A Prayer for the City Read Free Page B

Hospital just outside the city limits. As Enoch underwent surgery, members of his family began to gather in a makeshift reception room. High-ranking members of the police department arrived. And so did several members of the mayor’s office: David L. Cohen, the chief of staff, who, like Radar in
M * A * S * H
, had the ability to be in the right place well before anyone even knew there was a right place; and Anthony Buchanico, a police sergeant in charge of security for the mayor.
    Rendell himself was en route. In the meantime, about twenty people awkwardly milled about, speaking to one another in small and hushed circles, biding the time with trivial talk and small talk that never rose above the trace of a whisper, eyeing the cookies and soft drinks that had been laid out on a long white table but reluctant to take anything because it wouldseem crass and uncaring, waiting for some glimmer to indicate that Enoch was not going to die. When unofficial word filtered into the room that he was going to make it, the relief was palpable—among the family members sitting around one of the tables in a silent knot, among the police officials who several months earlier had gathered outside a city church on a blue and windswept day to say good-bye to a fellow officer who had been killed in the line of duty during what should have been a routine traffic stop. There would also be relief for the mayor himself, who hated hospital scenes such as this in an almost pathological way, perhaps because they conflicted so terribly with his eternal sense of optimism and served as a brutal reminder of all that the city wasn’t, but perhaps also because they echoed the death of his own father when he was fourteen years old.
    The mood of the room lifted with the news of Enoch’s recovery. Those gathered finally reached for the cookies and soft drinks without feeling guilty. And then came the crackle and pop over a small radio receiver that one of the officers carried, followed by the flat voice of a dispatcher:
    “Officer down.…”
    Buchanico, who had spent twenty-nine years as a police officer in the city, twenty-one of them in uniform, strained to hear the words as if they were some kind of macabre joke. How could another police officer be
down
in a different part of the city? Wasn’t the shooting of one officer enough of a sacrifice to the city tonight? He grabbed the radio and went outside so he could better hear the toneless words of the dispatcher.
    There were more crackles and pops over the radio, then the words:
    “Officer assist.”
    And Buchanico knew what those words meant. The officer was in trouble, terrible trouble, going down, choking on blood and spit and fear on a shitty street corner somewhere, and right then and there, standing outside by himself, Buchanico knew what was going to unfold. He had been through these scenes before, too many times before, too many goddamn times, and they never, ever got easier, the panic and confusion and anger and frustration, the horror of an officer slipping away in a darkened city street, the horror of his family as they drove in a frantic rush to the hospital entrance and immediately knew from the avalanche of lights from the police cars and the television vans that they needed to start planning a funeral.
    The moment Cohen had heard the initial call from the police dispatcher, he knew too that the officer was not going to make it. They had been luckywith Enoch, and Cohen knew that in the city, luck never came a second time.
    “These guys are getting their brains beaten in,” said Buchanico, his eyes welling with tears as he stayed outside and waited for the mayor to arrive. He knew how fellow officers felt about the mayor, how many of them felt rejected by him, how they hated him and didn’t fall for his charm and disarming self-deprecation for a second and were convinced that he was far more interested in the bright lights of
The New York Times
and
Good Morning America
than he ever was in