“Who is this?”
The bouncer had a softer voice than he expected.
“It’s Zorro.”
“She hasn’t come in yet, Mr. Zorro. Can I take a message?”
“Yeah,” the Chinaman said. “Tell her somebody raided her hamper. And if she wants her party clothes back, she’d better be nice to a particular gentleman. She’ll know who.”
“Anything else, Mr. Zorro? Then I’ll have to say goodbye.”
The Chinaman stood in the phonebooth biting a knuckle and watching the blood rise, his red hair sticky with sugar from all the napoleons he’d consumed. He couldn’t decide whether to go uptown or downtown, to meet up with Zorro, Odette, or Coen. He hogged the booth, scattering men and women who wanted to make a call. Finally he trailed a stocking from the top of the booth and walked away from The Dwarf.
2 DeFalco, Rosenheim, and Brown despised Coen because he wouldn’t live out on the Island with them. He had no family. Only an uncle in a nursing home on Riverside Drive. Coen’s wife left him for a Manhattan dentist. She had a pair of new children, not Coen’s. He ate at Cuban restaurants. He was a ping-pong freak. He wouldn’t allow any of the auxiliary policewomen near his flies. He bought chocolates for Isobel, the portorriqueña, and made their own offerings of cupcakes and lemon balls seem contemptible to them. He was the boyhood friend of César Guzmann, the gambler and whorehouse entrepreneur, and they knew that the Guzmanns owed him a favor. After the flop-out at Bummy’s, the three bulls drove home to Islip, Freeport, and Massapequa Park, and Coen gobbled black beans and drank Cuban coffee on Columbus Avenue with Arnold the Spic.
The waiters, who couldn’t warm to most norteamericanos, enjoyed Coen and his ten words of Spanish. They sat him in a privileged spot along the counter. They filled his cup with hot milk. They fed him extra portions of beans. Although they were proud of Arnold’s handcuffs, they didn’t dwell on the gun at Coen’s hip. They accepted him as Arnold’s patrón without the politeness and fraudulent grins they used on cops and sanitation chiefs. They protected his long periods of silence, and discouraged negligible people from going near him. He sat over his cup for an hour. Arnold read his comic books. Then Coen said, “Leave the Chinaman to me.” Deep in his comic, Arnold couldn’t hear.
Coen lived in a five-story walkup on Seventieth and Columbus, over a Spanish grocery. He had broken panes in two of his windows. Apples grew warts in Coen’s refrigerator. The First Deputy’s office woke him at three in the morning. They expected him downtown by four. In the past Coen would have changed his underwear and picked at his teeth with dental floss. But he was tired of their kidnappings. Brodsky, a chauffeur from the office, drove him down. Brodsky was a first-grade detective, like Coen. He earned his gold shield driving inspectors’ wives around and grooming undercover agents. Years ago he could buy his friends into a detective squad for a few hundred dollars. He had to discontinue the practice with younger chiefs in power. He rode through Central Park frowning at Coen. “They’ll burn you this time.” Coen yawned. He was wearing a pale tie over his pajama tops.
“Who wants me?”
“Pimloe. He’s a Harvard boy. He won’t eat your shit.”
“Another mutt,” Coen said.
He couldn’t get clear of the First Dep’s office. They stuck to him since his rookie days. Isaac Sidel, a new deputy inspector in the office, pulled him out of the academy because he needed a kid, a blue-eyed kid, to infiltrate a ring of Polish loft burglars who were fleecing the garment area with the approval of certain detectives from the safe and loft squad. Coen wore cheap corduroy for Isaac, and grew a ducktail in the style of a young Polish hood. He hauled coat racks on Thirty-ninth Street for a dummy firm and ate in a workingman’s dive until an obscure member of the ring recruited him over a dish of blood salami. Coen took no part in burglaries. He hauled racks for the ring. One day two men in business suits stole Coen’s racks and banged him in the shins. Isaac told him these men were county detectives from the District Attorney’s office, who were conducting their own investigation of the burglaries and were trying to shake off Coen. “Manfred, how did they make you so fast?”
In a month’s time the ring was broken up and the rogue cops from safe and loft were exposed, without much help from Coen. He was returned to the academy. He took target practice with the other probies. In bed before midnight, he followed all the Cinderella rules. After graduation the First Dep picked him up. Coen had a rabbi now. Isaac assigned him to the First Dep’s special detective squad. Half a year later Coen had a gold badge. He rose with Isaac the Chief, making first grade at the age of twenty-nine. On occasion the First Dep loaned him out to the Bureau of Special Services, so Coen could escort a starlet who had been threatened by some Manhattan freak. BOSS wanted a softspoken cop, handsome and tough, preferably with blue eyes. He was the department’s wonderboy until his rabbi fell from grace. A numbers banker indebted to the District Attorney’s office for pampering him after he strangled his wife showed his gratitude by mentioning a Jew inspector on the payroll of a gambling combine in the Bronx. The District Attorney sang to the First Dep. Isaac sent his papers in and disappeared without a pension. The First Dep waited a month before dropping Coen.
Brodsky delivered him to one of the First Dep’s rat-holes on Lexington and Twenty-ninth. Herbert Pimloe conducted his investigations here; he had replaced Isaac as the First Dep’s “whip.” Coen sat with Brodsky on a bench outside Pimloe’s office. The building was devoted to the manufacture of sport shirts, and Coen compared the design of his pajama tops with the shirt samples on the wall. Brodsky left at five. Coen thought of his wife’s two girls. He smiled at the tactics the First Dep men liked to use, sweating you on a wooden bench, forcing you to wonder how much they knew about the fragments of your life until you were willing to doubt the existence of your own dead father and mother. The company watchman arrived on the floor and stared at Coen. “Hello,” Coen said. He was getting sleepy. The watchman seemed indignant about having pajamas in his building. Coen straightened his tie and dozed on the bench. A hand gripped his collarbone. He recognized Pimloe by the attaché case and the Italian shoes. Pimloe was disgruntled. He expected his hirelings to stay awake. Coen stumbled into the office. Pimloe closed the door.
“You’re enjoying the Apple, aren’t you?”
“I can live without it, Herbert.”
“Bullshit. You’d fall apart outside the borough. The cunt are scarier in Queens. No one would notice your pretty fingers. You couldn’t nod to Cary Grant on the street. I know you, Coen. Take away the Apple, and you’d never make it.”
“I’m from the Bronx, Herbert. My father sold eggs on Boston Road.”
“The Bronx,” Pimloe said. “The jigs own spear factories in the Bronx. Hunts Point is perfect training ground for the tactical units. They could parachute over Simpson Street and kill the Viet Cong. Manfred, you’d freeze your ass in the Bronx. You’d have a shriveled prick.”
Coen threaded a hand through the opposite sleeve of his pajamas. “Herbert, what do you want?”
“Change your pajamas, Coen. They stink.” Pimloe touched his paperweight, a brass sea lion with painted whiskers. “I need a girl.”
Coen forced down a smile.
“Not for me, stupid. This girl’s a runaway. She’s been missing over a month. Her father thinks some West Side pimp caught hold of her.”
“Herbert, maybe it was the lipstick freak. Did you try the morgue?”
“Shut up, Coen. Her father’s the Broadway angel, Vander Child.”
“Herbert, why me? What about Missing Persons or one of your aces over at the burglary squad?”
“Vander doesn’t like cops. He’ll take to you. I told him you’re the man who guards Marlon Brando in New York.”
“I never met Brando.”
“But you know all the pimps. That’s what counts. Vander has a team of private detectives out. They can’t find shit. The daughter’s name is Caroline.”
Coen dug a finger under the
pajamas and scratched. Pimloe leered at him.
“She’s too old for you, Coen. Sixteen and a half.” He scribbled a Fifth Avenue address on a piece of departmental paper. “Vander’s expecting you. If you’re a good boy, Coen, he’ll let you see the view from his windows. Maybe he’ll feed you some kosher salami.”
Coen turned around. Pimloe kept talking.
“Coen, you’re the weirdest Jew I ever saw. Somebody must have put you in the wrong crib. How’s Isaac?”
“Ask him yourself.”
“All the Jews sleep in one bed. You, Isaac, and Papa Guzmann.”
“Your spies are napping, Herbert. The Guzmanns turned Catholic hundreds of years ago.”
“Then why do they keep Jew scrolls on their doors?”
“Because they’re superstitious people. Now what does Isaac have to do with Papa?”
“You’re slow, Coen. Isaac is Papa’s new bodyguard. Imagine, the biggest brain we had, whoring for a bunch of pickpockets.” Pimloe saved one wink for Coen. “You won’t be catching homicides for a while. I’m taking you off the chart. Don’t bother with the squadroom. You report to me.”
Walking down the stairs Coen put knots in his tie. Brodsky found him dozing on the sidewalk. Coen wouldn’t open his mouth until they reached Columbus Circle.
“Why should Pimloe be so curious about the Guzmanns? They can’t hurt him much from the Bronx. Papa hates the air in Manhattan.”
“It isn’t Papa he’s after. César’s split from the tribe. He’s been changing boroughs. But he don’t dig the East Side. He cruises on West Eighty-ninth.”
“And Isaac? Is Isaac with him?”
“Pimloe tell you that?”
“No. He says Isaac’s mooching for Papa.”
“Crooks hang with crooks,” Brodsky said.
Coen decided to walk the rest of the way. Men stared at his pajamas. He kept his holster out of sight. Remembering Brodsky’s allegiance to Pimloe, he cupped his hands and shouted at the car. “Brodsky, you were a mutt before Isaac took you in. He taught you how to blow your nose. Only Isaac’s dentist could cure your bloody gums.”
Brodsky shut his window and fled from Coen.
Herbert Pimloe was a deputy inspector at forty-two. He hated Coen. He wanted to smear him in Isaac’s shit. Isaac had been a DCI (deputy chief inspector) by the age of forty, and Pimloe resented this. He was obsessed with Isaac’s career. Isaac had controlled the office before he jumped into the Bronx, and now Pimloe was in charge of the First Deputy Commissioner’s investigative units, but he didn’t have Isaac’s hold over detectives and typists. And he couldn’t charm the First Dep, even though he occupied Isaac’s old rooms.
Pimloe graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, with a senior thesis on the aberrations and bargaining skills of Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Mussolini, and De Gaulle. His friends went on to law school and medical school and business school and departments of philosophy, and Pimloe mumbled something about criminal justice. Having measured the brain power of the chief finaglers of his time, he developed a singular distrust for colleges and books. He became a rookie patrolman in the NYCPD. He handled a riot baton and a Colt .38 Police Special, and escaped the draft. After five years of walking Brooklyn and Queens, the First Deputy picked him up. Somebody must have noticed the magna cum laude in his personnel file. He typed for the First Dep, wrote reports for the First Dep’s whip, Isaac Sidel, did bits of undercover work, changed from a Colt to a Smith & Wesson. He rose with the younger chiefs of the office, always a step under Isaac, fumbling in Isaac’s shadow until Isaac disappeared, but there was no easy way to get rid of the Jew Chief. Isaac could haunt an office.
Brodsky called for him at a quarter to seven. Brodsky had been Isaac’s chauffeur, and although this fact gave Pimloe immediate status in the eyes of other deputy inspectors, he was suspicious of the chauffeur; he didn’t enjoy being compared to Isaac. Moody, he wouldn’t go home to his wife. “Jane Street,” he said. “Find Odette for me.”
The chauffeur laughed.
Pimloe questioned him. “Do you think the glom is hooked?”
“He’s hooked. He’s hooked.”
“Are you sure?”
“Herbert, don’t I know Coen? He’ll take us to Zorro. You’ll see. We’ll throw the tribe on their ass.”
The chauffeur couldn’t get another word out of him. He missed Isaac. Isaac never moped in a First Deputy car. Brodsky couldn’t get comfortable driving for a Harvard goy inspector. He landed Pimloe on Jane Street.
“Herbert, Coen will produce. I swear.”
Pimloe dismissed him with a feeble nod. His mind was thick with Odette. He swaggered in her hallway, ringing a whole line of bells. “Cunt,” he said, slipping into Isaac’s idiom. He couldn’t get into the building. Odette’s landlady peeked at him from the opposite side of the door. He showed her the points of his deputy inspector’s shield. “Official business,” he mouthed into the glass, his lips fogging the door. The landlady undid the latch, Pimloe squeezing in. He lacked Isaac’s sweet smile, but he could still steal the pants off a Jane Street landlady. “Madam,” he said, collecting his Harvard undertones, “is the actress in?”
“She’s upstairs.”
“Shy about answering her buzzer, isn’t she?”
“That’s the rules. Is this a breakfast call? I don’t allow strange men in my house before eleven.”
“Nothing to worry about, madam.” He handed her an old Detectives Endowment card. “My number’s on the back. You can ring my superior, the First Deputy Commissioner of New York.”
The landlady scurried toward her basement apartment, clutching Pimloe’s card, and Pimloe went up the stairs. He wasn’t scrubbing indoors on the First Deputy’s account; he was considering the cleavage under Odette’s jersey, the dampness of her bellybutton, her manner of frowning at men. “I had to go and fall for a dike,” he muttered on the stairs. She wouldn’t come to the door until he shouted, “Odette, Odette,” into the peephole.
“It’s me, Herbert. It’s time for a conference. Let me in.”
Pimloe smiled when the lock clicked, but she kept her chain guard on, and she stared at him through scraps of light in the door.
“We can have your conference right here,” she said.
“Odile, are you crazy? This is Herbert Pimloe, not one of your uncle’s gloms. I carry a badge with a star on top. I don’t whisper to girls in a hall.”
“Then talk loud,” she said.
Pimloe could have snapped the chain off with his thumb, but he wanted to suffer for Odette. He saw the outline of her nose, slices of mouth, the startings of a chin.
“Odile, give me a minute inside. I’ll hold both hands on the door.”
“Inspector, I’m only Odile to my friends.”
Pimloe brushed the chain with a row of knuckles, playing the inspector for Odette.
“Where’s Zorro?”
“How dumb do you think he is? César wouldn’t come here. But I had another visitor.”
“Who?”
“The Chinaman. He stole all my garter belts while I was uptown.”
Pimloe could feel the dwindle in his underpants; he’d shrunk with the first mention of Chino Reyes. There was no revolver in his waistband. He kept his Smith & Wesson locked in a drawer, preferring not to be weighted down with a handgun. He hadn’t realized the Chinaman enjoyed fire escape privileges at Odette’s. He wanted no encounters on the stairs with César Guzmann’s pistol. So he wagged his goodbyes with a droopy finger and made the street before Odette could shut her door.
3 On Fifth Avenue Coen wore herringbone, and magenta socks. Coming across the park he disregarded the pull of rooflines and burnt stone. Coen dreaded the East Side. During the time of his marriage, while guarding the ingénue of a Broadway musical, a light-headed girl with weak ankles and a list of hectoring suitors, Coen was taken up by the producer of the show. He became a fixed piece in the producer’s entourage, appearing at his Fifth Avenue penthouse with and without the in
génue. Coen flexed his muscles, showed his scars and his gold badge, told stories about gruesome child murderers and apprehended rapists, passed his holster around. It took him three whole days to notice that his wife had moved out. She was staying with the young dentist Charles Nerval.
The producer gave Coen use of the maid’s room. Coen slept with the ingénue. He slept with the producer’s au pair, a Norwegian girl who knew more English than Coen. After hints and prods from the producer, he slept with the producer’s wife. He got confused when the producer’s friends began calling him “the stickman.” He shook hands with columnists from the Post. Collecting money owed to the producer, Coen wore the fattest of ties. He missed his wife. At parties he wrestled with a muscular thief the producer had put in his entourage. Coen didn’t mind the charlie horses and the puffs on his ear. He drank whiskey sours afterward, spitting out a little blood with the cherry, and sharing a hundred dollars with the thief. The producer would advertise these wrestling matches. He gave Coen and the thief spangled trousers to wear.
The thief, a Ukrainian boy with receding gums, hated the matches and hated Coen. Once, biting Coen on the cheek, he said, “Kill me, pretty, before I kill you.” The boy had not spoken to Coen until then. Ten years older, with a harder paunch and stronger knees, Coen could have thrown the boy at will, but he prolonged the matches to satisfy the producer’s guests. During the climax of the fifth or sixth match, with Coen scissoring the boy, he heard the twitches of the guests breathing encouragement on him, their bodies forked with agitation, and he closed his eyes. The boy took advantage of the lapse to free himself and hammer Coen with his elbows, an unforgivable act according to the producer’s rules. The guests tore the boy off Coen, booing and launching kicks, the women kicking with as much fervor as the men. Groggy, Coen leaned over the boy, slapping at ankles and shoes. He moved out of the maid’s room. He broke off relations with the producer’s wife. He cooked at home. Stephanie, his wife, was suing him in order to marry the dentist Nerval.
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