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“This is a bright,” Mulvaney said. “That would ruin the tone.”

  He looked me in the eye. We were on Flatbush Avenue ourselves now. The traffic was heavy, but more cheerful and hearty than the L.I.E. and punctuated by neon lights in pastels and primary colors pulsating from the tops of stores that stood close to us on real sidewalks, instead of in distant shopping centers. Mulvaney slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting the taxi in front of us.

  “Are you really going to Ireland?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I'm going to cover the Troubles.”

  “The ones they already have or the ones you are going to make?”

  “What do you think?”

  What I thought was that he was lucky to have figured out not one but two ways to escape Ronkonkoma. Manhattan—and Belfast.

  “Well, what do you think?” he asked again.

  “I think you should take me with you,” I said.

  Mulvaney looked shocked. Certainly I had shocked myself.

  “That was a joke,” I said.

  “Yeah. Besides, what would a Jewish broad do in Northern Ireland?”

  Order Irish men to behave?

  My breakfast is interrupted by Mulvaney, who sticks the phone in my face. “He says Hollywood will be fighting over us.” The agent has a fake Texas drawl. Why do I think he also has a store-bought tan?

  “So you're writing a book to go with the movie?”

  “Do we have to stay married to do this?” I ask.

  “Make up whatever you don't have or didn't do.”

  “Can I do something I wouldn't do?” I ask. “Like have an affair?”

  Mulvaney glowers.

  “We might need a little tension,” I say, as if things aren't tense enough.

  “Yeah,” the agent agrees. “But make the guy up.”

  “I'm a journalist,” I say. “I'm better off not making up anything.”

  Mulvaney puffs his chest and says that the agent represented Ed Koch.

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “nobody ever made a movie from Ed Koch's book.”

  He rolls his blue eyes, which is what he does when he wants the universe in general to understand that he has the patience of a saint. “That's because he didn't find Ed Koch until after he was mayor.”

  How hard could it be to find the mayor of New York City while he's still in office?

  CHAPTER 10

  Criminal Confetti

  Inside, the Sixteenth Precinct reeked of the same industrial-strength cleaning liquid I remembered from elementary school, reigniting the homicidal tendencies I'd felt in regard to that kindergarten teacher, who'd gotten what she deserved.

  A desk sergeant who looked like I expected Mulvaney would at fifty scowled as he motioned us over. His nose was red-veined; his stomach hung prominently past his belt. I held up my Suffolk County press pass and he shrugged.

  Mulvaney flashed his big-boy NYPD version and the sergeant nodded.

  “I want to see my father.”

  “Not so fast,” he said, grinning at Mulvaney as if I weren't there.

  I walked closer and stood in front of his face. “Then I want to see the new precinct commander!”

  “The captain's having dinner,” the sergeant told Mulvaney. “Howse your mother like you having a Jewish girlfriend?”

  “Mulvaney!” I said, before he had a chance to answer.

  “Mulvaney? You the kid of that lawyer in Queens?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great guy. He got my buddy offa some bullshit, trumped-up brutality charge. Any kid of Mulvaney's gets whatever he wants here.”

  “This how you got your job at Newsday?” I asked.

  Mulvaney turned red. “Actually it was my father's bartender,” he said.

  He had to be kidding.

  “I feel fer ya,” the cop said. “But we all do what we gotta do. C'mon, I'll take you in there.”

  We followed him down a hall that smelled from more cleaning fluid, then another that just smelled from dead rot. At the end we found ourselves face-to-face with thick black jailhouse bars. My father, head down, sat behind them on a metal bed with a bare mattress, next to a steel toilet bowl that didn't have a seat. In the other bed, sleeping arm in arm, two men in red evening gowns snored loudly. When my father saw us, he put his hand on the bowl and lifted himself up.

  “Somebody beat him,” I said to Mulvaney.

  “Why do broads like you always think that cops beat people?”

  “Maybe because they hire lawyers like your father.”

  My own father held on to his pants. His belt was missing. It worried me that the cops thought he might hang himself over Las Vegas Saturday Nite.

  “I need a Phillies Panatella,” my father said, as if he were asking for his last meal.

  I nodded, but I'd forgotten to bring one.

  “Anything else?”

  He shook his head and looked like he might cry. “I miss your mother.”

  “Daddy! You've only been gone a couple of hours. Besides, she put you in here.”

  A tear fell from my father's eye. He took off his glasses and shook them.

  “Mulvaney!” I said. “Do something!”

  We found the new precinct captain drinking his dinner around the corner at Keeler's Bar and Grill, which had a green awning and, inside, a pockmarked antique wooden bar. The captain himself was even more distinctive: a three-hundred-pound-plus six-footer with a large head and a full mane of red hair. He had a pint of beer in front of him, a shot glass of whiskey alongside it. “Daddy ain't gettin' out tonight,” he said as he swirled unsteadily toward us on his wooden stool. “Nobudies gettin' out.”

  “My father can't sleep in jail.” I tried not to look too closely at this, the latest offering of the NYPD. At least he made eye contact, even if his vision was as blurred as his speech.

  “Yeah, Steingut was supposed to make a call,” Mulvaney told him.

  “Ain't nobudie made no call,” the captain announced, emptying his shot glass.

  “He's just an old man,” I said.

  “Shush,” said Mulvaney.

  “There's ex-ten-u-a-ting circumstances,” the cop said.

  “Like for instance?” Mulvaney said.

  He leaned forward. “Like fer instance a mob connection.”

  “It was Las Vegas night at the shul!”

  “Ya never know where these wiseguys gonna show up.” The captain's words slurred more with each sentence. “Yah never know how they let each other know who they are. Red dresses, pink shirt, fer instance.”

  “Red dresses, pink shirts?” I yelled at him, incredulous.

  “We gotta look fer all possible connections.” The bartender filled his glass with more Bushmills. “Then there's the con-feddd-eee.”

  “Confetti?” I couldn't have heard him right.

  “Shush,” Mulvaney said.

  “Ya know. Confeddee.” He downed the whole shot. “Everyone with mob connections comes into the precinct these days with at least a few specks of that stuff on them. Blue and white. It's soz they can identify one another. Your father came in with the stuff all over him. Tons of it in his jacket pockets. We took the jacket as evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?” I asked.

  “Shush,” said Mulvaney.

  “Nah. Glad you askt. His two girlfriends had the stuff in their pockets. In cahoots.”

  “Captain,” I asked, “did you come up with this theory all by yourself?”

  “That I did, darlin'. Gonna get me a commendation with it, too.”

  I looked at Mulvaney. He rolled his eyes. I rolled mine back and then was sorry I had. So what if we were able to identify the same human beings as madmen? It didn't mean we could stand each other.

  I tilted my head toward the door.

  Mulvaney ignored me. “I think you're on to something there, Captain.” I'd been wrong. Mulvaney made no sense either. “It's like what happened with parsley.”

  The captain was sufficiently troubled by this modification of his theory that he push
ed his shot glass away.

  “Parsley was the Gambinos.” Mulvaney plunged ahead and I wondered if he was about to make it worse. “Carlo goes to collect a debt and the guy can't make it, so he pays off with a parsley farm. Now Carlo's stuck with more parsley than he ever dreamed existed. ‘Whatam I gonna do with all this fuckin' parsley?' he says, ready to shoot the guy.”

  As Mulvaney transformed himself into a mobster from New Jersey, the captain grabbed his beer, pulled his stool closer.

  “Then the guy's brudda, he works for Gambino, comes up with an idea. ‘We make people buy parsley,' he says. ‘We make it indispensable.' Next thing you know, every Italian restaurant in New York gets a visit from a Gambino parsley salesman. Boom. Boom. Just like that. That's why you see a sprig on every plate, from chicken parmigiana to clams in red sauce. A plate'd look naked without it.”

  “Soz?” The captain moved his stool back and took a slug of beer.

  “Well, you don't go around suspecting every guy who's got a little bit of parsley stuck on his lips after a big meal. They're not mobsters, merely victims. Victims of a mob marketing scam. Why, that parsley stuff, it sticks to you . . .”

  “Like confetti,” I said sarcastically.

  Mulvaney looked at me, impressed. “Exactly, darlin',” he said. “You ask me, somebody has paid off a mob debt with a paper-shredding company. Forcing it down everyone's throat. Shuls, restaurants. Soon we won't be able to walk anywhere in this city without running into those little bits of confetti. The guys you got in there? They're not mobsters, they're the victims! The first victims!”

  The captain drank the last of his beer. “Whadja say yer name is, kid?”

  Mulvaney told him.

  “Yeah? You the kid o' that big-time cop lawyer? Whatta they call him?”

  “The Real Mulvaney,” Mulvaney said, not without sarcasm.

  “Yeah, that's it. Nice guy. He spends mosta his time at my cousin's bar in Rockaway.”

  “I know,” Mulvaney said. “I saw your name on your shirt.”

  The transvestites walked out of the lockup and kissed Mulvaney, who did not kiss back. My father followed, with a bounce again in his step, if not in his now heavily wrinkled pink shirt. He told Mulvaney he was a genius.

  “And me?” I asked.

  “Chopped liver,” my father said. But he was laughing.

  At home my mother kissed her husband as if he had been gone a month and went upstairs to draw his bath.

  I was left alone in the living room with Mulvaney, in the midst of an uncomfortable silence and surrounded by horrifying décor.

  “I need a drink,” I said.

  Mulvaney nodded. “Maybe we should assess the damage at Snooky's?”

  “I don't know the bouncer anymore,” I said. “And what makes you think he was Jewish?”

  I tried my Nova, which started, so I drove away. He was, I noticed, right behind me down Avenue I, but I lost him on Flatbush, didn't see him when I turned on Seventh. Snooky's was still open but there was no sign of mayhem of any sort, and as I ordered a gin and tonic at the smooth oak bar, I wondered if Mulvaney might have fabricated the entire night.

  When he appeared, I ordered him a Bushmills.

  “Captain Tubridy's best friend,” I said, handing it to him. “And thank you for freeing my father.”

  He moved his own stool closer.

  “Mulvaney,” I asked, “are we trying to have a romantic event?”

  He did not answer.

  “Or avoid one?”

  Again, he did not answer. Perhaps, I thought, he really is Irish.

  Unlike the Mulvaneys, the Fischkin family does not come with its own bartender.

  We do, however, have a cousin who used to be Ed Koch's PR man.

  Cousin George is the second PR man to be depicted in this book I may or may not be writing, which should tell you just how far the average journalist would get without the public relations industry.

  “My husband wants me to write about him,” I say to Cousin George, who now has his own firm, close, though, to Gracie Mansion. I do not ask him why there isn't an Ed Koch movie.

  “Do not forget Tiananmen Square,” he says. A good PR man, he reminds me, could do a lot with that anecdote.

  “But all he did was cover it,” I say.

  It's true-true that Mulvaney was courageous in Tiananmen Square. Stubbornly so. He did not leave when the tanks were rolling and hide upstairs in the Newsday apartment, even if it did have a perfect view. He stayed in the square, even after a People's Liberation Army kid-soldier put a gun to his head and then shot a Chinese guy instead.

  Still, as Mulvaney's potential biographer, I must point out that his was not the only life spared that day.

  And when Beijing calmed, he could—and did—leave it for the pristine luxury apartment we rented in Hong Kong. True-true, he had very bad dreams every night. But then another story came along. Sure, Tiananmen Square still plays on in Mulvaney's brain. But he thinks about it in terms of his memoir. On a list of career achievements, his near miss at the wrong end of a gun transforms into a bullet, but not a real one:

  • Covered Tiananmen Square.

  American foreign correspondents are not supposed to become part of the story.

  Once in a while, though, that quick gun to the head turns from a threat into an arrest or an abduction or worse and the journalism community comes out in full, supportive force. For a while.

  Ultimately, though, reporters who become part of their stories do not win Pulitzer Prizes. Not even the ones who are killed.

  CHAPTER 11

  Premium Chocolate

  I left Mulvaney at the bar that night and didn't see him in Ronkonkoma. Weeks passed with no Mulvaney in the Gloomroom. A few of his mob stories from Manhattan ran, but the one about my father's transvestites didn't. I asked Leisure Suit if Mulvaney had even written it, but the editor waved me away because an injured twelve-ton sperm whale had washed up at Robert Moses State Park.

  “This is big!” Leisure Suit announced. “Very big!”

  Dumb, too. It was almost winter and that whale was stuck on Long Island when it should have been in Mexico.

  Mulvaney's whereabouts were as hard to figure. He had forced me to notice him in any number of ways, including springing my father from a lockup. Then he'd disappeared. Maybe he liked to have women fall in love with him as long as he did not have to fall in love with them. But that was not a Mulvaney trait mentioned by the Non-Naked Men.

  The only one who had any news about Mulvaney was my mother. She claimed he had stopped by the house while she and my father were at an emergency meeting of the B'nai Israel Board of Trustees. They needed to find a new name for Las Vegas Saturday Nite. “Something that will attract less law enforcement speculation,” she explained. “I think we should call it ‘Bingo' and have a winking-eye logo. The rabbi likes ‘Jerusalem Saturday Nite.' He says that since the state of Israel has to gamble for its survival, people will get it.”

  Attempting to sound casual, I asked her how she knew Mulvaney had been there.

  “Well,” she said, “he left the largest box of Godiva chocolates on our front steps. . . .”

  Why was he still buttering up my mother?

  “Unlike you, he actually listened to my story. That's what makes Jim Mulvaney a great reporter.”

  Newsday's accountants—who derived their power from terrifying editors—ordered Leisure Suit to give me four days off before the end of the year. As I contemplated a quick vacation getaway, I considered leaving Long Island, never to return. Be smarter than that whale, I said to myself.

  The whale remained on the beach and now Leisure Suit wanted to give it a name.

  “Something with stature,” he said.

  “How do you say ‘humongous almost-dead whale' in Latin?” I asked him.

  He stood, applauded, ordered the paper's librarians to do some quick research, and put in a rush order for “Physty Lives” T-shirts for the Gloomroom. “Physty,” the editor said, w
as short for Physeter macrocephalus, which actually meant humongous toothed whale. He was delighted with himself. But when the shirts arrived, they sat in a box by the City Desk Without a City. No reporter would take one, let alone put one on, prompting Leisure Suit to summon Mulvaney back from the city. “Mulvaney will wear anything,” he told us angrily.

  “Mob's into blubber?” I called out when I saw him at the desk behind me, sweet as could be. Even Mulvaney couldn't spoil my mood. It was the end of the Saturday shift and in minutes I'd be out of the Gloomroom for four glorious days.

  “You're welcome for the chocolates.” He had slipped a Physty T-shirt over his latest plaid. His chinos were too long and hung over his cop shoes.

  “The chocolates were for my mother,” I said.

  He tried to smooth the crumpled notes he was supposed to dump to me, then stood and walked to my desk. I pretended to concentrate on my computer.

  “That's not why I gave them to her.”

  “We have to do this quickly,” I said.

  On my screen, I called up the Long Island Budget, which was a fancy title the editors gave to their daily list of story summaries, proving once again that newspapers might rail against jargon but they all had their own.

  RONKONKOMA BUREAU

  Physty Lives

  Typically the Suffolk County Police Department and “Animal Rights Are Us/Long Island,” a humane society offshoot, have more trouble getting along than Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. . . .

  “Mulvaney, did Leisure Suit let you write your own budget note?”

  “How'd ya guess?”

  But now, fighting for a common good, to keep a sick whale alive, they have bridged their ideological differences and created a fragile, although workable, peace.

  He hated this as much as I did.

  “Mulvaney, if I tell you it's very funny, will you hurry with those notes? I have a plane to catch.”

  “Where?” Mulvaney asked, looking like he might want to go.

  “Where that whale should be,” I said. “Mexico. Isla Mujeres. Island of Women.”

  “Some Bella Abzug junket?”