Marilyn the Wild (22 page)

“Take off your sweater, Ida. It's warm in here.”

She brought him brown honey in a tablespoon. Isaac took the honey in one lick. He rose out of the tub, refreshed. Was the bear ready to dance? Sweet Isaac, he had foam on his pectorals. Ida blotted him with the inside of her sweater. The Chief was playing with her clothes. Buttons snapped under the pressure of a thick hand. Isaac was into her cups; he could nurse a nipple as well as any other man. The brassiere dangled at her side. Isaac was on his knees. He had her navel in his mouth. The suction on her belly produced an incredible shiver. Ida couldn't hold on to her legs. She crashed into him. He fell back with Ida, but he wouldn't come out from her belly. Ida thought she would have to pee. Her thighs contracted with the force of a mule. She couldn't throw the Chief.

“Don't stop, Isaac. Please don't stop.” But she could feel his mouth begin to drift. Her belly was no longer occupied. He wouldn't graze her with his tongue, nuzzle the walls of her chest. It was Isaac's turn to shiver. The bear had blood between his toes. Uptown bruises? She should have explored him better in the tub. Ida wasn't alarmed. She would rub off the anxious spots. She stroked the bumps of skin behind his ears.

15.

T
HE
prisoners' ward at Bellevue suffered a whiteout. Its windows were going blind. Snow packed into the spaces between the grilles, and froze to wood and glass. Stanley Chin was tripping out on the hard blinks of snow in the windows. Rupert Weil was full of shit. Only a tilted brain would compare Hong Kong with New York. There were no white storms in Kowloon. None of the orderlies would lend him a cigarette. They were asking fifty cents a smoke. Stanley wouldn't trade with robber barons. He had a quarter in his pajama pocket. He wished Blue Eyes would come back.

The ping-pong table was growing bald without Detective Coen. The net had droops in its bottom line. The balls were getting yellow. A shrill song from the edge of the ward drove Stanley into the slats of his hospital crib. The noise was spooking him. He hadn't heard a telephone ring since yesterday night. Bellevue was supposed to be snowbound. “Hey Chico,” he said to the orderly on call inside the prisoners' room. “You told me nobody could get through. What's happening?”

“I dunno,” the orderly snapped. His eyes were red from staring into blind windows too long. “Maybe it's the Holy Spirit.”

The orderly picked up the phone. “Yeah, yeah … speak louder, huh?” He plucked a portable wheelchair from the wall, opened it, climbed in, and wheeled himself to Stanley's crib. “The ding-a-ling, it's for you.”

“Who is it?”

The orderly laughed. “Your favorite boy. Blue Eyes. You got luck with that cop. You must be a special customer.”

The orderly lowered the slats, but he wouldn't give the wheelchair over to Stanley. “Let him wait. You don't want him to think you're an easy lay.”

“Chico, I got a quarter in my pocket. Take it, and push me to the telephone.”

The orderly reached into Stanley's pajamas, stroked the quarter, flushed it out, and made Stanley climb into his lap. He paddled them both around the ward at a reckless clip, bumping off bedposts, shaving walls, heckling the other prisoners, who were groggy with snow, then slid out of the wheelchair, and left Stanley with the phone in his elbow. Stanley had to dig with the side of his face to clutch the earpiece. “Mr. Coen?”

He heard a horrible buzz, scratching that had a murderous resonance against his jaw. Then a giggle came through the wire. “It's me.”

“Rupe?” Stanley was befuddled, but he turned away from the orderly to shield the voice of this crazy giggler. “Chico said it was Blue Eyes.”

“Schmuck, how could I give my real name? Would they let Rupert Weil call Bellevue? Blue Eyes gets you anywhere.”

The static began to suck at Stanley's cheek. “Rupe, the hospital's closed to the world. They can't find milk for the babies. The nurses go 'round asking prisoners for blood. How'd you make the call?”

“With my middle finger. You know another way to dial?”

“Don't sound on me, Rupe. I got warts in my ear from the telephone.”

“Ah, I'll pull you out of that dump. Not today. I'm running errands for my father.”

“Who does errands in a storm?”

“I'm going to fuck Lady Marilyn.”

Stanley burrowed his head into the earpiece. “Rupe, what'd you say?”

“I'm going to fuck Isaac's daughter … in the face.”

The phone spilled out of Stanley's elbow and knocked into the wall. “Chico, could you bend down for a guy?”

The orderly scooped up the phone. “Hey man, send Blue Eyes a kiss and say goodbye.”

Stanley grabbed with his cheek; the static could burn holes in a boy's mouth. He dropped the telephone. Rupert wasn't there. The orderly dumped him into the crib. “Chico, write a message for me … please. It's important.”

“Write it yourself. We got a union, man. I aint your slave.”

Stanley wagged his plaster mittens. “Would I bother you if I could write? … I'll give you a dollar.”

“I touched your pocket, man. You aint got no green.”

“I'll owe it to you. Don't be scared. Blue Eyes will pay.”

The orderly leered at him. “Is Coen into sponsoring rats?” He unclipped his ballpoint pen, twirled it in his mouth for a second, and started doodling on the back of a hospital menu. “What's the message?”

Stanley was reluctant to recite his dread to the orderly, but he had no choice; he couldn't buy wheels to Manfred Coen. He hadn't been asleep at St. Bartholomew's. The detectives who guarded him reviled Coen. They also hated Isaac and his daughter, whom they called a skinny cunt. Stanley learned from them that Blue Eyes was in love with Marilyn. He wouldn't snitch on Rupert, but he didn't want Coen's girlfriend to die. So he dictated to the orderly: “Dear Detective Coen, please watch out for Marilyn the Wild. She'll be in big trouble if she opens her door tonight. Sincerely, Stanley Chin.”

The orderly scratched out an I.O.U. Clamping the pen to Stanley's mitten, he forced him to sign his name. The signature was a series of bumps. “It goes to Police Headquarters,” Stanley said. “Blue Eyes will pay you more than a dollar.”

The orderly smiled. Leaving Stanley, he shoved the message through a slot in the prisoners' iron door, placed his tongue in the peephole, and whispered to the guard on the other side of the door. “Freddy, you see that paper. Stuff it in the toilet, fast. It's a poison-pen note from the lollipop gang.”

The orderly had a horselaugh behind his fist. He wasn't worried about the I.O.U. Stanley would have to pay up with a little skin, blood, or Bellevue chocolate pudding.

Rupert was stuck inside a telephone booth at the corner of Essex and Grand. A quartet of goons from Little Italy, fellows in long coats who had been stalking Rupert for a good two weeks, drifting in and out of grocery stores, restaurants, and horseradish stalls, eating bialys and kosher pickles, were standing on a snowbank in front of the booth. They rubbed shoulders to stay warm. All four of them carried odd bits of Amerigo Genussa's plumbing tools: lead pipes to pin back Rupert's ears, a metal snake to twist out his eyes, wrenches and screwdrivers to play with nostrils and lips. Rupert cursed his rotten luck. He'd have to huddle in the booth until the goons picked another snowbank. Rupert had no shirt on under the coat he had stolen from the housing police; his nipples were about to freeze to the lining.

He dialed Headquarters to badger Isaac before the goons disappeared; he got a recorded voice that whispered husky things to him. Rupert couldn't understand a word. He had weapons in his pocket: a fork, a spoon, a blunted can opener. They were sharp enough to go under the skin of a woman's neck. He would undaughter Isaac with the push of a spoon.

“Mister, once in your life you'll know what it means to lose.”

Rupert held no grudge against Lady Marilyn. Being Isaac's daughter was a question of circumstance; her one misfortune was Isaac himself. And Marilyn would have to pay for that. Rupert was no ordinary butcher; Philip's boy wouldn't have been able to bleed a duck, or a cow. But he had to take something from Isaac that was more valuable to him than his own police inspector's skin. Rupert wasn't unmerciful. He would bleed Marilyn faster than Isaac had bled Philip and Mordecai, and the whole East Side.

Rupert had all the cunning of an Essex Street coyote. From the stairwells and soft walls of abandoned buildings he learned how to live on the fly. He always kept a source of nourishment somewhere on his body. Ruffling his coat, he pulled a yellow lollipop out of the sleeve. Esther had been addicted to lollipops, and he caught his sweet tooth from her. He watched the gorillas on the snowbank and manufactured some yellow spit. The lollipop disabled him; yellow spit could only suck up images of Esther. Enclosed in a booth, with a candy brick in his cheek, he flashed on Esther's bosoms. He was smelling Esther Rose, feeling the stripes of fuzz on her back. He had to crumble the lollipop, or go silly in the head.

He jumped out of the booth. The shivering of the door must have reached the snowbank. The gorillas turned their heads. They were much too cold to make a significant leap. Girding themselves, they began to plod after a hopping overcoat.

Mordecai Schapiro faced snowstorms with cucumber slices, schnapps, and a lick of salt. These were the limits of his appetite. He was grieving over his daughter Honey, who couldn't stop running away from him. Would she catch pneumonia in such a thick porridge of snow, with her short skirts and flimsy stockings? Why should he kid himself? His daughter was a whore. She walked the streets in all kinds of weather. A strict professional, she even had a manager, a pimp with a silk handkerchief, Mordecai supposed, and a card saying she was free of the crabs. The schnapps mingled with the salt on his tongue, and the cucumber eased his bitterness, the pain of a father who felt mislaid.

Mordecai had a guest. Only a moron would visit you in the middle of a squall. He opened his door to a phantom in Cordovan shoes. A Manhattan snowdrift couldn't influence Philip Weil's queer sense of fashion. Philip came in his church clothes, Scotch plaids and tight gloves. Always the dapper hermit, in Mordecai's estimation. Their friendship had soured over the last twenty years. Without Isaac to cement them with his bearish charm, they slipped apart.

“I didn't expect you, Philip. I would have prepared. But it's hard to shop in a storm. I hear the A & P is out of goods. People hoard, you know. They want to safeguard their deliverance. You can't blame them. If you're old, you remember the hard times. And if you're young, you have a brutal imagination.”

“Don't be alarmed, Mordecai. I didn't come to steal your salt herring. Tell me about Honey. Has Isaac found her yet?”

“Isaac's a big man. Why should he help me twice in the same month? He drinks tea with commissioners. He rides in limousines. He knows the best opera stars.”