Loren lowered his head and whistled into his hands. “Don’t even dream of it, Isaac. The boy is ours. And if you make a stink, if you cry to some judge, I’ll have to shorten the life of your fellowship … we don’t lend out orphans in St. Louis.”
The chiefs all sat with sour faces. They arrived at Catfish & Crystal. Isaac romanced the mayor, charmed him with stories of how he’d captured Henry Armstrong Lee, the Most Wanted Man in America. “We had our best stoolies on the case. Henry Armstrong didn’t have a chance.”
He devoured a dozen crab cakes. And when Loren went to the john, Isaac followed him. “I apologize, Captain Cole. I was getting a little greedy. But I thought I could help the kid. He wouldn’t have a past history in New York. He could start all over again. I could get him into a decent school, find him a place to live.”
“It wouldn’t solve a thing. That uncle of his was the only kin he had. We don’t believe in forgettin’ kin … thanks for the pitch, Isaac. But Kingsley would die of loneliness in Manhattan.”
“I guess you’re right.” Isaac didn’t believe it. His head whirled with kidnapping schemes. But he couldn’t make war on the city of St. Louis. He didn’t have any stoolies in town.
He said good-bye to the mayor and went to his suite at the Breckenridge. He could see right into Busch Stadium from his bedroom window. It was a windy afternoon, and Isaac imagined ol’ “Country” Slaughter throwing bullets, forty years back in time. Why had that runt upset him so? Did Isaac read his own sadness in McCardle’s eyes? They could have been a pair of orphans together. Isaac’s dad had abandoned him to become a painter in Paris, his mother had started to pick rags, and Isaac ran around with murder in his brain. That’s why he was such a good policeman. He liked to dance at the very edge of violence.
He’d had one semester at Columbia College, had devoured all of James Joyce like a detective prowling for clues in a sea of words. He’d read Durkheim and Veblen and Harry Stack Sullivan and hundreds of books on the criminal mind. He’d lectured at police academies, lunched with the best pathologists in the world. But he wasn’t sure what kind of social pathology could explain McCardle. Was that uncle a demon or a violent drunk who slept a little too long one morning?
The telephone rang around midnight. Isaac woke out of a fever. He’d fallen asleep in front of the tube, watching Steve McQueen as a stone-faced cop. “Hello?” he growled into the phone. “Loren, is that you?”
“No, grandpa. What was Slaughter’s last year with the Cards?”
“How’d you get my number, kid? Did Captain Cole tell you to call me?”
“Ah, all the big cops stay at the Breckenridge. What was Slaughter’s last year with the Cards?”
“’Fifty-three.” Isaac had the memory of a bat. It was metal rainbows that confused him, not “Country” Slaughter. “Anything else I can tell you?”
“Drink your milk, grandpa. Good-bye.”
Isaac slept like a baby. The worm didn’t bother him once.
He got up at seven, ate toast and tea in his room, scribbled a note to the Justice Department, and hopped on a plane to New York. Justice could find a new singing policeman. He was only Isaac Sidel. He didn’t want to go to bed in Seattle and think he was in St. Louis. He sat in the sky and didn’t have to worry about bumping into metal rainbows or being startled by a boy like Kingsley McCardle. He read Newsweek and Time, took a suck of milk, and arrived in New York as the former Hamilton Fellow.
2
There was the usual fury around him, all the fury of the fourteenth floor, where the commissioners presided at One Police Plaza. Isaac missed the old Police Headquarters, a crumbling palazzo on Centre Street, which was being converted into condominiums. He would sit in Teddy Roosevelt’s office, with marble all around him, like a wayward prince, some Renaissance man who recognized the maddening colors of crime. He’d felt needed at the palazzo. He’d dance up the marble stairs that led to his office, chat with reporters who followed his every move, drink cups of coffee crowned with hot milk, brought to him from the Caffè Roma with cupcakes of ricotta cheese. Isaac was adored in Little Italy. He was Don Isacco, who happened to be the commandante di polizia. He was called dottore, like any other man of substance with a high-school diploma.
But the new headquarters was a brick tomb. It had no cafes or stone lions or the private terraces of a palazzo, gifts of a nobler time, when a policeman was like a consiglieri who settled arguments and delivered babies and whacked burglars over the head. Now Isaac’s band of cops were remote functionaries who worked out of a bunker in the sky.
He’d been gone two weeks, and it was as if he hadn’t been away at all. His deputies thrived without Don Isacco. They had their little territories to protect. They formed their own alliances while the PC was in San Diego somewhere, singing for his supper. He had to ask two of his sergeants to comb the building for the first deputy commissioner, who ran the Department whether Isaac was away or not. Isaac spoke at banquets. Isaac sat with the widow of a dead cop. He attended press conferences with Her Honor, Rebecca Karp, the mayor of New York, but he couldn’t have told you how many cops were in the field on a particular day.
His First Dep was a black man who stood six feet six. Carlton Montgomery III. He’d come out of the black bourgeoisie. His dad had been a dentist. But no one called him Carlton on the commissioners’ floor. He was Sweets, after Sweetwater Clifton, the first black basketball player on the New York Knicks. But this Sweets had never played professional ball. He’d heard Isaac lecture at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, watched him tremble like some Jeremiah chanting about the brutalities of city life, and Sweets had decided to become a cop. He was Isaac’s heir apparent, perhaps the next PC.
Sweets arrived after the third or fourth summons. There was a crisis in Williamsburg. The Hasidim were in the middle of a new war with the blacks. Children had been hurt. And Sweets had to bring rabbis and ministers and activists together, sit them down in the same room. Three years ago Isaac would have gone to Williamsburg himself. But he was more and more remote. He lectured and disappeared, like some cardinal or chief of state.
“Sweets,” he said, “is there anything I ought to know?”
“Like what, Isaac? The morale in Manhattan North is fucking low. The Academy is shoving kids at us who can’t fire a gun. We have sergeants who are dying on their feet. Internal Affairs is busting up my best precinct. Reports of police brutality are up nine percent. We still can’t get enough Latinos to pass the sergeants’ test. You have a goddamn Irish hierarchy that keeps bitching about their nigger First Dep, and their Pink Commish, who talks about Stalin to the Knights of Columbus.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said, “but what’s new?”
“The Rastafarians are controlling more and more of the drug traffic.”
“Jesus, I’m not Rip Van Winkle. I don’t sleep at my desk. The Rasties were banging up Brooklyn when I was the First Dep.”
“Goodstein hasn’t surfaced for a month.”
“Ah,” Isaac said. “A whole month.” Maurice Goodstein was the best mob lawyer New York ever had. He’d started out as a young assistant district attorney in the forests of Brooklyn. He’d sent half a dozen mafiosi to jail. His papa had died on the bench. He had all the best rabbis in town. He should have been the new federal attorney for the Southern District of New York. That might have brought him a seat in the U.S. Senate. But he fell out of grace in Brooklyn and began his own law practice. In a year’s time every important don from Syracuse to Staten Island was offering him a permanent retainer. The Feds sneezed and cried and called him the nation’s number one menace, the Al Capone of the courts. But he still had lunch at The Four Seasons and went to parties with ambassadors and former secretaries of state.
“Is he alive?” Isaac mused, half to himself.
“The statistics are against that, but I’d still say yes. Maurice is a cunning boy.”
“But what the hell is the word out on the street?”
“There is no word, Isaac.
That’s the trouble. You mention Maurie Goodstein, and every little mother closes his eyes and plays dead.”
“No fucking don has that kind of power. Sweets, it’s something else.”
“Isaac, I’ve got work to do. I’ll consider Maurie’s fate next time I’m on the can.”
Carlton Montgomery III started out the door. Isaac wondered who the real commissioner was. He felt like a boarder in this brick tomb. But he knew that Sweets wouldn’t politick behind his back. The First Dep was as loyal to Isaac as one “Commish” could be to another. There was a slight barrier of skin. But Isaac was too wild to be considered much of a white man. And Sweets didn’t play the nigger on the commissioners’ floor. He ran the Department. He cracked his own whip.
He stopped outside the PC’s door. “Isaac, one thing. Why’d you come home?”
“I was sick of having lunch with police captains.”
“You have a contract with Justice. You should have finished the tour. LeComte is going to come down on our ass. No more favors from the FBI. No more special treatment. No more hard cash.”
“I’ll handle LeComte,” Isaac said, and Sweets was gone.
But five minutes later LeComte was on the phone from D.C. Isaac had to decide like some rabbinical student whether he should take the call, or leave LeComte hanging for a week, play sick or dumb, or the harried commissioner who couldn’t speak to the number-three man at Justice. He took the call.
Frederic LeComte was the cultural commissar of the Justice Department. Treasury was frightened of him. The IRS sent him Christmas cards. The CIA invited him to Langley for their Monday brunches. He had all the resources of the FBI in his pocket. He’d come out of Salt Lake City, a poet turned policeman. He was an ex-Rhodes Scholar. He could have become a diplomat. But he preferred Justice. The Hamilton Fellows had been his idea. He wanted cops around the country to meet and shake each other out of their usual sloth. And Frederic LeComte had chosen Isaac because Isaac was the most unorthodox PC in America, a Hebraic scholar of crime who didn’t believe in the magic of software. But Isaac wasn’t loved at the Justice Department. He meddled too much in FBI business, and LeComte had to convince Justice to accept Isaac as the first Hamilton Fellow. And now Isaac had betrayed LeComte’s trust.
“You prick,” LeComte said, “you miserable, ungrateful prick.”
“I hope you’re taping this conversation,” Isaac said. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
“I can get the governor on the horn, Isaac. One phone call, that’s all it takes. We control half your budget. I want you on the plane to Wichita by six.”
“Can’t,” Isaac said.
“Why not?”
“My tapeworm.”
“Tapeworm? I’ll cut out your fucking heart. I’ll pull on that worm and strangle you with it. You owe me, Isaac.”
“Yes. That’s true. But I can’t go on the road, LeComte. I can’t. I met a kid in St. Louis, an orphan, and I realized all my talking was a waste of time.”
“Don’t tell me about orphans,” LeComte said. “I want you on that plane.”
“All right, LeComte, get me fired. Go into my files at the Bureau and find out how many ladies I kissed and the false arrests I made.”
“I could do worse than that, much worse.”
“I know,” Isaac said. “But you won’t. You prefer a son of a bitch like me in this chair, instead of some crusader you couldn’t work with … I need a rest. I’ll pick up the tour. Maybe. Next month.”
“Ten days, Isaac. That’s all you have.”
“I’ll decide when the vacation is over. Now tell me about Maurice.”
Isaac could feel that tick of silence. He’d caught LeComte, no matter what the commissar said.
“You mean little Maurie Goodstein? He’s probably at the bottom of some lake where he belongs.”
“I hear different,” Isaac said. “I hear he’s alive.”
“Well, you’re close to the action, Isaac. I’m in D.C. We don’t talk much about Maurie at Justice.”
“I’ll bet,” Isaac said. “What kind of deal did you make to keep Maurie out of business? He’s been clobbering all your prosecutors. You can’t get a conviction with Maurie around. Where is he, LeComte?”
“You’re the wizard, Isaac. You’re Sherlock Holmes. You tell me.”
And LeComte got off the line. Isaac had no jurisdiction over Goodstein’s life or death. He wasn’t even fond of Maurice. But he admired Maurice’s cunning in the courtroom. Maurie was five feet four. But he could puff himself up like a baby bull and wound any government witness.
LeComte was right. Isaac was a little like Sherlock Holmes, without the fiddle or the cocaine or a bumbling doctor to tell his tales. He’d become an “amateur” of crime.
He marched out of headquarters, sucking on his bottle of milk. He zigzagged across the city like a soldier, losing whatever tail LeComte might have on him. He walked in and out of buildings, taking rear entrances not even a native would have known. Isaac had a map of every little corridor and alley in the five boroughs. He landed in an old shirt factory near the edge of Chinatown, climbed a flight of stairs, and Isaac was in his own “waters,” the special department of the PC. It functioned like a secret service. It sought out radical groups, mad bombers, the safe houses of other countries’ secret agents.
LeComte supplied the cash. LeComte needed a liaison in New York. But Justice didn’t know the depths of Isaac’s pursuits. The PC spied on all the spiers. He couldn’t have a hundred different agencies carousing in his city under the protection of a hundred different flags. Isaac didn’t have the resources of the Justice Department. He didn’t even have one authentic spy on his payroll. But he’d cultivated his contacts with “sleepwalkers” from Bulgaria’s counterintel or the KGB, disgruntled men and women who liked to sit in some corner with Isaac and chat about philosophy, religion, or winters in New York. Isaac never asked these sleepwalkers to compromise themselves, but from a word here and there he made his own “quilt” and could tell if the KGB was going to be involved in some heavy traffic. Isaac couldn’t pounce. But he could provide a shadow detail and capture some of that crazy dance between the different spiers. At least he wouldn’t be ignorant of all those armies that worked his village.
But his own sleepwalkers had nothing new for Isaac. They weren’t official policemen. They had no existence outside the special department, no pension plan, and nowhere to retire to. But the department did have a code name: Ivanhoe. And these were Isaac’s renegade cops, former mercenaries, jailbirds whom the PC had to trust with his life. Isaac’s Ivanhoes. It was curiously medieval. Outcasts with their own secret affiliation. Fallen knights who lived in an old shirt factory.
Burton Bortelsman was their commandant. He was a refugee from Capetown. He’d been the captain of his own criminal brigade, with a hundred detectives under his wing. But he’d killed a man in a drunken fury, the former lover of a wife he pretended not to care about. And Bortelsman had to leave the country. He’d found his way to Isaac. And he was one more Ivanhoe.
“Are the Russkies mounting something?” Isaac had to ask.
“Nothing out of the ordinary. They had to put one of their decoders on a plane to Moscow.”
“A bit of extracurricular romance?”
“Exactly. Fell in love with the genuine article. She came right out of some cradle at British intelligence. I feel sorry for the man. She’s a classic, Isaac. Believe me.”
“And the Syrians?”
“They’re asleep.”
“Then do me a favor, Burt. There’s a mob lawyer who’s been missing for a month. I don’t think it was a Mafia kill. He’s too valuable an item.”
“Maurice Goodstein.”
Isaac smiled. “I’d like to know what happened to Maurice.”
“I’d say he’s sitting on some high wire, between oblivion and the witness protection program.”
“Then Justice has copped him. And he’s going to squeal on a few of the dons. But that
doesn’t sound like Maurice. He’s a fighter.”
“But LeComte could have taken all the fight out of him. He fucks people—constantly. Why not Maurice?”
“Then have a look, Burt.”
“It could bring LeComte to our door. I can’t run down Maurice and stay invisible.”
“All right,” Isaac said. “Don’t break too many backs. It bothers me that Maurice could disappear like that. And I don’t like LeComte entering my territories. Find Maurice.”
And Isaac left the old shirt factory with its band of Ivanhoes. He wasn’t thinking of Maurice. He had Kingsley McCardle in his head, that orphan boy from St. Louis.
Isaac shivered in the street. “Enos Slaughter,” he muttered to himself, before he started on his own crooked path to One Police Plaza.
3
Fuck the FBI. Someone else would have to play Alexander Hamilton for Frederic LeComte. Isaac wasn’t in the mood to travel. He spent afternoons in his office contemplating young McCardle’s brown jumpsuit. It brought him back to his own days as a truant on the Lower East Side, when he was the terror of P.S. 88, a school that looked like a French cathedral, with gargoyles that crouched from the window ledges and spat blue rain on your head. No one could account for that blue rain. Perhaps the gargoyles had a chalky substance in their stone mouths. Isaac’s dad had abandoned the Sidels, had gone to Paris to paint. And Isaac was left with a baby brother, Leo, and his mom, who’d opened a junk shop. He grew into a terrible thief. He stole to keep alive, and to burn out some of the anger against his dad. He felt orphaned, like McCardle. The boy wore Isaac’s own internal weather. Isaac’s dad came back after a while. But he was no longer part of the family. He was like a man in a haunted house. He left for Paris again when Isaac was eighteen. And Isaac abandoned college to get married and become a supercop.
He’d been invited to address the Christy Mathewson Club, a brotherhood of addicts who collected notes and memorabilia on baseball as it was played before World War II. The Christys were antiquarians. Joe DiMaggio was almost too modern for them. History stopped after the decline of Babe Ruth. Baseball had been Isaac’s passion, baseball and chess. He’d steal into the Polo Grounds twice a week, burrowing under a fence to watch his beloved Giants. And he’d become his own encyclopedist. His knowledge wouldn’t have meant much to the Christys if Isaac had been some lone wolf living in a closet. But the police commissioner was a catch. The club could capitalize on Isaac’s fame.
The Good Policeman (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 2