“Darling, I can always get a gun. I’m LeComte’s handmaiden.”
“I’ll bet you are,” Isaac said. “I’m not leaving Fran in Palermo. I’m not abandoning him.”
“He has no future in America. The children are on to his favors for the FBI. They’ll trample him the first chance they get. And Jerry D. knows he killed Don Roberto.”
“Who told Jerry?”
“I did. Fran has to stay here. And don’t bother sneaking out of the hotel to look for Robert. You’ll never find him. Every street is its own country. That’s why we had to behave like tourists. So the little kings and their ghost children would get used to us. I’ll take you to Robert.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow,” Anastasia said.
And he walked out of her room. She’d manipulated Isaac, called him darling and treated him like a pet bear. She’d have gone to bed with Isaac, hugging that holster. No, she wouldn’t have gone to bed with him at all.
Isaac had to coax Frannie out of his bedroom. Fran sat over his morning grapefruit, with lumps of sugar in his mouth. Coffee had spilled on his pajamas. His hand was trembling, the way Barbarossa’s used to tremble. Isaac was guilty about Joe. He’d left him in the badlands of Manhattan and the Bronx. Isaac couldn’t even trust his own department. The mayor’s detail had more clout than Police Plaza.
“Come on, Fran. Get dressed. Margaret’s taking us to Robert.”
“I can’t go,” Frannie said. “I have to finish my grapefruit.”
“I want to see you both face to face. Then I’ll understand some of the bullshit … how much did Sal pay you to pop Don Roberto?”
“I didn’t do it for Sal. I don’t like wheelchairs. I did it for Robert. He couldn’t escape without giving Roberto a send-off. I loved every minute.”
Isaac tore off Fran’s pajamas and dressed him in his pirate’s clothes, with the kerchief around his head. Jesus, Isaac thought. Fran looks just like a bishop in that catacomb of the Capuchin monks, a guy without his vital fluids.
“She’ll kill me.”
“Who’ll kill you, Fran?”
“My fiancée.”
“I thought you weren’t really engaged to Margaret.”
“I am … and I’m not. It depends on who’s asking and what benefit it brings … Commish, we’re not safe. People have a habit of dying around Margaret Tolstoy.”
“We’ll be careful,” Isaac said. “I’ll hold your hand.”
The three of them walked out of the Palme, and Isaac still couldn’t tell the baby from the babysitters. They landed on the Via Riccardo Wagner, behind the hotel, with its green shutters. There were potted plants along the street. Isaac could have entered that same heavenly garden on the walls of King Roger’s throne room. But the garden didn’t last. Garbage pails appeared. A mangy starving dog crossed Isaac’s path. Frannie shuddered, and Anastasia pulled him onto a side street that was so narrow, there was hardly room for Isaac or Fran between the walls. Clots of laundry hung from balconies over their heads.
The street widened again, and cars with crazy drivers seemed to come out of nowhere. Isaac had to dodge them like a matador. He had no grasp of Sicily. The street curled into alleys and other streets, tiny vicolos with their rat dogs and men who watched Anastasia with dull brutish eyes. Were they ordinary stragglers or the vassals of those little kings, undressing Margaret in their locked imagination?
Margaret led her own lost children into a small cemetery that grew right out of a courtyard. There were angels and cupids on the tombstones, and photographs of the dead, like medallions. Isaac had an odd feeling of peace, as if he’d arrived at some soothing necropolis where the living and the dead manufactured their own space and time, and no one was allowed to intrude.
They sailed beyond the cemetery and fell upon a bombed-out zone near the port of Palermo. Houses lay in ruin. There were hills of rubble strewn with the crushed wheels of bicycles and baby carriages.
“The Allied bombings?” Isaac asked. “That was over forty years ago. The little kings ought to practice some industry.”
“They do,” Anastasia said, and Isaac began to see nests of people within the ruins. “Darling,” she said. “This is Palermo. It doesn’t pay to rebuild.”
“Where’s young Robert?”
“Open your eyes.”
They’d come to a piazza with a little park. It was cluttered with a curious junglelike growth, banyan trees with roots snaking along the ground, strangling other trees. Each banyan was its own forest, with a little empire of trunks and roots growing out of every limb, like twisted chains, or the maddening hair of some Medusa. A man in a black leather coat stood inside the crazy complex of a banyan tree. He didn’t have the raggedy look of an apprentice puppeteer. It was Robert, without his master, like a young Sicilian god. He didn’t have spiky hair in Palermo.
“How are you, Mr. Isaac? I’m touched. Really, I am. The biggest police commissioner in America comes all the way to Sicily to visit the doll-maker’s boy.”
“You’re not Roberto’s boy. You never were.”
“I’m all the boy he ever had. I ate his shit. He swindled me.”
“That’s the life of any apprentice.”
“Yeah, it breaks my heart … hey, Frannie, aren’t you gonna give your partner a little fucking handshake?”
Fran kept behind Isaac. “We’re not partners.”
“You’re slipping, Fran. Lying to the commissioner like that.” Robert stepped out from the confines of the banyan tree. His coat wasn’t black. It was dark blue. “Hello, Margaret. Haven’t hugged you in a while.”
The Pink Commish was beginning to like this boy less and less. But he still couldn’t fathom young Robert. All that bravura was very thin.
“Why did you pretend to be Roberto’s child?”
“He wanted it that way. It made him feel that a miserable fuck like him could have a family. I played along. What else could I do, Mr. Isaac?”
“Have him killed.”
“I had to make my bundle … so I cannibalized Roberto. I became him.”
“Then why did you run to Palermo?”
“You’ll have to ask my padrone.”
“Jerry DiAngelis?”
“Christ, you are a little dumb for a detective. You’re being jerked around.”
“Who’s your padrone? LeComte?”
“That pencilhead? I didn’t cut my fingers, crawl on my belly day and night, to build Peppinninus for the FBI.”
“Who’s your padrone?”
“Haven’t you figured it out? Follow me, Mr. Isaac.”
Robert left the forest of banyan trees, with Isaac and Fran and Margaret behind him. He waltzed them through winding streets. Isaac began to hear a loud clatter on the roofs of certain cars. Robert started to laugh. It was a hailstorm. But Isaac had never seen such hugh hailstones, beautiful balls of ice that could bend a man’s back.
“The wrath of God, huh Mr. Isaac?”
And Robert danced in the hail, twisting his own body to the bite of the stones until he fell. Isaac lurched to pick him up.
“No,” Robert said, with a line of blood across his mouth. The hailstones stopped falling. But a fierce rain flooded the streets. The town had no drainage system. Cars stalled. The lights went out all over Palermo. It was darkness at noon.
Robert rose to his haunches. He let the rain lick at him. Isaac stood in an enormous sea. Palermo, he said to himself. He was Margaret’s magician, the rain god.
The storm turned into a drizzle. Isaac trudged across the sea to a jewelry store on the Piazza San Domenico, with darkened windows. He followed Robert into the gioielleria. It was another cave, filled with voices. The lights came on again, and Isaac found himself with a gallery of grandmas, wives, and little girls on a tiled floor. A man stood behind a long counter with a jeweler’s glass in his eye. He had very dark hair and the chiseled features of an Aztec Indian. Isaac didn’t even have to guess. It was Montezuma, risen out of whatever grave the FBI and the Drug Enforcement gen
iuses had prepared for him.
Margaret and Fran had come into the store with Isaac. Frannie’s face was white. He kept shivering at this Christ with the magnifying glass in his eye. Isaac was an imbecile. Montezuma and Sal were both jewelers. They had a dealership in diamonds, dolls, and junk.
Montezuma screamed at the grandmas, tossed them out of the gioielleria with the whole brood of wives and little girls, closed the shop, and welcomed Isaac into the back room with Margaret and Robert and Fran, who couldn’t stop shivering.
“Frannie,” Isaac said, “he’s not a fucking ghost. LeComte resurrected him. He’s done it before, with Sal.”
“Bravo,” Montezuma said, removing the glass from his eye. “But it wasn’t the same thing. Sal had a case of lead poisoning. He nearly died. The FBI surgeons had to carve a new body for him. Half of Sal is missing. Takes him a month to have an erection. Ask Margaret. She’s his nurse. But I didn’t take one hit. I was wearing a fancy vest with a bag of animal blood. Barbarossa shoots me. The bag explodes and I have my own red river.”
“It was a setup. You asked Joey to kill your mom and dad.”
“My mom and dad? They were amateurs, comedians with a candy store full of drugs, compliments of the FBI. We counted on Barbarossa. He’s a hothead and a moron, like that other boy you had. Manfred Coen.”
Coen, Isaac thought. It always comes back to Coen. “Montezuma, the first assassination might be fun. But you won’t survive the second.”
“Commendatore, it’s disrespectful to threaten me in my own town. I could have had your throat cut at the airport. Ask Margaret. I did Frederic a favor.”
“Fuck your favors.”
“I can see why Margaret fell in love with you in the middle of the war. You’re a reckless prick. I like that.”
“And you’re an FBI rat.”
“Can’t be helped, commendatore. Can’t be helped. LeComte caught me with my pants down. Had to do some tricks for him and all those other narcs. But that never hurt my business. I made LeComte very rich, so he could buy his field equipment and arrange a lot of busts.”
“But the little kings must have known you were partners with LeComte.”
“It’s on account of the kings that I had to play dead.”
“They can’t be that blind. You have a jewelry store. Any grandma can give you away.”
“You missed the point. I am dead. I went through the ritual of dying. The FBI powdered my face. I napped a couple of afternoons in an open coffin. The little kings couldn’t risk flying in to my funeral. They never travel. But they sent their associates, all the jackals they could spare. They stood over my coffin with their stinking breath. I rode to the cemetery in a silver truck. I climbed out of the coffin, had a game of solitaire, while the coffin was lowered into the ground with a rubber doll inside. And what can the kings do? There were witnesses to my burial. You can’t dishonor a dead man. The kings have to ignore me, pretend I don’t exist, or they will disgrace themselves. But every ounce of heroin in Palermo has to come through my door. That’s ideal, eh? I’m rich. The kings are rich. LeComte is rich. And Robert might be rich if he had some brains.”
“Roberto was stealing from you, right?”
“I had to put him in charge while I was dead. He controlled the traffic. He began to plunder and mark up the price of every doll. I couldn’t come to Manhattan. Roberto knew that. I was preparing my own surprise. And then young Robert does that foolish thing with Sal. I would have frightened Roberto back to tranquillity. Not kill him. Robert isn’t always reliable with the dolls. The maestro had to oversee his work.”
“Padrone,” Robert said, “I shouldn’t have—”
“Shut up. I need an indemnity, someone to serve as a ransom. I’ve decided on Fran.”
“You’ll put him in charge of a ghost school, he’ll train orphans and brats.”
“And what did he do in the Bronx? That crib he had, Crazy Corners, was a ghost school. I gave him the idea. Fran was our little king.”
“Well, I’m taking him home to the Bronx.”
“It will have to be in a hearse.”
“Montezuma, I’d love to start a ghost school. I’ll be your little lamb.”
“Margaret,” Montezuma said, “will you enlighten this poor fuck.”
“Darling, Fran stays with Montezuma.”
“But he hasn’t packed,” Isaac said. “His clothes are still at the Palme.”
“There’s no reason to pack. He can live at the Palme.”
“He’ll get lonely,” Isaac said.
“Lonely for what? America?”
“Poe Park and his baby commandos.”
“Darling, they’ll kill him if he ever goes near Valentine Avenue.”
“Let’s leave it to Fran,” Montezuma said. “Where would you like to live?”
“The Palme Hotel in Palermo,” Fran said, like the principal of a ghost school. And Isaac was in the mood to destroy the jewelry store and its jeweler. He could feel the boiling bags of blood in his own heart. “Montezuma, you didn’t work for Jerry DiAngelis or Sal. They were conveniences, mules with lots of money. The morphine base arrives by boat from Turkey, it’s refined into heroin in some fucking Mafia ranch in the mountains, it’s compressed and packed into narrow bags, and the bags are squeezed into the hollowed ribs of the dolls. Now each doll is a masterpiece, and it goes through customs like some lamb of God. You open art galleries in Düsseldorf, Manhattan, Cologne. You bribe curators. You have your own banker, Papa Cassidy. But how did LeComte uncover your scam?”
“I got careless. Killed a man. It was a stupid fight. Over drug money. The Feds were like a gang of grave diggers, going deeper and deeper into my past, so I went to church, a church called Frederic LeComte, and I got my salvation. But I had to give …”
“You let him into your big secret and sold a few of your friends. And when the kings were about to kill you, you staged your own death. Whose idea was it to borrow Barbarossa?”
“He was perfect for the part.”
“But who recommended him?”
Montezuma smiled. “Mario Klein. But it’s your fault. The most decorated cop in New York dealing drugs to the mayor’s secretary. It’s a scandal.”
“Padrone,” Robert said, “tell him the cop’s code name.”
“Why not? It has a nice ring. ‘Montezuma’s Man.’”
Robert and Montezuma laughed.
Montezuma’s Man. Isaac had been a dolt about young Robert, the ghost child who’d had a smuggler’s education. His own pilgrimage to Palermo was poorly planned. He couldn’t rescue Robert. There was nothing to rescue him from.
Isaac himself was a ghost child among ghost children.
“Commendatore, you have a devoted sweetheart. She brings a pistol into my establishment, hides it under her heart. And if I moved against you, she would splatter my brains on the wall. But I don’t mean you any harm. I’ve given you an audience. Now you’d better go … but not with the dottoressa. I have things to discuss with her. You can find the Palme on your own.”
He didn’t return to the hotel. He wandered across Palermo with a picture in his head: Frannie Meyers shivering in Montezuma’s back room. Isaac deserved whatever punishment he got. Mario Klein had been correct. The Pink Commish wasn’t a player in Palermo or the city of New York. And Isaac had a terrific attack of jealousy. It was Montezuma who must have told Margaret about the Isola delle Fémmine and its lost tribe of women and children. Montezuma was the real magician, the maker of myths. And Isaac was one more ridiculous knight.
He stumbled upon an outdoor market where people carried vegetables under their arms in paper horns. The vegetables were like long green noses. He nearly tripped over a rooster in the street. He saw a pingpong parlor close to the Piazza Verdi. But he didn’t have the heart to watch pingpong in Palermo. He would have thought of Coen. He had a cappuccino at the Gran Café Nobel. He walked outside into the dusk. There were no street lamps, and the town turned to midnight as darkness fell.
“Puttana di mèrde,” the boy said. He’d cut the strings of the money bag and freed himself from the tourist. But he’d lost his purse. He hobbled away without the bike. The tourist was also gone. Isaac stood alone in that early midnight and couldn’t contain his anger. He started to smash the bike. He broke the handlebars, twisted the headlight off its mount, tore at the fenders until a gang of older boys emerged and watched the spectacle of a madman destroying a motorbike.
The boys hissed at him. Ah, Isaac muttered to himself, ghost children coming out of the closet. There were ten of them, twenty, clutching thick wads of paper knotted with wire.
“Orso bianco,” they called him. Isaac the polar bear.
They whacked him with the paper clubs, punishing Isaac … until Margaret appeared with her Glock.
“Dottoressa,” the boys shouted at her.
Margaret shot the motorbike. The boys scattered into different streets.
Isaac wouldn’t even thank her. “It was Montezuma who told you that story about the women’s island. He’s another fucking fiancé.”
“Isaac, we’ll have an army here in a minute. Don’t talk. Your tongue is bleeding.”
“Montezuma’s Man,” he said. “You knew all about Joe. LeComte fixed it so that Montezuma could have his own little death and Joey would be on a string for life. What kind of fucking people are you?”
“Darling,” she said, “people just like you,” and she carried Isaac away from the carnage of a wounded motorbike.
Part Six
Montezuma's Man (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 16
