The Strangler by William Landay Page A

“You’ve been resurrected.” But the resurrection was incomplete. Joe was restored to detective, but in Station One, in the North End. The precinct covered parts of downtown and the North and West Ends. But the West End had already been reduced to a construction site, for the most part. And the North End was small and insular; it tended to police itself, without interference from outsiders like the Boston PD. Joe told Conroy he did not want the assignment. It was a step backward. “Now, don’t be stiff-necked, boyo,” the old man advised. “It’s a detective bureau. This is the way back. Take it.”
    And so Joe found himself in plain clothes again, standing before a narrow shopfront in the old West End, near North Station. The big plate glass window had been smashed, and the hole covered over with plywood sheets. Only a transom remained to identify the place, in gold lettering:

    MORRIS WASSERMAN • 26 • DELICATESSEN GROCERY

    Moe Wasserman’s little deli was on the ground floor of one of the few remaining tenements in the area, on one of the few remaining open streets, tethered to the city by a single road that led out to Causeway Street. Joe knew the place. He remembered that missing window. It had been decorated with gold lettering, too, in English and Jewish, and near the door cardboard signs had been taped to it advertising the lunch specials. Sometimes there would be a line out the door at lunchtime. But Joe did not know from Jewish food, and what did he need it for anyway? He knew what he liked. Besides, he’d probably go in there and say the wrong thing. So he had never tried it. Ricky would have tried it. Ricky would have strolled in there and come out gibbering Jewish and munching on a kosher pickle and doing the hokey-pokey and been elected mayor of Jerusalem, because that’s how things went for Ricky. Not Joe. Joe had to work for things.
    The shop was closed, permanently, and Moe Wasserman himself had to come unlock the door for Joe and show him in. Wasserman was thin and tired-looking, handsome but dingy, sixty-five or so. Joe liked him before he had even opened the door. He liked all Jews, he thought. Twenty years before, as a nineteen-year-old Marine, Joe had marched across France into Germany with the Fourth Armored Division and he had seen things. He had seen things. In France he thought he had seen it all in the fighting in the forest, nothing could shock him anymore. Then in Germany he saw what the Germans had been up to. He didn’t like to think about it. Joe had figured out that every country needed its niggers and in Europe of necessity the niggers had been white. Growing up Daley, it had been an article of faith that the Irish were Englishmen’s niggers. From that traditional ethnic underdog-ism, it had been a short leap to pro-Semitism. Even before the war, Joe’s dad had openly admired Jewish boxers and gangsters, the local booze-runners like Charlie “King” Solomon and Louie Fox. Weren’t the Jew-gangsters just looking out for their people the same way the Gustin Gang looked out for the Irish? And hadn’t Hitler taught everyone, finally, the need for niggers everywhere to look out for themselves, to punch back? Joe was inclined to lend his muscle to the cause. His little brother Michael stirred the same feeling in Joe: There were people who just did not like to throw punches, and it was the duty of guys who did to punch back for them, because if you didn’t, if you just stood by and let it happen, then you were guilty too. In a world that killed its niggers, you had to take a side. You had to stand up.
    For his part, Moe Wasserman did not seem to care much what the hulking detective thought about Jews or the war or anything else. He let Joe in and shuffled around flicking the lights on, revealing the destruction in the shop. It was worse than Joe had expected. Everything smashed. The floor strewn with shards of glass, kitchen equipment, furniture. The old man, too: he had a