That day when Sam and Tino slogged along a barely visible road, they saw a high rock face ahead where they could take a breather. Just before reaching it, there was a crack and something grazed the right side of Sam’s face. He swiped at his cheek with the back of his glove, then saw Caruso stumble but regain his feet and point to what Sam had already judged was a sniper’s nest in a tree thirty yards away. In a flat two seconds, the shooter was meat on the ground. When Tino turned to say thanks, Sam understood that what had popped onto his cheek was the better part of Tino Caruso’s nose.
Caruso lived, of course. All the guys from the Lower East Side who codeployed lived. After the war’s end, they burrowed back to their neighborhoods. Sam stayed with his mother for the time being. She could use the help and he could save for the day, whatever that might be. He snagged a Seventh Precinct badge again, which didn’t happen for every former officer coming back from the war.
He was grateful but soon restless. He couldn’t help but think of a certain something: in the snowy woods of Belgium, he had ordered an enemy soldier wearing a hijacked American MP uniform to be shot for giving wrong directions and switching road signs to send soldiers off to nowhere. Not that Sam wanted to be making a decision like that today, but here, on wheeled or foot patrol, he spent his days slapping citations through drivers’ windows and writing up accident reports.
So much had changed. Conversations centered on labor disputes. Unionized longshoremen had picketed, forcing hundreds of jobs to go idle. Fifteen thousand city elevator operators refused to punch buttons to take people up to their apartments and offices. Then the tugboat crews struck. The Irish and Italians were fussing at each other more than ever, who knew over what. Many more Jews were moving on from pushcarts, succeeding in their small businesses and relocating their families to classier suburbs.
And small crime was thriving-if you could call it that. The top district attorney was trying to fight it, placing more undercover cops to bust up prostitution, the numbers games, the creeping narcotics trade. But as of now, Samuel Rabinowitz could only walk his beat, chalk tires to see how long a car had been parked at a space with a posted time limit, and keep an eye out for no-goodniks prowling for something to lift.
A year passed, and the better part of another. He took to going to temple after not attending for a long, long time. There he met a girl named Ruth. She loved him. He tried loving her.
One afternoon he and Ruth took a table at Katz’s Deli. It wasn’t until their order came that he noticed Izzy and his sister two tables over. The sister, holy joe, had she ever changed. She was what, seventeen, eighteen, now? Sally. That was her name. Sally. And there was that sign: SEND A SALAMI TO YOUR BOY IN THE ARMY. Yellow, just beyond Sally Jacobs’s light-brown, curl-sprung head. A crown it could be.
Sam brought Ruth over to say hello. Izzy invited them to sit, bring their food. The rest of the time at that table, Sam did not register Ruth in his consciousness at all.
Ruth saw. Afterward, Ruth complained. Ruth walked.
In a week Sam and Sally strolled streets together to look in windows, and one Sunday they went to a movie called Gentlemen’s Agreement. The story had a New York City journalist, Phillip Green, becoming Phillip Greenburg so he could understand anti-Semitism. Sam and Sally talked a lot afterward about the masquerade. She could never do it, fake who she was on whatever side, while he kept saying you do what you must for a cause.
And, of course, he thought about, but didn’t tell her about, the fake MP in the woods south of Bastogne sitting proudly on a fallen tree, chin up, spine straight, lips moving in praise to the God or führer he loved, so that her newest suitor, Sammy Rabinowitz, could aim a muzzle at his chest and blow out the young German’s heart.
Sam was off-duty, out of police uniform, and at another favorite place for breakfast, tearing into a bagel loaded with cream cheese and sliced salmon and onions, two kinds of pickles on the side. He picked up a newspaper from the seat of the chair opposite and was reading it when Izzy and Mike Kelley walked in. Sam rarely saw anyone from the old days. Now he’d seen Iz twice in two weeks.
Sally had told Sam her brother didn’t really like it that she was dating him. “Izzy can be funny about things,” she said. Iz thought Sam had it too easy. Easy-Sam’s father dead early, Sam out busting his hump for jobs to help out his mother, once in a smelly butcher shop.
Mike headed over to his table. He still sported a crew cut, his red scrub looking good atop a body that had gained the right weight. His pants bore a sharp crease, as always, and his shirt, you could go blind from the white. “They let you off the beat?” he asked. “Don’t they know you’ll just go stir up trouble?” Not too funny, but Mike always tried.
“They let a horse out of its stall sometimes,” Sam said. “What’s buzzin’, cousin?” Mike said he was selling furs out of his uncle’s shop in Stuyvesant.
Izzy, he could be Sad Sack from the comics, slouchy as he was. He gazed at the banner on the newspaper that Sam still held in his left hand and said, “Don’t tell me you read that piece of toilet paper.”
Sam shrugged and didn’t explain.
Izzy’s face pinched. He said to Mike, “Let’s order. We have things to do.”
They got their orders bagged. On the way out, Izzy gave Sam a look that should have bothered Sam, but the effort would take more energy than what his caffeine boost had yet imparted. Good old Mike: at least he mouthed a “sorry.”
Sam folded the newspaper and laid it on top of the next table, masthead boldly showing. It was his first look at the The Daily Worker, the rag that had disrupted more than one family and set of friends.
The next time Sam went out with Sally, she told him how crabby her brother was after seeing Sam in the deli. “It was that newspaper you were reading,” she said.
“He thinks I’m not serious about you, is all. I’ll go have a talk with him. When’s he home?” Her brother still lived with their mother, although they’d moved downstairs to the first floor. The next day on his lunch break, Sam rang the two-chime bell.
When Izzy opened, he paused and then said, “Get your filthy Commie feet out of here.” He leaned left, and Sam could see a yellow something move between the door hinges. The door opened wider so Izzy could show him he was gripping his old stickball bat.
“She’s safe with me, Izzy.”
“You like your stinkin’ knees? You like walking around in your cop suit? Tell you what. Keep walking. The direction you came from.”
Sam left, but for Izzy’s mother’s sake. She was sitting on the green couch by the front window, holding back the lace curtain. Sally told him their mother’s doctors said she’d had a nervous breakdown. The father lived a separate life two apartments over. Mrs. Jacobs’s gray hair hung in strings past the collar line. Her mouth was the shape of a staple.
Six months later, Sam got a transfer to the Ninth Precinct. He’d still be pressing the bricks for a while, but in a larger area. If things worked out, he was told, he might get to work investigations, with a small pay pop. He let that desire be known from the start, but he knew it could be a year before it happened.
Still, now each day on the way to the Ninth squad room, he’d be singing the latest song, maybe “Buttermilk Skies” or “Prisoner of Love.” And when he went to visit Sally in the apartment she took with a girlfriend and the girlfriend stepped out, he’d try singing to her like Dick Haymes did with “Till the End of Time,” he was that happy.