Maria's Girls (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “Then it’s a tragedy,” Isaac said. “You’ll have a mid-life crisis before you’re twenty-five.”

  “I am twenty-five. And I’m going to call Uncle Malik. Uncle Malik won’t let you bully me.”

  “Call him,” Isaac said, handing Delia the phone. She started to cry.

  “Uncle Malik won’t talk to me … where’s my Uncle Sal?”

  “He can’t help you,” Isaac said. “Sit down.”

  He removed a gallon of mocha ice cream from the little freezer he kept behind his plants. He broke a spoon trying to dig out the ice cream from the bottom of the container. He had to chip at the mocha with a knife. He gave Delia a bowl, and they started to eat.

  “No Caroll,” he said. “And you can have one club, Chinaman’s Chance.”

  “One club? I’m not Salome. I need the exercise … will you visit me, Uncle Isaac?”

  “Ah, I wouldn’t want to make your other uncles jealous. And I don’t dance. I have a wooden leg.”

  “I like wooden legs,” Delia told him.

  She was playing the child again. But Isaac was immune to her charms. He’d sworn himself to Margaret Tolstoy. He waltzed Delia out of the office with his wooden leg. And waiting for him, in his anteroom, was the melamed, wearing a dark suit like some undertaker. The sergeants hadn’t known what to do about Iz, who had a special relationship with their chief. And so they let the melamed sit until Isaac discovered him with his own eyes.

  Isaac didn’t have much choice. He brought the melamed into his office.

  “Nice plants,” the melamed said. “You must talk to them every day.”

  “You had to come here, didn’t you? Should I give you a gold shield, Iz? Would you like your own desk in my office? I can make you a deputy commissioner, I can swear you in.”

  “I am your deputy commissioner. I always was. But I’m not rash, Isaac. I had to get in touch.”

  “You could have given me a tinkle on the telephone.”

  “I don’t trust telephones.”

  “Damn you, Iz, my office is wired. LeComte has his bugs all over the place.”

  “I’m not worried about LeComte. It’s Jerry I’m worried about. He’s planning a banquet with Sal’s old captains. And I don’t have to tell you who the guest of honor will be.”

  “He’s out of his mind,” Isaac said.

  “I can’t reason with Jerry. He says Sal belongs to him.”

  “We didn’t capture Sal to exhibit him like a monkey. It will cause bad blood. Those captains might decide to free the son of a bitch … sympathy is a fucking contagious disease.”

  “I agree.”

  “And where is the son-in-law?”

  “On Eighty-ninth Street with Sal.”

  “Will you ride up with me, Iz?”

  “No, no. He’ll think we started a conspiracy.”

  “Then I’ll drop you off at home.”

  “Your own troops might get suspicious.”

  “Jesus,” Isaac said. “You’re already in my office. How cozy can you get?”

  And he called for his driver, Malone.

  Isaac arrived at the rubble of Jerry’s brownstone in less than half an hour. Jerry’s soldiers shrugged at him as Isaac climbed the stairs. He could hear Jerry shout from the top floor.

  “Dress him, will ya?”

  Isaac peeked over the banisters and saw two soldiers trying to fit Sal into a tuxedo.

  “Leave him alone,” Isaac said.

  Jerry stared at the Pink Commish. “I didn’t invite you.”

  “I don’t need an invitation,” Isaac said.

  “This is my house.”

  “Good. But I have the key. Leave him alone.”

  “He has to wear a tux,” Jerry said. “I’m taking him to a benefit.”

  “Then you’ll have to kill me,” Isaac said.

  Jerry dismissed the two soldiers, his eyes burning with anger. “You talked to the melamed. My own father-in-law’s a rat.”

  “I love this,” Sal muttered, his head rising out of the chair. “I’ll go to the party, Mr. DiAngelis. I’ll count the faces. I’ll see who’s loyal. I’ll have my revenge.”

  “No one asked you, Rubino.”

  “Come on, Isaac. Dress me.”

  The anger had gone out of Jerry’s eyes. “I can’t disappoint the captains. I promised them Sal.”

  But he left the house, sulking in his white coat. “I’m the fool of the Family.”

  Isaac heard little popping noises and then footsteps on the stairs. He wondered if Jerry had decided to come back. But those weren’t Jerry’s footsteps. He saw Margaret coming out of the stairwell in a short brown wig. She was carrying her spacegun with a silencer. And Isaac almost had to laugh.

  “LeComte sent you,” he said.

  “Isaac, you couldn’t expect him to fall asleep. I’m his best man.”

  “I’ll bet you are,” Isaac said. “I suppose you whacked Jerry on your way in.”

  “No,” she said, “Jerry wasn’t in the deal.” She kissed Isaac in front of Sal, with the Glock in Isaac’s belly. And Sal was feeling murderous. He didn’t want a rescuer like Margaret making kiss, kiss, while he had the faint hope of an erection in his pants.

  “And you have all the angles, don’t you, dear?’ Isaac said. “You whacked Jerry’s soldiers and you’ll have to whack me too.”

  “That wasn’t in LeComte’s scenario,” she said.

  “But Jerry will think I had it all planned, so you’d better kill me.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sal said. “Don’t I get to say something?”

  Margaret ignored him. “I couldn’t kill you, love. You know that.”

  “And what if I didn’t let you take Sal?”

  “Then we’d have to rewrite the scenario,” she said.

  A G-man came up the stairs, a blue-eyed Mormon who’d been elected to carry Sal down into LeComte’s car.

  “Nobody touches me,” Sal said, “nobody but Isaac.” He bit the Mormon’s hand. “I’m a snake. I’m a fuckin’ snake.”

  The Mormon put a blanket over Sal’s head, picked him up in his wheelchair, and carried Sal and the chair out of the house.

  Margaret ran her finger across Isaac’s face. And then she vanished with the Mormon and the wheelchair. Isaac was left with the corpses of Sal’s babysitters. He shouldn’t have fallen in love with an FBI girl.

  LeComte was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. He grinned at Isaac.

  “It’s always nice to see my Hamilton Fellow.”

  “Fuck you, Frederic.”

  “You had your little caper. Fun is fun. But now we’re playing hardball. You had no right to steal Rubino. I stole him back.”

  “Grand,” Isaac said. “And now the war will start again. Babies will be shot in the street.”

  “We’re holding Rubino under wraps. The melamed can have his territories. I’ll catch Jerry another time. But we keep the wheelchair. We keep Sal … kiddo, walk me to my car. You can say good-bye to Sal and your sweetheart.”

  “She’s not my sweetheart anymore. She was going to glock me.”

  “Not a chance,” LeComte said.

  Isaac walked out with the cultural commissar to an empty street.

  “Where’s my car?”

  A schoolbus turned the corner and stopped in front of Isaac and the commissar. The door opened with a pneumatic hiss. The melamed stood behind the door.

  “Don’t be bashful, boys. Come inside.”

  There were soldiers at the windows, their cannons aimed at LeComte’s eyes. LeComte stepped into the bus.

  Isaac started to walk away. The bus moved alongside of him.

  “Sonny, do we have to shoot off your toes?”

  “Shoot,” Isaac said. “Iz, you staged the whole fucking thing.”

  “We can’t have a dialogue like this … people will notice.”

  “You knew LeComte was coming for Sal.”

  “I had a hunch,” the melamed said. “And I acted on it … we have Mar
garet, remember. We might hurt your fiancée.” The old man turned pale. “Sonny, I’m getting excited. I’ll have another stroke.”

  “Ah, we wouldn’t want that,” Isaac said with his policeman’s brogue and climbed aboard.

  29

  The bus brought him to a bingo club on Pleasant Avenue, in Jerry DiAngelis’ Harlem domain. Margaret had a mouse under her eye. Sal was wearing a dark tuxedo. LeComte was sandwiched between two of Jerry’s cannons.

  The bingo club was filled with Rubino captains, their wives and mistresses, their children, their bodyguards, and saintly halfwitted boys who served as good-luck charms. There was a priest in the entourage, the nephew of a particular captain. There was the Rubinos’ private baker. They’d all come to hiss at Sal, their fallen chief.

  It’s a circus, Isaac muttered. But no one kissed his hand at the bingo club, no one called him Don Isacco. He wasn’t a war counselor tonight. He was a captive, with Sal and LeComte and Margaret Tolstoy, whose mouse grew green under her eye. He couldn’t bring himself to clutch her hand. He felt as if he’d been cuckolded by the FBI.

  He watched the thick, swollen faces around him, all the celebrants, and then he noticed a boy who didn’t play with the other children at the club. It had to be Raoul, Jerry’s own little bastard. The woman next to Raoul must have been Alice, or Alicia, Jerry’s comare, a big blonde who looked more Levantine than Latino. But Isaac couldn’t really fathom any racial mix. Raoul was an outcast among the Rubinos. His eyes were like two enormous marbles in his head. And behind the boy was Eileen DiAngelis, like some bountiful witch at the proceedings, with her own mad claim on Raoul. Isaac almost pitied Jerry, who was caught between his comare and Eileen. Some crazy instinct must have driven him to invite them both. Perhaps he needed his two women to preside over the dismantling of Sal Rubino. But it was still a circus.

  Jerry wasn’t the ringmaster. He didn’t have the gift of speech. He was splendid in his white coat. But he couldn’t sway an army of bandits and their wives and children, legitimate or not. It was the melamed who stood on the dais at the bingo club, his face slightly twisted from the stroke. One arm trembled. But he was the Family poet. Next to him were Sal Rubino and LeComte, sitting on little black chairs.

  The melamed silenced that circus with a single twitch of his eyes. “Brothers and sisters,” he said. “I brought you a gift … your old friend Sal. Look at him. Don Rubino with his own FBI man. Ah, I forgot. I’d like to introduce Frederic LeComte, prince of the Justice Department, who indicted Jerry four times.”

  The captains and their women laughed and shouted, “Fucking Frederic LeComte.”

  The melamed held out his fingers. “Four times.”

  The children clapped. LeComte played with his knuckles. Sal’s head started to wag. Isaac had the urge to climb up onto the platform and sock the Hebrew teacher. But he sat with Margaret Tolstoy and Jerry DiAngelis and Raoul and all the Rubino captains. He’d have to create his own Mafia within the walls of One PP.

  “Brothers, sisters,” the melamed said, “all the while he was your padrone, he was babysitting with our enemy, Frederic LeComte. Ask him to deny it.”

  Sal’s head stopped wagging. Spittle flew from his mouth. His left eye seemed to circle the ceiling. He was on another planet.

  “Maybe,” the melamed said, pointing to LeComte, “maybe the Justice Department’s own little commissar will enlighten us. Speak to us, Commissar. We’re civilized men. We won’t bite.”

  LeComte continued to crack his knuckles. “I have nothing to say.”

  “That’s because you’re married to Mr. Rubino. And you had the wonderful idea of controlling our Family, of sitting behind Rubino, pulling him like a puppet, and laughing at us with all your FBI men. But you’re not at the Justice Department right now. You’re at a banquet of the Rubinos …”

  The captains grinned with sausages in their mouths. Their mistresses and wives hurled paper cups at Sal Rubino. And Isaac wondered if he was at some madcap convention and not a bingo club in the bucolic little corner known as Italian Harlem.

  The melamed raised his arms. “Brothers, I’m an old man. Please don’t disgrace our Family … after all, we escaped our misfortune. We found out who this Sal Rubino was. And the FBI isn’t our padrone. Eat, enjoy yourselves. We have no more business with these people.”

  And like a magician, he closed a curtain around himself and the two men in the chairs, and when the curtain opened, Sal and LeComte were gone. The melamed came down from the dais while the captains danced with their wives and mistresses, having already forgotten Sal. But a commotion had started around Jerry D. Eileen tried to steal Raoul from his mother.

  “I’m your wife,” she told Jerry. “The children of all your whores belong to me.”

  But big blond Alice had her own volition. “Darling,” she said, “when he’s on top of you once a month, he closes his eyes and dreams of me.”

  The two women attacked, their fists in each other’s hair. The melamed and Jerry were paralyzed. It was Isaac who parted Eileen and Alice, who took their blows, and allowed each of them to cry on his shoulder, while Raoul trembled near the melamed, his huge eyes absorbing all those crazy adults. And then the melamed’s own bodyguard collected the boy and his mother and drove them downtown in Jerry’s sedan.

  The banquet started all over again.

  Isaac stood in the corner with Jerry and the melamed.

  “You had to bring both women?” the melamed asked.

  “Ah,” Jerry said, “Raoul wanted to meet the FBI man.” And he walked off, celebrating with his own captains. Isaac was left all alone with the melamed.

  “I love that disappearing act,” he said.

  “Speak plainer,” the melamed said. “My mind’s impaired.”

  “Impaired, huh? I think the stroke did you some good … what happened to LeComte and Sal?”

  “I’m no murderer,” the melamed said. “I gave the rat to the FBI. I set him free. How can he harm us, Isaac? His own captains saw him on the stage with LeComte. He’s a walking dead man.”

  “He already died once.”

  “But you can only have one resurrection. That’s all God allows.”

  “And I suppose you’re God’s special priest.”

  “No. I’m a melamed who had to sit on his son-in-law because that son-in-law doesn’t have the brains to plan ahead.”

  “You’re the strategist, all right. You used me, Iz. And it’s not the first time. You show up at my office with crocodile tears. You knew that LeComte was listening to our conversation. And you knew he would try to get Sal back from Jerry. So you let him pounce, and then you bring LeComte and Sal to your little captains’ party.”

  “It was the only way,” the melamed said.

  “Why didn’t you trust me?” Isaac had to ask.

  “You’re a cop.”

  “I’m your fucking war counselor. I swiped Sal in the first place.”

  “You’re a cop. Sooner or later you would have turned on us. You don’t have a choice. LeComte would have applied the pressure.”

  “I didn’t turn,” Isaac said.

  “Sonny, not even you can fight the whole United States.”

  “What about Margaret?” Isaac asked. “She might have gotten hurt at the house on Eighty-ninth Street.”

  “Be a little charitable. She killed three of my men.”

  “She’s still my fiancée. And you set her up.”

  “Isaac, did I put her on the platform with LeComte? I kept her out of the picture. She can go on sleeping with gangsters and busting their brains. I have nothing against Madame Tolstoya, believe me.”

  “And Nose?”

  “He’ll stay in the woodwork. He doesn’t have Sal to sponsor him. And what can I do? Jerry won’t let anyone touch the kid. How can I get between two brothers? … but I’m tired of talking, Isaac. Enjoy yourself, please.”

  “LeComte will hunt you down,” Isaac said.

  “You don’t understand the psychology of
the FBI. LeComte wouldn’t want to advertise his appearance at our party. He’ll land in a pile of shit if his bosses ever learn he was kidnapped for a couple of hours.”

  “The man’s his own boss,” Isaac said.

  “You’re mistaken. That’s the beauty of this government. There are always bosses … good-bye, Isaac. I don’t envy you. A police commissioner with a talmudic bent. We’re both antiques.”

  The melamed went off to calm Eileen, and Isaac was like an outcast at the party. He couldn’t find Margaret. She must have slipped away with that mouse under her eye. He walked out onto Pleasant Avenue without a nod from the Rubinos and breathed the air of one more Harlem night.

  30

  They sailed away with Sal, Margaret on one side of him, Frederic on the other. And Sal had such bitterness he could have swallowed LeComte’s head, eaten all the cartilage, and spat out an ear or two with LeComte’s yellow blood. “I’ll kill DiAngelis. I’ll kill the melamed.”

  “You’ll do nothing,” LeComte said. “Those were your captains, Sal.”

  “So what? I’ll get other captains.”

  “That’s not the point,” LeComte said. “The melamed owns your Family. It’s all over, Sal. I have to cut our losses.”

  “And what about me?”

  “I haven’t let you down,” LeComte said. “I took you out of the sausage factory in New Orleans. I put you back together. I haven’t let you down.”

  “And now I’m Mr. Frankenstein,” Sal said, squinting at Margaret. He’d have gone to the FBI college in Quantico, he’d have educated his wheelchair to run over bankrobbers, if only Margaret would live with him again. But how could he expect her to respond to such a Frankenstein face?

  He started to shiver. The bitch took him in her arms, rocked him like the baby he was, and it was LeComte who ruined it, ruined it with his words.

  “What’s wrong, Sal?”

  “Shh,” Margaret said, and he could sniff that perfume of her body. It was like a long, savage hit to Sal, the awakening of something he’d rather not wake to. He could have made love to Margaret, in spite of all his brittle bones, the scrotum that was hiding in some little shelf. Sal was his own idiotic flower. But LeComte ruined it all.