Maria's Girls (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “Fine. You bumped knees with Diana. So what?”

  “I didn’t bump knees with anybody. Wake up. Isaac is using your wife. He brought her into his Monday Morning Club. Save the libraries and all that shit. And he has her start a branch in Montalbán’s turf. She sits down with the school board. She goes to lunch with Maria Montalbán. And little by little she starts spying for Father Isaac. Aint that how ya recruit a rat? It’s always innocent at first.”

  “Dianas not a rat.”

  “Add it up or down, kid. Sooner or later you’ll have to kill Sidel.”

  “No. You have it wrong, Sal … I’ll finish what Isaac started in New Orleans.”

  “Ah,” Sal said, clutching the wheels of his chair. “You don’t have the stomach for it. You’re a meat and potatoes man. You wouldn’t do the dark and the dirty. But you’ll have to kill Sidel … or let the wife drift into Montalbán’s arms. Because I think Maria has taken a shine to her.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Hit me, Caroll. I couldn’t even feel it. I’m the only friend you got.”

  Three bodies materialized in the gloom of Central Park. Barbarossa. Wilson. McSwain. They were all carrying Glocks.

  “Ah, it’s the Central Park circus,” Sal Rubino said. There was no alarm in his eyes. It almost thrilled him to see the Glocks.

  “How are you, Sally?” Barbarossa asked. He was wearing his single white glove. “I think you have a date with the Commish.”

  “I’m glad. I’d like the bed next to Isaac’s at Beekman Downtown. We could play checkers. I’ll steal his pants.”

  “Nah. Isaac will get out of bed for you … Caroll, make the call. We’ll be here when you get back.”

  And that’s when Caroll gripped the handles of the chair and drove Sal Rubino between Wilson and McSwain. McSwain’s eyes were on him. Wilson held her Glock to Caroll’s head. She was younger than McSwain.

  “Better stay where you are, Caroll.”

  He didn’t enjoy that touch of plastic on his skin. “Sal,” he said, “meet Wilson and McSwain. They have their own brick bungalow. They like to play the part of auxiliary policewomen. But they’re detectives on loan from One PP. They’re stalking Maria Montalbán.”

  “Pleased to meet ya,” Sal said. But neither Wilson nor McSwain would take Sal’s hand. And Caroll wheeled him along the edge of the bridle path, bumping over a layer of dead leaves.

  “Caroll.”

  He stopped, the softness of Barbarossa’s voice weaving its own little spell. Joey never shouted. Joey was capable of shooting off Caroll’s head. No one was sure of his allegiances. There was room for every kind of murder in that white glove. Joey played ping-pong, romanced Wilson and McSwain, sat in exile at Sherwood Forest, the most decorated cop in New York, who robbed, traded drugs, while he kept anarchy off the streets.

  “Caroll.”

  And Caroll pushed on the chair, wheeling Sal toward Mariners Gate. Sal’s soldiers were waiting for him. He grabbed Caroll with his own pocked hand that felt like pumice stone.

  “Kid, I wouldn’t go back. I’ve dealt with Joe. I’d trade all my soldiers for him. But he don’t believe in brotherhood.”

  “He was my partner, Sal.”

  “I know, but it means nothing to him. He would have iced ya if he had to.”

  “Then why did you sit in the Park?”

  “Because I put my faith in Caroll Brent.”

  And Caroll walked back into the gloom. He searched Sherwood Forest for Barbarossa and the two girls. They weren’t in the old mustering room. Barbarossa’s white glove was on the ping-pong table. There was no other sign of Joe.

  Part Three

  11

  He began to feel like a boarder at Beekman Downtown. He had terrible chest pains. A whistling would come up from his heart. He was Isaac Sidel, the eater of bullets. He didn’t bother about the holes in him. He was like an orphan without his worm. He drank his lime jello, opened the box his driver had brought him, and put on the uniform of the Delancey Street Giants. He wore his cap over the left ear, like Harry Lieberman. But he wasn’t trying to imitate the Bomber. Harrys style had wedged so deep into Isaac that it was beyond manners or memory.

  He brushed his teeth. He ventured out of the hospital while nurses and residents howled at him. He couldn’t even get into a subway. Five patrol cars stopped for him, recognized his bushy hair under the baseball cap. It was Isaac who’d made Harry famous again, and now they were like floating halves of the same self. Isaac got into the fifth police car and rode up to the north playing fields in Central Park.

  It was in the middle of a March blow. The trees swayed into the wind. Harry was on the diamond with the Giants. He’d chalked the field himself. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. There was no one else out in the north fields except Harry and the boys and Isaac Sidel. The boys were delinquents and orphans and mathematical wizards from Carlos Maria Montalbán’s junior-high schools. Isaac had selected them, found them little scholarships, fed them until they’d become a family out on the field. They couldn’t compete with Cardinal Jim’s Manhattan Knights, who were almost professionals at fourteen, but they were no longer delinquents. Or at least that’s how Isaac remembered them before he’d been shot. Now he saw them through the gray hairs at the back of Harry’s neck. They had a liquid motion Isaac had never seen before. Harry had given them a melodic line. He hadn’t molded them into little Harrys. He’d tested them against their own worth. He’d discovered their playing principle. And Isaac saw a desolate beauty on that frozen field. Harry had willed the Giants into a team.

  The boys gathered around him after their practice session. They were glad to see Isaac. But there was a bit of embarrassment in their eyes. Isaac wasn’t their mentor now. He was a big brown bear who wore the uniform of the Delancey Giants. They’d given themselves to the Bomber. Isaac was only a puller of strings.

  “How are you, Commish?” the Bomber asked, a celebrity in spite of himself. He had gray knots around his ears. His hands were gnarled. But he was still the wonder boy of 1943, who roamed center field for the New York Giants in the middle of a war, bumping into walls, catching line drives between his legs, hitting home runs that sailed into the bleachers like a golden egg. “I’m glad you’re out of the hospital.”

  “I’m not out,” Isaac said. “I came for a visit, that’s all. But the Delanceys don’t need Isaac. They have the Bomber. I never saw them play with so much teeth.”

  “They’re your team,” the Bomber said. “You chose them. I’m only substituting for you, Isaac.”

  “I’m not much of a field manager. I never was. I couldn’t lead them out of last place.”

  “That’s because you have that cardinal riding on your tail.”

  “Ah, don’t blame Jim. He’s devoted to the boys. Didn’t he ask you to mind the Delanceys while I was recuperating?”

  “To feather his own lousy nest. He wants to profit from me, Isaac. He’s put my picture in all his brochures.”

  “Well, you’re the Bomber. And the cardinal’s a businessman. He’s always looking for profit. But he’s never been mean to our boys. Our whole infield would be in a home for juveniles if it weren’t for Jim.”

  “I don’t like him bargaining for any kid’s life.”

  “I think I’ll go back to the hospital … and look for a bit of lime jello.”

  “Stay,” the Bomber said. “You’re our general. You can trade politics with the cardinal. I can’t. I was never good at intrigue. He’ll start finagling, and he’ll finesse me into the ground.”

  Isaac scrutinized the boys. Perhaps they did need his particular brain trust. Isaac could slug it out with the cardinal, dance with the PAL. Isaac was the Pink Commish. He always had a double motive for anything he did.

  “All right, I’ll be the general.” And the boys returned to the field and one final rally for the Bomber. Isaac was satisfied. From his perch in the northlands of Central Park he could spy on School District Eleven A, which was Maria Montalbán’s own
private plunder grounds. Montalbán shuffled pianos and school supplies between Eleven A and his own district. He took from Eleven A whatever he lacked downtown. He was like some absentee prince. And Isaac meant to shackle the son of a bitch.

  And so he commuted from his hospital bed to the playing fields. He was almost like a landmark in his billed cap, his white jersey with gold borders, his knickers, and his gray socks; the cut of his uniform had nothing to do with any current style. Isaac was dressed like Babe Ruth and the Bomber; he was one more antiquarian, one more relic of a lost tribe.

  It was 1984, and the Park had another famous ghost. She called herself Harriet Brown. She had pinched eyebrows and pitiless bangs that hugged her face like a helmet. She’d once been the most beautiful woman in the world. She still was the most beautiful woman to Isaac Sidel. He’d seen her in Ninotchka at the Loew’s Delancey in 1939, and he couldn’t forget the female commissar who is seduced by a playboy and all the guiles and material goods of Paris. Isaac was the only kid in the moviehouse who mourned the commissar’s fall from grace. He was a Stalinist at eleven. And Paris was only Babylon with revolving doors and splits of champagne.

  He would keep the autograph hounds out of her hair. He never talked of Ninotchka, or trespassed upon that anonymous side of herself. She was Harriet Brown, and he was Isaac Sidel, a police commissioner on sick leave. “I’m an aging little boy,” she said to Isaac on one of the strolls they took across the playing fields. That’s how she liked to think of herself, as a boy lost in a woman’s body. She was no hermaphrodite, this Harriet Brown. She was heartlessly female, but an entire planet had fallen in love with her image on the screen, and she resisted that image, chose to be the sexless child.

  “How are your wounds?” she asked, holding his hand.

  “Healing,” he said.

  “Will you give a sad boy a cigarette?”

  He carried a box of Dunhills for Harriet Brown, who loved to cadge cigarettes like a Central Park waif. She took a sandwich out of her bag and shared it with Isaac: meatless salami on white bread. That was their lunch, half a sandwich and a cigarette. Isaac could imagine her at one of the old automats, dining on a handful of nickels, like some illustrious bag lady.

  He bumped into Caroll’s wife at the end of his stroll with Harriet Brown, who walked out of the Park at Woodmans Gate.

  “Was that Garbo?” Diana asked.

  “Not so loud,” Isaac said.

  “Will you invite her to dinner … at my place?”

  “I will not. I hardly know her, Dee.”

  He’d disappointed Diana of the purple eyes.

  It bothered him to sneak behind Caroll’s back. But the only campaign he could mount against Maria Montalbán was with Cassidy’s daughter. His own squad at Sherwood Forest had fallen asleep. It couldn’t get near Montalbán. Diana could.

  “Well,” Isaac had to ask, “did he attend the first meeting of the Monday Morning Club?”

  “You couldn’t keep him away. His eyes were all over me.”

  “Be careful, Diana. He could get nasty, our Maria.”

  “I am careful,” Diana said. She wore a red cape from Saks. She looked like a grown-up Little Red Riding Hood who was ready to trap the Wolf. Only the Wolf had been to Nam. He ruled a kingdom of girls and boys on the Lower East Side. He had his own black market in school supplies.

  “Diana, have drinks with him … in some busy café.”

  “What am I supposed to do, Isaac, unbutton my blouse?”

  “Just get him to talk. He’ll start bragging. He’ll give himself away. He’ll invite you into his little network, show you how he’s feeding kids with the money he moves around.”

  “It’s still entrapment,” Diana said. “Remember, I’m married to a cop.”

  Isaac groaned. “You’re not gonna lure him into anything. We won’t trick the snake. But we’ll learn about his apparatus, and then we’ll pounce.”

  “And if he starts pawing me?”

  “We’ll pull you out of there. I have my best man backing you up. Joe Barbarossa.”

  “Caroll’s old partner,” she said. “Vietnam Joe. He might be friendlier with Montalbán than you think.”

  “He’s my best man,” Isaac said.

  “I thought Caroll was.”

  “After Caroll,” Isaac said. “Pardon me.”

  “You’re a genuine bastard, Isaac dear. That’s why I always liked you. You remind me of my dad.”

  “Not a chance. I’m a little leaguer next to Papa Cassidy.”

  “No you’re not. You’re twice as ruthless. And it’s not about money. It’s all for the general good … of Isaac Sidel.”

  “Then why are you helping me?”

  “Because I’m a sucker for lost causes … like you. If Montalbán is hurting children, he has to be stopped. And then I want you to get Caroll off the hook. No more crusades, Isaac. Promise.”

  “I’ll give him to the squirrels, I swear to God.”

  “He already has the squirrels. Just give him to me.”

  “I promise,” Isaac said.

  She kissed him on the cheek. “Am I your latest conquest, Isaac? Your little undercover cop?”

  “You’re not a cop,” he said.

  She kissed him on the mouth. “Oh, what a liar you are. You’d have made your own mother into a cop.”

  “My mother was nearly stomped to death. She didn’t even like cops.”

  “I’m sorry … I didn’t mean … I guess it’s dangerous for us to be seen together. Maria might be watching.”

  And she walked away from Isaac, that Little Red Riding Hood who was her own Molotov cocktail, because men couldn’t stop loving Diana Cassidy. It made no difference that she was married to Caroll. She’d always be a Cassidy, with her billion-dollar legs.

  12

  Baby.”

  She could torture him, give him the blackest headache, with one of her own dark looks. It had always been like that. Her mother had been negligible in Diana’s life, an exalted servant who was satisfied to keep within the clan. It was Diana who had ventured out, who’d been her Papa’s escort when she was eight years old. She would walk into any restaurant or high-priced bordello and not have to introduce herself. The madams and the maître d’s would say, “Cassidy’s girl.” And she could proceed into the most private corridors. Her father had to practice coitus interruptus, with Diana at the door.

  She was all the romance Papa Cassidy required. Her calves hardened when she was twelve. She started to bleed. She developed breasts. Her eyes had that sleepy night color of a cat. A millionaire proposed to her when she was fourteen. That millionaire was removed from Papa Cassidy’s boardrooms. Whatever suitors there were fell away from Cassidy’s girl. Men would chase her and then disappear, bought off by Papa Cassidy or beaten up. Until Papa realized she might become an old maid, and he began to pick her suitors. But she had a will of her own. She was attracted to mailmen and tubercular musicians. When that cop finally appeared, Caroll Brent, Papa Cassidy was relieved. Caroll had a kind of dimwitted handsomeness, and he was devoted to Dee. Papa could die without leaving behind a bachelor girl. But he had no intention of dying.

  He was fifty-five years old. The commodity he preferred was cash. He avoided paper transactions whenever he could.

  “Baby.”

  She’d come to him in her red cape. He wanted her to go to a charity ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  “It’s boring, Papa. I’d start to snore.”

  “It’s no less boring than that Hungarian orchestra you keep afloat.”

  “Czech, Papa. And the conductor is a genius. Milan Jagiello.”

  “Are you banging him, dear?”

  She could have slapped Papa. But he’d only start to sniffle, and they’d both end up bawling, with Diana on his knee. She didn’t want to rock in his lap. She was too old for that. She had a husband, her own orchestra, and Jagiello, the genius she was grooming to take over the New York Philharmonic.

  “Papa, I’ll
go to your goddamn ball. But you’ll have to pay a price.”

  His eyes began to wrinkle out like little electric lights. He could sniff a deal, and he loved to bargain with his only child.

  “Gladly,” he said. But it can’t have anything to do with Jagiello. I hate his guts. The man’s a parasite.”

  “No preambles,” she said. “No reservations, please.”

  “I promise.”

  “Then find Milan a slot at the Philharmonic … guest conductor, I don’t care.”

  “Baby, I can’t. He has no talent.”

  “Then go to your charity ball with one of your concubines.”

  “Okay. I’ll ask, I’ll dig, I’ll prostitute myself for that little prick. But you ought to find another protégé.”

  “He’s not my protégé. He was destitute … I helped Milan.”

  “But do you have to carry a hundred musicians because of Jagiello? What kind of name is that?”

  “Jagiello is the name of a king, a whole family of kings. And I have to support his orchestra. How else will he play? I can’t leave him floating around in Czechoslovakia and a hundred college towns. It will never advance his career.”

  “I’ll talk to some people. But give your father a kiss.”

  She was nearly as tall as Papa Cassidy. They had a similar rapacious look, like a couple of pirates who could turn Manhattan into their private farm. He wore a velour jacket that matched the color of his eyes. His clothes sat on him like a comfortable glove. He didn’t have to dress the part of a financial pirate. He was Papa Cassidy. And Dee was Cassidy’s daughter. Husbands were a very small item in Papa’s universe. He never bothered to imagine Caroll sleeping with his own little girl. He could have gotten rid of the cop. He tolerated Caroll, liked him as much as he could like a detective in squirrel country. He wondered how Caroll could hold Diana in check. She would ride over whatever man she was with, including Papa Cassidy. And when she closed her eyes to peck him on the forehead, her eyelids fluttering with some thought that was far from Papa, he grabbed her wrists.