eight months riding around the district in a battered Ford van, with another rookie police officer. Hauling prisoners (a great many of whom were drunks, not even guys who’d done a stickup) from where they had been arrested to the holding cells in the District Station was not exactly what he’d had in mind when he had become a law enforcement officer. Neither was hauling sick people from their houses to a hospital.
(Philadelphia Police, unlike the police of other major American cities, respond to every call for help. The citizens of Philadelphia have learned over the years that what one does when Junior falls off the porch and cracks his head open, or Grandma falls on an icy sidewalk, or Mama scalds herself with boiling water on the stove, is to call the cops.)
And Vito learned that while it was certainly possible that he could become a Highway Patrolman and race around the streets on a Harley, or in one of the antennae-festooned special Highway Radio Patrol Cars, fighting crime, that would have to be some time in the future. After he had four, five, six good years on the job, he could apply for Highway. It was police folklore—which is not always accurate—that unless you had done something spectacular, like personally catch a bank robber, or unless you knew somebody in Highway, or had a rabbi, some white shirt who liked you, your chances of getting in Highway were about as good as they were to win the Irish Sweepstakes.
But one night, after he had been pushing the van for eight months, the sergeant at roll call had asked, “Does anybody know how to type good?”
Vito had always thought that typing was something girls did, and was reluctant to publicly confess that he could do that sort of thing, but maybe it would get him out of the fucking van for the night.
“Over here, Sergeant,” Officer Lanza had said, raising his hand.
“Okay,” the sergeant had said. “See the corporal. Sweitzer, you take his place in the van.”
“Shit,” Officer Sweitzer said.
The district was behind in its paperwork, the corporal told Officer Lanza, and the captain was on his ass, because the inspector was on his ass.
It had not taken Officer Lanza long to figure out that (a) while he was not a really good typist, compared to anybody in the district he was a world fucking champion and (b) that sitting behind a desk in the district building pushing a typewriter was way ahead of staggering around in the ice and slush loading a fat lady into the back of a van.
That particular typing job had taken three days. Over the next two years, Officer Lanza had spent more and more time behind a typewriter in the office than he had spent in an emergency patrol wagon, in an RPC, or walking a beat.
When he had almost three years on the job, he had taken the examinations for both detective and corporal. He hadn’t expected to pass either first time out—he just wanted to see what the fuck the examinations were like—and he didn’t. He found that the detective examination was tougher than the corporal examination. Probably, he deduced, because he had been doing so much paperwork, which is what corporals did, that he had come to understand a lot of it.
Two years later, when there was another examination for both detective and corporal, he figured fuck the detective, I think I’d rather be a corporal anyhow, detectives spend a lot of time standing around in the mud and snow.
He passed the corporal’s examination, way down on the numerical list, so it was another year almost before he actually got promoted. He did four months working the desk in the Central Cell Room in the Roundhouse, and then they transferred him upstairs to the Traffic Division, where he had met Lieutenant Schnair, who was a pretty good guy for a Jew, and was supposed to have Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, the chief inspector of the Detective Division, for a rabbi.
Obviously, pushing a typewriter for the Traffic Division in the Roundhouse was a lot better than standing in the snow and blowing your whistle at tractor trailers at some accident scene for the Traffic Division, and Vito tried hard to please Lieutenant Schnair.
When Schnair got promoted to captain, and they gave him the Airport Unit (which, so far as Vito was concerned, proved Chief Lowenstein was his rabbi), he arranged for Corporal Lanza to be transferred to Airport too, after one