Paradise Man (2 page)

“A devil, but so sweet ... honey, who’s that holding your hand? Your uncle, or your dada?”

Holden tried to release her hand. He’d have to pardon himself, take long steps to the subway, and hide in a closet for six months, but the Marielita held tight.

“Dada,” she said. And he wasn’t sure if he should groan or smile or deliver up the Marielita to those tall women in their bonnets. He’d found himself a leopard girl in Queens.

H
OLDEN WENT DIRECTLY
to his tailor. He could have shopped the brat to some orphanage, but he hadn’t dealt with children before, and he wasn’t familiar with the rates. Goldie would know. Goldie was his tailor.

Samuel Goldhorn, Esq., had a storefront in the ruins of Hester Street. He was a London Jew. He’d arrived here without his father before he was ten. He’d served in the army with Holden’s dad. Spent most of World War II attached to one general or another, in the arts and archives division. That’s where he’d become a forger and a thief. Holden’s dad was a military cop with the same division. The two of them had dealt in stolen documents.

The store was full: six sewing machine operators. Chinese women who assembled Goldie’s counterfeit suits. They pretended not to look at the little girl Holden had brought in. But she caught them with her leopard’s eyes. They couldn’t defend themselves against the Marielita. He laughed to himself. The little girl was like an X-ray gun.

He traveled around the bend of the store, with patterns everywhere, bolts of cloth, designer dummies, the collar and cuffs of some exquisite shirt Goldie hadn’t gotten around to yet.

Holden knocked on the tailor’s door. “Goldie, it’s me.”

And Goldie buzzed him into the back office, where the tailor ruminated and stitched, giving himself a week to finish a cashmere coat. He’d lost track of time and money. The madman sculpted clothes.

He stopped working the moment he saw the Marielita. He tossed the cashmere coat aside. “A little complication?”

“No. A casualty. She was under the table.”

“A gift, then,” Goldie said. “From the Cuban Santa Claus.”

“Something like that. But you can’t bring her back to Macy’s. I’ll have to board her somewhere. I was thinking of that old woman in South Jersey. Mama Bell.”

Goldie whistled, and the noise seemed to wind through his skull. “She’s a bit compromised at the moment. Surrounded by Marielitos, that Union City bunch. I wouldn’t go to Mama Bell.”

“Fine. No Mama Bell. But I’m short in that category. I never needed a nursemaid.”

Goldie hadn’t listened. He was watching the Marielita. “What’s her name?”

Holden shrugged. “Will you use your charm on her, Goldie? She saw me in the act.”

Goldie reached under his desk and fished out a lollipop. He unwrapped it for the Marielita like a perfect gentleman. Had he picked up his manners from the generals at arts and archives? Holden Sr. had been through the same generals, but he couldn’t have unwrapped a lollipop like that. Holden Sr. had to flee the army and live like an outlaw in France, where Holden was born.

The little girl sucked the lollipop. Goldie placed her on his lap and chatted to her in the king’s own Spanish. He wouldn’t talk Newyorican with a leopard girl. Whole melodies passed between them, mountains of talk. Holden was very bitter. The Marielita had been silent on the subway into Manhattan.

“Goldie, who is this girl?”

“She won’t say.”

“You’ve been jabbering with her for five minutes. She had to tell you something.”

“She did. She told me about her dolls and her favorite dish of ice cream.”

“Thanks,” Holden said. “You solved the riddle. What the hell was she doing in Queens?”

“She doesn’t remember. She was sleeping under a table and you woke her up.”

“Women,” Holden muttered. “They’re all alike. Walk around with mysteries in their brains. Will you ask her who her dad is?”

Goldie smiled. “You’re her dad, she says.”

“I give up. She’s an elf. Her only past is dolls and ice cream.”

“It’s a blessing. You went out on a kill and inherited a daughter.”

“Is that smart?” Holden asked. “Did you have to say kill?”

“Holden, she’s not a dummy. She talks like an adult.”

“Not to me,” Holden said.

“You’re a little rough with her. That’s the problem.”

Holden cracked his teeth. It was a habit he picked up from his dad. “Rough? I was a lamb.”

“You didn’t buy her a lollipop or ask about her dolls.”

“Goldie, I had other things on my mind ... like what happens when the cops discover she’s missing. Whatever she told you, the little bitch has a family somewhere.”

“Shame on you,” Goldie said. “The girl decides you’re her dad, and right away you call her a bitch ... take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“How can I dress you with your clothes on. Take them off.”

“In front of the girl?”

“Holden, she must have seen men in their underpants. I guarantee you. She’s quite mature.”

Holden got undressed and stood around in his socks and shorts, like a doll in the window. Goldie gave him a silk shirt. The silk sent shivers along his spine. The tailor himself knotted Holden’s tie. Then he took a blue Beretta out of a bag and attached the gun to Holden with its leather cup. And he dressed Holden in a dark wool suit that was made to wear with this gun. Holden saw himself in the mirror. The suit hugged his skeleton like some armor of skin out of the Middle Ages, and there wasn’t the hint of a holster under Goldie’s wool.

Goldie had draped him like Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the best-dressed man in the world. London elite, Goldie called it. Wine-colored shoes and a display handkerchief that cost twice as much as a hat. Holden couldn’t walk in off the street and visit Doug Jr.’s tailors. He had to depend on Goldie to steal the tailors’ styles. Goldie had a carton of patterns from all the best shops. The classiest tailors didn’t have a public address. Would lords and earls wander into the marketplace with wild, anonymous men? The quality of a tailor was determined by who he wouldn’t dress.

“Goldie, what about the kid?”

“Offer her to Mrs. Howard.”

“I don’t get it. She’s not a nursemaid.”

“That’s the point. Nobody will know where to look.”

Mrs. Howard was a widow who’d once worked in the shop. She’d been a tailor up in Harlem with some tough gang, but she fled St. Nicholas Avenue years ago to stick pins in trouser cuffs for Goldie. She’d dress Holden when Goldie was ill. She’d had as good a hand as Goldie himself but she suffered from arthritis and could no longer grab a needle or a pin. Holden hid his file cards with Mrs. Howard, and the record books of the spies he carried. Holden had to keep spies, or he couldn’t have lasted. He’d almost been killed twice on a poisoned contract. His rats had saved him. And she ran them for Holden on her telephone line. She’d become Holden’s answering service. He hadn’t bought her loyalty. He loved her. She’d lived with his dad for a while. She was the only one of his father’s women he’d ever liked.

He walked out of Goldie’s with the Marielita, her lollipop, and his quarter million and took a cab to Mrs. Howard, who kept a flat on Oliver Street across from the old mariner’s church. She had her own back yard, with pigeon coops and a tiny barn for neighborhood cats. She wore a holster, like Holden, and the same blue Beretta, because he didn’t want anyone to surprise her in that yard, not a thief, or one of Holden’s enemies.

He rang three times and let himself in with his key. Mrs. Howard was waiting for Holden. Goldie must have phoned ahead. She had pudding for the Marielita. She was tall as Holden, a beautiful black bitch with arthritis. Holden wished she’d shed a generation somewhere. He’d have married her then. His own marriage had left him with a fist inside his heart.

“Holden, that’s one hell of a suit.”

“Cost three thousand for the pattern alone. Goldie uses expensive gyp artists ... Loretta, will you mind the girl? She was part of that trick in—”

“You don’t have to explain. She’s a lovely creature, Holden. We’ll do fine.”

“There’ll be an extra allowance ... for the girl and everything.”

Her eyes tightened, and he recalled how angry she could get at his dad. She was Holden’s dream girl when he was twelve. She’d parade in her panties and high heels, and he’d want to disappear into her flesh. He hated his father for having her. And hated him more when his father ditched her after a drunken brawl. She’d wanted to take Holden, and his father threw her down the stairs. That instant of Loretta flying, her long legs kicking out at random, stayed with Holden.

“Shut up about money,” she said. And he was that unhappy child again, mourning the loss of Loretta Howard.

“Any messages, Mrs. H.?”

“Nothing important,” she said.

The Marielita spooned her pudding, oblivious of him. Don’t forget dada, he almost said. He kissed Mrs. H. on the mouth, felt her gun against his heart, while the Marielita looked at dada once with her leopard eyes and returned to the pudding with a pledge of chocolate on her mouth.

I
T WAS NEAR MIDNIGHT
when Holden arrived at the fur market. The streets were black around Seventh. The storefront gates were locked on West Twenty-ninth. Holden had to ring for the watchman. He took the elevator up to Aladdin Furs, toyed with the alarm, and walked in. He could see the factory lights. His partner, Nick Tiel, was preparing for the Paris show. Nick hired fur cutters who went into the gloom with him. The cutters were faithful to Nick. Holden saw to that. One cutter, who’d waltzed off with a paper sleeve, was found with a bullet in his head.

It was a business where everybody stole. Manufacturers, cutters, mannequins, office boys. Nick Tiel didn’t care about the sables.

He could survive the loss of a few dozen skins. But he guarded every scribble. No one could enter the designer’s room without a nod from Nick. He was the most inventive designer in New York. The company whirled around Nick Tiel. He controlled the cutters, design assistants, salesmen, some of the buyers themselves. He could always anticipate a shift in the market. He was months ahead of other manufacturers’ lines. But Nick had been knocked senseless by a gang of Greeks when he’d first come into the business. And he never quite recovered from that beating. He’d fall down after one of his flurries, and Holden had to fit him together again. Holden was his gun and his glue. He guarded Nick when the madness appeared, kept him away from people, or Nick would have offered his designs to any beggar, and sold his company to the Greeks.

The Greeks had more than half the fur market to themselves, but they couldn’t contend with Nick’s genius to marshal a company for an important show. The Greeks were waiting for Nick to fall and not have Holden around. But Holden was always there.

It might have been a marriage. Nick Tiel was president, Holden was senior vice president and service man. And Holden’s services went beyond sables in a drawer. He killed people for Aladdin Furs. That was the complication. Nick had another partner. He owned Aladdin with Bruno Schatz, a Swisser who lived in Paris and was eighty years old. Schatz scheduled Holden’s calendar of hits. Holden and Nick barked and wore the best clothes, but they were the Swisser’s slaves. It irked them, but they didn’t have the capital or the connections without Schatz. They would have been adrift in a universe of Greeks.

Holden caught Nick Tiel eating a sandwich in the designer’s room with a team of cutters around him. They’d completed half a coat. Nick would never allow the same cutters to see a whole design. He himself was the joiner, the ultimate pattern man. “Kids,” he said. The cutters were as old as Nick Tiel. “There’s no money in couture. You’re much better off putting your money in shoelaces than sables.”

The cutters agreed, but they’d have sold their sisters for Nick Tiel’s ability to design a coat. And they were all snobs. Nick abused them, but they were sable cutters, princes of the line.

“Go into laces,” he said and dismissed the cutters, ordered them out of the designer’s room.

When a coat was very important, Nick lured Goldie uptown, because a thief like Goldie would never steal from him. Goldie would pin the canvas model onto the designer dummy, and Nick Tiel could walk around the dummy and imagine it in sable.

He offered Holden half his sandwich. “How was it in Queens?”

“Satisfactory,” Holden said, dumping the vinyl bag on Nick Tiel’s table.

“That’s no answer. Give me a nibble. Did the woman have a moustache? Did she make you?”

“She’s dead.”

“ ’Course she’s dead. That was the idea ... any particular problems?”

“No.”

Holden had a sliver of Nick’s ham. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

“I’ll give you something to dream about ... your next case.”

“I thought I’m going to Paris tomorrow with your prelims.” Holden always brought Nick’s patterns to the Swisser before the Paris fair.

“Something came up,” Nick said. “You’ll have to cancel the flight.”

“What could be as important as prelims?”

“Abruzzi’s daughter-in-law.”

“What the hell is she to Nick Tiel?”

“I love you, Holden, but don’t you ever watch the tube? She was kidnapped this morning.”

“Who would be crazy enough to kidnap a district attorney’s daughter-in-law?”

“The Pinzolo brothers,” Nick Tiel said.

Paul Abruzzi was the grand old man of Queens. He was waiting for the right judgeship to come along. Meanwhile he hunted the Mafia in his own county. He’d begun to make a stink about an undiscovered tribe of garbagemen, the Pinzolos, whom he liked to call the Sixth Mafia Family.

Holden yawned. “I’m going to bed.”

“You ran with those imbeciles once upon a time.”

“I did not. I went to high school with Mike Pinzolo. We were friends. And why are you so sure Red Mike grabbed the Abruzzi bitch?”

“I’m not sure. But it makes sense. He’s a Pinzolo. His father is in jail. The family suffers from malnutrition and a million other diseases. They’re out of their heads.”

“Nick, I’m not buying this one. I took the Parrot. I’ll have my rest. I don’t do anything back to back. It’s a bad policy.”