Blue Eyes

by Jerome Charyn

  “So what?” Schiller grumbled in his good-natured way.

  “I can’t remember touching his shoulder, shaking his hand, nothing.”

  “Manfred, it happens to lots of boys. I had a father who slapped you on the chin if you forgot to call him ‘Sir.’”

  “Did you kiss him?”

  “Maybe once in my life. It tasted horrible. Like wet paper.”

  Alphonso shouted from the table. “Hey man, don’t bullshit so much.”

  He toweled his moustache before he would play with Coen. He dusted the ball with his undershirt. He gave Coen trouble in both corners. With the cubano smacking the floorboards, it took Schiller minutes to locate his natural sleeping position. And he inherited nightmares from Coen, feeling the press of a bony hand on his forehead. He groaned, rubbed the wall, kicked the frying pan off its hook, and the cubano swore that he wouldn’t pay for his time with Coen if Schiller didn’t learn to sleep quiet. Alphonso reproached himself for having dusted the ball. The cop was eating up his serves. Ever since Coen stalled their game to chat with the house about father kisses, Alphonso couldn’t get his momentum back. He smiled, thinking maybe Coen and Schiller were fairies together, but he still did nothing with the bat. Coen jockeyed him away from the table, caused him to stumble in his combat boots and swing under the ball.

  Chino Reyes stood at the front table with his Police Special, a snubnosed .38. He had come uptown to humiliate the cop, make him beg for his life. But watching Coen in little Morrocan sneakers, he forgot whatever plans he had. His eyeballs hung on the patterns of Coen’s feet, those bends to the side, the red sneeze of the bat, the power Coen had over the ball. He liked Coen’s blue shorts, the vulnerability of his bared knees. The holster didn’t frighten Chino. He could have popped Coen in the head before that holster went into play. He passed Schiller’s bench, got within yards of Coen. Alphonso saw the gun first. He was close enough to the line of fire to lose a cheek or a hand. Chino motioned to him with the gun. “Vamos, muchacho. Out of here.” But Coen was waving his Mark V.

  “Finish the game, Alphonso.”

  Caught between two locos, a cop with a queerness for ping-pong and a Chinaman who liked to point guns, Alphonso decided to heed Coen. He was more afraid of the snarl on Coen’s lie than the Chinaman’s piece. So he served high, into Coen’s bat, amazed by the sureness of his own reflexes and the cooperation in his knees. The routine flights of the ball infuriated the Chinaman.

  “Coen, why are you bringing the cholo into this? Send him home. I don’t have quarrels with a Spic.”

  “Chino, you’re going to eat that pistol after the game is over. I told you keep away.”

  Alphonso felt his ankles give. He leaned hard into the table and returned Coen’s chop but he couldn’t get the Mark V to bite. And Coen smashed the ball into his armpit. It stuck there, befuddling Alphonso, who had never carried a ball in his armpit until now. Then it spilled onto the table. Alphonso pushed it back to Coen. Chino spit between his legs. He wasn’t going to tolerate another volley with that ping-pong ball.

  “Coen, you bother me too long for one night.”

  He aimed at the net. He wanted to blow all of Coen’s securities away. But the gun had too much kick. And he splintered Schiller’s wall, leaving cracks around the bullet-hole. Alphonso crawled along the tables and hid in the vestibule. He might have run further if his ears weren’t whistling so loud. Schiller woke with dust in his mouth and the bench on top of him. He thought the hotel had fallen through the ceiling until he swallowed a little dust and figured who the Chinaman was. The taxi bandit had come to shoot up Coen. Schiller wasn’t worried about the splinters. The Chinaman could pick off every wall in the place, dear sweet God, provided he continue to miss. Schiller meant to shout instructions, warn Coen not to be hasty, advise him to speak slow and curry the Chinaman if he could, but only a few dry squeaks came out. The dust had reached into his throat. And his arms were dead. He couldn’t raise the bench off his feet.

  All the Chinaman got from Coen was grief. “Draw on me, Polish. Show me who you are. You have a trigger. Just move your right hand.” Coen held on to the Mark V. He smiled into the Chinaman’s face. Measuring Coen’s smile, the Chinaman understood that there would be no satisfactions for him this far uptown, and he gripped the Police Special with both hands, conceived a target in his head a good three feet around Coen, and fired into the target. The bat jumped over the Chinaman’s ears. Coen felt a crunch from his teeth down through his groin and into the pit of his legs. He tasted blood behind his nose. His shoes were in his face. He couldn’t determine how he had gotten from the table to the wall. He was thirsty now. He remembered a peach he had bought during maneuvers in Worms, a giant red peach, a “colorado,” for which he paid the equivalent of fifty cents, because the fruitman swore to him in perfect English that the “colorado” had come from South America in a crib of ice. Coen scrubbed the peach in canteen water, his fingers going over the imperfections in the red and yellow fuzz. He cut into the fuzz with his pack knife, finding it incredible that a peach, whatever its nationality, should have wine-colored flesh all around the stone. He ate for half an hour, licking juice from his thumbs, prying slivers of fruit out of the stone, savoring his own sweet spit. There was blood in his ear when he tried to swallow. His eyes turned pink. His chin was dark from the bubbles in his mouth. Only one of his nostrils pushed air.

  Isaac arrived with his war party after the second shot. Coen’s partners, DeFalco, Rosenheim, and Brown, barreled into the vestibule wearing shotguns and shiny vests. Alphonso had to get out of their way or risk being trampled. It was too dark for him to notice the gold badges clamped to the three bulls, but he couldn’t mistake the importance of these men. Nobody but supercops could bust into a ping-pong parlor so fast. The Chinaman was at the middle table by the time he heard the commotion in the vestibule, the cocking of shotguns, the pulsing of shoe leather. Coen’s bloody ears didn’t comfort him. He had meant to crease the Blue-eyes a little, not bend him in half. “Polish, you should have been nicer to me.” Even as he looked between shotgun barrels and recognized Isaac, whom he had met in the Bronx and knew to be a heavy police spy, he couldn’t understahd what the bulls were doing here with so many cannons. He should have been out searching for Odette. Next time he wouldn’t drip in his own pocket. He’d undress the queen, make her feel the bump in his chest.

  DeFalco, Rosenheim, and Brown saw the blood leak from Coen, saw the Chinaman dangle the .38 (it was pointing nowhere), and they opened up. They ripped the woodwork, shattered three of the nine tables, brought a fixture down, left a mess of glass, and wasted Chino in the process. Rosenheim was the first one out of the vestibule. DeFalco and Brown rushed the tables. They needed no evidence about the Chinaman’s condition. But Brown squatted over Coen. “He’s dead.” Toeing through the glass DeFalco stumbled onto Schiller. He pulled the bench off Schiller’s feet, helped him up, and took the bits of plaster away from Schiller’s eyes. DeFalco couldn’t tell if Schiller was sobbing or trying to cough. He figured something had to be wrong with Schiller’s tongue. ‘Pop, what are you trying to say?”

  Spanish Arnold was curling his sideburns in preparation for dinner with Coen when his jars and drinking cups fell off the windowsill. He hopped downstairs in his undershirt, without the orthopedic shoe. He got around Alphonso and took in Isaac, Schiller, Coen, the three detectives, and the Chinaman’s remains. His head bobbed in Isaac’s eye. “Cock-sucker, you set him up. You couldn’t catch Guzmann’s tail, so you let the chink have Manfred, and then you got the chink.”

  DeFalco answered for Isaac. “Spanish, it wasn’t like that, I swear. It was supposed to be routine. The Chinaman went to Mexico with Coen, didn’t he? They slept in the same room. So why can’t they have a talk over a ping-pong table? We’re sitting outside in the car, so help me, joking about where the Chinaman’s going to take us next, and a report comes in over the radio five minutes ago that the chink walked out of Bummy’s with this captain’s gun.
Arnold, we were in here like a hurricane after that.”

  “Routine?” Arnold had to hold his lip so he wouldn’t cry in front of Isaac and the bulls. “Then why’d you come uptown with shotguns?”

  “Arnold,” Rosenheim said, “you know what the Chinaman can do when he’s on one of his mads. We couldn’t predict his mood. We had to be ready for him.”

  Brown was still squatting over Coen. He had no love for Isaac. How much of a rat could Coen have been, if his own Chief couldn’t save him? Isaac had an unnatural gift for pulling himself out of his own debris, for surfacing whenever he chose, and Brown could no longer be sure what was legitimate and what was sham with Isaac in the area. True, half the district (including himself) hoped the Chinaman would grab Coen’s balls, but Brown wasn’t so eager to rejoice. He could have pissed into Chino’s skull, wasted another Chinaman tomorrow; he wasn’t going to shame a dead cop. Perhaps he could read some of his own features in Coen’s bloody face. Perhaps there was a fondness in him for Isaac’s baby under all the rancor. Brown couldn’t say. He covered most of Coen with Schiller’s pink towels and waited for the morgue wagon to come.

  All the little shufflings at the First Deputy’s office were completed by the time Coen was put into the ground (the Hands of Esau took charge of the body at the request of a certain Manhattan chief, even though Coen had been delinquent in paying his dues). Pimloe suffered the most. He lost his chauffeur and had to vacate his front rooms overlooking Cleveland Place for a closet in the back. The lower-grade detectives who made up the bulk of the “rat squad” (they infiltrated police stations and spied on cops for the First Dep) could barely disguise their joy over the move. They had been trained by Isaac, and they respected the unsmoothed lines of Isaac’s theories, his avoidance of textbook procedures, his fanatical devotion to the modus operandi of criminals and crooked cops. He wasn’t the DCI to them (deputy chief inspector), somebody to avoid. He was Isaac, the master, the only Chief. And they didn’t have to cater to an ordinary DI like Pimloe. Isaac had come home.

  He sat in his office brooding over the congratulations he received for quieting Chino Reyes and closing one or two of César Guzmann’s dice cribs. The stenciler was outside scraping “Herbert Pimloe” off the door. His handgrips, his teapot, his honor scroll from the Hands of Esau, his bottles of colored ink, stored in the basement for months, had been returned to his rooms. His subordinates were overly polite. No one would mention Papa or Coen to him. Isaac had meant to have all six Guzmanns in his pencilcase (he would institutionalize Jerónimo rather than indict him) and Coen near his door when he returned from the hole (Boston Road). He hadn’t grubbed on his knees delivering nickels for Papa, gorged himself with sweet sodas, gotten pimples on his butt riding barstools, to come up with a Cuban Chinese refugee, a bandit he had helped to create. It was Isaac who queered Chino’s gambling operations on Doyers Street, sending kites to the District Attorney’s office about the fan-tan games under the Chinaman’s wing; it was Isaac who forced him uptown, reduced his options until he had to hire himself out to César or starve, because Isaac was bumping his own head in the Bronx and couldn’t find any gambits better than the Chinaman. He considered Chino Reyes sufficiently stupid to lead him through Guzmann lines, expose César’s marriage bureau, so he could catch a few Guzmanns with the brides. Only the Chinaman brought him nowhere but to Coan.

  Isaac might never have started with the Guzmanns. Papa’s numbers mill didn’t disturb him. As lodge brother and information minister of the Hands of Esau, he was ashamed to admit that a family of Jews could monopolize a portion of the Bronx, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that the Guzmanns were false Jews, Marranos who accepted Moses as their Christ, ridiculed the concept of marriage, and ate pork. Then stories, rotten stories, filtered down to Isaac by way of his Manhattan stoolies that a policy combine in the Bronx was moving into white slavery, that its agents at the bus terminals didn’t even have the character to distinguish between gentile runaways and Jewish ones. The Guzmanns were no longer quaint people, retards with policy slips who worshiped at home in a candy store; they were “meateaters” (buyers of human flesh), a family of insects praying on Isaac’s boroughs. He sent his deputies into the terminals without telling Manfred, who had been raised on Guzmann egg creams and might blow the detectives’ cover (most of them were in women’s clothes). The deputies came back with potato chips in their bras. They couldn’t link the Guzmanns to terminal traffic. The pimps working the bus routes had to ask, who’s César, who’s Papa, who’s Jerónimo? And Isaac was made to realize that he couldn’t trap the Guzmanns with old coordinates and shitty spies.

  He swayed the First Deputy, an Irishman with an aquiline nose, a gentle person who deferred to the brainpower of his Jewish whip, and was terrified by Isaac’s picture of six Guzmanns swallowing young girls. Isaac plotted his own doom. He paid an informant to squeal on him, implicate him far enough into the lives of Bronx KGs (known gamblers), so that he would have to send his papers in, give his badge to the property clerk, lose the rights to his pension, and resign from the Hands of Esau. The detectives under him trudged through the office, their eyes bulging with remorse. “Isaac fronting for gamblers? Bull. Somebody wants him stung.” Only Isaac could appreciate the full symmetry of his fall; within a week of clearing his desk he had offers to join gambling combines in Brooklyn and Queens. Isaac decided to starve. He was forty-nine, with a swimmer’s pectorals, bushy sideburns, and a boy’s waist, and he had a married daughter and an estranged wife who was rich without him. He moved from Riverdale to Boston Road. He sat in cheap bars waiting for Papa to bite. He taunted foot patrolmen, but they had heard of Chief Isaac, and they didn’t have the gall to hit him with their sticks.

  Papa took him in but there were no preliminary hugs. If Isaac had known the habitat of the Guzmanns, he might have understood the queerness of this and crept with his tail in his hand back to the First Deputy. The Guzmanns never hired a runner without hugging him first. Papa was following the customs of his fathers in Peru. For the Marranos evil had a discernible stench from up close. Their hug was only a subterfuge, the chance to sniff how much harm they could expect. Not to smell a man was to show him the greatest contempt. Isaac sucked the liquid out of Papa’s cherry candies and ate with Jerónimo’s spoon. He carried quarters from Jorge’s overflow, he formed a chain with Topal and Alejandro to load five-gallon syrup jugs into the cellar, he was given all the nigger accounts to play with. Papa had no salary for him. He lived on the pennies he collected, without seeing a dollar bill unless he brought his loot to the bank. No matter how far he toured Boston Road, he couldn’t find any smudges of César or the marriage bureau.

  So he washed pennies in his tub, learned the aromas of white chocolate from Jerónimo, shaved every third day, slouched like a Guzmann, grunted like a Guzmann, picked his nose, and arrived at the First Deputy’s office with sticky sideburns, a scratched face, and penny dust on his fingers. His former deputies could only goggle. They knew Isaac was floating in the Bronx, but they hadn’t expected such deterioration. Isaac, they remembered, was an immaculate man. Pimloe sneered together with the other DIs. They wouldn’t associate with an unfrocked inspector. And Isaac, who had been using monosyllables on Boston Road, penny talk, gesturing to Jerónimo, mooing at Jorge, saw he couldn’t explain himself to these men. The First Deputy rescued him, clarifying Isaac’s mission to the DIs and detectives from the rat squad. The DIs shook Isaac’s fist (they realized he would be the next First Dep). The detectives goggled anew, their faith restored in the master’s technique; no one but Isaac could have watched Papa Guzmann through the stem of an ice cream dish.

  Of all the Guzmanns Isaac preferred Jerónimo. They would break the hump of an afternoon leaning against Papa’s comic book racks, playing tic-tac-toe on a magic board (the baby generally won), finishing a gallon of chocolate soda between them. But Isaac wouldn’t allow fondnesses to muddy up the logistics in his head. Jerónimo was the Guzmanns’ weakest point. The baby coul
dn’t have wiped himself without the toilet paper Papa stuffed in his underpants to remind him where to look. He had to pause at most corners, rethinking the concepts of green and red. Still, Isaac might have gone after Jorge, who lacked Jerónimo’s social graces and could get dizzy walking a straight line, if Jorge hadn’t been so articulate with a fingernail and a knife (Isaac had seen Papa’s middle boy carve a runner for chiseling the family out of fifty cents). So he had detectives in unmarked cars ride behind Jerónimo in the street, bump him at five miles an hour. It didn’t take Papa more than a week to catch the drift of Isaac’s cars. He sweetened Isaac’s sodas, gave him phantom accounts to chase. Only then would he say, “Isaac, I don’t want bruises on my boy. If Alejandro finds a fender in his ass, that’s one thing. He knows how to spit through a window. Isaac, listen to me, that man who harms Jerónimo, black or white, will go out of this world with a missing pair of balls. Don’t be misled by the malted machines. I was raised in Peru.”

  And Isaac, who had taken overeager triggermen out of circulation, who had destroyed all the straw dummies in the policemen’s gym perfecting his rabbit punch, could only wag his head. “Papa, I never touched the boy. Those are somebody else’s men. I can’t direct traffic from a candy store.”

  Papa didn’t have to rely on Isaac’s generosity. He took Jerónimo off the street The boy had to confine his hikes to the spaces between Papa’s stools. He grew miserable dodging the leatherbound seats with chocolate in his mouth. Isaac was waiting for the Guzmann machine to collapse under the strain of Jerónimo’s sad eyes when the baby disappeared into Manhattan. Restless, with Papa on his back, Isaac learned to hate that other baby, Manfred Coen, who had been reared with Jerónimo, Jorge, and César. Coen suffered from syrup on the brain (like Jerónimo), chewed from the same lamb’s bone during the Marrano Easter, and Isaac resented this. He had pulled him out of the academy because he needed a boy with a pliable face, a blue-eyed wonder who wouldn’t look outlandish in a brassiere, who could chase a felon in women’s shoes, wear a false nose, become a swish for half a night. And Isaac got his plastic man. Fatherless at twenty-three, a rifleman out of Worms brought into passivity by a Bronx oven, Coen was ready to have his chin thickened with putty. Isaac had found the ultimate orphan, a boy with a squash-able self. Steered by Isaac, Coen made detective first grade impersonating bimbos, Polacks, fingermen, and lousy cops. Coen picked up a wife somewhere, a girl who took him to concerts, deprived him of his orphanhood little by little, and threatened his usefulness to the police. So Isaac began lending Coen to the Bureau of Special Services, and the wonder-boy escorted other men’s wives, slept on Park Avenue, drifted out of marriage, and jumped into Isaac’s lap.