Maria's Girls (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “Maria,” she said, “you can call the cops, but we’re not giving up this room. The suckers don’t know how to teach.”

  “You scare the living shit out of them. I mean, you are a bunch of scary girls. You’ve had three principals since September. Your teachers run home with nightmares. They never come back.”

  “They don’t know how to teach.”

  “I’ll find you teachers who can teach.”

  “Yeah, Maria, we gonna become bank clerks in seven years. We gonna dance for all the rich uncles. We gonna get a certificate saying we can spell. We gonna save until we can buy a color television. Is that gonna be our paradise? I’m fourteen, Maria. I already had two abortions. What kind of curriculum you gonna make for me?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m part of the same paradise.”

  “What about him? Mr. Dark Eyes.”

  “He’s a baseball monkey. He grew up at the Polo Grounds.”

  “He’s from the projects?” Miranda said, laughing from inside her barricade.

  “Hell, the world existed before there were any projects. Gentlemen used to ride on ponies at the Polo Grounds and hit a hard ball with a very long mallet. Then the mallets and the ponies disappeared. And you had round bats and baseball diamonds.”

  “You don’t have to teach us baseball, Maria.”

  “I’m trying to make a point. History is like music. It has a flow. But it’s hard to find.”

  “We don’t even have books here,” Miranda said.

  “I’ll get you books.”

  “It’s worse than kindergarten, Maria. It’s a zoo with black windows.”

  “Princess, you’re right.”

  “I aint your princess. Don’t forget.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maria said. “I was practicing my voodoo, little sister.”

  “I’m not your little sister … does Dark Eyes do anything but sit on his ass and remember the Polo Grounds?”

  “He’s the police commissioner.”

  Other heads emerged from the barricade. “He gonna arrest us?”

  “Ask him yourself.”

  And Isaac started to cry.

  “Not in front of these girls,” Maria spat inside his ear. “They’ll think you’re a sissy.”

  “I am a sissy,” Isaac said. “They’re right to rebel. The whole system stinks.”

  “That’s fine for you to say. But I have to live in this house. It’s the only one we have.”

  “Stop crying and tell me a story,” Miranda said.

  “I’m not a storyteller. But I can tell you the truth. I was standing under a bridge. Someone was waiting for me in the dark. A phantom. He shot me five times.”

  “Does it have to be cops and robbers,” Maria said, “the lousy riddle of your life?”

  “Maria, don’t be impolite,” Miranda said.

  “I dreamt of an angel with a baseball bat. His name was Harry. I didn’t ever want to wake up. But the doctors pulled me out of my dream. I’ve been sucking green jello ever since.”

  The whole barricade started to laugh.

  “Maria, we like the crybaby.”

  “There were other angels surrounding my bed. They tugged at my hair. They were boys in baseball uniforms, like mine. I have a team … had a team, I should say. The Delancey Giants.”

  “Do they play at the Polo Grounds projects?” Miranda asked, softening to this bear in the white-and-gold cap.

  “Not yet.”

  “Teach us some history,” another girl said. “Your Polo Grounds, how much did it cost to get in?”

  “Sixty cents,” Isaac said. “It was during the war, the big war against the Germans and the Japs. There were ak-ak guns above the Polo Grounds, on Jumel Terrace.”

  “What’s an ak-ak gun?”

  “Anti-aircraft,” Isaac said. “They were manned by civilian soldiers in little metal hats. I captured one gun when there weren’t any civilian soldiers around. I sat in the gunnery chair and watched that blue sky like a killer hawk until I got dizzy and fell off the chair. I’d go from the guns to the Polo Grounds. I didn’t like school. I had a better education in the streets. I stole books of ration stamps. But no matter how much I stole, I was still poor as a mouse.”

  “Or a girl from the projects.”

  Isaac started to cry again. He wasn’t mourning the Polo Grounds, or his lost livelihood as a trader in stamps. It hurt him to think of the ak-ak gun, and the little glories he’d had in that chair. And he was crying for Maria’s girls, who couldn’t even discover their own present tense in this dark, murderous school.

  Maria grabbed his arm. “Come on, Dark Eyes.”

  “What’s going to happen to these girls?”

  “Come on.”

  Isaac left the lunchroom with Maria Montalbán, who strolled the corridors in his mink coat, while his nostrils worked like a man sniffing out a rat. Isaac wondered where the teachers were. He saw schoolchildren in an endless drift, girls on some holy crusade against District Eleven B. And then Dr. Sampayo, the principal, ducked his head out of the teachers’ toilet. He had very big ears. He was one more functionary in this dungeon by the sea.

  “Maria, did you get them to leave the lunchroom? I won’t be responsible. They mock me, your little girls.”

  “They’re children, only children. And they have a simple wish to stay alive.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Isaac Sidel, the Pink Commish.”

  “You have your own policeman, and you couldn’t persuade the girls to end their mutiny?”

  “It’s not a mutiny, Dr. Sampayo. You’ll have your lunchroom. I promise you.”

  And it must have been a magic chant. Miranda whistled once, waved her arms, and broke up the barricade. All the children returned to their classrooms, but Isaac couldn’t find any teachers. He began to understand the design of this school. Half the teachers were Maria’s mules. And the other half were hiding in the toilets, or sitting home, or selling school supplies. One of them, who looked like an unsuccessful Santa Claus, arrived with a sack on his shoulder. “Maria, I can’t move a thing.”

  “Not now,” Maria said, and this Santa Claus shuffled along the corridor with his sack.

  “There aren’t any teachers,” Isaac said, “because they’re out peddling for you.”

  “The economy of my district depends on pencil cases. But you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I understand. I’ll glock you, you Puerto Rican prick.”

  “You have a problem, Isaac. The people you kill don’t stay dead.”

  “Like Sal, I suppose. It’s not my fault if he worked a miracle.”

  “I hear it wasn’t such a miracle.”

  “What do ya mean?”

  “You’re the detective. You find out.”

  “Maria, you won’t be as lucky as Sal.”

  “I’m a made man,” Maria said.

  “I don’t care how connected you are with Sal.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Sal,” Maria said.

  And Isaac could feel a shudder where the worm had once been. “You’re protected, aren’t you? That’s why I can’t get a subpoena. The Feds are letting you run your little racket.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Take me to Rubino’s warehouse.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I won’t touch all the shit he sells to you, all the school supplies.”

  “He doesn’t have to sell. The jeweler’s a rich man. I do him favors. He gives me pencil cases.”

  “Where does he get that kind of boodle?”

  “He rips off other people’s warehouses.”

  “And what are the favors you do for Sal, besides lending him Diana?”

  “Don’t start rapping with me, Isaac. You can’t win. You went to war with the jeweler. I was in the middle. I had to give him Dee. And I introduced him to Delia St. John.”

  “Ah, the eternal child. I can name you ten judges who’ve had her on their laps … take me to the warehouse.”r />
  “The jeweler wouldn’t like that. The jeweler might get mad.”

  But they marched out of the junior high, got into a cab that was waiting for Maria. It was much less conspicuous than a limousine. He brought Isaac to Sal’s Hudson River warehouse, which had become a huge shell, without a single blackboard or pencil case.

  “You tipped off Sal,” Isaac said.

  “Come on. He figured you were coming. And he likes to move his stuff around. It’s much safer for him … Dark Eyes, how come you’re on such a crusade against Maria Montalbán? Did I ever harm you, did I ever show you disrespect?”

  “You’re a thief. You hide behind a superintendent’s salary. You steal from your own district.”

  “You don’t get it, Dark Eyes. You’re jealous, is all. I’m the new king of your territories. People come to Maria. I give them what they want. Smack. Kosher bubble gum …”

  “And some good head from Maria’s girls.”

  “Don’t say that, Dark Eyes. I’m not a pimp.”

  And he walked out on Isaac. “I’m not a pimp.” Isaac was left alone in that enormous shell. All he could think about was lime jello.

  19

  Isaac packed his one little bag and moved out of the hospital, which was more like a hotel that catered to his whims and examined whatever wounds he had.

  “You’re too weak,” the chief cardiologist said. “You’ll collapse if you don’t get back into bed.”

  He put on his fedora at Rivington Street, bathed himself, crept around in the dust of his apartment, saw the March snow from his narrow window, found a clean shirt among his laundry, stuffed his baseball uniform into the closet, and decided to solve the case of Isaac Sidel. He’d been living like a sleepwalker ever since he first woke up in his hospital room on Gold Street. He’d have been much more alert if he hadn’t lost the worm. The worm was a moralist, the worm had encouraged Isaac’s descent into the unknown, the worm was like Shakespeare, breathing melodies wherever Isaac happened to go. He was miserable without the worm. His face was dark under the hat. He wore a Glock inside his pants. Isaac had never been fond of holsters.

  He visited Jerry DiAngelis, who was hiding from that jeweler, Sal. Jerry had captured the Rubino clan, until Sal had decided to play Lazarus in a wheelchair. But Jerry shouldn’t have fallen so hard. He shouldn’t have had to abandon his little fortress on Cleveland Place and his stool at the Baron di Napoli rifle club. He’d lost his lieutenants. His captains had gone over to Sal. He’d move from bedroom to bedroom in the middle of the night. His father-in-law, Izzy Wasser, had suffered a stroke. That old Hebrew schoolteacher had been the brains behind Jerry. His brother, Ted the Nose, had become a rat for the Justice Department. Nose was in the witness-protection program, but that didn’t stop him from rushing around the country like a bandit, hitting people under the aegis of the FBI. His rabbi was Frederic LeComte, cultural commissar at Justice. Isaac had been Justice’s first Alexander Hamilton Fellow, lecturing to police chiefs until he decided to stop off in New Orleans and murder Sal Rubino with the help of Jerry DiAngelis. He hadn’t planned the hit. He was rescuing his sweetheart, Margaret Tolstoy, who worked undercover for LeComte, as his own little gangbuster. She’d lived with Sal, slept with Sal, and betrayed him. And the jeweler would have gotten his revenge if Isaac hadn’t arrived and shot Sal with a Mossberg Persuader. Jerry had been running, running, ever since that night in New Orleans.

  It took Isaac two days to find Jerry’s current bedroom. Jerry had lost that full, flush handsomeness of his. He was away from his wife and his father-in-law, the melamed. He wasn’t even with his mistress, his comare, who was more like a second wife. He was miserable without the entanglements of his own people. He looked crazy, like his brother the Nose. But he wasn’t crazy. He had that maddening stare of a man who had to be permanently awake.

  “Isaac, forgive me, I should have come to the hospital while you were in a coma. But Sal had two of his lieutenants waiting for me.”

  “Forget it. I wouldn’t have recognized you. How’s Izzy?”

  “His mind is gone. Eileen is looking after him.”

  Eileen was Jerry’s wife. He’d married a Jewish girl and brought the melamed into his tribe. It was the melamed who’d stolen Sal’s clan away from him. And now Sal ruled from a wheelchair.

  “I don’t get it. You had the best captains.”

  “Sal picked them off. It was easy. He could play the invisible man.”

  “We killed him, Jerry. We walked away from a corpse. I had my own captain clean up after me.”

  “Where is this captain of yours?”

  “Burt? He disappeared. I don’t get it. We’re not careless people. I would have seen Sal’s hand twitch. I looked into his eyes. We killed Sal and his two cousins.”

  “Martin and Emile. They were likeable guys.”

  “Jerry, they would have shot your face off.”

  “They loved Margaret. That’s why you’re sore at them.”

  “Loved her so much they were willing to execute her.”

  “That was Sal’s orders. I didn’t enjoy whacking them, Isaac. It wasn’t fun.”

  “Jerry, am I dreaming? Sal was a dead man, right? Burt took our Mossbergs and threw them into the Mississippi. What went wrong?”

  “We had a silent partner somewhere.”

  “Sal had an angel, you mean, an angel with a hospital unit. Nothing less than that could have revived Sal. They brought that son of a bitch back from the dead.”

  “And killed Burt? They could have switched bodies. And Burt is lying in Sal’s box.”

  “Burt or someone else.”

  “But who’s this angel, Isaac? Who’s clever enough?”

  “Not clever,” Isaac said. “He just had to have the resources … like two or three government agencies.”

  “And cooperation from the locals in New Orleans.”

  “Fucking Frederic LeComte. That’s why you’re down so far. Sal couldn’t have chopped up your crews all on his own. God, I’m a dummy. It was LeComte.”

  “So Justice is running the Rubinos these days.”

  “Yeah, the Maf is dancing with the FBI. LeComte indicts you and indicts you, but he can’t make it stick. You look like a banker in the courtroom. So he goes after your brother. He turns Nose around.”

  “Ah, don’t talk about the kid,” Jerry said.

  “But not even Nose can hurt you. You don’t have the mark of a Mafia man. So LeComte decides to destroy you out on the street.”

  “And what do I do now?”

  “Run like you’ve been running. And I have to catch the fox, Frederic LeComte.”

  “Isaac, take care. You were glocked once. It could happen again. I think LeComte has declared open season on you and me.”

  They kissed like two grown men, and Isaac had to keep from crying. He was a fool with tears in his head. Jerry was the Maf, but Isaac felt closer to him and the melamed than his own army of cops. It was the Mafia that policed Manhattan. In the old days, when school concessionaires would rob children of their sandwiches and their milk, Isaac made one phone call to the melamed, and the milk would arrive with mountains of candy, donated to the children of New York from the concessionaires. The Maf had made its fortune running its own system of services. It had the rotten habit of killing people, but most of the people it killed were within its own fraternal order. Isaac had charts of each Mafia tribe at Police Plaza. He had entire family trees. He could pinpoint hit men and known gamblers (KGs), but the Pink Commish never believed in a war against the Maf. It was an invitation to chaos. All the cops in Manhattan couldn’t replace the services that the Mafia provided.

  LeComte would never understand. He was a “tourist” in Manhattan, even though he maintained an office at St. Andrews Plaza and several cribs. He was strictly Georgetown and G Street, the cultural commissar who had his own network of spies. Isaac could never fathom D.C. It felt like a blueprint for a city, with slums and shallow houses, and the Presidents own cottage on a lawn
. Isaac had traveled America for LeComte, he’d lectured in D.C., he’d talked to convicts and commissioners like himself, he’d gone down the Mississippi, like Huck Finn, he’d seen mud rats and flying alligators, but he could only seem to deal with the mud rats of Manhattan.

  He could have gone to D.C. and ferreted LeComte out of his hole in the Justice Department. But LeComte was never at Justice. He was much too busy dining with generals and his “cousins” at the CIA. And Isaac might have gotten lost in one of the passageways under Capitol Hill. And so he waited for LeComte across the street from St. Andrews Plaza, where the cultural commissar would rendezvous once or twice a week with federal prosecutors to map the end of mob rule in Manhattan.

  Isaac stood in the cold three days. It would have been futile ringing LeComte’s little secretary, because LeComte was a secretive son of a bitch. And Isaac would have lost the only “handle” he had, the handle of surprise. And during that third day, he felt someone knock on his shoulder. He turned around. It was LeComte’s mousy little secretary, Martha Hall. “Frederic’s waiting for you. Upstairs.”

  And so he crossed the street and climbed up to LeComte like a miserable rat. Martha had prepared a lunch. There were sandwiches on the conference table. A bottle of red wine. And Isaac’s favorite desert. Almond macaroons in a bed of mocha ice cream. LeComte was a “lesson” in blue, like he always was. The sharpness of the blue stripes on his shirt seemed to pierce Isaac’s eyeballs. LeComte had no mouth. He had two nostrils and a puckered pink hole in his face.

  “You’re a bad boy,” he said, pleased with his victory over the Pink Commish. “You could have made an appointment with Martha.”

  “Bullshit,” Isaac said. “You’d never have seen me.”

  “Let’s have lunch.”

  They sat at the conference table, Isaac eyeing the macaroons.

  “Go ’head, Isaac. I can’t touch ice cream and cake. I have to keep my figure.”

  LeComte was a fucking pencil, the slimmest man Isaac had ever seen. But Isaac wouldn’t argue over macaroons. Hospital life had turned him into a hunger artist. He savored the macaroons, chewed them slowly, and had his mocha with a plastic spoon.