They had their second coffee with steamed milk. And then Malone and Isaac descended into the street. Isaac wouldn’t ride in a limo. He preferred an old Dodge that had been slapped together at the Department’s body shop and garage. A man of the people Isaac was. The Pink Commish. But he wasn’t a bolshie, no matter what the politicians said. He had an Irish heart, Isaac did. Blunt and black with tears. Hadn’t he picked a colleen to marry? The good Kathleen, who accompanied him to the Shamrock Society dinners in the old days, her with the red, red hair. The colleen had gone out of his life. But he was still bound to the sons of Shannon.
“Where to?” Malone asked after he got behind the wheel.
“Sweets’ place,” the commissioner said, and Malone turned gloomy, because he hadn’t expected to chauffeur the black giant. Isaac and Sweets had separate offices and separate lives. Malone picked up Sweets at his house in Greenwich Village. Six foot six he was. And he had to duck for all he was worth to get into the Dodge.
“How’s the shop?” Isaac asked.
“I’m still trying to make peace with the Hasidim, Isaac. They consider me a dybbuk.”
“But you have Crown Heights under control.”
“For the moment.” And then, with his legs almost as high as his chest, he asked, “How are you, Mr. Malone?”
“Grand, Commissioner, grand.”
There was a new subway bandit on the prowl, a Latino who exposed himself in subway cars and grabbed women’s purses, and it was Sweets who went before the television cameras, Sweets who took the interviews instead of Isaac. “I don’t think I ought to appear alone, Isaac. I shouldn’t set policy. It doesn’t feel right. The press is starting to call you the invisible man.”
“I’m flattered,” Isaac said. “Sergeant, tell him. Didn’t he look like he could break a couple of heads while he was on the tube? How was he?”
“Grand.”
“Now no more words about protocol,” Isaac said.
“But why am I on this tour?”
“Because I want you to see the schools firsthand.”
“I’ve visited them with the chancellor, Isaac. I’ve spoken to high school seniors about the Department.”
“That’s not a visit,” Isaac said. “Tomás prepares himself, dummies things up, hires extra guards, and targets one school, straitjackets it, hides the bad kids in the basement, and you don’t get to see shit.”
“Isaac, I don’t want to be involved in your feud with Chancellor Tomás. Conduct your own guerrilla war with the Board of Ed. I have enough problems.”
“Will you just sit,” Isaac said, “and decide for yourself?”
“And you think the chancellor will be quiet while you enter his domain?”
“Let him howl his head off.”
“But we have no jurisdiction, Isaac. The schools are his.”
“I’m the police commissioner,” Isaac said. “The whole fucking city is mine.”
“If Tomás wanted to be strict about it, he could force us to get a warrant. And you might not find a friendly judge. Tomás is the Party man, not you.”
“Warrant?” Isaac said. “I haven’t come around to make arrests. We’re on a fucking survey.”
“What survey?”
“Tell him, Sergeant.”
And Malone had to provide a bit of Isaacs own blarney. “To see if the janitors aren’t divertin’ the electrical current for their own private use … and if the boys and girls are getting fresh milk in the free lunch program.”
“That’s not police business,” Sweets said.
“Haven’t finished yet, sir … to see if sexual molestations aren’t abounding on school property, if hoodlums and addicts aren’t taking advantage of the facilities, if the clerical staff is not derelict in—”
“Enough,” Sweets said. “I’m convinced. It’s a survey.” The First Dep was riding with lunatics, and he’d join their company if that’s what Isaac wanted of him. He knew the chancellor would scold Sweets one of these days, because Alejo Tomás wouldn’t speak to Isaac any longer, and Sweets would have to bear the burden, as he always did, covering for this crazy Commish. The PC would twist the law around to his advantage, but he didn’t have bankbooks stashed away, like Tiger John Rathgar, the old, disgraced Commish who sat in Green Haven. Isaac would visit him from time to time.
The PC had no prescribed route. He was Mandrake the Magician, without a cape. He went with his chauffeur and Sweets into the hinterland of Manhattan. The first stop was a junior high on Avenue A. The school’s fence had been ripped apart. Kids lounged in the schoolyard, wearing Halloween masks in the heart of winter.
“Hello, papa,” they said to Isaac, but they kept away from the black giant.
“Isaac, should I give them a toss?” Sweets asked. “They could be carrying some kind of shit.”
“We’re guests,” Isaac said. “Wouldn’t want an illegal search and seizure on our conscience, would we? Besides, Tomás’ lawyers might climb on our backs. I haven’t come to provoke, Sweets. We’re tourists in the neighborhood, that’s all.”
They entered the school, the three of them, Isaac, Sweets, and Sergeant Malone. The school guard was mortified. He recognized Isaac and figured it was a bust. He had a roach in his back pocket and a dime bag of cocaine. But Isaac didn’t hassle him. “Are you working hard, son? Keeping out the stragglers?”
“Yes I am, Commissioner Sidel.”
“You can call me Isaac.”
And the PC headed for the principal’s office to announce himself. But the principal had suffered a nervous breakdown and was on a very long leave, living in Miami. No one could say where the assistant principal was. It was an ordinary clerk who took Isaac around.
The school psychologist poked her head out of an open door. “Is that Norman Mailer?” she asked, seeing Isaac’s bushy white hair. “You’re not Mailer. You’re our fascist chief of police … you hurt black people.”
“I wouldn’t let him, ma’am,” Sweets said.
“You, you’re his Uncle Tom. You helped him capture Henry Armstrong Lee.”
“Henry Lee was a bank robber, ma’am. He was at the top of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.”
“That’s just hype,” she said. “He was our Robin Hood. He took from the rich and gave to the poor.”
“But most of the banks he robbed were in Harlem, ma’am, where poor people kept their money.”
“What would you know about poor people?” she muttered.
Isaac had to edge Sweets away from the woman with his elbow. “You’ll never win, Sweets. Henry Lee did light up a lot of Christmas trees. He was poor as a church mouse when we took him. I was fond of Henry Lee.”
And they marched unmolested from class to class. Isaac saw the same dead eyes he’d discovered at the children’s shelter in St. Louis. He missed Kingsley McCardle. The classrooms had a quietness that always scared Isaac. There were no barterings, no exchanges between the children and their teachers, who seemed caught in some eclipse. It was blue midnight at nine in the morning. Half the students had no books. They sucked on their own spittle.
“It’s one school,” Sweets said. “The principal’s gone. There’s no one to run the shop. Isaac, could you have taught those kids?”
“Open your eyes. It’s too fucking late. Half those little girls will be pregnant by next year.”
“You don’t know that,” Sweets said. “You’re just pulling statistics out of a paper hat.”
“And even if I am,” Isaac said. “Even if I am, I’m only a little off.”
It was the third school. And Isaac had gone up to the lunchroom. He’d seen those thin miserable sandwiches, the country apples, the glasses of milk. And he started to cry.
“Is it the worm, Chief?” Malone asked. “I could borrow a glass of milk.”
But Sweets understood what the crying was all about. It wasn’t an ordinary attack of melancholia. There was a hopelessness in the schools that Sweets could never have imagined. He’d played ice hockey at Horace
Mann. He’d been on the debating club. He’d had pocket money, and roast beef for lunch. He’d written papers about Malcolm and Martin Luther King. And now, as the first deputy police commissioner, he’d spoken to the very best seniors at the Bronx High School of Science. He’d met with Parents-Teachers Associations. He’d visited model junior high schools with Alejo Tomás. But he hadn’t been to schools like this. Sweets blamed himself. It was his very own borough, not some dune out in the Bronx. It was worse than Riker’s, where prisoners could scream or crap on the floor in protest. These kids looked like some vampire had bitten them on the neck. Sweets didn’t have Isaac’s ability to cry. He sat down and ate an orange with one of the kids. Then he got the hell out of there with Isaac and Malone.
“Fuck Alejo Tomás,” he said in the backseat of Isaac’s Dodge.
“He’ll run to Becky Karp and make a stink. She’ll demand apologies.”
“Fuck Becky Karp.”
“Ah, that’s the ticket,” said Malone, who was beginning to like the big black giant. His stomach felt tight and for a moment the sergeant believed that he’d inherited Isaac’s worm. He didn’t notice any Irish children in these schools, but that didn’t matter. Black they were and a little brown. But Jesus, they could have been on a starvation diet. He saw one lad vomit a thin, colorless bile into a wastepaper basket. The security guards looked like dunces who belonged in the asylum at County Cork. The professors here could have been tired animal trainers. It wasn’t a house of education, not even an efficient zoo, but a morgue where the cadavers had their own little chairs. This was no place for children.
He deposited Sweets at One Police Plaza. And then he took his granddad’s tuxedo out of the trunk. Isaac didn’t smile.
“Where’s the cape?”
“The cape?” Malone said. “The cape? It went out of style a hundred years ago.”
“But I saw you wearing the cape,” Isaac said.
The sergeant had to think. “Ah, at the Halloween party. It was for a gaff, a bloody piece of humor, Isaac.”
“I can’t go to the Ball without a cape.”
“Then I’ll take you home to the missus,” the sergeant said, “and she’ll iron the cape for you.”
“Grand.”
11
He didn’t have Mandrake’s perfect profile, or the penciled mustache and slick black hair that reminded him of Warren William, a long-forgotten movie actor who played the Lone Wolf during Isaac’s boyhood. The Wolf was a reformed jewel thief who had his own valet. He liked to wear opera clothes and was constantly getting women out of trouble. Isaac always linked him in his own mind with Mandrake the Magician.
He was looking in the mirror, attempting to clasp his bow tie, when he heard a knock on the door. “Come in,” he said without even considering the holster in his drawer. He wasn’t Pancho Villa.
It was Burt, back from Swan Lake, and he laughed at Isaac’s costume. The top hat, the cape, the bow tie that rested at an angle. “Be useful, will you?” Isaac said. “And fix this bloody thing.”
The Afrikaner reached around Isaac and clasped the bow tie.
“How’s the bookkeeper?”
“Dead.”
“It figures. But how did he catch it?” Isaac asked.
“That’s the interesting part. There was no sign of struggle. Even if someone tried to clean up after the kill, I would have felt it. I’m psychic about things like that.”
“No you’re not. You’re just a good policeman.”
“He caught a bullet in the ear from up close.”
“Find the gun?”
“No. But from the look of the hole, I’d say it was a very small piece. Like a derringer you could hide in your purse.”
“A ladies’ gun, you mean. A single-shot.”
“Isaac, I didn’t bother with our ballistics people. I left him alone. One of the local sheriffs will find the body.”
“But you’re hinting it was Margaret Tolstoy who knocked on her husband’s door, romanced him a little, and shot the poor fool in the ear.”
“Yes, it might have been a woman, or someone who fancied derringers and wanted to make us think it was Margaret.”
“And what’s your opinion, Burt?”
“It points to Margaret.”
“And the motive, Burt?”
“Isaac, I’m not a magician. But the woman arrives out of nowhere, calls herself Margaret Tolstoy, crawls in with Jerry’s people. It’s not kosher. She comes to you, the great love of your life.”
“I never even kissed her.”
“Makes it all the more romantic. Swears the Nose is trying to whack her out. You leave her with us. She runs away. She could have followed you up to Swan Lake. She might have been looking for money. Or following orders from somebody else.”
“The Rubinos.”
“Why not?”
“And you’re saying she’s a professional.”
“What do you know about the woman from the time you first met her until now? There’s a big bloody gap.”
“Then find her for me, Burt.”
“But what if she’s not the friendly type and I have to break her neck. Will you blame me, Isaac?”
“Yes, I will.”
“Then send another Ivanhoe to pick up the package. I’m not feeling suicidal this week.”
“I didn’t say bring her back. Just locate her.”
“You mean, give you the grids on Margaret’s map.”
“Yes, if you have to.”
“I should have stayed with the Boers. I’d have had a better chance to survive.”
“You killed a man, Burt. You were a tainted cop.”
“Like yourself, Isaac … but I will say, I love your suit. You’ll be the life of the party. Can’t miss. Give my regards to the Gov.”
It was five hundred dollars a seat, a charity banquet and ball. The governor didn’t take a nickel for his own pocket. The whole boodle went to the City’s hospitals and schools. But the Manhattan Ball wasn’t really about the gathering of gold. It was a show of faces. The cardinal was there. The mayor. The giant realtors. The Ball had grown into a politician’s paradise. Deals were made behind the bones of a turkey breast. But it was a curious sort of higgledy-piggledy. Because the governor, whose Ball it was, had little power here. He was exiled to the intrigues of Albany, even though he spent half his time in Manhattan. He oversaw the City’s budget, could unseat mayors and chancellors and police chiefs, but he wasn’t much of a player in Manhattan’s woolly life. He was an elder statesman who was younger than Isaac or Becky Karp and Alejo Tomás … and James Cardinal O’Bannon, aka Cardinal Jim, defender of the Archdiocese of New York, which meant Staten Island, Manhattan, the Bronx, and seven other counties. But his influence fell everywhere. Realtors kissed the ring that the pope himself had presented to Cardinal Jim. He was sixty-six years old and he had a longshoreman’s grip. He liked to flirt with the ladies and have a thimbleful of whiskey, drinking to the health of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. He’d become cardinal to the entire village, and most of the village had to pay its respects.
But Isaac wouldn’t line up to kiss the cardinal’s ring. He had no favors to ask. He could catch Cardinal Jim at a more practical moment, far from the politicians, where they could discuss the New York Giants, Joe DiMaggio’s swing, or the Dublin that Isaac had visited, and the endangered species of Irish cops in New York City. The cardinal loved to smoke in private and tell bawdy jokes.
And so Isaac mingled among the pols at the penthouse ballroom of the St. Moritz. He wasn’t so eager to talk. He stepped out onto the terrace and stared at that long, deep hallucination called Central Park, with ice over the Reservoir and the lakes. The Commish was almost happy, considering who he was, a melancholic detective who had his own little diocese. He was wearing Malone’s monkey suit, with the cape that fell over his shoulders like a Confederate general. He sucked on his bottle of milk. Councilmen couldn’t get him into a conversation. But Cardinal Jim got rid of all the handshakers and strol
led out onto the terrace to breathe the air with Isaac. The cardinal wore the red-lined cape of his office, and Isaac realized how foolish he was in Malone’s monkey suit. He wasn’t Mandrake the Magician. He was a relic from the Civil War via Malone and County Cork.
Isaac curtsied a bit to recognize the cardinal’s station. “It’s a grand view, isn’t it, Your Eminence?”
“Beg off the titles, will you now? I’ve had enough curtsying for one day, thank you.… Isaac, they’re like maggots. They never leave you alone.”
“Then why do you come to these affairs?”
“I can’t desert my flock. Congratulations, by the by. For cuffing Henry Armstrong Lee. It took courage, Isaac. Admit. Going into a deserted building to claim the FBI’s Most Wanted Man. And there it was, on the TV. I prayed for you, Isaac. My heart was beating so. I couldn’t contain myself. I was blubbering in front of all my priests.”
“But he wasn’t even armed.”
“All the worse for you. Made him twice as dangerous, in my opinion.”
“He was wearing women’s clothes.”
“To disguise himself and his foul temper. Don’t get modest on me. Accept an old vicar’s congratulations. I’m a prince of the church and I’m not modest about it. You’re our best policeman. But did you have to visit the chancellor’s schools without giving him notice? He’s a good Catholic. Worked hard to get his Ph.D. Wouldn’t want to ruin his reputation.”
“But it’s the children,” Isaac said. “They’re suffering because of him. We’ll never bring the middle class back into the schools with Alejo around. There’s a crisis, Cardinal Jim. And Alejo isn’t the right lad for the job. He won’t anger the mayor. He won’t anger you. He waltzes with the bureaucrats and the Party machine. He creates a holding pen for kids who spend a couple of seasons with him and disappear into the ruins.”
The Good Policeman (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 9
