Secret Isaac (24 page)

“Dublin was something else … Isaac, I always hated your guts. You were a pain in the ass from the beginning. You had to reform little Bronx boys. Save us from the wildlands of Crotona Park. How many of us did you ship to Columbia College? Savages who were taught to purr. We could mouth any sort of magic. We had Diderot for breakfast, Molière for lunch. Shitface, who told you to meddle? I'm not your rubber baby … why did you have to pick out Anne? Couldn't you reform another girl? Isaac, haven't you guessed? People die wherever you plunge. If you'd kept away from Anne, I wouldn't have to go searching for her in your Esau Woods …”

The king was through with him. He'd come to Isaac for the name of a cemetery. He hadn't shared a thing with the First Dep. “Isaac, I should have let those boys rip off your mouth in Dublin, when they had you in their car.”

“Why didn't you?”

“I'm not inhuman,” the king said. “I wouldn't hurt my old teacher.” And he was gone from the room. Isaac was in the same bloody fix. He still couldn't remember the king.

There were dead balloons and slices of rye bread on the stairs. The king walked over the shambles of Rebecca's party. The place stank of Democrats: judges, lawyers, and clubhouse whores, men and women that Dermott had to smear with money. He'd bought the little Mayor and the Chief of Police. God knows, half the City lived off Dermott Bride. Manhattan would disappear without the girls of Whores' Row. The king put a tax on the girls that could carry a whole fucking island. The economy of New York lay with its whores, and what they could earn on their backs. He crushed party cups with both feet on his way out of the building.

The king got into a black Mercury. It was Tiger John's official car. The pimps had their Cadillacs, and the Police Commissioner settled for a black machine that was like a fat upholstered toy. It had gadgets hooked into the seats, telephones that could connect the Tiger with his men in the field. But he rarely used the phones. He was frightened of the buzzing they provoked. He preferred silences when he was in the car. Tiger John liked to think about the bankbooks in his pocket.

Dermott was abrupt with him. He didn't enjoy having to mingle with Sammy's toad. “Where's the Fisherman?”

“Are you daft?” the Tiger said. “McNeill can't be seen with you. Not in this country.”

“Explain that, will you, Tiger John? Why you can sit with me, and McNeill can't.”

“I'm the PC. I can do whatever I like.”

This idiot had thirty thousand cops under his command. He could break a full inspector, knock him down to captain if he chose. Or drop a branch of detectives, decimate a squad. He was as gullible as a monkey in the Bronx Zoo. You fed him bankbooks once a month, like a banana in his mouth, and he was delighted with himself. He banged through Headquarters making mischief in the offices he entered. His rages were an enormous bluff. The PC had nothing to do. McNeill ran the Department for him.

“He's angry with you,” the Tiger said, “for coming back to America without asking him first.”

“Since when do I need Coote's permission to fly?”

“Boyo, that was the bargain you struck.”

The Tiger had a crafty approach for an imbecile. Mayor Sam must have given him lessons in the art of Irish persuasion.

“Coote doesn't have to worry,” the king said.

“You'll spoil his retirement if you don't get out of here fast.”

“I'll be home in Dublin by tomorrow night.”

The Tiger looked at him out of a pair of tiny, nervous eyes. “Boyo, tomorrow could be too late. Sheeny Isaac is crawling around. He followed me and Sam into the sauna room at the Dingle. He didn't have the decency to take off his clothes. All he did was talk about Dennis Mangen.”

“He's your First Dep. Can't you quiet him down?”

“Jesus, I'd love to get rid of him. But he's the darling of the press. The newspaper lads bruise their own two feet begging interviews off the boy.”

“Was that your shotgun party that Isaac was complaining about?”

“Not mine,” the Tiger said. “McNeill's. The Fisherman sent over two retired sergeants to drop a neat kite on Isaac's room. But Mangen had his shooflies in the hall. The sergeants were lucky to get out of there alive.”

The king laughed to himself. The cops of New York made a mad, struggling army. Mangen was biting everybody on the ass. Except for Isaac. Isaac was the great survivor. He could rise out of a curtain of shotgun smoke in his stinky pants. The First Dep was so smart and so dumb. Isaac had each point of Dermott's history in his heavy brain, but he couldn't pull them into a straight line. The Devils were a local club. They didn't have the firepower to terrorize a boroughful of gangs. They couldn't have gone out on rampages to enforce the peace without a little help from the cops. McNeill lent his youth squad to the Devils. The gang was a baby wing of the NYPD. Coote wouldn't deal with Arthur Greer. He touched Dermott on the shoulder, made him the king.

“Boyo,” the Tiger said, “where are we going now?”

“To a cemetery in Queens.”

“At this hour?” Tiger John bristled in his coat. “The harpies are walking about. Why are we going to a graveyard?”

“To meet a lady of mine.”

Isaac had blabbered about a loss of memory. The poor demented boy couldn't picture Dermott's face among the Devils. The king remembered the old gang. They had to use a shack in Claremont Park as a clubhouse, the Devils of Clay Avenue. They didn't have the funds to buy colored jerseys. The Devils were nothing until the cops picked them up. They had to run to the cellars and the trees whenever the Fordham Baldies arrived on Clay Avenue. The shabbiest nigger gang could have destroyed them in an even fight.

The Devils were without a single patch of honor. They were the scavengers of the borough, mocked by other clubs. Only the worst pariahs came over to the Devils' side, outcasts and imbeciles. The Devils lacked the scars of open combat. They would fall upon the isolated members of some gang more craven than themselves. It took twelve of them to beat up one boy. They would whoop and scream, steal a pocket off the boy's shirt, and run back to their clubhouse in the park. They shivered summer and winter long, with the hysterical passion of cowards and invalids. They feared that an enemy might retaliate and burn down their miserable shack. But few gangs would bother with them.

Then McNeill wed his cops to the Devils. It was the only bunch of kids that the youth squad could control. He gave the Devils a bit of fighting blood. His motor pool would taxi them to different parts of the Bronx, so they could hit an unsuspecting gang and disappear. The Devils became known for these lightning attacks. They still couldn't have won if McNeill hadn't dressed his toughest boys in the Devils' jerseys to smack Fordham Baldies over the head. The king began to earn a reputation with his knife. He could slash out and rip a shirt sleeve, shave an enemy's skull, with Coote's boys behind him.

Things went according to McNeill. He could slap any gang in the Bronx through little Dermott and the Devils of Clay Avenue. But the king had ambitions of his own. He wasn't satisfied with his existence as Coote McNeill's knife and stick. He met in secret with the man. They stood outside the Webster Avenue shul, smoking cigarettes. No one would suspect an Irish captain and an Irish pug to declare new policies in the shadows of a synagogue.

“Ungrateful brat,” McNeill said. “Haven't I blessed you enough? I picked you over that jigaboo, Arthur Greer. You're the goddamn lord of the Bronx. The Baldies piss on their toes when the king takes out his knife.”

“I want more,” Dermott muttered from the side of his mouth.

“That's grand. Should I pin a badge on your chest and call you Sergeant McBride?”

“No. You'd better gimme a college education.”

McNeill had a laughing fit on the steps of the old shul. He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “They don't let donkeys into college. You're too old. You must be twenty, for God's sake.”

“I'm seventeen.”

“You never finished high school.”

“So what? I want college from you, Captain McNeill. Or find yourself another baby.”

They grinned at each other. The kid was bluffing. They both knew that. Little Dermott was stuck in his shack. He had nowhere else to go. But Coote liked the idea of a little gangster in college. The Department could raise up a lovely, educated pigeon. Coote went to see his boss, First Deputy O'Roarke. “Ned, that dark bitch will be useful to us. We'll have ourselves a cutthroat with a college degree.” But even the great O'Roarke couldn't convince a college to take him. They had to groom him first. Only one lad in Ned's entire office could jabber about Karl Marx. That was young deputy inspector Sidel. “Ned, will you lend us the brain?”

“You can have him,” O'Roarke said.

Isaac was a natural for them. The brain had ties to Columbia College. They could shove the king in that direction. But they didn't tell Isaac about their plan to educate little Dermott. They sent Isaac over to sit with the Devils. He brought Dostoyevsky into the clubhouse. Most of the Devils yawned. They wanted to go on a scalping party. The king took Isaac's prattle in. He had to make up for years of neglect. He memorized every murder in Prince Hamlet of Elsinore, and he got into Columbia College.

“Graveyards,” Tiger John smirked into his coat. It took him and his driver hours to locate the cemetery at Esau Woods. John wouldn't step out of the car. He wasn't going to carouse near the tombstones in a Jewish yard, and let the harpies grab at him from the trees. Why was this Annie Powell buried with the Yids?

“That's an odd priest that would let her lie down in Esau Woods,” he said to Dermott.

“The priest was Isaac.”

Dermott walked over to the caretaker's shack and knocked on the window. The caretaker wouldn't come out. Dermott crumpled fifty dollars under the door. The caretaker smelled the money and stuck his head in the window. He wore a thick wool cap. “What do you want?”

“A grave,” Dermott said.

“For yourself?”

“No. A girl was buried here.”

“Under what auspices?” the caretaker asked.

“I don't know. She came with Isaac Sidel.”

A sense of recognition grew out from under the cap. The caretaker smiled. “The Christian girl, you mean … they can't fool us, those big commissioners. She's in Lot Eleven, Row B … you'll find a marker with a red flag.”

Dermott moved away from the shack. The caretaker shouted between Dermott's shoulder blades with genuine scorn. “What's the matter with you? You can't go in there naked? This is holy grounds.”

He gave the king a skullcap to wear. He also put a huge flashlight in Dermott's hand. Half the graveyards in the borough of Queens could have heard those batteries knock. Dermott clumped through Esau Woods with a big, loud metal canister that couldn't light up his shoes: the bulb was nearly dead. He came to that marker on Lot Eleven, Row B. It was a stick on a smudge of earth, with a filthy rag knotted to it. That was all of Annie Powell. The king trembled near that grave. The cold burrowed through him. Why? It wasn't winter yet.

That rag knotted to a stick was the king's sign: a dirty sniveling crook he was, in a silk necktie, who rode out of the Bronx like a cannonball, with police money and police wit, and bribed a judge in Connecticut to shorten his name, so he wouldn't sound like a shanty Irish boy. Dermott Bride. Dermott Bride. Funny coloring for a mick. Dark the hair and dark the eyes. Would you believe it now? They have Irish niggers in the New Country. They live in a land called the Bronx. His dad couldn't explain this complexion of the male McBrides. The old man was a dark-haired janitor. He kept his family outside the Church. He wouldn't have child Dermott beaten by any bald witch of a nun. The boy went to public school. All the other micks in his class were so ruddy. Green-eyed girls. They grew taller than little Dermott. He fought those big Irish mules, boys and girls, biting, scratching, gouging with his thumbs, or he would have been eaten alive. They still wouldn't have much to do with him. He couldn't join the Salters, the Green Bays, the Emerald Knights. He had to go with the Devils, a mangy gang without a clubhouse, that took sheenies in, and had a nigger for a president.