Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,122

his quota sheet to fill. He had to answer to the supervisors upstairs. The felonies got knocked down to misdemeanors. It was another form of demolition. You had to swing the wrecking ball. He was being judged on how he judged: the less work he gave to his colleagues upstairs, the happier they were. Ninety percent of the cases—even serious misbehavior—had to be disposed of. He wanted the promised promotion, yes, but even that couldn’t stifle the feeling that he had taken whatever idealism he once had and stuffed it inside a cheap black robe, and now, when he went searching, he couldn’t even find it inside the darkest slits.

He arrived at 100 Centre Street five days a week, put on his robe, wore his shiniest shoes, pulled his socks up around his ankles, and prevailed when he could. It was, he knew, about choosing his fights. He could have easily had a dozen pitched battles a day, more if he wanted. He could’ve taken on the whole system. He could have given the graffiti writers fines of a thousand dollars so that they’d never be able to pay it. Or he could’ve sentenced the firework kids on Mott Street to six months. He could’ve sent the drug addicts down for a full year. Chained them with a heavy bail. But it would all rebound, he knew. They would refuse to plead. And he would get the book slung at him for clogging up the courts. The shoplifters, the shoeshine boys, the hotel sneaks, the three-card-monte kids, they were all entitled eventually to say, Not guilty, Your Honor. And then the city would choke. The gutters would fill up. The slime would spill over. The sidewalks would fill. And he’d be blamed.

At the worst of times he thought, I’m a maintenance guy, I’m a gatekeeper, I’m a two-bit security man. He watched the parade come in and out of his courtroom, whichever Part he was in that day, and he wondered how the city had become such a disgusting thing on his watch. How it lifted babies by the hair, and how it raped seventy-year-old women, and how it set fires to couches where lovers slept, and how it pocketed candy bars, and how it shattered ribcages, and how it allowed its war protesters to spit in the faces of cops, and how the union men ran roughshod over their bosses, and how the Mafia took a hold of the boardwalks, and how fathers used daughters as ashtrays, and how bar fights spun out of control, and how perfectly good businessmen ended up urinating in front of the Woolworth Building, and how guns were drawn in the pizza joints, and how whole families got blown away, and how paramedics ended up with crushed skulls, and how addicts shot heroin into their tongues, and how shysters ran scams and old ladies lost their savings, and how shopkeepers gave back the wrong change, and how the mayor wheezed and wheedled and lied while the city burned down to the ground, got itself ready for its own little funeral of ashes, crime, crime, crime.

There wasn’t a bad thing in the city that didn’t pass through Soderberg’s gutter watch. It was like surveying the evolution of slime. You stand there long enough and the gutter gets slick, no matter how hard you battle against it.

All these idiots kept coming from their grind houses, strip joints, freak shows, novelty stores, peep shows, fleabag hotels, and they looked even worse for having spent some time in the Tombs. Once, when he was in court, he saw a cockroach literally climb from a defendant’s pocket and crawl along his shoulder and up along the side of his neck before the man even noticed. When he realized it, the defendant just whisked it away, and continued his guilty plea. Guilty, guilty, guilty. They nearly all pleaded guilty and in exchange got a sentence they could live with, or they went for time served, or they coughed up a small fine, and went along their merry way, a swagger in their walk, out into the world, just so they could turn around and do the same foolish thing and be back in his courtroom a week or two later. It put him in a state of constant agitation. He bought a hand exerciser that fit in the pocket. He slid his hand underneath the slit in his robe and took it from his suit pocket. It was a spring-loaded