El Bronx (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “Joey,” Bernardo said.

  “Jesus, kid. It’s like your bones are made of glass. I’m scared to pick you up. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  And Bernardo remembered the tale Isaac had told in class, how Fantômas had survived a terrible beating near London Bridge. Some crooked cops wanted to dispatch the king of crime, take on his infinite territories, become the new Fantômas. But the harder they kicked him, the quicker he rose; their very labor seemed to fuel Fantômas, and the crooked cops had to walk away. Fantômas found them, cut their throats.

  “Joey, I aint no glass man.”

  “Don’t talk,” Barbarossa said. “Your teeth are falling out.”

  “Let them fall.”

  Brock Richardson had gone to another inauguration, and Bernardo had to get there. “Mt. Eden Avenue,” he whispered in Barbarossa’s ear. Barbarossa wrapped him in the blanket he usually saved for Isaac Sidel, and drove Bernardo to Mt. Eden Avenue. Bernardo wouldn’t let another cop carry him up the stairs. He climbed, with both hands on the banister rail, arrived at Paulito’s door, entered, and found Paulito. The Joker’s general was sitting on the couch, with his hands in his lap, like he was going to church. But his eyes were swollen and there were deep red marks around his neck. The Bronx brigade had knocked him to the floor, strangled him, and then propped him on the couch, like a calling card.

  “Joey,” Bernardo said, “get him an ambulance, and then take me to Sidel.”

  “You’re going to the hospital, kid, after I attend to this.”

  “Fuck the hospital. I’m Fantômas,” Bernardo said and dropped right into the general’s lap.

  15

  The hospital had very strange pictures on the wall: men with muttonchops and high, starched collars, and Bernardo wondered if this hospital was also a museum. There was a bird outside his window. Bernardo saw grass, a strip of water, a fireboat, and he understood whose museum he was in. All the muttonchops were mayors out of the City’s past. Bernardo was in a back bedroom at Gracie Mansion, tucked away from ordinary traffic, the mayor’s secret guest.

  He had a hospital tray on his bed, with a glass of juice and some chocolate drink that was probably packed with protein. His mouth was too raw, he realized, to suck in solid food.

  There was a long velvet pull near his bed, like in an older time, when one of the muttonchops might have slept here or at another mansion, and Bernardo tugged at it, gave it a terrific yank, because Birdy hadn’t kept his promise and paralyzed him.

  The Big Guy came running with Barbarossa.

  “Boss, did you find Alyosha?”

  “You’re not allowed to talk. Your mouth is broken.”

  “Then Bernardo Broken Mouth is asking … where the fuck is Alyosha?”

  “I’ve been in the sky all afternoon searching for the kid. I scoured the Bronx with Joe. There wasn’t a sign of Alyosha.”

  “Boss, you want my opinion? You put too much faith in helicopters. You have to go on the ground.”

  “Shhh,” the Big Guy said. “I had the cook prepare you a tub of lime Jell-O. It’s soothing for the tonsils.”

  “I hate Jell-O. It’s for octopuses … where’s Paulito?”

  “The coroner has him.”

  “And I suppose the perp is a fucking mystery out of Fantômas.”

  “It’s no mystery to me,” Barbarossa said. “It has all the earmarks of the Bronx brigade.”

  “Then why don’t you arrest Richardson, close him down?”

  “Because then we’d have to arrest you, and Dad won’t listen. He thinks the Merliners would mourn you. It would leave a bad impression.”

  “And what do you think, Joey?”

  “I would have flopped you and the whole brigade months ago.”

  The Big Guy sipped from Bernardo’s juice. “I started that brigade when I was Commish. I handpicked every cop … knew half of them from the Academy.”

  “Like Birdy Towne and me.”

  “And what did both of you do?”

  “We started killing kids.”

  The Big Guy spilled juice on his pants. “Joey, he’s a Judas … I want him out of this room. Pack his bags and throw him to the dogs.”

  “Dad, he doesn’t have any bags.”

  “Bernardo, I trusted you, I brought you into my own brood. You were supposed to work with the gangs, calm them down, not annihilate them.”

  “Boss, it comes to the same thing.”

  “In your miserable dictionary, not in mine …”

  “We were everybody’s darlings for a little while. Remember that documentary on ABC about the brigade, our sports program, our record arrests? What did they call us, Isaac? Pioneers and saints.”

  “You were making progress … wasn’t he, Joey? I could feel the dent. The gangs were playing basketball with young cops, going to Yankee games together.”

  “And lighting up in the grandstands, doing dope.”

  “That was part of the recreation. Homicides were down sixteen percent. And then what happened?”

  “Reporters stopped coming to the Bronx.”

  “It’s not about popularity,” the Big Guy said. “It’s about kids and cops.”

  “But it was already too late. We set up phony drug deals, shot a couple of people. We were high morning and night. We’d invent a shitstorm and float out of it, bodies at our feet.”

  “And the gangs became your personal clay pigeons.”

  “Boss, it gets expensive to supply a whole brigade with grass. Richardson went into real estate, not to make a fortune, just to give us an edge. But prices in the Bronx kept going down and down, and we had to feed off the gangs …”

  “Gimme your shield,” the Big Guy said.

  Barbarossa had to interrupt him. “Dad, you already have it. I put it in your drawer. You were holding it for Bernardo.”

  “I’ll rip his face with it. I’ll scar the fuck … who bankrolled your little empire?”

  “Prince Martin Lima. Richardson would buy up abandoned buildings, rehab them, and Lima would shove in some of his own clients, but we still couldn’t collect the rent …”

  “Richardson’s another John Jacob Astor, huh? The biggest landlord in the Bronx.”

  “He started a corporation, Sidereal Ventures.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Sidereal, boss. It means blessed with stars, heavenly bodies. We all bought shares in Sidereal. I’m into Richardson for ninety or a hundred thou, and I’m not even sure how much he owes the prince. But the prince needed more territories for his product …”

  “And you offered him the Bronx. You cleaned out the gangs so his Dixie Cups would have a free ride.”

  “I’m still poor as a mouse.”

  “Poorer,” the Big Guy said. “Because I’ll sink you, Bernardo, without a pension, without your Glock.”

  “Boss, can I keep the mask?”

  “Joey, let’s smother him, please. I’ll put the pillow over his head. You hold his feet.”

  “Dad, he was your prize pupil.”

  “It doesn’t mean a thing. Bernardo betrayed us …”

  “Then ask him about Clarice.”

  The Big Guy patted his wet pants. “It’s not my business if he wanted to throw Clarice off her balcony.”

  “Ask him, Dad.”

  “All right … Bernardo, who hired you to play Fantômas?”

  “Richardson. He was acting as the prince’s agent.”

  “I must be dense,” the Big Guy said. “What does a Dominican druglord have to do with Clarice?”

  “The prince is multinational. He has accounts everywhere. Switzerland. Florida. Texas. Brazil. And one of his hotshot attorneys is J. Michael Storm.”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” the Big Guy said. “J. Michael was a Maoist. He wouldn’t go to bed with Martin Lima.”

  “It aint illegal. J. Michael moved the prince’s money around, and the prince was doing him a little favor, helping him get rid of Clarice. Or maybe he thought it was a favor. I didn�
��t discuss it with J. Richardson told me to get her out of Manhattan, and he didn’t seem to care if she had to lie down in a wooden box.”

  “Why didn’t he ask Birdy to do it? Birdy would have been a little more discreet. Clarice had never seen his face.”

  “But I knew the lay of the land. I tried to scare her … she laughed. I made love to her in the mask. That’s when Marianna came in.”

  “And all the Merliners live happily ever after … except for Alyosha.” The Big Guy nudged his son-in-law. “Joey, we have work to do. I’m dismantling the Bronx brigade. It was my dreamchild. I’m dismantling it.”

  “The two of us, Dad, against Richardson’s Apaches.”

  “Didn’t Fantômas take over the British police, turn it on its head, lead his own false attack against himself? We’ll do the same to Richardson.”

  “And what about Bernardo?”

  “Leave him here. He’s my prisoner,” the Big Guy said, and vanished from the bedroom with Joe Barbarossa, and Bernardo had to imagine Fantômas in muttonchops, like the mayors of New York, impersonating some police general, getting his own cops dizzy, exhausting them with chases across the roofs against a Fantômas who was right among them, at their very middle.

  16

  They couldn’t find a single Apache. Richardson had forsaken his offices near the roof of the Bronx County Building. Isaac stared at mustard-colored walls and the lone secretary Richardson had left behind.

  “He’s incommunicado, Mr. Mayor. Out in the field. On a very big case. Any messages?”

  “Yes. Tell Brock I love him, love him very much.”

  They stopped across the street, at the Concourse Plaza, where Maris and Mantle had lived with the rest of the New York Yankees, where Harry Truman had once taken a nap. It was now an old-age home, with chicken wire embedded in every window to discourage cat burglars and thieves. The mayor had promised to meet with certain pensioners who’d formed their own Isaac Sidel fan club. They knew Isaac’s history better than he did, and they sat bundled down in sweaters and revisited his life.

  “Isaac, tell the truth, your biggest satisfaction, after Marilyn the Wild, wasn’t winning elections or catching crooks, or even riding in your helicopter.”

  “My courses at the Academy, that’s what I miss the most. I feel deprived without a classroom, condemned to some strange planet where no one has ever heard of blackboards and chalk.”

  “What’s so special about teaching cops?”

  “Ah, but they weren’t cops in my classroom. They didn’t even wear a gun. We didn’t talk about crime scenes and medical examiners and morgues.”

  “Then what did you talk about?”

  “Metaphysics,” Isaac said. “All the laws that govern your ability to live inside your own skin.”

  “Laws,” said a retired judge. “If we knew the laws, we wouldn’t be at the Concourse Plaza. We’d be sailing on a yacht with other millionaires … and your cops wouldn’t be cops. They’d throw off their uniforms and move to Wall Street.”

  “And bore themselves to death. They’d be back in my classroom after six months. Cops have a particular rush, a hot melody that invades their blood, and they can’t find it anywhere else … ask Joe.”

  The pensioners looked at Barbarossa, recognized him as the cop who’d lived like an outlaw until he married Marilyn the Wild.

  “Dad’s right,” Barbarossa said. “I’d get lonesome without the street.”

  A man in old clothes appeared with a box camera. He stooped around the pensioners, photographed them with Isaac and Barbarossa. It was Abner Gumm, the Bronx historian. Isaac wanted to smile and welcome Gumm, but he couldn’t. His natural nosiness got in the way, made him realize that Gumm was no accident. The Bronx historian had followed him here.

  “Dad,” Barbarossa whispered, “that’s the Shooter. I met him in Bernardo’s bungalow. Said he’d been to Gracie Mansion. I think he’s full of shit. He comes running with a baseball bat after three Dixie Cups try to off Ber—”

  “Joey, whose signature was on the bat?”

  “What’s the difference, Dad? My story isn’t about baseball.”

  They had to stop whispering in front of the pensioners and Abner Gumm. Isaac fielded questions about the baseball war in the Bronx, but he couldn’t fool his own fan club. His face had turned dark.

  “Your Honor, don’t deny us Yankee Stadium. It’s the last excursion we have left. All we have to do is walk down the hill.”

  “I can’t promise when the Yankees will play again.”

  “Don’t promise. Just arrest all the players, force them to get into a uniform.”

  “But they haven’t committed a crime.”

  “Yes they have. They took our pleasure away.” Isaac had tea and cookies with his fan club. But the cookies couldn’t compare to Marianna’s mocha chip and peanut brittle. He had to find Alyosha, or she’d never bake again.

  Abner cornered him near a window. Isaac had to watch the world through chicken wire. But that imprisoned glass seemed to soothe him more than the picture of Hell Gate he had from his bedroom window.

  “Hello, Shooter,” Isaac said. “Did you have a chance to look at those murals I told you about? On Featherbed Lane.”

  “I’ve been busy doing portraits,” Gumm said. “I’m studying senior citizens throughout the Bronx.”

  “That’s kind of you,” Isaac said. “Are you fixing our future, Ab? Are we gonna be seniors together at the Concourse Plaza? I can’t wait.”

  Isaac hugged the members of his fan club and left with Barbarossa.

  “He’s spying on us for Richardson, isn’t he, Dad? I could throw him off the roof.”

  “And leave the Bronx without an historian?”

  They trudged down the hill into that heartland of housing projects and half-burnt buildings that had become a new kind of calvary for the Bronx. The poor were firebombed out of their homes, and that’s how the Latin Jokers had been born, as baby arsonists for landlords who wanted to collect insurance money on buildings they no longer cared about. But the Jokers, under Bernardo Dublin, had imaginative minds. They weren’t so eager to watch the Bronx burn. “We aint cannibals,” Bernardo told the gang. “If we’re gonna burn, let’s burn other people’s shit, not ours.” And the Jokers put on their handkerchief hats and started hunting the landlords, threatened to firebomb them out of their own little mansions in the North Bronx unless the landlords paid the Jokers a monthly stipend. “College money,” Bernardo called it. That’s what he told Isaac when they first met. The Big Guy had come to speak at Bernardo’s high school. And Bernardo, who was a terrible truant, attended classes that day. He was curious to hear a police chief. He’d made a tiny smoke bomb, a “toy” to blow Isaac out of the auditorium, but Isaac took all his confidence away. “Claim the Bronx,” Isaac said. “It’s your borough.”

  Isaac remembered the tall, muscular kid who came up to him after his speech. They had coffee together at a Bronx diner, and Isaac had a revelation: this kid ought to be a cop …

  He crossed the railroad tracks with Barbarossa, entered Claremont Village, the most notorious housing project in the world, where warlords patrolled the roofs with assault rifles and enormous searchlights on wheels, without the usual hierarchy of a gang. They weren’t vulnerable to any outside influence. Dixie Cups never came here. These warlords would have eaten up Richardson’s Apaches and Prince Martin Lima. They had their own anarchic order that didn’t relate to the rest of New York. They feuded among themselves, shot at each other from the roofs, carried crazy banners and flags. They didn’t need murals to memorialize their dead, and they didn’t need the City’s services. They buried fallen warlords in the basement and never bothered about a death certificate. They seemed to have a fondness for Sidel, who hadn’t disturbed them when he was Commish. It would have taken an army to unhouse the warlords, and even if Isaac could have found that army, half the women and children of Claremont Village would have been killed.

  He stood in Claremont’s co
mmon garden, which was cluttered with debris, and waited until one of the searchlights blinked at him, and then he rode up to the roofs with Barbarossa.

  “Dad, it could get delicate. These birds don’t know me.”

  “Ah, you’re family. They wouldn’t touch a hair on your head.”

  Isaac had already been up to the roofs, but it was Joe’s first trip, and he kept looking at the warlords’ little wonderland, a beehive of glass huts where they could sunbathe and sell drugs. The warlords had built a curious Copacabana above the dunes of the Bronx, a bone-dry beach whose surface was made of cement.

  The oldest warlord on the roof was African Dave, who was twenty-nine, like Bernardo, and had been at Claremont Village most of his life. He’d survived because he had a modicum of manners: he wouldn’t shine his searchlight in another warlord’s face. He’d been wounded six or seven times, a white man who wore an Afro and lived around Latinos and blacks.

  “Isaac, is that your son-in-law who still holds the record for selling more cocaine than any other cop, dead or alive?”

  “That’s him,” Isaac said. “Barbarossa.”

  Dave shook Barbarossa’s hand. He had battle scars under his eyes and mouth. He could have been a phantom who’d come walking out of a fire.

  “I think I’ll move all my shit,” Dave said. “I’m sick of the landscape. Look what I have to wear?” He tugged at his fiberglass vest. “How long can I stay bulletproof?”

  “Where are you going, Dave?”

  “To Borgia Butler.”

  It was another housing project, across the road from Claremont Village, but Borgia Butler was much more open to a police attack. It didn’t have the same feeling of infinite space.

  “You wouldn’t last a month, Dave. You’d have constant power failures. I ought to know. I monkeyed with the generators when I was Commish. We intended to hit Claremont Village through Borgia Butler, but I canceled the strike. Too many civilians would have been clopped in the crossfire.”