Anastasia was a complicated fiction. She had no future and no past, except for a weird idyll on the Lower East Side when she was the sweetheart of a dark-eyed junior-high-school gypsy, Isaac Sidel. She’d already done everything conceivable with a man, except bear him a child. And the gypsy would have hot flashes whenever he clutched her hand. He reminded her of those idiotic boys whom she’d eaten in another life. His devotion terrified Anastasia. He too gave her a ring. He was much more serious than Ferdinand Antonescu. Like a poet who could have been born in an asylum. Rut she was plucked out of that idyll, sent back to Roumania, where she was turned into a “swallow,” a professional teaser of men.
The swallow kept thinking of her little gypsy. He always stumbled into some killing ground. She might even have to shoot him in the pants one day. Rut she’d nurse the gypsy like she was nursing Sal. Anastasia had become Sal’s keeper. She’d bathe him, caress his dusty bones. The dry squeal in his throat might have been an orgasm. Anastasia couldn’t tell.
The small thread of history she had was somewhere between Isaac and Sal. The gypsy had blown off Sal’s face. LeComte rebuilt Sal like some kind of monster man. His own captains wanted to kill him. And the melamed wanted Sal’s cement. Anastasia had to wheel him to phantom meetings with his board of directors. He couldn’t visit the same place twice. The melamed had let him go free and also put a price on his head. But Sal wouldn’t hibernate. He had this maddening wish to appear in public. And so she wheeled him to Papa Cassidy’s wedding. They’d fought over that.
“She’s like a niece,” Sal had said. “I can’t disappoint Delia.”
“The melamed has his spies. We’ll last ten minutes.”
“I don’t care.”
“Well, I’m not sentencing you to death. Should I ask LeComte? He can be the umpire.”
“I won’t go to the Ritz-Carlton with a lot of G-men. They’ll embarrass me.”
“Then I’ll escort you, Sal.”
He was prince of the wedding, king of all the fat cats. The builders and brokers couldn’t survive without Sal’s cement. Isaac appeared at the wedding, and the look of him bit into her heart. He was the same gypsy who’d followed her home from school, her troubadour with his silent songs. She’d loved Ferdinand Antonescu, and hated him in that cannibal country of Odessa, but it wasn’t like having a sweetheart in the public schools of Manhattan. Anastasia would have peed in her pants if she’d smiled at Isaac on the Ritz-Carlton’s roof. She’d have abandoned the wheelchair and run away with her gypsy. But she couldn’t. She was sworn to Sal. And she had to take him down on the service elevator at the Ritz, wheel him across some forlorn kitchen to avoid the melamed’s men, who’d arrived on the roof with padded overcoats. Anastasia was always ten minutes from doom, no matter where she lived.
Isaac sat with the widow up in Marble Hill. He wasn’t sure if White still had some blood money in the attic. He had to be cautious.
“Mrs. White, have you looked in the attic? The Cap admired my baseball team, the Delancey Giants. He was sort of our treasurer, you see. But he was always going into his own pocket. And we’re solvent now. We’ve had some big donations. So if you should find some cash, well, it’s the Cap’s. It belongs to him.”
Ah, God protect Isaac from his own little lies.
He had to take his phone off the hook. The news hounds had gotten hold of his number. They wanted stories about Isaac the candidate. He busied himself with his baseball card collection. Willie Mays, 1951, was worth a thousand bucks. But Harry “Bomber” Lieberman, 1944, was practically priceless, because most of the card manufacturers had stopped production during World War II. Paper was much too scarce. But there was a very small run of phantom cards in ’44, a pirate edition that was never distributed in packages of gum. Isaac had finagled and cajoled to get the Harry Lieberman. He kept the card in a cellophane jacket. His fingers would tremble whenever he removed the card. He would touch it like some kind of totem. He’d met Anastasia in 1944. He’d sat in the bleachers at the Polo Grounds. A ticket cost sixty cents. But Isaac would crawl under the gate. The Polo Grounds stood on a bluffbetween the river and Harlem Heights, a magical green box where Isaac had come into his manhood watching the Bomber dive into his own shoelaces to catch a fly ball.
He’d been dreamwalking through the Polo Grounds ever since 1945.
He’d go to work at odd hours to avoid the reporters who stationed themselves outside One PP. His name appeared in gossip columns. He was called “the future king.” He ducked Becky Karp and Saturnino Gomez and realtors who were ready to make contributions to his war chest. Papa Cassidy sent him a check for a hundred thousand dollars. Isaac tore it up.
I’m not going to run, I’m not going to run, he sang to himself. But the town wouldn’t let him retire into a world of baseball cards. No matter how hard he resisted, Isaac would be the next mayor of Manhattan.
His picture was on the walls of Newyorican restaurants. No one seemed to like the current alcaldía, Rebecca Karp. He couldn’t walk into a café without someone kissing his hand. He was the chosen one, the guy with great expectations.
He went to his apartment on Rivington Street. His lock had been tampered with. The burglar didn’t know his business. He wondered if some journalist was squatting in his rooms. Isaac didn’t even take out his Glock.
“I’m home,” he announced, bursting through the door.
Anastasia sat on his couch, looking through Isaac’s card collection.
“It’s for kids,” she said.
“You’re wrong. Most of the serious collectors are my age. It’s an expensive habit … Margaret, are you on your lunch break?”
“No. I took the afternoon off.”
“Didn’t they teach you how to pick a lock at FBI school?”
“I’m out of practice,” Margaret said. “And I was too old to take the regular course.”
“But the KGB must have had a pretty good kindergarten.”
“Don’t, Isaac … I couldn’t get near you at the wedding. Sal is jealous.”
“Jealous?” Isaac said. “I’m your classmate who gets to kiss you every forty years or so.”
“I thought you liked my kisses.”
Isaac had a fit of meanness. He grabbed up his card collection.
Anastasia didn’t resist. “Will you keep a room for me at Gracie Mansion?”
“I’m not running for mayor.”
“I lived in a mansion once,” Anastasia said.
“I know. When you were a child war bride in Odessa. But this is different. There aren’t any Nazis around our necks.”
“There are always Nazis,” Anastasia said.
“I’ll handle them.”
“You’re getting all gray,” she said, climbing off the couch and touching Isaac’s hair. That touch terrified him. She could immobilize Isaac with the run of a finger.
“Take off the wig,” he said.
Anastasia removed her blond mask. She was as gray as the Pink Commish. Her hair had been cropped like a cadet.
They started to kiss. Soon they were undressing each other. She looked at the wounds on Isaac where the bullets had gone in. Her examination excited him. He was hung like a horse. Her gun and his gun lay on the night table. And when Isaac entered her, all his dreams of baseball fell away. He wasn’t an orphan of the Polo Grounds. He didn’t need card collections or the burnt grass of center field. Anastasia was all he required. She had one long blue vein on her leg. He worshiped that vein. He’d have killed to keep her. But she’d become Sal’s nurse. He’d have to wage war on Justice to get her back. Isaac didn’t have the manpower to attack the United States. He was a lonely commissioner in a chaotic town.
He couldn’t pin her to the bed like a butterfly. She had sturdier wings than Isaac. So he suffered this terrible “tristesse.” She smoked a little black cigar that must have been a habit from her Odessa days and nights. Isaac sat next to her in a tangle of sheets.
“Marry me.”
“No.”
&
nbsp; “I’ll kick LeComte on his ass soon as I get to Gracie Mansion. I’m the people’s choice. Marry me.”
She put on her wig, and Isaac couldn’t reconcile his Anastasia with that mop of yellow hair.
“Can’t we have some lunch?”
“It’s late … Sal doesn’t like to be alone.”
“Where do you sleep when you’re with him?”
“I sleep in Sal’s bed.”
“Does he touch you?”
“Yeah, he touches me. He still has hands … don’t ask me another question, Isaac. Don’t.”
“So I’m the beggar who has to wait, wait for crumbs.”
She socked the Pink Commish, hit him flush on the mouth. And Isaac fell back, bewildered. He’d swallowed half his tongue. Ah, they must have trained her as a ninja at FBI school.
“I risked my life coming here, Mr. Mayor.”
She dabbed his mouth with a handkerchief.
“Sock me again,” Isaac said, “but don’t go to Sal.”
“It’s my job. There’s no pleasure. I pity the poor guy.”
“Quit LeComte,” Isaac said. “Quit the son of a bitch.”
“Damn you, Isaac. LeComte could deport me. I have no papers.”
“You’re in limbo. Like me.”
“Smile,” she said. “You’re my man.”
And she kissed Isaac with such persuasion, he forgot about his sore tongue.
“I could blackmail LeComte.”
“Shh,” she said, and she was into her clothes and out the door.
“When will I see you?” Isaac hollered behind her.
“No questions, my silly darling goose.”
Darling, she’d said. She ran down the steps, and Isaac was happier than the last time he saw the Bomber hit a home run, forty years ago, on a September day in the Polo Grounds. Forty years of grief. Without Harry on the handle. One two three.
Anastasia ran and ran. She removed her blond wig and put on a black helmet, like Louise Brooks, her favorite star, who’d arranged her own invisibility and died in that winterland of Rochester, New York, where Anastasia had seduced and abandoned Marco Ponti, the Mafia prince of Lake Ontario. She’d married the prince in a secret ceremony. But the FBI had confiscated Anastasia’s wedding ring (she’d always get a receipt for the booty).
In Lulu, one of the first silent films Anastasia had ever seen, Louise was murdered by Jack the Ripper. Lulu gave herself to Jack and disappeared with a smile. She was a girl who went looking for death, like Anastasia. But Lulu didn’t have a Glock, or a hundred different aliases and a closetful of wigs.
She was assigned to Rubino, Jack the Ripper in a wheelchair. He’d loved her and tried to kill Anastasia. He wouldn’t stop giving her wedding rings. Sal had a whole continent of rings, and he’d get morose if she didn’t wear them on her fingers, five or six to a hand. She took off the rings when she visited Isaac.
Sal wouldn’t stop pestering her.
“Chinaman’s Chance.”
“I’m not taking you to a disco. It’s dangerous.”
“It’s a bottle club.”
“It’s still dangerous.”
“But I promised Delia I’d visit her at the Chinaman’s.”
Anastasia tapped him on the head, which had the texture of a lettuce leaf. “She’s married, you dope. Papa Cassidy wouldn’t let her dance.”
“Who’s a dope? I protected Delia. Papa had to sign a contract or I wouldn’t give the bride away. Delia gets to dance when I say so. I’m her force majeure.”
“Force majeure? That’s not a person. It’s an act of God.”
Sal picked up his cordless telephone, cradled it in the curve of his arm, dialed with one raw finger, mumbled a few words to Papa Cassidy, and put down the phone. “It’s done. Delia dances tonight. At the Chinaman’s. A command performance.”
“It’s risky.”
“Then I’ll find another babysitter. One of the Mormons will take me.”
“They’ll take you to LeComte, you big dope.”
Anastasia drove him in the taxicab she often used as a cover. She didn’t care for this arrangement of Sal’s. A private midnight show. She left the cab near the Park Avenue trestle and carried Sal in her arms across a moonless street, like a broken feather. All the weight seemed to have gone out of his body. She went down the cellar stairs to Chinaman’s Chance. Lady Longlegs was all alone, dancing in the dark. The music seemed to drift out of the floor, like a dragon’s breath. Anastasia didn’t like it. The scenario was a little too neat, the cellar a little too dark. She sat Sal down in a chair, next to a mirror that had its own silver life and revealed aspects of Delia St. John.
Anastasia had her Glock. She’d shoot the mirror if she had to and drag Sal out the door.
“Uncle Sal,” Delia said, her legs kicking out against the silvered glass, and for a moment Anastasia thought there were two Delias.
She didn’t like it.
“I’m happy,” Sal said. “I ought to live in the dark … I am the fucking darkness.”
“When you’re not the force majeure,” Anastasia said.
“Shaddap. I’m concentrating.”
But Anastasia didn’t take her eyes off the mirror, because that glass held whatever truth there was in this lousy salon. And when she could no longer see Delia’s kicks in the glass, she lunged toward Sal’s chair, but it was too late. Three heads appeared in the mirror. The melamed, Papa, and Jerry DiAngelis, clutching a Mossberg Persuader.
“Better not go for the gun,” he said with a sweetness in his voice. And Anastasia couldn’t have glocked the three of them and also save Sal.
“It’s like New Orleans, isn’t it, Jerry?” she said.
“There’s a big difference, sweetheart. You weren’t protecting this piece of shit. He was going to put out your lights.”
The melamed started to make catlike noises in his throat. “We don’t have time for dialectics. Madame Tolstoya, you can walk away from this cellar, or die with Sal Rubino. That’s your only choice.”
“But I’ll get one of you before Jerry gets me.”
“I don’t think so,’ the melamed said. “You’re quick, my dear, but I have two more pistols behind your back. I wouldn’t come naked to Chinaman’s Chance.”
“Margaret,” Sal said. “Don’t talk to that Hebrew schoolteacher.”
“You’ve been doing mischief, Mr. Rubino. LeComte was supposed to retire you. That was our bargain. I gave you back your life. And you wouldn’t let go of your cement. You blabbed to politicians. You meddled. You wanted to bribe our best captains.”
“I’m a player,” Sal said. “I can’t sit still … but this wasn’t political. I came to see Delia dance. That’s my privilege. And Papa ratted on me.”
“Not at all,” the melamed said. “He knows where his future is … and it’s not with you.”
“How much are you paying Delia?”
Delia emerged again in that silvered glass. “Not a cent, Uncle Sal. You killed Maria. I’m Maria’s girl.”
“And who financed that killing? Who commissioned it? Your darling husband. Papa wanted Maria out of the way.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Papa said. “The man is nothing but a murderous snake.”
“Talk, talk, talk,” the melamed said. “I’m going crazy … Sal, I can’t let you leave this cellar. It’s that simple. And Madame Tolstoya has to decide. Either she walks, or she shares a grave with you.”
And then a voice seemed to shoot right out of the glass. “I’ll decide who walks.” Anastasia saw that bearish face. He didn’t have his baseball cap or his big chapeau. He wore a dark suit, with a tie knotted around his neck.
“Jesus,” Jerry said. “I can’t believe it. How did Isaac get in?”
“Through the door, Jerry. Through the door.”
“But someone had to tell you about our little meet.”
“Papa told me. I put a tap on all his phones.”
“I’ll crucify you, Sidel,” Papa said. “Jerry, you�
�ll have to kill this man and the woman and Sal.”
“Don’t be so generous with our guns,” the melamed said. “He’s the police commissioner.”
“Papa’s right,” Jerry said.
“Sonny boy, you shouldn’t agree with strangers.”
“I’m the boss,” Jerry shouted in the dark. “And I say Isaac goes.”
“He could have brought his own army,” the melamed said. “Isaac, will you get out of here like a good little boy?”
“The honeymoon is over, Iz. I’m declaring war on the whole tribe, including your loanshark, Papa Cassidy.”
“He’s insane,” Papa said. “Kill him, Jerry. I’ll write you a check for six million dollars.”
“Dad,” Jerry DiAngelis said to his father-in-law. “I’ll take my chances. Isaac is alone.”
The melamed rubbed his eyes. “I like the Stalinist. I’d rather have him as a live enemy than a dead one.”
“Kill him,” Papa Cassidy said.
Anastasia reached for her Glock. If she blew the melamed’s brains out, Isaac could hide in all the smoke. But what about Sal? What about Sal?
“Kill him,” Papa Cassidy said.
And another voice came out of the glass. The rough purr of an angry animal. “Papa, when does Delia dance?”
Papa froze against the silver. “Dee? Is that you?”
“Yes, Papa. I’m Isaac’s back-up man.”
Papa Cassidy beat his chest. “Jerry, don’t hurt my daughter.”
“Nobody walks,” Jerry said.
“Sonny boy,” the melamed said, “are you going to kill the whole country? Let’s say good-bye.”
Maria's Girls (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 24