Little Angel Street (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “The City’s ungovernable,” he told the reporters. “All I can do is stand up and take arrows in the head.”

  “Is that your job description for the mayor of New York?” asked a woman from Newsweek.

  “Yes.”

  “Whose arrows are they?”

  “Everybody’s,” Isaac said, winking at his Giants and racing down the steps. He’d gotten past his own advance men. He’d gotten past Wig. He’d only been mayor ten minutes and he was already out of communication with his staff. He was beyond the perimeter, a mayor lost in the storm of New York City. It wasn’t supposed to happen. He had detectives and aides to track his every move. But he wasn’t like any mayor there had ever been.

  He went across the road to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal prison near Police Plaza. That was the simple arc of Isaac’s itinerary. He felt like a jailbird, sentenced to four years at Gracie Mansion and City Hall. But he couldn’t just wander in. He had to wait for the warden.

  “I’d like to get into the Heart of Darkness.”

  “I don’t understand,” the warden said. He was a cautious little man. Isaac couldn’t remember his name.

  “Heart of Darkness,” Isaac said.

  “You have no jurisdiction here. This is a federal facility. I could have you tossed into the gutter.”

  “But you won’t. I’m on my honeymoon, warden. The Justice Department wouldn’t want the mayor to be unhappy on his first day in office. Would you like to call Justice? Or should I do it for you?”

  Isaac rode upstairs to the Heart of Darkness. It was a segregated cell block without windows where all the violent cases lived, mad bombers and murderers, traficantes who set people on fire, hacked off arms and legs. There were tiny slits in the walls, which gave off grim little rainbows of light. Isaac wandered from cell to cell. Prisoners whispered to him from their own private plots. He couldn’t see their faces, only the corners of their eyes at the edge of each rainbow. They congratulated Isaac, wished him luck.

  “I’ll get you books, magazines,” he said. “Penthouse, Playboy, Moby Dick.”

  “Fuck Moby Dick.”

  Isaac fell out of the gloom of being mayor. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “A shitbird, like yourself.”

  His heart began to thump. He peered into the cell. He still couldn’t see a face.

  “Who are you?”

  “Herman Melville.”

  “Don’t be cute. I could drag you out of there. I have the power.”

  “Didn’t you get my letter?”

  Someone had scribbled to him from this cell block. Isaac had the letter in his pocket.

  Dear Mr. Mayor,

  Hello from the Heart of Darkness. I’m inside the well at MCC. I have no contact with the world. They won’t let me read. I can’t survive without books. I don’t miss the exercise yard. I don’t miss the dining room. I don’t miss the shower stalls. I don’t miss conversations I never had. But I miss a book.

  Yours,

  The Reader

  P.S. I preferred it when you were police commissioner. Now you’ll have to kiss babies for the rest of your life.

  “I know you,” Isaac said. “I know that voice … you’re one of mine.”

  “That sounds cozy, Commissioner. One of yours? Maybe we’re kissin’ cousins.”

  “We’re a lot closer than that,” Isaac said. And he drew a name out of his own dark well. “Terry Winch. You used to be my driver.”

  “Fuck you. I’m not Winch.”

  “You’re Winch. You are. I lent you books.”

  “Yeah, your plugs are shot, old man. Try some vitamin E. I don’t drive cars. I’m strictly baseball.”

  Isaac started to shiver. None of his Giants had ended up in the Heart of Darkness. He’d rehabilitated them with a baseball bat and a small library of books. “Hey, Herman Melville, gimme a hint.”

  “Hint, you motherfucker. Who hit the home run that landed in the lion’s mouth?”

  Lion’s mouth? Isaac muttered to himself. “Hector. Hector Ramirez.”

  Ramirez had pitched and played the outfield on the Delancey Giants of ten, twelve years ago. He’d hit impossible home runs that bounced into the animal cages at the Central Park Zoo. He was Isaac’s Babe Ruth, who broke every batting record in the Police Athletic League until he dropped out of sight when he was fourteen. Isaac searched and searched for the kid. But Hector Ramirez had become one more missing person in a town that loved to swallow up people, dead or alive.

  “Hector, you could have been with the Yankees right now … millions in your pocket.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Isaac had to grab his own face to keep from crying. He’d been mourning Hector Ramirez while his mind detached itself from him.

  “My little man,” Hector said. “Isn’t that what you called me?”

  “Ah, it was harmless. I was proud of you, that’s all.”

  “Hector Ramirez, superspic. My pappy was insane. He was fucking my little sister. I had to get out of the house … or one of us would have killed the other.”

  “You could have come to me,” Isaac said.

  “What? I watch you while you arrest my pappy? I would have been the hero of my block … I ran away with my sister, and what happened, huh?”

  Isaac could make out the glint of Hector’s eyes in that reluctant rainbow of light. “I’d rather not—”

  “I slept with her. I beat her up. I became her pimp. I was a good little capitalist, wasn’t I, Uncle Isaac?”

  “I’m not your uncle. I never was.”

  “You were my teacher, my coach, my fucking tomahawk.”

  “You must be here under an alias, or I would have heard about it.”

  “I told you. I’m Herman Melville. I iced a narc, a snitch for the DEA. I cracked his skull with a Louisville Slugger, the same fucking bat you bought me for my twelfth birthday.”

  “Hector, I have some friends at Justice. I can …”

  “No. I had enough favors. I’ll do this on my own dime.”

  “Hector,” Isaac said, “come close … I want to look at your face.”

  “What for? I never grew up. I’m a Delancey Giant.”

  Isaac rode downstairs to the warden. There was a terrible twitch in his eyes. “Melville,” he said. “Heart of Darkness. He’s here on a homicide. I want his cell filled with books. Not the usual crap. You find him some Dickens and Dostoyevsky … and bring him a lamp.”

  Isaac left the warden and strolled into a blizzard. The snow had fallen like cats and dogs while Isaac was upstairs with Herman Melville. Cats and dogs. A face emerged from the snow. It belonged to Larry Quinn, chief of Isaac’s detail.

  “Your Honor, we tried to beep you.”

  “I left my beeper at home.”

  “That’s foolish, sir. We can’t have you walking into a twilight zone. The city’s connected to your heartbeat.”

  “Heartbeat,” Isaac said. “I’m only the mayor.”

  And he disappeared into a wall of snow.

  25.

  The pols were calling him Humpty-Dumpty.

  They laughed into their fists. “All the king’s horses, all the king’s men,” they said about Sidel. Humpty-Dumpty had run away from his own inauguration. Wouldn’t even have a glass of wine with Judge Caution and Cardinal Jim. They were expecting complications. The pols would have to step in, rule the City from their clubhouses. But the chaos they had predicted wouldn’t come. Humpty must have been working behind invisible walls. Suddenly there was a Sidel administration. The king had gone outside the Party for his chosen ones. He hired a new broom, Nicholas Bright, as his first deputy mayor. Nicholas fired half of Rebecca Karp’s secretaries and other loyal souls.

  The pols stopped talking of Humpty-Dumpty and made an appointment with their king. They crowded into his office, which still had photographs of Rebecca Karp with Barbra Streisand and Billy the Kid, with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Arthur Ashe, Frank Sinatra, and hairy Isaac, her former Commish. />
  Her desk had never been cleared. Isaac sat behind it with his dark eyes. And the pols had to admit that the black wool he wore was becoming to a king. But whose initials were on his white shirt? G.R. Geronimo Rex?

  “Your Honor, certain people have been punished, loyal followers, constituents who campaigned for you.”

  Isaac reached into a drawer and removed a slip of paper.

  “Martha Hurricane, forty-six, member of the mayor’s temporary typing pool. Vision impaired in both eyes. Can’t distinguish between uppercase letters and lower ones … is she related to any of you, or all of you?”

  “She’s my wife,” said one of the pols, a certain Tyrone Hurricane, who’d attached himself to the Bronx-Manhattan-Mozambique Independent Democratic Club. “Brother Isaac, who else will have her? She can’t pass the civil service exams. Democrats ought to look after Democrats.”

  “You’re right,” the mayor said. “I’d rather move Mrs. Hurricane into personnel. She won’t have to test her eyes or her typing finger … but all the other cuts will stand. Restrain yourselves, brothers and sisters, or I’ll restrain you.”

  Isaac abandoned the pols, walked out of City Hall, and went over to sit in Jack Caution’s chambers at State Supreme Court. Isaac smoked a cigar with the chief judge. Jack Caution was a man with silver hair. He’d reformed the State’s judicial system, rooted out fraudulent judges. He was a year younger than Isaac. His father and grandfather had been minor magistrates. He was the most logical choice for governor if Billy the Kid went to the White House or retired. And Jack Caution would need a popular mayor at his side, a law and order man, the Pink Commish.

  The chief judge’s chambers filled with cigar smoke. A blue haze floated between Jack Caution and the king.

  “Your Honor,” Isaac said. “I’d like to shut down the Ali Baba. It’s a filthy sink.”

  “Who’s the landlord?”

  “Quentin Kahn. He’s a pornographer and a pimp. Brings children into the country, sells them off. His henchmen murder Roumanian mules. It’s a slaughterhouse, Your Honor. Ali Baba is the home and headquarters of the Knickerbocker Boys.”

  “That’s hearsay, Isaac. You don’t have proof.”

  “I could present you with five or six corpses from potter’s field.”

  “All Geronimo Joneses, eh? But you’d have to trace them back to the Ali Baba. And you can’t. So leave it alone.”

  “Your Honor, I need a vacate order.”

  “Isaac, I can’t undermine the courts as a personal favor to you.”

  “The voters will support us. I’m on my honeymoon.”

  “Isaac, I won’t sign any order to vacate.”

  “Then I will. I’ll forge your signature,” the king said, removing a piece of paper from his pocket and depositing it on Jack Caution’s desk.

  “You’re a scoundrel, Sidel.”

  “The worst.”

  “You could go to jail.”

  “Your Honor, I’ve already been to jail. It’s no big deal.” The king uncapped his fountain pen. “Sign!”

  Jack Caution took the king’s pen, stared at the document on his desk, signed it, and said, “Mr. Mayor, go to hell!”

  The king could have gone to Barbarossa, who had a gold shield, but Marilyn the Wild would blame him, she’d conjure up the ghost of Blue Eyes, swear that Isaac was shoving Barbarossa into a battle zone, was dangling him, creating another Manfred Coen. He had to tap-dance very lightly around his daughter. Isaac was afraid of her wrath. And so he had to depend on Wig. They borrowed a pair of sledgehammers from the gardening crew at Gracie Mansion, put them in the trunk of the mayor’s limousine, and Isaac got behind the wheel, drove himself and Wig down to the Ali Baba.

  Isaac didn’t want to scare the prostitutes and the johns. He carried the sledgehammers into the Ali Baba in a big shopping bag. Isaac showed his court order to one of Quentin’s geeks, who served as house manager while Quentin was away. The geek was illiterate. His lips kept moving, but he couldn’t decipher a word. He started to cry.

  “Quent will kill me.”

  “He’s finished, son. There’s no more Ali Baba.”

  Isaac cleared out the customers and the working girls. He and Wig uncovered a curious kind of labyrinth. Half the Ali Baba had never been open to the johns. They found little apartments where the princelings from Ceausescu’s palace must have stayed until Black Michael got rid of them with a bodkin. They found a room packed ceiling-high with yellow condoms. They found closets filled with correspondence, including a sheaf of letters from Billy the Kid’s grandnephew, Oskar Leviathan, addressed to Quentin Kahn.

  Dear Uncle Quentin,

  I am so happy in America.

  I am saying prayers to God every night.

  Mama Rose says I will live in the White House one day with Uncle Billy. I love Mama Rose. I put wet towels on her head when she has the willies. I sing to her when she cries in her sleep.

  I miss Aunt Rita. Uncle Billy says I shouldn’t write to her. But she is not a bad person. She took me and Cousin Harwood to the movies. Cousin Harwood is not so nice. He steals coins from the candy machine.

  If Mama Rose has to go to the hospital again, can I stay with Aunt Rita?…

  Isaac stuffed the sheaf of letters inside his coat. He and Wig wandered into back rooms where Quentin’s whores would hang out when they weren’t behind the booths or sitting with johns upstairs in the hot tubs. These back rooms had forlorn cribs and playpens. The whores couldn’t afford babysitters and had to entertain their own tots. There were jars of baby food on the shelves, there were rubber animals, and picture books that opened into panoramic jungle scenes. There was the faint perfume of piss and talcum powder.

  “Wiggy, I hate this fucking place.”

  They took the sledgehammers out of the shopping bag and knocked down the walls. The playpens and the cribs sat in a sea of rubble.

  They tore through the Ali Baba, waving their hammers like wild men. They destroyed Rita’s booth.

  I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

  They ripped Quentin’s own door off its hinges. They demolished his antique desk, a memento from an earlier robber baron. Quentin’s safe had already been sacked by someone else. The steel door was unlocked. The shelves were barren except for a few scattered photographs of Margaret Tolstoy and Nina Anghel, both of them with red hair that looked like burning trees attached to their scalps.

  They chained a padlock to the front door, then wrapped another chain around the padlock and locked that too. It could have been a religious ceremony. The king was exorcising a dybbuk, shutting down evil spirits in New York.

  Reporters were waiting outside the Ali Baba. They swarmed around Isaac and Wig, who looked like angels with sledgehammers, standing in their own dust.

  “Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor, will you close all the massage parlors and porno mills?”

  “Me? I’m not a dictator. I’m just giving notice to Quentin Kahn.”

  “Didn’t he contribute to your campaign?”

  “That’s his mistake,” Isaac said. “Not mine.”

  “Mr. Mayor, are you signaling to us that this is going to be a hands-on administration?”

  “I don’t know how to signal,” Isaac said.

  Wig cleared a path for the king, who could escape reporters but not the PC.

  “Get into my car,” Sweets said, a dark fury on his face. They got into the back of Sweets’ Dodge, but there was hardly any room for them. They were squeezed against the black giant.

  “I could arrest both you motherfuckers.”

  “Sweets,” Isaac said, “Wig and me are homeboys. But you’re from the Hollows. You have the Revolution in your blood. Shouldn’t call us motherfuckers.”

  “Albert Wiggens,” Sweets said, “you should have a little more sense. Taking a sledgehammer to property that doesn’t belong to you.” He plucked out his commissioner’s badge with its five gold points and placed it on the king’s lap. “Mr. Mayor, I resign. I’m not going to spend m
y life chasing you down after each unlawful entry.”

  “Unlawful?” Isaac said. “I have Jack Caution’s signature.” He unfolded the order to vacate and handed it to Sweets, who put on his bifocals to examine the document and looked like an enormous, brooding genie let out of a bottle.

  “Isaac, that chief judge is nuttier than you are. No warnings and not one arrest. You can’t close Quentin Kahn. His lawyers will reopen the Ali Baba in twenty-four hours. And he’ll probably sue the shit out of the City … Isaac, I let you have Wig, and you involve him in some dumb caper. The FBIs are watching the Ali Baba. They don’t need Albert Wiggens.”

  “Sweets,” Isaac said, “LeComte is running Quentin Kahn.”

  “Then he’s Justice’s headache … damn you, Albert Wiggens, why the hell are you with this man? You used to hate him.”

  “Still do,” said Wig.

  “Then collect your pension and disappear.”

  “It would be like committin’ homicide, Sweets. The boss can’t see straight. He thinks the world is white.”

  “Get out of here. Both of you.”

  Isaac returned the badge to Sweets and followed Wig out of the car.

  26.

  The Ali Baba remained shut. The Daily News ran a feature on Isaac’s war against prostitution mills. The mayor was photographed with Becky Karp. It was the first glimpse of Rebecca in months. She wore tinted glasses and wasn’t sitting in her rocking chair. The pols quickly realized that the éminence grise of the Sidel administration was that corpse, Rebecca Karp. She’d risen from the dead. She sat behind closed doors with Sidel and helped him choose his cadre of commissioners, including Nicholas Bright. Nicholas had no political allies. He didn’t vote Republican or Democrat. He didn’t vote at all.