Secret Isaac (23 page)

“Marsh, I wasn't Dermott's rabbi. Didn't you tell me how he took to Joyce?… he was your star pupil before he went to Yale.”

“You primed him, Isaac, you taught him how to sniff for Leopold Bloom.”

“You're crazy. I've forgotten every line in that book. It was burned out of me years ago, that shit.”

“Cops don't forget,” Marshall screamed. “And you're the biggest cop of them all.”

Isaac was the snake of Rebecca's party. Democrats squinted at him. Wives lured their husbands out of his reach. Bread turned to cotton in his fist. He couldn't even chew on a sandwich. The snake was out of luck. He stumbled upon Dennis in a pack of young lawyers. Mangen had come to shake Rebecca's hand and wish her success in Isaac's building. Isaac grabbed him away from the lawyers. The lawyers were aghast. They couldn't believe the Special Pros would allow himself to be pawed by a bum.

Isaac's eyeballs were inflamed. He looked like some Ahab hunting whales in an old, dry building. A crease appeared in the middle of his forehead. His seven days of mourning had isolated him from all humankind. The hairs stood on his scalp like an idiot's knot.

“You cunt …
you
kidnapped Sylvia Berkowitz.”

“I only took back what you stole. Where I come from a man's entitled to his wife.”

“Dennis, you've been living with subpoenas too long. You think you can scoop up a body and deliver it anywhere. To the courthouse, to one of your jails. Sylvia's a free agent. She doesn't belong to any dean of Columbia College … the next time you bring your shooflies into my apartment, I'll break them off at the neck. You've been collecting skunks and pissy old men. I'm not crazy about that rat's army of yours.”

“Isaac, you ought to be. That rat's army has been keeping you alive.”

“I'm sick of your fairy tales. God save me from protectors like Morton Schapiro … you love to play with history. Tell me again how little Dermott is a police spy.”

“Ask the king. He can answer for himself.”

“How, when he's sitting in Dublin?”

“Dermott's in New York.”

“I haven't seen him,” Isaac said.

“You will. He wouldn't leave the country without thanking you. You buried his woman for him.”

Mangen disappeared from Isaac to mix with his young lawyers. Isaac's brain began to smolder on him. Why was
he
the last to get the news? Isaac had a mess of stoolies and cops clumping through the City. No one had mentioned Dermott Bride. Scamotti brushed into him. Isaac held on to Blue Eyes. “Manfred, don't fuck with me.”

Scamotti laughed.

It was Coen's teeth that he saw. Coen's purple mouth. “If you hate me, Manfred, tell it to my face. I don't like to dance with spooks.”

“You're hurting me,” Scamotti said. “Leggo.”

It was futile work. Manfred wouldn't admit who he was. Isaac would have to survive with a ghost around him. He went away from the Democrats and trudged upstairs.

26

T
HE
party boomed under Isaac. Becky's people seemed to exist without a place to sleep. Were the Democrats going to snore against the walls? Isaac heard strange nibbling sounds. Someone was eating the woodwork outside his office. Isaac didn't care. The fucker could attack his closets and his brooms. Isaac fell into a dream about Blue Eyes. Blue Eyes and Annie Powell. They were in Dublin together. It made Isaac whimper to see Blue Eyes and Annie wading with the ducks in Stephen's Green. It must have been summertime. Manfred didn't have a shirt. The blond hairs around his nipples were growing wet. Annie's dress was way above her knees. The ducks were hysterical about the condition of her thighs. They quacked at the scars that ran from her groin to her kneecaps. The impressions were deep, like miraculous birth scars, as if a woman could give birth to any creature through her thighs.

Isaac groaned in his chair. The nibbling sound had gotten closer. The party was asleep. The Democrats must have found somewhere else to go. Isaac could have his peace. He opened one eye and saw two little old men crouching in the dark. They wore derbies in October, and long neckerchiefs that could have been used to hide a man's face. The bits of light coming from the lamps in the street gave them fat shadows that humped up against Isaac's wall. The shadows wobbled because of what the old men were carrying in their arms. It could have been two long-headed babies. They're pros, Isaac muttered to himself. Only a cop or a hired killer would hold a shotgun with such profound gentleness. He ducked behind his chair.

The shotguns blasted pencils and cups off his desk. Wood splintered over Isaac's ears. The explosions could have made a fucking eternity around Isaac. The shotguns kept going and going. It was torture for what Isaac did to Coen. He'd have to live with the crump of two shotguns in his ears. They wouldn't even let the schmuck die.

Then the noises stopped. Isaac heard one of the old men say, “Shit.” There was some scuffling. Isaac crawled into the foothole of his desk and came out through the other side. The shotguns were gone. He had no more old men with derbies to shoot pencils off his desk. Morton Schapiro was breathing over him, Captain Mort. “The pricks got away,” Morton said. “I couldn't wrestle with both of them.”

“Who were those guys?”

“Dunno. They looked like cops to me.”

“You were in most of the stationhouses, Mort … didn't you recognize them?”

“I couldn't,” Morton said. “They kept covering their mouths.”

“Funny guys they were … with derbies sitting on their brains. Morton, what the hell were you doing on my floor?”

“Mangen told me to stay up here. He said you might have a few visitors tonight.”

Dennis was his rabbi, all right. And Isaac had a new “angel,” Captain Mort. He couldn't be sure if those two old men were serious with their guns. They damaged a lot of wood. But Isaac's skin was pure as ever. They hadn't even singed his hair. Still, Captain Mort had wrestled with them, faced up to their neckerchiefs and those wicked guns. Isaac had to pay his debt to the shoofly.

Morton was delighted with the stingy thanks he got, the mumble of words out of Isaac's mouth. “Now you can go home,” Isaac said.

A gloom crept over Captain Mort. “What if they come again?”

“They won't. Morton, they're afraid of you.”

He couldn't do much about the shattered wood. He'd have to work in a sea of splinters until Rebecca threw him out. He picked the shotgunned pencils and cups off the floor. Then he sat behind his desk. He was feeling snug as Moses ever could. The arrival of the two old men had been a preliminary dance. It was a bit of foolishness designed to scare the shit out of Isaac. He knew what would come next. He'd have to wait a little while. The main act would begin when the shotgun dust had settled.

A man appeared at the door. Isaac didn't have to blink. “Dermott,” he said. “Don't be shy. Come on in.”

The king stepped into Isaac's office. He was small, the way Isaac remembered him. He had a crow's black hair, and peculiar features for an Irishman. How did he get so dark? Were there gypsies in the Bronx that mingled with the shanty Irish of Clay Avenue and Crotona Park North? Or did his blood lines go deeper than that? He could have sprung from a hidden race of dark-skinned Irish, seafarers from the Levantine who had come down the Liffey four hundred years ago to settle in Blackrock. Isaac snapped on the lights. The king's eyebrows bunched on his face. Dermott had the right people to take Isaac apart. But no one seemed willing to murder him.

“That's a pair of lovely boys you lent me. Did you supply them with neckerchiefs and all?”

Those eyes beetled up at Isaac until they covered half the king's head. “Isaac, O'Toole is the only gang I ever had. And he's gone.”

“What about the Clay Avenue Devils?”

“Christ, I ran from the Devils before I was eighteen. If you're going to make me spit out my past, Isaac, then at least let a man have his chair.”

“Sit,” Isaac said, and the king sat down across from Isaac in the room's only other chair. The First Dep didn't have a great need for hospitality. He preferred a barren room.

“Well, if the neckerchiefs didn't belong to you, then what was that joke all about? You're not a blind man, Dermott. You walked on the debris they left. Two old men in derby hats shot up my office twenty minutes ago.”

“They're not mine, I said.”

“Then why are you here? Did Tiger John send you? Are you supposed to warn me never to go near Mangen again?… you know, Dennis says you're a police spy. I told him he was full of shit.”

The king laughed. “Since when are you so loyal to me?”

“Don't kid yourself,” Isaac muttered. “I have eighteen special squads. I'd have known before now if any cop was carrying you on his lists … Dermott, I'm curious about something. It seems I got you into Columbia College. I read the report I wrote for Marshall Berkowitz. But kill me, I can't remember meeting you.”

“We met. Many times. We had long talks, me and you, when I was with the Devils.”

“I talked to Arthur Greer. He was president of the club.”

“But Arthur didn't get into Columbia College.”

Isaac still had that shotgun music in his ears. His head was a rubble of bones and blood. Why could he picture Arthur, who was pushed from his roof, and not little Dermott?

“What did we talk about?”

“Immanuel Kant.”

The king was telling lies. Bronx thugs with black hair couldn't have gotten into Kant.

“You gave me books to read,” Dermott said. “Dostoyevsky … Kant … James Joyce … it wasn't only literature. We talked about the South Bronx … the death of Crotona Park.”

Isaac had to be in his dotage. Does senility strike at fifty-one? The Guzmanns had ruined him, those pimps of Boston Road. They'd given him a clever dose of venereal disease: a syphilitic worm that was eating away at Isaac's prick and Isaac's brain. He'd brought Kant and Dostoyevsky to little Dermott, and Isaac couldn't recollect a word.

“What other cops did you talk to?”

“Why?”

“Because a memo exists from my dead boss, O'Roarke, asking me to put you into college.”

“This O'Roarke never came to our clubhouse. I can promise you that. He didn't meet with the Devils.”

“Then who could have told him about you?”

“Anybody … we were popular in those days. The Devils policed the Bronx.”

“And you, you walked from Columbia to Yale, you said hello to Marshall Berkowitz and goodbye, you learned from Marsh about Shem and Shaun and the powers of the Liffey, and you graduated from Marshall's class to become the overlord of every pimp in Manhattan.”

“And what did you learn from Marsh? To rush through the streets slapping heads? Big cop who grovels in the dirt and puts on disguises, so he can land in a crook's underwear. The trouble with you, Isaac, is you don't have some poet to celebrate all your deeds.”

“I'm not dying to be famous,” Isaac said. He was growing less fond of this dark-haired boy, this gypsy Irishman from Clay Avenue. He had an itch to take the king by his ears and shove him into the wall. “What's your secret, Mr. Bride? How did you stay invisible for seventeen years? A whoremaster without a face. Why didn't we have your pedigree in my files? We had pages and pages on Arthur Greer … I could have told you the grooves in his knuckles, or the size of his prick.”

“Arthur wasn't happy unless he was at the center of things. He entertained judges and movie tycoons. I was the quiet one. I kept my nose clean.”

“A pretty story,” Isaac said. “But it's mostly shit. Some cop had to be fronting for you … you have bad habits for a king. A king ought to be gracious to his friends. He shouldn't sit still when they die.”

“Isaac, what the fuck is in your head?”

“I didn't catch you grieving for Arthur and your man O'Toole.”

“It's not your business how I grieve and who I grieve for.”

“Your uncle, Bagman McBride. Where the hell is he?”

“He's safe,” Dermott said. “The uncle is out of your hands.”

“And Annie Powell? Once you discard a mistress, I suppose that's it.”

Isaac smiled when Dermott reached into his pocket. He could predict the knife that would come out like a long tooth. The king's elbow made a perfect line. That line never wavered, never broke.

“Are you going to cut my face, sweetheart?”

“No,” the king said. “I'm not interested in your face. It's your throat I want.”

Isaac didn't move from his chair. He was gambling that little Dermott wasn't ready to stick him with the tooth. “Arthur lied for you the last time I saw him. He said you were the mediator for the Devils, and I believed him. The king made his rep with his tongue. No, no. You were his blade. The quiet boy who could scar you for life. That's how you talked … poor Arthur was only president of the club. You were the king.”

The tooth disappeared with a snap of the king's wrist. “Where did you bury Anne?”

“Her mother wouldn't take her,” Isaac said. “I had to find a plot. She's in a Jewish cemetery near Floral Park. Esau Woods.”

Those black eyebrows began to rumple like mad, as if the king were having a fit inside his head, and nothing showed, nothing but the rumples over his eyes. He looked up at Isaac. “You shouldn't have let her stay on the street … I tried to get O'Toole to pull her into Brooklyn Heights. Jamey couldn't do it.
You
were around. The big rabbi from Headquarters, Isaac Sidel … how come you didn't ask me what I remember about you?”

The king was setting him up. Isaac could feel it in the shiver of his voice. Little Dermott had a harsh vocabulary. His words would lead Isaac into some ugly twist. “I didn't think you remembered very much. You wouldn't even nod to me in Dublin.”