Serpico by Peter Maas

Author:Peter Maas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2017-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

That night Serpico went home to his Greenwich Village apartment. He had spotted the ad for it and moved in just prior to his transfer to the 7th Division, and was still in the process of cleaning up the courtyard that had been billed as a garden.

The apartment at the time had only a bed, a table he had picked up somewhere, and a couple of chairs, and after the day he had spent with Stanard it was too depressing to be in. He did not feel like seeing anyone, so he took a long walk alone through the Village streets, ending up on one of the Hudson River piers, staring at the swirling black water, hunched against the wind. But the wind and the cold forced him off the pier, and he retreated to a dingy bar facing the river under the West Side Highway. There were two or three other customers, whom he guessed to be sailors. At the moment he wished he were shipping out somewhere with them. Serpico normally drank very little, but he had several scotches in quick succession. They had no effect on him. Christ, he thought, I can’t even get drunk.

He returned to the apartment and paced aimlessly back and forth. For the first time, he accepted the idea that he might have to leave the Police Department, that all his aspirations about being a cop, and all his concepts of what a cop stood for, were crashing around him. It was the waste, the waste of his hopes and the waste of the years he had put into the job, that angered him perhaps more than anything. He had wanted nothing to do with corruption. It had been thrust on him by crooked cops who seemed to have a free rein in the department. But if he did leave, it would not be without a fight. He would not be run out by the corruptors, and have to carry that humiliation with him for the rest of his life; first he would take them on, and the system that allowed them to operate.

Finally he phoned Captain Cornelius Behan again at home. It was the first time he had spoken to him since he had asked Behan to check into the 7th Division.

“Yes, Frank,” Behan said, his voice, as usual, low and pensive, the kind Serpico recalled hearing as a boy in the darkness of the confessional.

“With all due respect, Captain,” Serpico began brusquely, “what the hell have you got me into? This place which is supposed to be so clean is worse than the other place I was. The only difference is the price.”

“I don’t follow you, Frank.”

“I’m telling you. They already told me I can get eight hundred a month for doing nothing, just like that.”

“Oh, my God,” Behan said, “what a bucket of worms.”

“I don’t know what to do, but I’ve got to do something. I’m not going to just sit here and take this.”

“No, of course not, Frank.

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