“Apologize,” he said, glaring at his son-in-law, the don of all the dons, even if the mortality rate was high for a Mafia king like Jerry.
“Apologize for what?” Jerry said, his teeth glinting like a wolf.
“I heard you on the intercom. You insulted the memory of Sophie Sidel.”
“Who the fuck is Sophie Sidel?”
“Isaac’s mother, may she rest in peace.”
“How did I insult? Who remembers?”
“You called the Commish a motherfucker. She had a violent death, Sophie Sidel. And you told him, ‘That breaks my heart.’”
“Dad, it was just an expression … Jesus Christ.”
“There was malice behind it.”
Jerry stood up at the table, bowed, and kissed Isaac’s hand. “I apologize, Don Isacco.”
“Without sarcasm, please,” the old man said.
“Isaac, I’ve been under a strain,” Jerry said. “LeComte has been grabbing at my balls. Forgive me … now can I finish my meal?”
Jerry adored the old man as much as Isaac did.
Eileen ladled out chunks of an enormous pie that was filled with berries and walnuts and pears. Jerry had his comare, whom he visited twice a week, but the comare, who was blond and beautiful, and Argentinian by birth, couldn’t have prepared a pie like that. Isaac himself was a little in love with Eileen, who knew about the comare and never mentioned her. She was as fierce and proud as the melamed. And she’d fashioned a family in this landscape of thieves. She couldn’t have children. Isaac didn’t know the reason why. He wouldn’t have asked. Jerry had had a child with the comare, a ten-year-old boy. And it was this that ate at Eileen. She would have liked to add the boy to her household of waifs, the melamed who began as a burglar, the husband who would rot in jail or die in some meaningless Mafia war, and Teddy Boy, who depended on her when he wasn’t out strangling people with a necktie. She was fond of Isaac also. She recognized the wayfarer in him, with all his captures and glory hours on TV.
“Isaac,” she said, “another piece?” cramming the commissioner’s plate with a mountain of berries. And then she prepared black coffee with a lemon peel and hot milk for Isaac’s worm. She was familiar with all his maladies.
When the meal was over, Isaac and Jerry wandered out of the kitchen and into a closet that Isaac chose, because it wasn’t within reach of LeComte’s parabolic mikes.
“I’ll figure out his fucking equipment, Isaac. Don’t you worry. I have the best sweepers in the business.”
“You’re wasting your time. LeComte is always a year ahead of the competition. No one’s immune. He’s bugged my office too.”
“That’s indecent,” Jerry said. “You’re our highest cop.”
“Means nothing to him. But I have a problem, Jerry. You lied to me.”
“About what?”
“Margaret Tolstoy.”
“Isaac, are you sick? She’s not even Crabbs’ comare. She’s a bim.”
“Well, your brother tried to strangle her and almost succeeded.”
“What the hell for?”
“That’s what I would like to know. He doesn’t have too many ideas in his head.”
“And you’re saying I arranged it, huh? I have no interest in the merchandise, no interest at all.”
“And she swears that Teddy Boy iced Mr. Crabbs.”
“Crabbs is as alive as you … or LeComte.”
“That’s hard to believe. Someone was outside my window, Jerry, with a shotgun.”
“Some local kid with a gripe … or a fucking addict.”
“Addicts couldn’t afford a Mossberg Persuader. Your Family is fond of that particular gun.”
“Did you have a peek at the cocksucker?”
“He was wearing a mask. And he dropped both barrels into my kitchen, Jerry. Shot the place to shit. He was after Margaret Tolstoy.”
“It’s insane, Isaac. Come on.”
They stepped out of the closet and returned to the kitchen, where Teddy Boy was devouring the remains of the pie. His hands were thick with blood from all the berries. His brother caught him while he was trying to cram another piece of pie into his mouth. Jerry threw him off his chair, grabbed his grizzly head, and banged it against the floor. “Nose, are you free-lancing again?”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“You went after that puttana Margaret with a necktie … and you had a shooter waiting outside Isaac’s window, the fucking chief of police.”
Jerry got up, stood over his brother, and started to drag him around like a sack.
Nose started to cry.
The melamed entered the room. “He’s your own blood, Jerry. You’ll kill him.”
“I’ll do worse than that,” Jerry said. “I’ll make him wish that being born is something he’d like to forget.”
But when Eileen appeared, her black eyes boring into Jerry, he stopped dragging his brother. “How the fuck can I operate? I have retards who want to blow the commissioner away.”
The melamed clutched his silver hair. “The walls, Jerry, the walls.”
“I know about the walls, Dad. Teddy, I want that shooter of yours whacked out.… Are you hiding Crabbs?”
Nose shook his enormous head.
“Then take Isaac to him.”
Nose started to rise like a whale. He whispered in his brother’s ear.
“I don’t give a flying fuck,” Jerry said. “The man has to explain himself to Isaac. Get your car keys, little brother.” Then he turned to the Commish. “Isaac, do me a favor. Hold his hand. And make sure his jalopy isn’t wired for a bomb. My crews have gone crazy. And there’s a rat running around. LeComte might have paid him to finish off my little brother. I wouldn’t mind. He’s a nuisance. But the wife would miss her teddy bear.”
And so Isaac started down the stairs with Ted. The melamed called to him. “Remember, Isaac. Stalin also got it in the end. I don’t care what the Soviets say. Beria poisoned him.”
“Maybe he did. But Beria died the same year. That doesn’t make him another Stalin. See you, Iz.”
8
Isaac’s teeth rattled in his head. He waited for a violent pull of the worm that always signaled an attack of vertigo. But it didn’t happen. He’d been dying to tell Jerry and Eileen and Iz who the rat really was. He wished Jerry had dragged the life out of his little brother. But Isaac would have to resign if he revealed who Informant M (for Manhattan) 76666 OC/TE was. Teddy’s FBI code name was the Four Sixes because of his uncommon serial number. Four Sixes was LeComte’s star in the case that was building against Jerry DiAngelis and the crime family he’d inherited from the Rubino brothers, Vincent and Paul, who’d opened their “book” to Jerry, initiated him into the clan, and then tried to kill him when his own Manhattan crew seemed almost as powerful as the Rubinos themselves and their nephew Sal. But the Rubinos had died in that war. And now Jerry was prince of the Family, with a couple of rebellious crews that were still loyal to Sal and were ambiguous about Jerry and his brother. And so the prince had to walk out of bombed cars and pacify the crews that were against him. He didn’t favor shotgun parties. He wanted to heal old wounds. But he’d had to kill a captain or two. And while he danced and did all his politics, Source 76666 met with LeComte and sang his brother’s life away.
They walked to Ted’s cream-colored Coupe de Ville. Isaac slid down under the sedan to see if the car was wired. But it was an idle move. The bomb could have been triggered by remote control, and it would have taken Isaac half an hour to unearth the “clock.” Fuck it, he said. The FBI was shielding Ted. LeComte’s own experts had probably vacuumed the car for plastique.
They climbed in, and Isaac sat with Ted. The Nose wasn’t as dumb as he seemed. It was easy to play the imbecile. But he was LeComte’s kingfish, the Four Sixes.
Ted drove out of Manhattan, crossed the Washington Bridge. And Isaac had to smile when Ted stopped at the Red Apple restaurant, gateway to the Catskills and the Borscht Belt. The Red Apple had been a Jewish
colony during Isaac’s boyhood. Now it was a glorified hot-dog stand. The Nose gobbled half a dozen dogs. It was only an hour since he’d attacked Eileen’s pie. Isaac recalled the political discussions he’d had on a Red Apple bench with fellow waiters who were working the Borscht Belt to find a rich man’s daughter to marry … or lacking that, get laid.
“Das Kapital,” Isaac muttered.
“What?” Four Sixes said. “You ain’t gonna snitch, are you, Isaac? I mean, what I did, I had to do. The Big Man, he had me in a bind. I couldn’t last it out in a prison cell. The grub’s no good. And I can’t take a crap with the screws watching all the time. I need Eileen’s cooking.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Isaac said, “or I’ll finish what Jerry started.”
“He’s my big brother,” Four Sixes said with a lunatic smile. “He can touch me all he wants.”
“You’re five years older than Jerry.”
“He’s my big brother. He looks after me.”
“And you betray him to a shitband of FBI men.”
Ted started to bawl. “I can’t do time. My brother can. But I can’t.”
They drove to Swan Lake, and Isaac fell into a poisonous mood, because he didn’t want to consider his days and nights in a Borscht Belt kitchen at seventeen, when he’d had to fight whole crews of busboys to find a place for himself. Teddy Boy stopped a hundred yards from the lake, and the borders of a deserted hotel. The lake was frozen through. It was winter in the Catskills. The ice made little crackling sounds, like breathing skin. Isaac recognized the hotel. Its signboard had been torn down. But it was a big white house over the water, with porches that went as high as the roof. The Hotel Gardenia, where Isaac discovered Lenny Bruce in the main casino. It was just after the war, and Bruce was a struggling comic, a famished Jewish kid. They’d come out of the same whirlwind, like inmates of an orphan asylum where money and social standing were as meaningless as the moon. Isaac still lived in that orphanage. He didn’t even have a thousand dollars in the bank. He was a pauper with a big salary. And he’d worked this hotel, slaved in its kitchen, danced with doctors’ wives, made brutal love to them while their hubbies were in Manhattan.
“What the hell is Crabbs doing here?” Isaac asked as they climbed the hill over the lake and listened to the ice. Had the Mafia seized the Borscht Belt after it had become a graveyard?
“It’s a beauty, ain’t it, Isaac? Like a fucking castle. And you can’t approach it from the back. The hill’s too steep.”
“Who found this place?”
“I did.”
“It’s not one of LeComte’s warehouses?”
“LeComte never heard of this hotel.”
“So you were taking a Sunday drive, and bingo, you saw the white hotel and you said to yourself, ‘This is for Teddy Boy.’”
“Something like that. But I had an edge. Crabbsy’s been to the lake before. He’s familiar with the terrain.”
“Familiar with the terrain? That’s LeComte talking now. Did he take you through the FBI course at Quantico? Did he send you to school with all the G-men so you could be an educated rat? Mr. Four Sixes. Is this where you’ll retire, Nose, when they put you in the witness protection program?”
“I ain’t going into the program. I wouldn’t hurt my brother.”
“You’ll just nibble at his fingers until he’s all gone. I asked you, Nose, why the fuck is Crabbs here?”
“He’s hiding.”
“From whom?”
“The government.”
“So now you’re his guardian, huh?”
“I’m his friend. He does my taxes. He gives me an allowance. He invests my cash. But I can’t tell.”
A man stepped out onto the bottommost porch. He was carrying a 12-gauge Mossberg, like that guy with the mask. He didn’t look like any accountant Isaac could imagine. He didn’t have spectacles or a splayed ass. Isaac was instantly jealous. “Margaret’s husband,” he muttered, because he had the feeling this wasn’t some Buffalo Bill of the Catskills. It was Crabbs. He had dark eyes and a thick crop of hair, and that peculiar stink of intelligence.
“Nose, are you nuts?” he said.
“Crabbs, I want ya to meet—”
“I know who it is. The singing policeman, Isaac Sidel. I’ve sat next to him at banquets. I’ve seen him on the news. Nose, you shouldn’t have brought him out to the lake.”
“I didn’t have no choice, Crabbs. He visited my brother. He told him about Margaret and—”
“Will you come inside,” Crabbs said. “You’re turning us all into targets. There’s a terrible glare off the lake.”
They went into the Hotel Gardenia. The lobby had been gutted. The chandeliers were gone; the front desk had been ripped right out of the wall. There weren’t any portraits of the Gardenia’s Jewish greats: Hank Greenberg, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor … cardboard cutouts that had stood in the lobby and had seemed so lifelike to a boy of seventeen that Isaac could remember mumbling to Al Jolson and asking Hank how come he’d retired in 1947 after hitting twenty-five homers for the Pirates.
“Mr. Crabbs, are you an old Borscht Belter?”
“Away from the windows, will you? There’s still a glare.” Crabbs put a blanket around his shoulders. “Yes, I’m a veteran of Swan Lake. I did some time at the resorts. But not at this particular cheesebox … I always loved it up at the lake. You could hear your echo for miles. It was beautiful then. Lanterns over the water. Midnight boating parties.”
“Who are you hiding from? LeComte?”
“Commissioner, this is my vacation.”
“The Mossberg isn’t a birdgun. It’s for maiming people and bears. What are you afraid of?”
“Cops like you … don’t you get it? Jerry’s going down. And I do his arithmetic for him. The Feds have me marked. I’m the monkey in the middle. When they serve their papers, I don’t intend to be around.”
“So you’ve become the hermit of Swan Lake.”
“It’s better than a coffin.”
“But who exactly wants you dead?”
“Right this minute? I wouldn’t know. But I can see the handwriting. Mob accountant indicted. His throat gets cut at the Metropolitan CC.”
“Has LeComte made any overtures?”
“He doesn’t have to. Commissioner, don’t be dense. I’m trapped. LeComte’s got most of the firepower. Jerry has his good looks and a sensational father-in-law. But he can’t control his crews. One day they’ll whack him out. And I don’t want to be there. I’m closing all the books.”
“Does that include Margaret Tolstoy?”
Crabbs hunched under his blanket. He held the Mossberg to his chest. His eyes seemed to lose their liquid in that enormous lobby of the Gardenia. “That woman is my business.”
“Not when you send Nose out to strangle her.”
“It’s a family matter.”
“Attempted homicide? I could bring you to Headquarters right now.”
“But I’m holding the Persuader,” he said.
“Then use it, Mr. Crabbs. Because I’m not leaving without an answer.”
“Is Madame Tolstoya a friend of yours?”
“I met Margaret when I was fourteen. She called herself Anastasia then.”
“Yeah, the last of the Romanovs. She’s a dime-store slut. I married her. But the trouble is I already had a wife.”
“So Margaret was your comare.”
“‘Bloodsucker’ is a better word for that little bitch.”
Isaac slapped the accountant. The Mossberg dropped to his feet. Neither Crabbs nor Teddy Boy reached for the gun. Crabbs drew further into his blanket. Teddy rocked on his heels. And Isaac thought he’d come to a home for catatonics on the south shore of Swan Lake.
“What did she have that could hurt you so much?”
“Details,” Crabbs said. “Angles she could have given to the FBI. Little notes I’d left with her in case I had to run. She was dreaming of blackmail, Margaret was.”
“Did she name a price?”
“No, but I could see it in her eyes. I wasn’t safe, Mr. Sidel, long as Margaret’s alive.”
Isaac slapped him again. “You prick. You were scared shitless so you settled on Margaret as your scapegoat.”
Crabbs wiped a fleck of blood from his mouth.
“Please don’t hit him,” said the Nose, whose mitts were almost as large as old Harry Lieberman’s of the New York Giants.
“Goat?” Crabbs said, his crazy laughter rising to the roofs. “She had Jerry on a string. She was his woman. But he had a wife and a comare, and he couldn’t handle Margaret. So he passed her on to me. I was Jerry’s garbage pail.”
“How did Jerry meet her?”
“She appeared,” Crabbs said. “Out of the blue. And she fell in with the gang. Or maybe Jerry inherited her from one of the Rubinos. I can’t remember.”
“First she wasn’t there,” Nose said. “And then she was.”
“Just like that,” Isaac said. “She flew out of a magician’s glove.”
Nose pondered what Isaac said. “It’s possible.”
“And she never talked to you, Mr. Crabbs, about where she was or who she was with until she became your comare.”
“I told you. She had a tight lip.”
“Even about baseball?” Isaac said.
“She’s Roumanian, for Christ’s sake. Bucharest was her territory. Not baseball.”
“But you’re a Christy, aren’t you?”
“So what? I happen to love the game. It’s not relevant to Margaret.”
“And did you know that Schyler Knott has disappeared from the club? Someone tried to strangle him … with a necktie. Doesn’t that sound familiar?”
“Nose was never near the Christy Mathewson Club, were you, Nose?”
The Good Policeman (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 7
