The Force. Don Winslow

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       PROLOGUE

      

      Lenox Avenue,

      Honey.

      Midnight.

      And the gods are laughing at us.

      —LANGSTON HUGHES, “LENOX AVENUE: MIDNIGHT”

       Harlem, New York City

       July 2016

      Four A.M.

      When the city that never sleeps at least lies down and closes its eyes.

      This is what Denny Malone thinks as his Crown Vic slides up the spine of Harlem.

      Behind the walls and windows, in apartments and hotels, tenements and project towers, people are sleeping or can’t, are dreaming or are beyond dreams. People are fighting or fucking or both, making love and making babies, screaming curses or speaking soft, intimate words meant for each other and not the street. Some try to rock infants back to sleep, or are just getting up for another day of work, while others cut kilos of heroin into glassine bags to sell to the addicts for their wake-up shots.

      After the hookers and before the street cleaners, that’s the window of time you have to make a rip, Malone knows. Nothing good ever happens after midnight, is what his old man used to say, and he knew. He was a cop on these streets, coming home in the morning after a graveyard shift with murder in his eyes, death in his nose and an icicle in his heart that never melted and eventually killed him. Got out of the car in the driveway one morning and his heart cracked. The doctors said he was dead before he hit the ground.

      Malone found him there.

      Eight years old, leaving the house to walk to school, he saw the blue overcoat in the pile of dirty snow he’d helped his dad shovel off the driveway.

      Now it’s before dawn and already hot. One of those summers when God the landlord refuses to turn the heat down or the air-conditioning on—the city edgy and irritable, on the brink of a flameout, a fight or a riot, the smell of old garbage and stale urine, sweet, sour, sickly and corrupt as an old whore’s perfume.

      Denny Malone loves it.

      Even in the daytime when it’s baking hot and noisy, when the gangbangers are on the corners and the hip-hop bass beats hurt your ears, and bottles, cans, dirty diapers and plastic bags of piss come flying out of project windows, and the dog shit stinks in the fetid heat, he wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world.

      It’s his city, his turf, his heart.

      Rolling up Lenox now, past the old Mount Morris Park neighborhood and its graceful brownstones, Malone worships the small gods of place—the twin towers of Ebenezer Gospel Tabernacle, where the hymns float out on Sundays with the voices of angels, then the distinctive spire of Ephesus Seventh-Day Adventist and, farther up the block, Harlem Shake—not the dance but some of the best damn burgers in the city.

      Then there are the dead gods—the old Lenox Lounge, with its iconic neon sign, red front and all that history. Billie Holiday used to sing there, Miles Davis and John Coltrane played their horns, and it was a hang for James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. It’s closed now—the window covered with brown paper, the sign dark—but there’s talk about opening it again.

      Malone doubts it.

      Dead gods don’t rise again except in fairy tales.

      He crosses 125th, a.k.a. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

      Urban pioneers and the black middle class have gentrified the area, which the Realtors have now christened “SoHa,” a blended acronym always being the death knell of any old neighborhood, Malone thinks. He’s convinced that if real estate developers could buy properties in the bottom levels of Dante’s Inferno they’d rename it “LoHel” and start throwing up boutiques and condos.

      Fifteen years ago, this stretch of Lenox was empty storefronts; now it’s trendy again with new restaurants, bars and sidewalk cafés where the better-off locals come to eat, the white people come to feel hip and some of those condos in the new high-rise buildings go for two and a half mil.

      All you need to know about this part of Harlem now, Malone thinks, is that there’s a Banana Republic next to the Apollo Theater. There are the gods of place and the gods of commerce, and if you have to bet who’s going to win out, put your money on money every time.

      Farther uptown and in the projects it’s still the ghetto.

      Malone crosses 125th and passes the Red Rooster, where Ginny’s Supper Club resides in the basement.

      There are less famous shrines, nonetheless sacred to Malone.

      He’s attended funerals at Bailey’s, bought pint bottles at Lenox Liquors, been stitched up in the E-room at Harlem Hospital, played hoops by the Big L mural in Fred Samuel Playground, ordered food through the bulletproof glass at Kennedy Fried Chicken. Parked along the street and watched the kids dance, smoked weed on a rooftop, watched the sun come up from Fort Tryon Park.

      Now more dead gods, ancient gods—the old Savoy Ballroom, the site of the Cotton Club, both gone long before Malone’s time, ghosts from the last Harlem Renaissance haunting this neighborhood with the image of what it once was and can never be again.

      But Lenox is alive.

      It СКАЧАТЬ