Badge of the Assassin

Chapter One North of the Triborough Bridge, the Harlem River slices sharply to the northwest, narrowing Manhattan Island down to a tadpole tail of land. At 142nd Street, Fifth Avenue, the dividing line between the East Side and the West Side, runs up against the river and comes to a stop. Lenox Avenue, which is Harlem's name for Sixth, extends northward as far as 147th, and then it, too, runs out of land. Seventh lasts all the way to 154th, just one block short of the Macombs Dam Bridge, which leads across the river to the Bronx and Yankee Stadium.From the air, the triangle of land bordered on the south by 155th Street, on the west by the sheer cliff known as Coogan's Bluff, and on the east by the Harlem River doesn't look like it belongs to New York. Beyond it, to the south and west, one can see the huddled tenements of Harlem pressed to each other like subway riders in the morning. But in the triangle itself, known generally as the Colonial Park district, the tenements have long since been leveled, to be replaced by two distinct sets of ungainly X-shaped apartment towers.The southernmost set of towers consists of four thirty-story apartments that from above look like mammoth jacks left lying on the ground by the children of giants. And well they might, for the land they stand on was once the home of Giants. The Polo Grounds used to be here, and now someone's living room covers the spot where Eddie Stanky rode from third to home on Leo Durocher's back after Bobby Thomson's home run in the '51 playoff.Just north of the Polo Grounds Project stand seven identical twelve-story towers and a larger eighth one that is really just two of the smaller buildings run together. Although the grounds have been attractively landscaped with hedges, grass, trees, and wide walkways, nothing can disguise the fact that the Colonial Park Houses, as these eight towers are collectively called, are low-income housing. In an effort to pass them off as something else, the architects hoped to create a parklike atmosphere by facing the main entrances of all the buildings inward, so that the project is self-contained, its back turned on Harlem. But Harlem cannot be so easily thrust aside. Like an unpleasant thought the mind tries to reject, it has a way of reasserting itself. Psychoanalysts call this phenomenon the return of the repressed, but the cops in the Thirty-second Precinct had a simpler way of putting it. In Colonial Park, they said, you watched your ass.Richard Hill had fought in Vietnam and should have known the sound of gunfire when he heard it. But on a spring night twelve thousand miles from where he had done his fighting, the sudden noise caught him off guard and he assumed the explosions were firecrackers. It took a moment for him to realize he was once again on a battlefield. When he did, he reacted like a soldier.As he passed between buildings 159-14 and 159-20, he glanced to his left, the direction from which the sound of the firecrackers had come. But there were no children playing in the area, no signs of life at all. There was just, on the sidewalk near the bushes, sixty to seventy feet in front of him, a clump of discarded clothes.Then the clothing moved, shifting on the ground as though there were something alive in it. He watched for a few seconds, until he was certain he had seen it move, then walked toward it, quickening his pace as he drew closer. When he had cut the distance in half he began to hear a terrible moaning, like an animal in pain, like the wind keening through high trees. By this time he was running.The thought flashed through his mind that there were snipers on one of the roofs. An instinct bred in distant jungles took over and he darted for cover, then raised his head and scanned the rooftops. He saw nothing. In an infantryman's crawl, he inched toward the fallen man, alert for any glint from above that would be the only warning he would get of the sniper'sTanenbaum, Robert K. is the author of 'Badge of the Assassin' with ISBN 9780743432986 and ISBN 0743432983.