“But do they have names?”
“Certainly. There’s Orlando, Rinaldo, Ruggiero, Gano the traitor, and Charlemagne the king.”
“Which one is Charlemagne?”
“I’m not sure … Isaac, you can take your pick. Gano’s the one with the longest mustache.”
“But LeComte said you sold your dolls.”
“Yeah. Sold them to myself. I set up a couple of phony collectors, my own middlemen. Why should I give my moves away?”
“So Sal has his brigandess and you have your five bachelors.”
“More than five,” Jerry said. “I wouldn’t keep my whole treasure in one closet.”
“And you’ve been fighting with him over the dolls … both of you are trying to catch the biggest fish. A museum? A billionaire?”
“Isaac, all you ever think about is money. I wanted to make a killing. But it got complicated. Experts would get down on their knees and look inside the closet. They quoted prices. They started to sing about this renegade puppeteer who ran down from Naples with his dolls and his guapperia, his stories of outlaws and kings. The carabinieri chased him from town to town. He learned all the Sicilian dialects. His own dolls were a little too clumsy. So he copied from the Sicilian masters. He made smaller dolls, dolls he could carry on his fucking back, like a peddler. But he was no Neapolitan jerk. He had royal blood in him, this puppeteer.”
“The baron di Napoli.”
“I never said he was a baron.”
“He called himself Peppinninu. It intrigued you. And you started collecting the dolls.”
“The dolls were in the Family, you dope. I had them since I was a boy. They belonged to my old man.”
“He was a doll maker?”
“Stop kidding. He was a grocery clerk. He didn’t have a pot to piss in. I had to go out and punch people when I was twelve or we would have starved. The old man would get one wormy wheel of cheese for Christmas. But I had the dolls. I kept them. And then this curator comes along. A German. From Cologne. He starts offering me big dollars. Well, I was a Rubino captain. I had to tell my don.”
“You told Sal?”
“Not that little shit. His uncle Paolo. The don says he’ll investigate things. But he wasn’t interested in any dolls. He’d already made plans to have me killed. Sal had poisoned Don Paolo’s mind, said I wanted the whole Family. I had to fight back. It was the don and his brother Vincent who got killed.”
“What about that curator from Cologne?”
“I’m not finished. I was gonna sell. But I get a knock on my door. It’s Roberto DiAngelis. The cousin of a cousin. Another grocery clerk. He sold cheese with my old man until he retired. He came to me because now I was his don. He fed me a story about the dolls. The five paladins had been his. He gave them to my father to hold. He buried the rest.”
“And he was Peppinninu in disguise.”
“Keep quiet. He’d inherited the dolls. Peppinninu had been his master.”
“This Roberto was also a puppeteer?”
“One of the best. But he couldn’t make a living on Mulberry Street with a part-time puppet theater. And he wouldn’t sell his Peppinninus. They were sacred to him. Isaac, how could I check? My old man was dead. ‘Don Roberto,’ I told him, ‘any moron can pretend to be a puppeteer.’ He took me to his cellar and started pulling on his dolls behind a little stage. He did a whole saga in forty minutes. About Orlando and his mad fits. I cried like a baby girl. How could I not believe him? He was a DiAngelis, a cousin. I swore to him that I’d protect the dolls. I don’t fuck with Family honor.”
“But what is Don Roberto doing with his dolls?”
“It’s not my business, Isaac. He won’t sell. And that crazy old master of his must have been an anarchist. He didn’t want any of his dolls in a museum.”
“Sounds fishy,” Isaac said.
“Stronzo, are you calling me a liar?”
“Where is Peppinninu’s disciple?”
“On Mulberry Street.”
“Take me to him, Jerry. I’ve never seen a Sicilian puppet show.”
“He’s retired. I told you. You could get a hernia lifting a doll that’s almost half a man. And I can’t betray his secrets.”
“I’m not moving, Jerry, until you promise me a show.”
Jerry glared at Isaac. “Stronzo,” he said.
15
They crossed the street, Isaac, Joe, and the don, Jerry DiAngelis. They entered another social club, one that had no guests, and they climbed down into the darkness. Jerry snapped on a light. And Isaac had a lesson in enchantment. He discovered the stage of a Sicilian puppet master, with its curtains, its frame, its back cloths, all registering images of knights and brigands in terrific battle. There were hundreds of warriors, fighting in field after field. It was a tiny universe of blood and armor, with magnificent ladies watching from various hills. There were bridges and castles in the distance, castles that seemed to float right off the cloth.
Isaac recognized Charlemagne, the isolated king. He battled no one. He stood with a crown on top of his helmet, contemplating all the blood.
“Hey,” Jerry shouted. “Don Roberto?”
An old man popped up, his head above the curtain. He must have been standing on a scaffold behind the stage. He was holding a gun.
“You brought the Commish?”
“Didn’t I promise?”
Another head appeared. It belonged to young Robert, the child of Don Roberto’s old age. He was a lethargic boy in his twenties, this assistant puppet master. Isaac had never seen such an odd coupling of father and son. He had to hop on his toes and reach above the roof of the stage to shake young Robert’s hand. The boy had an iron grip to go with his lazy eyes and the spikes in his hair. Don Roberto was still holding his gun.
“Who’s the sweetheart?” he asked, waving the gun at Barbarossa.
“That’s Joe. He drives the Commish.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“He plays with Raoul.”
“That’s different,” Don Roberto said from his little roof and began to berate his son. “Hey, this isn’t a picnic.”
Young Robert pulled on his spiky hair. “You’re rushing me, and I don’t like it.”
Both of them sank behind the roof of the stage, like divers into some sunken sea. Isaac could hear a rumble. Then the curtain opened and he saw three tremendous dolls sway with a loud, lyrical pull. Isaac was touched by their metallic dance. They had all the awkwardness of wooden skeletons with armored skin. They seemed more alive to Isaac than Isaac was to himself. The dolls raged in a Sicilian he couldn’t understand. But it was still like Shakespeare. He could sense their music.
A woman was on the stage, with two men. Marietta, the warrior queen, with Rinaldo, her liege man, and Moro, the Saracen giant and knight. Moro’s head poked around the roof. He had a turban and terrible whiskers. His mouth was completely red. He wore trousers instead of a skirt. His hand was bigger than Isaac’s, bigger than the queen’s head. He roared at Rinaldo.
It was a love triangle, and Isaac shivered with the fascination of a little boy. The two knights, Rinaldo and the giant, cluttered and clanked around Marietta in a war dance. They sang and spat and menaced one another with their crooked swords. Then the action stopped, and Isaac was heartsore. The dolls had lost their mobility. They stood like dead people.
“Commish,” Don Roberto croaked from behind the stage. “I could interpret for you.”
“I don’t need interpretations.”
“I could throw in a little English.”
“I prefer the Sicilian way.”
“You could trip and get strangled in the melodrama.”
“Please,” Isaac said.
“What about the sweetheart?”
“Please don’t stop the show.”
The metal and wood jerked back into motion. Rinaldo and the giant dueled for a solid hour. Sword fell upon shield. Pieces of armor dropped off Rinaldo. He lost his shoulder guards, his neck plate, his i
ron shoes. He was nothing but raw wood, with eyes and a few other articles. He had to withdraw.
Moro the giant stood alone with Marietta and serenaded her. The queen wouldn’t answer him. She raised her sword. And now there was another battle. She was much too swift for the giant. He wouldn’t parry her blows. He didn’t have the passion to fight Marietta. He was lovesick, that’s all. Isaac thought of Anastasia, his own warrior queen.
The curtain came down suddenly, in the thick of battle. It appealed to Isaac, who didn’t like ordinary endings.
Ah, he was Moro, the whiskered one, who could defeat knight after knight but never win his queen.
There wasn’t any room for Roberto and his son to come out from behind the wings. They had to climb off the scaffolding, cross the stage on their hands and knees, and crawl out from under the curtain, like prisoners of their own establishment.
The maestro wore a gold scarf. He was in his seventies. He’d dyed his hair black and colored his cheeks, like Isaac’s own dad, Joel Sidel, the Cézanne of Paris, who was still alive. Young Robert had no affectations. He swam inside his pants. The colors had faded from his shirt. But he had the incredible forearms of a man who had to maneuver enormous dolls and navigate their exits and entrances.
He also had a syrupy voice, and Isaac realized that young Robert did the spoken parts, sang Marietta and Rinaldo and the giant.
They marched upstairs to the vacant social club. Young Robert began to twitch. His father shouted at him.
“He’s a hyena. He can’t handle the dolls.”
“I do my best.”
“It’s like working with a piece of cardboard. He’s so stiff. I have to crouch like a hunchback, and my own boy is asleep.”
“Don Roberto,” Isaac said, “the sword fights were wonderful.”
“They stink.”
“Ah, he’s never satisfied,” Jerry said.
“Leave me alone … I was on a stage ladder since I was ten. You had to have three hands. Two aren’t enough.” He sat down on a stool and started to drink from a silver flask. He offered the flask to Isaac.
Isaac took a gulp. The PC could have been drinking whiskey with worms in it. He offered the flask to young Robert.
“He don’t deserve none,” Don Roberto said, and swiped the flask out of young Robert’s hand. “Let the sweetheart drink,” he said, smiling at Barbarossa.
“Careful,” Jerry said. “Joe could smash your face.”
“I’d love a good wallop,” Don Roberto said, sucking on his flask.
Isaac was in awe of the old master. “Maestro, who taught you your craft?”
“I taught myself. No doll maker ever gives his tricks away. I had to educate my elbows and my teeth. It’s no Punch and Judy business. A Sicilian doll can break his leg running across a stage. And what if you have a partner who’s asleep? You have to do it all yourself.”
“And Peppinninu?”
“A mean and miserable guy.”
“From Naples.”
“So he said. I was nine when I met him. Palermo was a snake pit. I was starving in the streets. The carabinieri were the biggest bandits. They chewed on your bones.”
“What about the Sicilian Maf?”
“Ah, Il Figli. The Society of Sons. They were lovable boys. Shot each other’s heads off with their ‘piccolos,’ the little shotguns they carried under their coats.”
“Did Peppinninu have a piccolo too?”
“He didn’t have much more than his own pants. I felt sorry for him. He couldn’t learn any of the dialects. He would louse up all the stories about Charlemagne. And he’d get dizzy going up and down the ladder. But he could carve like nobody could. And he didn’t give a crap about tradition. He never copied from another doll. His dolls were dreamers. They had trouble in their eyes, like ’Ninu. Took him a month to finish a doll’s hand, a whole week for an eyelash.”
“How did he ever last long enough to do fifty dolls?”
“Fifty? He did a baker’s dozen. I was there. I guarded his treasure. Thirteen dolls.’’
“But that’s not the treasure Sal Rubino talked about. He said fifty dolls.”
The maestro started to laugh. He had green and black teeth that looked like the borders of a terrible trough. “Sal’s insane. I performed for him when he was a kid. Did you know that? He’d sit with his uncles, Paulo and Vincent. The two dons. He never missed a show. Not like Jerry here.”
“Roberto,” Jerry said, “I didn’t have time for recreation.”
“Recreation? The dolls are our past. That’s all we have.”
“Terrific. I have enough problems running the Family. Sal’s been digging up half the cellars in Manhattan, looking for Peppinninus. Right, Roberto?”
“Right … my own son hates me, because we have to live like rats in a shoebox.”
“You don’t have to be a submariner,” Isaac said. “Sell Sal all the dolls you have.”
The maestro revealed his rotting teeth. “You’re Sal’s agent. You and the sweetheart. The Black Stocking Twins. You’ve been going into the cellars … for Sal.”
He took the pistol out of his pocket. “I’ll finish the sweetheart first.”
“Ah, gimme the gun,” Jerry said.
“No. The sweetheart is mine.”
“Gimme the gun.”
The old man started to whimper. Jerry took the pistol out of his hand. “You’ll hurt yourself. You can’t blame Isaac. He has to practice his logic. That’s what he’s paid for. He’s the Commish.”
“I couldn’t sell,” said the maestro. “Not to Sal. Not to the museums. ’Ninu was my master. I had dinner with him every night for seven years, when we could afford to eat. He couldn’t attract a crowd. The only independence he had was the dolls. He wasn’t kind. He cheated me. But he was my master. And when he died, I buried some of the dolls, bundled up the rest, and brought them to America, the fucking promised land, the land what made me a two-bit clerk along with Jerry’s dad.”
“And those dolls are still buried in Palermo?”
“Nah. The other pupari were jealous of ’Ninu. They were jackals. They would have dug up every doll. I went back and forth to Sicily. I brought over the dolls two at a time. They were like my children, Mr. Isaac. They were my children.”
“And I’m your beautiful doll,” young Robert said.
“They don’t answer back. They don’t give you heartburn and hiccups.”
“How did Sal get his hands on Giuseppina?”
“Because I was a fool. And desperate. And my second wife was sick … the mother of this hyena. She was in the hospital with a damaged heart. Jerry was in jail. I had to go to Sal. I borrowed money. I gave him Giuseppina as collateral. I never liked her. Her hands are too big.”
“And she’s the only doll he has?”
“Swear to Christ,” the old man said.
“Then where do the collectors come in? How did they discover Peppinninu if you had most of the merchandise?”
“Dunno. He was already a myth. He’d killed a dozen carabinieri on his way to dying.”
“Jerry, what happens now?”
“Nothing. Roberto stays in the cellar until I get Sal.”
“Sal is LeComte’s baby. And even with your five paladins in the closet, you can’t battle the FBI and all the other people LeComte has inside his cuffs.”
“I’ll manage,” Jerry said.
“Not without me and Barbarossa.”
Isaac shook hands with the maestro and his son with the spiky hair. He would have hugged Jerry, but they’d lost that old comfort between them. They were reluctant allies, involved in a grab bag of ambiguous dolls.
Isaac marched into the street with Barbarossa.
“I want a tail on that cellar, Joey.”
“That’s impossible, boss. Jerry will spot our sound trucks. This is his country, not ours.”
“Then we’ll borrow an FBI truck. Let him think it’s LeComte. I love the dolls but not mythical doll-makers. Peppinninu is nothing but a
fancy cover.”
“You can never tell, boss.”
“Yeah, Sal says fifty dolls. Roberto says thirteen. It’s a fucking shell game. I don’t like it.”
And both of them climbed into the Dodge like a pair of Peppinninus.
16
He turned to pingpong. Barbarossa had been the champion of Saigon, but he was reluctant to establish his sovereignty at Schiller’s. He would play after midnight, when the usual sharks had earned their supper money and would leave him alone. He didn’t wear a headband or short pants. But the kibitzers were mesmerized. “He has Manfred’s strokes.”
And Barbarossa would have to hurl his paddle into the spectators’ gallery to break their mad concentration. “I’m not Coen.”
He wouldn’t bet on a game. He’d hit the ball with Schiller, or some wizard who wanted to relax at the last pingpong club in Manhattan. Barbarossa’s customers would come by and pester him.
“I don’t have any product,” he’d say between strokes. And all his customers disappeared. He planned robberies. He dreamt of drug lords and traficantes. But he played pingpong. He began to understand why Blue Eyes had retreated here. His table was an outpost of tranquillity until Isaac brought his own dirt into the club and got Coen killed.
It was 2:00 A.M., and Joe was hitting with Schiller. The old man had never really recovered from Coen. He was agile in his straw shoes, but he was still Coen’s orphan. And Barbarossa drifted into his own dream with every slap of the ball. He wanted to free his head of dolls, those enormous children with helmets and plumes of hair. And then a doll whisked in front of him. He couldn’t tell how much armor she was wearing. It was Marilyn the Wild.
“Can’t sleep, Joe. Mind if I watch?”
“Ah,” he said, “I’m sick of playing,” which wasn’t true. Schiller never compared him to Coen, but Marilyn could. She’d confuse him with that dead angel of Isaac’s. But Barbarossa didn’t intend to die.
Schiller returned to the kibitzers, who’d forgotten how to sleep. And Barbarossa was a little bothered. He couldn’t take Marilyn into the back room. It was like a warehouse with a bed. He didn’t even have a radio. He wouldn’t entertain Isaac’s daughter in a barren closet.
Montezuma's Man (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 9
