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He was only forty but had looked fifty for the past twenty years.
Thank God in heaven! What a relief! They could let their breaths out now. Miss Efficiency was a bigot. These days the thing about bigotry was, it was undignified. It was a sign of Low Rent origins, of inferior social status, of poor taste. So they were the superiors of their English baby nurse, after all. What a fucking relief.
Such open-faced optimism they had, whoever dreamed up that building back then!
noble Romans wearing togas in the Bronx! Such
Kramer had reached that low point in the life of an assistant district attorney in the Bronx when he is assailed by Doubts. Every year forty thousand people, forty thousand incompetents, dimwits, alcoholics, psychopaths, knockabouts, good souls driven to some terrible terminal anger, and people who could only be described as stone evil, were arrested in the Bronx. Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system—right here—through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more
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Ever so quietly, the U.S. had started printing money by the billions to finance the war in Vietnam. Before anyone, even Johnson, knew what was happening, a worldwide inflation had begun.
She was Lopwitz’s fourth wife, French, a countess, apparently, no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, with an accent like Catherine Deneuve doing a bath-oil commercial.
Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx, from the youngest Italian just out of St. John’s Law School to the oldest Irish bureau chief, who would be somebody like Bernie Fitzgibbon, who was forty-two, shared Captain Ahab’s mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, “What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail.”
“A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you’re weak.”
He was experiencing the resentment of those who discover that, despite their own grave condition, the world goes on about its business, heartless, without even so much as a long face.
All the cops turned Irish, the
Jewish cops, like Goldberg, but also the Italian cops, the Latin cops, and the black cops. The black cops even; nobody understood the police commissioners, who were usually black, because their skin hid the fact that they had turned Irish.
He had the gaunt and haunted athletic look of those who stare daily down the bony gullet of the great god Aerobics.
They all pay lip service to democracy. You ever notice that? If Genghis Khan was around today, he’d be President Genghis, or president-for-life, like Duvalier used to be.
Curry, Goad & Pesterall.
a common tauro-scatological expletive
