Night Must Fall (Part 1)

By Marc-Yves Tumin

To his boss, he was just another fresh-faced Irish boy in a blue uniform.

This is his story.

A mechanic sinks his life savings into a truck factory in the South Bronx.

He puts in 12-hour days, six days a week. It's a tough way to turn a buck. Each night, when he closes up, he hopes the plant's in one piece the next morning.

The neighborhood's an industrial area and the image of desolation. There are brickworks and a poultry slaughterhouse down the block. Every now and then, you find a stiff dumped in a lot.

To qualify for insurance, he's compelled to hire a central-station alarm company. Diamond Security is one such firm. It's in a basement of the Diamond District at Midtown.

Its days bustle with vice presidents who drink too much coffee and kowtow to their customers, referred to as "subscribers" by management and 'subs" or "humps" by the uniformed employees.

Its night shifts comprise three people: an impatient dispatcher, an older, rumpled repairman, and a young security guard.

The night shift gets little respect. The cops call its crew "square badges."

The subscribers call them worse. When a burglary occurs, the night shift's blamed. Its men are regularly accused of theft, incompetence, and sleeping on the job.

There are thousands of alarms to monitor and two people to investigate. How it plays out is a roll of the dice.

If the dispatcher doesn't send a guard and there's a break-in, he's on the carpet.

If the repairman's slow to fix a faulty, they say: "He's dropped anchor." If the guard arrives late at a premises, "He's a spaz."

The men shrug off the insults and go about their work. They're a tough lot, made tougher by harsh conditions.

A few were cops and this is the end of the line. A few others are waiting for that pie in the sky, a city job.

A few of the oldest have lost all ambition and are resigned to their fate.

They like to drink, play the ponies, and hang out at an after-hours joint called the Derby Club.

In the depths of winter, an alarm rings in the automotive plant.

At Diamond Security, an electric meter flickers frantically and expires.

The dispatcher chews his pipe and watches it intently. He calls over Ronan Geraghty: "We've got multiple drops. You better take a look."

It's 3 a.m. Geraghty pulls on his parka, trudges upstairs, and careens through the snowy streets to the Bronx.

The dispatcher calls the police and the factory owner: "I've got an alarm on an open."

Geraghty's new to the job and still on probation. In six months, he'll apply for a pistol permit. He's in the union, but it's a sweetheart deal and the reps rat out the brothers.

Eventually, Geraghty will pack heat. For now, his self-defense consists of his fists, a walkie-talkie, and a long metal flashlight.

He works for little more than minimum wage and prays for a career with the NYPD.

Until then, he spends his spare time at the Starrett City Boxing Club.

He's a promising amateur fighter. According to Jimmy O'Pharrow, who runs the gym, "The kid has heart."

Geraghty lives alone in a small apartment in Bay Ridge.

Each day, he does roadwork by the seafront. He shops along 86th Street at the small stores under the El.

The neighbors like him and his Sicilian landlord often invites him over for dinner.

"You too skinny. When you getting married?" the landlord asks constantly.

"When I join the force," Geraghty replies.

He's smitten with a blind girl from a rich family upstate.

He wants to tie the knot. He thinks of her often and carries her locket, but her folks are doing their best to drive them apart.

When Geraghty arrives at the plant, he calls his supervisor.

The dispatcher's eating a donut and doesn't warn him that the factory has a history of break-ins by armed men.

Geraghty's supposed to wait for the cops, but his boss' immediate concern is going home early, so he orders him to search the premises.

Some corrugated metal flails in the wind against a chain-link fence as Geraghty tears open an envelope containing keys.

He unlocks the front office. The factory's pitch black. The light switches don't work.

There's a fuse box, but it's locked, so starts his search in darkness, hanging on for dear life to his flashlight.

The plant spreads across three floors, including a basement.

There's so much equipment strewn around, it's hard to tell if a robbery's occurred.

As he picks his way through the shadowscape, he bangs into tires and transmissions, hubcaps and axles, engines and radiators.

It's freezing. The air reeks of paint, chemicals, and diesel fuel.

As he squinches about, the only other sound's the scuffling wind, and, in the distance, the chained wheels of a garbage truck, grinding its plow against the asphalt tide of snow.

(Conclusion next week)