“I’m sorry.”
Kamal shrugged. “Just a thing. She’ll get through it.”
“How old is he again?”
“Three.”
“Early intervention is important,” Joe said. “There are resources—more than the schools will admit having if you don’t push it. Give me a day or two and I’ll give you some ideas and some people she can talk to. My uncle raised me, and he was a city social worker. He had ways of navigating the system that still apply.”
Kamal seemed to absorb this, then gave a clipped nod, which Joe took as a communication of thanks. He lifted his chin in a “so long” manner and turned away.
Contrary to what Joe had thought when he first met with Aideen, guys at Kross did care that he was a lawyer, and for the most part it was working to his advantage. He wasn’t cozy with the inmates who seemed to run the place—shadowy figures on the upper floor who seemed to come and go from cells at will and at all hours—but he was visited regularly by men asking for help with motions and appeals. Joe obliged and asked nothing in return. Mostly Black except for one or two Latino men, the inmates were folksy and plainspoken. The Latino guys stuck together and took counsel mostly from within. Some of the guys he helped reminded him of old clients. Some of colleagues. Some of cops.
With the fog of his first miserable days in Rikers receding, he was finding himself able to do more than simply endure. It’s not that he could or would make light of the terrible things all around him, or the horrors he only heard echoes of from the shadows. There was incessant noise: talking, screaming, jailhouse rapping, fighting sometimes. If he slept at all, it was mostly during the day. The food was awful. The boredom was stifling. In short, it was bleak, but he was quickly learning that all states of mind could be products of perspective as much as circumstance.
It was strange to think that he had never learned something so profound in his fifty years, half of that as an attorney. But with mixed feelings of guilt, stupidity, and acknowledgment of privilege, he was internalizing it. He had been a prosecutor for most of his career, an arbiter of punishment for codified gradations of evil. A professional finger-pointer. Now the pale finger of the law was pointed at him. That reality cracked him open like an egg, but it allowed in truths he had never been forced to contemplate. For all the legal help he could provide, and that the recipients seemed grateful for, the truth was that the inmates of Rikers were teaching Joe more than he could have possibly imagined or could ever repay. Among those things was the reality that a man—any man—inside this terrible place was more similar than different from any man outside it. This realization was painful but freeing, and he was beginning to embrace it.
CHAPTER 46
Wednesday, July 13, 1977
Broadway
Upper West Side, Manhattan
10:57 p.m.
Joe calmed himself by counting things.
He counted vintage Checker cabs as their headlights cut through the gloom. He counted triangular Marlboro signs atop the newer ones. Robbie had directed that they walk south on Broadway, on the west side of the avenue, so he counted the streets as they reached each corner. The signs were a pale yellow, grayed out in the darkness, but there were enough passing cars that he could make them out.
The streets were filled with trash and debris. People on the sidewalk, thankfully, paid the boys almost no mind. Old men stood smoking in doorways. Kids, many of them shirtless and in high striped tube socks and short shorts, congregated on front stoops down the side streets. Their laughter was mostly cheerful, not foreboding. Joe counted the types of storefronts also. Two coffee shops so far, one a Chock full o’Nuts and one with a Hot Bagels sign in the window. A candy store. A hardware store. In front of the hardware store, two men with undershirts and hairy backs stood outside and casually swung baseball bats.
Steel gates were down on most of the stores, many of them covered with graffiti. The boys had seen people on the street with merchandise, even pushing shopping carts full of items, but had encountered no looting since Seventy-Ninth Street. The term itself—“looting”—was not familiar, but now the men on the radio were using it regularly and talking about areas of the city where it was happening. Their echoed voices seemed to come from everywhere.
At the corner of Seventy-Fourth Street was a massive, beautifully carved building that seemed to disappear into darkness above them. Like most of the buildings they were passing, there was candlelight in many of the windows but little activity. On the street, though, was something like a block party. At first Joe thought it was another store being looted, but the mood of this crowd was very different. There was no shattering glass, no whooping or grunts, no pushing and shoving. It was a happy gathering of young men, most of them shirtless, arms flung over each other’s shoulders. They huddled in groups and passed around bottles and cigarettes.