Isaac understood the club’s particular code. The Christys believed in an America without Jackie Robinson, when baseball was a white man’s province, and black men lived and died in their own little league. But the Christys weren’t the Ku Klux Klan. They were racist in their own odd fashion. They had black members who listened to white men’s fables about Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker and the shame of Shoeless Joe. Isaac could have boycotted the club. But he wanted to talk to those antiquarians. The Christys knew there had been black players in the big leagues long before Jackie Robinson. Like Bones McClintlick, who was advertised as an Indian while he was with Louisville a hundred years ago. And the Emery brothers, Slats and Charles, who ate up the National League at the start of this century. There had been others, who were blessed (or cursed) with blue eyes, men and boys who came out of some farm country and took a convenient nickname, like Tadpoles or Mad Tom. Isaac himself had fallen in love with the names of catchers and pitchers and first basemen who belonged to an era when every village could field its own team. Isaac was a hillbilly at heart. He never lectured for the money. He’d donate whatever loot he got to the Police Athletic League.
And so he arrived at the club, a blue sandstone building on East Twenty-ninth. The Christys had their own house. They were as rich as some Byzantine king. The club owned several banks and an entire block of brownstones. Isaac saw his own face on a placard outside the club. He looked like a grandfather, with gray sideburns and thick lines in his forehead. It startled him how much he’d aged. He was still that boy who burrowed under the fence.
He had his lecture prepared. He meant to talk about the litany of names that had formed Isaac’s America. He was forgetful now and had to remind himself of his own commissioners and their wives, but he could recite the names and statistics of men who’d played before he was born. Baby Doll Jacobson. Sad Sam Jones. Roger Peckinpaugh.
The auditorium was packed. And Isaac was welcomed by the president of the Christy Mathewson Club, Schyler Knott. Schyler’s granddad had once been captain of the Princeton baseball team. And Schyler himself was a second baseman at Swarthmore or Hamilton or another school Isaac couldn’t keep in his head. He was an investment banker in his grandfather’s firm. A curious man of thirty-six or -seven. He didn’t seem like much of an antiquarian. He wore banker’s clothes, but he didn’t have that “old boy’s” presence of the other Christys. Schyler would have celebrated Jackie Robinson. But he presided over a club that couldn’t even mention Willie Mays.
He pumped Isaac’s hand. He was blonder than a movie star. He didn’t bother to ask Isaac about his speech. And Isaac began to feel wicked. I’m going to get away with murder tonight.
“Where’s Maurie Goodstein?” Schyler asked.
And Isaac forced himself to smile. There were photographs of Mathewson and Babe Ruth and Three Finger Brown on the wall. Little Maurice didn’t seem to belong in their company.
“I went to Colgate with him,” Schyler said. “He was a friend. He’s also a member of this club. I’m sure he would have wanted to hear you speak.”
“He never mentioned the Christys to me.”
“You know Maurice,” Schyler said. “Didn’t want to give the club a bad name. But he sat on our board. He was our biggest fund-raiser.”
All of a sudden the Christys didn’t seem so antiquarian to Isaac. Had the club been laundering money for some Staten Island don under Maurie’s own umbrella? Isaac had an itch to flee the antiquarians, to run away from this house of the dead.
“Schyler, there hasn’t been a clue about Maurice.”
“But you must have some theories.”
“Of course. But it’s police business. I couldn’t compromise my own detectives out in the field.”
“That’s the trouble,” Schyler said. “I was the last one to see Maurie. And none of your detectives ever bothered to knock on our door. Maurie was having lunch with me at the club.”
“Was he agitated?”
“Not at all.”
“Think, Schyler,” Isaac said, the policeman again, not the baseball fanatic.
“He was happy … for Maurice. Had a new boyfriend, I gather.”
“Did he give you a name?”
“No.”
“What about a line of work? What did the boyfriend do?”
“I’m not sure. He might have been a male nurse. Maurie mentioned some hospital.”
“Which hospital?”
“I can’t remember. And this isn’t the time for an inquisition, Isaac. You’re our guest.”
Most of Schyler’s blondness was gone. He’d lost that lithe, youthful look. He was one more antiquarian. And Isaac began to mingle with other members of the club. He traveled from face to face until he stopped in front of another old man. Isaac felt a brutal pull.
“The Bomber,” he said. “Harry Lieberman.”
The old man laughed. “Yes,” he said. “I’m Harry. I’ve wanted to tell you for ages how much I admire the stances you’ve taken. You’re the best commissioner we have.”
“Not everyone would agree. But you should have written … or telephoned me.”
“I’m too shy,” the old man said, and Isaac recognized the Bomber’s big, unmistakable hands.
“You were my hero,” Isaac said. “I watched you from the bleachers for two whole seasons. You hit twenty-five homers in 1944.”
“Mr. Commissioner, half the talent was overseas. I couldn’t even get near the team when the regulars got back. That’s why I jumped to the Mexican League. I’d spent most of my life in the minors. If there hadn’t been a war, I’d still be with the Jersey Giants.”
Yes, that was the rabbinical side of the story. The Second World War had depleted the majors. And all of baseball had become one big farm team, without DiMaggio or Greenberg or Ted Williams. But the bomber wasn’t a bush-league kid. He had the bat and those big mitts. He’d ripened during the war. Isaac remembered his catlike moves, the way he’d taunt the entire Cardinal infield. He could have been the Joe DiMaggio of the New York Giants. But he succumbed to that myth of the secondhand ballplayer, and those garbage teams the war had bred. The Bomber shouldn’t have vanished in 1946. He was the casualty of his own civilian warfare. If he hadn’t dreamt of an army uniform while he was at bat, he could have hit a hundred more homers.
“I’d like your autograph,” Isaac said.
The old man covered his face with those big hands of his. “Go on. You’re the Bomber now.”
“Please,” Isaac said.
And the Bomber signed the program notes the Christys had prepared on Isaac. To the Commissioner. From Harry Lieberman, your biggest fan. November 29, 1982.
Isaac wanted to cry, not out of that ordinary sadness of meeting the athlete as an old man with a grizzled neck. Isaac wasn’t sentimental about anyone’s mortality. But the Bomber had been the phantom player who’d entered Isaacs heart and then disappeared into some eternal children’s league …
Isaac was led up to the podium by Schyler Knott.
People clapped.
Isaac’s shoulders quaked. He could feel the worm writhe. But the PC hadn’t brought his bottle of milk. He didn’t care. Isaac wasn’t going to be silenced by a stinking worm. He could have talked about the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and the ruin of Ed Cicotte, Swede Risberg, Chick Gandil, and Shoeless Joe, with his lifetime batting average of .356. But it would have been silly stuff, because Isaac knew about other gamblers, other fixed games that had never been publicized, never announced, and why should he tarnish the Christys’ heroes? Don Isacco wasn’t mean. But he wanted to rile the antiquarians a bit. He would have liked to mention Willie Mays, but he had to keep within the club’s rules. And so he decided to talk about Josh Gibson, the great black catcher of the nigger leagues who was supposed to join the Washington Senators during World War II, but the Senators chickened out and Josh fell into a kind of madness, holding conversations with DiMaggio in his head, asking Joe why he wouldn’t recognize Josh.
Josh Gibson and Jo
e DiMaggio.
That was the topic of Isaac’s talk. But Schyler got in the way. He began a long, long introduction about the Christys and Isaac himself. “… a fellow antiquarian who saw Mel Ott play in the old green gardens of the Polo Grounds. Isaac Sidel is one of us. A brother to baseball. I don’t need to list his credentials. He’s the current Alexander Hamilton Fellow, traveling in behalf of the Justice Department. He captures psychopaths with his bare hands. It’s Isaac who brought in that bank robber, Henry Armstrong Lee, the most dangerous man alive.”
Isaac was embarrassed about Henry Lee. His best informant had told him where the bank robber was. And the media had turned it into a scalp hunt. Now Isaac was growing forgetful of Josh. He’d lost the music of his speech, and Schyler hadn’t finished introducing him yet. Don Isacco gnashed his teeth.
“Brothers, sisters,” Schyler said, “a big hand for the police commissioner, Isaac Sidel.”
It was too late. Gibson had gone out of Isaac’s head. He looked down upon a landmark of faces. He placed his elbows on the podium. He stared like a rhinoceros, seeking the riddle of his own words. He thought of Kingsley McCardle. The boy would have loved the story of a black catcher who hungered to play DiMaggio in the big leagues. The whole goddamn country wouldn’t let Gibson grow up. Josh, Isaac muttered to himself.
Even with all his truculence he noticed a woman in the audience. He smiled bitterly because he’d “captured” Henry Armstrong Lee while the bank robber was sitting in a woman’s skirt. But this woman didn’t look like Henry Lee. She couldn’t have been much younger than Isaac. But her face wasn’t ravaged at all. Time hadn’t bitten into her yet. And Isaac remembered her from forty years ago. The hair was still pulled high. The lipstick was bloodred. The mouth was moist. The cheekbones were fierce. Isaac started to cry.
“Anastasia,” he said, before he tumbled into Schyler’s arms.
4
There was a whole team of doctors around Isaac’s bed. He was wearing some long hospital nappy, like an infant. There were flowers from Her Honor, Rebecca Karp. The bastards had drawn blood from Isaac. He could feel the pricks in his arm. The humidifier in the room purred like a little giant. The doctors all had white coats.
“Commissioner Sidel, have you ever swooned like that before?”
“Yes,” Isaac said. “I’m a swooner. Go away.”
“But you could have gone into shock … we would have had to—”
“Go away.”
He started to rise up from his bed, and the doctors disappeared, except for Gordon Gould, the Department’s chief pathologist, who served as Isaac’s own physician from time to time.
“Gordon, where the hell am I?”
“Beth Israel. We brought you in an ambulance. Your blood sugar was very low. You were hibernating … like a polar bear. All the essential functions had slowed.”
“What time is it?”
“Time?” the chief pathologist said. “I’d say six in the afternoon. I’m not wearing my watch.”
“And I’ve been lying like this for a day.”
“Three days, Isaac.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“But what happened?”
“Nothing, nothing. I saw a ghost.”
“At the Christy Mathewson Club?”
“Why not?” Isaac said. “That club is full of ghosts.”
“I’m considering a CAT scan.”
“Gordon, what are you going to find? Bubbles in my brain? I have a worm. It fucks me whenever it feels like it.”
“Yes,” Gordon said. “It could have been the worm, eating up all your essential sugars. But I doubt it. Isaac, please … we’ll have to take some tests.”
“After Christmas,” Isaac muttered. “I might be in a more festive mood. Where’s Sweets?”
“Isaac, I’m not part of your cadre. I’m a pathologist.”
“You still work for me. I want Sweets.”
“All right. I’ll send for Sweets.”
And Isaac closed his eyes before his chief pathologist had left the room. He had terrible dreams. Lions were eating away at his body. He had no legs. He cried like he hadn’t cried since he was a boy and his father had gone to Paris to become the new Cézanne.
He was still bawling like a baby when he woke up. There were no lions around. Only Frederic LeComte.
“Who let you in here?” Isaac asked without bothering to wipe his eyes. “I’m the Commish. I ought to have a guard outside my door.”
“You do,” LeComte said. His face was fuzzy. But Isaac recognized the blue color that LeComte had a fondness for. Powder-blue shirts ordered from Hong Kong. Blue silk ties. Isaac dressed like a bum. He loved secondhand shoes, hats, and pants. His vision began to clear. He could see the cultural commissar’s aristocratic nose. His lips were very, very thin. Isaac could imagine LeComte as the intellectual hatchetman for Cardinal Richelieu. There was something clerical about him, like a murderous priest.
“Isaac, we’ll take care of all the bills. That’s one of the advantages of being a Hamilton Fellow.”
“LeComte, I have a hospital plan. I don’t need Justice to watch out for me.”
“We worked you too hard,” LeComte said. “When you recover, you’ll only have to do a couple of cities a week.”
“I’m not going back to that gulag,” Isaac said.
The aristocratic nose began to twitch. “Do you realize how many applicants I had, Isaac? One thousand three hundred and ten. And I picked you.” LeComte walked from the window to the bed and back again. “And I picked you.”
“LeComte, I never applied for your fellowship,”
“That’s the point. It was by invitation only. But people started applying … congressmen put on the pressure for their favorite candidate. But I got caught in a shitstorm and picked you. You didn’t have one miserable supporter outside of me. And you call it the gulag. TV coverage in every city. Soon you’ll have a fan club, like Jack Nicholson.”
Isaac sat up in his hospital nappy. “LeComte, why’d you come here?”
“You’re my protégé.”
“Why’d you come?”
“To warn you, you motherfucker. I don’t want your secret service looking for Maurie Goodstein.”
“I don’t have a secret service,” Isaac said. “It’s illegal.”
“I know. I pay for it. I can have Burton Bortelsman deported, Isaac. I can send him to South Africa. If the blacks don’t kill him, the Afrikaners will.”
“It might get hairy,” Isaac said, “if the Washington Post ever discovered that old Burt was a paid informant of the Justice Department. You won’t touch Burt. Now tell me what it is Maurie’s done. Which don are you after?”
“Stick to your own cradle, Isaac. You’ll live longer. Goodbye.”
And Isaac settled into bed. The mayor called. Isaac was sleeping with Rebecca Karp twice a month. He would visit the little bunker under her office at City Hall or ride up to Gracie Mansion in the middle of the night. Their romance existed in some familiar territory between hatred and lust. She’d been a beauty queen, Miss Far Rockaway of 1947. Her popularity rose with Isaac’s triumphs. Their lovemaking was born out of a loneliness of two people who couldn’t make permanent attachments. Isaac had been married before he was twenty. His wife Kathleen fled to Florida. He was as intimate with her as he would have been with any stranger. She’d fallen out of Isaac’s sphere of things. They’d had a daughter together, Marilyn the Wild. She kept getting married to spite her dad. She was living in Seattle. And when Isaac had visited that town as a Hamilton Fellow she wouldn’t even take his phone calls. She’d loved his “angel,” Manfred Coen, and Isaac had gotten him killed in one of his ploys against a tribe of Peruvian pimps. She’d never forgiven Isaac for that. The tapeworm had come from that tribe. The tapeworm was their gift.
And Becky Karp? She couldn’t have found the time for marriage in her appointment book. Isaac suited her fine. He never made demands. Their minds were always elsewhere, but they had whateve
r tenderness their bodies could bring. She loved waiting up for Isaac and was just as happy when he left. That was the power of their alliance. Their forages in bed were almost like the City’s own seal. Isaac was the gentlest lover she’d ever had.
“How are you, dear?” she said with her Rockaway accent. “Get well, will you, Isaac? I can’t get any coverage since you’re in the hospital. You’ve been monopolizing the six o’clock news.”
“Its not my fault,” he said. “I got dizzy and fell. But I’ll be out of here in a day. I promise.”
“I called six times,” she said.
“I was probably asleep.”
“Isaac, what’s with Maurie Goodstein?”
Jesus, Isaac muttered. Even the mayor was into Maurie. The whole town had one preoccupation: little Maurie Goodstein.
“You think he ran off with one of his faigeles?” Becky asked.
“For a week, yes. But not a month. Maurie isn’t that romantic.”
“Then where is he?”
“I’d gamble that the Feds have him.”
“But he couldn’t survive in the witness protection program. He’s too conspicuous.”
“I agree.”
“Then solve the riddle, Isaac. That’s why you’re my police chief. And get well.”
Becky got off the line and Isaac grew more and more depressed. He waited and waited for Sweets, but his First Dep didn’t come. And then Sweets materialized, out of the smoke and mist of Isaac’s vaporizer. Isaac figured it was just another ghost who had come to haunt the PC. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Shit, you are a sight,” Sweets said.
The Good Policeman (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 3
