Secret Isaac (17 page)

“That's what he gave to my mother for the privilege of renting me. So long, Mr. McBride.”

They didn't love the idea of Annie whoring in the street. She'd make that five thousand on her back, she would, with any man who'd have a scarfaced woman. The uncle tried to threaten her. “I'll get the cops after you, I swear.”

But the cops didn't bother her. No one bumped Annie from her corner. The worst of it was having to see O'Toole. She was fond of that donkey, even if he still worked for her man.

“Do us a small favor now, Annie girl.”

“What?”

“Can you pick a less strenuous occupation?”

“No.”

“Then have a drink with me, for God's sake.”

“I will.”

The donkey looked after her, kept the most belligerent whores off her tail. But she didn't need Dermott's muscleman. She had a new benefactor. A bum, a
strange
bum. Father Isaac. He took her to lunches in his smelly clothes, mumbled shit about a daughter he had. Annie didn't want complications. The bum wouldn't pay her to undress. He lectured Annie, told her she wasn't for whoring. She should be somebody's wife. She was tempted to laugh and shout in his ear,
Mister, you're looking at the original Mrs. Bride
, but she couldn't give Dermott's secret away. A bum like that, where did he get the money to buy her champagne? She never asked. He had to be a special magician, because cops and pimps became ostriches around Father Isaac. They dug their heads into their shoulders whenever he passed. But it didn't always work in Annie's favor. The bum would scowl at her johns, and she had to get him to disappear, or she couldn't have made a penny.

It was a life for her, standing in doorways, smiling at idiots from New Jersey. She didn't care. She'd shove that five thousand into the uncle's mouth someday.
This is for Dermott, Mr. Martin McBride. Tell him he can brand a girl, but he can't make Annie into a cow
.

Oh, she was a big talker, she was. She began to see
her
dwarfs around the City. Jesus, it could have been the old men who had bandaged her, you know, washed her panties in the hotel sink, but she wasn't sure. All of the Fisherman's people looked alike.

They would come up to Annie and blow in her face. “Get off the street, little girl.” But when she asked them how the king was doing, they ran from her in their brittle, old men's shoes. It was beginning to drive her crazy.

She would go into the Irish bars along Eighth Avenue and drink slugs of Jameson's whiskey, crouching on a stool. The whiskey couldn't help. The old men appeared in the window with their yellow teeth. She might as well have carried them inside her skirts, the way these old men clung to Annie. They followed her home. “Last warning, little girl. Invisibility, that's our advice. A certain gentleman would like to see you shrink a bit.”

She should have told Jamey about the dwarfs. She didn't. They trapped her in her doorway the very next night. They struck her with the handles off a broom. It wasn't her body they were after. The dwarfs kept banging her face. She woke up in a fucking hospital. Father Isaac was there. She pretended not to notice him. She didn't want a sermon now. She must have been delirious. When she opened her eyes again, two of the Fisherman's people were standing around her bed. They didn't have their broom handles. They smiled, and then they were gone. She prayed to that saint of hers. Jude gave her the will to crawl off the bed. She went into the closet for her skirts and strolled out of the hospital.

The donkey found her wandering in the streets. He brought Annie up to her room. “Jesus, where the hell were you?”

She had bruises on her lips. It was hard to mumble. Her head was mixed up. “Coote, Coote the Fisherman.”

“What's that?”

“He put his salmons in the window …”

She lay in bed for a week. The donkey came in and out of her room. “Jamey, who are those old men?”

“Retired cops,” he said. “Ancient, hairy sergeants … they'll never hit you again. Not with O'Toole around.”

“Was it Dermott who sent for them?”

“I doubt it, Annie girl.”

She ate her bread and butter, and soon she was strong enough to go downstairs. She wasn't much of a whore anymore. Men would blink at her battered face and avoid Annie Powell. So she took to dancing at her corner as a way of attracting johns. She sang Irish songs. But the words didn't come out right.

In Dermott's old city

Where the boys are so pretty

And the rivers run underground

I met a fisherman

A sweet, sweet fisherman

Who cried, Cockles and cunts,

Alive, alive all …

Oh, she did pull in a few customers with her songs, drunken Irishmen and Swedes, old sailors they were, who didn't seem to mind a bashed-in girl. But she had a bit of a problem at home. Jamey was shivering on her bed. He wouldn't tell Annie what he was hiding from. He grew a beard sitting in the dark so long. And he frightened the old sailors.

She had to learn how to live with Robinson Crusoe. It was an odd braying the king's donkey had. He spoke in grunts. It didn't bother her. She had nothing worth jabbering about. Was she meant to recall Dublin with Jamey O'Toole? Tell stories of Dermott? Coote? Cashel Hill? She was possessed with ideas of money. Five thousand, or she'd remain Dermott's cow. She'd buy her freedom, she would. You couldn't take advantage of Annie Powell.

20

D
ID
you ever see the man on Grafton Street, the sandwichman who holds a huge signboard near his chest, touting some miserable tourist pub, with his eyes dead to this world? He stands with his jaw in the rain, a giant in a shabby coat. Remember him? The signboard stays perfectly still. He never blinks or scratches his nose. The donkey in Annie's room looked just like that. His face wouldn't twitch for thirty hours. But Robinson Crusoe wasn't dead. He was dreaming of the fire escape behind his mother's house in Chelsea.

It was only twenty blocks from Chelsea to Annie's room at the Lord Byron. But Robinson Crusoe couldn't run or crawl those twenty blocks. How can you find your mother's window with holes in your head?

The Fisherman was watching the streets. He's not in Connemara. The salmon don't bite this time of year. The king should have listened to Jamey O'Toole. But Dermott was always the businessman.
Dermott, he's a rat bastard, he is. Didn't I work for him? He'd dummy up the evidence. Or get his lads to knock you on the ear. He poses as the quiet one. But he's the killer, all right. Don't believe him. If he puts us in two cities, he'll be able to pick us off
.

The king sent little James back to Ameriky. O'Toole had to help uncle Martin collect the rent. It all turned sour when Annie arrived. No one had to tell him the history of that mark on her face. It was Dermott who gave her the cut. Sweet Jesus, how did he lose his own wife?

Then the Fisherman got into the act. His cronies beat her with their sticks. The donkey went looking for Coote's little old men. He found three of those lads at the Kilkenny Inn on West Twenty-fourth. He shoved their skinny behinds into a booth. “That's lovely what you did to Annie Powell. It's kind of you to go for the face. I'll make you dumb in a hurry if you don't explain to me what it's about? I thought we had a bargain with Coote. Why did he attack the girl?”

“Jamey darlin',” the little people said, squashed inside their booth. “That's ancient history. The king threw her out months ago. Dermott doesn't want her on the street. So what's she to you?”

He pushed their flimsy heads all the way under the booth. “She's a friend of mine. Keep your bats and sticks to yourselves, understand? I'll leave your brains stuck to the wall if Annie has another accident.”

“Dermott won't like his donkey boy meddling in Coote's affairs.”

“To hell with Dermott, and to hell with you.”

He tapped them once on the skull to give the lads something to dream about. Then Jamey walked over to the house where he lived with his mother. Two detectives were hunched in the park across the street. There was a third blue-eyed wonder in the alley at the back of the house. These blue-eyed boys were from the First Deputy's office. They belonged to Isaac the Pure. Was Isaac working for Coote? Jesus, the whole Force was under the Fisherman's net.

Jamey trudged uptown. Detectives followed him in their green cars. Coote's people loitered on every other block. They winked at O'Toole. There's a message in the crackle of an old man's eye. The donkey had been sold out. He was an expendable item to Coote. They would get another boy to collect their black rent. It was silly to run from Manhattan. If Isaac had gone in with Coote, they would have their lads checking for him at all the depots. He could smash one or two of them, but he couldn't beat up the City of New York. Oh, it was a merry Police Department when one commissioner danced with the next. They'd be dancing on Jamey's head soon enough. He didn't have much of a choice. The donkey went to hide in Annie's rooming house, because it was a dark, ratty place where cops didn't like to go.

The donkey's instincts were correct. Isaac and the little people kept away from Annie's room. Jamey had a life of it. He drank wine and ale from bottles in the window. His jaw was gripped with patches of hair. His shirt crumpled on his back. He became Robinson Crusoe in less than a month.

It pained him to watch Annie scuttle into the room with her johns. Such geeky old men, sailors from two or three wars ago, rotting in their winter vests. The donkey was obliged to wait in the hall. He would curse the king on those occasions.
Dermott, you gave my ass to Coote and fucked Annie girl
.

He couldn't last in the dark forever, with the odors of Annie's clientele in his beard. The poor girl was always drunk. Whiskey drunk. The whiskey gave her the fortitude and the soft burn she needed to entertain those crumbling sailors, sing to them and part her legs. The donkey had a rage in him. He wasn't going to shrivel because of Isaac and Coote McNeill. He combed his beard. Robinson Crusoe was getting ready for the street.

Daylight hurt his eyes. He could have been indoors for centuries. He wasn't used to crowds of shuffling men and women. They seemed moronic to Jamey, with their hard, fixed faces and translucent ears. They were staring into some uneasy eternity inside themselves that made him want to pick them up and hurl them into the gutters.

Robinson Crusoe left them alone. His education had come in the dark. The king was dumb, swear to God. He'd allowed Coote to jockey him into a hotel wing that was more a prison than a home. Dermott had his Alcatraz in seven large rooms. Coote provided the jailers. Ancient cops with kidney stones, borrowed from the Retired Sergeants Association. Hearing aids and heart murmurs. But they'd served under good commissioners. They were trained to kick a man to death. Lovely boys. The king had given his guts over to them, when he had his Annie and his O'Toole.

Jamey gritted his teeth. The young dudes were out. They tried to feather him with leaflets from all the massage parlors. He knocked the dudes to the side. He stuck his face in windows. People shrank from him. But the cops couldn't get under his beard. Those blue-eyed wonders who walked in and out of cafes scorned this Robinson Crusoe. They didn't connect him with their image of that strongman O'Toole. The donkey was free to cruise.

He traveled down to the Fisherman's territories inside the Kilkenny Inn and picked a table near the door. The little people, Coote's old men, didn't recognize him. They sat on their stools, looking past Robinson Crusoe. He sneered at them.

“Bring the Fisherman here.”

The little sergeants squeezed their eyes. “What's this?”

“Never mind. Just get me that old fart.”

They complained to the bartender. “He stinks, this bag of garbage. Who invited him in?”

“I don't need invites. I'm your loving friend. The O'Toole.”

They smiled at Robinson Crusoe with cracked lips. “Is it Jamey? In the flesh? What makes you think the Fisherman would ever talk to you?”

“Well, would he rather have me knock on his door at Police Headquarters?”

They got up off their stools and stood near the pay telephone. Jamey whistled “Columbus Was an Irishman” and “Phil the Fluter's Ball.” Coote was at his table before he could turn his back.

“It must have been a long ride from Chinatown,” Jamey said. “The traffic can get pretty thick in the morning … isn't that right?”

“What do you want, O'Toole?”

“Where's your bloodhound, Isaac the Pure?”

“Isaac?” the Fisherman said. He wasn't chasing salmon at the Kilkenny Inn. He came without his hip boots. “Isaac snores with the rats on Centre Street. I haven't said hello to that prick in months.”

“Then why are Isaac's lads waiting for me outside my mother's building?”