They were Irish hags from Clonmel, Wicklow, and Dun Laoghaire. Annie was drinking coffee with them. Isaac approached that enclave of boxes. Annie’s legs were crossed. Her brow wrinkled up when Isaac’s shadow fell on her. The three hags said hello. Annie didn’t have to raise her eyes; she could tell from the persistence of his shadow who it was.
“You’re standing in my sunlight, Father Isaac. Do me a favor and shove your ass a bit.”
The hags had a stove in their fort put together from pieces of tin. They were baking sweet potatoes in the stove, and they offered Isaac one. He couldn’t hold the potato. He had to slap it and push the potato from hand to hand. Annie laughed at his clumsy routine. She was beginning to like him all over again. Finally he gobbled the bark off the potato and chewed the inside. It was an inherited trait. His crazy mother also loved sweet potatoes. She had a junk shop downtown, and she slept in it with her Arab boyfriend Abdul. Then a gang of kids beat her up. She lay in a coma for months before she died. Those kids had some wild grievance against Isaac, and they got at him through his mother. He was a dumb prick with a worm in him and a host of scars that stayed soft and wet. He bumbled through the City now like a wounded bear. Who was Isaac? The worm, or the bear that grew around it?
“Jamey’s dead. Some people kicked him in an alley.” Annie blinked at Isaac. “How do you know?”
“I could take you to the morgue and let you have a look … they didn’t leave him much of a face.”
“Jamey’s killers, were they little people with brooms in their hands?… then they work for the Fisherman.” She couldn’t say Coote, Coote, because she’d promised the king never to utter that name. “He’s an old man with high boots. He owns a house on a yellow lake. If you get up early in the morning, you can watch the salmon jump.”
“Did they have a falling out, Dermott and the Fisherman? Is that why O’Toole got killed?”
No matter how many times he cut her, she wouldn’t give her man’s secrets away. She’d mourn for the donkey without telling Isaac. “Don’t fuck with the old man,” she said. “You’ll end up with a salmon in your mouth.”
The girl spoke in riddles that Isaac couldn’t connect. He’d have drawn her out of that enclave, removed her from the hags, but she might lift those skirts and show her quim to Ninth Avenue. Isaac couldn’t risk that.
“Go to Castledermott,” she said. “You can visit the yellow lake. If you pee in the water, God forbid. You’ll murder all the fish.”
He left Annie muttering and said goodbye to the three hags. His “angels” were across the street, watching Annie from the inside deck of a fruit and vegetable market. They were unfamiliar boys. His whole Department was shifting under him. Couldn’t he get two fucking “angels” that he could recognize and trust? He’d have to call the new Headquarters, demand cops with kinder faces, like Manfred Coen. His “angels” were turning hard on Isaac.
22
HE was beginning to shy away from Centre Street. He couldn’t think with an army of plasterers droning under his corner room, tearing down walls to build a culture house for Rebecca Karp. They would bury Isaac under a curtain of dust. He’d have to spend his days with a handkerchief over his eyes. Sam was fucking him. But Isaac didn’t intend to yodel in front of City Hall. Whatever the Mayor promised, whatever the Mayor swore, Becky Karp and her cultural committee would bump him into the street.
Isaac went to his hotel. The pimps were in a somber mood. They shouted at their black mamas. Younger “brides” were coming in, and most of them weren’t black. They were runaways from Sioux City, Bismarck, Pierre, and Great Falls, little snow queens, white girls who couldn’t have been more than twelve, though their bodies seemed burnt-out. Isaac had a maddening drive in him to arrest every pimp at the hotel and bash them on the skull. These ancient young girls belonged in an orphanage, not a brothel. They were recruits from the prostitution mills of Minneapolis and St. Paul. But if Isaac revealed himself, if he came down on the pimps like a hammer, he’d lose his status as a bum. He wouldn’t be able to wander through the hotel, half invisible, an old crock with black shit on his face and his fly unbuttoned.
Still, it hurt him to be near those girls and do nothing for them. They had the mousy complexions of frightened, wingless bats who couldn’t stand the light. They thrived in darker places. The girls wore sunglasses inside the hotel. Isaac could hear them walk the corridors in their platform shoes. Was it Dermott or Sweet Arthur Greer who first made the Minneapolis Connection? Girls with pink eyes, skin that bruised at the touch of a finger. It was a monstrous imprisonment. Arthur and the king had helped transfer Isaac’s hotel into a boardinghouse for squirrely twelve-year-olds.
He couldn’t get to Dermott, so Isaac would have to try Sweet Arthur again. He jumped on the phone to round up detectives for a raid. He would destroy Arthur’s penthouse if the “blues” didn’t break that Minneapolis Connection and find a better home for these girls. His deputies had to interrupt him. “Isaac, there isn’t an Arthur anymore.” The “friend” of all Manhattan pimps had jumped from his penthouse roof.
“When did it happen?”
“This afternoon.”
“Was he pushed?”
“Isaac, what do you mean? Arthur was alone. We checked with the doormen. They swear no one came up to the penthouse today.”
“Dummies,” Isaac said, “who gives a shit what a doorman swears? Doormen can tell lies. Like everybody else.”
His own inspectors turned to imbeciles when Isaac wasn’t around to stroke their wooden heads. Arthur wasn’t the type to kill himself. He loved his penthouse too much. He’d been a hoodlum since the age of nine. He wouldn’t have let a stranger close enough to shove him off a roof. He was with a “landsman” when he died. It was a familiar face that killed Arthur Greer.
Isaac wondered about that familiar face. He was being followed in the street. He’d had the same shadow a week ago. It was that ex-cop, Morton Schapiro, who used to fly from precinct to precinct in the Bronx. Captain Mort was supposed to be working for Arthur Greer. Isaac banged him into a doorway and grabbed Schapiro by the throat. “Your boss is dead. Schmuck, did you kill Arthur Greer?”
He seemed indignant, Captain Mort. “Isaac, let go of me. I got nothin to do with that boogie pimp. Honest to God. I have a kite for you … from Mangen.”
Dennis Montgomery Mangen was the Special State Pros. The Governor had appointed him to ferret out corruption everywhere in New York. But Mangen was on a holy mission to clean up the City Police. The mention of his name could scare any cop.
“Mangen wants to see you.”
Isaac still had Schapiro by the throat. “Are you one of Dennis’ shoofly boys?”
“Yeah, I work for Mangen.”
“Tell him I don’t have time for him.”
“Isaac, that aint too smart.”
Mangen had his own investigators, his own stool pigeons, his own grand jury. He could slap an indictment on you faster than “Hizzoner” could blow his nose.
“Listen,” Isaac said. “I don’t like Dennis sending shooflies out to sit in my pants. If he wants to see me, he can come to my hotel.”
“You’re joking,” Schapiro said. “Mangen doesn’t go into the shithouses.”
Isaac gave Captain Mort an extra squeeze on the throat. Then he threw him out of the doorway and went back to his hotel. Mangen appeared in fifteen minutes. He was much younger than Isaac, but they had things in common: Marshall Berkowitz and Columbia College. Mangen was another one of Marshall’s protégés. He came to police work after Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. He was a tall, pugnacious Irishman who kept his old, battered “skeleton keys” to Joyce. He wore a coat with a fur collar in the middle of September. He sat with Isaac on Isaac’s bed. The bum had no chairs in his room.
“Isaac, your Department stinks, right from the top.”
Isaac smiled.
“I’m not talking about you,” Mangen said. “It’s Tiger John I want.”
“Tiger John? The Tige
r’s pretty dumb for a Police Commissioner.”
“I agree. But he still gets a nickel for every whore that has a pair of legs.”
“Dennis, I’ve been scrounging at this hotel for three rotten months. I’ve watched the pimps and their women … the porno shops … the love parlors … and I never sniffed Tiger John.”
“He doesn’t come uptown to grab his nickels. He can sit at Headquarters. Tiger John owns a piece of the trade. He has nineteen different bank accounts … and aliases to go with them. You’d get a kick out of John’s aliases. They have a deeper imagination than John himself. The accounts are in small bundles, that’s true. But they add up to a hundred and fifteen thou.”
“Dennis, if you’re so sharp, tell me how much I have lying around …”
“You,” Mangen said, “you’re a poor man. You have nine hundred dollars spread in three accounts.”
“I didn’t think I owned that much,” Isaac said. “I wouldn’t care if Tiger John had himself a million … how do you connect his nineteen bankbooks with the whoring business?”
“Isaac, I can’t give my sources away.”
Mangen always had his “sources.” He was known for the rats he kept on his payroll. If he couldn’t buy information from you, he could bring you in front of his grand jury. A “call” from Mangen was enough to ruin a man’s career. He would dishonor judges and cops, and make it difficult for bank managers to survive. But his “sources” were tainted with hysteria. A bank manager would announce whatever Dennis wanted to hear. He ran his two floors at the World Trade Center like a Gestapo jailhouse. Assistant prosecutors would bark behind locked doors, while you stood in the corridors waiting to be let in, with closed-circuit television cameras blinking pictures of your face from inside Mangen’s walls.
“Dennis, if you chew off the Tiger’s knees, you’ll get flak from Sam. They were boys together in some Irish county. Sam’s getting popular in his old age. If he gives a cry, you’ll feel it. The whole Trade Center could begin to rock.”
“Let me worry about Sam,” Mangen said. “Just help me out with Tiger John.”
“Don’t mistake me for one of your shooflies. Me and the Tiger never had much in common. We avoid each other whenever we can … why did you hire Captain Mort? He may be a good legman, but he’s a lousy cop.”
“Morton’s all right. He does favors for me from time to time.”
“But I don’t like to have him in my cuffs.”
“Why? I put him there to protect your life.”
“Who’s trying to kill me?”
“Tiger John. He got to Sweet Arthur, and he’ll get to you.”
Isaac looked at Mangen with a bum’s heavy eyes. The worm was waking up. That creature churned in Isaac’s belly. “I thought Arthur jumped off his roof.”
“He didn’t jump. He was pushed.”
Mangen had more sense than Isaac’s own blue-eyed boys. But he was a little warped on the subject of Tiger John.
“Dennis, did you ever hear of a guy called the Fisherman?”
Mangen said, “No. Who is he?”
“I’m not sure. He’s supposed to be partners with Dermott Bride.”
“That one. He’s a thug … and a police spy. He puts out for every cop in Manhattan and the Bronx.”
“That’s strange,” Isaac said. “He never put out for me.”
“The Tiger kept him from you … he owns Dermott Bride. And they’ll fix you the way they fixed Arthur and Tiny Jim O’Toole.”
“O’Toole was Dermott’s man,” Isaac said.
“That doesn’t matter. The cunts know I’m onto their scam … they’ll try to knock out every trail they left on Whores’ Row. Isaac, you’re a nuisance for them. They don’t like the idea of having a commissioner in their neighborhood, pretending to be some kind of bum. They’d blow you away if I didn’t have Mort watching out for your health.”
The loose hairs on Isaac’s mattress must have gotten to Mangen. “We’re an odd lot,” he said. “You, me, and Dermott. We all flew out of Dean Berkowitz’s skull. The only fathers I had were Marsh and Leopold Bloom. Scan one line of Ulysses with Marshall Berkowitz and you can become the best prosecutor in the world … his wife ran away. Poor Marsh. It’s his third marriage. Did you ever meet Sylvia?”
“Once or twice,” Isaac said.
“She’s a tart, if you ask me. I promised Marsh to help him find her, but the woman’s disappeared.”
What could Isaac say? That he was hiding her in his flat on Rivington Street? He was giving Sylvia the chance to reconsider her marriage. The First Dep hadn’t humped her since his days at the Shelbourne Hotel. That much was true. Mangen got off Isaac’s bed. The fur on his coat stood crookedly around his neck.
“Isaac, whatever happened to that sweetheart of yours? Coen. Manfred Coen.”
“He died on me,” Isaac said. “Last year.”
“He was a nice boy. Mr. Blue Eyes.”
Mangen left, and Isaac heard a great clumping of feet on the stairs. The Special Prosecutor hadn’t come to Isaac without his army of shooflies. He probably had men like Captain Mort stationed on every landing. Dennis was an “angel” with fur on his shoulders. The schmuck thought he was keeping Isaac alive.
Mangen shouldn’t have mentioned Sylvia and Marsh. The worm burrowed with its armored heads, skewering Isaac. He walked out, went around the block to shake off Mangen’s shooflies, and took a cab down to Rivington Street.
It was past dinner time on the Lower East Side. The knish stores had begun to close. You couldn’t even get fried bananas, or yellow rice. Puerto Ricans, Haitians, and Jews were going home to their television sets. Isaac had no expectations that Sylvia would feed him and the worm. He was just looking in on Marshall’s wife.
Isaac saw a cop’s uniform on his chair. Sylvia was in bed with a patrolman from Elizabeth Street. Isaac had worked that precinct once. All the good, tough cops grew out of Elizabeth Street. You had to mend the little wars between a hundred different societies, gangs, and gambling clubs that surrounded the Elizabeth Street station. It was like being the white father in a cranky piece of Shanghai. Isaac was loved and feared on Elizabeth Street long before he became the First Dep. He wasn’t wanton with his knuckles. If Isaac busted your head, it had to be something you deserved. He would protect small shopkeepers from rapacious cops and kids without asking for a free bowl of rice. He was Isaac the Pure. But that was twenty-five years ago.
This patrolman was sleeping off his tour of duty, “cooping” in Isaac’s bed. Sylvia had opened her eyes. She wasn’t disturbed at the prospect of a bear in the room. She pointed to the sleeping cop. “That’s William.”
“I wouldn’t want to wake the boy,” Isaac said.
“Don’t be silly. Stay awhile. William never gets up this early. Isaac, would you like a cup of tea?”
“No thanks,” he said, his stomach growling for ham, cheese, lettuce, mustard, sweet Seckel pears.
“Then get out of your clothes, for God’s sake.”
“Sylvia,” Isaac said. “William might not go for that.”
“That’s William’s problem … not ours. Isaac, you look pale to me. Don’t wait too long … you could freeze in your pants.”
What the hell? Why couldn’t Isaac be hugged near a sleeping cop? He’d had so many disappointments in the past few days. Green-eyed Jenny was having his child without him. O’Toole was beaten to death. Whore children were invading his hotel. Rebecca Karp had kissed Mayor Sam and secured a lease to Isaac’s building. Annie Powell sat with three Irish witches in a paper fort, and wouldn’t even nod to Isaac. Now Mangen pestered him with stories of Tiger John. The stories made no sense. Tiger John was Sam’s creation. He didn’t have the balls to push around a squad of killers from 1 Police Plaza. It had to be someone else.
The bear undressed and climbed in with Sylvia and the sleeping cop. William moaned from his corner of the bed. The cop was having a nightmare. He muttered, “Mama, mama,” and pulled most of the blanket on top of hi
m. Part of his leg was exposed. The skin was bitten down near the shank, and the calf muscles seemed to twist into the bone. The cop must have had rickets as a baby. Isaac entered Sylvia. Three in a bed. Three in a bed. She clutched his back and moaned louder than the cop. Isaac was in the middle of a slow despair. Men were dying around him. The Special Pros had more of a grip on the murders attached to Whores’ Row than Isaac could ever have from his stinky hotel.
23
THE bear had a troubled time. He couldn’t tell where he was. Then he remembered that Sylvia lay between him and William the cop. The bear was still on Rivington Street, hugged by Sylvia Berkowitz in his own bed. Images of Marshall, Mangen, and Manfred Coen crept into Isaac. The worm chewed off lumps of him. His misery was complete.
He dressed without disturbing Sylvia and the cop. He watched the two bodies rub and make a creaky music. He wasn’t jealous of the way Sylvia turned from Isaac’s empty spot and reached for William in her sleep. Isaac had to get out of there.
He walked to Centre Street. Becky’s carpenters wouldn’t be biting into walls at two A.M. The culture committee had made enormous progress in a week. The bastards had reshaped the ground floor. They were grooming the old Headquarters for a party that would celebrate the beginning of Becky’s lease. The pols admired her. She’d stolen a building from the City of New York and was ready to evict her only tenant, Isaac the Pure. All the big-time Democrats would come out for Becky Karp. Rebecca was contemptuous of Isaac. She sent out invitations for her party to everyone but him.
The phone was ringing in Isaac’s office. Son of a bitch. “Hello,” Isaac said, “hello, hello.” It was one of Sammy’s live-in aides. His Honor was missing from Gracie Mansion again. Isaac shouted into the phone. “Get Becky Karp. She owes the City a favor or two. She can grab a nightgown to cover her tits and go looking for Sam.”
His bitchiness began to gnaw at him. The Mayor was an old man. He’d had problems with his memory before. He could have an attack of senility and lose his way in the streets. Isaac took a cab up to Cherokee Place, where he’d found His Honor strolling in his pajamas two months ago. But there was no Mayor Sam on Cherokee Place. He wondered if His Honor could have gone to an Irish club in the area. Sammy must have belonged to twenty of them. His favorite was the Sons of Dingle Bay, on First Avenue. The Sons had installed a sauna on the premises, because His Honor loved the idea of a Finnish bath. The club wasn’t dead at three in the morning. Isaac saw pecks of light behind the screens in the ground-floor window. He had to knock and shout his name to get in. “Isaac Sidel … I’m here for Mayor Sam.” A few retired cops were playing poker in the game room. Isaac didn’t stall. He plunged into the sauna with all his clothes on. The Mayor sat on the sauna’s lower deck with a towel under his bum to protect him from the heat of the wood. He was with his toy commissioner, Tiger John. Two old men in a room built like a large dollhouse with rocks burning on a crib that was placed in the corner. “Laddie,” the Mayor said, “you’ll sweat like a pig if you don’t make yourself a little more naked.” The Tiger agreed. Their raw bellies moved up and down. They didn’t seem surprised to have Isaac in their room.
Secret Isaac Page 14
