He arrived at the Ali Baba, dove into the dark without a name. It soothed him to be ripped of all identity. He could float across that blue haze, free as a fucking bird. He didn’t have to bear the brunt of his own coronation. He wasn’t Sidel.
He got past the first black commando. He was so conspicuous in his orange pants that nobody bothered to notice him. He was one more masquerader, one more undercover man. He presented himself at Rita Mae’s booth like a lovesick caballero. Rita’s nipples stood like merciless darts under a web of white silk. But those darts weren’t for him. She already had a customer in her booth. This caballero wasn’t wearing orange pants. He was dressed in corduroy. It was Judah Bellow. Judah whispered through the glass wall that separated him and Rita. There wasn’t any boredom in Rita’s eyes. She didn’t cup her breasts or try to excite Judah.
Isaac was paralyzed. There was something so intimate about that crazy talk between the glass that he just couldn’t spy on Judah. He stepped back into Ali Baba midnight, waited for the whispering to end. The real-estate baron came out of Rita’s booth, walked within a hair of Isaac. Judah was crying. He patted his face with a silk handkerchief and disappeared. Like a fucking ghost.
Isaac took Judah’s place. He scrunched inside the booth. The boredom had crept back into Rita’s eyes. She flicked her tongue at Isaac.
“Honey, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“You’ve already seen mine,” Isaac groaned.
Her eyes seemed to startle inside her head. Then she laughed.
“Shame on you, Mr. Mayor, trying to take advantage of a working girl.”
“How did I take advantage?”
“Sneaking up on me in a mustache.”
“It’s nothing,” Isaac sad. “The FBIs are all over Ali Baba. I couldn’t get past them without a fancy costume.”
“You mean Mr. Frederic and his niggers? They been propositioning me.”
Isaac groaned again. “It’s entrapment, Rita. You shouldn’t be talking to them.”
“Yeah, baby, I get the message. You my protector now.”
“Rita, why the hell was Judah Bellow here?”
Rita Mae pressed up against the glass. “I aint no tattle-tale.”
“You’ve been warehousing children for Quentin Kahn. I know that. I saw them with Harwood. Little blue-eyed monsters from Roumania.”
“Did Harwood talk to you? That boy has a big mouth.”
“Is Judah part of the scam? Is he Quentin’s boss?”
“Hush,” Rita said. “Meet me in the chapel upstairs. And don’t you disappoint me, like you did the last time.”
“LeComte kidnapped me, Rita, tossed me right out of the Ali Baba. I couldn’t …”
“Hush.”
The same dark curtain dropped over the glass, and Isaac felt horribly alone without Rita Mae Robinson. He fumbled in the dark, climbed upstairs, and found the chapel, which was really a closet with a single prayer desk and a treasureful of crack vials and yellow condoms on the floor. He waited for Rita, but Rita never showed. Isaac went back down to her booth. A different girl sat behind the window, with watery eyes and a wounded smile. He ran from that look and bumped into a black commando.
“Hey, watch your fuckin’ feet.”
Isaac fled the Ali Baba in his orange pants. He didn’t bother to change clothes. He’d become a subway jockey. He rode up to Lenox, entered the brownstone where Rita Mae lived, a little rotting mansion with a rat’s nest of apartments, rapped on Rita’s door until he realized that the door wasn’t locked. He walked in. The apartment was tranquil enough. Rita sat on the sofa with a plastic bag twisted around her head. There were no signs of struggle. Her fingers didn’t claw at any material. Her back was straight. Her eyes stared out at Isaac from under that plastic veil.
He didn’t rock in front of Rita like some guy in a prayer shawl. But he blamed himself. He should have grabbed a police car and shot uptown with the siren screaming. Then he might have saved her.
But he was saddled with the ambiguity of a mayor-king. The election had hobbled Isaac, left him to drift in some void. Like everything he did right now, he was a little too late …
There was something very, very neat about Rita’s veil. She was a lost bride on a death date. Isaac didn’t have to stare at the tiny coloration in the plastic, marks of Rita’s breath.
He pulled off the veil. “Rita, do all the girls at the Ali Baba like to play dead … or only the ones who are minding Quentin’s store?”
Rita’s eyes began to roam. She reached around and lunged at Isaac with her pigsticker, a knife that was like a featherless dart. Isaac caught her at the wrist.
“I’m not a homeless man anymore,” he said. “I stopped playing Geronimo Jones.”
But he shouldn’t have been concentrating so hard on Rita. A pair of burly characters wrestled Isaac to the ground. He recognized Brother William, the night manager at the Seventh Avenue Armory, and Harwood, Rita’s moon-eyed boy. They held him with his neck fastened to the floor.
“Rita Mae, stick the honkey,” William said. “Stick him before he gets us killed … he aint no king. He’s working with the FBI and the Mafia and that motherfucking Judah Bellow.”
Isaac was scared, but not because of the pigsticker. He’d never been surrounded by such a wild and willful gang.
“I could kill you … I really could,” Rita said, nicking Isaac’s ear with the knife. Even with all the pain, he couldn’t stop admiring her hazel eyes.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“We already done that game, Mr. Mayor. I don’t like it when you follow me home. It’s dangerous. People are starting to talk.”
“Then you shouldn’t wear a plastic veil in front of strangers.”
“You’re not a stranger,” Rita told him, and she found some witch hazel and a cotton ball and started to swab Isaac’s injured ear and wipe the mustache from his mouth.
PART THREE
12.
He wasn’t a complete flop. He did learn that the night manager was Rita Mae’s big brother. But Brother William couldn’t have led this gang. He didn’t have the brains or the courage. He was like an extra rib. And Harwood had already graduated to some other world. It was Rita who kept them from falling into chaos and supplied the glue that any gang had to have. She was part of Quentin Kahn’s kindergarten class. But she wouldn’t talk about Quent or the children or Judah Bellow.
“Rita, it’s rough out there … and how can I help if you leave me in the dark?”
“You can’t help us,” William said. “You just Dr. Death … people die wherever you sleep.”
“But I’ll have to arrest all of you if I catch you warehousing any more of Quentin’s kids.”
William’s whole face started to quiver. “Stick him, Rita, while we still got the chance.”
“I can’t,” Rita said. “He’s one of my best clients. I’ve seen the Commissioner’s pickle.”
Even Harwood came out of his moon country long enough to laugh.
Isaac returned to Rivington Street, took a bath, changed his clothes, and went to see Judah Bellow. Judah occupied three floors on Madison: Emeric & Company, in honor of his mentor, Emeric Gray. Isaac didn’t have to schedule a meeting with this pharaoh. He was summoned into Judah’s office in the middle of a conference. The conference broke. All the junior partners scattered to the ends of the hall. And Isaac was left alone with Judah in an office that could have contained King Tut’s royal tomb. Judah even had his own tomblike table.
“Isaac, what happened to your ear?”
“Rita bit it,” he said. “She’s getting kinky.”
“Maybe you ought to introduce me to this Rita.”
“Come on, Judah. I saw you with her at the Ali Baba. Rita Mae Robinson. She’s like a gypsy. Has her own booth.”
Judah Bellow didn’t bother to blink. He had that raw power of a pharaoh in his own glass box.
“Have you been spying on me, Mr. Mayor?”
&nb
sp; “Nah. I’ve given that habit up. I’m between and betwixt. Neither the mayor nor a cop. It feels like an empty house.”
“And so you visit the sex shops on Times Square.”
“Judah, you sat at Emeric’s feet. You studied with the great man. You ought to be more precise. Sex shop? The Ali Baba is an empire … I’m planning to close it down. Soon as I inherit Gracie Mansion.”
“Close it down,” Judah said.
He was a little younger than Isaac, and he didn’t like to show off his wealth. He dressed in the shabby genteel way of his dead master. He wore ancient corduroys and a blue workman’s shirt. Emeric Gray stopped building apartment houses after the Depression. He’d fallen out of favor with those modernists who didn’t believe in ornament. It had become too costly to construct an Emeric Gray. All the arti sans he’d collected around him began to die. Emeric sat in his workshop for twenty-five years like a madman with his models and plans. Judah had come to him as a boy in his teens, kept him company, ate sandwiches, drank champagne in the hook of an afternoon while the master’s hearing began to fail. They’d sit in silence until Judah could breathe the master’s thoughts. He studied the design of a building, and its soul. One day, while Judah was still at high school, in a tournament with the fencing team, Emeric marched into the street without his hearing aid … and a trolley ran him down. There was hardly a remembrance of him in the newspapers. One more builder who’d grown out of touch with contemporary design. Then half the city seemed to wake to the constellation of brick palaces Emeric had constructed for the middle class. There were no Emeric Grays on Park Avenue or Madison or Beekman Place. He was never the architect of the rich. His palaces had no river views or indoor swimming pools. They sat on some narrow plot, with their terra-cotta motifs, lyrical and all alone. And Isaac was jealous of Judah, who was Emeries last confidant.
“Did he wear bow ties?” Isaac had to ask like a beggar.
“Emeric? He did have a fondness for the bow tie. They had to be very soft. His skin was quite sensitive.”
“How come he never married?”
“He was always too busy … and then he wasn’t busy enough. He had mistresses, Isaac, up to the very end.”
“But no daughters, no sons? An architect ought to have children.”
“Ah, that’s a potent thought.”
“I mean, to continue his line … as a builder. But you could have been his adopted son.”
“Emeric didn’t adopt me. I studied with him. That’s true. But he wasn’t a man who liked to talk. He didn’t dwell on the past, Isaac. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. He’d outlived his own building materials. What he had loved lost their validity in the marketplace. He’d priced himself out of existence. And he wouldn’t adapt.”
“But he must have told you something. He couldn’t have been in mourning year after year.”
“Isaac, the man had no hobbies or outside interests. He was in exile, a builder who couldn’t build … he went to his office every day. He did have a few commissions. But nothing came of them. He was too unyielding, too ambitious. He anticipated all our problems with the homeless. He wanted to put up a handsome barrack near the Great Hill in Central Park.”
“A visionary,” Isaac said. “There’s no such thing as a handsome barrack.”
“You’re wrong,” Judah said. “But it wasn’t practical. Speculators would have forced the homeless out of Emeric’s barrack. He never really understood Manhattan real estate. Quality drives up the price. And Emeric would only consider the very best.”
“Like his disciple.”
“I’m not his disciple. I ate lunch with Emeric out of a paper bag … I was just a kid.”
“Tell me, Judah. Is Rita Mae also ‘quality’?”
“I could have my lawyer answer that. But it isn’t a crime to come and go in the Ali Baba. Frankly, Isaac, Rita Mae Robinson is none of your fucking business.”
“Come on. You could have any hooker on the planet. So it isn’t about love or a little S-M. I’d say Rita is acting as your broker. You’re paying her and Quentin Kahn to get you a blue-eyed Roumanian boy or girl.”
“Prove it,” said the pharaoh.
“I can’t. But if you’re caught with a stolen child, I’ll name you as an accomplice, Judah, and no lawyer will help.”
“Then I’ll have to take my chances, won’t I?”
“Judah …”
“Your Honor, do you realize how difficult it is to adopt a child, any child?”
“Particularly a white one, huh, Judah?”
“It’s dead out there. The supply has completely diminished. The local lawyers, the judges, the agencies all have their cuts, and so there’s a terrific boom in black-market babies.”
“But these aren’t babies, Judah. The kids I saw were at least seven or eight.”
“Yes, that’s the market of last resort. You don’t have to deal with a pregnant girl who can decide on a set of parents and then change her mind, ask for the baby back after she gives birth. Her lawyer can hold you up for hundreds of thousands of dollars … it’s much safer with the Roumanian connection. Most of the children are orphans, Isaac. They’ll have a much better home here in America.”
“Judah,” Isaac said, “it sounds like slavery … is Quentin Kahn running a goddamn club for pedophiles? Is it bondage time at the Ali Baba?”
“Isaac, you have my guarantee.”
“What’s your part in all this? You come out of the Ali Baba with tears in your eyes. Tell me, Judah. Why?”
The pharaoh patted his mouth with a red silk handkerchief. “There was one particular child … a little girl, Natalia. I’d been corresponding with her, sending her money. I’d grown fond of the child. And don’t call me a pedophile. You know what those State orphanages are all about. I could protect her, bribe a few of the doctors and the guards.”
“Rita was the conduit, your personal letterbox.”
“That’s it.”
“You handed her the money, and she gave you letters from the little girl. Natalia. Are you sure the letters weren’t a fake?”
“I talked to Natalia once … on the phone. They have English classes at the orphanage. Her voice was marvelous, magical … more than I could ever have imagined.”
“More than you could imagine. And Quentin Kahn was going to smuggle her out of the orphanage, send her across the ocean in a secret canoe.”
“Nothing like that. I didn’t want to adopt. I …”
The pharaoh chewed on the red silk. Isaac tore the handkerchief from Judah’s mouth. “What happened?”
“I put a hold on the girl. I didn’t want anyone else to adopt her … Isaac, you have a daughter?”
“What does she have to do with this?”
“My daughter killed herself.”
“I’m sorry, Judah. I didn’t …”
“There was no chronic depression. She was a painter. Rather successful, I think. Had a couple of shows. Sat down in the bathtub one night and slit her wrists.”
“Judah, what was her name?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It was Natalie, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Her name was Natalie.”
“And Quentin Kahn got in touch with you after Natalie slit her wrists.”
“Yes,” the pharaoh said.
“He found your Natalia in the orphanage, like some perfect package.”
“Package? What are you driving at?”
“Judah, did Rita Mae tell you that little Natalia was dead?”
“How did …? She caught a chill. Died of pneumonia. Just like that. I might have saved her, Isaac. I should have brought her out of Bucharest. To hell with all the legal stuff.”
“Judah, can I have a look at her letters, please?”
“No.”
“I won’t confiscate them. I promise.”
“A policeman isn’t supposed to promise.”
“Judah, I’m not a policeman anymore. I’m a month from being mayor.”
“It w
on’t matter to you. You’ll dig up all the dirty garbage, you’ll poke around in other people’s affairs. That’s your nature, Isaac.”
“Help me, Judah. I’m getting awful pissed at Quentin Kahn. I don’t like the services he provides … did you know that Schyler Knott is missing?”
“He resigned from Landmarks. That’s all I care about. Good riddance.”
“But he’s tied up with the Knickerbocker Boys.”
“Been murdering homeless men. I’m not surprised.”
“But they’re not really homeless men. They’re fictitious people. Without the least identity. They …”
“Isaac, I don’t have the time to become a sleuth. And if you mention Natalia’s letters, I’ll swear they’re something a mayor-elect cooked up to keep himself busy.”
The pharaoh began summoning all his junior partners, and Isaac became a superfluous man at Emeric & Company. He stared at images of Emeric on the way out: Judah had surrounded himself with portraits of Emeric Gray. The master had had a very weak chin. He was fond of cigars. Emeric Gray looked like an impoverished accountant, and not a character who had marked Manhattan with palaces for the middle class.
13.
Isaac returned to Schiller’s club. He hit the ball with his coach, who was one of Quentin’s traffickers. Isaac was convinced that Michael Cuza, alias King Carol, ran Quentin’s pipeline from Bucharest to Manhattan. He could have been a member of the Securitate. King Carol loved to tell stories about Nicu and Zoia, the great dictator’s children, who lived like royal brats, their pockets stuffed with cash.
“Did you ever dance with Zoia?” Isaac asked his coach.
“Me dance with a princess? Little father, I was nothing but a pingpong player.”
“But you won medals, didn’t you, Michael?”
“I was a finalist in six international tournaments. But that was long before the Ceausescus.”
“And you met Quentin Kahn at one of those tournaments?”
Little Angel Street (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 7