When you live in a democracy, there are certain things you believe will never happen to you. Then a day comes when the blindfold is removed and you discover the harsh nature of life at the bottom of the food chain. I could hear myself breathing; my skin felt dead to the touch; I had never felt as inadequate in dealing with a situation. “What’s the arresting officer’s name?”
The sergeant looked up again. “Slakely,” he said.
“Is he in the building?”
“Possibly.”
“I want to talk to him.”
His eyes drifted down the hallway to a coffee room that had a Coca-Cola machine and a table where several cops were sitting. “He’s a hard-nose, but the people he brings in usually deserve it,” the sergeant said. “Do yourself a favor. Get a lawyer. Don’t pick a fight with the wrong guy.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He didn’t answer, nor did he look up from his paperwork again. I walked to the doorway of the coffee room. I didn’t have to guess who had put my wife in jail. He was eating a sandwich, his long legs splayed, his fingers covered with grease and crumbs. He was the only man in the room whose eyes immediately met mine.
“Are you Officer Slakely?” I said.
He stopped chewing and set down the sandwich. “What can I do for you?”
“Why did you make up those lies about my wife?”
“Who says they’re lies?”
“I do.”
“This is a restricted area.”
“The city attorney’s office is right down the hall. I come here all the time.” I dropped a nickel in the Coca-Cola machine. I pulled a Coke out of the slot and stuck the neck in the bottle opener and pried off the cap and set it in front of him. “Do you other fellows want one?” I asked.
They looked at me, blank-faced.
“Your wife is in jail for a reason. You’re not making things easier for her,” Slakely said.
“I pulled her out of a pile of corpses in a Nazi death camp. She spat in the face of an SS colonel. The only reason she didn’t do it to you is she didn’t want to bring down trouble on me.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“A cop who’s for sale.”
“You’d better haul your ass out of here.”
I nodded. A jar of tomato sauce sat on the table in front of him, a steak knife inserted in it. I looked at his throat, the malevolence in his eyes, and the ignorance and hostility and fear that lived like a disease in his face. “You violated her person, didn’t you?”
“She told you that?”
“She didn’t have to. It’s written all over you. I’m going to expose you for what you are, bub. I’ve never met a cockroach that did well in sunlight.”
I heard his chair scrape back as I walked out of the room. But he didn’t follow me into the hallway, and I knew I probably would not see him again. Like all of his kind, he would disappear and be only a footnote in a script written by someone determined to ruin our lives. I wished Grandfather were with me. I wished he could tell me what to do. I wanted the moral clarity and violent alternatives available to him when he took on John Wesley Hardin in 1881. The advent of modernity had empowered the bureaucrat and the
coward and the bully, and I would not see my Jewish girl from the Book of Kings until morning, when she would be led into court handcuffed to a chain, her hair in disarray, her clothes grimed from sleeping on a floor stained with spittle and cigarette butts and the overflow from a broken toilet.
HER BAIL WAS three thousand dollars. Her car had been towed to an impoundment, the bumper bent out of shape, the fender scratched by the wrecker’s steel hook. When we came home, she immediately went into the shower, and I put her soiled clothes in the washing machine. I opened all the windows in the house, inviting in the sunshine and the wind and the smell of burning leaves as a way of counteracting the pall that seemed to be settling on our lives.
Our attorney, an old family friend named Tom Breemer, found out that during the Depression, Slakely had worked private security for a fruit company in California and had been involved in the shooting death of a labor organizer.
“How’d he get out of it?” I asked.
“The records disappeared. He was a chaser in a navy brig during the war. He’s been divorced twice. Colored people get off the street when they see him coming. He worked vice in Galveston. That’s the long and short of it.”