The Boy Detective Read Free Page B

when Alabama’s governor George Wallace came on. This was in 1968, before Wallace had been shot, saw the light, and was crowned a “national treasure.” In those days he was purely a fearmonger with sweet talk. When he addressed the nation, as he did for a full three minutes that evening, you knew you were getting hate and death, unsullied by platform politics. My father, not taking his eyes from the TV screen, thought for a moment, giving himself just the right pause. Finally he said, “You know, in a decent country a jackass like that would not be given ten seconds on television. But now, thanks to you liberals, he can talk his brains out.”
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    W HOA ! S PEAKING OF TALKING: Here’s a guy, underdressed for the weather in jeans, a T-shirt, and a blazer, quick-stepping up Thirtieth and braying into his cell in behalf of a business deal he hopes to pull off. I can’t make out the particulars. He yammers on into a small crowd ahead of me, gaining speed, and explaining about how “It’s a lock, Phil” and “Let’s just do it!” It is evident that Phil is not ready to just do it, if he ever will be, and sensing this, our public speaker grows louder and more dramatic in his self-promotion. A self-revving engine. The crowd expects that he’ll take off. And just as this thought occurs, why yes , his left foot rises on the air and then his right, and all at once he is lifting into the cold dark, two or three inches off the ground, speaking ever more urgently. “You don’t see this happening , Phil? Of course you do! Of course you do!”
    At first, finding him merely pathetic, I listen to his pitch with a disinterested malice, waiting for his voice to sink in despair as he grows aware of his inevitable failure. Phil says no, emphatically. My man droops his head, held so high until that moment. But now, as he approaches Thirty-second, I find myself quietly cheering his lusty desperation, as if he were speaking for all mankind knocking its head against a brick wall. And you can feel others on the street pulling for him, too, though not a syllable of encouragement is uttered. In his relentless effort to win Phil over, he has become the leader of our pack of strangers, our head bird. We are swept along in his tail wind. “Come on , Phil. You know it’s going to happen. It’s gotta happen!”—the last words we hear from him as he goose-steps toward the moon.
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    I F YOU DON’T want to be around people who talk their brains out, why live in New York? Talking freely is the city’s thing—you can feel it—what the city does, and has done from the start, when the Dutch carried the prizes of tolerance and openness from Holland across the Atlantic and planted those bright, fat tulips here. Free thought became free markets. The Dutch republic of the 1600s boasted the most gloriously diverse culture in Europe. Bertrand Russell called seventeenth-century Holland the birthplace of “freedom of speculation.” I cannot claim that as a boy I was aware of any of this history, but even a nine-year-old could feel the city’s extravagant freedom in the air—every block, every home inviting you to speak your mind. On my detective’s walks, though I hardly knew it, I strutted as a young colonial, escaping the tyranny of a silent house.
    Who, after all, is more suited to the liberal life than the detective, who, by dint of his very profession, defies restrictions of government, of the police, and of conventional, predictable thinking? If in some ways detectives are also arch conservatives, in that they tame the behavior of their clients, indeed tame society itself, and make it orderly, still, they function according to their own rules of honor and justice arrived at independently. The private enterprise of the private op. Every detective story depends on their freedom of speculation without which no mystery can be solved.
    As I