Marilyn the Wild (5 page)

Barney wore a Colt with his name and rank engraved right over the trigger, and a quick-draw holster with tassels at the bottom, like Buffalo Bill. Sliding out from the table, he gripped the holster's beard to prevent the Colt from stabbing him in the belly. The “crows” had swallowed too many red peppers: their eyes watered at the vision of Barney embracing Isaac. Were these burly men or dancing bears?

There was nothing sanctimonious about Cowboy's embrace. He squeezed Isaac's ribs with devotion. Barney wasn't a piddling warrior; he shared the grief of his enemies.

But Isaac hadn't interrupted Cowboy's lunch for a bear-hug, and the smell of Chianti in a bottle brushed with straw. “Don't try to steal chickens off me, Barney. Stay out of my coop. I can handle this alone.”

“Who's a chicken thief?” Cowboy said. He fought back his desire to take Isaac by the ears and throw him under the table.

“If there's a riddle, I'll solve it. The persons who touched my mother will have to deal with me.”

“No vendettas, Isaac. This is police business. I can bring the whole Manhattan South down on those freaks, whoever they are.”

“Barney, I don't want your boys rushing in and out. It's my caper. Hands off.”

“Isaac, who have you got? Blue Eyes? That imbecile couldn't find his dick in the street.”

“Barney, don't curse. You're talking about my man.”

Cowboy had to let him go. As Chief of Detectives, he stood above the ladders that inspectors had to climb. But the First Deputy was dying of cancer, and the cop that inherited the First Dep's chair controlled the City police. Barney didn't have to guess who O'Roarke's heir would be. Still, he was in a celebrating mood. His oldest daughter, a spinster of thirty-two, would be a bride in eight days. This was Barney's last unmarried child. What had Isaac accomplished? He'd married off the same daughter three times.

Isaac didn't signal upstairs for Brodsky; a chauffeur could distract his mind. He rode in a cab, unwilling to discuss sugar scares, crime, or the weather.

The driver figured Isaac was a pornography czar, or a manager of small-time queens: no one had ever asked him to cruise the all-night movie houses on Forty-second Street. “That's the one,” Isaac said, jumping out of the cab. The driver saw him disappear into the foyers of the Tivoli Theatre. He couldn't believe Isaac's gall. “The guy must think he's invisible. He walks through ticket windows.”

Isaac foraged in the back rows. He couldn't borrow a flashlight from a Tivoli usher. Wadsworth, the man he wanted, would have hidden from him. He avoided the male prostitutes who were soliciting near the aisles. “Need a finger, baby? It'll cost you. Six dollars an inch.” Isaac could have put them away, but he would have lost his man. He had to protect Wadsworth's house.

He heard a low crackle behind him. “
Vas machst du,
Isaac?” The Chief had to laugh. Wadsworth wouldn't recognize the fact that Isaac was an English-American Jew without a Yiddish vocabulary.

“Wadsworth, I'm doing fine.”

Wadsworth was an albino, a milky nigger with pink eyes. He couldn't survive in sunlight. Wadsworth needed twenty-four hours of dark. He lived at the Tivoli, rinsing his mouth in the water fountain, doing his underwear in the sink, sneaking out after midnight, and returning to the theatre before the sun had a chance to rise. He existed on buttered popcorn and candy bars from the Tivoli's machines. He could sit through cartoons, features, and coming attractions in one position. Wadsworth claimed he never had to sleep.

“Did you look after my uncles, Isaac? My uncles are important to me.”

“I'm trying, Wads. I can't jump over the civil service lists. But there may be room for a typist with the Department of Parks.”

“Isaac, my uncles can't type.”

The Chief had to groom Wadsworth with favors, little and big. He found temporary jobs for Wadsworth's long family of uncles, cousins, and friends. Wadsworth would take no profit for himself. He was the best informant Isaac ever had. A burglar by trade, and a sometime arsonist, he sold watches and shoes to firemen, sanitation workers, and the sons of mafiosi. Connected uptown and downtown with pickpockets, shylocks, and pinkie-breakers, Wadsworth cornered information before it hit the street.

“Isaac, if you're here about your mom, I can't help. Motherfuckers with masks, busting faces without putting a finger in the till, that sounds like amateur stuff.”

“Or a hate job. Wadsworth, do you know anybody who dislikes me so much he'd send a gang of rotten kids to grab my tail?”

“Isaac, you asking me if you got enemies? I can name ten cops who'd love to murder you, including Cowboy Rosenblatt.”

“I could name twenty, but this isn't the work of a cop. What about the Guzmanns?”

Gamblers and pickpockets from the Bronx, the Guzmanns were becoming a tribe of pimps. They had entered Isaac's borough to find chicken bait, thirteen-year-olds, all of them white, and Isaac vowed to drive the Guzmanns out of Manhattan. He stationed his men at the bus terminals to frustrate their ability to snatch young girls. “Wadsworth, are the Guzmanns paying me back?”

“Na,” Wadsworth said, showing his pale lip. “The Guzmanns have feelings. They wouldn't hit on your mother. They'd come direct to you.” The deep red of his pupils burned in the dusty air of the Tivoli; Isaac had to look away from Wadsworth's eyes. Wadsworth said, “Try Amerigo.”

“Why would Amerigo come after me?”

“He's been grumbling, Isaac, that's all I know. He thinks you're sleeping with the FBI's.”

“Wadsworth, that's office politics. The First Dep has to be polite. We use their labs sometimes. But Newgate's a dummy. Why would I sleep with him?”

“Don't explain it to me, man. Save it for Amerigo.”

Isaac blinked in the raw sunlight outside the Tivoli. He was a cop who wasn't used to caves. He scowled at Inspector Pimloe's theories on the lollipop gang. His office had come up with shit, stupid shit. Pimloe brought Isaac a gallery of hobos and talked of random attacks. Isaac had other ideas about these lollipops. They scared Ida, his fiancée, raided his hangout on Essex Street, and beat up his mother in a single night. They wanted Isaac to get the news. Could Amerigo Genussa be their benefactor, the man who fingered Isaac, and supplied the kids with masks and all-day suckers?

Amerigo was president of the Garibaldi social club and the
padrone
of Mulberry Street. Before he went into real estate and bought up a sixth of Little Italy, he'd been a miraculous chef. He had to give up the Caffè da Amerigo to supervise his holdings and safeguard the streets. The Puerto Ricans were making inroads, Chinamen were grabbing vacant buildings north of Canal, but Amerigo had kept out the blacks. His hirelings liked to boast that their mammas and girlfriends couldn't see a black face a half mile around the Garibaldi social club, unless it belonged to a cop, or an FBI man.

The Garibaldis were having a personal war with the FBI, whose scarecrows and paid informers swarmed Amerigo's streets, tapped his telephones, peeked in his window, dug wires into his walls, tried to flirt with the daughters of Mulberry grocers, bakers, and ravioli men.

Isaac took a second cab down to Grand Street. He visited the fruit stand of Murray Baldassare, across from Ferrara's pastry house. Murray had been a marginal stoolpigeon, registered with the First Deputy's office, until Isaac turned him over to Newgate. Now he was Newgate's decoy, a fink for the FBI. Newgate financed Murray's career as a fruitman, throwing four thousand dollars into the stand. Murray had no time for the fruit. Women from the neighborhood were fleecing him out of his bundles of tangerines. Murray was supposed to spy on Ferrara's; Newgate had the notion that the
dons
of Grand Street conducted their business over Ferrara's coffee mugs and trays of Sicilian pastry. There wasn't a child in Little Italy over the age of six who didn't know that Murray Baldassare was a fink. He stayed alive because he had nothing to feed Newgate. Amerigo himself ate Murray's tangerines.

Murray recoiled at the image of Isaac shining through the tiny window of his stand. He developed hiccups that knocked underneath his lungs. Isaac had to drive a fist into Murray's shoulder before the fruitman could get back his speech. The tangerines had a scarlet flush; their skins bled for Isaac. He swiped one from Murray's window, its skin tearing under the force of Isaac's yellow nail. The nectar inside was frozen to the strings that covered the fruit.

“Chief,” Murray said, “why come here? You want to see me dead?”

Isaac licked his fingers. “Relax, Murray. Amerigo knows you were married to me. He won't hurt you.”

“It aint Amerigo. It's the FBI's. Newgate'll cripple me. You think he's stupid? He can figure for himself. The reports I'm shoving him are a bunch of crap. He'll say me, you, and Amerigo are dancing on his head.”

“Didn't I put you in business, Murray? Don't complain. You're a celebrity now. Nobody ever copped a fruit stand off the FBI's before.”

“Isaac, I'm begging you, get me out of this.”

Isaac put the injured tangerine back in Murray's window.

“Talk to me, Murray. You watch the street. Has Amerigo been hiring any goons lately?”

Murray's eyes wandered from the ceiling to Isaac's shoes. “I think so.”

“How many, Murray, how many has he hired?”

“Three or four.”

“Are they lollipops—kids? One of them a young girl? Did he send them to stomp on my mother?”

Quivers rose inside Murray's cheeks that went beyond the possibility of a bluff. “Your mother, Isaac? … Newgate never told me. Who could do such a terrible thing?”

Isaac made the corner, with Murray caught behind his glass, tangerines up to his groin, his trunk twisted and inert, and his face turned mechanical: dim leering eyes in a nest of hollows. He was a discard, a spy that Isaac had manufactured, stroked, groomed, and shelved, and then fobbed off on the FBI.

The Chief was remorseful about Murray. But Newgate had hounded the First Dep for one of Isaac's famous spies, and Murray was the spy Isaac could spare. He passed the social clubs of Mulberry Street, their windows shuttered with broad stripes of green paint, with the inevitable “MEMBERS ONLY” scratched into the green.

Isaac entered the Garibaldi club. The members glared at him, but no one threw him out. The Garibaldis endured his policeman's smell, his blunt tie, his calfskin shoes, his orange socks, and the desecration of a pistol in their rooms. Most of them were men over sixty, snug in the thermal underwear exposed at their ankles and their wrists. They were drinking black coffee mixed with anisette, or cappuccinos from the Garibaldi's big machine.

Growls escaped from Isaac's stomach. He was addicted to coffee with steamed milk. He shunned the espresso joints of Bleecker and MacDougal, the Caffè Borgia, where they drowned your coffee in whipped cream, the Verdi, with its bits of chocolate in the foam, and the Reggio, which had a tolerable caffè moka, but little else. Isaac went to Vinnie's luncheonette on Sullivan, where he could enjoy his cappuccinos in a simple glass, or Manganaro's on Ninth Avenue, if he was in the mood to banter with the countermen, who begrudged pulling the handles of their espresso machine.

The aroma of coffee inside the Garibaldi club, thickened by the push of radiators, could drive a cop mad. The Garibaldis had the best cappuccinos in New York. You couldn't attribute this to the wonders of a machine that produced sensational foam and squeezed boiling water through a bed of coffee grounds. It was the devotion of the Garibaldis themselves, who wouldn't consider making cappuccinos for hire.

Amerigo Genussa sat among the Garibaldis in a stunning red shirt that was wide in the sleeves. A man no older than Isaac, with scars around the eyes from fights he'd had in the kitchens of Little Italy, he was concentrating on his game of dominoes.

Isaac resolved not to break the silence at the Garibaldi club. He would outlast dominoes, cappuccino mugs, Amerigo's hatred for him. But the whistling heat off the radiators clung to Isaac, attacking the skin behind his ears. The redness of Amerigo's shirt turned bitter in Isaac's mouth, and he could taste the dry surface of the dominoes. “You want a coffee, Isaac?”

“No.”

Amerigo brought two mugs down from the shelves. Slyly, without a crease in his nostrils, Isaac watched the coffee-making. The machine shivered with a sucking noise as Amerigo steamed the milk. He cranked the lever, and coffee poured from two metal fangs.

“It hurts me to have a sullen man in my club. Stay out if you can't smile.”

He pushed one of the mugs at Isaac. The Chief stared at the bubbles in the milk. “Bite my fist, landlord, but don't you ever go near my mother again. I'll kill you so slow, your brains will leak into your ear before you have the chance to die.”

“Isaac, I fuck you where you breathe. If I wanted your mother, I wouldn't have messed up the job.”

The Garibaldis fingered their dominoes while Isaac and Amerigo grimaced at one another near the cappuccino mugs.

“Tell me you haven't been hiring goons off the street.”

“Sure I'm hiring. You think your mother was the only casualty? The little bastards come into my precincts, slap Mrs. Pasquino over the head, demolish her bakery, and run home to Jewtown so they can eat their kosher baloney. Isaac, I'll break their feet.”

“Amerigo, are you saying it's a gang of rabbinical students? A Jewish karate club? Take a walk for yourself.”

“Two of them are Yids, definitely. A boy and a girl. The last one's some kind of nigger. If he's not a spade, then he's a Turk or a Jap. Isaac, it's gotta be.”

Isaac dug his jaw into the cappuccino mug. He licked the coffee, his throat purring at the taste of browned milk. “Amerigo, I'll handle these lollipops. Call off your goons.”