The Good Policeman (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  He had no trouble breaking into Thirty-nine Grand Street. The front door had a pathetic lock. But Isaac began to shiver in the hall. He had a dizzy spell on the stairs. I’m not going to faint, I’m not going to faint, he muttered as he watched the filthy cracks in the walls. This wasn’t a house where Anastasia ought to have lived. And then he laughed with all the bitterness of a lover with lesions in his heart. It’s a perfect place for Margaret Tolstoy.

  He stood outside the door, listening for noises that might tell him Margaret was inside. Then he removed the lockpicks that he carried in his coat, near the bottle of milk. He opened Margaret’s door and stepped inside like any burglar. He wanted to breathe Margaret, unearth Anastasia in all he could smell. But Isaac sniffed dust and the odors of decay. This Crabbs couldn’t have been much of an accountant. The furniture was older than Isaac’s, with little lice marks in the wood. And there were no ornaments around, no pictures of Margaret, no paintings on the wall. And Isaac wondered if a genuine burglar had come before he did. The closets had been picked clean. There were none of Anastasia’s underpants in the chiffonier. No lipsticks or perfumes. No checkbooks. No little signs of disorderly life that any couple would have had. The burglar, whoever it was, hadn’t been a common thief. He or she worked for the government or Jerry DiAngelis.

  Isaac’s beeper began to whine. It was a Japanese gizmo with its own electronic message board. Isaac looked at the screen. PAY DAY. Her Honor wanted him at City Hall. He switched off the machine. His vertigo was gone. The world was pulling around him, and Isaac felt like a pygmy in the dark. He’d been on the road for two weeks and all the coordinates had changed. Some mother was sitting in the wings and running Isaac. And Isaac had to find who it was. And why.

  6

  Wrapped as he was, like a snowman in a tattered scarf and a coat that could have come from his dead mothers junk shop, Don Isacco arrived at City Hall. He didn’t mingle with the newspaper folk Or the mayor’s entourage. He could have been a bum from the almshouse that had stood on this site. The old English masters had built a jail here, Brideswell, and had their own hanging tree. Isaac wondered when the tree had been felled. Before or after the Revolution? He went around to the side entrance of City Hall, descended a little flight of stairs, knocked on the door. One of his own policemen, assigned to Becky Karp, scrutinized Isaac and let him in. He didn’t have to explain his whereabouts to a bodyguard. But it was close to Christmastime, and Isaac didn’t want to be curt.

  “Hullo, Tom. How’s your wife? Give her my regards.”

  “I will, Chief. Would you care for some coffee now?”

  “I’m too frozen to drink a cup,” Isaac said. “I’d start to melt.”

  And the bodyguard laughed. He was from the old brigade, when the Department was an Irish “castle,” and the Shamrock Society ran half the show; the police commissioner himself was only an adjunct of whatever cardinal sat in the Powerhouse, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But now the Department had a Jewish PC and a black First Dep, and the Irishers had begun moving into the FBI, or were becoming sheriffs in Arizona or New Mexico, where they could hold on to their pensions and still carry a gun. And Isaac had to contend with the new Indian countries of Bushwick and the South Bronx. He couldn’t reclaim them, because he couldn’t reclaim the schools, which had become holding pens for moon children, kids who lived like marauders and maddened wolves. Nine-year-olds with knives.

  He followed the bending lines of a water pipe into Rebecca’s bunker. She was named after that Jewish witch from Ivanhoe. Rebecca. The monkish knight, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, dooms himself and dies out of his love for that storybook Rebecca. Isaac had never cared for Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the wonderboy of Sir Walter Scott’s tale. But Brian de Bois-Guilbert had haunted him since he was nine, because he could never really pronounce that name, and Isaac was passionate about the notion of a monk with a battle-ax.

  “Bois-Guilbert,” Isaac muttered, while his Rebecca was waiting for him in the bunker’s little bedroom. She was wearing a red robe. Isaac could see all the way down her throat. “You’re late,” she said, winding her wristwatch. She’d never borne a child, and she had the body of a twenty-five-year-old. She was still Rebecca of the Rockaways.

  “Come to bed.”

  “Your Honor,” he told her. “I’d like to resign.”

  “Cut the crap. This isn’t the time for it. I have a three-o’clock at the Board of Ed.”

  “If you’re looking for a chancellor, what about me?”

  “Isaac, insanity isn’t your best feature.”

  “But I’m serious,” he said.

  “We already have a chancellor.”

  “Alejo Tomás? He’s an invisible man.”

  “And you never finished your freshman year at college. You’re practically an illiterate from the City’s point of view. And why would I want you down at Livingston Street? You’d ruin me with all your cockeyed schemes. We’d be fighting every minute.”

  “But it would help the kids, Rebecca. It would help the kids.”

  “What kids?” she asked. “Isaac, I know your worth. I couldn’t get reelected without you at One Police Plaza. Come to bed.”

  And she pulled on Isaac’s rags.

  He sat down near Rebecca, as forlorn as Brian de Bois-Guilbert.

  “Isaac, is it such a task to make love to me?”

  “Becky,” he said. “I’m no good as a police chief.”

  “Crazyhead, you’re the number one cop in America. Didn’t I lend you to Justice? The first fucking Alexander Hamilton Fellow.”

  “But it’s the schools, Becky. That’s where it starts.” And Isaac made a hammer with his fists.

  “You have a new cookie,” she told him. “My deputies say, ‘Get rid of that Pink Commish. He’ll cripple you in the end. He’s in love with Joe Stalin.’ But do I ever listen? It’s a cookie, isn’t it?”

  Her Honor leaped out of bed. She tossed off her robe, and Isaac could feel the music of her body, the deep chest, and the trim, athletic hips, calves that shone in the dark.

  “Thank you, good-bye. I don’t need you around while I get dressed.”

  He stood there, absorbing her punishment.

  “Isaac, come with me to the Board of Ed. I’ll tell them you want to be chancellor and I’ll watch when they laugh in your face.”

  “They will laugh,” he said. “And then they’ll bow to a lackey like Alejo Tomás.”

  He marched out in his rags, while Rebecca cackled and started to cry. “I don’t care if you have a cookie. I don’t care. I don’t care.”

  He went to the Christy Mathewson Club. There were new champions on the wall. Rabbit Maranville. Rogers Hornsby. Joe Judge. Where the hell were Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, and Mathewson himself? Isaac smiled. What would his cryptographers at the Ivanhoe “division” have done about the new faces? Old men were drinking sherry in the main hall. But Isaac didn’t see Schyler Knott. He climbed a flight of stairs to Schyler’s office. He could come and go as he pleased. Who would have questioned the Commish? He stopped near the darkened glass of Schyler’s door. He’d have to become his own cryptographer and look at the Christys’ receipts. Perhaps there were notes Schyler had taken about Maurie Goodstein and Margaret Tolstoy.

  Isaac grabbed for his picks. The door opened like a baby. But he’d have to rifle around in the dark. He couldn’t risk putting on a light. He groped toward Schyler’s desk, and that’s when a pair of hands girdled his chest with the force of a python. Don Isacco couldn’t breathe. Bubbles formed in his mouth.

  “Keep still.”

  Don Isacco stopped fighting.

  A light went on. And Isaac recognized one of the Bomber’s mitts. Harry Lieberman, formerly of the New York Giants, stood behind Isaac.

  “Can I turn around?” Isaac asked.

  “Yes,” Harry answered, breaking his grip.

  Isaac coughed. The Bomber gave him a glass of water. “Drink slow,” he said.

  To be squeezed to death by his very own hero. I
t seemed proper to Isaac. But there was nothing cruel in the Bomber’s face. He was an aging boy from the Polo Grounds, carrying out some mission for Schyler Knott.

  “Sorry, Commissioner,” the Bomber said as Isaac sipped from the glass.

  “Where’s Schyler?”

  “I’m not allowed to tell.”

  If only Isaac could have had his own team, with the Bomber in center field, he wouldn’t have needed the Ivanhoes. “Harry, I’m your friend.”

  “Schyler doesn’t think so.”

  “What happened?”

  “This guy came around and started to threaten.”

  The Afrikaner, Isaac muttered. Burt. “Was he a stocky fellow with a bald head?”

  “Something like that. He came again and I had to throw him down the stairs.”

  “I apologize,” Isaac said. “He’s one of my investigators. I should have kept him on a leash. But I was desperate. I’m looking for someone named Margaret Tolstoy.”

  “Never heard of the babe.”

  “She has a husband. He’s a member of the Christys. Martin Crabbs.”

  “The accountant. Why didn’t you say so? I didn’t know he was married.”

  “But she was here … the night I gave my speech.”

  “You didn’t give your speech, Commissioner. You disappointed us. I was waiting for a month.”

  “But it was because of Anastasia. Margaret, I mean. She was a childhood sweetheart. Not a sweetheart exactly. I was in love with her and—”

  “I remember the babe. She had blond hair. A peach. She’d never been to the club before … Schyler had two other guests.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Two other guests. They scratched his cheek with a knife. They started to strangle him with his tie … here at the club.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Maurice’s address. But they couldn’t get it. Schyler wouldn’t betray a Christy.”

  “But why didn’t he go to the cops? He could have called me.”

  “They were cops,” the Bomber said.

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Schyler didn’t tell no one but you that Maurice was a member of the club. They were your people, Mr. Isaac.”

  “They were not,” Isaac said. None of his Ivanhoes would have touched Schyler’s face. “Listen, Bomber.”

  “I’m Harry,” the Bomber said. “Don’t take privileges.”

  “It’s a mess. Schyler’s in danger. He has to come to me. If he does know where Maurie is, there will be more trouble.”

  “We take care of our own, Mr. Isaac. We don’t strangle. We don’t use knives. But we were scrappers once, and we haven’t forgotten how to fight.”

  “Dammit, Harry, there are enough detectives in town. Warn Schyler, will you? He has to get in touch.”

  “I’ll see,” the Bomber said.

  “Why did you change the pictures on the wall? You had Babe Ruth … and now there’s Joe Judge.”

  “We have our own message system, Mr. Isaac. It’s internal to us. And you’re not a Christy. Don’t get smart. You can’t break our codebook, even if you are the biggest cop.”

  “Harry …”

  “If you come again, wear a tie. That’s house rules. And don’t bring your fancy needles. We’re gentlemen. We don’t pick locks.”

  And Isaac skulked away like a dog. The Bomber had unmasked him as a thief. And crazily, as the snow flew around him, Isaac started to cry. The worm hadn’t bothered him once in the Christys’ bluestone building. But he sucked on his bottle of milk.

  He trudged to the Lower East Side, and even in his ragged coat, people recognized him. They kissed his hand. Old Jewish men, Chinese seamstresses, Irish widows, and Latino dowagers of Loisaida. He couldn’t escape his bearish self. “Don Isacco, Don Isacco.” The drug dealers had fled with a police chief in the neighborhood. The holdupniks had to think twice. Isaac kept a flat on Rivington Street. It was his official address, a rent-controlled apartment that cost him under two thousand a year. There were no burglaries with Isaac in the building. There was enough hot water for a king. And even if Isaac’s tub was in the kitchen, what did it matter?

  He could walk into any health club, or shower at the Pierre.

  Women wrote him love letters, sent him pictures in the mail, with marriage proposals and lists of all their assets. But Isaac wasn’t looking for a millionairess. Columnists quoted him in the papers about crime. His figure could be seen on the six o’clock news, the great detective in the clothes of some cadaver. He was much more popular than Rebecca Karp. He’d been offered movie contracts. All Isaac had to do was play himself. Suddenly his very ruggedness had become chic. But all he could think about was Anastasia.

  He’d never find her again.

  He had a terrific appetite to bargain with the merchants of Orchard Street, as he’d done before he’d been a famous cop. It was in Isaac’s blood. His mom and dad had been traders once upon a time. And Isaac loved to shave off a dollar or two from a merchant’s price. But it was difficult for him now. The merchants wouldn’t take a penny from Don Isacco. He had to reach into his pocket for a false nose. He warmed up the putty and fit the nose to his face.

  He went into Abraham’s, where he’d bargained as a boy. The old man was over eighty now, and he had a young black assistant who babbled a stronger Yiddish than Isaac ever could. “Traif,” the assistant said when he had a look at Isaac, meaning that this bum was unkosher and wasn’t worth a minute of the old man’s time.

  “Pajamas,” Isaac said with his false nose. He saw himself in the old man’s mirror: half Fagin, half Frankenstein.

  “Wash-and-wear, or what?” the old man asked.

  “Flannel,” Isaac said, as if there could be no other pajamas in the world.

  “For flannel you gotta pay,” the old man said.

  “Nisht, Abraham, nisht,” the assistant said, trying to discourage the bartering that was about to begin.

  “Show this gentleman our merchandise, will you, Al?”

  “He’s a schnorrer.”

  “Show!”

  “I’m big around the chest,” Isaac said. “I need extra large.”

  “What about the bottoms?” Abraham asked.

  “I like to roll them up around my knees.”

  And the assistant carted out great brown boxes of Abraham’s flannel pajamas. Isaac sifted through the boxes, happier than he’d been in a long, long while. He found a pair with white stripes in a blue field. They looked like prison pajamas. “How much?”

  “Fifteen dollars. They cost me sixteen. But they’re on sale.”

  Isaac had to be cautious. Abraham was temperamental about his prices.

  “Thirteen,” Isaac said.

  “Mister, go home.”

  But Isaac could read the signs. Abraham hadn’t closed the boxes.

  “You are a schnorrer,” Abraham said. “I give you from Hong Kong. Merchandise. The best.”

  “Thirteen.”

  Abraham took the thirteen dollars and thrust the pajamas into a paper bag, while Isaac’s heart swam with all the delirium of a curious kind of kill. “Now take off that miserable mask,” Abraham said. And Isaac was gloomy again.

  He pulled off the nose and picked at the putty.

  “How long I know you?” Abraham asked.

  “Forty years.”

  “Longer,” the old man said. “And you still take advantage. Next time you come to bargain, come without the nose.”

  And Isaac waltzed out into the snow with his striped pajamas. Perhaps he should consider a movie contract. No one could really police New York. And as he crept toward his apartment, he could feel a shadow behind him. He wasn’t carrying the gold-plated gun LeComte had given him to start his career as a Hamilton Fellow, an expensive toy from the gunsmiths at the Justice Department, with the attorney general’s signature engraved on the grip. Isaac didn’t require such an immaculate piece. He had his own hands to play with. He glimpsed into the shop windows. The shad
ow was wearing a homburg, with rubber boots and a long coat. Isaac began to muse. They send infants in galoshes after me.

  He would lead this shadow on a merry chase. It had to be a package from LeComte or Jerry DiAngelis. Isaac decided to take the package home. He trudged toward Rivington Street, turned the corner, ducked into a doorway, and when the package appeared, breathing hard and clomping along in his rubber boots, Isaac leaped at him like a werewolf, spun the package around. The homburg fell off. He was looking into Anastasia’s almond eyes.

  Part Two

  7

  He couldn’t have told you if it was a dream or not. But Isaac had grown philosophical since his fiftieth birthday. And he’d have argued that it wouldn’t have mattered much. What was fixed in his memory had its own tactile life, could be touched like the teeth in his head. Had he dreamt Kingsley McCardle? Was the Justice Department or LeComte himself one more ghost? LeComte couldn’t bother him now. And McCardle had entered so deep into his psyche, the kid belonged to Isaac’s tribe. But he was thinking of an icon, the figure of Jesus painted on a wooden panel, Jesus wearing thorns of gold. Isaac had seen the icon in Anastasia’s household and had to ask what the hell it was. He knew all about the Son of God. There were even churches on the Lower East Side with onion domes, where all the Ukrainians went. The priests wore big hats. And they carried pendulums of incense. They had beards like the zaddiks of Brooklyn, but they were taller, brutish men, and their eyes burnt in the middle of the afternoon with a samovar’s yellow flame.

  But it was the icon in Anastasia’s house, that Jesus with the golden thorns. His face had all the sadness of a man who must have sinned. It was only logical. Their Jesus was a Jew, like any haunted ragman of Hester Street, with a bundle of clothes on his back. But Isaac would sit and drink Russian Orthodox tea, black as blood, while Anastasia’s aunts crossed themselves and asked mercy from the icon for having a little Jew in the house. They loved talking to a piece of painted wood. And that wood had become a deity for Isaac, like the images of Moses on the mountain, Moses with a blackened face. Anastasia had wakened him when he was fourteen. He could still feel the thickness of her stockings, see the little hairs on her aunties’ chins, and that Son of God on the wall.