Montezuma's Man (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  But Alicia wouldn’t listen. She hurled a lamp at Isaac, who ducked but couldn’t get out of her way. She kicked Isaac, clawed at his mask.

  “Help me, will ya, Joey?”

  “Ma’am, don’t struggle,” Barbarossa said. “You’ll make it worse for the boy.”

  His voice must have calmed Alicia, who stopped trying to scratch Sidel. Raoul took Barbarossa’s hand.

  “Joey,” Isaac said, starting to panic. “Should we pack something? A little suitcase with shirts and underpants?”

  “No, boss. Let’s get out of here … ma’am, I wouldn’t scream, because we might get nervous and take it out on Raoul.”

  “I won’t scream,” Alicia said.

  Her sad eyes were a fucking heartbreaker. Barbarossa wanted to touch her hair. “Boss, let’s go.”

  He clomped down the stairs with Raoul, who was wearing a polo shirt. Isaac was behind them, like a ragged boy in a black stocking. The Twins got into the car with Raoul and took off their masks.

  “I’m Isaac,” Isaac said. “Remember me? We met at a party once.”

  “I remember.”

  “We can stop for some candy … but not in this neighborhood.”

  “Boss, don’t sweet-talk him. Leave the kid alone.”

  The three of them sat up front in Isaac’s black Dodge.

  “Boss, you shouldn’t have kidnapped the fucking kid.”

  “Don’t curse in front of Raoul.”

  “I’m not cursing. Jerry’s gonna shit a red-hot brick.”

  “I want him to.”

  “Your daughter’s out there in the dark. Your brother’s sitting up on Indian Road. They’re easy targets.”

  “Jerry wouldn’t touch them. He’s not like that.”

  “But he’ll let you have Raoul, huh?”

  “He knows my limits.”

  “Yeah, your limits. You steal a kid, you frighten his mother.”

  “I have to flush out Jerry, get him to the table. Raoul’s the only card I have.”

  “Isaac Sidel, champion of all the kids, crabbing about schools when you’re a kidnapper. I’m voting for Rebecca Karp, not you. Boss, you’re the Devil.”

  “All right, I’m the Devil. But at least I’ll learn from Jerry what this dance of the dolls is about.”

  “Where do we go now?” Barbarossa asked.

  “I dunno. I thought Raoul could stay with you.”

  “At the pingpong club?”

  “Why not? You could teach him the game.”

  “Boss, I’m not Blue Eyes.”

  “It has nothing to do with Coen,” Isaac said.

  “Well, I’m not dying at Coen’s table.”

  “Die?” Isaac muttered, his face a mottled color.

  “What if Jerry comes to the club with his shooters?”

  “Then you give him back Raoul.”

  He didn’t even have time to rip off any Colombian dealers. He was saddled with the kid. And Barbarossa had bills to pay. He didn’t want Rosalind thrown out of Riverdale. He sold his last kilo to a young wizard on Wall Street. The wizard was twenty-one years old. He could predict the rise and fall of companies by staring into a screen.

  “I’m hungry. I need more blow,” the wizard said.

  “You’ll have to wait.”

  “I could try another snowman,” the wizard said.

  “I’m bonded,” Barbarossa said. “As reliable as the American eagle. I never disappointed a customer in my life. Don’t blame me if you run around the corner and get yourself killed.”

  “Joey,” the wizard said. “I can’t wait too long.”

  But Barbarossa couldn’t get back into the business. He cleared off the envelopes and files from Coen’s table and started to play pingpong with Raoul. He had to wear his holster, because he couldn’t be sure who might sneak up on him at Schiller’s club.

  “Would you like to call your mother, Raoul?”

  “After the game.”

  The entire spectators’ gallery had fallen in love with Raoul. “A refined boy,” they said. “Who’s his father?” But Schiller seemed to know. He had the natural telepathy of a man who lived all day under artificial light.

  “Sidel got you into this,” Schiller said to Joe. “Raoul is Jerry DiAngelis’ secret son, isn’t he?”

  “Not so loud,” Barbarossa said.

  “Why do you follow the whims of that gangster Sidel?”

  “Isaacs the PC,” Barbarossa said.

  “He’s still a gangster. He always was.”

  “I work for him, Schiller. I’m his man.”

  “That’s no excuse,” Schiller said, and he boiled string beans and cabbage for Raoul on his private burner at the rear of the gallery, while Barbarossa gave lessons to the kid, taught him the rudiments of pingpong.

  The club was very quiet. There were no calls from One PP asking Joe to drive Sidel to the borders of Brooklyn and the Bronx. It was Schiller who discovered the boy’s interest in science. Raoul was a fanatic about space travel. He understood how you could get lost in a black hole and never come out, how you could grow younger all the time if you traveled far enough and fast enough in one direction.

  “Raoul,” Barbarossa said, “what if you got to the end of the line, the fucking edge of the cosmos?”

  “There is no edge,” Raoul told him, as if he were talking to a child.

  “You wouldn’t bump into a wall of gas?”

  “Gases don’t have walls,” Raoul said. “They have vapors which sometimes seem like a wall.”

  “Ah, so here we are, living in a cradle that never ends.”

  “It will end,” Raoul recited to Joe. “The universe will stop growing and everyone who’s alive will be squeezed to death.”

  “A sad story,” Barbarossa said.

  He was at the table, hitting a pingpong ball with Raoul, when a woman walked into the club. She looked strange and not so strange, like the business of matter and antimatter that Raoul had told him about. Everything in the universe had its own fucking twin, according to Raoul. The woman had frizzy hair. It was Isaac’s lost girl, Marilyn the Wild.

  She looked at Barbarossa with his holster and pingpong paddle. “Blue Eyes?” she said.

  Barbarossa put down his paddle. “I’m not Coen.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must have been delirious … a boy I once knew died at that table. And I was on some kind of pilgrimage.”

  “You mean this table is like a shrine.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Exactly. And he wore a holster while he played.”

  “But not a white glove.”

  She approached the table. “I’m Marilyn Daggers.”

  “Mrs. Daggers, I know who you are. I work for your dad.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Then I wasn’t wrong. You are Manfred Coen.” And she started shouting at Raoul. “Is he a detective too?”

  She ran from the table.

  Joe beat her to the door. “Wait,” he said. “I’m Barbarossa.”

  “Well, Mr. Barbarossa, I’ll tell you right now. I’m never going to mourn another one of my father’s men.”

  “Don’t go,” Barbarossa said, but he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with Marilyn Daggers Sidel.

  9

  Isaac waited for the shit to fly. He had Raoul. He’d broken the little world of Jerry DiAngelis, boss of the Rubinos, who liked to move about Manhattan in his mythical white coat. Jerry had grabbed the Rubinos from Sal. He was the new lord of the Maf, with silver streaks in his black hair. He created fields of danger wherever he walked. He had a ferocious temper. He began punching people when he was twelve, and he’d never stopped. He shied away from interviews. He wasn’t like Sidel. He couldn’t afford to discuss his own poetics of crime. He let his father-in-law, the melamed, do most of his talking. Jerry didn’t theorize. He loved Raoul.

  And so Isaac waited. But there was a terrific silence in Mafia land. Didn’t have a single threat on the phone. But the shit would have to fly. Isaac was certain
of that.

  He’d been hungry ever since he woke out of his coma. The Commish couldn’t stop eating. And while he sat in his favorite Newyorican restaurant, he noticed someone beside him. LeComte was sitting at the next table in his habitual colors: blue on blue.

  “That was brilliant,” he said. “Swiping Jerry’s bastard.”

  “Don’t talk that way about Raoul.”

  “Pardon me. Isaac, would you like a holy war in the streets?”

  “Who’s Peppinninu?”

  The cultural commissar rolled his eyes. “Is that what this is all about?”

  “Who’s Peppinninu?”

  “An exercise in evasion, like everything in Sicily.”

  “Sicily,” Isaac said. “The FBI is also Sicily. Your whole fucking life is an evasion. Where does Margaret fit in?”

  “Isaac, you can’t blame me because she happened to show up at your junior high school during the war. How could I have bothered you then? I wasn’t born.”

  “You were a schemer long before you were born. Your molecules were all over the place.”

  “But that has nothing to do with Margaret. She’s Sal Rubino’s nurse.”

  “And she collects me outside the Gerusalemme social club, with three corpses sitting inside, and brings me to Sal.”

  “She saved your life.”

  “She and Frannie Meyers, with his children’s army. That’s some confederates you have in the Bronx. Kids in diapers who sell cocaine and carry Glocks.”

  “I have to fight Jerry DiAngelis however I can.”

  “But you’re the one who encouraged Sal to tell me about the dolls, and don’t deny it.”

  “Yes, I encouraged Sal.”

  “Why me?”

  “You can retrieve the dolls. I can’t.”

  “And what’s your cut?”

  “Let’s just say I’m Sal’s partner in the enterprise.”

  “Silent partner, huh? Is Justice going into venture capitalism?”

  “We have to borrow, Isaac, same as everybody. And I have to finance certain operations.”

  “Then talk to me, LeComte. Who’s Peppinninu?”

  “Does it matter? The dolls exist. I have museums in five countries competing for them. There’s nothing like those dolls. You saw Sal’s brigandess. She’s unique. She has whole histories behind her.”

  “Then raise your millions. Sell Giuseppina.”

  “That’s the catch. The museums aren’t interested in singletons. They want the fifty dolls.”

  “And you can provide the fifty?”

  “Not on my own. You’re our stalker. You’re the Commish.”

  “And what about Jerry DiAngelis?”

  “Jerry’s out of the race. He’s auctioned the dolls he had to our associates. He’s sorry now. He’d like to get his hands on Giuseppina. But he can’t have the little lady.”

  “Give me one reason why I should help you and Sal?”

  “If we make the sale, Isaac, I can finance your campaign.”

  “I’m not running.”

  “You have to run. Rebecca can’t win.”

  “You should be glad. You’ll have a Republican at City Hall.”

  “I’d rather have my Hamilton Fellow.”

  “So that’s it. I run for mayor and redeem Frederic LeComte.”

  “Isaac, your own trials commissioner, Malik, will get the Republican nod.”

  “Good. He’ll be the first Moslem mayor we’ve ever had.”

  “He can’t govern the City.”

  “LeComte, I’ll tell you a secret. Nobody can.”

  The cultural commissar got up from the table. “Return Raoul. It’s not the right time for a civil war.”

  LeComte walked out of the restaurant. Isaac had his second serving of Moros y Cristianos. Black beans and white rice.

  There was a sedan outside the restaurant. Isaac smiled.

  “Hello, Iz.”

  “Foolish man, get inside.”

  Isaac climbed into the sedan. There weren’t any soldiers around. The melamed sat alone.

  “Isaac, prepare an obituary, please.”

  “Jerry has to talk to me first.”

  “Don’t you know him and his pride? He’ll never talk while you have Raoul.”

  “I wouldn’t have snatched the kid if you hadn’t given me the idea.”

  The melamed closed his eyes. His skin looked like brittle paper. “What could I have said that brought you to such a conclusion?”

  “Didn’t you sit in Ratner’s and tell me to watch out for my daughter?”

  “I told you that Jerry was rash.”

  “And I’m supposed to be the cautious one. The don wants me dead.”

  “He wants a lot of things. But your daughter’s alive and so are you.”

  “Don’t discuss Marilyn,” Isaac said. “She’s not part of the negotiations.”

  “Are we negotiating, Isaac?”

  “Yes.”

  The melamed opened his eyes again. His skin seemed to burst with its own peculiar light. He could have been ten years old or a hundred and ten.

  “Iz, you should have told me about Sal’s dolls when I was with the Family.”

  “Dolls?”

  “Don’t,” Isaac said. “You’re not an actor, Iz. Neither am I.”

  “Sal’s puppet theater? A small detail.”

  “You’ve been fighting over those dolls for five years.”

  “It’s Jerry’s project. I don’t meddle in all the Sicilian stuff. You’ll have to ask him.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “But you’ve damaged your standing, Isaac. How can Jerry look into the eyes of his soldiers when he’s lost his son?”

  “I rented Raoul. There’s no danger in that. Jerry knows.”

  “You’ve questioned his honor. Now he’ll really have to kill you.”

  “Not until we talk,” Isaac said.

  “Talk? He’ll rip out your tonsils.”

  “Come with me, Iz. I’ll take you to Raoul.”

  “God forbid. I can’t have a part in it. Bring Raoul back to his mother, Isaac. Then Jerry’s captains will swear it was a mistake. Two idiots took the wrong boy.”

  Part Three

  10

  She’d gone on a pilgrimage and hadn’t meant to stay. She only wanted to peek at Coen’s table. But she realized the little sin of her life. She couldn’t really live with a man. Blue Eyes had haunted her all through her marriages. She’d married to get away from Coen. And the marriages were like stations of a particular cross. That cross was Coen. And here he was, like a risen Christ, with a pingpong paddle and a white glove. Barbarossa. He wasn’t blond, but he did have blue eyes.

  And Marilyn had to laugh. Because after ten or twenty minutes, she thought of marrying him. She met Schiller, the impresario of that cluttered place. And she met the boy, Raoul, who was a hostage in one of her father’s campaigns.

  She couldn’t seem to hide very much from Isaac’s new man. He noticed the scars on her wrist.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “I was desperate … it must have been between marriages. I was living in San Francisco, I think.”

  But Joe’s heart was pounding underneath his holster. It was almost as if a second Roz had drifted into the club, a suicidal sister. He had so much fucking tenderness, he could have cried. He wanted to take care of Marilyn, shelter her in Schiller’s back room. But it was like a stinking cage where he slept and squirreled tiny portions of dope. He was a dealer who couldn’t deal. He had no product and no chance of robbing some coca merchant. He couldn’t keep up with the Colombian trade while he drove Isaac and guarded a little boy.

  “I have a sister. Rosalind. She raised me. Roz never married. She has depressions. They’re irresistible, like the pull of the moon. I have to keep her locked away in a house, a home for chronic patients.”

  “And I remind you of her.”

  “A little,” Joe said. “I love Roz, Mrs. Daggers.”

  “Forget th
e Daggers part. I’m Marilyn.”

  Marilyn didn’t have a tapeworm like her dad; she had a different radar. I’m Barbarossa. It was the start of a romance. She could have taken off her clothes. She wouldn’t have been ashamed, not even in front of Schiller and the boy and that circle of kibitzers. But would she lie down with Barbarossa and mourn Manfred Coen? How could she tell in advance?

  She looked up and saw the brown eyes of her dad. She’d loved him while he lay in his coma. But he’d survived all his bullet wounds.

  “Joey,” he said, “you’re taking Raoul back to his mother. And no mask. You walk upstairs like a gentleman and deliver the kid.”

  “Boss, it’s Bath Beach.”

  “There won’t be a problem. Jerry’s expecting you.”

  Barbarossa left with the boy. Isaac didn’t care about Schiller’s dirty looks. Schiller could go piss in a bottle. Isaac was the PC. He could shut down this rathole whenever he liked and end the myth of Coen’s pingpong table.

  “I was worried. You run from Mark and you don’t say a word. I thought you’d be happy with a Legal Aid lawyer. He’s your kind of man.”

  “Isaac, I slapped you once. I’ll do it again.”

  “You’re camping out with Leo, aren’t you? On Indian Road. My brother tells me nothing. All I’m good for is getting him out of jail.”

  “I asked him not to tell you.”

  “Were you going to avoid me, huh?”

  “No, Isaac. I needed a rest, time to get ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “This. But I didn’t expect to meet you in the middle of a crime scene … isn’t that what they call the place where someone gets killed? The cops rope it off and make chalk marks around the body.”

  “Marilyn …”

  “Don’t bother rehearsing that old story about Coen. I hope your new angel is a little less devoted to you.”

  “I don’t have an angel. I never did. Keep away from Joe. He’s a murderer and a thief.”

  “Good for him. If he’s mean enough he might stay alive … good-bye, Isaac.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Indian Road. I like to watch the moon with Uncle Leo.”

  “During the day? That’s quite an accomplishment.”

  “Oh, you can always conjure up the moon, Isaac. All you need is a little imagination.”