Where There's Smoke полностью

There are almost eight million people living in this city, and nine percent of them—more than 700,000—are black. Of these, close to half a million live in the rank ghetto known as Hammerlock. Knowing the bitter humor with which slum dwellers baptize the rat-infested areas in which they’re forced to live (as, for example, La Perla in San Juan, a pearl indeed), you might automatically conclude that the name of a wrestler’s hold had been applied to Hammerlock only after it became a slum—the grip of poverty metaphorically pulling the slum dweller’s dig­nity up behind his back and yanking on it till it broke.

Wrong.

Once upon a time, and long before my own Dutch grandfather came to these shores, the section now known as Hammerlock was interlaced with canals built by his ancestors. The harbor and river, then as now, were busy with seagoing traffic; the network of canals eased the clutter, diverting barges loaded with merchandise onto the inland waterways. Hammerlock in those days was an area of farms and forests, its dirt roadways permitting the passage of a single horse and wagon, or a coach perhaps, but certainly not two of them approaching from opposite directions. The canals were speedier and safer; then, as now, there were highway robbers everywhere, and they probably thought twice before sticking up a barge, which was a crime close to piracy on the high seas and punish­able by hanging. In any case, as with all canal systems, there were locks. These locks were named after the keep­ers who ran out of the Canalside shacks to open the gates whenever a barge approached. Buersken’s Sluis, Goed-koop’s Sluis, Favejee’s Sluis, Weidinger’s Sluis were all part of the system. As was Hemmer’s Sluis. Well, when the roads were improved, the canals were filled in (some of them, in fact, were filled in to make roadbeds), and the names of the locks vanished together with the locks themselves and the Canalside shacks that had dotted the landscape. But the keeper Hemmer had constructed for himself a house of huge stones cleared from the field be­yond his lock, and this remained on the site long after the canal running past it had been filled in. The house itself became known as Hemmer’s Sluis, which was changed to Hammer’s Lock when the English took over the city, and later, long after the house itself had been burned down by the Hessians fighting Washington’s troops, this was shortened to Hammerlock. As a matter of interest, the northernmost corner of the slum named Hammerlock—the part that jutted into the river and pointed a jagged finger of land toward the next states—was called Landslook, a bastardization of Lange’s Lock from days of yore.

I got uptown at about ten minutes to three, found a garage on Liberty and 104th, and parked Maria’s Pinto there. The last known address for Charles S. Carruthers— according to his parole officer’s report—was 8212 McKenzie, four blocks west of Liberty, near the corner of 106th. The day was sunny and mild, and the residents of Hammerlock were out in force to enjoy the good weather, anticipating the winter perhaps, when they would be im­prisoned indoors in badly heated apartments. It was no accident that Hammerlock had the highest fire-incidence rate in the entire city, or that most of those fires took place in the wintertime, when cheap and faulty kerosene burners were used to supplement the heat that was sup­posed to be coming up in the radiators; go fight City Hall.

The citizens regarded me with suspicion, partially be­cause I was a white man in an exclusively black neigh­borhood, but more specifically because they knew I was fuzz. To them, it didn’t matter that I was retired fuzz. Fuzz is fuzz, and there’s a fuzz look and a fuzz smell. They knew exactly what I was, and they could guess at why I was there—to get one of their people in trouble. They were wrong. I was there looking for a white woman who maybe knew why a white man had stolen a corpse from a mortuary after killing a white employee of the place. But they were right, too. Fuzz is fuzz.