Maria's Girls (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “How are you, Iz?”

  “The Stalinist is here, the great police chief. You took a fall. I heard about it on the radio. I’d have written you a card, but my fingers don’t make sense when I grab a pencil.” And he shouted to his daughter. “Eileen, fix him a meal. He’s a growing boy.”

  And like some power source, Eileen poked into the room with spaghetti, wine, and a dish of chocolate ice cream on a tray.

  “Isaac, it’s the only menu we have.”

  She left the two disabled warriors.

  The melamed watched Isaac eat.

  “Are you hungry, Iz?”

  “I’m always hungry,” the melamed said. And they shared the ice cream.

  “LeComte is behind Sal Rubino.”

  “Rubino, the resurrected man … don’t eat all the chocolate.”

  “Iz, Jerry won’t survive if he runs. Sal will get lucky. And one day his boys will reach Jerry’s bedroom before Jerry does.”

  “And what would you suggest?”

  “Attack the son of a bitch.”

  “With whose army?”

  “If you have six soldiers, attack with the six.”

  “That’s an invitation to slaughter.”

  Isaac couldn’t seem to catch a note of the melamed’s senility. Iz reasoned better than Isaac, even with his broken gaskets.

  “There won’t be any slaughter if we pinpoint Sal’s weak spots and move on them one by one.”

  “One by one,” the melamed said, spooning up the last of Isaac’s chocolate ice cream. “And we lose all the DiAngelises … I’m better off stealing ice cream from your dish.” The melamed blew his nose. “I have to wear a diaper because I’ve started to pee in my pants. I can’t fight Jerry’s war. My leg would be leaking all day.”

  “Let it leak.”

  “I’m an old man. I had a stroke. I still can’t tie my shoes.”

  “I’ll tie them for you.”

  “I’ll look at you and forget your face,” the melamed said.

  “I’ll remind you, Iz.”

  “I’m not Julius Caesar. I’m only a melamed.”

  “The best in the business.”

  “You flatter me, Isaac, because I gave you ice cream.”

  “I hate chocolate,” Isaac said.

  “Then why did you eat it?”

  “I’m hungry,” Isaac said. “I’m hungry all the time.”

  “Like me … I’m better off hiding from Sal.”

  “That’s not the melamed talking,” Isaac said. “That’s another man.”

  “I am that man … go home, Isaac. I have to change my diapers.”

  Isaac kissed the melamed, said good-bye to Eileen, and went down into the street.

  He had no more avenues. He only had the Glock in his pants, and he wasn’t in the mood for target practice. He was eating six and seven times a day. The hunger pains would return in the middle of a meal. He drank wine and Mexican beer, frightened that he would starve. His freezer was stuffed with mocha ice cream. But Isaac couldn’t sit in his flat. He traveled from restaurant to restaurant, like some phantom pirate ship, Sal receding from his mind. But there were photographs of Maria in every window. They were like the flags of his own inconsequence. He couldn’t nail Maria or keep the little man alive.

  And once, during a midnight attack of hunger, after his seventh meal, he came out of his Newyorican restaurant on Norfolk Street and was tossed into a panel truck by several pairs of hands. The surliness around him only increased his hunger. He wasn’t blindfolded. His captors looked into his eyes with the least regard. They bounced him up and down the ribs of Manhattan and brought Isaac to one of the Rubino warehouses.

  The warehouse was cluttered with blackboards that looked like the remains of prehistoric wingless birds. Isaac already missed his next meal. Sal’s soldiers sat him on a stool.

  “Where’s Sal?”

  “You think Sal will save you?”

  “No. But I’d love to bite his face.”

  They held Isaac’s own Glock against his eye. He dreamt of macaroons and grilled salmon and endless ice-cream cones. Two figures came toward Isaac. Neither of them was in a wheelchair. It was Jerry DiAngelis in a beautiful white coat and the melamed, wearing an old sweater. The Glock was returned to Isaac’s pants.

  “Jesus, you didn’t have to trick me like that. I’m hungry. I might have had a heart attack.”

  “Ah, but we had to know if you were Sal’s pigeon.”

  “Yeah,” Jerry said. “You visit me, you visit my father-in-law. You come with big ideas. You could have been Sal’s pet pigeon, trying to smoke us out.”

  “He hired one of my own men to glock me.”

  “That’s only circumstances,” the melamed said. “It wouldn’t hold up in my court of law.”

  “So you bring me here, pretend that your soldiers are Sal’s, and what did you expect me to do?”

  “Beg for your life, say it was some mistake, how close you were to Sal.”

  “And did I pass your fucking test?”

  “Isaac,” the melamed said. “You shot Sal and Sal resurrects himself.”

  “Jerry shot him too.”

  “But Jerry didn’t have LeComte behind him.”

  “And you think I asked LeComte into the neighborhood, you think I invited him to New Orleans?”

  “It’s possible. You were Justice’s own Jewish boy.”

  “Then why don’t you glock me and get it over with?”

  “Eileen would start to cry,” the melamed said.

  “All that stuff about being senile. It was a big act.”

  “Partly,” the melamed said. “Why should we advertise whatever little strength we have? It comforted Sal to think my brains were out the window. He pisses on us, but he hasn’t destroyed the house. And I worry about Eileen.”

  “He wouldn’t touch Eileen.”

  “Rubino,” Jerry said, “Rubino would kill her if he could.”

  “He likes Eileen.”

  “That’s why he’d kill her. He’s a jealous prick. He wants what he can’t have.”

  “Nose is in town,” Isaac said.

  “I told you not to talk about the kid.”

  “He glocked Maria Montalbán,” Isaac said. “He’s Sal’s hitter. You’ll have to take him out.”

  “Eileen would have a fit. He’s the fucking infant she never had.”

  “And a loose wire,” the melamed said. “He could start trampling the few soldiers we have left.”

  “He’s my brother,” Jerry said.

  “I’d swear that Sal has already paid him to glock Izzy and you.”

  “Don Isacco,” Jerry said. “Shut your mouth.”

  “The Stalinist is right for once.”

  “Yeah, Iz. I won’t hit my little brother.”

  “You’ll have to,” the melamed said.

  “Everybody gives me orders. My comare is having a breakdown. I can’t see my own son.” Jerry had a ten-year-old boy with his comare, a beauty from Argentina. The boy’s name was Raoul. The melamed had adopted him as his own grandchild, even though the boy wasn’t Eileen’s.

  “Iz, I’m cracking up. I never close my eyes anymore. I never sleep.”

  “You’ll sleep,” the melamed said. “You’ll sleep in a pine box if we don’t stop your little brother and that cripple in his chair.”

  “I’m the boss,” Jerry said. “I make the rules.”

  “Then make them, sonny boy, or I’m going back to my blanket. I liked looking out my window at the old Police Headquarters. I was enjoying my senility … Isaac, you should never have moved to Police Plaza. It was a mistake. You can’t guard the City from a big red tomb. It has no character.”

  “I agree,” Isaac said.

  Jerry started to pull on his own ears. “I can’t believe it. The two biggest brains in town bawling over some dump with a round roof. Iz, I was in the basement of that old Headquarters. Should I tell you how many cops punched me in the teeth?”

  “Leave us alone
,” the melamed said. “Me and Isaac have been to paradise. Both of us came back from the dead.”

  “So did Sal. And you didn’t trust Isaac an hour ago.”

  “I had to see with my own eyes,” the melamed said. “I had to borrow a warehouse and bring him here … children, we have to do a little damage to Sal.”

  25

  It was a war like any other war, but the Rubinos didn’t realize any of the little shocks. The melamed’s war was without machine guns. No bomb exploded in a Rubino café. No acountants were kidnapped. No crews were wiped out. A Rubino rent collector might get knocked on his ass by a runaway car. His receipts would disappear. But the rentman would suffer no real damage. A loanshark who’d just lost his wife would leave a little note and hang himself. How could the Rubinos tell that the loanshark’s letter had been composed by the melamed himself, who had a wondrous imagination and could mimic the psyche of any man? The losses multiplied, but they were hard to grasp. The melamed picked away at the outer edges of Sal Rubino’s empire. There wasn’t a sudden drop in revenue, just a gradual fall that no bookkeeper ever noticed. Jerry DiAngelis stuck to his rhythm of hopping from bedroom to bedroom. The melamed stayed near the window at his old address. The same bottles of excrement arrived. The Rubinos would sing the same dirty songs on the melamed’s phone. The war seemed to have the same old clock.

  And then the circuits started going insane. Money was stolen from the usual “letterboxes.” Loansharks were hanging themselves with a frightening regularity in all five boroughs. Scaffolds were falling on the heads of too many bagmen. Rubino soldiers were electrocuting themselves inside their houses. It was Sal who discovered this rise in the Rubino mortality rate. He was the one who had to scribble checks to all the widows and show up at funeral parlors in his wheelchair. He had his accountants go through the books. He started to panic. He wheeled himself through all his closets, where he kept bags of money in case of catastrophes. Sal would never be short. But the sight of all that money couldn’t soothe him. He had to soothe himself. He dialed the melamed’s number.

  “Is that you, Isadore?”

  “Yes,” the melamed said.

  “I hope you didn’t mind the bottles of shit. Let’s have a meet.”

  “Whatever you say, Sal.”

  “I’d like to bring you and the son-in-law back into the Family. We’re one tribe, Isadore.”

  “Whatever you say. But I can’t climb down the stairs. You’ll have to come to Cleveland Place.”

  “Not a chance. I’m tied to my chair.”

  “My captains will lift you, Sal.”

  “I’m scared of heights.”

  “Then we have a problem,” the melamed said.

  “I know. You’ve been murdering me, Isadore. You’ve been murdering my men.”

  “War is war.”

  “You didn’t have to put a rope around the neck of people who never pulled a trigger. You didn’t have to fuck with electrical wires. I could live with a straight execution. Your captains against mine.”

  “You and your boyfriend LeComte have finished off most of my captains.”

  “LeComte isn’t my boyfriend,” Sal said.

  “Then call yourself a canary,” the melamed said and hung up on Sal.

  Sal set the melamed’s house on fire. The windows shattered. The chimneys fell into the street. No bodies were found. But Sal hadn’t meant to touch the melamed. Just to leave him without his precious window. He wouldn’t persecute an old Hebrew schoolteacher. Kill him perhaps, but not with fire and smoke. He had his headhunters out looking for Jerry DiAngelis and Isaac Sidel, who’d visited the melamed two days before Sal’s loansharks started hanging themselves. He couldn’t imagine a hell without Isaac. Isaac had to suffer along with Sal, like a fellow musketeer. That was one of the few blisses he still had. He couldn’t lie down with a comare. He was a broken stick. It took three men to undress him and carry him into bed. He hired putanas to crawl between his legs, but he couldn’t stay hard, even when he manufactured fantasies of Margaret Tolstoy. He’d had miraculous dreams while he lived with Margaret. And it poisoned Sal to know he could never live with a woman again. He felt like ripping out their heads. He wanted to wound Margaret Tolstoy.

  It was three in the afternoon and Sal had an appointment with Ted the Nose, who’d become the chief enforcer of his clan. It gave Sal some delight that Jerry’s brother worked for him, that he’d split the DiAngelises in two. The Nose had been an FBI informant. And Sal had borrowed him from the United States, with the blessings of Frederic LeComte. He was bashful about his new friend, but he would have been in purgatory, reciting the prayers of the dead, without this LeComte. LeComte was no less a gangster than Sal. The government was twice as bent as the Rubinos. It bothered Sal. You couldn’t even trust the United States.

  Ted was older than Sal, older than Jerry, as old as Sidel, but he had the deranged eyes of a damaged boy. He couldn’t really function without the cooking of Eileen DiAngelis. And he couldn’t do jail time, so he joined the FBI. He was the only man in America who could frighten Sal. Sal had worked with other loose cannons. But there had never been a cannon like the Nose.

  “Should I take out the melamed, Sal?”

  “He’s practically your father-in-law.”

  “I didn’t marry Eileen. My brother did. And he turned Eileen against me.”

  “You did rat on your brother to the FBI.”

  “I never gave them nothin’ big. Just the little things.”

  “Don’t go near the melamed. The melamed knows about you. He’s got Isaac on his team.”

  “Then I’ll take out Isaac.”

  “Not until I say so, kid.”

  “I’ll take out Isaac.”

  “Show a little discipline, will ya? You’ll get Isaac when the time is right. I want you to mop up whatever cannons the melamed has left. Take five or ten of my boys and go through each fuckin’ territory until you find a cannon.”

  “I’ll find them, but I’ll do it alone. And then I’ll take Isaac.”

  Sal couldn’t argue with such a crazy cannon. The Nose had one or two myths inside his head. For him Isaac was the ultimate bad guy, who lived between Jerry and LeComte, who played with all the technicalities of the law, and mocked Nose’s condition as the weaker brother who sang to the FBI. As soon as Nose left, Sal dialed the Pink Commish. No one picked up, and Sal put his phone on automatic dial. Two masseurs worked on him, oiling his scarred trunk, molding the horned flesh that he wouldn’t allow any comare to see. He almost had an erection, dreaming of Margaret Tolstoy.

  Three of his soldiers put him into the tub. Angelo, his new lieutenant with one glass eye, washed the oil off Sal’s back. It was a woman’s job, and now it had to go to a man. A board was placed over the tub and Sal had his broiled baby lamb chop, prepared by Sal’s own cook who slept in a cot near the kitchen and was on call twenty-four hours a day. No one knew when Sal would decide to eat.

  Angelo had to feed him, because Sal couldn’t hold a knife or a fork in his mottled red hands. It was after six, and Sidel’s phone went on ringing. Sal’s soldiers returned him to his bed.

  The tycoon arrived at seven. Papa Cassidy in a blazer that was so blue it seemed to swallow up every color in Sal’s bedroom. Sal had no love for this man. There was nothing but dollars between them. At least with Isaac there was that shared history of Margaret Tolstoy. Papa Cassidy looked like a commodore away from the sea. One of his eyebrows twitched.

  “I can’t get to Delia,” Cassidy said.

  “Relax.”

  “We’re supposed to be married.”

  “Relax, Papa. I’ll start to pee if you don’t stop.”

  “I’m impotent without Delia.”

  “I’m impotent all the time,” Sal said.

  “I can’t bear to think of her with another man.”

  “That’s easy. I’ll waste all her boyfriends.”

  “You can start with Caroll.”

  “I don’t kill son-in-laws. Besid
es, he’s a cop. And what about Malik? I can’t kill him. The girl has a celebrated class of clients.”

  “I paid you a lot of money to get rid of Maria.”

  “That’s different,” Sal said. “The little monkey was stealing from us and making trouble.”

  “He wanted Delia for himself.”

  “No. Not for himself. Maria never liked you.”

  “I’ll pay double for Caroll.”

  “Out of the question. I happen to like the kid.”

  “I could find another contractor.”

  “That contractor would come back to me. And I’d have to blow your fuckin’ brains out. You’d better learn to live with Caroll.”

  “Then deliver Delia to me.”

  “All right. I’ll try. But I’m her guardian. I can’t ask her to marry against her own will.”

  “I’ll pay triple.”

  “Papa, she could cheat on you, marriage or not. And you don’t have to triple the price. I’m drowning in money.”

  “That’s not what I hear,” Cassidy said.

  Sal began to root under the covers. “Explain yourself.”

  “DiAngelis is killing your people and making a grab for the whole Family.”

  “He’s a cream puff, that Jerry. He’s running so fast, he has to shit in a paper bag. But why are you rankling me, Papa? It’s dangerous.”

  “You shouldn’t have hurt my daughter.”

  “Didn’t we talk about that?”

  “You shouldn’t have hurt Dee.”

  “I had to make Isaac miserable. That’s my only passion. You should never have let her work for the big Jew.”

  “Then kill Isaac for me. He’s behind Caroll.”

  “I am not killing Isaac,” Sal said. “I will make him suffer. But he doesn’t rest until I rest. Understand? Good. Now I’m entitled to my beauty sleep. Good-bye, Papa.”

  “You’ll deliver Delia?”

  “Papa, if I have to say good-bye again, I’ll deliver you.”

  Cassidy left, but Sal didn’t have his beauty sleep. He put on white gloves. He still had enough touch in his hands to grasp a pair of tweezers and toy with the stones in a brooch. He was the jeweler, after all. And the stones had come from a hot collection he’d given to Margaret Tolstoy. He loved to destroy the elaborate settings, a stone at a time. But he could only work for five minutes. His hands would grow feeble and the tweezers would fall out of his grasp.