled over to the curb, right behind a panel truck with two wheels on the street and two up on the sidewalk. Two men were unloading it, stacking cartons on the sidewalk, and the store owner was holding a clipboard and checking off items as he noted their presence.

  He looked up at the two of us in our uniforms, recognized Vince. “I know,” he said.

  “Course you do,” Vince said. “The whole block’s a No Standing zone, plus he’s half in the street and half on the sidewalk, which is a violation itself. Plus half the sidewalk’s blocked with boxes.”

  There was a little back and forth, with a pro forma feel to it. I remember the place of business as a neighborhood housewares and hardware store, as common in its day as a nail salon or tattoo parlor now. The owner said he couldn’t control delivery times, that he had to have goods on his shelves, that everybody with a pushcart knew you couldn’t do business from an empty wagon. And his helper was late, what could you do, kids today, but as soon as he got here the cartons would be shifted inside where they wouldn’t block traffic, and as soon as the delivery was completed the truck and its driver would go back where they came from, and what was a man supposed to do?

  And Vince told the man he was right, he was a hundred percent right, but the law was the law, and it said to move the truck along now and write out a summons, and what was he supposed to do?

  The man thrust his hands into his pockets and said he’d get the sidewalk clear as quickly as he possibly could. And the truck on its way. And Vince said that was reasonable, and things generally worked out when a couple of reasonable men had a chance to talk it out.

  And they shook hands, and we got back in our squad car, and Vinnie pulled away from the curb and said, “See, that’s an important lesson. Here’s an incident that’s a definite violation, no question. You got a truck parked where it’s not supposed to be, blocking the street and the sidewalk, and you got boxes strewn out all over the sidewalk, and it’s not like they’re gonna disappear in five minutes. Other hand, here’s a decent fellow just trying to make a living, running a small retail business that’s an asset to the neighborhood, and what’s he supposed to do? You go by the book, his delivery’s interrupted, his shelves are full of empty spaces, plus he has to make an appearance downtown and pay whatever the fine is. You see what I mean?”

  I said I did.

  “You’re a cop, you don’t want that. But you can’t drive on by and overlook it, either. You have to stop, you have to have the conversation we just had, and it won’t make the truck or the boxes vanish in a puff of smoke, but they’ll be out of the picture sooner than if we took no notice and kept driving. Make sense to you?”

  Perfect sense, I said.

  “They can’t teach it at the Academy,” he said, “but it’s something they all know. You gotta know what’s in the book, and you also gotta know when to leave the book on the shelf, when to use your judgment.”

  We talked some more, and he drove some more, and then he pulled to the curb and cut the engine. He drew a wallet from his pocket, found a ten-dollar bill, and handed it to me.

  I figured I was supposed to pick up something, but the store we were parked in front of sold plumbing supplies, and I’d let that potential career go by the boards when I took the NYPD exam. I was puzzled, and my face must have shown it.

  “When we shook hands,” Vince said levelly, “his hand had a twenty-dollar bill in it. That there’s your share.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  That was the test. If I’d shown shock or gone into judgment, if I’d refused to take my portion of the bribe, he’d have found a way to cover. Knowing Vince, he’d have most likely passed it off as a gag; there’d been no twenty dollars from the store owner, and he was just trying to see what I was made of, whether the nuns would be proud of me.

  (He knew I hadn’t gone to Catholic school, and wasn’t even Catholic in the first place, but that was a phrase he liked. “Oh, wouldn’t the nuns be proud of you!”)

  And I might have bought it and I might not, but over the next month or two he’d find a way to dump me as a partner. He had his own way of doing things, and the pay he drew from his city job was by no means the extent of his income. The twenty-dollar handshake, in one form or another, put food on his table and new shoes on his kids’ feet. He wasn’t in any gangster’s pocket, and he drew a ragged line between clean and dirty graft, but he couldn’t live the life he’d chosen with a straight arrow for a partner.

  Did any of this go through my mind at the time? I don’t see how it could have. He hadn’t said Take your time now, think it over. What he’d said was That there’s your share.

  What I did was take the money. What I said was thanks.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  And what did I think about it?

  Hard to say. I was, to a degree, the kind of straight arrow that would have worried Vince—or at least I had been. If I wasn’t exactly shocked to discover that Eddie Towns was filling out questionnaires for people he hadn’t bothered to interview, I was certainly taken aback, and in no hurry to take the same shortcut myself.

  And I didn’t show up for class on East Twentieth Street in the hope that they’d teach me how to steal. I may not have been wearing rose-colored glasses, but I still saw myself as very much on the side of the angels. I’d be able to spend my life, or at least the next twenty of thirty years of it, doing my part to make the city a better place. I’d be helping out good people and locking up bad people, and that struck me as a higher calling than plugging leaks and opening drains—although, now that I think about it, one’s not a bad metaphor for the other.

  So what did I think?

  So that’s how it works. I had ten dollars I hadn’t had a few minutes ago, and the man who’d handed it to me was a little more relaxed in my presence, and I’d learned something about him even as he’d learned something about me. But the lesson I’d learned seemed to me to be less about my new partner and more about my new job. This was how it worked. This was how a store owner managed to take care of his business, and this was how a police officer managed to balance out conflicting realities.

  If Vince Mahaffey felt more at ease with me once I took the money, well, it worked both ways. I felt a bond, because we’d shared something, and I sensed that he’d taught me something, and it was by no means the last of the things he had to teach me.

  And, you know, I must have felt a touch of guilt. Because when I took the money I’d broken both a rule and a law, and none of that was customary behavior for me.

  When our shift ended, Vince wrote up his report of the day’s activity. The store owner and the delivery truck got a sentence or two, stating that we’d come upon a delivery to a specific retail establishment that was blocking traffic and secured the cooperation of all parties in rectifying the situation.

  Close enough.

  And the two of us went from the stationhouse to a bar he liked, something with Emerald in its name, and he bought the first round and I bought the second. Nowadays that would have pretty much accounted for my ten-dollar windfall, certainly in Park Slope. But everything was cheaper back then, booze included, and the pre-gentrification Slope was a working-class neighborhood with prices to match.

  So I got change back from my ten-spot, and walked out of there with it in my pocket, because it wasn’t the kind of place where anybody felt the need to tip the guy behind the stick. Leave your change on the bar at the Emerald Garden and they’d figure you were in a blackout.

  Two drinks had me feeling good—no surprise there—and I might have stayed for a third. But I had a date.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Her name was Anita Rembauer, and I don’t suppose I’d ever have met her if I hadn’t tried to get a date with a friend of hers.

  I was at the Police Academy, a few weeks into the training, and when they cut us loose I went around the corner with a couple of fellow trainees to a coffee shop on Third Avenue. I don’t remember who I was with, but I excused myself when I glanced at a nearby table and saw a girl I recognized.

  A woman, I suppose, because she’d been a year behind me at James Monroe, and I think we’d been in a class together. Biology? One of the sciences, anyway. I remembered her name was Corinne, though that may not be how she spelled it, and that she was on the swim team, which saddled her with Chlorine as a nickname. This didn’t seem to bother her. Few things did, she was a sunny girl, and a pretty one.

  Enough so that I carried my Coke over to her table. She remembered me right away and invited me to sit down, and she told me she worked in the neighborhood, and had stayed late in the office that night, and I said I was spending most of my evenings at the Academy. She hadn’t even known it was in the neighborhood, but she thought it was terrific that I was going to become a cop, and I thought she was terrific, and when the moment seemed right I asked her if she might like to go to a movie that weekend.

  Her face clouded, and she explained that she couldn’t. She had a steady boyfriend, in fact they were the next thing to engaged. I was disappointed but hardly devastated, and I said I was sure they’d be very happy together, but if by some chance it didn’t work out—

  That got the kind of laugh that deepened my disappointment, and the announcement that she knew a girl she thought I’d like, one she was dead certain would like me. Her name was Anita, she worked two desks away in the same office, and she was cute and had a great sense of humor.

  But there was one thing. Did I still live in the Bronx?

  “She doesn’t like Bronx boys? What is it, the accent?”

  The problem, Corinne explained, was geographic in nature. Anita lived with her parents in Bensonhurst, deep in Brooklyn, and it took her a couple of trains and upwards of forty-five minutes to get to work in the morning. And Corinne, who’d lived not too far from me in the Bronx, had moved to a furnished room on East Eighteenth Street once she’d settled into her job, because her own commute had been almost that bad.

  “So with you in the Bronx and her in Bensonhurst—”

  The point was clear enough. We’d be spending all our time in transit.

  But evidently the impulse to serve as matchmaker to one’s friends, or even one’s acquaintances, is a primal one. Corinne, having taken note of the problem, was quick to wave it away. Anita and I could certainly meet at a movie theater in Manhattan, she said, some spot equally convenient or inconvenient for both of us, and afterward if we hit it off we could have a drink or a bite to eat at some nearby restaurant, and then I could walk her to the subway and we could go our separate ways. How did that sound?

  I said it sounded okay.

  And that Saturday night I waited for her in front of the Criterion Theater, at Broadway and Forty-fourth. The picture, ideal to take a date to, starred Rock Hudson and Doris Day in what would now be called a rom-com. We’d spoken on the phone, and I’d told her I’d be wearing a cape and carrying a see-through plastic bag with a goldfish in it. She assured me she’d be easy to spot, that there weren’t that many girls who shaved their heads.

  We found each other with no trouble. Her hair, a rich brown, was in a ponytail, and her oval face was pretty. She was on the tall side, just a couple of inches shorter than I. I can’t say we felt as though we’d known each other forever, but we were encouragingly at ease on first meeting. I’d already bought our tickets, and on the way in I picked up popcorn, and we found seats and watched the movie.

  Afterward we had clam rolls and iced tea at the Howard Johnson’s two blocks from the theater. It’s long gone, but so are Rock and Doris. And so’s the Criterion, for that matter, which morphed into a Toys-R-Us around the turn of the century, and is now something else.

  Nothing stays the same.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I had a good time, and so did she, and we walked the half-dozen blocks to the Times Square subway station in a mixed mood. In the ordinary course of things we’d be planning other dates, but it wasn’t much of a stretch to say that Brooklyn and the Bronx were poles apart.

  I offered to escort her home, and she told me that was sweet but not to be ridiculous, and she’d be fine on the subway and her neighborhood was safe and well-lit. I did walk her to her platform, and then went off in search of mine.

  I said I’d call her, but doesn’t everybody says that?

  And then a week or so later I ran into Corinne on my way to class. Anita had really had a good time, she said, and had commented on how bright and good-looking I was. “Although I must say I never noticed it myself,” she said.

  It seems to me that Corinne married that virtual fiancé of hers, but I never learned whether it worked out or whatever became of her. I can only hope that, married or single, she found her way into sales, because she had a gift. We had that brief conversation on the sidewalk in front of the Academy, and the next day I called Anita and asked her if there was anything interesting two people could find to do in Bensonhurst. And how did you get there, anyway?

  By subway, of course, and if you started from the Bronx, as I was to do two nights later, you’d have to change trains at least once. We arranged to meet at her neighborhood movie house, and I allowed for plenty of travel time and got there early. There was a bar two doors down from the theater, and I’d have liked a beer, but instead I remembered something I’d heard in one of my classes on Twentieth Street and stayed on the street, walking around as if this were my beat, sizing things up, letting my eyes take the measure of the scene around me.

  Another thing Yogi Berra probably never said was that you can observe a lot just by watching, and I was putting that notion to the test, running a silent monologue in the privacy of my mind. That kid looks wrong for the neighborhood. What’s he looking for? Why does that woman keep looking at her watch? Older man’s walking very deliberately, setting each foot down very carefully. Physically frail? Or maybe trying hard not to look as drunk as he is?

  And then: Jesus, there’s a nice-looking girl. And the realization, maybe half a second after the thought, that it was Anita, and that her eyes were working the street because she was looking for me.

  The movie was okay, and so was the pizza place around the corner. We each had a slice and a Coke, and talked long enough to eat and drink our way through a second round. Our conversation was easy, and not overly burdened with substance. High school, friends getting married, favorite TV programs—nothing we couldn’t have phoned in. I said the pizza was good, and she said I could count on her to find good pizza, a nice Italian girl like herself.

  Oh? Rembauer?