Marilyn the Wild (7 page)

Brian sank into the property closet door, his knees dropping out from under him. He couldn't breathe until he was below the level of Coen's eyes. Stirring air through his pockets, he considered Isaac's mysterious ways. The Chief wouldn't enter a locker room. He'd hire Coen to do his killings. Brian was remorseful now that he bungled his drinking party with Marilyn. He could have been one of Isaac's deadly angels.

He was afraid to touch Coen, to embrace a killer's knee. So he sobbed with his thumbs in his sleeves. “Manfred, never mind what Isaac says. Me and Marilyn once were going steady. Check it out I didn't swipe her off the street … Manfred, she knew me from Echo Park. We had accordion lessons together at the parish … some girl. She was the first Jewish mick I ever saw.”

How could Coen pull the ears of a man this close to the ground? Marilyn had wandered into his apartment an hour ago, naked under her coat, her cheeks puffed out, and blood in her nose. Coen realized these markings couldn't be accidental. Her head was mapped too methodically with swollen ruins. He discovered her skirt, blouse, and shredded pants among the cookies in her shopping bag. He couldn't believe this was Isaac's work. If the Chief had been in the mood for corporal punishment, he wouldn't have broken Marilyn's face. He would have gone to Manfred, who was hiding her from him. Coen took advantage of Marilyn's dizziness. He was able to shake Brian Connell's name out of her. He rushed down to Elizabeth Street. Coen didn't have Isaac's agility. He was poor at contriving schemes. He meant to slap Brian, and then what? Should he undress Brian in the stationhouse, have him crawl without his clothes?

Brian's sobs made Coen miserable. The cop's ears were wet. Coen distrusted the anti-crime boys. They were meddlers who liked to play detective in the street He lost his desire to steal Brian's pants.

“Listen to me, you glom. Wherever Marilyn goes, you walk the opposite way. If you're ever in her neighborhood, you'll wish Manhattan didn't exist”

Brian's partners remained neat the walls with their guts sucked in. They didn't have the clout of a blue-eyed detective. They were only glorified patrolmen, cops out of uniform, so they couldn't pounce on Coen. Isaac would have flopped the entire squad, fed them to niggers and man-eating sharks in the Bronx.

From Elizabeth Street Coen went on a tour of youth centers in the lower East Side. He was scouting for ferocious teenagers, boys and girls who might be lollipops. His third stop was a Jewish center at Rivington and Suffolk. He noticed a remarkable absence of skullcaps and religious memorabilia. Where were the Jews of Suffolk Street?

The center proliferated with Chinese boys, Latinos, blacks, and surly whites from Seward Park. Its oblong game room looked as if it had to confront a nightly whirlwind. The walls were plundered dry, the woodwork having disappeared, and holes existing where ornaments and basketball fixtures should have been.

There was a series of huge, snaking genitals on the front wall, signed by “Esther Rose.” The artist had been meticulous about pubic hair, stippling it in with eye shadow and different shades of lipstick. “Esther Rose” seemed to have a slanted mind; her clitorises were much taller than her cocks. Coen enjoyed the lipstick art. “Esther Rose” had put little eyeballs and chicletlike teeth around the swads of pubic hair.

Slogans were scrawled in shocking pink under “Esther Rose's” genitals.

“RUPERT SAYS WE'LL ALL DISAPPEAR IF ARABS AND JEWS DON'T KISS”

“THE GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT IS THE INVENTION OF BANKERS WITH A LOW SEMEN COUNT”

“RUPERT SAYS GEORGE WASHINGTON WILL BE FORGOTTEN LONG BEFORE WILLIE MAYS”

“SACHS AND GIMBEL'S ARE THE WHORES OF NEW YORK, RUPERT SAYS”

Coen couldn't devote himself to Rupert's sayings. He had to mingle with the center's population, cast about for suspicious objects and faces, fish for a gang of womanbeaters.

Boys in jerseys and brimless hats milled from corner to corner, avoiding Coen and his lumber jacket. Their vocabulary baffled him until he realized that “red mountain,” “torro,” and “colony” were the names of cheap wines.

The baby winos began to sneer at Coen. They collected around a ping-pong table that consisted of a crooked green net and a series of hills. The local champion, a loud, argumentative boy with wiry hair, challenged the winos to a game if they could come up with fifty cents. The winos were too poor. So the champion enticed Coen with his eyebrows and a suck of his lip. “Hey bro', got some pocket money?” Coen agreed to play.

The winos hooted at him. They smelled another victim of the hilly ping-pong table. Coen acknowledged their noises with a grin. They were reasonable hoodlums. He was hoping to flush them out, find the lollipops through them. The champion had a sponge bat with fresh sheets of rubber glued on. He gave Coen a sandpaper bat worn down to the wood. Coen didn't worry. Ping-pong was his game. He'd perfected his strokes at an uptown club after his wife divorced him.

The champion had an illegal serve. He wouldn't throw up the ball. He held it in his fingers, and slapped at it while turning his wrist. The ball sped across the table with an evil spin. The champion had memorized the peculiar surfaces of this table; he know every hill, every dull spot, every dip in the net. But Coen wasn't a country player. He minimized the boy's advantages by blocking the ball with his shallow bat. He added a delicate push, and the ball went back over the net with the same exact spin. The champion stared at the ball. No one had ever made him hit his own spins. He grew demoralized after three short volleys with Coen. He began eating the rubber off his bat.

The winos refused to cheer. They rolled their eyes with a menace Coen couldn't ignore. He'd never seen fourteen-year-olds with such dispassionate faces: they had the glint of hard, old men. They marched around Coen, berating him in a babble of Spanish and English.

“Who is this
borinqueña
?”

“
Yo no sé
, man, but I think he came down to fuck with us. Bring Stanley.”

“Stanley'll picadillo him for hustling fifty cents.”

Stanley was a Chinese boy with spectacular biceps. He arrived in a Bruce Lee sweatshirt with ripped-off sleeves. Coen wouldn't pay court to the boy's muscular twitch. Biceps couldn't frighten him. Stanley had a beautiful face. That's what disturbed Coen. Muscles seemed incongruous with soft eyes. The winos' monkeyish glint and bitter cheeks were missing from the boy.

He had a perfectly tolerant voice. “Mister, what do you want from us?”

“A little news,” Coen said.

The baby winos squeezed their eyebrows together. They were appraising Coen. A shrimp like him couldn't take them by surprise. They had a gift for smelling cops. Cops don't play ping-pong, they decided among themselves.

“Hey sister, you from the Board of Ed? You know what we do to truant officers? We suck their noses and tickle them to death.”

“You gotta be wrong, bro' … this
muchacha
is a Treasury man. He saw you licking on a bottle, and he's trying to collect his whiskey tax.”

“You full of shit. I say he's an uptown fairy. He's here to redecorate.”

Coen unbuttoned his lumber jacket. He was going to scratch himself. But the spring in his holster had loosened during the ping-pong game, and his gun fell out. The winos fluttered near the gun. “
Mira, mira
, look what uncle brought Spread out, man.” Coen was chagrined; he hadn't intended to menace the winos with a gun. They ran from him. The Chinese boy was the only one who stayed.

“I'll ask him about the lollipop gang,” Coen mouthed to himself, trusting Stanley's intelligence. The center cleared out, leaving Coen an uncomplicated view of rotting walls and broken electrical wire. Stanley wouldn't move. Coen was about to mention the lollipops when he felt two enormous claws climb on his chest and throw him over the ping-pong table. He could have sworn Stanley's ankles never left the ground. The boy had kicked air without going into a crouch or tightening his beautiful face, and he crashed into Coen's lungs with his feet. Coen was on the floor with a pain scooping under his heart that rattled his throat and brought his guts into his mouth. He figured he would have to die. But his lungs were blowing in and out. Blood rushed into his head. Coen stood up. He was thinking lollipops again.

6.

T
HE
owners of the Ludlow Street restaurant were angry at Ida Stutz. They could no longer work her twelve hours a day. Ida had grown sullen. She was insisting on her rights to a genuine lunch break. The Chief hadn't knocked on the restaurant's cloudy window since he returned to America, and Ida meant to find him.

She was worried about Isaac. He'd become a skinny inspector if she couldn't fill him with mushrooms and barley soup. It wasn't in her nature to be stingy with men. Isaac needed her flesh to rid himself of anxieties and the strain of being a father, husband, son, and brainy cop. Ida simplified his life. She knew he had a missing daughter, a shrill wife, and a mother in the hospital, poor Sophie, who took Arabs into her bed. Ida was on her way to Rivington Street, and Isaac's rooms. She would freshen the earth in his flower pots, scrub the inside of his refrigerator, wait for him by the fire escape.

The streets had a pernicious look to Ida. The remains of boxes from the pickle factories flew across the gutters, bumping like fingers and limbs off a doll's body. The February wind could eat into wood, slice through the corners of the low, gutted buildings, make the old Jewish beggar on Broome Street sink his head into the middle of his overcoat, blow under the deepest layer of Ida's skirts, and pinch the seams of her powerful bloomers. Ida was praying for snow. The dark
snegu
of her Russian grandmother (the snow that fell near Delancey Street was more blue than white) could cake all the gutters with rich ice, hide the debris, force the pickle factories to conduct their business away from the sidewalks.

Ida didn't bemoan the past. It was no matter to her that the Essex Street market sold wigs instead of farmer cheese. The Cubans had come to Essex Street along with an influx of Israeli grocers. Ida welcomed them. She battled with the Israelis over her heathen principles, her distrust of promised lands and Jews with tanks, but she battled out of love. And the Cubans adored Ida's blintzes, although they couldn't pronounce the word.

Hands, rude hands, without mittens or gloves, snatched at her near Isaac's building, pulling her into a hallway. She was surrounded by a confusion of masks. She shivered at the hot, breathing eyes on top of her. Ida recognized the lollipop gang. This was the threesome that had visited her in the restaurant, stealing blintzes, fondling her breasts, and had gone around the corner to break Sophie's head. Ida could smell a girl's hair under one of the masks. Growls came out of the girl. The other two were quieter.

“Isaac's pussy,” the girl said, holding Ida by the jaw. The two boys had to restrain her. “She's harmless,” the shorter boy said.“Take a look.”

The girl couldn't be placated so easily. “She goes down for him. It must rub off. A homely bitch is what I say.” And the girl got up on her toes to grab hunks of Ida's hair. “Tell sweet Isaac regards from Esther Rose.”

“Shut up,” the shorter boy said.

The taller boy slouched against a row of bruised mailboxes, his body turning away from all the banter. As Ida pushed at the fingers tearing into her scalp, she felt the boy's restless moves. He was retreating from his friends. The shorter boy, wedged close to Ida and Esther Rose, brought Ida out of Esther's reach. “Get smart,” he said. “That man's too piggy for you. He has shit in his ears. He made his name sucking off New York. Now the city's taking revenge.”

“Let's fuck her,” Esther rasped. “Let's fuck her under her fat clothes … it'll be like throwing harpoons in a whale. I'll bet she's filled with mush.”

She whacked at Ida with the blade of her hand. The taller boy stumbled along the wall, catching metal pieces off the mailboxes with a shoulder. Esther nudged the other boy. “Are you with me, Rupe?”

He blunted Esther's chops with an elbow. “We're going … come on.”

They pushed Ida deeper into the hall, packing her into the space behind a door, and ran, their masks struggling towards the street in a steady wave. Ida didn't whimper. It wasn't strictly fear that kept her behind the door. She couldn't figure out the three masks. What did they want with Isaac and her? She wished she could drown herself in the smoky air of the restaurant. Ida loved to breathe salmon and baked cottage cheese. She wallowed in her shoes, trying to hurl the wind out of her ankles. It was freezing in the hall.