Read Bread (87th Precinct) for Free Online

happens.”
    Carella treated himself to a long, leisurely lunch at a French restaurant on Meredith Street, wishing that his wife were there to share the meal with him. There is perhaps nothing more lonely than eating a French meal all by yourself, unless it’s eating Chinese food alone, but then the Chinese are experts at torture. Carella rarely longed for Teddy’s company while coping with the minute-by-minute aggravations of police work, but here and now, relieved of routine for just a little while, he wished she were there to talk to him.
    Contrary to the opinion of some male show-business pigs who surmised that being married to a beautiful deaf-mute guaranteed a lifetime of submissive silence, Teddy was the most talkative woman Carella knew. She talked with her face, she talked with her hands, she talked with her eyes, she even “talked” when he was talking, her lips unconsciously mouthing the words his own lips formed as she watched and read the words. They talked together about everything and anything. He suspected that the day they stopped talking would be the day they stopped loving each other. Even their fights (and her silent raging anger was frightening to behold, those eyes flashing, those fingers shooting sparks of molten fury) were a form of talking, and he cherished them as he cherished Teddy herself. He ate his Duck Bigarade in silence, alone, and then drove to Stiller Avenue for his 3:00 appointment with Lockhart and Barnes.
    Clearview, in Calm’s Point, was a section of the city variously labeled “heterogeneous,” “fragmented,” or “alienated,” depending on who was doing the labeling. Carella saw it for exactly what it was: a festering slum in which white men, black men, and Puerto Ricans lived elbows-to-buttocks in abject poverty. Perhaps Mr. Agnew, who had seen one slum and therefore seen them all, had never had to work in one. Carella worked in a great many different slums as part of his everyday routine, and since he was not a milkman or a letter carrier or a Bible salesman, but was instead a police officer, his job sometimes got a bit difficult. If there is one thing the residents of a slum can detect immediately, it is the smell of a cop. Slum dwellers do not like policemen. Being a cop (and naturally being a bit defensive about judgments made on the basis of whether or not a man is carrying a police shield), Carella could nonetheless recognize the fact that slum dwellers, both criminal and honest, had very good reasons for looking upon the Law with a dubious and distrustful eye.
    Many of the cops Carella knew were non-discriminating. This did not mean they were unprejudiced. In fact, they were sometimes too overly democratic when it came to deciding exactly which citizen was in possession of a glassine bag of heroin lying on a sawdust-covered floor. If you were a black or a tan slum dweller, and a white cop entered the joint, the odds were six-to-five that he suspected all non-whites of using narcotics, and you could only pray to God that a nearby junkie (of whatever color) would not panic and dispose of his dope by dropping it at your feet. You also realized that, God forbid, you might just possibly bear a slight resemblance to a man who’d held up a liquor store or mugged an old lady in the park (white cops sometimes finding it difficult to distinguish one black man or one Puerto Rican from another) and end up at the old station house being advised ofyour rights and subjected to a strictly by-the-book interrogation that would crack Jesus Christ himself.
    If you happened to be white, you were in even worse trouble. In the city for which Carella worked, most of the cops were white. They naturally resented all criminals (and slum dwellers were often automatically equated with criminals), but they especially resented white criminals, who were expected to know better than to run around making the life of a white cop difficult. The best thing a slum dweller could do when he smelled a cop