“I could have sworn that Carol killed her,” Isaac said.
“She didn’t like Carol. But she would have done anything for the old man. That was her mistake. Trusting Archie Harris.”
“Trust?” Isaac said, waving his Glock. “Get off this bus. All of you.”
“Including him?” Wig asked, pointing to Archibald Harris.
“No. We’ll deal with him later.”
The Knickerbocker Boys climbed down from the ambulance, stood on parade in front of Isaac. Harwood’s eyes began to drift. Wilson Bright bit his nails. William shuffled his feet. And Wig had to endure that metal ribbon in his head.
“Some gang,” Isaac muttered, slapping Wilson Bright with his free hand. “Take advantage of homeless men. Your brother can’t save you, Mr. Bright. Where did the corpses come from?”
“Mostly from Carol.”
“Mostly,” Isaac said. “That’s an elegant word from a philosopher like you. Language is your special arena, isn’t it, Wilson? You’re the one who created the Boys’ manifestos.”
“Yes, Mr. Mayor. It was I.”
“It was I,” Isaac repeated. “It was I. Babble the king’s English like a beautiful bird. But this bird steals poor men’s pants and writes racist literature.”
“I did what I was told.”
Isaac slapped Wilson again. “Told by whom?”
“Carol … and Eddie Royal.”
“Ah, the little magical jockey. Mr. Royal paid you in cash, didn’t he? So much for each stiff.”
“Yes. Three hundred dollars for pickup and delivery.”
“And the abattoir was always the Ali Baba, wasn’t it?”
“What’s an abattoir?” William asked.
“A slaughterhouse,” Isaac said. “Eddie Royal and Quent and Carol did all the work right under the FBI’s nose. They had plenty of back doors, plenty of loading docks. Now I’ll tell you who the corpses were, and you tell me if I’m right. Roumanian military men.”
“Yes, Mr. Mayor. Military men.”
“Members of Ceausescu’s palace guard.”
“I couldn’t say. But they did have military titles. Lieutenant So-and-so.”
“And who was the mortician? Who stripped them naked, let their beards grow, and dressed them in stinky clothes?”
“Me and Brother William and Brother Archibald.”
“Three morticians,” Isaac said. “Three blind mice … and you grabbed my name, didn’t you, Mr. Bright? You decided to call each of them Geronimo Jones. That was your bit of genius.”
“No,” Wilson said. “I can’t take credit for that. It was purely Quentin Kahn.”
“Purely Quentin Kahn.”
“He took the initiative. We had the corpses. We dropped them in a dark hole or delivered them to a shelter. It was getting suspicious. So when we found out that you were boarding with us as Geronimo Jones, he got the idea. It came to him in a flash. He supplied the name of each Knickerbocker Boy. I did the notes.”
“I was the gambit, I was the hat trick … and the fucking prototype.”
“Yes, Mr. Mayor. You inspired the Knickerbocker Boys.”
Isaac slapped him a third time. “Keep the credit, Mr. Bright. I don’t want it. Did Margaret Tolstoy have anything to do with the corpses?”
“The woman with all the wigs? I wouldn’t know. She was with Quent quite a lot.”
“And Nina Anghel?”
“Never heard of her.”
“Nina Anghel,” Isaac said, raising his hand for yet another slap.
“I almost forgot. The lady champion. I only met her once. She has the biceps of a man.”
“Did she enter any tournaments in America?”
“You’ll have to ask Carol,” Wilson said. “Pingpong isn’t my game.”
“And what is? Ghouling around in different graveyards?” The king was distraught. Welcome to the Knickerbocker Boys, he sang to himself.
“Boss,” Brother William asked, “what we gonna do with Brother Archibald?”
“Deliver him somewhere. Like we always do. We’re the Knickerbocker Boys.”
But all he had in his head at the moment was Margaret’s cropped gray hair. He wanted to sail the Danube with her, devour all of Europe. And here he was, stuck in an old fire-house with a dead man and a rotten gang of lunatics.
PART FIVE
21.
“Aunt Margaret, Aunt Margaret, can’t you find us Mr. Baudelaire?”
She wasn’t an aunt, or a mother, or much of a companion. She was touring the cemetery in Montparnasse with Nina Anghel, who was taller and sturdier than Margaret, with thick red hair that couldn’t be braided or coiled into lengths of rope. Nina’s hair was much too wild. Margaret had taken her to the best fashion shops on the rue de Grenelle, had bought her the sexiest stockings and shoes. She still looked slightly brutish, like some femme fatale with the heart and soul of a soccer player. But this was Nina’s charm. Rawness and vulnerability. She wore red, red lipstick, rouge coquelicot from the house of Guerlain. She covered her freckles with liquid powder from Chanel. Teint Lumière. Her toenails were painted green.
Margaret was moved by this monster who couldn’t bear to look at herself in the mirror, who was haunted by her own face. Nina Anghel terrorized all her opponents, female and male, but was like a gigantic brooding doll in silk underpants. She stumbled upon Baudelaire’s grave and started to cry. Baudelaire was buried with his mother, Caroline, and his stepfather, General Jacques Aupick, ancient ambassador to Constantinople and Madrid. There were flowers and candles and trinkets on the grave. Nina couldn’t stop bawling.
“I’m shocked,” Margaret said. “A world champion crying like that. You’ll lose your edge on the pingpong table. The biggest sissy will beat you.”
“Son beau fils,” Nina said, reading words off the tombstone. Doesn’t it mean ‘his beautiful son’?”
“Not at all. That’s how the French say stepson. Beau-fils.”
“Then it’s a language that tells lies. And I don’t care to study it, Aunt Margaret.”
“You’ll be a greenhorn all your life.”
“Girls from Bucharest are always greenhorns, Aunt Margaret. Ogres steal them from the schoolyards and introduce them to sex.”
“Nina, how many ogres have you kissed?”
“None so far. But I’m an ugly duck, Aunt Margaret.”
“With silk pants from La Perla.”
“Pants can’t make you a person. I have unruly hair. My face is like a road map, full with freckles. I’m nineteen and not one man has made love to me.”
Thank the Lord, Margaret wanted to say. She was a concubine at ten and eleven, a bride at twelve, taking her honeymoon on the Black Sea, gobbling human flesh to keep alive. Margaret was the real ogre. But she hadn’t eaten any orphans when she lived in Paris at the beginning of the war. Her protector, Uncle Ferdinand, was waiting to carve out his own little country in the Ukraine. The uniform he’d designed for himself was a little too green. It had gold lightning bolts. But Margaret didn’t care. She lived right over the cemetery, on the boulevard Edgar Quinet. And the cimetière had become her own private Paris. Uncle Ferdinand took her to soirees, passed her off as a little dancing prodigy, but the only thing that gave her pleasure was stealing pieces of dark bitter chocolate that sat beside some German general’s coffee cup. And she grew addicted to dark chocolate wrapped in gold foil. She’d been hungry for dark chocolate half her life. And Margaret was the one who was crying now. Because this cemetery, where she’d played years and years ago, sucking on her treasure of chocolate while most Parisians starved, was as much a home to her as her mansion on Little Angel Street. She didn’t have a home in the United States, just a series of names and numbers in a very long address book.
“Don’t cry, Aunt Margaret. Tell me about Baudelaire.”
“Ah, he was a dandy who died of syphilis. He was paralyzed for a whole year. He forgot how to spell. He couldn’t even pronounce his own name near the very end.”
�
��That’s a terrible thing for a poet.”
“Or a pingpong player,” Margaret said, without wiping her eyes. She could feel the trees, the alleys, the roads, the lanes, the tombs, the crypts of forty years ago. The crooked crosses. Stones sinking into the ground. The cimetière had its own boulevards and avenues and the Allée des Sergents de la Rochelle, which led to a stone tower that was shaped like a cannon shell, and where, she’d assumed as a child, a whole cadre of hunchbacks lived, marred by some magnificent disease. They ventured out at night, after the cimetière was shut, and tended the entire garden. Margaret could see their lanterns from her window. How she’d envied the hunchbacks of Montparnasse!
She entered another avenue with Nina Anghel and found the grave of Alexandre Alekhine, “Genie des Echecs de Russie et de France,” who died in 1946. Another world champion, like Nina Anghel. But Alekhine had prowled the world of chess. There was an image of him sculpted into the stone, wearing a bow tie, and Margaret wondered if it was the same Alexandre she’d met at one of the soirees, the darling of the Gestapo, who also loved bitter chocolate and drank cup after cup of the blackest coffee Margaret had ever seen. This Alexandre’s mouth was blue-black from all the coffee he consumed. He didn’t have time to play chess. The war might end and he had to make his fortune selling the dark chocolate he’d swiped at the soirees.
Margaret went from Alekhine to the tomb of a fallen aviator, who’d been given the médaille du Mauroc and the couronne de Roumanie. Near the aviator was an unmarked grave with two figures jutting out of the stone: a pathetic skeleton leaning on his own scythe and a full-bodied woman holding a star above her head, the bad and the good angel of death. Which of them would Margaret have to choose?
“Auntie, where’s Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Sartre and Maria Montez?”
“Hold your horses,” Margaret said. “I only grew up here. Without Maria Montez.”
A man in dark glasses was waiting for them beside a statue at the heart of the cimetière, a winged creature clutching flowers, who was floating above the dead. Nina ran up to the man.
“Did you meditate this morning?” he asked, removing the glasses. He had blue eyes and tiny scars that couldn’t have come from any dueling classes. He was practically born in an orphanage. But he had all the bearing of an aristocrat.
“Ask Margaret,” Nina said. “I looked at a candle for an hour.”
“And did you move into the candle?”
“Yes. I was making love.”
His face started to wrinkle and the scars danced in the sun like tiny fish tails. That’s how he revealed his displeasure, this complicated, merciless orphan who was methodically plundering treasure from a madman. Ceausescu.
“Nina, I could cut your allowance in half.”
“I’m nineteen. I don’t need an allowance.”
“Idiota, I manage your life,” said Michael Cuza, also known as Carol.
“I can sign my own checks.”
“And give your dowry away to every beggar in the street.”
“I don’t have a dowry. I give exhibitions. People pay to watch.”
“You’re number one in the world,” Michael said. “Who could ever beat you? Name me the woman or the man.”
“I’m not a circus animal,” Nina said. “I have feelings. I should fall in love.”
“With whom?” Michael asked.
Nina sat down and contemplated that winged creature, looking for his genitals, which she couldn’t find. She’d never been stroked by a man, never been kissed. She’d had an orgasm once, during a pingpong match. Her legs must have knocked in a magical way.
“She has the mind of an infant,” Michael said to Margaret Tolstoy. “Some lout will knock her up, and her career will be over. I promise you, she’ll give birth to a cow.”
“Or a king,” Margaret said. And Michael laughed. It cost her a lot to hear that rumbling music, invoked a past that was long before Angel Street, when she and Michael were guests of the State, charter members of the royal orphan asylum on Rahovei Road. He was always a princeling, her Michael, who played pingpong with his own jailors, protected Margaret from the groping hands of older boys and the jailors themselves. She was little Magda then, something of a beauty at eight and nine. She’d never known her mother or father. Michael was her only kin. She loved him like a gallant, loyal older brother. But the State seized Michael, sent him to military school, turned him into a cadet, and then Ferdinand Antonescu discovered her in a dancing class and plucked her out of the orphanage. He was a much sweeter jailor. And Margaret didn’t seem to mind his caresses. Ferdinand was never rough with her. And he did bring her to Paris. She had her own rocking horse, a stash of dark chocolate, and a cemetery that she could conquer and explore.
Michael conducted business in the cimetière. He’d stand in the Allée Principale, where he could watch the exits and the cemetery guards in their dark blue kepis, and he’d meet with some antique dealer or silver merchant or agent of an auction house and present his “plunder book,” his little catalogue that would vary from week to week, filled with items that his own henchmen had removed from the Palace of the Republic, right under the diktator’s nose.
Ceausescu was too occupied with building yet another wing to the palace, with its six hundred clocks that were set from a console in the diktator’s suite. He could create time according to his will, declare his own sunrise at two in the morning. The palace was swollen with artifacts, with money and jewels. Neither Ceausescu nor his wife could keep track. Their desire to accumulate was outside logic and the ordinary principles of human greed. The diktator had already squirreled away a billion dollars in foreign bank accounts; two billion, according to Michael. The diktator had been a reformer at the beginning of his reign. The little father of his people had condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He organized clinics to control old age, battled illiteracy, protected the poor, the feebleminded, and the lame. But he quickly went from reformer to pharaoh. He tore up entire villages and turned them into industrial camps. And when Bucharest was ripped by an earthquake in 1977, the diktator designed his own mad city of haunted apartment houses on boulevards that dropped into an empty ditch … and a royal court, the Palace of the Republic, which he couldn’t bear to complete. It sat in a huge lifeless park. Bucharest, Paris of the Balkans, was now a concrete garden and graveyard.
No one went there. It was a city that seemed to disappear from the map. And Michael was only stealing treasures from a country that was becoming a mirage.
His partners in crime were little princes of the palace guard, soldiers who imagined lives for themselves in that fairyland of America Michael had told them about. They would journey to Paris with the jewels. Michael would pay them a pittance and con them into getting onto a plane with a load of blue-eyed brats. Michael had promised them penthouse apartments and fat bank accounts. But they were talkative creatures and could have been turned around, used as witnesses against Michael. Besides, he didn’t want to share his wealth. It seemed simpler and cleaner to kill them.
“He’ll come after you,” she said.
“Who? God? The Devil? Billy the Kid?”
“Your other pupil. Sidel.”
“He’s too busy chasing Geronimo Jones.”
A buyer appeared with a pigskin briefcase. And Michael romanced him. He talked rapidly in French, introduced him to Nina Anghel, let him ogle Margaret, then took him on a tour of the cemetery, showed him the celebrity graves, while Margaret and Nina followed them at a distance.
Black Michael would earn a million francs this afternoon, selling off the diktator’s jewels, which he carried in his pockets like some negligible merchandise. He wasn’t even wearing a gun. He was Michael the trader, captain of Ceausescu’s bodyguards and a colonel in the Securitate. The secret policeman. He’d always been reckless. He could fight ten wars at once, play chess and pingpong, but he’d never made love to Margaret. It would have been a sham, a performance, one more of Michael’s masks. And he wouldn’t perform with
Margaret. He’d lie, he’d cheat, he’d steal, but he wouldn’t perform. She was grateful for that. She’d have had to kiss him if he asked. That was her job. Kissing men for the Justice Department.
The briefcase bothered her. All that pigskin. It was a little too correct for carrying a million francs in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. And she wasn’t startled when the buyer pulled a sleek Italian pistol out of the pigskin.
“Monsieur,” he said, “the jewels, s’il vous plaît.”
And Black Michael was shaking, not out of fright, but out of anger with himself. He should have recognized a robber, a gunman all dolled up as a merchant. The shaking stopped as violently as it began. Michael shrugged.
“Shoot me. I couldn’t care less.”
“Not you, monsieur. But the little champion. She’s more valuable, eh?”
And that’s when Margaret pounced. Nina Anghel had never seen a woman leap on a man like that. The robber lay on the ground. Margaret had kicked the gun out of his hand. Michael didn’t ask any questions. He reached over and snapped the robber’s neck.
“You fool,” Margaret said. “This is my cemetery, Michael. We can’t leave him here.”
But Michael picked up the robber, held him close in his arms, and walked him out of the cimetière.
She was waiting for Isaac, could feel him inside her like a breathing child, her own special homunculus. But the homunculus must have gone to bed. The days passed. Isaac didn’t appear. Michael went about his business, punishing people for that mishap in the cemetery. A band of mavericks, Hungarian emigres, recycled policemen who had caught on to the tricks inside Ceausescu’s palace, the constant, systematic looting. Michael dismantled the Hungarians, murdered their chiefs. Took him forty-eight hours. Meanwhile Nina Anghel had an exhibition at a pingpong palace on the rue Pascal, in the thirteenth arrondissement. It wasn’t really a palace. It was a club that the city of Paris had built for its Metro workers, a bunker with a high metal fence and two floors of pingpong tables. The club had developed its own ecology, where instructors taught the children and grandchildren of these Metro workers, until you found three generations at the rue Pascal. And Manhattan had one prehistoric pingpong club that paid homage to a dead man, Coen. Pingpong itself had become a kind of fossil.
Little Angel Street (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 13