Read Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth for Free Online Page B

Schmidt talking. “We break out the gym set on those bastards.”
    Irony of ironies, after so many years I was back in Brownsville, standing with Pete Schmidt on the edge of a roof of a sixstory tenement overlooking Pitkin Avenue. I tried to mentally reconstruct the street, as it had been in my youth. The shops and pushcarts and most of the Jews were gone. The neighborhood had changed; it was now one of the most dangerous, squalid, and dilapidated areas of the city.
    Remember, this was the early ’60s. A battle at the other end of the world was ratcheting up, and we had a drug war blazing in our backyard. At the time, even the most pessimistic observer could not imagine that we could lose both.
    Most of time, when on patrol, I’d feel like the good yeoman crime fighter for the city of New York, the designated lightning rod for the madness that took place in ghetto people’s lives. In a short time I learned that along with street criminals, there were hard-working, good people in these neighborhoods, people who counted on me.
    When I walked patrol, I eyed the alleyways, hallways, and storefronts. I wasn’t stupid, or very brave. I forced myself to go into the dark places, the long alleyways that ran between the tenements. At the end of those alleyways were doors that led to stairways that led to basements that were lit with candles, where mattresses were scattered on ice-cold floors, where rags were blankets and buckets were toilet bowls—the tenement cellars where desperate street people slept.
    I could see faces at windows, shapes in hallways, forms traveling in and out of the darkness. Believe this when I tell you, the ghetto never sleeps.
    I had been a visitor in many ghetto apartments—sometimes invited, most times not. I knew that on the coldest of nights, ice formed inside the glass windows and on the sills of those apartments. I had seen ice on the floors and on bathroom mirrors. Slum landlords regulated heat in that part of town so that none rose after 6 o’clock in the evening.
    My father was right. Small wonder these people wanted to burn those buildings, equipped as they were with rats and leaky faucets that ran ice water and ceilings that dropped lead chips of paint into cribs where infants slept. I once saw a baby girl whose toes had been gnawed to stumps by a rat. I saw that and wondered what in the hell country I was in anyway.
    The next time, when I spoke to my father I said, “You were right. Were you ever. Jesus!”
    He smiled.
    A recollection. Voices and faces. Tales like threads over and around a piece of time. So mindful I am of my experiences in Brooklyn that nothing goes away. Now, I can see myself as I was then: None of it was real, like I was in a movie, some dodo up on the screen, some character in my skin making his way through a world he didn’t understand.
    I’m young and healthy. The drinking age in New York City was eighteen, but they wouldn’t serve me without ID until I was thirty. Baby Face, they called me. The cops and the street people, they all called me Baby Face.
    Today I look in the mirror. “Baby Face,” I say to the reflection. “Yeah, right.”
    I see myself sitting in homeroom at William H. Maxwell Vocational High School in East New York one morning. A bright fall day in Brooklyn and the teacher walks into the room. Passing as a high school student, I’m there to buy dope. The teacher smiles nervously at me, squints, turns around, then turns back and looks at me again.
    The teacher’s name was Veltri, I called him “Red” when I was the pitcher and he was the great glove and strong hitting shortstop of our own John Adams High School baseball team in Ozone Park. Later, in the boy’s room, Red asked me, “How are you doing?” I said fine, that I was there to do something that had to be done. I told him I was a cop. He said, “Yeah, I figured.”
    After a week at Red’s school, my job was done.
    I was now standing in the principal’s office. I remember how that