Teasdale’s command center was “the Bing,” the nastiest jail on the island. It housed the incorrigibles. The Central Punitive Segregation Unit—CPSU—was a supermax facility, in permanent disciplinary lockdown. Yet Teasdale had penetrated the bitter heart of this bunker, the most ancient and run-down unit in the penal colony. The warden had declared a red alert—a total lockdown of the island—once Teasdale went on the warpath, but this lowly teacher from Vermont was able to override the warden’s red alert and seize control of every facility, trapping the master and many of his screws in their own bullpens. Of course, the dreaded Ninja Turtles of ERU—Rikers’ Emergency Response Unit—had rushed the Bing with their batons. The Turtles were unmistakable in their fatigues, padded coats, helmets, and steel-tipped boots. The Turtles had solved every crisis on the island. ERU had never failed. But Teasdale disgorged the Turtles, sent the warden’s paramilitary unit howling from the Bing, their faces covered in feces and blood.
Isaac walked into a swirl of elite units from the NYPD; the police commissioner had arrived with his sharpshooters and SWAT teams clad in black. But the new Commish, who was little more than the mayor’s attack dog, had been given no instructions at all. The mayor couldn’t afford a massacre. And the governor stood on the sidelines, yapping with reporters, while the Bronx borough president, who was swept into office with Isaac Sidel, seemed to care about the island’s population of undesirables. He was shrewd enough to talk to Sidel in front of the cameras.
“There are kids in the Bing, Mr. President, and old men with diabetes and heart conditions. What can you do?”
“Go inside and talk to Mr. Teasdale.”
“And if he won’t reason with you?”
“Well, we’ll have to reason with the unreasonable.”
Isaac was no stranger to this island. He’d taught classes at one of Rikers’ high schools, had met with boys in their “junior” jail—sixteen-year-olds were treated as adults and sent to the penal colony. He’d tried to secure scholarships for the brightest ones, and gave reading lessons to boys who had never learned to spell. He’d wanted to get rid of Rikers, but he had neither the power nor the will—it was a gulag on the East River, with a tundra all its own; more than half of the young men who did time at Rikers returned within a year. Even as president, he’d petitioned the Federal Bureau of Prisons, but nothing came of that petition; it was mired in politics. Jails and penitentiaries brought in big bucks. And there were always stats about the little “dips” in violence, while the prison population boomed. Democrats and Republicans alike clamored for additional wardens and screws.
Teasdale still remained a mystery. COs weren’t allowed to wear guns inside the cellblocks. They could arm themselves outside the jails, since they might encounter former inmates with a grudge against them. Teasdale’s band must have broken into the COs’ lockers and swiped their pieces. That’s what Isaac had heard on the news. But perhaps there was another explanation. Some of the inmates went out on furlough; they would leave Rikers aboard the Department of Correction’s orange and blue buses, volunteer at homeless shelters and hospices for men and women with full-blown AIDS, and then return on the same orange and blue buses in the middle of the night. And Isaac wondered if Teasdale had smuggled warriors and weapons into Rikers on these buses. If so, this wasn’t a spontaneous eruption and riot. It sounded more and more like a Wildwater op. And Martin Teasdale wasn’t some preacher out of the wilderness. He was a mercenary, a soldier of fortune. But how could Isaac be sure?
Neither the Ninja Turtles nor a single screw would welcome the most popular mayor the city had ever known. The governor conferred with his aides, and finally approached Sidel. That prick, Isaac muttered to himself.
The Gov had abandoned Isaac a month after the elections and sided with the Democratic Caucus. “You’ll have to solve this thing, Sidel,” he said on camera.
“You numbskull,” Isaac said, “you nitwit, why don’t you wave your handkerchief and come inside with me?”
The Gov fled from the TV crews without a word, as Isaac shoved around the cameras. No one volunteered to accompany him.
A janitor had to steer Isaac toward the hellhole where Martin Teasdale had barricaded himself, a corral for the most violent inmates—CPSU. The janitor wouldn’t follow Isaac on his journey.
“The crazies are in there, Mr. President. Good luck.”
But Isaac wasn’t alone. A tribe of stray cats had swarmed around him, caressing his heels with their scarred heads. They didn’t bother with mice or insects. They hunted rats on this little razor-wired plantation. And the leader of the tribe, known as Desirée, an enormous white she-cat with many scabs, had fallen for the Big Guy at first sight. She had a strange, high-pitched voice in Isaac’s presence, though she snarled at other cats who inched too close. Desirée had adopted Isaac, and led him into the Bing, her curled tail like a crusader’s flag.
Isaac stepped on crumbs of shattered glass. Cockroaches climbed the walls as Isaac went through a gate that opened for him and Desirée, and shut behind them with an electrical scrape. The aroma here was much worse than the stench of shit and sweat and unwashed linen at the city’s homeless shelters—it was the perfume of perpetual rot, and it made Isaac giddy for a moment.
The metal detectors were unmanned, but one of Teasdale’s rebels sat in the control booth with his own button mike and ushered Isaac into the facility. The Big Guy passed a cell block cluttered with screws in their winter underwear. They looked frightened and forlorn.
Who the fuck is Martin Teasdale?
A voice shot out at him with its own grit.
“Are you bearing arms, sir?”
“Yes,” Isaac shot back into the stinking wind that blew across the Bing. “I’ve come with my Glock.”
“Dangle it from your left thumb.”
So Isaac dangled his Glock and stepped deeper into a stench that debilitated him.
“Is this your bodyguard?”
“No,” Isaac said, pointing to the mountainous white cat. “My welcoming committee.”
He went through another rumbling gate and arrived in a tiny room that must have been a holding pen, where he spotted Martin Teasdale and his motley band of rebels. Some must have been high on coke or meth; others looked deranged. They had a variety of weapons: stun guns, grenades, hand cannons, firemen’s hatchets, and swords from another century. The men—Latino, white, and black—wore head scarves, stocking caps, and doo-rags made of silk. None of them were in jailhouse green. Several sported CO uniforms, with the shirts unbuttoned and cuffs rolled up. They couldn’t have been professional soldiers. They had the swollen cheeks and split lips of inmates who’d been manhandled. Isaac sensed a piercing beauty and defiance in the sad, bitter faces of these men—outlaws sentenced to solitary confinement. The women looked as fierce as the men. Some were pregnant; others wore the uniforms of female COs. The preacher stood out among them. He was very tall, like a skeleton in a sheath of yellowish skin.
“Reverend Teasdale,” Isaac said, “I feel silly with my gun resting on a finger.”
“You can put it back in your pants, Big Balls.”
Who is this guy?
Isaac was touched by Teasdale’s army. Pregnant women, psychopaths, desperados, and pale boys with filth on their faces. How had they managed to overcome a penal colony with the population of a small town? Perhaps Isaac miscounted their numbers and misconstrued their mission. Was the reverend a genius of disorder?
“Are you hungry?” Isaac asked. “I can give a shout and have some food brought in.”
“We have command of the kitchen,” Teasdale said. “We’re not hurting for grub.”
“Then why did you summon me? Why am I here?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” the talking cadaver said. “Sit.”
They sat down at a table that was infested with rat droppings. Teasdale offered Isaac a Mars bar that had come from one of the facility’s vending machines. Isaac unwrapped the bar, took a bite, and soon the caramel clu
ng to his teeth.
“Big Balls, why haven’t you shut down Rikers? It’s the worst penal colony in creation. It reeks with shit.”
“Reverend, I sent in reformers while I was mayor. I got the children out of there. I did what I could.”
“Don’t talk mayor to me,” Teasdale said. “You’re president. You could have the Justice Department shut down Rikers.”
“It’s not a federal facility,” Isaac said, with a sudden lameness in his voice.
Teasdale cackled at him. Tribe members in doo-rags glared at Isaac.
“Big Balls, that’s no excuse. Federal marshals could swoop down on this island and create their own red alert. The warden would shit his pants. I voted for you, voted for the first time in my life. And you play your war games with the Pentagon.”
“What war games?” Isaac asked. “You won’t find generals crowding the Situation Room.”
“Situation Room,” Teasdale said with spittle on his tongue. “That’s a laugh. The real war is right here. Rikers is crowded with crazies—men and boys who have no business being inside a jail. And this isn’t even a jail. It’s a holding pen for undesirables.”
Teasdale was right on the mark. But Isaac couldn’t admit that in front of this band, or he would have had to surrender himself to Teasdale.
A boy with a teardrop painted on his cheek—the mark of a murderer—pointed a Colt .45 at Isaac’s heart. He couldn’t have been much older than eighteen. Isaac recognized him instantly: Oswaldo Corona, who’d been one of Isaac’s best students on the island. He’d been elected to arista, the honor society. Isaac had talked to Columbia and Yale about him. And here he was in the Bing, with that ominous teardrop.
“Mr. T.,” Oswaldo said, in that sweet, childish voice of his—he even wore his arista pin. “Should I whack him in the right eye or the left?”
“Homey,” Isaac said, “did you forget me so fast?”
“I’m not your homeboy,” Oswaldo said. “You’re the master, and I’m the slave.”
“’Waldo,” Teasdale asked, “what will we accomplish by shooting out his eye? Go easy on Big Balls. He’s better than most.”
Isaac couldn’t stop squinting at that teardrop. How had a boy who had written about vegetable gardens in the barrio, who adored his moms, and wanted to be a novelist or an astronaut, have ended up killing someone and having a teardrop painted on his cheek as a sign of respect?
Oswaldo wouldn’t talk about his past or his present. It was this rabbi of the dispossessed who had to explain what had happened to the boy scholar. A CO at the jail for “juniors” had tried to punk Oswaldo out to another CO, and Oswaldo had punctured his throat with a ballpoint pen. The boy had gone back into the maze of the court system, and would soon be transferred to a facility upstate, where he’d probably spend the rest of his life. Meanwhile, he wore a teardrop and carried a cannon, like Isaac’s own Secret Service.
Isaac swore to himself that he would look into the case. No, he would have to do better than that, or he himself would be trapped in the maze.
“Mr. T.,” Isaac said, “Rikers should be shut down, but it will only rise out of the mist on another island, the ghost of a ghost. I can’t reform the courts. No president can. I can shuffle around my federal prosecutors, but the numbers will still come up short. How the hell did you trap the warden and all his disciples in their own cages? You got around their red alert, locked them inside their lockdown. And you took the Ninja Turtles and tossed them out of the Bing. You’re no rabbi. You trained will all the other mercs at Warm Springs.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Teasdale said. “No questions. If I surrender, Big Balls, there has to be a press conference.”
“I can’t protect you,” Isaac said, “once we’re outside the Bing. I can’t call the shots.”
“Yes, you can,” Teasdale said.
“Rabbi, don’t be so damn naïve. The might of the whole system will rain on your head like a shitstorm.”
“But not while you’re standing beside me. Shut the Bing for thirty days. Talk to the press. The warden will have to dance on a bed of nails—for a little while.”
Isaac agreed to the rabbi’s terms. He left the COs in the cellblock and marched out of the Bing with the Reverend Teasdale and his rebels. Isaac had secured their weapons, including the cutlass, and carried them in a metal container, with Desirée at his heels. He held off the Ninja Turtles and the SWAT teams. He was still commander in chief.
“Rabbi,” Isaac said, “I think you’d better free the warden, or this will never go down.”
Teasdale whispered into his button mike: a siren blasted, and soon every gate on this island gulag opened with a maddening screech. Teasdale had handed back Rikers to the little despots of the Department of Corrections.
Suddenly Isaac was some kind of a hero. Reporters from all over the planet wrapped a necklace of microphones around the Big Guy.
“Mr. President, how did you get the fiend to surrender?”
And for a moment Isaac’s glamour had returned. He wasn’t the recluse of Pennsylvania Avenue, marauded wherever he went. He had freed an entire facility from its captors, had walked unscathed out of the lions’ den.
“Mr. Teasdale is not a fiend. I can’t concur with his methods. He broke the law, and he’s willing to pay for his transgressions. But you’ll have to consider this an extreme form of protest. I’m going to ask Justice to shut down the Bing for thirty days. We’ll have another look at this island.”
The Big Guy didn’t blink or squint into the lights. Half the world was watching the metamorphosis of Isaac Sidel—resurrection, really. This was the man who had helped elect the unelectable Michael Storm, and now stood in his place. The cameras seemed to settle on his windbreaker. He was a president who was willing to enter the maelstrom.
“And what about that feral cat?” asked a journalist from El País.
“Desirée? I’m taking her with me to the White House.”
22
Dragon hadn’t been part of the lift package. Isaac didn’t want to ride through his own town in an armored cradle. Marine One delivered him to the Wall Street helipad, where he climbed into an anonymous sedan with Desirée, Captain Sarah, Stef, Matt Malloy, and another member of the White House detail. The sedan delivered him to an Italian grocery on Ninth Avenue that also had three dinner tables with waxen cloths; it was a Mafiosi joint, and he’d been coming here ever since he was a deputy chief inspector with the NYPD. His daughter Marilyn and Joe Barbarossa, his son-in-law, were sitting at one of the tables.
The Big Guy had a special dispensation. He could bring his feral cat inside the store. The grocer’s other cats scattered behind the counter at Desirée’s first hiss. Sidel was pleased. His cat was territorial. She curled up at Isaac’s feet, her meow like an asthmatic trumpet. Marilyn barely had room under the table for her legs.
“Isaac, did you have to adopt such a monster?”
“The cat adopted me,” Isaac muttered.
“That’s even worse,” Marilyn said. “All the strays collect around you. Isaac, you’re a bag of bones. Joe, tell my father that he looks terrible.”
But Barbarossa couldn’t do that. He’d gone out on kills with Isaac Sidel. Isaac was the only boss he’d ever had who understood his erratic nature, his mood swings, his gift for violence. Every other cop on the force had feared him, not because his father-in-law had once been the Pink Commish and was now president, but because Barbarossa was volatile and dangerous to have around. He wore a glove on one hand; it covered the burns he’d received in Nam fighting other drug dealers. And Barbarossa’s glove could rip at you out of nowhere.
He decided to play the diplomat and not contradict his wife, who could be as warlike as her father.
“Ah, Dad,” he said, “I’ll bet you haven’t had a decent meal since you left the Apple.”
They drank Chianti together from a bottle wrapped in straw, had roasted red peppers soaked in olive oil, a chopped salad, grilled sardines, spaghetti pomodor
o with the thinnest noodles Isaac had ever seen, and a hazelnut cake that the grocer’s wife had prepared for the president. Isaac had to sign his autograph for the grocer’s tribe of nephews. He’d sent one of them to Sing Sing. But the grocer and his wife didn’t bear a grudge.
Marilyn scrutinized her father across the table without the semblance of a smile. “I still say he’s thin.”
Isaac would never recover from Marilyn the Wild. She ruled him and rifled his dreams. She was like a burglar inside the Big Guy’s gut.
“When are you coming to DC?” Isaac asked.
“Never,” she said. “I told you not to run. You can’t breathe outside the boroughs.”
Matt suddenly appeared at the table with his mobile. “Didn’t mean to interrupt, Mr. President. But I think it’s urgent. Renata Swallow just called the White House, and the switchboard patched the call through.”
“Renata’s on the line? But she wouldn’t take any of my calls . . .”
He grabbed the mobile from Matt with its two rabbit ears. He always felt like a Martian with that machine. He had to juggle with the rabbit ears before he heard Renata’s voice; it sounded as if she were stranded in an echo chamber.
“Renata, I hope this has nothing to do with Balanchine. I’m not in the mood to talk about the master.”
She was crying, and Isaac regretted that he was so nonchalant with her; like a ping-pong player fending off a vicious serve with one eye shut. “What’s wrong?”
“Viktor wants to see you.”
“Fine,” Isaac asked. “We can meet in one of the tunnels at Gallaudet—tomorrow.”
“He’s not at Gallaudet,” Renata said. “He’s in Manhattan—on the Lower East Side.”
Ah, Isaac reasoned with himself. Viktor Danzig must have inherited his mother’s flat—the seamstress Pauline wouldn’t take a nickel from her billionaire son. Rembrandt had buried her in Woodlawn.
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