The Good Policeman
An Isaac Sidel Novel
Jerome Charyn
A MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media Ebook
Contents
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
Part Two
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Part Three
14
15
16
Part Four
17
18
19
20
21
22
Part Five
23
24
25
26
27
28
Preview: Maria's Girls
Part One
She was the little darling of Pushkin Street. She would arrive at the Opera with Prince Finkelshtein and Uncle Ferdinand. It was 1942. The Opera House had lost part of its roof, but no one seemed to care. The German tenor Minos Schmidt was Don Giovanni that night. She could see the spittle flying from his mouth. Finkelshtein wept. Magda thought it was unbecoming of a prince. But she couldn’t understand why a member of the Russian nobility had to slave for Ferdinand in his own house. And she’d never heard of a prince called Finkelshtein.
“Ma jolie,” the prince said, holding her hand.
Ferdinand would taunt him. “Finkelshtein, you don’t have much longer to live … would you like to sleep with the child?”
“No, Your Excellency.”
“Then please let go of her hand.”
She couldn’t quite grasp the curious talk between them—French, German, English, Roumanian, and Greek. They were like Berlitz professors on the prowl. Ferdinand had once slapped the prince in public. Finkelshtein. He’d been the most powerful man in Odessa until the war. It had something to do with olive oil. He’d created his own school for violinists. He’d lured opera companies from all over the world to Lastochkina Street. And now he was a kitchen drudge.
Ferdinand wanted to rename every street in Odessa. He put up new signs. Pushkin became Danube Street. Red Alley was Fortune Road. The Deribasovka was Little Angel Street. But the signs only angered people. No one would ever admit where Little Angel Street was, no matter what the signs said.
It embittered Ferdinand. He blamed the prince. “These are your lackeys, Monsieur.”
“But I can’t control their eyes.”
“Of course you can. They’re nothing but Odessa Jews.”
“The Jews have fled, Your Excellency.”
“No. They’re hiding in the Catacombs.”
The Catacombs was where the bad people were. The bad people hated Ferdinand. They lived in long tunnels under the town. It was 1942, and only some of the people were starving. Uncle Ferdinand had his Opera and a circus and bits of Finkelshtein’s music school.
Magda was twelve years old. She lived with Uncle in a mansion on Little Angel Street. One night the Nazis came for Finkelshtein. Uncle could have stopped them. His signature was gold. The Nazis grabbed Finkelshtein by his feet. He managed to smile at her.
“Au revoir, ma jolie.”
“Au revoir, Monsieur le prince.”
And when Ferdinand made love to her that night, his great bulk above her, Magda moved like stone. How else could she punish him for not saving the prince?
She wouldn’t cry. Ferdinand would only have shouted at her, and it couldn’t have helped Finkelshtein. He wore his gun to bed, because no one could tell when the bad people might come, the partisans who lived like bats in their tunnels and caves. One of the cooks told her there was a second Odessa, under the ground, with an opera and palaces and a Pushkin Street for the partisans, because they couldn’t bear to be without the city they adored. What did Magda know about people who were crazy enough to build their own Odessa in the dark?
She had two or three nights with Ferdinand, and then he buckled up his uniform and said, “Come.”
“Where are we going, Uncle?”
“Come.”
They got into Ferdinand’s limousine and rode three blocks. The emperor of Odessa didn’t like to walk. They arrived at Gestapo Headquarters on Gogol Street. Uncle danced her over to the little corporal at the gate.
“Major König, bitte.”
“He’s occupied, Mein Herr.”
“He’s always occupied,” Ferdinand said. “My niece doesn’t have time to wait. She has her dancing lessons, Herr Korporal.”
And they flew into the major’s office unannounced.
His tunic was draped over the chair. All his medals blinked at Magda. He was with a lady.
“Countess Leskov,” he said, “this is our Roumanian friend. Herr Ferdinand, finance minister of the Odessa region … and his niece.”
The Countess Leskov was naked under her coat. Her lipstick had bled onto her chin. She was the fattest countess Magda had ever seen.
The major put on his tunic. The countess took some of his money and left.
“How are you, Mademoiselle Magda?” the major asked. He had a beautiful blond face, with a tiny scar on his lip.
“Leave her alone,” Ferdinand barked. “She’s mourning the prince.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Finkelshtein. She misses that man.”
“But he’s a Reichskriminal,” the major said. “He’s been shipping guns to those dogs in the Catacombs. And he’s not an authentic prince.”
“Ah, but I think he is,” Ferdinand said. “The czars liked to elevate a few of their moneylenders. And the Finkelshteins go back years and years in Odessa.”
“An old wives’ tale.”
“Perhaps, but I need him back.”
“I told you, Herr Ferdinand. He’s a Reichskriminal. He’s being processed this minute.”
“I’m glad. But unprocess him. You’ll have to lend me the prince.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Then I will resign, Herr Major. Or perhaps you’d rather arrest me and the mademoiselle … I won’t leave the building without Herr Finkelshtein.”
“You’ll end up paying a very bitter price.”
“Yes, but my domestic situation will improve. That’s what matters to me at the moment.”
It took half an hour to produce the prince. He must have been lost somewhere in Gestapo Headquarters. His mouth was black-and-blue. His ears had tiny rings of blood. His eyes sat deep in his skull. Ferdinand found him a German private’s coat to wear.
Finkelshtein wouldn’t talk on his way home to Little Angel Street. He was Magda’s soldier-prince. His face was much too swollen to laugh or cry. Magda wanted to ask him about that Odessa of the dark, where Gestapo majors didn’t grab Gogol Street for themselves. But she couldn’t say a word while Ferdinand was in the car. Finkelshtein muttered to her from the side of his mouth. “Merci, ma petite,” he said, “merci,” before he wandered up Ferdinand’s steps to the house that was no longer his.
1
It could have been St. Louis.
There was a metal rainbow in the sky, an arc that loomed over the city like a gigantic toy. And Isaac didn’t feel like testing himself against toys. He wasn’t little David out on a picnic with his lyre. He was a police chief who’d been riding across the country as a guest of the Justice Department. The great American detective out on a tour. Justice was sending him to meet with the country’s other detectives, to share his information with them, his expertise, and to discover how police departments in Seattle or St. Louis dealt with the
same pathology that Isaac found in New York. He’d captured Henry Armstrong Lee, the FBI’s Most Wanted Man, a bank robber who liked to dress in women’s clothes. And now Isaac was the first Alexander Hamilton Fellow, lecturing to men and women who had more sophisticated gadgets than Isaac had ever seen, who could reconstruct whole bloodlines from a speck of hair, identify serial killers with one spot of semen, but couldn’t make the pathology disappear any better than Isaac.
The arc was bloodred this morning.
What other town had a metal rainbow right on the levee? He’d arrived with ten other chiefs from Missouri and Kansas who’d heard him lecture about social disease. Poverty and decay. The no-man’s-land of certain housing projects where citizens had to form posses to leave their apartments. The biggest deterrent to crime, Isaac had said, was an alphabet book. “Teach a kid how to read and his curiosity goes inward. He’ll dream about Sinbad the Sailor and he won’t steal cigarettes from the old man down the hall.”
And then the chief of some border town in Kansas asked Isaac if alphabet books could cure New York of the Mafia. Isaac said no. “There’s nothing to cure. The Mafia’s big business. But it’s not on the board. It doesn’t need a stock exchange. All it needs are citizens who can’t get what they want from city government because it’s too involved with feeling its own belly, and tickling its own back.”
The chiefs smiled to themselves and wondered how long this Alexander Hamilton Fellow was going to survive in the same bed with the Justice Department, talking like the Mafia was only another city agency. But they liked his gruff manner and his graying sideburns, Isaac Sidel, police commissioner and big-city boy. He belonged in the funny papers, with Dick Tracy. But Dick Tracy didn’t carry a bottle of milk in his coat, the way Isaac did. Isaac always carried a bottle of milk. He had a tapeworm, and when it got hungry and mashed his insides, he fed it with a swallow of milk.
He rode out with the chiefs along the Daniel Boone Expressway, across Gravois Avenue, to visit a “juvenile facility,” because that’s what Isaac wanted to see. And it broke his heart. Not because the jailers seemed cruel. They were as enlightened as he could expect from a city shelter. The nurses didn’t even have an institutional smile. It was the children. Isaac knew that half of them were a little retarded. And the other half were already beyond repair. They had that maimed look Isaac had met in a hundred other classrooms and shelters, kids with uncurious eyes.
He traveled from room to room with his delegation of chiefs. He visited the soup kitchen, drank the minestrone that was offered him, and sucked on his bottle of milk. But he couldn’t get away from those uncurious eyes. The walls were ocean-green in the recreation room. The shuffleboard sticks were all new. But the children seemed to play in slow motion, as if they didn’t have an attitude toward the wooden discs they shoved into the scoring zones.
Isaac joined the game. The chiefs could do nothing but watch as Isaac gripped his long wooden cue and scored a perfect seven. The disc had its own strange music, like a flattened planet sliding on a painted floor. But not even Isaac and his cue stick could bring those children out of their slumber.
He left the shuffleboard field, the chiefs right behind him, most of them in uniform, like a little army of many coats. Isaac wanted to get out of this children’s jail. He wanted to give up his fellowship and remind Justice to go to hell. He had nothing to teach. He wasn’t Dick Tracy. He was more like a commissioning agent who gathered detectives and stoolies around him, some kind of clever spider. And while he prepared himself to make his exit with the chiefs, to run from this jail and that metal rainbow over St. Louis, he was trapped by a face. It belonged to a boy who was as runty as the rest, a boy in the same brown jumpsuit that was standard issue in this jail. A uniform with many pockets.
“Hello,” the boy said, singling Isaac out from the other chiefs. His mouth was crooked and there was a mockery in his voice, a form of play that Isaac hadn’t found in the shuffleboard room. The boy had lots of wrinkles. His face was used up, but he wasn’t a little sleepwalker. He was like a wizened old man of six, with an old man’s eyes.
“How old are you, son?”
“Twelve,” the boy said.
Isaac didn’t believe the kid. Where were his shoulders?
“What’s your name?”
“Kingsley McCardle.”
“And how long have you been living here?”
“Half my life.”
The chiefs pulled at Isaac’s elbow. They didn’t like this colloquy. He wasn’t supposed to engage the children in a heart-to-heart talk. These were wards of St. Louis, a city with its own unusual life, because it belonged to no other county in America. It was like a landbound island named after Louis IX, the crusader king who watched over this old French village on the Mississippi. But the boy wouldn’t stay silent.
“Who are you, grandpa?”
“Isaac Sidel … police commissioner of New York.”
“Heck, that ain’t much of a living,” the boy said, and the cops continued to pull at Isaac.
“Loren,” Isaac said to the city’s chief of detectives, who’d brought him out of Kansas and into that little country under the metal rainbow. “I’d like to sit with the boy.”
“No time, Isaac. We’re having lunch at Catfish and Crystal. The mayor’ll be there.”
“Loren, I’ve had too many mayors for lunch. Let me talk to the kid.”
And Loren Cole, who ran the detective bureau like a crusader king, who was as incorruptible as Isaac, and decided where justice fell in St. Louis, took Isaac aside.
“Kingsley’s not for public consumption.”
“I’m not going to write about him, Loren.”
Captain Cole stood belly to belly with that cop from New York. He was bigger than Isaac. He could have dragged Isaac to Catfish & Crystal, but Isaac would only have haunted him in the restaurant, haunted him about Kingsley. “He’s one of our invisibles, Isaac. Supposed to be lost. We didn’t want him running through the courts. So we stuck him in this crevice, if you know what I mean?”
“What the hell did he do?”
“Do? He lived with an uncle in a goddamn shack behind Busch Stadium. The uncle tossed him around. I’m not sure. There weren’t no other kin. Kingsley took a Coke bottle, sharpened the lip, and while the old man was sleeping, he dug him in the neck. I saw the shack. I saw that old man’s river of blood. We brought Kingsley in, tested him, had a team of child psychologists studying the color of his piss. The kid had an IQ that was taller than a church. He knew all the Cardinal greats. He’d read the Bible, Isaac, every verse. He talked about the stars and how things were dying everywhere. I can’t say that uncle needed a Coke bottle in his neck. But I didn’t want reporters interviewing the boy. I didn’t want him on the six o’clock news like a freak. I took him to a friendly judge and had him remanded here. The case is still sitting in my drawer. Don’t spoil it, Isaac.”
“I’m not keeping a journal, Loren. I don’t work for Justice. Let me talk to him.”
“No.”
But Isaac was stubborn and explosive, like the boy, and Loren knew the kind of day he’d have to endure if Isaac didn’t get a couple of words with McCardle. Dick Tracy would destroy Catfish & Crystal, bring that restaurant down.
“Two minutes, Isaac. And if you bring up unpleasant matters, I swear to Jesus I’ll put my cuffs on you and lock you in the toilet.”
“Anything you say, Loren.”
And while the other chiefs waited, Loren put Isaac together with McCardle in a pantry between the kitchen and the nurses’ station.
“I’d gut him again, old Uncle Sol,” the boy said without a bit of provocation from Isaac. “He was mean as a tit.”
“I didn’t ask you about family business.”
McCardle laughed. “I know what’s on your mind, grandpa. How old are you?”
Isaac sucked on his milk bottle.
“Forget it. What would you like to be when you grow up?”
“Grandpa, are you dumb?” M
cCardle said, wrinkling his eyes. “I can’t afford to grow. I got to stay here with the children. Ask the cop. I teach them arithmetic.”
“It’s not much of a future,” Isaac said.
“Depends on what you mean, grandpa. I have a future. I can be the oldest kid in St. Louis. I get to see the Cards every summer on Stan Musial Day. I hear Enos Slaughter had a better arm than Stan. Is that true?”
“Slaughter had the best arm in baseball.”
“How would you know that?” McCardle asked with his old man’s eyes looking at Isaac’s milk bottle.
“I grew up with the New York Giants.”
“What was Slaughter like?”
“He was bald and had big ears and he ran like an donkey and threw like a knife.”
“That’s Slaughter all right. I read about him in Guffy’s Guide to St. Louis …”
Loren peeked into the pantry. “Time’s up,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” McCardle said. “I’m talking to the man.”
“Time’s up.”
Isaac walked out of the closet and returned Kingsley to his jailers. He didn’t even say good-bye to the boy. An anger was building in Isaac. He sat next to Loren in the limousine.
“What are you going to do with the boy?” Isaac whispered.
“There’s no secrets here,” Loren said. “Everybody knows McCardle.”
“Well, what are you going to do? You can’t let him rot inside that little jail.”
“Rot?” Loren said. “He’s doing high school in there.”
“And then?”
“We sneak him through the back door at Washington U.”
“What if the back door is closed?”
“This isn’t Moscow, Isaac. We can always try another college. We’ll get him in.”
“He’s dying in that little jail, Loren, can’t you tell? His face is all wrinkled.”
“He was like that when we found him.”
“Well, maybe he could use another environment.”
“We’re not stage designers, Isaac. We gave him what we’ve got.”
“But you could lend him to me.”
The Good Policeman (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 1
