Little Angel Street (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “Sir, I didn’t exactly know …”

  “I’m not scolding you, Nicholas.”

  “I realized something was askew when that dead man was found at the shelter, the first Geronimo Jones, but I closed my eyes.”

  “Nicholas, I was the first Geronimo Jones. But those bastards stole him from me. It was like taking my birthright … did Wilson confide in you, did he tell you anything about the ambulance rides?”

  “He mentioned a certain black man, mentioned him over and over again. Wilson was in awe of him.”

  “Was it Archie Harris?”

  “Yes, Archibald. Brother Archibald.”

  Isaac had fallen out of love with baseball. It was the land of lawyers and business managers and free agents. Utility infielders becoming multimillionaires. He’d get invited to a game, sit in a box seat, watch the players, and couldn’t find pleasure on a single face. He’d never romanticized the Negro leagues. The Brown Bombers and the Homestead Greys were outlaws who lived in poverty, but Isaac would rather have barnstormed with them than with the heroes of modern baseball.

  “Nicholas,” Isaac said, “you’re in my camp now. If your brother tells you anything, you report to me.”

  “I promise. But will he have to go to jail?”

  “Nicholas, I can’t say yes or no.”

  There was a freckled face standing outside the closet, a redheaded vision—an angel come to haunt Isaac in that grim, gray light. His dead mama, Sophie Sidel. But his mama had never been a freckleface. It was Dr. Lillian Campbell, Schyler Knott’s shrink, with her animal eyes. Ah, there were too many women in the king’s life. And they all belonged to some elaborate lost and found department. He said good-bye to Nicholas Bright, and Lillian entered the closet.

  “You’re a hard man to find, Mr. Sidel.”

  “Come on, the whole world knows this is my office. Anyone could come in and shoot out my lights. I do nothing. I dance around in the dark. People steal my name. Real-estate barons kiss my boots and plot behind my back.”

  “Schyler wants to see you.”

  “Grand,” Isaac said. “But I’m tired of all this intrigue. I ought to have a vacation. Would you like to come along, Dr. Lillian?”

  “Are you propositioning me?”

  “No. I’m crazy about freckles, that’s all.”

  She took Isaac by the hand, led him out of Schiller’s, sat him down in her car, and drove him to the Christy Mathewson Club, with its boarded windows and scaffolding.

  “Ah, I should have figured. Schyler has nowhere else to go”

  They went in through the cellar door. Schyler sat in his own little bunker. He needed a shave. He’d lost that impeccable lightness, that blond aristocratic mask. He looked more like a homeless man than the president of a baseball society.

  “Schyler, Archie Harris of the Brown Bombers and the Baltimore Elites. He’s part of your gang.”

  “I don’t have any gang,” Schyler said, with Lillian behind him like a freckled panther. “And I never met Archibald Harris.”

  “And I suppose you didn’t write jingles for the Knickerbocker Boys. Schyler, don’t waste my time. I’m getting mad. Monte Ward. Will White. Sam Wise. Morris deMorris. Your own Ku Klux Klan. I mean, I could understand baseball antiquarians without Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays. But there isn’t one word about the Negro leagues in your annals. No mention of Cool Papa Bell or Josh Gibson—”

  “Or Archibald Harris. Don’t fence with me, Isaac. Can you name the mental institution where Josh Gibson spent the last part of his life?”

  “I know about Josh, how he’d have conversations with Joe DiMaggio in his head. Wouldn’t it make you crazy, Schyler, if you were a grown man playing in a children’s league?”

  “The Negro National League was hardly for children, Isaac.”

  “Yes it was. Because you could never graduate into the white leagues.”

  “I didn’t invent the color ban. America did.”

  “And who the fuck is America? Me. You. Lillian.”

  “Isaac, I never liked your language.”

  “Then ask Dr. Lillian to wash my mouth. I’d love it … you shouldn’t have written that crap. About niggers and homeless men.”

  “I didn’t write anything. I only supplied the names.”

  “And that makes you innocent, huh Schyler, huh?”

  “The City I love is dying, Sidel. It’s losing the memory of its own past. Do you know why Harlem never had a team in the Negro National League? The major leagues were scared that whites would come and see the blacks play in Harlem and empty the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium.”

  “Aint it a fact?” Isaac said. “Economics is the rudest king of all. You’re a cold fish, but I would have wanted you on my Landmarks Commission.”

  “Even after Monte Ward and Will White?” Schyler clutched Lillian’s hand in that damp cellar, sitting in some royal chair that must have belonged to his Dutch ancestors. “In twenty, thirty years you’ll have a whole new crop of pharaohs, and they’ll fight to bring down every landmark there is. They’ll kill, Isaac.”

  “I won’t let it happen.”

  “Mr. Mayor, this is Manhattan. Land is stronger than merchandise or money … and you’re a hairy boy who’ll inherit Gracie Mansion. The pharaohs will gobble it up.”

  “Let them gobble. I’ll live in a tent. But what’s it got to do with a list of forgotten ballplayers? Quentin Kahn isn’t in Judah Bellow’s league, but he’s becoming a pharaoh.”

  “Quentin Kahn is nothing. I paid him to start the Knickerbocker Boys.”

  “Shhh,” Isaac said. “The man happens to deliver corpses. Schyler, wake up. These aren’t homeless men on a merry-go-round. They’re Roumanians who swindle children into the country.”

  “They aren’t Roumanians.”

  “Has Quentin been reading you fairy tales?”

  “He swore to me. He was collecting dead people and depositing them at different points … as a lesson to the City.”

  Even in that little heart of darkness Isaac could see the hot pain coming off Schyler’s face.

  “What lesson, Schyler?”

  “That soon we’ll all be homeless. The City is a cesspool. The plague is upon us, Isaac. We’ve inherited other people’s dirt, and we’re being punished. I had to do something. I couldn’t shut my eyes. There’s no place for the Christy Mathewsons in this town.”

  “Schyler, tell me, how did you get involved with Quentin Kahn?”

  “He joined the Christys about a year ago.”

  “Quentin Kahn just marched into your club?”

  “No. The governor introduced him to me.”

  “Ah, he came with a recommendation from Billy the Kid. That’s grand. And what did Billy say? That Quent was one more antiquarian who happened to run the Ali Baba?”

  “We have similar interests … we want to keep the pharaohs from tearing down that Emeric Gray on East Fifty-sixth.”

  “And you think that a prick like Quentin Kahn cares about Emeric?”

  Isaac touched Dr. Campbell’s elbow. “Lillian, please, get him into a sanitarium …”

  “Schyler isn’t crazy … he cares about your town, Mr. Sidel.”

  “But it could get slippery for him. Quentin Kahn isn’t a radical city planner. He runs a murder factory. He’s using Schyler. He could call him a partner one day and kill him the next. And I don’t have the resources to watch over him.”

  Isaac walked out of the Christys’ cellar and ducked back into the street. He’d have to find which Yugoslavia Quent was in. And trap him, with or without Carol. But he couldn’t stop thinking about that hospital on a hill. Mother Cabrini. Here he was, like a grandpa, worrying about Wig.

  18.

  He found his own Yugoslavia, at a kiosk on Forty-second Street. Pingpong Power. Quentin Kahn was publisher and editor in chief. Michael Cuza, aka King Carol, was contributing editor. And that retired jockey, Eddie Royal, was treasurer of Quentin’s little mag. Isaac had a bitter smile. Pingpong P
ower was edited and printed at 23 Plymouth Street, a couple of doors away from where the rats tried to feed on Rita.

  The king read from cover to cover. Pingpong Power was a source book, itinerary, and bible that had nothing to do with the American Table Tennis Association. It didn’t list local tournaments or the ratings of top American players. The publisher lamented the sad state of pingpong in New York, the lack of tables, the public disregard. “There are more pingpong tables in Belfast or Carcassonne than in all of Manhattan. The nadir of pingpong is New York.”

  He talked about pingpong power in Roumania, Poland, Brazil. “It’s the fastest growing sport among women in China, Bulgaria, France.” The world’s youngest woman champion, Nina Anghel, was a nineteen-year-old Roumanian whose face, body, pingpong skirt, and bat were featured throughout the pages of Pingpong Power. She looked like a grown-up Orphan Annie with freckles and frizzy hair. Nina Anghel was interviewed in three separate articles. She had a custom-made bat with pimples on one side and sponge on the other. She posed with Quentin Kahn, Carol, and Margaret Tolstoy. Isaac had a ball of bitterness where his worm had once been. His Anastasia and some champion with frizzy hair. He was like some jealous husband, only what did he have to be jealous about? There was Margaret with Nina Anghel on a cruise ship. Isaac devoured the bloody caption like a cannibal. “Nina Anghel and her companion-coach, Anastasia Antonescu, aboard the SS Silver Eagle, on their successful tour of the Danube countries.”

  Isaac saw a swollen river behind Nina Anghel’s back, the makings of a forest. He was furious. Margaret Tolstoy had disappeared from Isaac’s bed, had abandoned the little comforts of Rivington Street, to play nurse to a teenager that Quentin Kahn had trumpeted into some kind of champion. She’d borrowed the name of her Black Sea husband. Ferdinand Antonescu. It wasn’t a legal marriage. Anastasia had been twelve. And Antonescu was the dictator of his own mad country.

  There were other pictures of Anastasia and Nina Anghel. At the Kempinski Hotel in West Berlin, posing with different women champions. At the Trocadero in Paris, where Hitler had stood sixty years ago, admiring the curious iron jewel of the Eiffel Tower. The king had a sudden jolt. His father, Joel, had abandoned Isaac and Leo and Sophie Sidel to become a portrait painter in Paris. Joel had a Vietnamese mistress named Mauricette, whom he’d married after Sophie’s death. Isaac had visited his disappearing dad once or twice. Joel was in his eighties now, happier than he’d ever been. Isaac sent him money as often as he could. Joel had once been a millionaire, a manufacturer of cloaks and fur collars. But he didn’t have much of a pension as a portrait painter. He might have starved without Isaac’s dividends …

  The king couldn’t escape his own roots, not even in Pingpong Power, which was a fanciful cover for the buying and selling of children. There were nine pages of personals in a twenty-page magazine. It wasn’t hard for the king to break the sad little code of longing behind most of the messages.

  “Caucasian couple seeks blue-eyed fox terrier. Box 221, Tulsa.”

  “Hartford newlyweds wish to correspond with Nina Anghel’s younger cousin …”

  “Serious Boston club would like to borrow Nina Anghel for a month to train a class of gifted eight-year-olds.”

  “Earnest husband and wife searching for blue bicycle with Bulgarian tires …”

  Isaac didn’t believe that Quentin’s mag was about sex for sale. Quent wasn’t hunting for pedophiles. He didn’t have to. He had thousands of childless couples he could prey upon. Isaac followed the photographs. Quent and Nina Anghel in some Balkan village. Anastasia and King Carol holding hands in Bucharest. Isaac didn’t like the look in their eyes. Were they lovebirds? Had Quent been the beard, confusing Carol’s tracks, while Isaac’s childhood sweetheart was involved in some autumn sonata with another man? A king, no less. A false king.

  Isaac was horrified.

  A patrol car spotted him in the street. “Mr. Mayor,” the driver said, “the Commish would like to see ya?”

  “I don’t have time for Sweets. Not right now.”

  Isaac commandeered the car, got the driver to take him to Plymouth Street. “Thanks.” He sniffed around like a bear. Twenty-three Plymouth Street was a bottled-up building with a blackened storefront. Pingpong Power didn’t even have its name on the door. But the king was curious. He hadn’t crossed into Brooklyn for nothing. He stood flush against the building, picked the storefront’s lock, and crept inside. He’d come to a black hole. He took out his pocket flashlight and shone it into the dark. There were piles of Pingpong Power in some sort of pilgrim’s progress from the first issue to the last. But Isaac couldn’t find a printing press. Just a nudie calendar on the wall that was three years old. And pellets of rat shit all over the place. The king could have been in a library. He glanced through back issues of the magazine. There were photographs of Nina Anghel at sixteen, when she was “vice-champion” of Europe. Without her coach, Anastasia Antonescu. Nina posed with Carol. Isaac put all the old issues back. It was only Anastasia who could intrigue him.

  He turned off the flashlight and walked out of Quentin Kahn’s phony editorial office. Sweets was standing on Plymouth Street.

  “I’ve been paging you, Isaac. Why didn’t you call me back?”

  “The damn battery’s dead.”

  “Did winning an election teach you how to lie?”

  “All right. I was on a case.”

  “You’re a civilian, Isaac. All your cases belong to me … where’s Wig?”

  Isaac shrugged. Sweets grabbed the future mayor and shook his shoulders. “Where’s Wig?”

  “Dunno,” Isaac said. “I could slap an assault charge on you.”

  “It wouldn’t stick. I’m worried. Wig is supposed to check with me every twenty-four hours. I lent him to you on that one condition. He hasn’t called. I should have grounded him three years ago. I should have put him on permanent disability. But he’d die without the street. So I let him have the mayor’s detail.”

  “Yeah. He and Mario Klein divided up the city between them.”

  “Rebecca’s your mayor, Isaac, not mine.”

  “She appointed you, Sweets.”

  “You twisted her arm. Where’s Wig?”

  “At Mother Cabrini.”

  “You sneaked him in there with the cardinal’s help, didn’t you, Isaac?”

  “Ah, Wiggy’s scared you’ll retire him.”

  “You have a short memory, Mr. Mayor. Wig hates your guts. And suddenly you’re his champion.”

  “I’m nobody’s champion,” Isaac said.

  They rode out of Brooklyn together.

  “Sweets,” Isaac said. “I don’t think you’ll have any more problems with the Knickerbocker Boys. They’ve run out of Geronimo Joneses.”

  “I hear you talked to Schyler Knott.”

  “You know about Schyler’s involvement?”

  “Isaac, you’re not the only antiquarian in the world. Baseball fanatics have been calling in, leaving us tips. And I had dinner with Billy the Kid.”

  “Billy’s touching all the bases, isn’t he? Did he tell you about his niece’s little boy? Oskar Leviathan.”

  “The Gov had to tell me about Oskar … once he told you.”

  They arrived at Mother Cabrini and went to Wig’s room, nurses and nuns hovering around the white king and the black giant. But Wig wasn’t there to receive them. He’d vanished from his bed. Isaac blundered through the hospital, but he couldn’t find Wig.

  “I don’t blame you,” Sweets said. “I blame myself. One more blackout and Wig might not recover.”

  But Isaac was dreaming of Anastasia and King Carol. He’d become addicted to Pingpong Power. All the young nurses looked like Nina Anghel.

  Wig had escaped Sweets by half an hour. He’d put on his clothes and his two holsters, took his wallet from the night table where the nuns had left it, said good-bye to Jesus, and walked out of Mother Cabrini. He was fucking dizzy, and the daylight murdered his eyes, but he couldn’t leave Harwood all alone to wr
estle with his ropes. Wig stumbled down the hill to St. Nicholas Avenue, which was near enough to his own territory. A couple of strays from the Seventh Avenue Armory, who panhandled on St. Nicholas during the afternoon, discovered Wig. He fell into their arms.

  “Wiggy, you ever gonna let us into the Purple Gang, huh?”

  “Next year.”

  They got into a cab with Wig and escorted him to Convent Avenue, while he rocked between them, stars and moons in his eyes.

  “Brother Franklin, Brother Ralph, take me to my door.”

  He was their chief, a police lieutenant and prince of the Purples, who looked after Harlem’s homeless men. They brought him into his building, wouldn’t accept money from Wig. He started to climb the stairs. He didn’t panic now. He felt safe in his own lair. No one, not even Isaac or Sweets, knew his real address. He would invent different drops, mailboxes in other buildings, where his gun permits would arrive. He didn’t have a mailbox here. He never chatted with his neighbors. He had none. He found his key and opened the door. Shit! He’d forgotten to bring Harwood some french fries. But he had a box of frozen Milky Ways in the fridge. He couldn’t survive without Milky Ways. He’d hungered for them when he was a boy, but his mama couldn’t even afford a refrigerator. A man’s status was measured in the frozen Milky Ways he could devour. When the Purple Gang hid out, they couldn’t worry about chitlins or hot corn bread. They lived on a diet of Milky Ways. And no supermarket in central Harlem could keep enough Milky Ways in stock. It hardly mattered that the Purples didn’t exist. The legend was there.

  “Harwood?”

  The boy wasn’t in his chair. The ropes had been cut. Who the fuck had entered Wig’s fortress and grabbed the boy? A ghost? The FBI? Wig marched into the kitchen and opened his freezer. He had to have a hit of frozen nougat.

  All his Milky Ways were gone.

  19.

  Isaac dialed the FBI’s Manhattan field office.

  “Sidel here,” he said. “I’d like to speak to Frederic LeComte.”

  “Sorry, sir. We have no Frederic LeComtes with us.”

  LeComte kept an office at St. Andrews Plaza, with all the other lads from Justice, but he wasn’t vulnerable to a phone call. LeComte’s secretary would only laugh at Isaac, while she recorded his conversation. He was a man between jobs. He could be trifled with for another few weeks. But LeComte was sensitive to his own image at the FBI.