Maria's Girls (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  He tried to think of the life he’d had before he met Dee. He didn’t have a life. A few turns in the sack with Sarah Potts of the PAL. He might even have been engaged to Sarah. But it was an engagement to nothing and nowhere. He couldn’t have married Sarah. She had no music in her body, the way Diana did. He’d been comfortable talking “police” to a lady cop. He could go with Sarah to the shooting range at Throgs Neck. But that didn’t make for a whole lot of mystery. She’d have a pension. So would Caroll. He didn’t long for Sarah Potts.

  He knew the ice man would come up to his room, shake his hand, smile, chat a little, and then glock him while Caroll was looking out the window at his fortune of trees. He wished it was Joe. He wished it was Joe. Caroll could have made something of a suicide pact. He’d have finished Barbarossa with one last magic glance.

  He shouldn’t have been drinking so much, not a warrior like him. He’d buy a white glove, like Joe had, a parade glove Caroll could wear on every one of his kills. Because he was the ice man, the secret member of the Monday Morning Club. And what if he met another Caroll coming through the door? Had he gone bananas under the bridge and shot Isaac five times without knowing it? But he didn’t even own a Glock.

  And when he heard the footsteps, Caroll had to laugh. He plugged his bottle of Four Roses and held it by the neck. There was a feeble knock on the door. “Come in,” Caroll said, moving closer and closer to the end of his line. Isaac had a daughter to cry for him. Sweets had several children. But Caroll and Diana couldn’t make a kid.

  He stood behind the door, the bottle high over his head, and could see the floppy roof of a hat. It was the diva herself, Delia St. John. Caroll groaned and came out from behind the door. She discovered him with the bottle. She didn’t flinch. Her eyes simply took all of him in.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “That depends on who you are and what you want.”

  “I’m a used-up detective, but you know all about that.”

  “And I’m a professional child. That’s my metier.”

  “Cork was right,” Caroll muttered. “You are a hundred years old.”

  “I could be a lot older than that, if you’re on a great-grandmother trip. Sky’s the limit.”

  “I’m not one of your tricks,” Caroll said.

  “I don’t have tricks. I have admirers. And they’re all perfect gentlemen.”

  “Yeah sure. Like the three characters who were photographing you the first time we met. The shy pornographers.”

  “They weren’t shy. And they aren’t pornographers. They work for Uncle Sal … and why are you holding a bottle over your head?”

  “That’s my business.” Caroll threw the Four Roses on his bed. Delia took something out of her handbag. Caroll recognized the plastic nose of a Glock. She was pointing it at him.

  His knees shivered for a moment, and then he felt a wondrous calm. He didn’t care what Delia did. He almost wanted to dance.

  “Here,” she said. “Take it. You’ll need some protection. You sure know how to make enemies, Mr. Brent.”

  “Who gave you the gun?”

  “I stole it,” she said, “from one of my bodyguards.”

  “That’s great. That’s grand. It could be a hot fucking piece.” Caroll held the gun in his handkerchief and dropped it back into Delia’s bag. “Now good night.”

  “It’s not even dinner time,” Delia said.

  “Well, I keep peculiar hours.”

  “You’re an alcoholic,” she said.

  “And what if I am? Who sent you?”

  “Uncle Joe.”

  “Is he another one of your bodyguards, Joe Barbarossa?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “You can tell him I’m buying a white glove … we’ll have a game of ping-pong, just me and Joe. I’ll do the Blue Eyes shuffle. I’ll bend his back … was he trying to blackmail the pornographers? Is that why he staged that little séance behind the fire door?”

  “He was helping me. And who else could he trust but his own partner?”

  “Trusted me so much that he didn’t mention a thing. He brought me into his web, that’s all.”

  “It was complicated,” Delia said. “Furio wanted me as his private model. I don’t give exclusives. Furio doesn’t own me. But Uncle Sal was dead at the time.”

  “Dead in New Orleans.”

  “And Furio was captain of the Family.”

  “So Joey scared the shy pornographers, who were also Family men. Where is this Furio?”

  “When Uncle Sal returned from the dead he had Furio’s throat cut for being disloyal … and unkind to me.”

  “Yeah,” Caroll said. “That sounds like Sal. I like his chivalry. But why are you here?”

  “Joe asked me to look for your wife. She’s at Chinaman’s Chance. It’s an after-hours club five minutes from the hotel.”

  “Diana never goes uptown. Her limit is Ninety-sixth Street.”

  “Not anymore.”

  She took Caroll by the hand. Her fingers were very warm. She must have had a motor that ran at high speed in March. Her blood was much warmer than Caroll’s. His head was spinning from the Four Roses. He had whiskey eyes. He looked like some ghostly animal in the mirror. And Delia looked like the stars.

  “I’m not going,” he said. “You could have me zapped in the street.”

  But he followed her down the stairs, his hand in hers. Children near the landing asked for her autograph. “Miss Delia, Miss Delia.” They didn’t have bits of paper, so she put her signature on their sleeves. Each letter was exact. The capital D was like a universe of its own.

  “Who taught you your penmanship?”

  “Uncle Maria.”

  And Caroll groaned again. “Did you go to school in District One B?”

  “Yes and no, Uncle Caroll.”

  “I’m not your uncle. And what do you mean, yes and no?”

  “I’m an uptown girl. But I took music lessons in Loisaida.”

  “With your Uncle Maria?”

  “Uncle paid for the lessons.”

  It took fifteen minutes to complete all the signatures. And Delia admitted that Montalbán had been her English teacher at Joan of Arc Junior High School on the Upper West Side. “Maria’s girls.” Gringas, Latinas, and mulattas who practiced the same florid hand. The girls would have died for him. He taught them gringo culture better than any gringo could.

  “It was scary, Uncle Caroll. He knew the lives of all the English poets. He knew the poems. ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright … in the forest of the night.’ ”

  “William Blake,” Caroll said. It was the one poem he could remember from all his schooling.

  The wind sucked under his coat on Central Park North. The trees looked damaged and desolate from the ground. The Park was one more howling. There was a Cadillac behind him and Delia.

  “My bodyguards,” she said. “They keep me from getting kidnapped.”

  He walked toward Fifth Avenue with Delia. He was incredibly jealous. Maria’s girls. There was a moonscape of buildings to the left of Caroll, houses of the dead. They walked hand in hand, the Cadillac crawling behind them. They passed under the Park Avenue trestle and the moonscape disappeared. They’d crossed into some magic territory of people and red stone buildings and grocery stores and bonfires in trash cans that glowed with yellow tails. Caroll must have been on these streets before. But they’d never shimmered in such red and yellow light. The diva was showing him her Manhattan.

  He brooded over Montalbán.

  “Was he the best teacher you ever had? … did he undress you after class?”

  Delia took her hand away.

  “Did he get you modeling jobs? Did he introduce you to Papa Cassidy and all the bigwigs at the Board of Education?”

  She slapped his face. It felt like kisses in the cold air.

  “He saved my life. I was a model since I was nine. He took me out of circulation … he sent me to music classes.”

  “And you started m
odeling again.”

  “My mother was crazy. My father was dead. I had two little sisters …”

  “Sure,” Caroll said. “Maria’s girls.” He was miserable. Delia clutched his hand and led him into a building without a front door. He struggled in the freezing weather of the hall. Down a flight of steps he went with Delia St. John. The walls were bewitched. He could hear a curious caravan of voices. They entered a cave where a man in dark glasses frisked Caroll, but didn’t bother with Delia’s handbag. The cave was cluttered with men and women who drank at a broken-down bar, their faces coming out of obscurity with certain chances of the irregular ceiling light. There was no music in the cave, nothing but continual chatter. And Caroll couldn’t understand the attraction of this club. Then the light fell on Maria Montalbán and a packet of Maria’s girls, their faces swollen and grim. Caroll imagined them as refugees from Joan of Arc Junior High until he recognized Dee next to Montalbán, his arm around her waist, and Caroll lunged into the darkness of the cave, but wherever he emerged, it wasn’t with Maria or his own wife. He kept going into the dark and coming out on some far side of the cave, emptied of people. It was like the story of his own existence, scratching in the dark, from Far Rockaway to Sherwood Forest and Central Park North. He’d had Dee. He’d had a marriage. And now Dee was one more face in the dark. He couldn’t cry like Isaac Sidel. He didn’t have Isaac’s capacity. He might have given himself utterly to the cave, scrutinizing the light, if Delia hadn’t taken his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought Maria would talk to you. I was wrong.”

  “Where are they? Where’s my wife?”

  “They’re gone, Uncle Caroll.”

  And he found himself back out on the street, away from Chinaman’s Chance.

  17

  Cat in the middle, cat in the fiddle, cat on the top of the moon. She was tired of being Cassidy’s daughter, patroness of the PAL. She was crazy about Caroll, but she couldn’t spend her life on a single honeymoon. She could still feel the goose bumps from the time they’d made love in the old barn in back of Sherwood Forest. She didn’t dare take off her clothes, because there might be a guardian or a drunken cop on the premises. Her skirt was above her hips, hiding Caroll, and she had to stifle her own screams. But a barn was only a barn.

  She liked being a spy, the unpaid soldier of Isaac Sidel, ferreting in the ruins of Maria’s barrios. She was the heiress, and he was the prince of the streets, courting her with all that gibberish. He wanted to marry her on top of her own marriage. She knew all about his women, “Maria’s girls,” who were loyal to him for years and years, in spite of boyfriends, husbands, rich uncles and all. They were prostitutes and salesgirls and single parents. But he never exploited them. Isaac said they carried drugs for Maria, and this was the “currency” of their devotion. But she didn’t believe Isaac.

  “They’re straight, boss. I swear.”

  She liked to think of him as her boss, this man who policed a city in his baseball cap and a pair of knickers, who rose out of his hospital bed to meet with her in the north woods.

  “All his chiquitas are mules. He makes a habit of converting them to his cause. They carry his shit and like to think that they’re helping schoolchildren, like the children they were when Montalbán was their own electric teacher, a wizard with the English language.”

  “You could be wrong,” she said.

  “I’m as wrong as a calendar without Mondays. He’s a thief, Diana, and don’t fall for him. He has his bottle clubs, he has his cafés, but he still steals from the City.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  Isaac started to cough. He didn’t even have a sweater over his uniform. He looked like the ghost of some lost baseball season.

  “Caroll’s going to be punished, isn’t he?” Diana said.

  “He can’t go around punching people.”

  “I was dancing with Maria …”

  “You’re never home,” Isaac said. “I have to call and call.”

  “I’m out in the field,” she said. “I’m your faithful servant. I go around with Maria. I visit his sanctuaries. He’s going to introduce me to his jeweler, the man who takes care of all the gold.”

  “It could get hairy.”

  “Hairy? No, no, no. I’ve been initiated. I’m one of Maria’s girls.”

  “Don’t say that,” Isaac said.

  “But I am. Where’s Caroll?”

  “Living at some bad-ass hotel. Don’t worry. He’ll be back.”

  “He never even took his clothes. He’s keeping company with Delia St. John. I saw them together. At a bottle club. Maria says they’re practically engaged.”

  “Come on, she has a million boyfriends.”

  “She’s dating my dad. Imagine, Papa and Caroll involved with the same little bitch. She could become my stepmother … Caroll’s on the bottle, isn’t he? He’s gone back to his first love, Four Roses. Does Delia iron his shirts?”

  “I doubt it,” Isaac said. “Shouldn’t you visit him? It’s rough for the kid.”

  “Delia can rock him to sleep. I have a date with the jeweler.”

  “Diana, don’t disappear on me.”

  She kissed him under the bill of his cap. “Have to rush. Don’t want to be late.”

  And she ran out of the Park, Isaac standing under a tree like some orphan of the woods, the holy crusader against crime. Did she belong to Isaac or Maria? She wasn’t sure. Maria had lent her one of his cribs, a duplex on a Hundred and Twentieth Street. She slept alone. She hadn’t invited him into bed, her curious cavalier. They’d kiss with their clothes on.

  “Marry me.”

  “I’ll wear your rings. But that’s about it.”

  She would have slept with him, she wanted to, if he’d let go of his marriage song. She was Caroll’s wife. She could only consider a husband at a time. But he moved her, this man of the public schools. He had disciples everywhere. They’d stop him on the street.

  “Maria, I still have nightmares about Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “They’ll go away, Charlene.”

  She couldn’t mistake that adoration in their eyes. He’d crawled under the secret veil of language. It had nothing to do with grammar or past and present tense. They’d discovered how to sing in Maria’s classes …

  He was waiting for her at the crib, his eyes like dark funnels. He’d grown up in a housing project near the East River. He’d gone to one bombed-out school alter the other, and survived them all.

  “Come op. The jeweler’s expecting you.”

  And they went down from the crib, both of them wearing red capes, like cardinals of the realm. She was beginning to feel more and more comfortable around Maria. He clutched her hand.

  They got into a limousine that must have come from the Board of Education.

  “My cousin’s car,” Maria said. “It belongs to Alejo. I borrow it sometimes. For official business.”

  He would stop at certain street corners, while men and women ducked into the car and delivered packets of money to Maria. He broke each packet and counted the bills. He didn’t hide his counting from Dee.

  “Is that school money?” she asked.

  “No. Cash receipts. You can write that down for Isaac. And don’t bother to playact. The Monday Morning Club was Isaac’s idea. He planted you between his piles of books. You’re supposed to draw me out, so he can tap into all my circuits and build his case against the evil superintendent, the monster who takes food out of children’s mouths. But it’s not so simple. I can’t survive on a superintendent’s allowance. So I deal and deal and deal. And you can tell Isaac that he isn’t the only one who has his spies.”

  He kissed her on the mouth.

  “Maria, why did you give me those rings and lend me your crib?”

  “I’m a passionate man,” he said. “And I like you. I like you very much.”

  “I don’t want to meet the jeweler … I want to go home.”

  “Your home is with me.”

  And
the limousine stopped at a huge warehouse close to the Hudson River. Dee could taste the water and the wind and the grime. She got out of the car with Maria. They were next to a handball court. The strangest creatures were volleying savagely with a little pink ball. Women with the broadest shoulders she’d ever seen, until she realized they were transvestites who serviced the truckers of the West Side. And they were volleying in all that wind.

  “Hello, Maria,” they shouted through the wire cage of the court. “Is that your pet?”

  “I don’t keep pets,” Maria said. “And mind your own business.”

  “We always do.”

  “Consuela, you owe the corporation a thousand dollars.”

  “I thought I was getting a rebate,” the most muscular transvestite said. “Aren’t we Maria’s girls?”

  “The don owns you, dearie. You’d better pay.”

  And he went into the warehouse with Diana.

  “Curse me,” he said. “Tell me what I did isn’t on any school’s agenda. But how else can I juggle the books? If a school hurts, I have to find the right Band-Aid.”

  “Like transvestites who exercise on a handball court.”

  “You shouldn’t be so prejudicial. One of the girls has a Ph.D.”

  “They aren’t girls, Maria.”

  “You’re wrong,” Maria said. “If God won’t make you a girl, then you just go against nature.”

  “While you get rich.”

  “I have to eat, dear. I have to eat.”

  The warehouse was cluttered with school desks that were packed in leaning towers, with pianos, with plumbing fixtures, with water fountains that were high enough for a kindergarten class, with window poles, with blackboards that were already chipped, with infinite boxes of board erasers and pencil sharpeners.