The Whites

“Infernal: Of or relating to a lower world of the dead.” Rarely does a dictionary definition describe a novel, but in the case of The Whites, by Richard Price (writing as Harry Brandt) infernal just about sums it up. For it is in that lower world that Billy Graves lives. As an NYPD sergeant in Manhattan Night Watch, the team of detectives assigned post-midnight felonies from Wall Street to Harlem, Graves spends more waking hours with dead strangers than he does with his family. He even met his wife over a corpse, that of her husband, overdosed on heroin. “I thought he was what I deserved,” Carmen replied back then, when Billy asked how come. And it is the history behind that answer — what Carmen really means — that fuels this classic revenge tragedy. Set in motion by chance, it uncoils, ferociously fast, on streets depicted with the cinematic intensity familiar from other Price novels, notably Lush Life and Clockers.

At a murder scene underneath Penn Station, for example, Billy observes, “Other than the still-congealing blood, the killing floor — a debris field of candy wrappers, Styrofoam cups, the odd article of clothing, a shattered liquor bottle barely held together by the adhesive on its label — gave up too much and nothing at all.” Earlier that night, he surveys the aftermath of a gang fight, ” . . . the sound of tires rolling over a side street of shattered light bulbs . . . the 2-9 Gang Unit, six young men in windbreakers and high tops, were already harvesting collars, plasti-cuffing belly-down bangers like bundling wheat.” From his opening paragraph depicting St. Patrick’s Night drunks reeling out onto sidewalks, Price hurls us into a chaotic underworld, and we surrender to the arrhythmia of cop life:  Billy, if he’s lucky, taking his sons to school, seeing Carmen off to her job as a triage nurse, and downing a vodka-laced cranberry juice to guarantee sleep before doing it all over again. Another night, more blood, more of Price’s whip-crack dialogue and dead-eye descriptions.

Then the past returns in the murdered shape of Jeffrey Bannion, whose killing looks like delayed payback. Eight years earlier, Bannion murdered a child and pinned the crime on his own disabled brother, who was in turn killed within days of his incarceration. Recognizing Bannion’s corpse, Billy calls retired detective John Pavilcek, once the investigating officer on the case.

“Hey.”
“I heard,” Pavilcek said.
“What do you think?”
“That there’s a God after all.”

Or an avenging cop? Bannion was, after all, one of the Whites, the name used by a powerful, maverick crew of detectives, known as the Wild Geese, for “those who committed criminal obscenities on their watch and then walked away untouched by justice.” Of the seven original Wild Geese, only Billy remains on the force (under the shadow of a coke/shooting scandal), but he and four of the original crew still meet, still rely on each other. His focus tight on Billy, Price introduces the other veterans — and each one’s personal White — somewhat perfunctorily, denying all but Yasmeen Assaf-Doyle much depth. Consequently, when the remaining Whites start turning up dead or damaged, the accruing mystery seems more like a geometry puzzle than a suspense drama as Billy struggles to match victim and avenger.

Alongside this plot, however, Price develops a parallel, deeper quest for vengeance that in turn deepens the inner lives of his main characters. Not that the action slows. “Big, fast, and devoid of mercy.” That’s the oddly affectless Detective Milton Ramos, whose path occasionally crosses Billy’s at work but who becomes a menacing shadow in Billy’s life when he recognizes Carmen behind the triage desk. In that instant, the fatal connection between Milton’s family and Carmen, a decades-old betrayal, ignites a new, slow-burning terror.

“Turn to the wall, please?”
Billy did as he was told, so stupid with fear he felt high.
“Did you know?” Ramos asked him from behind.
“Did I know what.”

In an elegant twist, Ramos asks the question that Billy has been asking throughout the novel, of suspects and of former brethren who seem to have closed ranks against him. “You created secrets and you kept secrets.” He knows that, he works in the shadows. But the darkness at the heart of his own life, Carmen’s darkness, will never yield to daybreak. Besides, “Billy loathed sunrises; he knew them as cruel mirages, each one a false promise that a tour had come to its end. . . . They made him feel f . . . d with.”  Price makes us see why.