Education of Patrick Silver

by Jerome Charyn

  The detectives couldn’t decide what to make of the blood in Isaac’s mouth. Was the commissioner choking to death? They were satisfied when they saw Isaac spit out small chunks of enamel. A commissioner couldn’t die of a broken tooth. Then Isaac’s lot improved. With his sledgehammer elbows he snapped Patrick’s chin around and forced the thumb away from his Adam’s apple. “Had enough, you stupid son-of-a-bitch?” he said, climbing on top of Patrick.

  “I’ll stuff turds in your ears before I’m through,” the Irishman remarked as he hurled Commissioner Isaac off his chest. It grew into a seesaw affair, with much crossing of elbows and bumping of skulls. Such ambiguous scrabbling gave the detectives fits of insecurity. Nobody would win or lose.

  Finally Patrick and Isaac came apart. Both of them lay huffing on the floor. Their faces were grim, their knuckles rubbed blue. Patrick’s shirt had disintegrated. He plucked white hairs off his body. Isaac inspected the damage to his mouth. “Bring us some tea,” he growled. His staff began to function again. Detectives ran for the commissioner’s tea pot, for his favorite honey biscuits, for sugar, spoons, and delicate china. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

  Alone, without a clutch of nervous hens, Patrick and Isaac drank tea and cognac from blue-veined cups. They didn’t speak. They grunted once or twice. Isaac’s men stood outside the door and wondered at the periods of silence in the commissioner’s room.

  The tea had gone to Patrick’s head. “Mr. Deputy,” he muttered, with cognac blowing off his tongue. “What is it you’ve got against those Guzmanns? That’s a poor clan. You’ve been skunking Zorro for a year.” He slapped the commissioner’s desk with the heel of his stocking. “You’d better pick on a different family.”

  “They murdered Manfred Coen,” Isaac said, sniffing the cognac in his teacup.

  “Everybody talks about Coen,” Patrick said, sucking up more tea while he remembered Odile and that blue-eyed cop of Isaac’s. Sad, sweet Manfred was supposed to have been irresistible to the female population of the City. According to the snitches at Headquarters, women couldn’t hold up their pants around Blue Eyes for very long. The Bureau of Special Services loved to steal him from Isaac once or twice a week: Coen was in great demand as a bodyguard for starlets, lady politicians, and the wives of foreign diplomats.

  Patrick hugged his knees. There were rumors in Manhattan and the Bronx that Isaac tossed Blue Eyes to the Guzmanns because his daughter, Marilyn the Wild, had gone crazy for Coen. The commissioner had a girl who ran away from all her husbands (she’d been married eight times, Patrick heard) and went to sit on Coen’s lap. Patrick used to see her at Headquarters, a daughter that any cop would have been glad to chase if she wasn’t so close to their Chief. A skinny, green-eyed girl with tits she was. And an Irish mother (Isaac’s estranged wife Kathleen, the real estate goddess, lived in Florida most of the year). The First Dep had no luck with women. His wife, his girlfriends, and his only daughter abandoned him. Marilyn the Wild was in Seattle gathering a new crop of husbands and hiding from her dad.

  “Isaac, speak the truth now? Did you sacrifice poor Manfred on account of the lady Marilyn?”

  Isaac took a honey biscuit and chewed on it. He’d wrestle Patrick a second time unless the big donkey shut his mouth. “If you’re so interested in Coen, why don’t you help us trap the Guzmanns?”

  “Isaac, that’s a pitiful request. What difference can it make to you if the Guzmanns live or die?”

  “They put a worm in my gut. I ate their shit for half a year.”

  “Did you expect Papa to kiss you on both eyebrows? He knew about your masquerade. Isaac, the fallen Chief. The lad who gave up Manhattan to lie down in a candy store. I was a lousy detective then, the low man on the First Deputy’s pole, and even I couldn’t believe that Isaac the Pure could ever bring himself to take a bribe from gamblers. You were always so big on logic, making your lovely little charts on the criminal mind like it was a glass ocean you could skate across with your leather shoes.”

  Patrick’s tongue was growing heavy with the froth of his own words, but he wouldn’t let Isaac go. “Your logic stinks. You could have had a vacation in the Bronx without your elephant stories. But why did you want to sleep with the Guzmanns in the first place? Is it Papa’s hairy legs that turned you on?”

  “No,” Isaac said, the cognac burning into the hole in his cheek that Silver had made for him. Isaac was mourning his lost tooth. He nearly rose off the carpets from the rawness in his gums.

  “Not Papa,” he said. “Not Jorge, not Zorro. It’s Jerónimo.”

  Patrick shuddered into his tea. “God damn you, Isaac. Don’t revive that ancient story. I’ll scream, I’ll piss on your walls, if you mention the lipstick freak.”

  “Jerónimo’s a faigele.”

  “Some faigel,” Patrick said. “He does fine with Zorro’s wife. Should I tell you how often he’s crawled into her bed?”

  “You mean the great Odile? I thought she was married to Herbert Pimloe. That girl goes down for an army every night. Name me one man who hasn’t fucked Odile.”

  Patrick didn’t give a fig about the commissioner’s china. He would have bitten the teacup and presented Isaac with the shards, but he wanted to drive him off the subject of Odile. “Weren’t we talking about the baby?”

  “Absolutely,” Isaac said. “A faigel, I promise you. He likes to mutilate little boys. What can you expect from a family of pimps?”

  “You’re wrong. Moses didn’t raise his boys to attack infants on a roof. I’m the baby’s keeper, am I not? Wise to all his habits. I’d know if he went freaking on the roofs.”

  “He’s been stuck at home lately. Ever since the Guzmanns moved in with you. The baby’s shy with his father around. But it won’t last. The craziness is in his blood. He’ll sit on his hands for a while, then he’ll have to jump. How long can you live on white chocolate? I give him another week, and he’ll be out hunting for boys.”

  Patrick was tired of cognac in a teacup. He grabbed a corner of Isaac’s desk and pulled himself up from the carpets.

  “What are you going to do, Isaac? Place a dwarf on every roof?”

  “We won’t have to. Are you blind? I have enough men on Hudson Street to pick needles off the ground. We’ll catch him in the act.”

  “Isaac, who stuck a fiddle up your ass? Why don’t you push uptown with your lads and burn a few more shuls, you miserable fat shit.”

  Patrick fled the room, walking on shifty ankles. He was bloated with tea. He passed a maze of offices packed with First Deputy boys. They had malicious smiles for him. “Mad Patrick.” These were Isaac’s snakes. Patrick could ignore them. He was brooding over more important things. The Chief had called him a tin Irishman, a lad from Bethune Street. I’m as Irish as the toads of Killinane, Patrick should have said. He’d got his Ireland from the neck of a Guinness bottle, studying history and magic at the Kings of Munster, on Murray Silver’s knee.

  Isaac’s men heard him groan to himself. He had an odd look in his eye, this St. Patrick of the Synagogues. His lips were going at an incredible rate. Isaaaac, he said, I knowww about wizards, saints, and kings. Brian Boru, the first king of Munster, he threw the Danes out of Limerick, slapping their heads with a dried bull’s pizzle until they dropped their knives and ran down to Skibbereen. St. Briget, abbess of Kildare, she fornicated with the wild fishermen of Dungarvan to keep them from ravaging her community of nuns. The witch of Limerick, a frightful hag, she lived a hundred and ninety years, laying curses on her town, and died of a sneeze that tore her chest. St. Munchin, the hermaphrodite, he brought the lepers into Ireland and suckled them on his own milk. Murray once told him there might have been some Jews among the lepers. How many Silvers drank from Munchin’s tit? God knows. Patrick’s thirst for black ale had come from the saints.

  Detectives in the halls were squinting at the shreds of clothing on his back. Here’s a man that goes in and out of Isaac’s den! Who gave him the mumbling lips? They marveled at the powers of t
heir Chief, convincing themselves that the First Dep had turned St. Patrick into a spy. They hadn’t noticed Patrick’s blue eyes before. “Mother,” they said. Isaac had a new “angel,” another Manfred Coen.

  10.

  HE could have finished the afternoon in his office, had a flunky shave him and pick the remains of Patrick’s shirt off his body. The First Dep wasn’t a fastidious creature. He could survive with burnt cotton on his face. He had enough tangerines and honey biscuits to outlast the clerks camped around his door. Isaac would sign no documents today. He kept a small apartment on the other side of the Bowery. He could step into his private elevator, walk out of Headquarters, and go to Rivington Street for a bath and a fresh linen suit. But Isaac had lost his bishopric. He wasn’t loved on Essex and Delancey any more. He dialed the police garage. “Warm up the Chrysler, will you? And fetch my man. He’s probably in the toilet with his comic books.”

  Now that he was the First Dep, Isaac could avoid the main stairway at Headquarters and bypass other commissioners and other cops. He rode his elevator down to the garage, got into his Chrysler, and shut the door. The air conditioner sucked under his clothes. His thighs were still wet from his match with Patrick Silver. He knocked on the glass partition that isolated him from the driver. “Palisade Avenue,” he said. “It’s at the end of the Bronx.”

  Isaac was going to his old apartment up in Riverdale. It belonged to his wife. Kathleen was in Florida converting swamps into condominiums; Isaac could have the apartment to himself. He would find a suit in one of the closets, a silk shirt with brocaded pockets, a hand-painted tie, sets of underwear.

  The First Dep ruled over a kingdom of fat and skinny cops; he could turn chief inspectors into patrolmen, flop a whole division, take a man’s gun away, groom his own squad of “angels,” destroy the Guzmanns one by one, but he was still a slave to Centre Street. He was on call twenty-four hours, like the grubbiest intern at Bellevue. He had an automatic pager on his belt that could summon him back to Headquarters, or put him in touch with the PC. When he got to Riverdale, he would throw the gadget under a pillow and climb into Kathleen’s tub.

  He didn’t feel sorry for the big Irish. St. Patrick shouldn’t have dragged the Guzmanns into the shul. Isaac wasn’t running a hobby shop at Police Headquarters. He’d smoke the Guzmanns out of all their nests in Manhattan. The First Dep couldn’t be accused of starting any fires. Isaac simply told a spy of his (Martin Finch belonged to a gang of pyromaniacs from Cobble Hill) that he knew of a synagogue that was a perfect firetrap. “Martin, it’s ready to fall. A match in the cellar, a whiff of kerosine, and goodbye. But be careful. The janitor’s an Irish giant. You’ll recognize him by his white hair and his smelly feet. Wait until he goes out for a walk. There’s a family of idiots inside. You can burn their noses, but I don’t want a funeral pyre. No cremations, you hear? Just get their asses out on the street.”

  The doormen on Palisade Avenue saluted the First Dep. Isaac had become the celebrity of the house. They’d read articles about him in the New York Post, articles that declared Isaac was the brainiest First Dep the City ever had: he lectures at John Jay College, he squeezes criminals, he plays chess.

  He found a brassiere and an open pocketbook on Kathleen’s parquet floor. Was there a burglar in the house, a crazy guy who liked to sniff brassieres while he went through your belongings? Isaac had a pistol near his gut. But he wasn’t going to wag it at a pathetic boy in a duplex apartment. Or search the closets on two floors. He began switching on the lights. A pair of checkered trousers was draped over Kathleen’s favorite settee. The boy had a peculiar trademark: he worked in his underpants.

  “Come out, you fucker, wherever you are. I’m a cop. Don’t make me pull you by your ears.”

  The burglar jumped out of Kathleen’s bedroom, hugging his shirt, tie, socks, and shoes. He was a man of sixty, or sixty-five, with deep gray sideburns and a little belly. Isaac recognized him. He was Miles Falloon, one of Kathleen’s many partners. He pluclced his trousers off the settee before Isaac could say hello.

  “’S all right, Miles. Only came for a bath and a change of clothes. Go on back in.”

  But Falloon had disappeared. Isaac shrugged and started to unbutton his summer jacket. Kathleen watched him from the bedroom door. The real estate goddess was almost fifty-two. The Florida swamps hadn’t wrecked her Irish beauty. She was voluptuous in a purple robe. None of the bimbos Isaac knew, girls twenty years younger than his wife, had Kathleen’s cleavage. It was like a wound under her throat, a vulnerable patch of skin between her breasts, that could drive Isaac insane after twenty-seven years of marriage.

  Isaac was a groom at nineteen, a father at twenty. He’d met the Irish beauty at a real estate office near Echo Park while he was a college student looking for a cheap flat in Washington Heights. Kathleen took her college baby on a real estate tour, making love to him in one empty apartment after the other. Isaac figured he was an amusement for Kathleen, a pastime with a bullish neck, an anonymous boy she kept around during office hours. But she wouldn’t let him rent a flat. The college baby had to move in with her. He married Kathleen in a church on Marble Hill, Isaac the skeptical Jew, a Stalinist in 1948, a boy who believed in the forces of history and the erotic truths of his twenty-four-year-old wife.

  “Where’s your darling?” she said, remaining inside the door.

  Would he have to tell her how Ida Stutz threw him over for an accountant with plastic sleeves? Only Kathleen couldn’t have heard about Ida in the swamps. The Chief became shrewd with his wife. “I have a lot of darlings,” he said. “Which one do you mean?”

  “Manfred Coen.”

  “Blue Eyes? He’s dead.”

  “Then why aren’t you wearing a mourner’s cloak?”

  Isaac began to fumble. “I didn’t kill him. It was a stinking family … the Guzmanns. They had a pistol, Chino Reyes. Manfred slapped him once. The pistol got even. He blew on Manfred with a stolen gun.”

  “Where were you when it happened, Prince Isaac? You’re the holiest cop around. Couldn’t you save Manfred Coen?”

  “Kathleen, it was an accident. I was only two minutes away.”

  Kathleen stepped out of the door to scrutinize Isaac. “Turd,” she said. “I know your rotten vocabulary. You’re always two minutes away when you need a good excuse. Now what the hell are you doing here? I didn’t call for a chaperone. Who asked you to scare off my friends?”

  Isaac gulped the word Florida. “I thought you were in the Everglades.” He told Kathleen about his desire to crawl into her tub. “I got messed up at work. This crazy Irish Jew tackled me in my office. He would have run home with my neck in his hands if I didn’t fight back.”

  “Look at you,” she said. “God bless the Irish Jew. I’d like to thank him for shoving coal dust in your face.”

  “It’s not coal dust,” Isaac said, turning glum. “They’re flakes off Patrick Silver’s shirt. That lunatic walked out of a fire to wrestle with me.”

  He could feel some fingers inside his jacket. Kathleen was stripping him. “Get undressed,” she growled. “What are you waiting for? Don’t you want your bath?”

  They went down one flight to Kathleen’s master tub, Isaac carrying his gun and soiled clothes. Kathleen stuffed the clothes into her hamper. Isaac climbed over the great wall of the tub. Kathleen had no use for a husband, but she could still admire the firm hold of Isaac’s buttocks, the flesh that stood like pliable armor in the middle of his back. She’d stuck with the Jewish bear until her daughter left for college. Then she ran to Florida, and with a realty corporation of nine senior partners (the other eight were all men), she chopped into the Everglades and built a slew of retirement colonies over the swamps. The clerks at her headquarters in Miami were in awe of Kathleen. They had contempt for her partners, whom they considered inferior people. “The lady’s got a pair of balls on her,” they would murmur to themselves. According to their own calculations, Kathleen was worth a million and a half.


  Isaac sat in a puddle of water. Kathleen threw bath oil at his knees. Her breasts looped under the robe. Isaac beckoned her into the tub. “Not a chance,” she said. “Prick, I have to be at the airport in an hour. I’m not taking a bath with you.”

  The bear was getting hungry. His cock rose out of Kathleen’s bubblebath. She threw more oil at him. Kathleen wasn’t going to fornicate in a sunken bathtub with her own burly husband when she had five millionaires chasing her, Florida men without scars on their body from a murderous hammer, knife, or gun butt.

  “Marilyn split with her new man,” she said, hurling information at Isaac. His cock fell under the water. His eyes were grim.

  “Who told you that?”

  “She called me in Miami. I begged her to come down for a visit. I wired her the fare. But she never showed.”

  “Why didn’t she call her father?”

  “She’s afraid of you. Four husbands in six years. That must be some kind of record. Anyway, it’s your fault. She loved Coen. And you kept him from her.”

  “Coen,” Isaac said, splashing with a paw. “I didn’t take Blue Eyes out of her bed. But she has a craziness for marriages, that girl. Coen worked for me, remember? I didn’t want a son-in-law sitting on my shoulder. Manfred was beautiful, but he had trouble spelling his name. He was an orphan. Orphans don’t last. He would have died one way or another.”

  “But he didn’t need a push from you, Prince Isaac.”

  The Chief couldn’t argue with Kathleen. He had a claw in his belly: the worm was migrating again. It grabbed his bowels with a short, hooking rhythm. Isaac had to scream. “Oh my God. Jesus motherfucker shit.” The real estate goddess blinked at him.