“He hasn’t been convicted yet. He’s waiting trial, like the rest of us.”
“I can’t,” the cardinal said.
And Macho went away with the other blue-eyed boys.
The cardinal lit his cigarette with faltering hands and blew ribbons of smoke around Isaac’s ears. “He subpoenaed me, the little shit.”
“Michaelson?”
“Michaelson, indeed. I had to meet with his Three Sisters.”
“I’m sorry, Jim.”
“It’s not your fault,” the cardinal said. “He’s playing Oliver Cromwell. I’ll excommunicate the man.”
“He isn’t Catholic.”
“I’ll get a dispensation from the pope,” the cardinal said with a wink. “He’s bumping around in the dark, asking me questions about your finances. They’ll never indict you.”
“Yes they will. The grand jury will give the Sisters whatever they want.”
“You should have been more careful. You were reckless, Isaac. Who’s your lawyer?”
“Maurie Goodstein.”
The cardinal coughed out a little ball of smoke. “You’re insane. I can’t ask our own lad to represent you. Wouldn’t be kosher. He’s with the archdiocese. But I can have his law partner look into your affairs.”
“Thank you, Jim. But I’ll go with Maurice.”
“Is it suicide you’re thinking of? LeComte will subpoena him the second he shows his face.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“At least let me make a few calls, so I can come up with a bond that will get you out of this hole. Mind, the Church can’t be involved directly. But I have a couple of friends.”
“I like it here,” Isaac said.
“It’s madness. Sitting with child molesters … Isaac, I won’t be able to visit you again.”
The grand jury returned a true bill on Isaac’s fifth day in the ward. The Three Sisters wove a little history of Isaac as a rotten police chief and a soldier of crime. He was the pirate of One Police Plaza.
There was a rejoicing in the other cellblocks. And Isaac thought that the Muslims and the Rastafarians were celebrating his own fall from grace. But it wasn’t Isaac they were celebrating. It was Henry Armstrong Lee. He’d escaped from the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, on the afternoon of Don Isacco’s indictment. It never should have happened. The pen was situated inside a military compound. But Henry Lee had stepped out of Fort Leavenworth in women’s clothes. It was the first prison break at the fort in seventeen years.
And there was so much singing, so much carrying on at Riker’s, that the warden had to suspend yard privileges and take away the prisoners’ ice cream. It would have caused a riot on another afternoon. But the Muslims and the Rastafarians forgot about dinner. They had Henry Lee on their minds. The Rastafarians prayed to their own Jesus, Haile Selasse, the Lion of Judah, for Henry’s safe return to Harlem. He couldn’t function anywhere else. Harlem was his blood country. Harlem was where he lived. And for the second time in his life Henry Armstrong Lee was America’s Most Wanted Man.
And it was into this madhouse of rejoicing that Isaac’s daughter came. Marilyn the Wild had flown in from Seattle to see her dad. Isaac was scared to death. He didn’t want to confront his daughter. He’d found some peace in the isolation ward. But he shuffled into the same room where he’d met Cardinal Jim.
“We sold the house,” she said. That was her hello to Father Isaac. But she didn’t seem worn after eight or nine husbands. She had her mother’s Irish temper and Isaac’s own stubborn ways. The worm clawed Isaac’s belly and then curled into a fist, hiding from the ghost of Blue Eyes, Manfred Coen.
“How’s your husband?” Isaac asked. “How’s Mark?”
“We sold the house.”
“Aren’t you happy in Seattle?”
“Don’t talk like an idiot. Just tell me which bondsman to go to. I’m sort of rusty.”
“You don’t need a bondsman. I’m staying where I am.”
“Yes, my father the jailbird. It suits your complexion. You never liked the sun. But you’ll get tired of it. I know you, Isaac. It’s another part for you to play. So let’s end this little drama and tell me what to do. Or should I go to the chief rabbi at One Police Plaza?”
“Marilyn, you don’t understand. I could have made bail. I don’t want it.”
“Good. Then I can get my house back. And we have nothing to discuss.”
“Marilyn.”
“Good-bye, Isaac, good-bye.”
The blood was boiling up in Marilyn. But he didn’t dare touch her, hold her. She would have screamed.
“Baby,” he said.
That one word halted Marilyn the Wild. She turned on Isaac with such fury that he thought he’d drown in the dry air together with his worm.
“Don’t you ever call me that.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Sorry for what?”
“Coen.”
She slapped his face and Isaac was glad there was no iron grille between them. The warden had removed it. He had a celebrity in the house, the first Alexander Hamilton Fellow.
Isaac nearly grinned. If he couldn’t get a kiss from his daughter, a slap would have to do.
“If you say ‘Coen’ again, I’ll kill you, Daddy dear.”
“I thought I could save him.”
“He loved you, Isaac. And you shuffled him around like one more pawn.”
“I’m a policeman, for Christ’s sake. He grew up with that gang of pimps. I had to throw him into the pot.… I didn’t mean for him to die.”
“Yes you did. You couldn’t bear it, Daddy dear, that I was crazy about Coen.” She started to cry. “God, he was so sweet … and so dumb. He never even noticed how you were using him. We were orphans, Manfred and me. That’s why I liked him so much.”
“You’re no orphan,” Isaac said.
But Marilyn was gone.
24
He wasn’t sworn in at the Blue Room of Rebecca’s City Hall. He would have dreaded that. All the mayor’s clowns patting him on the shoulder. There were no ceremonies for Sweets. He was only the Acting Commish. He wore Isaac’s badge, sat at Isaac’s desk, delivered lectures at the Harlem Ecumenical Council and B’nai B’rith. He was wanted on talk shows five nights a week. Pretty ladies powdered his face. He was introduced as the first black police commissioner the NYPD ever had. And it didn’t matter how many times Sweets said he was only minding the store until Isaac came back.
“Commissioner Montgomery, Isaac isn’t coming back.”
“Don’t let him fool you,” Sweets had to declare. “He’s like the Count of Monte Cristo. Isaac always comes back.”
He couldn’t see his children. He couldn’t make love to his wife. Carlton Montgomery III had become a public creature. And now Sweets understood why Isaac had behaved like a gypsy in this room, why he’d gone off the edge of the earth and created the Ivanhoes when he had his own Intelligence Division that could have monitored the Russians and the Iranian mission. Isaac had to find some fucking way to get back out into the field.
Sweets settled disputes between the chief of detectives and the chief of patrol. He addressed the brotherhood of black policemen and the Shamrock Society of Irish cops. The Irishers had been taking sick leave and wouldn’t go to work while their “prince” was banished to Riker’s Island. They invoked the name of Brian Boru, the first high king of Ireland, and Isaac was only a Yid whose granddad had come out of London, if Sweets remembered right. The Hands of Esau wouldn’t even prepare a statement about Isaac’s condition. The Polish and Italians were quiet. But the most conservative of all the societies had suddenly become a radical wing.
Rebecca wanted to punish the Shamrocks. “Get rid of them. Dock their pay.” But she didn’t understand her own Police Department. If the Irish walked, the structure would start to crumble. A fourth of the precincts would become ghost towns. And Carlton Montgomery III wasn’t going to fight Brian Boru.
He met with the Shamrocks
, assured them that he didn’t covet Isaac’s job. And one by one the Irishers came back to work. Even Isaac’s driver, Sergeant Malone, returned. And he chauffeured Sweets from one banquet or church or synagogue or television studio to the next. The sergeant drove him to a mosque in Bushwick where Sweets had to swear that his Intelligence Division hadn’t tried to infiltrate the Nation of Islam. And then he had to run home to his Intelligence chief and see if it was true.
“Inspector Hines, keep out of that fucking mosque.”
“There’s been talk that the bastards are making bombs.”
“I don’t believe it. And if you have any hard information, hand it to the FBI.”
Hines beat the heel of one shoe with a little stick. “Isaac said I shouldn’t get too chummy with the Bureau. They could turn around and slap us on the head.”
“That’s not a problem. You can always slap them right back.”
It wasn’t Hines’ fault. The job was filled with minefields. The magic rabbis and all their Brooklyn bodyguards who had disliked Sweets when he was First Dep began inviting him to the darkest corners of their synagogues where they cooked food and lent him a prayer shawl, while the bloods in Williamsburg and Crown Heights grew suspicious of the Acting PC. You couldn’t win. And for a moment Sweets wished he had his own corporation of Ivanhoes who could disappear at will.
Sergeants jumped when he arrived on the fourteenth floor. He couldn’t have little chats with deputy chiefs. Every twist of his mouth was interpreted, taken as a sign. No one would criticize him. His plants were watered religiously. He was all alone.
And when LeComte called from Georgetown, asked him for a meet, it was the Acting PC who picked the time and the place. Sweets didn’t want him around the building. It was LeComte who had hastened Isaac’s fall, encouraged him to develop new “countries” outside the ken of the Police Department. There couldn’t have been any Ivanhoes without LeComte.
They met at a wine cellar near Gold Street. It was a haven for young brokers who were romancing their secretaries. But Sweets had come before the five-o’clock rush. He’d secured a booth for himself and LeComte, who arrived from D.C. on the midafternoon shuttle. LeComte had narrow shoulders and a cockatoo’s colorful crest. He wore a shirt with pink and blue stripes. He had little ears. His mouth was like a rip across his face. He had a cellist’s hands. He’d never have been able to strangle a man.
“Has Rebecca been treating you right?” he asked, clutching a goblet of wine with those hands of his.
“I avoid Rebecca whenever I can.”
“Well, she’ll come calling close to the primaries. You’re the hotshot in town.”
“Really?” Sweets said. “Next thing I know you’ll name me the new Hamilton Fellow.”
LeComte laughed, and his chest started to quake. Sweets felt like grabbing LeComte and flinging him across the wine cellar.
“Isaac’s tenure is for the whole year,” LeComte said.
“Does that include jail time?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t prepared the rule book on Hamilton Fellows.”
“The only rule book, LeComte, is what’s inside your fucking head … you abandoned Isaac. You sold him out to Oliver Cromwell and his Three Sisters. Michaelson wouldn’t go to the toilet without asking your permission.”
“That’s not true,” LeComte said in the dark of the wine cellar. The waiter had brought them apples and cheese. And Carlton Montgomery III, who’d been raised around nannies and black governesses, watched LeComte cut an apple into four perfect quadrants. Not even Carlton’s dad had that kind of precision at the dining room table. Who the hell was this man from Justice, this Mormon who rose out of Salt Lake City to ride herd over Manhattan? “I didn’t want him to indict,” LeComte said, eating one of the quadrants. “But Michaelson has big plans for himself.”
“Stop it,” Sweets said. “You could have killed the whole indictment idea.”
“And have it look like I’m tampering with the City’s top investigation team? … I had to give him Isaac.”
“It still doesn’t make sense. Isaac knows Internal Affairs is shadowing him. He could have gone to Poplar Street and jerked McCall around until IAD is shitting bullets and Isaac is in the clear. But he allows the investigations to continue. He doesn’t bother McCall. He wears handcuffs instead, makes fun of the judge who’s arraigning him, and rides out to Riker’s.”
“Isaac willed it on himself.”
“No,” Sweets said. “It’s another one of his capers. Like the time he moved into the Guzmanns’ candy store and pretended he was on the take. He lost his shield—”
“And Manfred Coen. And the Guzmanns gave him that worm.”
“I don’t care. It’s another caper. Isaac can’t survive without a lick of Indian country. That’s how he deals. He lives inside the elephant’s ass. I’d never have understood … until I became Acting PC. I’d rather have the heart of darkness than this. All I am, LeComte, is Rebecca’s armpit, a public relations man.”
“Did you get a call from the Three Sisters?”
“Hell no. I’d destroy Michaelson’s grand jury room if Selma Beard ever monkeyed with me.”
“Selma could use you on the stand. But she knows you’re loyal to Isaac. You’d make a bad witness.”
“Is that why I came to Gold Street? To discuss the merits of Isaac’s case?”
LeComte swallowed the second quandrant. “Try a piece of apple. It’s delicious.”
“How can I help you, LeComte?”
“By pulling your tigers off Jerry DiAngelis and Sal Rubino. I don’t want some red-hot detective getting in my way. I’ve got Jerry and Sal. All I have to do is squeeze a little harder and they’ll self-destruct. Half of Sal’s soldiers are already brain dead. And with the Hebrew teacher in the hospital, Jerry’s kind of hopeless.”
“I’ll back off,” Sweets said. “But pull that broad.”
LeComte finished the third and fourth quadrants. Sweets had never watched such delicate eating in all his life.
“What broad?”
“LeComte, if you’re going to bullshit me, I’ll have to close shop.”
“Ah,” LeComte said. “Isaac’s old classmate. Margaret Tolstoy.”
“No. Magda Antonescu. I don’t want Russian agents running around in Mafia country.”
“She’s not a Russian agent. The woman happens to work for me.”
“Fine. Rut if she’s captured or killed, I’ll be caught in a shitstorm. And you’ll run a thousand miles from Magda. Pull her, LeComte.”
“She’s valuable,” LeComte said. “Give me a couple of months.”
“I want her off the street.”
“Did you look at her reports? She’s my best scalp hunter. The woman doesn’t miss.… I could go to Rebecca, Sweets. She won’t back you on this one.”
“Then I’ll tell her to eat the badge I’m wearing for Isaac Sidel.”
“I’ll pull Margaret … soon.”
“And she can’t testify in open court. We’ll all end up in the Lubyanka.”
“She won’t testify. I promise.”
“And what if Michaelson should subpoena her?”
“He won’t.”
“The Three Sisters might want Isaac’s old girlfriend on the stand.”
“Then we’ll have her disappear,” LeComte said.
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Well,” Sweets said, getting up from his apples and wine. “I might be able to dance with Justice … until something better comes along. By the way, LeComte, what do you intend to do about Henry Lee?”
“Catch the son of a bitch.”
“I mean, you didn’t have much luck the last time … without Isaac. And it doesn’t look good for Justice, having the number one bank robber in the world escaping from a goddamn federal fort.”
“We have leads,” LeComte said. “The Bureau will grab his tail.”
“I hope so,” Sweets said. “Because I’m scared shit
of Henry Lee.”
And he marched out of the wine cellar, leaving Justice to pay the bill.
25
It was a life like any life, being a citizen of Riker’s. Don Isacco had grown fond of the isolation ward. He preferred it to the commissioners’ floor. He could retire here, howl for his pension, get extra ice cream for the child molesters. Macho, who was nineteen, had never learned to read. And Isaac composed an alphabet book, scratching out little stories that he had Macho memorize. He never asked the blue-eyed boy what he had done. It wasn’t kosher to talk about one’s own case. And Isaac wouldn’t use his imagination. In two weeks’ time he’d turned Macho into a spectacular speller. In a month Macho was building paragraphs. Isaac was proud of his pupil. But all the little cushions he’d prepared, the habits of a man among outcasts like himself, failed him the moment Margaret arrived in the ward.
It was as if she were some marvel who’d floated through the gates. Her visit was as disturbing as Marilyn the Wild’s, and twice as magical, because Margaret was like a piece of family furniture that had been lost to Isaac. And he was wounded all over again. The vacation had ended for Don Isacco. Riker’s was only another howling in his head. The isolation ward had drifted to infinity and Isaac was left with Margaret Tolstoy.
“The guards here are jokers,” she said. “They kept touching my tits.”
“It’s nothing,” Isaac said like a sleepwalker. “A body search.”
“That wasn’t a body search. It was more like rape. But …”
“I know, Sal Rubino’s snoring and you can’t stay. He might get up any minute and ask about his Margaret.”
“Isaac, shhhh. I heard Sal talking to his captain.”
“You mean ol’ Yellow Eyes.”
“The two of them were arranging a hit. They have a soldier in this lousy jail. They called him the Big Blue. They said, ‘We’ll have the Big Blue jump on Isaac. The Blue will put out his lights.’ Why the hell are you laughing?”
“A blue is a black man. The Big Blue could be anybody at Riker’s.”
“Then find him, Isaac, because he won’t go away. Sal was talking dollars, a lot of dollars.”
The Good Policeman (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 19
