Little Angel Street (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “To my place.” She didn’t have a place. It was the last of Michael’s apartments, on the boulevard Montparnasse. She hadn’t sold the building yet. She didn’t want to make the trésor public suspicious. The tax people might come after Michael. The building was in Nina’s name.

  She helped the old man dress.

  “Joel, what happened to your wife?”

  “Mauricette? She died on me last month. I wanted to bury her in Montparnasse, but we didn’t have the money. You know, a grave near Jean-Paul Sartre. It means something to me. My son the mayor doesn’t understand. I’m a mediocre painter. I don’t have the gift. But I’ve been happier doing portraits than living like a bedbug in Manhattan. Kill me, Isaac’s fiancee, but I can’t stop loving Paris.”

  “I’m Margaret,” she said. “Margaret Tolstoy.”

  “Tolstoy. It’s nice to be named after a genius.”

  Margaret got him down the stairs, past the golems’ court with the blue earth, and onto the rue Vieille-du-Temple, while she clutched her velvet sack with Michael’s millions. Her mouth started to shape a scream. She was looking into the eyes of a bandit with a blue face. Joel had distracted her. She’d forgotten all about the Hungarians. But this Hungarian had a familiar grin. It belonged to the missing mayor. Isaac Sidel.

  “No excuses,” she said. “Abandoning your father like that. Joel was starving to death.”

  “I was waiting out here. I didn’t have the courage … and then I saw you go in.”

  “You were in Carcassonne, weren’t you? And Michael was foolish enough to let you out of his forest alive.”

  “I’m confused,” the old man said. “Is it my son the mayor? He looks like the wolfman. His cheeks are all blue.”

  “He is the wolfman. He hasn’t shaved in a week.”

  Margaret maneuvered father and son into a taxi. They rode out of the Marais, along the same route where Leutnant Lodl of the Service Juif had once driven her. Lodl was in love with her, a little girl of twelve called Magda Antonescu. The Marais had been full of women and children with Jewish stars on their chests. Magda hadn’t been able to find any men in the streets. Lodl had a Jewish mistress. There was going to be a roundup, a grande rafle, and Lodl, who had helped plan it, was also hiding Jewish children, sending them into monasteries, delivering them to friends he could trust. Lodl was like a handsome Frankenstein. The escape routes he designed for the children were almost as efficient as his plans for the rafle. The leutnant had a love of detail.

  “Lodl,” she’d asked, “can I keep a Jewish boy or girl under my bed?”

  “Quiet, you little mouse.”

  He’d stroke her calf, but he wouldn’t kiss her on the mouth. She was a child, after all, though Uncle Ferdinand would marry her in six months. And when Magda returned to the Marais in July, after the grande rafle, she couldn’t discover any children. The Marais was swept with ghosts, like a bitter cemetery …

  She began to cry in Michael’s kitchen on the boulevard Montparnasse. Margaret hadn’t expected house guests. She’d organized her own rafle, rounding up Michael’s money. But she couldn’t get Lodl out of her mind. She had onions and potatoes and turnips and leeks. She had a can of tuna fish, a loaf of rye bread, a bottle of wine, some blue cheese. She hadn’t made a sit-down meal in months. Margaret was always eating on the run. But she prepared a salad, served the two Sidels in the dining room, which opened onto Paris like a magnificent flower garden.

  “Delicious,” said the old man, his goatee hovering over the salad bowl. He didn’t even look at the view, this Gauguin whose eyes had gone inward. And he wouldn’t look at Isaac.

  “All right,” Joel said. “I abandoned you. Are you happy now?”

  “Mom died like a dog,” Isaac said.

  “But I didn’t step on her bones. And you were nineteen years old, twenty, when I left. Where’s the crime?”

  “Papa,” Isaac said, “you could have painted in New York.”

  “No. It was Paris or nothing.”

  “Where are your canvases?” Isaac growled. “You painted portraits in a tourist hotel like a refugee from Montmartre.”

  “That was my privilege,” Joel said.

  “I ought to rip out every hair on your face.”

  “Isaac,” Margaret said. “You shouldn’t talk to Joel like that. Remember. I’m wearing my Glock.”

  “Let him talk,” Joel said. “He was always a wild animal.”

  “Yeah, Papa. I’m the wolfman.”

  There was a knock on the door. Margaret rose from the table with her gun. “Who is it?”

  “Nicolae Mars. I’m in trouble. Let me in.”

  His simple plea unsettled her. Margaret opened the door. Nicolae crashed into her arms, propelling Margaret toward her blind side, where she could only see the wall, while six Hungarians entered the apartment with Italian pistols. Margaret shoved away from Nicolae and could have shot one or two of the Hungarians, but those other murderers would have gotten to Joel. She didn’t want that old man from the Marais to die in Michael’s house.

  “Margaret dear,” Nicolae said, cleaning his eyeglasses with a foul rag, “you really ought to give me your gun.”

  “Nicolae, if I die you die. Remember that. You shouldn’t have gone to the Hungarians.”

  “Had to, dear. Michael retires, just like that. Never even consults us. I’m his ward.”

  “You’re close to sixty,” Margaret had to remind him.

  The novelist exploded with indignation. “I’m fifty-five … Margaret, you have two visitors. One of them is famous. I recognized Sidel. The mysterious mayor of Manhattan. We might have to kidnap him.”

  “You’ll kidnap shit.”

  Her dumb darling had come out of the dining room. He’d wrecked Margaret’s equilibrium. She’d never get the drop on those Hungarians.”

  “Maître, the money, the money,’ said the chief of the Hungarians, a shriveled ex-policeman who wore an eye patch.

  “Margaret,” Nicolae said, “see for yourself. They’re impatient boys. Michael’s already butchered their compatriots. Their guns might go off. It could create a frightful accident … I’ll relieve you of the money bag and then we’ll disappear.”

  “You’ll relieve her of shit.”

  “Isaac,” Margaret whispered, “go back to your father. This is my fight.”

  “Nah,” Isaac said. “Margaret, I’ll take the little fish. I’ll crack his head.”

  “Who’s a fish?” Nicolae asked, indignant again.

  The ex-policemen aimed their pistols at Isaac’s eyes.

  The door opened. Oskar Leviathan strolled into the apartment with Nina Anghel. The Hungarians smiled. Michael’s precious enfants walking into their little trap. But Isaac understood the battle plan. It was a new variation on the Trojan horse. Michael’s horse was metaphysical. He’d sneaked his warriors inside the murderers’ den. He was on another suicide mission. But it was Nicolae’s suicide, not Michael’s.

  The murderer with the eye patch dropped to the carpet with a bodkin under his ear. An arm reached around the door with the suppleness of a snake and snapped the neck of another murderer. Then Michael’s face appeared, like an unholy mask, his eyes practically hollow, and he let out a scream that almost shattered Isaac’s eardrums. It was a kamikaze call. The king couldn’t move. His arms and legs were frozen. He was like some spectator in a tiny field of toy soldiers. Michael moved from soldier to soldier, snapping their necks.

  Isaac heard a strange meow. It was Nicolae crying.

  “Maître,” Michael said. “I loved your words so much.” He strangled Nicolae in front of Nina Anghel and Oskar Leviathan. The novelist died with the same meow.

  Joel Sidel wandered out of the dining room, saw the dead bodies, and scolded his son. “Isaac, I can’t keep up with all your tricks.” Then he returned to the dining room, shut his eyes, and fell asleep in his chair.

  34.

  The king was welcomed home with incredible panache. There was a parade of boats in th
e harbor, with fireworks that exploded Isaac’s phantom image across the sky. A few Orthodox rabbis complained. No town should worship idols, they said. The Committee to Re-elect Isaac Sidel, which financed the fireworks, issued an apology, and the rabbis withdrew their complaint. Isaac couldn’t understand all the fucking sound and fury. He’d run to Carcassonne to kill a man, had failed, had been out of touch with New York for a week, and came back a hero.

  It was LeComte who had woven a legend around the king, prepared little leaks for the press and then a full dossier. The mayor of New York had gone undercover and followed a gang of murderers across France, the very gang that had been killing homeless men. The leader of the gang was Michael Cuza, aka King Carol, a notorious Roumanian cutthroat, smuggler, and jewel thief, operating out of ping-pong parlors.

  LeComte went to Harts Island off the coast of the Bronx, visited potter’s field. All the Geronimo Joneses were pulled out of their communal graves and discovered to be former members of Nicolae Ceausescu’s palace guard who’d swiped treasures from the great dictator. Michael had lured them to Manhattan and murdered every one, dumping their bodies at different homeless shelters, while he hid behind the mask of a pingpong coach.

  Enter Isaac Sidel. Police chief and mayor-elect and Justice’s first Alexander Hamilton Fellow. “He’s a natural nightfighter and an awesome, original detective,” LeComte was quoted in New York magazine. “Sherlock Holmes on the new frontier. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Sidel tracked Michael Cuza to a pingpong parlor, offered to train with him and become his pupil, so he could uncover Michael’s modus operandi.”

  And according to the article, this New Age Sherlock Holmes had gotten between Black Michael and his gang, and it was the gang that killed Michael in his Montparnasse lair. But the photograph of Michael Cuza’s corpse in New York magazine looked suspiciously like that cherub, Nicolae Mars.

  The king burnt the article in his fireplace. He took to wearing his gun at Gracie Mansion. He would stop strangers in the hall, like a highwayman. He went after Martin Malik. “Who started the Committee to Re-elect Isaac Sidel?”

  “I did,” Malik said, standing his ground.

  “I haven’t been in office a month, and there’s already a committee to re-elect?”

  “It’s standard practice, Mr. Mayor. If you don’t start early, you’re dead after a year.”

  “Fine. Who’s the chairman?”

  “We have two chairpersons. Papa Cassidy and Rebecca Karp.”

  Isaac groaned. “Papa once took a contract out on my life. Did you know that, Malik?”

  “You can’t survive without a committee to re-elect.”

  “And you can’t have fireworks. How much did it cost to put my face up in the sky?”

  “Ninety thousand dollars.”

  “Malik, imagine how many homeless men and women I could feed with ninety thousand dollars.”

  “But the committee can’t feed them. It would be a misuse of funds.”

  And the king ran from Malik, who was the real mayor. Isaac was only marking time on Little Angel Street. His dad had moved into the mansion with him. He did portraits of the mayor’s employees. He wore his beret and climbed up and down the stairs with an easel and leaky tubes of paint. Joel had made his own Paris inside the mansion’s walls. He never went out. He was over eighty and seemed content to immortalize the Sidel administration.

  But the king wouldn’t sit for his own portrait. He couldn’t decide whether to kiss his father or kill him. He’d seen Joel twice in thirty-five years, and now they were practically roommates. Isaac wore slippers, like his dad, and stuck to Little Angel Street.

  The doorbell rang around midnight. The king had been dozing near the fire. He got up, wondering if any of the Hungarians survived the slaughter in Montparnasse and had come to kidnap him. Isaac opened the door and found a black man with scars on his face … and two wire crutches.

  “Wiggy, what happened to your wheelchair?”

  “I smashed it. Told the hospital I couldn’t leave you all alone. Asked the doctors to outfit me the best they could.”

  “Ah,” Isaac said, “it’s fucking good to see you.”

  And the king had his bodyguard again.

  He was asked to give a speech. Schyler Knott had reopened the Christy Mathewson Club and wanted Isaac at the inaugural dinner. The king couldn’t refuse. He came with Wig. They looked like a couple of killers in black tie. Schyler Knott, that purist of white baseball, had started a drive to induct Archibald Harris into the Hall of Fame.

  Isaac had a very odd dinner companion. The melamed, Izzy Wasser. Why would the Maf’s biggest brain come to the Mathewson Club? But Izzy was a baseball freak. And Isaac was an idiot. The melamed was here to celebrate Archie Harris for another reason. It had nothing to do with the nigger leagues.

  “Iz, you hired him.”

  “Isaac,” the melamed said, “do you have to speak riddles?”

  “Archie Harris. You hired him.”

  “Not so loud. I wasn’t with the Family in ’forty-six. You were a schoolboy and I was a struggling melamed and second-story man. And that’s when Archie flourished. In ’forty-six … but I hired him later. He did a lotta piecework for us until your bodyguard shot out his tonsils.”

  “Wig had a reason,” Isaac said.

  “Sure he had a reason, but he ended Archie’s career.”

  “Then it wasn’t a myth. About the Purple Gang.”

  “Isaac,” the melamed whispered, “we held Harlem in place with one man. Archibald Harris. He terrorized all the colored numbers men. I loved Arch. We talked baseball for hours.”

  A lectern was brought to Isaac’s table and hooked to a microphone. The king stared out at his audience and started to cry. He couldn’t control himself. Wig stood up on one wire crutch and put his arm around the king.

  “Should we cancel, bro’?”

  “Wiggy, I’m all right.”

  They formed a curious pietà, Albert Wiggens and Isaac Sidel. The bodyguard and his crippled king. Wiggy sat down again.

  “Met a princess at this club. Anastasia. She was born in Bucharest, the little sister of Carol, the boy king. Carol was a real sweetheart. He robbed people and played pingpong in the royal palace. Anastasia and Carol were quite a team. When royalty went out of fashion, they joined the secret police and traveled all over the world. The princess appeared at my junior high school in nineteen forty-three. And appeared again forty years later at the Christys. Still a secret agent. But she and Carol now free-lance for the FBI. They also raise midget deer on a mountain north of Carcassonne when they’re not whacking people for the FBI’s own little darling, Frederic LeComte. And thinking about the princess made me cry. But I shouldn’t be so personal. Schyler invited me here to talk about Archibald Harris and black baseball …”

  Isaac laughed when he saw the limo waiting for him outside the Christy Mathewson Club. He put Wig into his own limousine. “Wiggy, I have to do a solo.”

  “I’m your bodyguard.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll be safe. It’s only the FBI.”

  He sent Wig home to Little Angel Street and climbed into LeComte’s limo. The cultural commissar was in a rage. He held a gun on Isaac, a nickel-plated target .22 that he must have grabbed off the firing range at the FBI Academy. “That was some fairy tale, Your Honor. Can I quote you?… when they’re not whacking people for the FBI’s little darling, Frederic LeComte.”

  “You bugged the Christys.”

  “Of course I did. How else could I keep up with you? You’re a firecracker. Isaac, you’re not to mention Anastasia or King Carol, not ever again.”

  “Frederic, my fairy tales are as good as yours. You shouldn’t be giving interviews to New York magazine. You’re the FBI.”

  “But I had to untangle the mess you made. It wasn’t easy. Michael Cuza is dead, Isaac. Is that understood?”

  “Dead until you need him. And what happens to Oskar Leviathan and Nina Anghel?”

  “They’re par
t of the fallout, part of the flak. But they won’t suffer very much on the Montagne Noire.”

  “With Margaret Tolstoy.”

  “She’s Michael’s now,” said LeComte. “I promised her to him. That’s part of the deal. You can live without Margaret Tolstoy.”

  Isaac grabbed the target .22 out of LeComte’s hand and dug it against his throat.

  “Frederic, I’m not afraid to shoot. You believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  What could the king do? LeComte was like a mean fairy godmother who kept him and Margaret alive. Isaac was almost a son of the FBI.

  “I’ll get lonely without you, Frederic, swear to God.”

  Isaac returned the .22, got out of the limo, and hitched a ride to Gracie Mansion in a police car. He didn’t bother to undress. He slept on the sofa.

  The king made himself a glass of orange juice in the morning. He had a guest. Schyler Knott. The king was still in black tie.

  “Your Honor,” Schyler said, “I’m giving the barons their matchbox.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Emeric Gray on East Fifty-sixth. I’m not going to landmark it.”

  “Why didn’t you say something at the Christys last night?”

  “I didn’t want to disappoint you. And I never mix baseball and landmarks … Your Honor, Jason and his partners have agreed to set aside two million dollars for the homeless.”

  “It’s a bloody bribe.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “But none of Emetic’s buildings can ever be replaced. You’re the one who said it, Schyler. Every fucking stone is our second skin.”

  “You brought me out of the basement, Isaac. I’m a politician now.”

  Isaac marched upstairs. He found Wig in Harwood’s bedroom. The truant officers had come to Little Angel Street, but they couldn’t get Harwood to go back to school. Harwood had the imprint of a mayor’s mansion behind him. He lived with Isaac Sidel. But he couldn’t recall the letters of the alphabet. And the brutal policeman, Albert Wiggens, was teaching him how to read again.

  “The white man goes to humdrum heaven and humdrum hell, but the nigger goes to the poor man’s paradise.”