Education of Patrick Silver

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Education of Patrick Silver Page 5

by Jerome Charyn


  O’Roarke was a distant cousin of the priest who had thrown all the Jews out of Limerick in 1906. He didn’t share his dead cousin’s belief in sheenie devils. He had a primitive love of Irishmen that could tolerate any church. He knew the family names of Patrick’s congregation. He had dialogues with Hughie Prince at the Irish synagogue, or Hughie’s shop, on the question of messiahs, golems, and antichrists. He’d been to chapel with the Limerick Jews. He had a skullcap in his desk. He adored Patrick Silver and kept him out of harm.

  Only Patrick was a rotten diplomat. The shul exhausted him, making him blind to the little wars at Headquarters, the schemes of rival commissioners. A healthy, vigorous O’Roarke enabled Patrick to step around the different Irish chiefs without any bother. Once the First Dep began to die in his chair, the chiefs weren’t so bashful with the yarmulke boy. They bumped him in the halls. They hid his peeing bottle. Patrick paid no mind to them. He gathered his minyans and watched the shul.

  It was Guinness that brought him down. He got abominably pissed one afternoon at the Kings of Munster. He challenged four Innisfree lads to a fight after they insulted the river Shannon. Patrick forgot to hand his gun to the barman. The Innisfree lads stripped him of his holster and shot away the fixtures at the Kings of Munster. The shooting couldn’t be hushed. Patrick was called to the firearms board at Headquarters. The chiefs who sat on the board accused him of being a drunken sod who couldn’t hold on to his gun. They gave him the choice of resigning, or becoming a clerk.

  Lieutenant Scanlan nudged Patrick out of his reverie. “St. Patrick, we’ve arrived. You’d better grab Jerónimo’s hand. They don’t let infants into a hospital without a father.”

  Patrick got out of the car, with Jerónimo clinging to his soccer shirt. The baby had never been to a hospital, and he was mortified. His fist lay deep in Patrick’s shirt. The weather had changed. It was drizzling now. Jerónimo went up the steps of St. Vincent’s, his gray head under Patrick’s arm, so that the six detectives pushing behind them figured they were in the company of middle-aged twins.

  Another detective was standing at the top of the stairs. Fatter and uglier than the rest of Isaac’s blue-eyed squad, he’d come out of the hospital to greet Patrick Silver. “Go home, you miserable prick.”

  “Be nice,” Patrick said to Brodsky, Isaac’s chauffeur and errand boy. “You’ll corrupt the lad. He isn’t used to cops who swear. He sleeps in a synagogue. He prays with me.”

  “Then teach him how to pray for your life.”

  “Brodsky, your wires are crossed. Isaac sent for us. I’m supposed to see Commissioner Ned.”

  “Silver, that’s a shame. Your timing was always lousy. The great O’Roarke died half an hour ago.”

  Patrick shambled on the stairs, his stockings at the edge. The baby nearly toppled. He hung on to Patrick with both hands, his ears growing wet.

  “Died a half hour ago?” Patrick muttered through his teeth. “Then I’ll pay my respects to the corpse.”

  “Not a chance,” Brodsky said. “Isaac doesn’t need you any more. He told me to lock the doors in your face.”

  “Brodsky, I can punch out all your doors. Don’t rile me. I’m going in to Commissioner Ned.”

  Brodsky grinned from his superior position on the stairs. “Silver, your protector is in another world. So walk away from here. You won’t have your feet for long without old Ned.”

  Patrick charged up the stairs. He might have bowled into Brodsky, and gotten through the hospital door, but having to lug Jerónimo hindered his attack. The six detectives caught him by the pants and threw him off the stairs. Patrick rolled onto the curb, with Jerónimo across his chest. Scanlan hovered over him. “St. Patrick, don’t sit in the rain.”

  A growl escaped from Patrick. He wouldn’t move. Gradually Jerónimo slipped off his chest. The baby was no fool. He could tell wet from dry. He put his earmuffs on. Patrick’s growls grew familiar. “Suck Isaac’s eggs.” Then he rose up with Jerónimo and hobbled towards the shul.

  6.

  HEADQUARTERS was in a powerful slumber during the five days it took to bury Commissioner Ned. All activities ceased. Deputy inspectors wore black ribbons on their coats. The Irish chiefs went uptown to sit with old Ned’s coffin. The PC stayed behind his door and wouldn’t deliver any mandates. Nothing could happen while O’Roarke was above ground.

  Pimloe had a difficult time. He couldn’t ascend to O’Roarke’s chair before the burial was over. Old Ned began to roll in his box. The corpse pointed a finger at Cowboy Rosenblatt, Pimloe’s greatest ally. The First Deputy’s office was the one corner of Headquarters that didn’t fall asleep; O’Roarke’s undercover units had gathered information that Cowboy was accepting bribes from a chain of Brooklyn restaurants. Somebody leaked the news. The PC had to act. He suspended his Chief of Detectives.

  Cowboy screamed in his rooms. “Isaac fucked me. He’s the guy. I swear to God, I never stole a dime.” His rage brought him little bits of nothing. He no longer had three thousand detectives under his command. The Irish chiefs shunned Cowboy’s office. They recited Hail Marys around his door. They couldn’t think of old Ned without crossing themselves. They were having chills in the first week of August. Their mouths turned gray. They were convinced that Commissioner Ned had the Holy Ghost on his side. How else could a dead man indict a Chief of Detectives?

  There was no investiture for Herbert Pimloe. The commissioners couldn’t anoint a cop who had been promoted by a thief like Cowboy Rosenblatt. Pimloe seemed loathsome to them now. But the commissioners were beginning to panic. Headquarters couldn’t function without a First Dep. They scratched for a candidate. Isaac’s was the only face they saw. He was still a tainted man, reckless, obsessed, cursed with a tapeworm and marks on his forehead, so they anointed him halfway. His title was never solemnized. They could drop him in a second. He was made Acting First Deputy Commissioner.

  This slight to his integrity didn’t bother Isaac the Brave. He had Guzmanns on his mind. But he couldn’t chase every celebrant out of his new office. Big and little cops were coming to shake the hand of First Deputy Sidel. The Irish chiefs wished him a long, long tenure (they could be damaged by a First Dep). Newgate, the FBI man, who worshiped Isaac, envisioned an age of cooperation between his bureau and the high commissioners. It was the FBI man who had huddled with state troopers and agents from Middletown to help Isaac flush the Guzmanns out of Loch Sheldrake. Newgate himself had led the raid on Papa’s farm, nearly capturing Jerónimo. Isaac was indebted to him. He allowed the FBI man to move his pillow next to the First Deputy’s chair.

  Pimloe was the last person to call on Isaac. He’d become a disheveled cop since yesterday, sleeping in his pants. He approached the First Deputy’s chair with a miserable face. “Isaac, don’t worry. I’m getting out.”

  Isaac wouldn’t let him go. He liked having a Harvard boy scramble for him. “Herbert, I’m making you my number-one whip.”

  Isaac didn’t covet O’Roarke’s chair. He had no intention of rampaging through Headquarters. He’d delegate Pimloe to spy on stationhouses and turn marginal thieves into stool pigeons. Isaac was sick of police affairs. The Bronx had cured him of conventional ambition. He agreed to wear a badge with the gold points of a commissioner because it was an excellent blind. The First Deputy could eat up Papa’s candy store. Isaac couldn’t laugh, couldn’t shit without castor oil, couldn’t embrace a woman, until the Guzmanns capitulated to him.

  A captain of Corrections arrived bringing felicitations from the Inspector General’s office. His name was Brummel. He had a small-caliber gun strapped to his chest.

  “What happened to Ernesto Parra, the lipstick freak?”

  Captain Brummel produced a gigantic loose-leaf book. He went through the pages with a lick of his finger, and brought out a section of the book that was fat as a loaf of bread.

  “Brummel, I didn’t ask you for a prison encyclopedia. Where’s the freak?”

  “He hanged himself four months ago,”
Captain Brummel said, twiddling with the rings of his book.

  “And you hide it in a yard of paper.”

  “Isaac, it was a slip, that’s all. A clerk misplaced the file.”

  “Sure. Brummel, give my regards to the Inspector General and get the fuck out of here.”

  Isaac wasn’t displeased. Ernesto’s death supported his case against Jerónimo. The whole of Headquarters could scream at him: Isaac, you’re persecuting the baby. Headquarters was wrong. Isaac knew in his bones that Jerónimo was the freak. Little boys died on roofs wherever Papa’s baby happened to be. Poor Ernesto was a victim of Cowboy Rosenblatt’s lust for solving mysterious crimes. The dollmaker could barely speak a word of English. A team of homicide boys exhorted a confession from him with a series of nods and blinks. Cowboy went on all the local channels with Ernesto’s tools, a dollmaker’s kit of scarred Exacto knives. These are the murder weapons, Cowboy said. He showed how an Exacto could be used to slice a little boy. Isaac was on Boston Road at the time, working for the Guzmanns, and he couldn’t shove himself between Cowboy and the dollmaker. Ernesto died in the Tombs.

  The Acting First Dep broke away from all his admirers. He walked out of Headquarters with no escorts on his tail. Two battered Chevrolets were waiting for him behind Cortlandt Alley. These weren’t ordinary sedans out of a police garage. They belonged to the First Dep’s private fleet. They were cars that floated through the City, staying an ugly green all year. Summer or winter, they never got the chance to be indoors.

  Isaac was going into the Bronx. He didn’t take his chauffeur along. Brodsky had become like an old wife. His presence reminded Isaac of his days as the scourge of Manhattan. The Guzmanns had butchered Isaac’s memory. He could only dream of candy stores and white chocolate and Jerónimo’s curly head.

  A young detective-lieutenant with a blond mustache sat in the front Chevrolet. He had a merciless eye for detail, this Lieutenant Scanlan. He could remember the routes Jorge Guzmann took crossing Boston Road, or what Alejandro wore last Friday, and tell the color of an ice-cream soda from a hundred feet. He was driving for Isaac today.

  “Scanlan, roll up your windows. I don’t want people getting curious about us.”

  The Chevrolet was filthy enough to hide Isaac’s face. The air turned sour with the windows up. The weather inside the car made Scanlan’s eyes swim. The Chevrolet baked to a hundred and twenty degrees. Stuck in a blinding hot storm, Scanlan drove on intuition. “Mother of God,” he intoned to himself. Isaac didn’t mind a sweating car. He’d always been partial to steam baths.

  The two Chevrolets arrived on Boston Road. They didn’t tie up with the rest of Isaac’s fleet. The First Dep pulled his other sedans off the road. He wouldn’t let Scanlan near the candy store. The Chevrolets kept out of sight. Isaac napped with scowls in his head.

  He knew Jorge would have to come out of the candy store. Boston Road had once been Papa’s exclusive territory. Now his empire shrank to the perimeters of a candy store. He had to send Jorge out twice a day to prove that the Guzmanns were still alive. Jorge couldn’t be bullied by detectives in a car. He was Papa’s middle child. His fingers behaved like the prongs of a nutcracker when Jorge had you in his grip. He could tear the jaw off a man’s head. But Jorge was a sweet Goliath. He wouldn’t frighten shopkeepers, babies, and old women. He tickled cats in the Spanish grocery, even if they clawed him. Until you threatened his father’s territories, Jorge would never harm you.

  Scanlan was too intimidated to poke the First Deputy Commissioner of New York. He leaned over his seat to mutter a few words. “Papa’s animal,” he said. “Jorge is on the loose.” Isaac’s scowl disappeared. He woke with a little smile. Isaac had spent six months inside the candy store, smelling Guzmanns while his hair dropped out and a worm grew in his belly. Was it worth giving up his sideburns to see Papa’s boys in their underpants? Isaac ate Guzmann chocolate until his face began to rot, but he learned to distinguish among the boys, tell their weaknesses and their peculiar habits. Alejandro played with his prick in bed. Jerónimo could gobble great quantities of white chocolate, but one dark brick would put him in a daze. Topal’s thumbs were soft and girlish. Jorge had skinny legs.

  The Chevrolets began to move along Boston Road. They followed Jorge for half a block. Papa’s boy had a marker in his head. He would drift from lamppost to lamppost, without straying from the curb. Isaac couldn’t catch a Guzmann who hugged lampposts. He glowered at Scanlan. “It looks like Jorge’s staying on his side of the road.”

  “He’ll cross,” Scanlan said, hunched into his seat. “It takes him six lampposts.”

  Isaac wouldn’t reduce Jorge’s drifting walk to coordinates of lampposts. He was staring at the bend in Jorge’s knees. He’d have to cripple Papa’s boy, or the Guzmanns would rat away in their candy store, living on chocolate. Isaac wasn’t taking revenge on Jorge’s legs. He had to deal in vulnerabilities. Jorge was impenetrable above the waist. His Guzmann chest could defy any number of Chevrolets.

  Papa and Zorro were Isaac’s enemies, not the boy. He’d played with Jorge in the candy store, building shadows on Papa’s wall with a finger, a stocking, and a spool of thread. Jorge could have smashed Isaac’s skull, only Jorge was gentle with Isaac, stroking him like a big doll, or a half-brother. Isaac would have preferred to attack Alejandro and Topal, useless boys. But Jorge was the one who could lead him to Papa.

  Jorge kept to the line of the curb. Scanlan was beginning to doubt himself. Should he ask Isaac’s permission to climb the sidewalks and run after Jorge? Isaac would have said no. While Scanlan despaired of catching Jorge in the gutters, Jorge stepped off the curb. Scanlan signaled to the second Chevrolet, which cut in front of Jorge. They had him in a sandwich now.

  Jorge’s mind was closed to fenders and green cars. He thought of the change in his pocket, milky nickels and dimes. He had to buy turnips for his brothers. Papa would fume at Jorge if the bodega man robbed him of a nickel.

  Scanlan was on top of the boy. He didn’t have time to exult. If he crashed into the other car without Jorge on his bumpers, Isaac would ride him out of Headquarters and drop him into a cow barn for surplus cops. The Chevrolet was choking him. He couldn’t breathe in rotten weather. Scanlan had maimed a dog once with this car, never a man. He tried not to look at Jorge’s rounded back. He aimed for the rear license plate of the second Chevrolet. Closed windows couldn’t protect him from the sound of crumpled bone. It was a terrible noise, much worse than the squeal of metal. Where was Jorge? The two Chevrolets unclapped themselves and crept out of the borough.

  Zorro Guzmann, the Fox of Boston Road, stood in a phone booth on Eighth Avenue. He wasn’t making telephone calls. This booth was his Manhattan office. Whore merchants would leave notes for him under the telephone box, with descriptions of the girls they wanted: blonde or brunette, with or without beauty marks, with bosoms or lean chests, thirteen or under. The telephone box was free of notes. The whore merchants were going elsewhere for their goods. Zorro had been squeezed out of Port Authority. He couldn’t grab runaway girls any more. His talent was still there. He would stroll in a parrot-green shirt and smile into the windows of a bus, with a packet of flowers in his hand. But the terminals were crawling with Isaac’s men. Zorro couldn’t get near a bus without melting a brown crayon over his cheeks. And no girl would look at a pimp who waxed his face.

  It wasn’t the death of his business that slapped Zorro under the heart. He stumbled outside the booth. Pedestrians figured a catatonic man was stalking Times Square. Zorro bit his shirt to keep from howling. The attack wouldn’t go away. Something had happened to one of his brothers. Nothing smaller than that could have made his chest knock with this sharp a rhythm. The Guzmanns had umbilical cords that could cover the girth of Manhattan island.

  The Fox felt paralyzed. His brothers were in two places: the candy store and Silver’s shul. Not even the Fox of Boston Road could dash uptown and downtown in a single furious leap. Zorro had to choose. Silver wouldn’t let
Isaac the Shit hurt Jerónimo, he decided in midstep. So the Fox went north with easterly swipes, bouncing in and out of gypsy cabs. Isaac’s blue-eyed detectives had been cautioning Manhattan cabbies about the Fox; he was wanted for sodomizing young girls.

  Meddling cabdrivers couldn’t alarm Zorro. He would change cabs in the height of traffic, without giving his route away. “Hombre, go straight ahead. I’ll show you where to turn.” He was the only Guzmann who had graduated from elementary school. But he couldn’t go far into the seventh grade. At Herman Ridder Junior High School, on Boston Road, all his teachers pestered him. They filled his brain with irrelevant geography, contradicting his notions of the world, which he got from the candy store.

  Zorro knew more about Columbus (Cristóbal Colón) than any of his classmates. Cristóbal was born into a family of Marrano usurers, pickpockets, and thieves. The family fled Spain and went into hiding in Genoa. Around the age of ten Cristóbal became a pimp, then a convict, a murderer, and a religious fanatic. He had a mad conversion in the Genoa prison, believing himself to be the messiah who would lead Marranos, convicts, and the scattered tribes of Israel out of a corrupted Europe. Frightened of Cristóbal Colón’s messianic talk, his jailors released him and banned him from Genoa for life.

  Cristóbal went to the king of Portugal. The king wasn’t interested in convicts and apostate Jews. The monarchs of Spain were more sympathetic to Cristóbal’s schemes. He promised them remarkable wealth. He would find the east by sailing due west and award Ferdinand and Isabella with the jewels of India and the island of Cipango (Japan). Seeing a profitable way of getting rid of Jews, they financed Columbus’ trip.

  Cristóbal was a fraud in Papa’s eyes. No Marrano could ever have thought the world was anything but flat. Falsifying his charts, Columbus sailed east and landed in the Bahamas with his three boats and a crew of convicts and Marrano pimps.

  Zorro recited this story to his class at Herman Ridder. The boys and girls tittered behind their desks. “Flat,” Zorro insisted. “There aint a bend in Boston Road.”

 

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