O’Mara’s out there. If he is, have him lasso Jack.”
“I’ll tell you who was also at the Acme, Peter, in case you haven’t heard. Matt Payne.”
“I heard. I saw Henry Quaire in the Roundhouse.”
“This time he was a spectator,” Sabara said.
Pekach came back into the office, followed by a uniformed lieutenant, John J. “Jack” Malone, who showed signs of entering middle age. His hairline was starting to recede; there was the suggestion of forming jowls, and he was getting a little thick around the middle.
“Good morning, sir,” he said.
“Close the door, Jack, please,” Wohl said. “Gentlemen, I don’t believe you’ve met the new commanding officer of Dignitary Protection? ”
Malone misinterpreted what Wohl had intended as a little witticism. The smile vanished from his face. It grew more than sad, bitter.
“When did that happen, sir?” he asked.
Wohl saw that his little joke had laid an egg, and he was furious with himself for trying to be clever. Malone thought he was being told, kindly, that he was being transferred out of Special Operations. And with that came the inference that he had been found wanting.
“About ten minutes ago, Jack,” Wohl said, “which is ten minutes after the commissioner told me we now have Dignitary Protection. Have you got something against taking it over?”
“Not here,” Malone said, visibly relieved. “I thought I was being sent to the Roundhouse.”
Well, that’s flattering. He likes it here.
“Do you know a sergeant by the name of Henkels?”
“Yes, sir, I know him.”
“There is something in your tone that suggests that you are not especially impressed with the sergeant.”
“There used to be a Sergeant Henkels in Central Cell Room,” Pekach volunteered. “If it’s the same guy, he has a room temperature IQ.”
“That’s him, Captain. I guess they moved him upstairs,” Malone said.
The Central Cell Room was in the Police Administration Building.
“Well, Sergeant Henkels and his Dignitary Protection files are about to be transferred out here. Into your capable command, Lieutenant Malone.”
“Oh, God. He’s a real dummy, Inspector. God only knows how he got to be a sergeant.”
“Well, I’m sure you will find a way to keep the sergeant usefully occupied.”
“How about sending him to Wheel School and praying he breaks his neck?” Malone suggested.
“I don’t think there will be time to do that before the Vice President comes to town,” Wohl said.
“I saw that in the papers,” Malone said. “We’re going to have that? There’s not a hell of a lot of time . . .”
“We’ll have to manage somehow.”
“Who are they going to move into command?” Malone asked. “Did the commissioner say?”
Wohl shook his head, no. He was more than a little embarrassed that he hadn’t considered that.
“One of the chiefs probably,” Mike Sabara said. “It’s the Vice President.”
“They’re not going to move anybody in,” Peter Wohl said, softly but firmly. “If this is a Special Operations responsibility, we’ll be responsible.”
“You’d be putting your neck on the line, Peter,” Mike Sabara said. “Let them send somebody in, somebody who’s familiar with this sort of operation.”
“Let them send someone in here with the authority to tell our people what to do?” Wohl replied. “No way, Mike. We’ll do it. Discussion closed.”
Corporal Vito Lanza had not been the star pupil in Bishop John Newmann High School’s Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced Typing courses, but he had tried hard enough not to get kicked out of the class. Being dropped from Typing would have meant assignment as a library monitor (putting books back on shelves), or as a laboratory monitor (washing all that shit out of test tubes and Ehrlenmayer flasks), neither of which had great appeal to him.
Almost despite himself, he had become a fairly competent typist, a skill he thought he would never use in real life after graduation, and certainly not as a cop, chasing criminals down the street on his Highway Patrol Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
There was a two-and-a-half-year period after graduation from Bishop Newmann High, until he turned twenty-one and could apply for the cops, during which Vito had had a number of jobs. He worked in three different service stations, worked in a taxi garage, and got a job cleaning Eastern airliners between flights at the airport. He hated all of them, and prayed after he took the Civil Service Examination for the cops that he would not be found wanting.
Officer Lanza had quickly learned that being a cop was not what he thought it would be. Right out of the Academy, he had been assigned to the 18th District at 55th and Pine Streets. He spent