Martha's knee found Dave's under the table.
"I think you like our Tournedos Alfredo very much," the young Italian said.
"I love tournedos," Martha said.
Dave Pekach had no idea what a tournedo was.
"Sounds fine," he said.
Martha's knee pressed a little harder against his.
"And before, some clams with Sauce Venezia?"
"Fine," Dave said.
FOURTEEN
Certain enforcement and investigation jobs in Narcotics, Vice, and elsewhere require the use, in plainclothes, of young policemen who don't look like policemen, or even act like policemen, and whose faces are unknown to the criminals they are after. The only source of such personnel is the pool of young police officers fresh out of the Police Academy.
There are certain drawbacks to the assignment of such young and, by definition, inexperienced officers to undercover jobs. While they are working undercover, they require as much supervision as they can be given, because of their inexperience. But the very nature of undercover work makes close supervision difficult at best, and often impossible. Most of the time an undercover cop is on his own, literally responsible for his own fate.
Some young undercover cops can't handle the stress and ask to be relieved. Some are relieved because of their inability to do what is asked of them, either because of a psychological inability to act as anything but what they are-niceyoung men-or, along the same line, their inability to learn to think like the criminals they are after.
But some rookies fresh from the Academy take to undercover work like ducks to water. The work is sometimes what they dreamed it would be like-conditioned by cops-and-robbers movies and television serieswhen they got to be cops: putting the collar on really bad guys, often accompanied by some sort of sanctioned violence, knocking down doors, or apprehending the suspect by running the son of a bitch down and slamming his scumbag ass against a wall.
There are rarely-although this is changing-either the gun battles or high-speed chases of movies and television, but thereis danger and the excitement that comes with that, plus a genuine feeling of accomplishment when the assistant district attorney reviews their investigation and their arrest and decides it is worth the taxpayers' money and his time to bring the accused before the bar of justice, and, with a little luck, see the scumbag son of a bitch sent away for, say, twenty to life.
Officers Charles McFadden and Jesus Martinez had been good, perhaps even very good, undercover police officers working in the area of narcotics. Officer McFadden, very soon after he went to work, learned that he had a rather uncanny ability to get purveyors of controlled substances to trust him. Officer Martinez, who shared with Officer McFadden a set of values imparted by loving parents and the teachings of the Roman Catholic church, took great pride in his work.
He had a Latin temperament, which had at first caused him to grow excited or angry-or both-during an arrest. He had noticed early on that when he was excited or angry or both, more often than not the scumbags they had against the wall somewhere seemed far more afraid of him than they did of Officer McFadden, although Charley was six inches taller and outweighed him by nearly ninety pounds.
As Charley had honed the skills that caused the bad guys to trust him and help dig their own graves, Hay-zus worked on what he thought of as his practice of psychological warfare against the criminal element. During the last nine months or year of his undercover Narcotics assignment, he was seldom nearly as excited or angry as those he was arresting thought he was. And he had picked up certain little theatrical embellishments, for example, sticking the barrel of his revolver up an arrestee's nose or excitedly encouraging Charley, knowing that he was incapable of such a thing, to "Shoot the cocksucker, Charley. We can plant a gun on him."
Either or both techniques, and some others that he had learned, often produced a degree of cooperation from those arrested that was often very helpful in securing convictions and in implicating others involved in criminal activities.
Both Martinez and McFadden knew they had been good, perhaps even very good, undercover cops, and they both knew they had not been relieved of their undercover Narcotics assignments because of anythingwrong they had done, but quite the reverse: They had bagged the junkie scumbag who had shot Captain Dutch Moffitt of Hig
hway. That had gotten their pictures in the newspapers and destroyed their effectiveness on the street.
They would have happily forgone their celebrity if they had been allowed to keep working undercover Narcotics, but that, of course, was impossible.
A grateful Police Department hierarchy had sent them to Highway Patrol, where they were offered, presuming satisfactory probationary performance, appointment asreal Highway Patrolmen much earlier on in their police careers than they could have normally expected.
Big fucking deal!
Maybe that shit about getting to wear boots and a Sam Browne belt and a cap with the top crushed down would appeal to some asshole who had spent four years in a district, keeping the neighborhood kids from getting run over on the way home from school, and turning off fire hydrants in the summer, and getting fucking cats out of fucking trees, and that kind of shit, but it did not seem so to either Hay-zus or Charley.
They had gone one-on-one (or two-on-two) with some really nasty critters in some very difficult situations, had come out on top, and thought themselves, not entirely without justification, to be just as experienced, just as goodreal cops, as anybody they'd met in Highway.
They were smart enough, of course, to smile and sound grateful for the opportunity they had been offered. While Highway wasn't undercover Narcotics, neither was it a district, where they would have spent their time breaking up major hubcap-theft rings, settling domestic arguments, and watching the weeds grow.
There was soon going be another examination for detective, and they were both determined to pass it. Once they were detectives, they had agreed, they could apply for-and more important probably get, because they had caught Gerald Vincent Gallagher, Esquire-something interesting, Major Crimes, maybe, but if not Major Crimes, then maybe Intelligence or even Homicide.
In the meantime they understood that the smart thing for them to do was keep smiling, keep their noses clean, keep studying for the detective exam, do what they were told to do, and act like they liked it.
As their first tour enforcing the Motor Vehicle Code on the Schuylkill Expressway very slowly passed, however, they found this harder and harder to do.
Only two interesting things had happened since they began their patrol. First, of course, was making asses of themselves by turning the lights and the siren on and then pulling alongside Captain Pekach and that rich broad from Chestnut Hill he was fucking and signaling him to pull over.