El Bronx (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “Say nothing,” Bernardo said. “Do nothing. Just let the glass gun peek out of your coat. That’s all the eloquence we need.”

  “Bernardo, who are we tracking?”

  “A Domino with a blue mustache.”

  “That’s bad. Panther never goes anywhere without an army.”

  “Then it’s our rotten luck,” Bernardo said.

  They walked under the El to Shakespeare Avenue; Bernardo sang a few words inside a telephone booth, and a white Cadillac appeared. Bernardo entered the Cadillac without Abdul. Martin Lima, one of the Dominoes’ five ailing princes, sat on several cushions, with a pair of teen-aged girls in his lap. He had no bodyguards, only a driver with a Nighthawk cradled in his arms. The girls’ eyes began to flutter. They were barely old enough to have breasts and were the prince’s own personal crack babies, with brutal red lipstick … and Glocks strapped to their thighs. Bernardo felt like strangling Lima, but he couldn’t interfere in a prince’s sexual politics, particularly if the girls came from the Dominoes’ harem in Washington Heights.

  “Jefe,” Bernardo said, “forgive me, but I have to ask. The niñas on your lap, are they local?”

  “Dublin, I signed a treaty with you and the Jokers. I wouldn’t touch niñas from the Bronx … but is that why you called me? You becoming a chicken inspector for the Jokers?”

  Martin Lima was a fat boy with pockmarks on his face, a computer wizard from Fort Washington Avenue who liked to kill people and keep the Dominoes’ books on one floppy disc. He’d turned the Dominoes into a multimillion-dollar gang with Swiss bank accounts, while the Jokers struggled to hold onto their cash.

  “Jefe, you’ll have to give me the guy with the blue mustache.”

  “What’s his sin?”

  “He raped an idiota … one of ours.”

  Martin Lima bounced the crack babies on his lap, and Bernardo had to interpret this gesture: the prince was angry at Panther, angry at Bernardo, angry at himself.

  “If it’s true, Dublin, I’ll take care of it. I’m like King Solomon. I have my own tribunal. What’s the idiota’s name?”

  “Jefe, it’s Joker territory, and it has to be a Joker solution. That was part of our pact.”

  He brushed against one of the crack babies and pulled out the Glock from inside the strap on her thigh. Lima’s driver lunged against Bernardo with his Nighthawk, but he was a little too late. Bernardo socked him on the side of the head, and the driver started to groan. The second crack baby reached for her Glock, and Bernardo slapped her hand away.

  The prince was seething. “I made you rich … you cannot steal weapons from me in my own Cadillac.”

  “Jefe, what are you saying? I’m one of your loyal subjects. This gun has been blessed by a prince. I will blow out Panther’s brains, and you will be the real executioner.”

  “Dublin, the Jokers will starve without me. Your banking practices stink.”

  “We’re peasants. We never learned to handle money like a prince … your Dixie Cups weren’t supposed to sell in the schoolyards, and rape retarded girls.”

  “Panther isn’t a Dixie Cup. He’s my captain.”

  “That’s even worse, because his lack of respect came from you. Jefe, if you continue to break the hearts of our little mothers, I will find you and piss on your head in front of all the Dominoes. You’ll run to Santo Domingo to hide from the shame.”

  Bernardo got out of the car, blew kisses into the glass, and watched Martin Lima drive away. Abdul crept up behind him.

  “Take me to that fuck with the blue mustache.”

  They walked down the hill to Cromwell Avenue, where the Dominoes had established their own candy store on Joker land. Bernardo parked Abdul behind a lamppost and stepped into the candy store with the Glock wrapped in a handkerchief inside his pocket, while soldiers eyed him from the counter, Nighthawks in their hands. They all recognized Bernardo Dublin, the Bronx detective who’d made a treaty with their five princes. They couldn’t even question him. Bernardo was walking too fast. And why should they get rough? He was the nearest thing to royalty the Jokers had. Bernardo didn’t stop until he discovered the man in the blue mustache pondering a primitive slot machine. Martin Lima had swiped it from a smugglers’ warehouse in lower Manhattan and had given the machine and a bucket of money from all over the world to Panther’s candy store. But Panther, who was hairless except for his mustache, and had a slight hump, couldn’t play “La Bandida.” He tried to hypnotize the machine, put a spell on it with his milky eye, when Bernardo crept into Panther’s feeble field of vision.

  “Dublin, how’s my man?”

  Bernardo reached into the bucket, pulled out a coin, fed it into the machine, which lit up like a silver moon. He pulled on the lever, the wheels churned, and three painted oranges lined up in the window. La Bandida piped a little tune, and coins began to drop from its bowels into a metal tray.

  “You’re a bruja,” Panther said. “Only a witch could open up La Bandida and make her part with her money.”

  “Yeah,” Bernardo said. “I’m a bruja.” He’d played a similar bandit at the casino in Deauville. But none of the Dominoes had ever been to Deauville, and they couldn’t figure out that La Bandida would only feed on French coins.

  Panther turned his back, yawned, and Bernardo realized that the prince had never even bothered to warn him, hadn’t called the candy store. Bernardo swung him around delicately with one hand.

  “Panther, you shouldn’t have touched la idiota. She belongs to us.”

  And he glocked Panther, shot him in his milky eye. Panther’s head exploded. He crashed into La Bandida, and more coins spilled into the tray. His soldiers seemed perplexed. They looked at Panther, looked at Bernardo Dublin, listened to the music of La Bandida, watched that continuing shower of coins … as if Panther, dead or alive, had magicked the machine. They hadn’t quite recovered from their trance when Abdul leapt into the candy store with his glass gun. They dropped their own glass guns and pleaded with Bernardo.

  “Jefe, don’t kill us, please.”

  Bernardo smashed each of their Nighthawks against the counter, then he shoved the soldiers into the store’s tiny toilet, and warned them not to leave for half an hour. He wiped the Glock, left it on top of La Bandida, walked behind the counter, and made a chocolate ice cream soda for Abdul and himself. His hands were trembling. He drank the soda, ate some pretzel sticks, and marched to the motel with Abdul.

  His hands were still trembling. Bernardo wasn’t scared of his own skin. He’d gone into the candy store on Cromwell Avenue like any fucking warrior prepared to die. He stood under the shower. He was still shaking. He put on his pants and leather coat, got a little Polish vodka out of the fridge, and the trembling stopped. He turned around. She was standing near the mirror, wearing a velvet cloak, like a million dollars in a whores’ motel.

  “Fantômas,” she said.

  “Shut up.”

  “My Bronx baby is growing cross.”

  “It isn’t safe here … did Abdul let you in?”

  “Why shouldn’t he let me in? I’m one more piece of ass.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Then you shouldn’t live here, Bernardo. Like a vagabond. Come downtown and stay with me.”

  “Yeah. Marianna would love that. The killer cop who jumps into her mama’s pants.”

  “Marianna’s nuts about you. She wishes she could live inside my pants.”

  “Don’t say that. She’s not a puta.”

  “We’re all alike. Either angels or putas, aren’t we, my Latin lover?”

  “I’m half Irish,” Bernardo had to insist.

  “Then behave like an Irishman … put on your mask.”

  “No.”

  She started to undress, and Bernardo realized what all that trembling had been about. He didn’t want to go to hell without Clarice. The thought of not making love to her again in this world terrified him. He didn’t give a damn what he’d have to endure down below. Hot coals? Icicl
es on his ass? Rat’s piss in his vodka cup? As long as he had Clarice here, now.

  She swirled his vodka in her mouth. “Put on your mask.”

  “Then I might have to hurt you.”

  “I’ll take my chances, darling. Put on your mask.”

  He fished out the hangman’s hood from under his bed. He cursed the Big Guy who’d filled his brain with Fantômas. Sidel was always into masquerades. “There was a guy named Gurn,” Isaac once said. “A lowlife, an artillery sergeant in the Boer War, with black powder on his face. That was Fantômas’ first mask. He served under a nobleman, Lord Bentham, and fell in love with the nobleman’s young wife. A beautiful creature, dark or blond, who cares? She could sink a whole continent with her looks. The lord finds his lady with that lowlife, points a pistol at Lady Bentham’s heart. Gum had no choice. He springs on Lord Bentham, strangles him, and grows into that curious king of crime, the aristocrat without a family tree, the man who turned his own history into fire and smoke …”

  Bernardo had found the mask in the basement of a theatrical supply shop. There wasn’t a single lowlife cop in Isaac’s classes at the Academy who didn’t long for the same magic transformation, coupled with murder. The anonymous artillery sergeant couldn’t reinvent himself without taking the lady and strangling the lord.

  Bernardo was naked all of a sudden, shivering at the beauty of his Lady Bentham. How many of her lords would he have to kill?

  11

  There was a spooky feeling on Featherbed Lane. Alyosha couldn’t find one Dixie Cup. The streets were crystal clean, without a bubble pipe in anyone’s mouth burning little white rocks. The Dominoes didn’t cruise by in their Cadillacs. The traffic on the Cross Bronx seemed to mark its own quiet music, like drumbeats in the rain, only it wasn’t raining, and Alyosha had to wonder if some poor prick had confused ratland with paradise. And then he realized what the quiet was all about. He saw ten Dominoes, not Dixie Cups, but warlords with their regular colors, gray neckerchiefs and gold bracelets, grouped like Apaches on top of the hill, not those false Apaches from the Bronx brigade but red-blood Indians who could really make you suffer.

  Alyosha had nowhere to run, because ten other Dominoes had taken the street below him. And it wasn’t any war game. These Apaches had come for Alyosha. They must have wanted some kind of revenge on the Joker’s mural man. He didn’t cry for Paulito. Paulito was stuck in a hole. But Alyosha couldn’t imagine who would draw his own memorial. There wasn’t enough talent in the Bronx to render his dark blue eyes. Rest In Peace, Homey …

  The two bands arrived like a pair of pinchers, ready to squeeze Alyosha. Then a white Cadillac appeared out of its own crazy mirage, with the Domino flag hanging from the aerial: five black dots on a gray field. The door opened. Alyosha got inside with a couple of baby brujas who were already getting famous in El Bronx as gun molls; they would fire on cats and garbage cans while the white Cadillac cruised. But they didn’t seem too interested in the sights of Featherbed Lane. They grabbed Alyosha, kissed him, touched his dick.

  “Miranda, this one is cute. Are you sure he was a little puta at the boys’ prison?”

  “Sure I’m sure. He sucked every guard in the house.”

  The baby brujas giggled. And Alyosha was mortally wounded: he’d never gone near a guard … except when the older boys made him put on high heels and a dress.

  “I dunno,” said the second gun moll. “He don’ look like no fairy to me.”

  And Alyosha rolled among them, helpless in their battlewagon. They bounced across the little Washington Bridge into Domino country, and Alyosha had that awful fear that he was back at Spofford again, having to parade in front of the older boys. But Spofford was at the other end of the world, in Hunts Point, near Casanova Street, and Alyosha was heading toward Fort Washington Avenue, where the Dominoes had bought an abandoned supermarket and made it into their national headquarters.

  The Cadillac drove into a tunnel that led right inside the supermercado, which was one enormous room with a bowling alley, a luncheonette, a little red-light district where the gun molls could lie down with favored warlords, a dance floor, a drug factory, a bank with its own vault, a dormitory where the Dixie Cups slept, and five silver thrones for the gang’s five princes, but four of the princes must have been having their “periods,” because only one throne was occupied. Martin Lima sat on the middle throne, with his warlords and business associates and baby brujas.

  “Ah, maestro,” he said to Alyosha, “glad you could make it.”

  Alyosha didn’t know how to address a prince. He bowed, measured his words, and muttered, “How’s His Highness?”

  “High, man. Very high.”

  He handed Alyosha pieces of colored chalk and photographs of some mother in a blue mustache. “I mean, the Jokers can’t monopolize you, kid. Talent is talent. It has to be shared … I want you to do a portrait of Panther on my wall. I have the right to ask. He was butchered by your brother’s gang.”

  “But I need my paint bombs and a ladder.”

  “Nobody sprays paint in my supermercado. The cans could start a fire.”

  “Highness, I never painted indoors. I need natural light.”

  “We’re drug merchants. We never leave this building except for a crisis. You’ll have to live with our light … now begin!”

  Alyosha had the whole rear wall. He grabbed a very fat stick of yellow chalk and sketched Panther’s outline in five minutes flat. Then he reached across the wall and drew the brittle mountains of Washington Heights in the light of the moon. He applied the different colors, standing on his toes, chalked in Panther’s blue mustache, the white of his milky eye, the gray of his handkerchief, the rough black teeth of rooflines under a renegade moon. He’d mastered the properties of chalk, teaching himself on the spot how to make a color bleed, so the blue of Panther’s mustache could blend right into the atmosphere.

  “Perfect,” Martin Lima said. “Maestro, I’m touched that you could immortalize Panther like that … preserve his motherfucking essence, but you’re still a Joker, and I can’t forget that fact … Felipe, he’s all yours.”

  Alyosha couldn’t understand what Mouse’s cousin was doing at the supermercado. Felipe had come out of Spofford, come out of the Bronx, to work for the Dominicans. He was fifteen years old. He smiled at Alyosha, approached him with a tube of lipstick.

  “Jefe, I think I’ll decorate the puta’s mouth … then he can kiss all the boys and girls.”

  “What about the cucarachas?” one of the warlords shouted.

  “Yes, the cucarachas too.”

  And Alyosha’s premonition had been right. The supermercado was another Spofford. But he wasn’t going to kiss or be kissed. He lunged at Felipe, stabbed him in the eye with the stick of blue chalk.

  “Mama,” Felipe said, “I’m blind.”

  The warlords and the baby brujas fell on top of Alyosha, began to kick him, scratch him, bite his face, until a figure in a mustard-colored shirt pulled Alyosha out from under all those bodies. It was Richardson of the Bronx brigade. He wore a cowboy hat in the supermercado.

  Martin Lima shouted at him. “Brock, you’re interfering with a Domino operation.”

  “Yeah, but he’s my snitch, and I can’t afford to lose him.”

  “The maestro works for you?”

  “Everybody works for me, prince. You ought to know that.”

  “I don’t care,” Martin Lima said. “You’ll have to ransom him.”

  “I’ll ransom him with that,” Richardson said, dangling his handcuffs.

  “You threaten me, man, in my own living room?”

  “Believe what you want, prince, but I can have my whole brigade here in half an hour.”

  “No,” the prince said. “Never. They’re strictly Bronx.”

  “All they have to do is close their eyes and cross a river.”

  “Let them cross. You’re on my payroll. I can prove it with my own printout.”

  “Wrong,” Richardson said. �
�You’re one of my registered rats.”

  “Rat? I’ll fix you.”

  “Relax,” Richardson said. “You’re part of my manhunt, prince. We’re all trying to rid the Bronx of nefarious gangs like the Latin Jokers.”

  “Then how come the kid’s alive? His brother runs the Jokers.”

  “Wrong again. I run the Jokers. And Alyosha’s my little helpmate.”

  “That still doesn’t make you innocent … Bernardo killed my captain.”

  “Panther? You’re better off without him. And Bernardo had instructions from me.”

  “Are you crazy, man, to tell me this?”

  “Panther was stealing from you, prince. Look what I found … after I searched the candy store.”

  He tossed a small grocery bag packed with hundred-dollar bills into Martin Lima’s lap.

  “Dummy,” Richardson said, “the man had his own fucking bank inside the slot machine … he was a thief.”

  “He could have been holding that bag as part of a bigger payment.”

  “Correct. But the payment wasn’t for you, homey. It was for Mr. Brock Richardson of the Bronx brigade.”

  “Talk my language, man, or get out.”

  “He was ambitious. He wanted your throne. He was getting up a bundle to pay Bernardo …”

  “Pay him for what?”

  “To sock one into you.”

  “Liar,” Martin Lima said.

  Richardson took out his pocket tape recorder, switched it on, and half the supermercado heard Panther’s voice.

  “… I hate that fuck with the pockmarks. I get peanuts to do his dirty work. You wanna guess why all the other princes are on vacation?”

  “Turn it off,” the prince said.

  Richardson dropped the recorder into his coat, tugged on Alyosha’s sleeve, and left with him, while Martin Lima ranted into Richardson’s back.

  “Brock, nobody gave you or Dublin a license to hit my people …”

  Richardson threw Alyosha into his mustard-colored Ford and started to laugh.