Secret Isaac

by Jerome Charyn

  Isaac stole her from Forty-third Street before she could complain. He had the grip of a large monkey. She couldn’t free her hand. The pimps and the young black whores laughed at the image of Annie and Isaac trundling along. You would have thought the bum had himself a wife. They went to the Vinaigrette. Isaac bought her little bottles of champagne. His tactics seemed more aggressive today. Annie preferred white wine and green beans. But those little bottles didn’t soften the bum. “I can take you off that corner,” he said. “I can make it so you won’t have a foot of space to prowl on.”

  “God, you really are a priest … if you’d like to buy a share of me, you’ll have to ask Martin McBride.”

  “Fuck McBride,” Isaac said. “I want you to live with me.”

  She didn’t laugh at his proposal. Her eyes began to sink into her skull.

  “I have a place downtown. On Rivington Street. Don’t worry. You can have your men. I won’t interfere. I’ll mix drinks for them. Go out for bottles of wine. But I don’t want you on the damn streets.”

  “Mister,” she said, “I don’t need an uncle, thanks. I already have a pimp.”

  Could he tell Annie Powell that she was torturing him and his rotten worm? That he’d bump any john who went near her corner? He was jealous, stupidly jealous, of a girl he hadn’t even slept with. That scar had gotten him crazy.

  “Who’s Dermott?” he said.

  She ate a mouthful of fish.

  “I asked you about Dermott Bride.”

  She got up from the table, put her napkin down, and walked out of the restaurant. Isaac was left with three corks and his little bottles of champagne. He phoned his office. A limousine was outside the Vinaigrette in seven minutes. The waiters at the restaurant saw the bum get into that big car. They were wise men. They understood that strange things existed in this world. The very rich often preferred to dress like cloches. They wouldn’t forget this bum with the scarred beauty, the limousine, and the splits of champagne.

  Isaac’s deputies had located Martin McBride, who lived with a fat wife in eight rooms near Marble Hill. Martin had emphysema. But he had to suffer August in New York. He collected money from the pimps of Manhattan and heard their complaints. He was known in mid-town as “Bagman Martin.” He’d been a petty crook for over half his life. Poor Martin didn’t have much of a record: arrested as a vagrant two or three times. Short spills in the Tombs. But that was twenty years ago. He’d prospered in his old age.

  Isaac’s men kidnapped him out of his apartment in a three hundred dollar suit. The old bagman was bewildered. Centre Street was completely black. Why was he being shoveled through the halls? He didn’t believe Isaac’s deputies were cops. But this was the old Police Headquarters. They deposited him in a back room on the third floor. The room was dark except for the lamp in his face. Who in Jesus was behind that desk?

  “Scumbag, is Annie Powell yours, or not?”

  “Sir,” the old bagman said, “I don’t know who that sweetheart is.”

  “But she happens to know a lot about you … How’s Dermott these days?”

  “Who, sir?”

  Isaac reached over his desk to twist McBride’s two ears.

  “Ah, the nephew. He’s doing fine.”

  “Could it be that you’re working for him, Martin McBride?… that the nickels you collect from every whore’s purse goes to little Dermott?”

  “That’s impossible, sir. Dermott’s a Yale man, swear to Christ. Helped put him through that college. He was training for the bar … but he never got to be a lawyer, sir. The nephew tired of his studies.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  Isaac was tired of twisting ears. He was readying to bang Martin’s head against the wall. But Martin suddenly had a coughing fit. It wasn’t contrived. Isaac could see the awful blue and yellow of emphysema on him. He had his deputies send Martin home. He learned nothing from the old bagman. He didn’t get one bit closer to Dermott Bride.

  5

  THE pimps wouldn’t talk to him. The black whores couldn’t even pronounce Dermott’s name. Annie would run from him soon as Isaac appeared. She’d have no more lunches or dinners with the old bum. He walked into a pornography shop managed by a friendly Russian Jew. The Jew was smart enough to read under Isaac’s disguise. He knew about the legendary First Deputy of New York.

  “Sidel, don’t play the schmuck with me. Ask me a question, and I’ll answer it, but only if I can.”

  His name was Lazar. And he carried a pistol under his counter, wrapped in a handkerchief.

  “The girl with the scar on her face, who is she? She wasn’t here a month ago.”

  “The gorgeous one?” Lazar said, making perfect breasts with his hands. “The knockout? Sidel, lay off of her. She’s Dermott’s bride.”

  And he began to titter. Isaac wouldn’t smile.

  “Who’s Dermott?”

  “Dermott? Dermott’s the king.”

  He was mum after that. Lazar had to attend to his shop. Isaac was sharp enough not to pull at him. Lazar had told him as much as Lazar cared to tell. Dermott’s the king. Now Isaac was beginning to understand why there was peace on Whores’ Row. This Dermott had to be the overlord of all the pimping traffic. Uncle Martin was his bagman, the old boy who settled Dermott’s accounts. But why didn’t some gang of mavericks slit Martin’s throat? Was Dermott that much of a king? And how could he hold his little empire together if you couldn’t catch sight of him? It all didn’t fit. Isaac Sidel shouldn’t have been ignorant of the emperor of Times Square.

  He had no more time to ruminate in a pornography shop. He was expected at John Jay. Isaac gave lectures twice a week at the School of Criminal Justice. He walked to his hotel, shaved, put on a pair of fresh dungarees. That was Isaac’s teaching clothes.

  The worm itched when he arrived at John Jay. It was a bad sign for Isaac. The worm was hardly ever wrong. He had a new pupil in his class. Melvin Pears’ green-eyed wife. She sat at the back of the room with a notebook in her hands. That notebook inhibited Isaac. He forgot to prance around the classroom. He stood near the window and talked about the futility of criminal justice. “The Bronx is dying,” he said to the young firemen and cops in his class. “Street by street. We can’t send in artillery. The kids would only burn all our tanks. Soon the edges of Manhattan will go … then you’ll have towers on the East Side with machine-gunners in the lobby … you’ll need armed guards to get you in and out of the supermarkets.”

  One of the firemen raised his hand. “First Deputy Sidel, what can we do about it?”

  “Go into the Bronx,” Isaac said. “Build over all the rubble. Why can’t we have shopping plazas in Crotona Park?”

  The cops giggled to themselves. The areas around Crotona Park looked as if they’d been napalmed. There were more arsonists in the Bronx than grocers. These cops would have figured Isaac for a bolshevik if he wasn’t the First Dep. They enjoyed jeremiads from a deputy police commissioner. You could light up in class. Isaac didn’t care what kind of junk you smoked. But that green-eyed lady worried him. Was she going to use Isaac’s words against old Sam in Becky Karp’s bid for Mayor? He could watch her scribbling between her legs. That’s no place to keep a notebook.

  She was there, in the same seat, at his next class. The worm nearly hobbled him. He had to lean against the wall. “Sure,” he muttered to himself. “It’s not too hard to recognize a traitor. Especially when she has green eyes.” But he wouldn’t coddle to her, sweeten his own talk. He mentioned Stalinist solutions. “Mobilize. The cops can’t do it themselves. Have a goddamn citizens’ army. Fight the shits who won’t cooperate. Bring back Joe DiMaggio. Get Willie Mays to build a new Polo Grounds … behind the Grand Concourse. Where’s Durocher now? Take ten percent off everybody’s salary … a tithe for the Bronx … no, make it twenty percent.”

  The cops laughed, but that green-eyed wife of Pears clutched her notebook. Isaac grew sad. I’m burying Mayor Sam. He ended the clas
s twenty minutes before the bell. He tried to skirt away from Mrs. Pears. She trapped him at the exit. He would have had to crawl under her bubs to get around her. She put a slip of paper in his hand. The specks in her eyes were incredible. They flashed shiny gray dust like small planets about to break apart. He was jealous of Melvin Pears. Isaac also had a wife. Kathleen. A tough Irish lady who had married him before he was twenty. The wife was in real estate. She developed swamps in Florida, had ten suitors and a million in the bank, and she didn’t need a cop who liked to go around in bum’s pants. He saw her once or twice a year. They made love if Kathleen was in the mood. It was more of a friendly hug than anything else. Now he had to deal with Mrs. Pears.

  “I didn’t mean to blunder into your class … I’m sorry … it’s just that I was interested in what you had to say … can you come to dinner tomorrow night?”

  “Your husband’s too tough for me, Mrs. Pears.”

  “I’m Jennifer,” she said. “Jenny … Mel likes you … don’t mind his scowls … he has to practice making faces to satisfy all the juries … he’s much nicer at home.”

  6

  HE expected Rebecca Karp to come out of the closet and eat off his neck with the hors d’oeuvres. It was only a party of three: Pears, his wife, and Isaac Sidel. Jennifer hadn’t been wrong. Melvin wasn’t the lawyer at home. He offered Isaac sucks from his hash pipe. The First Dep smoked with Mr. and Mrs. Pears. Why not? He was fifty-one. He ought to have a taste of hashish before he died. It didn’t offend the worm, and it warmed Isaac’s head. But he couldn’t let go of the cop in him. “Mel, did you ever hear of an ex-law student named Dermott Bride?… went to Yale.”

  “I don’t think so,” Pears said, and they all took sucks from the pipe. “I couldn’t scribble a brief without some hash in me,” he said. “I always work better when I’m stoned.”

  Isaac didn’t see a nudge of affection between husband and wife. Their bodies seemed to exist in some kind of neutral sphere. It’s the hash, Isaac figured. They probably fuck three times a day. Mel had the grace not to mention Rebecca Karp. And Isaac didn’t talk about the Mayor. A little sleepy boy came out of one of the rooms. He wore fireman’s pajamas. He ran to his father. “Alex, say hello to Isaac.”

  He shook hands with Alexander Pears, who had his father’s mouth and his mother’s green eyes.

  “Isaac’s a policeman … smarter than Dick Tracy.”

  Alexander was four and a half. He kissed his father and went to bed. He couldn’t stop looking at Isaac. Jennifer was in the kitchen putting whipped cream on a pie. Thank God there had been no politics tonight. Pears didn’t say a word about why the Police Commissioner ran prostitutes off the street. Isaac was the one who started to talk about hookers. He was dreaming of Annie Powell. “There are certain pimps. They get their fingers on a girl. And she’s owned for life … or until she gets ugly and has to be shipped to Nova Scotia, where anything that walks will pass as a woman.”

  He noticed Jennifer standing over him. “Sorry if that sounds cruel. But it’s a fact. You know, if a girl’s too beautiful, and her pimp is afraid of losing her, sometimes he’ll scar her face. It’s a fantasy he has … he thinks the scar devalues her in the eyes of other men. But it doesn’t always turn out that way. The scar can make her even more desirable. And the pimp will lose her anyway.”

  They had cognac and chunks of pecan pie. Melvin slumped into his chair and fell asleep. Isaac whispered with some embarrassment to Mrs. Pears. Melvin was snoring hard. Jennifer didn’t apologize. She accompanied Isaac to the door. The worm was rising in his gut. The cognac caused his bald spot to twitch. The hash must have been like a love potion to Isaac. He had Mrs. Pears against the door. That’s how he found himself. A stumbling man. His tongue was deep in her mouth while he swallowed half her face. He could still hear Melvin snore. That fucking kiss, there was no end to it. The worm didn’t keep Isaac’s clock. He could have been gnawing at her for an hour. What if the gentleman wakes up? Or the little boy in the red pajamas marches out of his room and sees mama with Dick Tracy’s tongue in her mouth? It was Isaac’s nervousness that got them apart. He told her about his hotel. “It’s too decrepit to have a name. You don’t have to meet me there …”

  He was downstairs, on Madison and Seventy-ninth, outside Melvin’s place. What the fuck was it all about? Was it some game plan in Melvin’s head to bring him over to Rebecca Karp? Feed the boy some hash, get the wife to kiss him, and he’ll fly from Mayor Sam? His tongue was raw as shit. Did Jennifer entertain every guest in a similar way? He was so busy kissing her, he hadn’t even felt her tits. God, he was dumb about women. His wife Kathleen was right to head for Florida. You couldn’t get much companionship from a cop who was married to his own love of mystery and technique. He’d slept with a hundred women, whores and businessmen’s wives, and while he probed, stroked, and sucked, his head would grind away at some caper that had been bothering him. The First Dep solved a quarter of his mysteries in bed. Fucking seemed to drive the trivia out of him, to hold his concentration for detail. But that was before the Guzmann family gave him his worm. The worm had idled Isaac’s need for sex. That’s why this tonguing business with Jennifer was crazy to him. It’s the hash, Isaac said. The hash roused a part of him that the worm had laid to rest. He was convinced he wouldn’t see Mrs. Pears again. She’d avoid his classes. She’d never come to a shithouse hotel.

  Isaac hobbled to West Forty-seventh Street. He changed into his bum’s clothes. He had this urge to prowl. Annie wasn’t at her corner. So what? Was she sucking off a tie manufacturer from Hoboken? Isaac would murder the son of a bitch. He’d hold every whore in detention, white or black, to ruin Annie’s trade. Let no man finger that scar. The First Dep was going mad. He wanted to kiss that “D” Dermott Bride had put on her. To feel the ridges in it with his mouth. He’d keep his tongue in his own face. The tongue was for Mrs. Pears.

  She must have given him a bit of luck, Melvin’s green-eyed wife. Isaac saw Martin McBride outside Lazar’s pornography shop. The bagman wasn’t alone. He had Jamey O’Toole with him. Tiny Jim. O’Toole was a renegade cop. Isaac’s own investigators, the First Dep’s “rat squad,” had brought evidence against Tiny Jim. He’d been taking bribes without mercy, “black rent,” breaking the heads of local businessmen to further the cause of protection agencies in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Isaac put him out on his ass. O’Toole lost his pension money, but you couldn’t hurt a lad who was six feet seven and had a pair of fists on him that could give shorter men a permanent headache. O’Toole was still in business. He’d lent himself out to Dermott and Martin McBride. He was the old bagman’s walking shotgun. There weren’t too many gangs in New York that would meddle with Jamey O’Toole. You’d need a hatchet to get at him. A bullet would only leave a little nipple in his chest.

  But Isaac had a worm to hearten him. He wanted to devil this O’Toole. “Jamey,” he said, “I hear your old shield is lying in the property clerk’s drawer.”

  O’Toole had a warm smile for Isaac. “How are you, Chief? It’s hard to remember all the different uniforms you own. Isaac, I don’t have a grudge, I swear … but keep out of the alleys, will you? You could fall and lose one of your eyes on the ground. Have you met my employer, Martin McBride … Martin, don’t be fooled by the man’s stink. It’s Isaac himself, the First Deputy of New York.”

  McBride’s fist was soft and wet in Isaac’s hand.

  “We’re already old friends,” Isaac said. “Martin visited me … at Centre Street.”

  McBride’s fist shot out of Isaac’s hand.

  “O’Toole, take a message to Dermott, will you, please? Tell him I’m fond of his Annie … and I’d like to dig my own initial into his royal Irish face.”

  Martin scampered behind O’Toole.

  Jamey didn’t harden to the First Dep. “You’ll have to forgive me, Chief. I don’t think I’ll relay that message. It’s a declaration of war, you see. And I might be caught in the middle. You’ll have to sing to Dermott y
ourself.”

  “I would, if you’d tell me where he is?”

  “That’s your problem, Chief. Dermott, he doesn’t like the notoriety. He’s in a bit of retirement now. But you might send him a postcard. If you could get the proper stamps.”

  O’Toole walked off, taking Martin by the hand.

  7

  ISAAC went to brood in his hotel. You needed some Celtic harp to unwind an Irishman’s words. Fucking O’Toole. Proper stamps? Retirement? Dermott had to be out of the country. And Martin was doing his trade for him, with O’Toole serving as the muscle. The Italian lads wouldn’t soil their fingers with black whores in the street. But not even O’Toole could fight off every nigger gang; there were plenty of “blues” that would have been willing to strangle pimps for nickels and dimes. They were all getting pieces of the pot. That was Dermott’s magic. Then why was he in such a shroud?

  The bum didn’t come out of his room. Knocks on the door couldn’t get him off his unmade bed. The worm itched at him and forced him to recognize a face. He had a visitor. Jenny Pears. She wasn’t sure it was Isaac until he put on another shirt. He began arranging pillows. She laughed at his pathetic urge to clean up four weeks of filth. She liked Isaac’s room.

  He tried to explain. “Have to live this way … on a heavy case.”

  “Why are you so skinny,” she said.

  “Jennifer, I was a fat man until a year ago. Had the thickest neck in Manhattan. But I was trying to hook a gang of thieves. The Guzmanns. I lived with them six months. Had to make them think I’d broken with the cops. But that was a smart family. I did their chores and they put a worm in my belly. And the worm’s been feeding off me ever since.”

  “Isaac, there are hospitals, you know. Laboratories that can shrink your worm, dissolve it, kill it, prevent it from growing new tails.”