“He didn’t say. But Harwood wouldn’t move unless it was rainin’ money somewhere.”
“He aint supposed to leave this mansion.”
“I couldn’t prevent him, Wiggy.”
Wig dreamed of the territory in front of him and managed to cuff William on the ear. “Like you couldn’t prevent your sister from dying, huh?… Who am I, Will?”
“The Purple Gang.”
“And what’s the Purples’ strongest point?”
“Killin’ people.”
“Now surprise me, William. Did Harwood say anything before he left?”
“He mentioned a pingpong ball.”
Wig measured the air like a stalking bird and plucked William’s throat. “Who plays pingpong, huh?”
“Isaac.”
“Who else?”
“Michael Cuza … King Carol.”
“And you let Harwood fall into Carol’s hands?” Wig could barely see a big fat blubbering face.
“I forgot all about Carol.”
“Go on. Get out.”
He didn’t run to Isaac. Wig had his own war to play out. He put on his ankle holster and his Glock, got a cab at the gate, started downtown to the Ali Baba. It was only a hunch. Black Michael could have lured Harwood inside that haunted house. And then Wig muttered to himself, It’s me he wants.
The king’s bodyguard rode uptown to Convent Avenue. There was no one inside his crib, but he could feel a certain presence, as if the Devil had come to town and parked his ass close to Albert Wiggens. He checked the fridge. He still had his stash of Milky Ways. It was freezing in his crib. And if he hadn’t been such a blind man, he would have realized a little sooner that the window was open. Now he could recognize Black Michael’s technique. That open window was an invitation for Wig to climb up to the roof. His whole damn future depended on some fire escape.
He stepped outside the window, stood on that metal landing, which had already begun to rock. There were white curtains around him, billowing sheets stretched across endless clotheslines in the back yard. They looked like the haphazard sails of a pirate ship.
Wig climbed that lunatic ladder and arrived at the roof. Black Michael stood with a cigarette in his mouth. He had Harwood in front of him, with the point of a pigsticker scratching Harwood’s throat. Michael was only a couple of feet away.
“Ah, you’re early,” Michael said. “Congratulations. I wasn’t expecting you for another hour.”
“Let the boy go,” Wig said. He didn’t reach for his Glock. He could have rolled onto the tarred floor, got out his belly gun, but Harwood might not have survived that scramble. The boy was crying, and Wig wanted to clap his hands over his ears, because the sound was ripping at his heart. He was the only papa Harwood would ever have.
“Let him go.”
“Couldn’t,” Michael said. “You’d kill me. You’re a notorious outlaw.”
“Harwood never hurt you.”
“But you did. You walked into a fancy hotel and made Quent give up his ghost. Personally, I’m rather glad. But he was my partner, Wig. And what will people think of me? That I couldn’t even protect my own partner? It’s bad for business.”
“I’m here, aint I, Michael? You can have me.”
“That’s much too simple. Bang bang. Wig is dead. Michael shoots the Purple Gang. I need a bit more adventure. What if Harwood and I climb onto the ledge and you have to capture us? It would be like a game of tag.”
“You can fuck yourself, Mr. Black Michael.”
“Mustn’t curse, Wig. I hold all the cards. There’s no more Harwood if my elbow should slip.”
Wig beckoned Black Michael with his hands. “Come to me, bro’. Do me with your dagger. I aint shy.”
But Michael shoved Harwood onto the lip of the roof, kept him from falling, then climbed up, balancing himself like an acrobat with the blade of his hand.
Motherfucking maniac, Wig mumbled to himself. He had sun spots in his eyes. And that reflection off the white sheets sickened him. He had to face an eternity of clotheslines.
“Waiting for you, Wig.”
He growled deep inside his throat. He wasn’t going to let a Roumanian child stealer mock him in front of the boy.
“Harwood,” he said. “Hold on. I’m coming up to meet ya.”
He stepped onto that narrow lip. He didn’t look down. But the sun and the pull of rope between the buildings made him dizzy.
He looked into the fierce blue of Michael’s eyes and all the dizziness went away. He was dueling with the Devil. But it was peculiar, because it seemed to Wig that Michael was holding him, keeping him on that ledge, with the power of his eyeballs. Black Michael had him on a string, and Wig was doing his own dumb dance.
“Michael,” he said, “you’re mine.”
“Yes,” Michael said in a tender voice, a voice Wig might have used with Rita when he was courting her. Michael had some powerful shit, like voodoo, and Wig was flooded with a crazy kind of peace. The steel band had gone right out of his head.
He reached toward Harwood and fell.
He didn’t moan about his miserable life. He was Icarus, the guy who was destined to fall from roofs. His ears swelled with blood. He heard a great whooshing sound, and he wondered if God was a baritone or if that Devil on the roof was playing one more trick. He’d bump, bump into clotheslines, and the white sheets would cling to him like so many parachutes. But nothing could break his fall or oblige him to black out. He was as lucid as a church bell. Detective Lieutenant Albert Wiggens, Disabled. On special assignment to the Honorable Isaac Sidel. The mayor’s own marshal. Black Icarus. Couldn’t live or die.
PART SEVEN
31.
It was Barbarossa who knocked on the king’s door. No one else dared summon him out of bed. Isaac traveled to Harlem Hospital in his bathrobe, with Barbarossa behind the wheel. Wig had been lying six or seven hours in his own back yard, bundled up in clotheslines. It was Harwood who finally claimed him, called the police, after hiding on the roof. He was waiting at the hospital for Isaac and Barbarossa, with red marks on his throat, his mouth a bitter blue, his hazel eyes without luster, his fingers frozen. Isaac gave him gloves to wear, and lent him Barbarossa’s overcoat, said one word—“Michael”—and the boy began to cry.
“Mr. Isaac, that man say, ‘Little brother, don’t move.’ I couldn’t help Wiggy. I couldn’t save him.”
“Joey,” Isaac whispered, “the kid’s in a trance. Will you get a doc for him? I have to look for Lieutenant Wiggens.”
Isaac had never called him that. Lieutenant Wiggens. He found Wig in the emergency ward, inside some derelict closet, with Sweets and the hospital chaplain hovering around him. Sweets was holding Wiggy’s hand.
“Don’t you die on me, you hear? You’re our last commando, Wig.”
Sweets glanced up at Isaac with a fury on his face. He whispered something to the chaplain, then motioned to Isaac with one of his huge paws. They convened on the far side of the closet, Sweets towering above the closet’s canvas walls.
“I gave him to you,” Sweets said. “It was supposed to be his glory hour. Wig shouldn’t have been out on any roof.”
“Black Michael conned the boy, kidnapped—”
“Black Michael’s your coach.”
“He’s also coaching Billy the Kid and Judah Bellow.”
“Not anymore. I banned him from New York City.”
“He’s FBI,” Isaac said. “A one-man task force. LeComte sends him on suicide missions.”
“He should have kept away from Wig.”
“Banish him,” Isaac said. “You’re the PC.”
“I am not. I’m a floater. You never swore me in.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Isaac said. “Everybody knows you’re my Commish. Who cares about a ceremony?”
“I care.”
Sweets turned his back on the mayor, shoved between the canvas walls, and went to Wig, while Isaac stood at the edge of nowhere, the pariah king.
Wi
g had his own wheelchair within a week. A deputy inspector arrived at the hospital, got Wig into his dress uniform, and drove him down to the Blue Room with all his medals and a pair of white gloves. All the pols and Manhattan moguls kept pumping his right and left hand.
Wig stopped shaking hands after a while. He didn’t want to soil his gloves. He sat next to the Commish, Carlton Montgomery III, Carlton’s wife, and Carlton’s three little girls, while Isaac stood under the City’s seal and swore Carlton in as his police commissioner. The wife was called Florence, and she’d come out of the same aristocracy as Sweets.
She brought Wig a glass of punch and an almond cake. She had high cheekbones like Rita Mae. Wig was almost in love with her, but he wouldn’t have messed around with Sweets’ wife.
“I’m serving notice,” Sweets said, clutching the microphone with his paw. “I won’t tolerate hidden venues in my town. The law doesn’t recognize magicians and invisible men. There’s only one paradox in New York City, and that paradox is your police commissioner. I don’t like to sit on fences. I’ll give a good slap whenever I have to. I’ve learned that from Isaac Sidel.”
The pols cheered and raised their glasses of punch. Sweets was sending LeComte a kite. There would be no more Knickerbocker Boys in Manhattan, no more Carols. LeComte should have been at Sweets’ little party, but he wasn’t in the Blue Room. Neither was Billy the Kid. All the other nabobs had come to celebrate Sweets. Martin Malik lurked in the corner, biting into a macaroon.
Becky Karp, who’d risen out of her rocking chair to have some punch in the Blue Room, gripped Malik’s elbow and danced him toward Sidel.
“We’re hiring Malik,” she said, “stealing him away from Sweets.”
“We are?” Isaac said.
“Yes. We need a broom. I’ll figure out his title and his salary.”
“But Malik hates me,” Isaac said. “Don’t you, Malik?”
“It doesn’t matter,” chirped Rebecca Karp. “He can knock off our enemies while he hates you.” And she danced Malik back to his corner.
Isaac had a sudden urge to commune with someone out of his own past. Not Joey or Marilyn or his brother Leo. It had to be baseball. He could have gone up to Washington Heights and visited with Harry Lieberman, but the Bomber had no affection for Isaac and wouldn’t talk baseball with him. Herman Melville, he’d go to Herman Melville.
He left City Hall. It was snowing, like the last time he’d been to the MCC. The warden gave Isaac a wispy little smile. He went up to the Heart of Darkness, passed all the tiny bullets of light in the walls, but Herman Melville wasn’t inside that segregated cell block. Isaac went back down to the warden.
“Where’s Hector Ramirez?”
“Your Honor, I haven’t a clue. Federal marshals stole him right out of his cell with Dostoyevsky and all his other books. They had some kind of writ that smelled of the Justice Department.”
LeComte had gotten Herman Melville out of the Heart of Darkness as a favor to Isaac. Or was it a favor?
Isaac took a cab up to Little Angel Street. He sat in Rebecca’s rocking chair. Wig might never walk again. The king was responsible for his own bodyguard. If he hadn’t gone near Rita, imposed himself upon the Ali Baba, she might still be alive. Black Michael was the king’s own poisoned rabbi. Michael had taught him to meditate and to love the ball, had sent him a fortune in baseball cards as some memento mori, had almost murdered Wig, and then disappeared into a crack between Carcassonne and Bucharest. The king couldn’t find him. He had a few spies, remnants of his former secret police, the Ivanhoes, who’d checked with their associates in France. Nina Anghel had dropped out of the pingpong circuit. The red lioness didn’t have one exhibition scheduled anywhere.
Isaac sat on the porch with his plastic pouch. He began shuffling the baseball cards. Tobias Little. Monte Ward. Jay Penny had a baseball green in the background and a magnificent blue and orange sky. The king searched this sky for some clues.
The telephone rang.
“Your Honor,” said one of his secretaries. “There’s a maniac on the line. Mr. Herman Melville.”
“Put him through.”
Isaac could hear a click and then a hoarse whisper. “It’s your little man … meet me at our clubhouse in half an hour.”
“Clubhouse?”
“Yeah. You figure it out.”
Isaac would often have breakfast or lunch at Ratner’s with his Delancey Giants. He drove down to Delancey, parked the car, and entered Ratner’s with such a scowl the waiters left him alone. One little boy asked him to sign his name on a napkin. “Jay Penny, Champion Base Ball Catcher,” he wrote, and the little boy returned to his table.
The waiters brought him barley soup and seeded rolls, a bottle of celery tonic, three cups of coffee, and a prune Danish. He couldn’t stop eating. He’d come out of his coma a year ago and had been famished ever since. He had to eat for the dead man who was still inside him and for the tapeworm that had vanished from his intestines when Isaac was shot under the Williamsburg Bridge.
A tall man in a black leather jacket appeared at Isaac’s table. Two other men, also in leather jackets, were waiting for him at Ratner’s front door. These men were babysitters. And Hector Ramirez, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-six, had that gray complexion of a guy who’d been living without sunlight. He ordered a celery tonic.
“Don’t you dare pity me,” Hector said. “And if you sniffle once, I’ll strangle you inside your favorite restaurant.”
“You’re in witness protection,” Isaac said.
“Thanks to you. I was happy. I had my books. I didn’t ask for this cowboy stuff.”
“I told LeComte to pull you.”
“And now he has me doing capers. But you kept your word. The warden let me have Dostoyevsky. I read The Brothers Karamazov sixteen times. I am what I am because of you.”
“That’s unfair. I got you a uniform, and gave you a small allowance, so you wouldn’t have to work after school.”
“Don’t forget the Louisville Slugger.”
“All right,” Isaac said. “You crowned a narc with it, but was that my fault?”
“What does Ivan Karamazov say? Eternity is a bathhouse full of spiders. Well, I sent the narc over there with your baseball bat … coach, you’re paler than I am, and you didn’t spend three years in the Heart of Darkness.”
“I’m looking for a guy,” Isaac said. “It troubles me. I can’t sleep.”
“What’s his name?”
“Michael Cuza. Some people call him King Carol.”
“Black Michael? The FBI’s own fucking ninja.”
“He was my pingpong coach.”
“On rainy days,” said Hector Ramirez. “Don’t move. Have another celery tonic. I’ll be back in a couple of hours with all you need to know about Black Michael.”
“You can’t,” Isaac said. “LeComte has you under a screen …”
“I was born under a screen, but I taught myself how to walk and talk.”
Hector Ramirez marched out of Ratner’s with his two babysitters. And the king started to cry. He didn’t even get the chance to talk baseball with his greatest prodigy. The king and Cardinal Jim could have gotten Hector into the big leagues if the boy hadn’t disappeared from the Delancey Giants and left Isaac with a bunch of orphans who dropped into last place. Isaac’s only championship had come with Hector Ramirez. The cardinal’s team took over the Police Athletic League and the Delancey Giants had a quick fall from paradise.
Isaac didn’t have to watch the clock in the window. He nibbled on a poppyseed cake and knew that Hector wouldn’t return to Ratner’s. He was on his fifth celery tonic when the FBI burst into the restaurant in the form of Frederic LeComte and the same two babysitters in leather jackets.
“I spring him for you, Isaac, and this is how you repay me? You’re never to see Hector Ramirez again. If you approach him, if you exchange one word, the kid goes back into solitary and sits for the rest of his life.”
�
�Come on, LeComte, you gave him a ticket to ride because I happened to discover him in your little house of detention. You couldn’t afford the bad publicity. Here I am, the virgin mayor, with one of his ex-Giants tucked away in the dark. A Puerto Rican kid who’s passionate about Herman Melville. The media would have had a love affair with Hector Ramirez.”
“I still freed the kid.”
“And got your mileage out of him. How many capers has he done for the FBI? He knew all about Black Michael. Was he out in the Hamptons with Michael and Margaret Tolstoy? Did you use him as Michael’s lookout man?”
“You’re talking silly,” LeComte said.
Isaac tossed his plastic pouch onto the table. “Silly, huh? Margaret says this is from Michael. Spoils of war. He knocks off a drug ring for Uncle Sam and comes up with an incredible batch of baseball cards. A terrific find. But Michael isn’t that much of a magician. He doesn’t know dick about baseball, and neither does Margaret. It’s an FBI package. The cards are from you.”
“No,” LeComte said. “They’re from Michael. I merely appraised the value for him.”
“Merely appraised,” Isaac said. “I want Black Michael. Where is he?”
“Michael’s been erased from our books. He doesn’t exist.”
“He existed long enough to have Wig thrown off a roof.”
“You’ll have to find a new pingpong coach.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. “Michael made a real booboo. Sweets doesn’t like it when the FBI lets a mad dog fuck over his head. Sweets is fond of Wig. And now you’re on his shit list.”
“Mr. Mayor, you’ll have to heal that rift. He’ll lose a giant portion of his budget if he dismantles our joint task force.”
“Sweets won’t dismantle anything. He’ll just narrow you a little and cut your heart out. He had a good teacher. Isaac Sidel.”
“But there’s one more ingredient,” LeComte said.
“Margaret Tolstoy. She’s in limbo with Black Michael. You sent her there, didn’t you, LeComte? And if I’m not your boy, Margaret stays where she is … here, finish my celery tonic, you miserable cocksucker.”
Isaac picked up his plastic pouch and vanished from Ratner’s restaurant.
Little Angel Street (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 19