Blue Eyes

by Jerome Charyn

  Coen prepared for Vander Child. He mentioned his name to the doorman of Child’s apartment house. The doorman called upstairs. Coen sat on a scrolled lobby bench with his knees wide apart. The doorman smiled under the starched blue wings of his dickey and began to patronize Coen. “I’m afraid Mr. Child doesn’t know any Manfred Coens. State your business, please.”

  “Tell him Pimloe,” Coen shouted into the plugboard. “P-I-M-L-O-E.” The doorman let Coen pass.

  Child welcomed him in a flannel gown with enormous pockets. A handsome man with a mole on his lip and a negligible hairline, he was just Coen’s age. Coen found it hard to believe that Child could have a daughter of seventeen. They stood chin to chin, both of them a touch under five-feet-eight. Child had greener eyes. He liked the detective Pimloe chose for him. He mixed Coen a fruit punch with rum and sweet limes. Child insisted they drink from the same bowl. Coen felt dizzy by the third sip. On Child’s couch each discovered the other was a ping-pong buff.

  “Use a Butterfly?” Child said.

  “No. Mark V.”

  “Fast or slow?”

  “Fast,” Coen said. “Where do you hit?”

  “At home. I hate the clubs.”

  Coen seemed unnerved. “You have a table here?”

  Hugging his gown Child walked Coen through bedrooms, a sitting room, and a hall of closets. A high-breasted girl in another flannel gown swore at Child from one of the rooms. She sat on a round bed drinking punch and jiggling some earphones. “Who’s the Sammy?” she said, pointing to Coen. “A new customer? Is he a live one? Vander dear, am I going to perform on trapeze?” She threw the earphones at Child. He ducked and nudged Coen out of the room.

  “My niece,” Child said. “She has an active imagination. She thinks I live in a brothel.” They stopped in a corklined room with soft blue lights and a regulation ping-pong table. Coen admired the luminous green paint on the table. Child put a Butterfly in his hand. He could hear the girl sing a school song. “Carbonderry, my Carbonderry,” she said. He hefted the ping-pong bat. Child fed him a fresh ball and volleyed in his flannels. Coen chopped with the Butterfly. Child smirked.

  “Who taught you that? Dickie Miles? Reisman? Do you want hard rubber, a pimple bat?”

  “No. I’ll play with this.”

  With the ball coming off blue light, Coen had to squint. He wondered when Child would begin talking about his daughter. He had trouble with Child’s serves. Swaddled in herringbone he couldn’t smash the ball. The necktie was making him gag. Child helped him undress. Coen played in boxer shorts. Uneasy at first, he grew accustomed to the undertable currents on his kneecaps. Child had a greater repertoire of strokes. His loops got away from Coen. His flick shots would break near Coen’s handle. Coen slapped air. Child attacked his weak side, forcing Coen into the edge of the table. Twice the Butterfly flew out of Coen’s hand. The girl was singing again. “Carbonderry, my Carbonderry.” Her mocking, nasal cries upset Coen’s ability to chop. The ball made a thick sound against his bat. Child had a lead of 18-2 when the girl came in. Seeing Coen sweat in stockings and shorts amused her. “Darling, isn’t this the bloodhound who’s going to bring Carrie back? He has cute nipples for a cop.” She approached Coen’s half of the table. “Did he tell you I’m his niece?” Coen looked away from her open collar. The girl was taller than him, and her bosoms hovered close to his neck. “He really is an uncle, you know. Nobody believes it. Vander doesn’t have favorites in his cast.”

  Child pushed little dents into the Butterfly with a finger. “Shut your mouth, Odile.”

  “Vander, couldn’t you use the bloodhound in a bigger way? He’s naked enough. And marvelous with a paddle in his fist. Get him to swish it, darling. I want to see.”

  Child threw his bat. It struck her on the shoulder, and she shaped a perfect scream with the muscles in her jaw. Her nostrils puffed wide. In pain, her bosoms had a glorious arch. Moaning, her body grew lithe. The girl’s physicality astonished Coen. She could shrink a room with any of her moves. She ran out with Child. He heard them chatter in a corridor. Child came back much less interested in Coen. “Odile’s an actress,” he said. “Don’t be taken in by her rough talk. She has pornography on her mind.” Child scored three quick points and collected the bats. He brought Coen into his study. “My daughter went to school with Odile.”

  “Blood cousins?” Coen asked.

  “Yes, blood cousins,” Child said, scrutinizing Coen. “Odile’s the older. She could sway Caroline. They both became involved with a Jew pimp.”

  “Is he from Manhattan, the pimp? Does he walk, or drive a car?”

  “He has a Spanish name, that’s all I know.”

  “Guzmann?” Coen said. “Is it Guzmann. César Guzmann?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How did your girls meet César?”

  “You said César, Mr. Coen. I didn’t. It might be Alfred, Pepe, Juanito, God knows.”

  “What were they doing with a pimp, Mr. Child?”

  “This isn’t East Hampton, Coen. The pimps cruise around Caroline’s school every morning looking for fresh tail. They fish pretty hard. Several Carbonderry girls have run off with Spics. The school hushes it up. You can’t keep a chastity belt on Amsterdam Avenue.”

  “You think your daughter’s with this pimp then? If your niece was mixed up with him too, she ought to remember his name.”

  “Odile? You won’t get much from her. She’s Carrie’s conspirator. She plays dumb.”

  “Still, it can’t hurt. I’d like to ask her a few things.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t, Coen. Pimloe can tell you about Odile. He talked to her once. She started stripping for him in the middle of a conversation. She’ll steer you wrong, Coen, and try to win you over. Anyway, my own men have questioned her. Detectives from the agency I hired.”

  “What did she give them, Mr. Child?”

  “I told you. Nothing. The little bitch loves to perform for detectives.”

  Child handed him photographs of Caroline and the detectives’ report, which came in a large brown envelope with scalloped edges, the hallmark of that particular agency. The scallops annoyed Coen. He figured the detectives were soaking Child. The girl in the photographs had mousy features and hair like straw. Her neck, her stingy jawline, the bones behind her ears, had little to do with Child. Coen peeked inside the envelope. There were bloated expense vouchers, news of “suspicious vehicles” parked near the Carbonderry School, hints of white slavery. Coen couldn’t believe anybody would bother to capture so homely a prize.

  “They think she may be in Peru,” Child said. Coen smiled to himself. The Guzmanns came from Peru, where they had cousins who were pickpockets, city bandits, and confidence men; these cousins could have swallowed up a hundred New York girls, at Papa Guzmann’s request.

  “Some money,” Child said, drawing six hundred-dollar bills from a wood box. “Pimloe says no cop buys information like Manfred Coen.”

  “For six little ones I can buy the world, Mr. Child.”

  “Keep it,” Child said, squeezing the money into Coen’s palm. “Peru’s a lonesome place.”

  Coen played with the lamp outside Child’s apartment. He sat the shade on a chair and passed each of Child’s hundred-dollar bills over the bulb. He looked for Pimloe’s marks under the treasury numbers. The money was clean.

  Child was considering the details of his Harold Pinter festival when he heard a knock inside his dumbwaiter. He dismissed it as a nuisance, rats among the cables, or the superintendent’s boy farting in the shaft. Should he open with The Dwarfs or The Birthday Party? Should he go with native Americans, or import an English cast? He was fifty thousand dollars shy. He would have to make Odile run a little harder for the money. He wouldn’t finance musicals. He would have nothing to do with gauche mystery plays. He resisted vehicles for resurrected movie stars, even though he could have been guaranteed a return of a hundred thousand a year.

  Vander was a purist on the question of which shows he wo
uld back. He expected to lose his money. His father, also Vander Child, but a richer man, had left Vander II with a taste for croissants and a love for “le ping-pong,” which he learned as a thirteen-year-old in a ballroom near the Bois de Boulogne while Paris was flooded with unemployed Czech ping-pong champions after World War II and Vander I was the unofficial New York ambassador to France. After three tiresome years at Princeton, during which he hustled his classmates out of their spending money playing ping-pong with them sitting on a stool, he fell in with a group of impoverished actors, brought a production of Alfred Jarry to New York, and became known as the “Angel Child.”

  The knocking persisted from the kitchen. Vander opened the dumbwaiter; the Chinaman tumbled out, grease on his bodyshirt, the mop over one eye. Vander prepared to take the Chinaman by a suspender and stuff him back into the shaft.

  “Don’t,” the Chinaman said, his one visible eye trained on Vander. “Another white man touched me before on the cheek, a cop with pretty vines, and hell regret the wound he made coming out of his mama’s belly. This cop has a Puerto Rican sidekick, a cripple. They’ll both be eating grass.”

  “Chino, did you assault any of my doormen? Have you been bruising skulls?”

  “Not me. I got in through the basement. I had to find the right dumbwaiter line. Vander, my knees are sore. I’m not used to hugging wires.”

  “Who sent you? Zorro? You can tell him I’m not taking his money any more.”

  “Tell him yourself. I don’t do business in dumbwaiters. I came for Odette. Where is she? In the tub?”

  Vander had to giggle. “You shouldn’t mess with her underwear, Chino. She’s been promising to scratch out your eyes.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  The Chinaman spread his fingers around his chin and shouted at Vander’s ceilings for Odette.

  “Don’t waste your lungs. She’s with her sweethearts. She went to The Dwarf.”

  The Chinaman saw for himself. Raising the shreds of his mop so he could have two free eyes, he tracked across the living room, opened closets double his own height, investigated each of Vander’s four tubs. The fineries of perfumed soap in the shape of a yellow egg and abundant robes on a silver hook appealed to him. He fondled the egg, sniffed the robes for traces of Odette. Satisfied she wasn’t around, he palmed Vander’s doorknob.

  Vander got between the Chinaman and the door. “Chino, you’d make me happier if you tried the dumbwaiter again. My neighbors might not appreciate your looks.”

  The Chinaman moved Vander with a pinch on the sleeve. “Vander, my policy is never go the same way twice. It hurts your luck.”

  “Then take off that toupee. You’ll scare my elevator man.”

  The Chinaman carried the mop under his arm, his own hair sitting high on his scalp. Vander noticed little improvement; the loss of a toupee only accented the tight lines that went from the Chinaman’s ears, over his cheeks, and into his eyes. Grim markings, Vander thought. He couldn’t relax until the elevator dropped below his floor. He dialed Pimloe at the First Deputy’s office. He rasped into the phone.

  “You call that protection, Herbert? He was here … not Zorro, the chink. He almost tore my arm. Herbert, I didn’t bargain for this. You were supposed to have a man outside twenty-four hours. I’ve had enough to do with shamuses. Your boy was here. Coen. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Odile … what? Herbert, I’m not her trainer. I can’t shackle Odile … Herbert, she hasn’t seen Zorro. Wouldn’t I know? I’d break her toes if she lied to me … Never mind. I don’t want Chinamen in my dumbwaiter any more. Attend to him first. Goodbye.”

  The Chinaman had already wrecked Vander’s appetite. He wouldn’t have fresh croissants and madeleines brought up from the pâtisserie. He would swallow ordinary bread today.

  4 Coen found Pimloe’s chauffeur sleeping on Columbus Avenue in a First Deputy car, two doors up from his apartment house. He woke the chauffeur with a knuckle on the head. “Don’t get smart, Coen.”

  “Listen, Brodsky, your boss must take me for a retard. I don’t like a fancy goy laying six hundred dollars on me for shit work. Why is Pimloe setting me up? How many clues did he throw Child about the Guzmanns? The schmuck forgot that César doesn’t cruise. He can’t drive a car.”

  “If Pimloe’s such a schmuck, how come he can slap a uniform on you and make you eat your badge? He owns you, Manfred. Tick him off, and you’ll be pulling weeds for some precinct captain on Staten Island. So behave yourself. Just locate the girl.”

  Coen settled into the car. “Take me to Pimloe.”

  “No way. You had one audience with him. That’s enough. Pimloe can’t spare the time.”

  “Why not? Is he cracking eggs at Gracie Mansion today?”

  “He isn’t like you, Coen. He doesn’t keep shoving ping-pong balls in his pocket.” Brodsky smiled. Remembering Coen’s knuckle, he bothered to rub his head. “Relax, Manfred. Nobody has to sweat.”

  “Child doesn’t seem all that eager for his daughter. I’ll bet she’s living on Ninth Street with a professional boccie player. They bowl on the dining room floor.”

  “Ninth Street? That should make her easy to find.”

  “Brodsky, take your finger out of your nose and stick it on the wheel. I want Amsterdam and Eighty-nine.”

  Brodsky dropped him across the street from a bluestone house with twin flags draped over its front; the flags had exotic lettering, a field of plain stars, and touches of white, plum, and gold. Brodsky was amused by the flags. “What goes? This one of the bordellos you keep hearing about? For African diplomats only?”

  “It’s the missing girl’s school.”

  “Manfred, should I wait?”

  “No. You can tell Pimloe I’m after a white pimp who sits in a Cadillac and provides ugly girls for Peru.”

  Boys and girls in plum suits marched in and out of the Carbonderry Day School sucking ice cream cones. Pulling on their dark stockings, the girls seemed utterly removed from the voluptuousness of Odile, although several of them walked with a kind of stumpy grace. Coen found no plausible pimp cars near the school; no Mark IVs with soft ray glass; no cream-colored Eldorados; nothing silver; nothing mint green. Plainclothesmen wearing headbands and dungarees passed Coen four times in the same hour. He recognized them by the color of their headbands; on Thursdays the anticrime boys always wore blue. They were prowling after the child molester who operated exclusively on the West Side. One of the plainclothesmen stopped Coen. “You dig this school, sonny boy? You get your kicks smelling girls’ shoes? What’s your name?”

  Coen stuck his shield under the plainclothesman’s teeth. And the plainclothesman, who was timid around gold badges and much younger than Coen, skulked to a different block. More headbands approached. Coen had to give up on Carbonderry or risk a toss by baby cops in dungarees every quarter hour. He decided to visit his uncle Sheb. First he hiked over to a papaya stand on Broadway and watched for a chileno in a gypsy cab. It was the chileno, cabless today, who wandered into Coen. They drank papaya juice at Coen’s expense. The chileno got edgy when Coen stayed quiet. He envied the ability of this Blue-eyes to slow himself down, an agente with the appearance of a man wanting and valuing nothing. So the chileno went to Coen. “I could use a cup of coffee, Manfred. My cab’s in the shop.”

  “A whole cup?” Coen said, establishing the formal bargaining ground of detective and stoolie, without the affection he had for Spanish Arnold. “What do you have that’s worth a cup?”

  “Try me.”

  “A white pimp. He tours the neighborhood in a green Cadillac maybe. His specialty is young broads. I want his name.”

  “White? How white? With blue eyes, Manfred?”

  “Figure brown or gray.”

  “Try Baskins, Elmo Baskins. The chicks call him Elmo the Great.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “In the street, man. He drives a tan Imperial.”

  “Blas, I’m only giving you half a cup,” Coen said, uncrumpling fifty
dollars for the chileno. “You’ll have to blow harder for the other half.”

  The chileno took the fifty, and Coen walked down Broadway. He doubled back to a nut and candy shop, where he bought burnt almonds, dried apricots, and a pound of sesame sticks. He entered Manhattan View Rest armed with paper bags, having to nod to all the old ladies on the green bench outside. He was sure they knew his history. Manfred; son of Albert and Jessica, who put their heads in an oven wearing holiday clothes and made the Daily News. Coen picked Manhattan Rest for uncle Sheb because it was without a denomination, and he didn’t want to see his uncle plagued by fanatical old Jews for having a brother and a sister-in-law who were suicides. Sheb found Albert and Jessica; Sheb brought them out of the oven and screamed their deaths from the fire escape. But he was considered a madman long before this. He sat in Albert’s store candling eggs with his prick out. Nobody could sight a bloodclot faster than uncle Sheb. He drank the bloody eggs himself, spitting pieces of shell over the counter. Widows and older wives accepted his remonstrations and bribes of jumbo eggs, and lay with him on his cot near the toilet. It was this nagging sexuality that kept uncle partly sane. He had to dress up for his women and get his hair cut. He had to cackle the right phrases, fondle a kneecap while holding his eye on an egg.

  Coming through the bachelor quarters at Manhattan Rest, Coen found his uncle in a small room off the library where gentlemen could reflect in private. Sheb wore Coen’s old shirt and Coen’s gray trousers from the Police Academy. He was crying and scratching out a letter with a bladderless fountain pen. He dunked the entire pen into a bottle of ink after every five strokes, and pretended not to see Coen, who listened to the scratches and didn’t snoop.

  “Albert, we don’t have the belly for it. Sure, I know men with tits. Not the belly. Jessica has it over us. The superior person is the person who sits down to pee. Always. I’d rather have a hole than a fist in my pants. How many eggs, Albert, how many eggs?”