“It’s not that,” she said.
The gray mist that had dominated the day evolved into a pelting, icy rain. Gusting winds bent the trees over like cranky old men forced to touch their toes. The ferocity of the storm destroyed the reflective oily sheen that usually floated on the surface of the bay, making the water seem particularly cold and lifeless.
“Then what’s the matter, kiddo?”
She ignored the question. “You were gonna tell me about Bobby Friedman and how you came to be a cop, remember?”
“Okay, wait here.”
I retreated into my bedroom and dug deep into my closet to find the galvanized metal box that held the file I was looking for. Slowly thumbing through the file, I hesitated, realizing that this might not be as good an idea as it had seemed earlier. But I was committed. Removing a few old strips of newspaper clippings held together with a single paper clip, I put the rest of the file back in the box. I had only looked at these articles one other time since cutting them out of the papers over forty years ago. The narrow strips of print were like me: yellowed, delicate, fragile, on the verge of turning to dust. I laid them down on the coffee table in front of Sarah. “Read these. It’s sort of where the answer to your question begins.”
From Daily News, December 11, 1966
Detail of Coney Island Bombing
Gary Phillips
For the first time since a car exploded on West 19th Street in Coney Island on December 6, the police have released details about the investigation. The two bodies discovered in the wreckage have been positively identified as Martin Lavitz of Mill Basin and Samantha Hope of Gravesend. Both were students at Brooklyn College. The car, a 1965 Chevrolet Impala, was registered to Miss Hope.
Questions have swirled around the case since several unconfirmed reports surfaced that the blast was too powerful to have been the result of a gas tank mishap. Witnesses to the early morning blast reported hearing an enormous explosion and said they saw a huge fireball rising several hundred feet into the sky.
“I ain’t seen nothing like it since Korea,” said John Washington, a subway motorman who had stopped at nearby Nathan’s for a hot dog. “Shrapnel was falling every which way. It was just like Pusan all over again.”
Police spokesperson Lawrence Light stated, “It was definitely a bomb. We think that they intended to plant the device in or near the draft board offices in the Shore Theater building across from Nathan’s Famous. Our bomb squad thinks the explosive device simply detonated prematurely, killing both Lavitz and Hope.” The bomb itself was apparently very powerful, but not sophisticated. The police refused to release details on the type of explosives used in its construction.
Sources indicate that both Miss Hope and Mr. Lavitz were known to be affiliated with many campus radical groups and were part of the growing anti-war movement. Ronald Epstein, head of the Students Against Fascism at Brooklyn College, said, “Marty and Samantha are martyrs. They are just the first casualties in a long battle against the military industrial complex’s meat grinder war machine. Vietnam is a little war now, but it won’t be for long.” Others who knew both victims were shocked by the news.
Sarah finished reading the first article and placed it back down on the table. “I guess those were very different times.”
“Believe me, kiddo, you’ve got no idea. Sometimes, when I think back to those days, I can’t even imagine I lived through them.”
“But what’s this got to do with Bobby Friedman and you becoming a cop?”
“Almost everything.”
CHAPTER ONE
FEBRUARY 1967, BROOKLYN
Bobby was smiling that night I bailed him out of the Brooklyn House of Detention, or as it was more affectionately known in the County of Kings, the Brooklyn Tombs. He was smiling, but things were different. He had changed. I’d known him since I was six years old and he’d always been blessed with a thick layer of woe-proof skin and slippery shoulders off which trouble would run like rain-water. Just recently, though, his skin didn’t seem quite so thick nor his shoulders as slippery. Maybe it wasn’t Bobby who had changed, but the world had changed around him, and even he’d been powerless to resist its momentum. Listen to me, sounding like I know what I’m talking about. What did I know about the world, anyway? I was just an unambitious schmuck from Coney Island, bumming around Brooklyn College looking for a lifeline. Everything I knew about the world, really knew about the world, I had learned on a stickball or basketball court or on the sand beneath the boardwalk.
Bobby Friedman was a happy son of a bitch — quick to smile, slow to anger. The thing about him I could never figure out was how he turned out that way. He certainly didn’t get his take-life-as-it-comes attitude from his parents. Hard-boiled, old-school communists, his folks were about as warm and cuddly as a box of steel wool. His mom was a cold fish who’d spent her childhood on a kibbutz in British-occupied Palestine, but she was Blanche Dubois compared to Bobby’s dad, a tough monkey who’d fought in the Spanish Civil War as an eighteen-year-old and had been a union organizer for the last three decades. Bobby used to joke that his mom’s favorite lullaby was “The Internationale” and that “Free the Rosenbergs” had been his first full sentence. Needless to say, the guys in the neighborhood didn’t hang out much at Chateau Friedman. My pal Eddie Lane used to call their stuffy, oppressive little apartment in Brighton Beach “the gulag.” It was kind of hard to cozy up to people who used words like liberal and progressive as faint damns, and who held nothing but contempt for our parents. As off-putting as their condescension toward our parents’ bourgeois aspirations might have been, it was nothing compared to the contempt they had for their own son’s cheery and entrepreneurial nature.
Don’t misunderstand: Bobby could recite the ABCs of communism, and even believed a lot of what had been drummed into his head since he popped out of the womb. He had joined Students for a Democratic Society before it became fashionable, and was a top-notch recruiter for the cause. He was a charming alchemist, a guy who could organize a protest rally out of thin air. Bobby Friedman was also the poster boy for cognitive dissonance — even if he could tell you what kind of cigars Castro preferred or explain the minutiae of the Kremlin’s latest Five-Year Plan, Bobby would always be more Lenny Bruce than Lenin, more Groucho than Karl Marx. And there was something else: Bobby Friedman liked money. He liked it a lot. He liked to spend it. More than that, he liked making it.
He was a hustler. He always had an angle, even when we were kids. For instance, he was great at flipping baseball cards. Instead of hoarding them all, he’d sell the duplicates of the prized cards, like the Mickey Mantle rookie card, to the highest bidder. He understood long- and short-term investment before the rest of us understood that we didn’t come from the cabbage patch. Bobby seemed to know where he was going and what the world held in store for him. The future that stretched out before me like a vast desert was, to Bobby, an oasis. He was a man with a plan. I admired that about him.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at Bobby’s smile that night at the Tombs. I was, though, maybe for the first time since we’d sat next to each other in Mrs. Goldberg’s kindergarten class. I was surprised because not only had he chained himself to a police paddy wagon and been dragged along Bedford Avenue for a hundred yards, but because the demonstration was about, among other things, the vicious lies the press and police had spread about Samantha Hope. Bobby’d been dating Samantha Hope for almost a year before the explosion. He had seemed totally smitten by her from the moment they met. I’d been more than a little smitten myself. I suppose all of us guys were. Who wouldn’t have been? She was a Brooklyn Jewish boy’s wet dream: a golden blonde shiksa goddess with crystal blue eyes, creamy skin, chiseled cheekbones, and legs up to here. Forget that she was an older woman — by two years — worldly, at least compared to us, and savvy about all sorts of things, but especially politics, drugs, even sports.