"Julie was on that door for six hours straight, performing a high-wire act that defied all the laws of gravity. Every five minutes, the lady inside there grabbed one of her kids and rushed to the window and hung the kid outside it, upside down, holding him by the ankles, swinging him, yelling she was going to let go if the cops didn't back off. Cops and firemen all over the street, trying to figure out where to run with the net, which way she was going to swing that kid before she dropped him. Julie at the door, talking her out of it each time, telling them all they wanted to do was help her, help the kids, help each other, come on but of there we'll talk it over. Woman had a meat cleaver in her hands. Her husband was a butcher. The kid she dropped out the window before they got there, she'd cut off his hands at the wrist."
"Wow," Eileen said.
"Heineken and a Coke," the waitress said, and put down the drinks, and rushed off again.
"Anyway," Goodman said, "Julie started to think she was making some progress. For the past hour - this was now eight o'clock at night, she'd been on the door since two in the afternoon, they'd already sent out for pizza and sodas. The woman has asked for beer, but you know we never let them have anything alcoholic …"
Eileen nodded.
". . . and she'd already fed herself and the- kids and was beginning to feel chatty and at least for the past hour she hadn't tried to throw anyone out the window. So Julie starts telling her about her own kids, the way Mary Beth did with that woman in the lingerie shop last week, and they're getting along fine, and Julie's got her convinced she isn't armed, takes off her jacket, pats herself down … no guns, see? Nobody gets hurt, right? And then she takes a chance, she asks the lady to send out one of the kids, nobody's going to hurt her, the kids must be sleepy, they've got a cot set up down the hall, why doesn't she send out one of the kids? And the lady says Let me see again that you don't have a gun, and Julie shows her she doesn't have a gun, which is the truth, and the lady says Okay, I'll let you have one of the kids, and she opens the door and splits Julie's head in two with the cleaver."
"Jesus!" Eileen said.
"Yeah. So the ES cops stormed the door and killed the lady and that was the end of the story. Except that Brady got called on the carpet downtown, the Commish wanting to know what had happened there, a kid dead, a woman dead, a police officer dead, what the hell had gone wrong? If there was already a person dead when the hostage team got there, why didn't they just storm the door to begin with? Brady explained that we didn't work that way, whatever had happened before we got there didn't matter, it was a clean slate, our job was to make sure nobody got hurt after we were on the scene. Which the Commish must have thought was ridiculous because people had got hurt, there were three people dead and television was having a field day.
"The TV people were angry because Brady wouldn't let any of them near where the lady was contained - well, that's still a rule, no television cameras. So they began questioning the entire validity of the program. Almost wrecked it, in fact. All the hard work Chief McCleary had done getting it started, all the advances Brady had made when he took over, all of it almost went down the drain. The newspapers went after him, too. They'd all endorsed the incumbent mayor, who'd lost the election, and the new mayor had appointed a new commissioner and now the Commish was being blamed for what Brady had done, and naturally the buck stopped at Brady, it was his program, he was in command of the team. It was a hell of a mess, believe me."
Goodman was working on his lobster as he said all this. Delicately taking it apart with nutcracker, fingers, and fork, dipping the succulent meat into the butter sauce, chewing, popping a fry into his mouth, back to the lobster, working on the claws now, a gulp of beer, another fry, eating, talking.
"Brady blamed himself, of course, he's that kind of man. Got it into his head that he hadn't adequately trained Julie . . . which wasn't true, we've since learned there's only so much you can teach in a classroom. And, anyway, she was really a top-notch negotiator with a great deal of experience. Played it just the way she should have, in fact. Her bad luck was to come up against a lady who'd've snapped under any circumstances."
Goodman fell silent. Eileen watched him demolishing the rest of the lobster. Huge gulp of beer now. Another fry.
"Big family?" she asked.
"Just the three kids," he said.
"I meant you."
"No, I'm … huh?"
"The way you're eating."
"Oh. No, I've always eaten this way," he said, and shrugged. "I get hungry."
"I see that."
