Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  WINTER

  WARNING

  AN ISAAC SIDEL NOVEL

  JEROME CHARYN

  DON QUIXOTE WITH A GLOCK

  1

  I began the saga of Isaac Sidel in 1973 . . . only the saga wasn’t about Sidel. Isaac was a minor character in his own series. Blue Eyes (1975) was devoted to a blond detective, Manfred Coen, who was Isaac’s adjutant. He was modeled on my older brother, Harvey Charyn, who didn’t have blue eyes, but did have Coen’s penchant for silence. Harve was a homicide detective in the NYPD. We both grew up on the mean streets of the South Bronx. Harve was my survival kit. Gang leaders left me alone because they didn’t want to tangle with my brother, not because he lifted weights and had biceps as big as ostrich eggs. That wouldn’t have mattered much to the Cherokees or the Minford Place Maulers. What mattered to them was that Harve didn’t have a pinch of fear in his brown eyes. He would have taken on every member of the Maulers, one by one, each with his zip gun and South Bronx claw—a hammer with a spike attached to its head with a battalion of rubber bands.

  And so I led a charmed life, and was never scalped or bruised by a makeshift tomahawk. Harve was the artist in the family and a great reader of books. But he didn’t get into Manhattan’s celebrated High School of Music and Art; he had to loiter around at some lowly trade school, where he didn’t have a whiff of Picasso or Cézanne, and studied industrial design instead. But I had all the cunning of a billy goat. I got into Music and Art, where I was introduced to middle-class culture and buxom girls from Central Park West. And later, while I studied Russian lit at Columbia College, Harve soldiered in Alaska, having to drive heavy-duty trucks on long hauls. I never touched a rifle, a bayonet, or a ten-ton truck. My prize possession was a bookcase that housed my collection of Modern Library classics. I was already hooked, a rabbinical monk who believed in the holiness of the written word.

  I lived in a closet in Washington Heights, tacking pages together until I published my first novel in 1964. Meanwhile, Harve got married and became a cop, and I taught contemporary lit at Stanford, published a book of stories and five more novels, each one with less sales than the last—my life as a writer had become one great vanishing act.

  So I went to Harve. He was a Mafia expert, stationed in the wild lands of Brooklyn, and I wanted to resurrect myself as a crime novelist. Hammett had the Pinkertons, and I had Harve. I tried to cannibalize him and his little band of detectives, learn their lingo. I traveled with them in their unmarked cars, listening to their hatred of the street—everyone outside their own orbit was either a “mook,” a “glom,” or a “skel.” They weren’t much like the warriors I imagined detectives to be: they were civil servants with a gun, obsessed about the day of their retirement. I sat with Harve in his station house, saw the cages where all the bad guys were kept. I visited the back rooms where cops would sleep after a midnight tour. I was Charyn’s kid brother, the scribbler, and radio dispatchers flirted with both of us.

  My brother drove me to the Brooklyn morgue since I needed to look at dead bodies for my novel. The morgue attendant took me and Harve around. All the dead men looked like Indians. Their skin had turned to bark. I distanced myself from the corpses, pretended I was touring some carnival with refrigerated shelves. It was Harve who sucked Life Savers and seemed pale. I was only a stinking voyeur in the house of the dead.

  But I had the beginnings of a crime novel. I chose my hero, Blue Eyes, aka Shotgun Coen, who raced into battle with a shotgun in a shopping bag. I made him a graduate of Music and Art, as if I was grafting my own life onto Harve’s. Coen had all the sadness of the South Bronx, that brittle landscape of long silences. Coen was divorced, like me. He worked for Sidel, a volatile chief in the first deputy commissioner’s office, known as Isaac the Brave. Isaac had gone undercover, disgraced himself, joined the Guzmanns, a tribe of Peruvian pimps, with their headquarters in a candy store on Boston Road, in the heartland of the Bronx. And Manfred was left out in the cold. Isaac could no longer protect him. Coen had also committed a sin. He fell in love with Isaac’s voluptuous daughter, Marilyn the Wild. And Isaac was filled with an ungovernable jealous rage. Blindly, he maneuvered to get Coen killed. Manfred dies in the middle of his own novel, and the rest of the story unravels, as Isaac pounces on the Peruvian pimps and redeems himself. He’s some kind of a villain in our first encounter.

  I didn’t realize that there would be a second. But I had to continue the tale and get to the fundament of Isaac’s feud with Coen. Hence, I wrote Marilyn the Wild (1976), a prequel to my first crime novel. I figured my job was done. But that very year I got a phone call from movie star Richard Harris.

  “Do ya know who I am?” he asked.

  “Do I not?” I answered, trying to imitate his Irish brogue.

  I loved Richard Harris in This Sporting Life (1963), where he’s an oddly poetic brute of a rugby star fresh out of the coal mines. Harris himself had played rugby at school in Ireland, and one could feel the pinpoints of tension in his body. He was the closest anyone would ever get to Marlon Brando’s subversive charm on the screen.

  He adored Blue Eyes, he said. And he wanted me to create another character like Manfred Coen, a brooding Irish version of him. I sat with a galaxy of lawyers in a glass tower on West 57th Street to iron out the details of my “indenture” to Richard Harris. Who would own the character I created, particularly if I wanted that same character to appear in one of my own novels?

  Harris flew in from Hollywood. We were scheduled to meet for breakfast at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel. I arrived first. I’d never seen such opulence—palm trees and exotic plants and a vaulted skylight—in the middle of Manhattan. Harris arrived a few minutes later in his bare feet and filthy white pants. Who would have reprimanded him for violating the Palm Court’s dress code? Whatever rules the Plaza had didn’t pertain to Richard Harris. My mind was on the prowl, and I immediately had the character I wanted to create: Patrick Silver, a barefoot Irish-Jewish janitor at a crumbling synagogue—Congregation Limerick—on Bethune Street, in Greenwich Village. Manfred Coen was long dead, but I would rekindle Isaac Sidel in this novel and his feud with the Guzmanns.

  The first scene of The Education of Patrick Silver (1976) takes place in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, with a barefoot Patrick Silver guarding one of the Guzmanns. The novel has its own surreal flavor, a noir Alice in Wonderland, with Patrick as my Mad Hatter. With Richard Harris in mind, I wrote and wrote. Of course, my novel was in want of the usual fabric for a Hollywood film. It would have needed the madcap metaphysics of someone like Quentin Tarantino, and Tarantino was thirteen years old at the time.

  Harris would never get to play Patrick Silver. But Sidel was back with a vengeance, still a somewhat shadowy figure, cursed with a tapeworm after the death of Manfred Coen. And then, in 1978, he would have a novel all his own, Secret Isaac, where he makes a magical trip to Dublin to commune with James Joyce’s ghost and meet with Dermott Bride, an Irish-American gangster exiled at the Shelbourne Hotel. Isaac himself may have unwittingly launched Dermott’s career. He’s risen in the ranks, with his tapeworm, and is now the first deputy commissioner of the NYPD.

  Sidel must have fallen out of mind, since I abandoned the series for twelve years. I didn’t publish The Good Policeman until after I had moved to Paris in 1989. What was a wild child from the South Bronx doing near all the mythic cafés along the Boulevard Montparnasse? Even as a small boy, I’d loved the idea of Paris, with its one recognizable totem, the Eiffel Tower. At junior high, while all my classmates chose Spanish as a foreign language, I studied French with a few other misfits and stragglers. My French teacher, Mrs. Maniello, kept repeating how lucky we were. She herself was an incurable Francophile. She would tell us tales about Fantômas, the king of cri
me, a hero of French fiction who was the wickedest man alive. Fantômas rode across the rooftops of Paris, leaving a pile of corpses in his wake. He used all the tricks of a detective to capture his prey. Fantômas murdered at will. He had a daughter, Hélène, who was his one mark of vulnerability. And I wondered if part of the inspiration for Isaac Sidel had somehow risen out of Mrs. Maniello’s class. Sidel wasn’t evil per se. But he did use many of Fantômas’ tricks. He wore disguises and got rid of his enemies one by one. And he had his own Hélène—Marilyn the Wild.

  No matter. I moved to Paris. But I was in the middle of an identity crisis, like some Candide stunned by a stick, or perhaps a French Pinocchio adrift without his puppeteer. I walked around in a daze, with a kind of residual terror. The apartment I had rented was as schizoid as I was. Its front rooms faced one of Paris’ ugliest and busiest boulevards, the Avenue du Maine, while the kitchen and bathroom overlooked the Montparnasse Cemetery. It was strangely soothing to stare at that green graveyard while I was on the pot. But my own writer’s engine was impaired. I couldn’t traverse the least imaginative landscape. Previously, I’d written novels about Wild Bill Hickok, FDR, and Rags Ragland, a maverick fictional third baseman who was tossed off the Boston Red Sox, banned from baseball, and had to play in the Negro Leagues. My mind had been voyaging for twenty-five years, moving from target to target, and then it all stopped. I couldn’t commune with my own creative ghosts and gods. I’d start a novel, and would have to abandon it after several tries to sculpt a décor. I’d lost touch with my own language. I worried that I’d start dreaming in French. Yet there was one subject I could still write about—New York, one landscape I could still traverse, one décor that was mine. And so I returned to my very own Fantômas, Isaac Sidel, and wrote Maria’s Girls (1992). Isaac was now police commissioner, but the novel swirled around detectives from Sherwood Forest, as I dubbed the precinct in Central Park. I’d never realized there was such a precinct until I returned to Manhattan on a short trip and went on a pilgrimage to that mysterious police station. It made a lot of sense. Sherwood Forest was where the horses had once been stabled when there were horse patrols in the park. The precinct itself existed in its own time warp.

  Meanwhile, comic actor Ron Silver had read The Good Policeman and wanted to play Isaac Sidel in a television series devoted to Sidel’s adventures and mishaps. And now I was involved in the warp of a television series as a writer-producer, which meant I had to remain in Manhattan for six months. Silver had been marvelous in Paul Mazursky’s adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel, Enemies: A Love Story (1989), where he plays Herman Broder, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Europe who’s involved in multiple love affairs. Broder had enormous, sad eyes that seemed to watch the world at a slant and suck up all our sympathy. And Silver was an excellent candidate for Sidel. He grew up on the Lower East Side, like Sidel, and his father was in the clothing business, like Joel Sidel, Issac’s errant dad. But Silver had grown a beard since he’d played Herman Broder, and must have seen himself as a seductive Mephistopheles. All that comic empathy was gone, and the beard seemed to camouflage his emotions and obscure those enormous eyes. He did look a little like Fantômas, but Sidel’s warmth and wackiness had disappeared.

  “Ron,” I said, “you gotta shave off that fucking beard.”

  “Why?” he asked, as if he were talking to a pet snake.

  “Because it’s like wearing a mask.”

  I told him how wonderful he’d been in Enemies: A Love Story.

  “Terrific,” he said. “That movie lost millions.”

  “It doesn’t matter. That guy in the film is Sidel.”

  Ron kept his beard. The series about Sidel was canceled. I returned to France.

  I continued my own series, novels devoted to Isaac Sidel and his rise from police commissioner to mayor of New York. He kept murdering bad guys as he built his own makeshift ladder of success.

  I began teaching at the American University of Paris. I started a film department and felt comfortable around kids who were vagabonds like myself, commandos between two cultures. And when another vagabond, Quentin Tarantino, emerged as a filmmaker with Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), I realized he was sculpting his own novels on the screen, just as I was directing my own films on the page, with jump cuts and words that were able to conjure up multiple décors. I had my cinematic language the way Tarantino had his. He was his own Alice, his own Mad Hatter; he could kill off a character in one scene and bring him back to life in the next. He was Glenn Gould playing with his eyes shut, Bobby Fischer dancing blindly with his back to the board. Perhaps I couldn’t reach the perfection of Pulp Fiction in my crime novels, but I wanted them to explode with an absolute sense of play.

  I quit teaching in 2008 and returned to Manhattan. I felt like Candide venturing into a wilderness of words. A whole new language had been carved in my absence. It hurt the most whenever I watched a Knick game. I knew what “drop a dime” meant when it related to a snitch. But how did you “drop a dime” during a basketball game? And when I heard Knick announcers talk of “3-and-D” and “dead-ball rebound, ” I wondered if I was Rip Van Winkle or Methuselah. I had to gather in this new vocabulary, become my own “dead-ball rebound.” It didn’t hurt as much when I dug deep into the nineteenth century and wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010), or I Am Abraham (2014), a novel in Lincoln’s own voice, or when I slipped back into the 1980s to write Winter Warning, the ultimate encounter with Isaac Sidel, where he becomes, almost by accident, President of the United States.

  2

  It’s the twelfth novel in a crime series that’s occupied my psyche, waking and dreaming, for over forty years. The series has a ripple effect that builds from book to book like a curious mosaic, but each of the novels can be read on its own. I didn’t provide a reader’s bible for Winter Warning. Blue Eyes is never mentioned. Isaac’s tapeworm has fled, but he feels like a character who’s in constant mourning. There’s a sadness that accompanies his every move. And I realized that the rhythm of the book, as in all the Sidel novels, grows out of the cosmic sadness of my childhood. I’d always been an outlier. I didn’t belong to Manhattan’s middle-class culture at Music and Art, or any culture at all. And perhaps that’s why Fantômas resonated so deeply when I was at junior high. He was a breaker of boundaries in that mask of his. Murder was a form of poetry to Fantômas. And his many disguises were like language itself—words could kill.

  Yet Isaac was rabbinical, a profoundly moral man. He didn’t have a penny in his pockets. He wasn’t fueled by greed. He never uses the presidency for his own personal gain. Perhaps that’s why all the politicos in Winter Warning are scared to death of him. He can’t be bought and sold. He wears his Glock in the White House, like a frontier marshal on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  He’s haunted by one man, Abraham Lincoln. Isaac doesn’t believe in Lincoln’s “better angels.” He’s been wrestling demons all his life. He prefers to have his Glock, even if it falls out of his pants and bumps along the carpets. But Lincoln was his own better angel, who held the fabric of the country together with the force of his beliefs. Lincoln also had a mad wife and a boy who died in the White House. Isaac’s wife abandoned him years ago and has become the queen of Florida real estate. And so Isaac shuffles across the White House residence in his shaggy slippers, with Lincoln’s ghost to keep him company. He doesn’t have Lincoln’s aura and never will. His own political party would like to stage a coup and get rid of him. His only allies are a Russian crime boss and a pair of Israeli fugitives. His first trip abroad is to a former death camp in the Czech Republic. But he doesn’t feel at home until he rides Marine One to Rikers Island and puts down a revolt among the inmates. He’s Don Quixote with a Glock rather than a lance. His own music has been inside my head ever since I can recall. If the world has darkened around him since he first appeared in Blue Eyes, he’s always been a noir character in a noir world, and always will be.

  WINTER

  WARN
ING

  PART ONE

  1

  His honeymoon was over before it began. He didn’t even have his ninety days of wonder, that period of immortality granted all modern presidents, the good, the bad, and the mediocre. He’d swept his party back into power in what was soon known as the Slaughter of ’88, as he captured sixty-two percent of the popular vote on his credentials as a cop. People thought they’d elected a mayor-sheriff with a Glock in his pants, not Spinoza with a bald spot. They couldn’t seem to remember that he was a political philosopher as well as a sleuth and had once been called the Pink Commish.

  Isaac Sidel wanted to eliminate poverty on his first day in office; he talked of subsidies for the disenfranchised. His top aides had to hem and haw. Finally they cleared their throats and hinted to Isaac that the disenfranchised hadn’t catapulted him into office and created a Democratic landslide, hadn’t cast a single vote.

  “So what?” Sidel said. “It’s still a crying shame.”

  He’d lost his hand-picked chief of staff, Brenda Brown, who was even more of a maverick than Sidel. She wanted the Big Guy to sidestep Congress and govern by presidential decree. Brenda was preparing executive orders that would have overturned rulings of the past three Republican presidents. But Brenda had a breakdown after a month, as she realized that the White House was a hornet’s nest of compromises, and she ran off with a summer intern, a voluptuous magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke—it was the first scandal of the Sidel administration.

  The Democratic National Committee climbed on Isaac’s back and thrust Ramona Dazzle upon him, a Rhodes scholar who wouldn’t stray into uncharted waters at the White House. And soon Isaac began to suspect that his own party had planted a spy in the West Wing; where once he’d had a tapeworm he now had a dybbuk, who gobbled his intestines piece by piece. Ramona handled all the details of his daily life; she hired and fired until he couldn’t recognize a soul. The White House had become an alien hotel. It was Ramona who presided over the menus—the Big Guy had to feed on crumbs—and had furniture shunted around to suit her fancy. The Oval Office was a hovel compared to Ramona’s suite of rooms. Isaac had no sense of décor. But Ramona had plucked Dolley Madison’s music box and chiffonier out of a secret storage facility in Maryland that collected the residue of former First Ladies, and her own corner office had become the jewel of the West Wing, half museum and half war room for skull sessions with her brats.