Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [250]
“We’ll have you there in a couple of minutes,” the cop next to the driver said, swiveling around to look at me. His face was darkened with smoke, and his eyes were bloodshot. Looking at him, I was reminded of the duke of Wellington’s remark on the first sight of his army in Spain: “I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.”
“What’s going on out there?” I asked.
“A riot.”
“How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad.”
“If they want to burn down their own neighborhoods, let ’em,” the driver said, with a shrug.
His companion nodded. “Sure. But you got to stop them looting. And shooting at us.”
They both fell silent for a moment. I had no difficulty in imagining what was likely to happen to anybody who was suspected of opening fire on a Detroit cop.
“You’ll be OK at headquarters,” the driver said. “I’ll say one thing for Girardin. At least he was smart enough to take a few precautions. I mean he must have seen it coming. That’s why he had all the manhole covers around headquarters welded shut. He didn’t want them pulling the manhole covers, then breaking into the building from underground.”
Even in Budapest, I reflected, nobody had taken this precaution. The idea that the manhole covers around police headquarters had been welded shut at the last minute gave me some sense of just what was taking place here—a realization confirmed by the sight of my destination, which was ringed by armored cars and floodlights.
As it turned out—and not surprisingly—Girardin was too busy to spend any time with me. His office had the look of the Smolny Institute, from which Lenin directed the 1918 revolution: heavily armed men trooping up and down the stairs, weapons stacked everywhere, people rushing back and forth with urgent messages, an almost palpable sense of urgency in the air, and the unmistakable scent of violence everywhere. At least half a dozen people told me that the manhole covers had been welded shut.
I flew back the next morning, having been driven to the airport by another silent pair of cops, through streets that were deserted and over which hung a thick pall of smoke.
Few of my subsequent books from the right side of the law led me into any similar adventure. I was taken on a tour of Chinatown by the precinct captain, introduced to the NYPD detective who specialized in art theft, and spent a good deal of time at One Police Plaza, meeting prospective authors. Since law enforcement is a small world, I soon had books by FBI agents and even by U.S. marshals. Just like the people in organized crime, every law-enforcement officer has a story to tell, and most of them are good raconteurs.
I’ve never done a police cookbook, though. Not yet. Probably somebody is writing one right now in the front seat of a patrol car.
THE SEARCH for a different kind of criminal, by a very different kind of cop, brought Peter Mayer and me together again briefly when I was presented with the opportunity to buy Ladislas Farago’s Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, by his longtime (and long-suffering) agent, Maximillian Becker. Farago was the author of a best-selling biography of Patton and a kind of self-appointed expert on matters of secret intelligence. “Laci” (the Hungarian diminutive of Ladislas), as Farago was always called by his friends, was a rotund, bearded man, with an ingratiating smile and definitely uningratiating eyes.
In Farago, I instantly recognized a type completely familiar to me: the transplanted Hungarian with the deliberately mysterious background who knows (or claims to know) everyone and is so far beyond scruples as not to understand their existence. Farago embodied all those stories about the cleverness of Hungarians—“A Hungarian is a man who enters a revolving door behind you, and comes out ahead of you”; “The Hungarian recipe for an omelet begins,