Myron pointed to a man with plastic on his sleeves who sat eating mushrooms off the edge of his thumb.
“That’s Luxenberg … our accountant.”
Isaac went across the street and knocked on Ida’s door. She swallowed hard after she recognized the Chief. Ida wasn’t malicious. She offered tea and sponge cake to the cop who had deserted her. She wouldn’t spoil the occasion with shrill cries. How often does a man come back from the dead?
“Isaac, believe me, what’s nine months between friends? But couldn’t you have sent me a postcard from the Bronx?”
“Police business,” Isaac said, with sponge cake in his mouth. “My own daughter didn’t know. Ida, I was caught in a freeze. The Guzmanns dipped me in cold chocolate. They put spiders in my hair. They gave me a worm.”
“Isaac, who are the Guzmanns that they should do such disgusting things?” Ida watched him lick some honey off the side of his spoon. The Guzmanns, whoever they were, hadn’t robbed him of his old habits. The Chief loved to sniff for honey. “Isaac, I’m engaged.”
“They told me at the restaurant. Luxenberg. An accountant with plastic cuffs. Ida, does he wear plastic when he pees?”
Ida walked into the kitchen. The Chief followed her. He began taking off her clothes. He didn’t rip Ida’s blouse. He was diligent with all her buttons. He had Ida’s skirts and summer bloomers on the kitchen table without scratching her legs. He didn’t need a blanket under him. He could grovel on Ida’s linoleum. She coughed when Isaac licked the gulley in the middle of her chest. She felt the bear’s hot nose in her belly. Ida understood. He was sniffing for his honey jar. He stirred, pushed his head away. The Chief forgot to undress himself. His pants came down. He crept into Ida.
The bear was miserable. He copulated with his skull against the wall. Only a retard could be blind to Ida’s motives. She was afraid of the Chief. The girl had deep grooves in her mouth. She went walleyed under Isaac: her pupils shrank inside her head.
Isaac bit his tongue. The doctors had told him about the vague discomforts a worm could bring to a man. Isaac cursed the doctors and their fluoroscopes. The worm was eating him alive. Its armored head pinched and scraped his gut. He swore to Jesus he could feel the cocksucker twist around. The worm was conspiring with Ida to agonize the Chief. He slid out of her, clutching his pants. He knew a cashier’s tricks. The girl suffered Isaac on top of her to deflect him from her suitor’s plastic sleeves. Ida gave her own honey to the bear, so he wouldn’t go back to Ludlow Street and rage against Luxenberg and the dairy restaurant.
Isaac stole out of the kitchen. His knees were stamped with the print of Ida’s linoleum. He fled across the Bowery with sludge in his heart. The Chief had lost his old avenues of comfort. The bishopric was gone.
Herbert Pimloe was a cop with a Phi Beta Kappa key. He’d dreamt of Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Hobbes years ago in Harvard Yard, under a wet coat and a miserable wool hat. Pimloe rejected the mundane boundaries of a Harvard degree. He had contempt for lawyers and other government boys who longed to smell an ambassador’s breath and die for the diplomatic corps. Pimloe became a cop in New York City.
He married a girl from Chappaqua. He moved to Brighton Beach. He had three boys, who inherited Pimloe’s gruffness and Pimloe’s brains, and grew obsessed with the shape and gold color of a Phi Beta Kappa key. Pimloe patrolled the streets of Brooklyn in a blue bag. He didn’t mouth idle bits of knowledge at his precinct. But he couldn’t escape from Harvard Yard. A young inspector in the First Dep’s office picked him out of Brooklyn. The inspector was Isaac Sidel. Isaac wanted a patrician on the First Deputy’s lists, a boy with a gold key.
Pimloe carried fingerprint cards up from the basement. He brought sandwiches to the Irish commissioners. “Find my shoelaces for me, Harvard. Get me some ink for my pen. Harvard, where the fuck are you?”
He became the deputy whip, sweeping up after Isaac, coming down on cops whose ears had begun to corrode. Whole precincts were afraid of Isaac. No one could figure where he would pounce. A deputy whip lacked this option of surprise. Familiar at the stationhouses, much more visible than the Chief, Pimloe was the man you hated.
He survived on swift elbows and memories of Thomas Hobbes. He annexed himself to Isaac’s rival, Cowboy Rosenblatt. With Cowboy’s help he would crawl around Isaac and sit in the First Deputy’s chair.
Isaac was a tainted man. Feuding with the Guzmanns, he’d crippled himself. He could no longer inherit O’Roarke’s chair. The Irish commissioners would never trust a cop who jumped into the Bronx for a tribe of Marrano pimps and penny bankers.
Pimloe stood under a designated tree in Central Park (close to South Pond), and dreamt of the First Deputy’s chair. He had a sour time. There were twenty inspectors at Centre Street who could outrank a deputy whip. Cowboy would have to push him over their heads.
Meanwhile Pimloe kept to his tree. He had an appointment with Odile Leonhardy, the retired porno queen. Odile wouldn’t take him up to her room at the Plaza Hotel. She claimed that a cop could scare off film producers. She was dying to break into the movies. So she picked a spot that couldn’t endanger her; it was a tree with a split trunk that gave Pimloe an uncompromising view of the Plaza. She wanted the cop to eat his heart out.
The grayish walls of the Plaza turned light pink at the end of July. It was a color that reminded Pimloe of frozen entrails in a fish store, and blooded-out meat. The whip was growing somber. Pimloe was jealous of all the producers who mixed with Odile. He imagined men without their clothes, making Odile into another Merle Oberon, while she sat on someone’s hairy knee.
“Herbert.”
Pimloe saw a lump of sky through sunny leaves, and a heel broader than the back of any yellow duck in South Pond. The heel dangled right above Pimloe’s nose. Odile was inside the fork of a powerful branch. Pimloe didn’t have to peek around the hump of her platform shoe. The girl wore a dress that was totally transparent.
“Couldn’t we sneak into the Plaza?” Pimloe begged from under the limbs of the tree. He had a horrible lust for Odile. “How much would a few minutes cost?”
The whip could have frightened her; he had titles to throw at Odile. Herbert Pimloe would be the new First Deputy the minute O’Roarke fell off his chair.
“I’ll buy you a dress at Bloomingdale’s,” Pimloe shouted into the tree. “Come down.”
“No.”
“Then tell me what you want.”
“Pommes frites.”
Pimloe began to shake; Odile would lure him into the Café Argenteuil on Fifty-second Street, where she would gobble French fried potatoes that cost two dollars a sliver. Pimloe would have raided Bloomingdale’s to glut Odile with clothes. Material draped on her body gave pleasure to the whip. But he wasn’t going to make a pauper of himself for pommes frites!
“Odile, cafés are out. It’s too early to eat French fries. What about some whiskey? I brought my flask along.”
He offered Odile a drink. Whiskey fumes crept up the tree. Odile wouldn’t surrender to a puny silver bottle that was going black from the grease on a policeman’s thumb.
The whip’s knees came together in one bitter knock. His shoulders drooped. He spilled whiskey on his pants. “Okay,” he said. “Pommes frites.”
The tree shivered once. A pair of veiled buttocks slid off the branch. Pimloe heard hissing in the leaves. Odile was on the ground. She stood higher than the whip in her platform shoes.
She was the miraculous lady of Central Park, a leggy creature without a hint of underwear; all the hermits and banditos from around the pond left their hiding posts to gaze at Odile. The swing of her legs out of glorious hip sockets caused each of them to choke on his tongue. She had the stride of an ostrich. She covered merciless territory with the flick of her knees.
Pimloe could taste the ligatures of Odile’s spine. The dents in the small of her back gave off a salty perfume. He’d have to slip away from Brighton Beach to marry Odile. Pimloe could fight off the wrath of those Irish sup
erchiefs. He’d wait until they crowned him. Then they’d have to kneel to Commissioner Pimloe. The First Dep could have any number of wives.
4.
THE cab driver had two ninnies in the back: a gray-haired infant and a huge Irishman in stinky socks. He’d picked them up at Abingdon Square because it was a slow day and he couldn’t afford to select his passengers. He shuddered when he heard the giant mention Boston Road. “Excuse me, I couldn’t find Boston Road in a hundred years.”
“We’ll teach you how to find it,” Patrick Silver muttered, with a knuckle in his toes.
A piece of scratched leather stuck out of Patrick’s soccer shirt, but the driver couldn’t see the bulge of any gun. What kind of mick wears an empty holster? A crook from Boston Road? Or a cop with a fascination for leather? The driver knew all the precincts from Chinatown to High Bridge, but he hadn’t met scruffy cops like these: gray-haired boys in charity suits. The small one kept shoving caramels into his mouth. The driver humped down into his seat to absorb the shock of exploding caramels.
Patrick chose the Willis Avenue Bridge. The driver began to sulk. The black water under his cab swelled up like overcooked blood. The Harlem could never be a genuine river in his estimation; a toilet for the Bronx, it ran on hot piss, carrying blood and garbage into the sea. A boiling piss-hole and two imbeciles with gray tufts behind the ears had cut him off from Manhattan.
They passed over the skeleton yards of a freight terminal on the Bronx side of the bridge. They were in Mott Haven, on the lip of an old industrial region, cluttered with warehouses and an uncertain railroad that seemed to exhaust itself near the water, with pieces of track about to spill off the end of the borough. The warehouses leaned into the bridge like huge, prehistoric teeth.
The driver felt much safer moving across the bones of Southern Boulevard, with street after street of rubble. The whole Bronx could vanish in front of his eyes. Why should he care?
Little bodegas with tin walls began to crop up around Boston Road. The driver saw a flood of green cars. He smiled as he recognized the outline of institutional green: only a cop sitting under a blanket would ride in a big green boat. Could the imbeciles in his cab be part of the same team?
“Jesus, tell me, who are you guys staking out? Dope fiends, niggers, voodoo men?”
The mick made him stop in front of a miserable candy store. It was a matchbox of dying tin and wood, wedged into the wall of a tenement with disconnected fire escapes; struts were missing from every ladder.
An old man came out of the candy store wearing the traditional smock of a petty entrepreneur. His thick body was completely uncombed. His eyebrows grew wild on his head. A furrier would have envied the hair on his knuckles and his wrists. The driver couldn’t believe that this old man had created the fuss of cop cars on Boston Road.
“Shove off,” the mick said, slapping a twenty-dollar bill into the driver’s pocket. The driver wagged his head. He was in a nothing borough, outside a candy store that sat in the ruins, surrounded by a squatters’ army of cops in green boats. He waved to the infant, Jerónimo, anxious to get out of firing range. “Thanks,” he crooned to Patrick Silver. “Thanks.”
Papa Guzmann waited for the cab to leave before he hugged Jerónimo. He’d been itching to touch the boy, to fondle the ears of his oldest child, but he wouldn’t hop towards Jerónimo in the presence of strangers. The Guzmanns were a sensitive race. Papa could tolerate the big irlandés. Silver worked for him. And Silver didn’t have a devious smell. Papa judged you with his nose. He could pick out a lying, sinful creature with his very first snuff.
He brought Jerónimo into the candy store, away from the smog of Boston Road. Jerónimo began to mewl for his brothers. Two of them, Topal and Alejandro, arrived in their pajamas from the back room, which had bunk beds and a crib (for Jerónimo) and served as a dormitory and a way station for cousins from Peru and pickpockets from Ecuador and Miami who came under Papa’s largesse. The two pajama boys disappeared inside Jerónimo’s embrace, but they couldn’t stop his mewling. Jerónimo licked their foreheads with a creamy tongue while his face grew wet from prodigious, penny-round tears. The baby could have raised his grandfathers out of hell with the energy he provided. ésar and Jorge were missing. Jerónimo called for his youngest brother. “Zor-r-r-o.”
Papa couldn’t help his child. Zorro had been exiled from the candy store by Papa himself. It was Isaac’s fault. The Chief had produced a moronic twelve-year-old girl who swore in front of three assistant district attorneys, and a Manhattan judge that César Guzmann, alias Zorro, alias the Fox of Boston Road, had captured her off a Port Authority bus, sodomized her, and sold her into prostitution. Papa realized the falsity of this claim. No Marrano would ever sodomize a cow, a girl, or a horse. Papers were prepared for Zorro’s arrest. Now Isaac’s killer squadrons sat on Boston Road with bench warrants in their pockets. Zorro would lose his scalp if he came near the candy store.
Jerónimo bent behind Papa’s malted machines, looking for César and Jorge. He put his fist through comic book racks stuffed with school supplies, Valentine boxes, and pornographic displays. Papa had dioramas that told the story of abductions in Egypt, wife-swapping among the Eskimos, concubines in Sardinia, brothels in Peru. Jerónimo didn’t enjoy cardboard women poking out of a corrugated landscape. He bruised their heads with a fist.
“Zor-r-r-o.”
Papa offered him a chocolate egg, pink licorice, some runny marzipan. Jerónimo scorned such food. It was only after he scraped the walls of Papa’s dormitory, with his nose under the beds, to prove Zorro wasn’t available to him, that he settled down to eat. He had a brick of halvah, white chocolate that couldn’t be broken without a hammer, a pound of Turkish delight, and an egg cream Papa made with a pint of syrup and two quarts of milk.
Nothing he ate or drank could put the baby to sleep. He was restless in the candy store. Papa had given him away. He lived in the basement of a synagogue now with Patrick Silver. He shuffled through the dormitory with his belly in his hands, but he couldn’t get familiar with his old crib. He took his naps in Silver’s bed.
The baby’s nervous walk saddened Papa. He muttered words with Silver to take his mind off Jerónimo’s estrangement from the candy store.
“Do the cops haunt your synagoga, Irish?”
“Not at all. Moses, Jerónimo is safe with me.”
Papa dug a finger into his smock. “Isaac has his spies. Couldn’t he plant one inside the congregation?”
“Moses, not to worry. We haven’t had a new face at the shul in forty years. Anyhow, you can’t hide too many pistols under a prayer shawl.”
“Irish, take him home,” Papa said, squinting at the baby. “He’s outgrown the people here. None of my other boys has ever been to a Jewish church.”
“Should I bring him next week?”
“No,” Papa said. “Isaac’s children are getting too close. We’ll have green sedans on my counter in a few days.”
Silver understood Papa’s bitterness about the green sedans. Until Isaac’s “children” arrived on Boston Road, Papa’s candy store had been the premier numbers bank in the east Bronx. But Boston Road was dead. Papa’s runners had to eat their own policy slips. The green cars followed them everywhere. They couldn’t accept a nickel play from the hog butcher on Charlotte Street without interference from the cars. Detectives hissed at them and banged on the hog butcher’s window. The runners came to Papa with a twitch in their eyes. Papa had to let them go. “Chepe, here’s a fifty. Don’t be bashful. You have an aunt in New Jersey, no? Visit her for a while. I’ll tell you when to come back.”
Father Isaac had turned the candy store into a tomb for Guzmanns. Jorge was the only one who crept in and out. Papa would pin a grocery list to his shirt (Jorge couldn’t remember the names of different breakfast cereals), and send him to the bodega on the opposite side of the street. The cops were frightened of Jorge. He was a boy who could pull a detective out of a car and shake the clothes off his body. Jorge had
the squeeze of a python. It wasn’t fair. Isaac’s “children” had a complete armory in their cars. Blackjacks and clubs would have disintegrated on Jorge’s skull. Shotguns were inadequate. A detective had his limits. You couldn’t blow a man’s head off in the middle of Boston Road.
Papa launched the baby with a fresh supply of caramels. “Jerónimo, listen to the Irish. He’s your father now. Don’t forget to wash your mouth. If you misbehave, the Jews will clip your hair.” The baby kissed his brothers and left with Patrick Silver.
Patrick wasn’t a jittery person. The cop cars that bumped around his feet couldn’t make him scramble for the sidewalks. A detective sergeant taunted Patrick and the baby from the lead car. “Silver, stop wiping Papa’s ass. Give us the dummy, and you won’t have to slave for the Guzmanns any more. I can promise you your gun and your shield.”
Patrick slapped the sergeant’s fender. “You can have him, but not alone. The lad goes with me.” He opened the door and got in with Jerónimo, pushing the sergeant to the edge of his seat. The sergeant broke his discomfort with a smile.
“Silver, I could drive you straight to Headquarters with the siren on. Isaac will know what to do with the dummy.”
“Me and Isaac have the same rabbi. His name is O’Roarke. The First Dep watches over me. He’s a clansman of mine. Our people are from the kingdom of Limerick. O’Roarke will smash your fingers if you whistle in my face. We’ll go to Bethune Street, thank you. Hurry up. I’ll be late for evening prayer.”
Papa wasn’t blind. He saw the baby sitting in a police car. It didn’t worry him. Silver’s nearness to the police was beneficial to Papa. An ordinary goon couldn’t have preserved Jerónimo’s life. Papa had no choice. It was the synagogue or the candy store, and Papa didn’t trust himself. He had swallowed llama shit in Peru, drank the blood of a mountain goat to fight starvation, but Jerónimo couldn’t survive on Boston Road. Isaac would have seized him from the candy store. Papa couldn’t keep that son-of-a-bitch out of the baby’s crib, no matter how many cops the Guzmanns happened to kill.
Education of Patrick Silver Page 3