The rookie had to be content with second place, behind Mrs. Dalkey, who gathered her people, the dog, and the dog dish. Coen couldn’t reach his building without walking through her procession. The rookie called him in under two hours.
“They broke him, Coen. The lady was right. He used to be a dollmaker. He hasn’t worked in years. He coaxed those kids onto the roofs. He used an Exacto knife on them from his doll kit. He has play dresses at home. For old dolls. The freak tried to fit the dresses on the kids. He marked them up with his grease pencils. He gave each of them a new set of lips. He couldn’t fool the bulls.”
Coen turned around on his bed. “Morgenstern, they must have some pretty sharp heads over there. That cubano couldn’t even speak his name in English. Did they find any doll dresses on him? And why does he poison dogs?”
“I don’t know.”
Coen figured Morgenstern might be less jubilant by the middle of the afternoon. The bulls would probably erase him from their report. Having a rookie put his fingers on the lipstick freak could take away from their prestige.
Irene, alias the Widow, alias Mrs. Dalkey, couldn’t have been widowed, because she’d never been a wife. She was born in a foundling hospital on Delancey Street, and was given the name Irene by a hospital nun. The plumber Frankensteen and his wife, a petulant woman unwilling to suffer through a childbirth of her own, adopted Irene and brought her to Frankensteen’s cellar shop, where they also had their living quarters. As soon as Irene learned all the habits of speech (around the age of three or four), Mrs. Frankensteen confounded the little girl over the state of her birth, telling her she was an “elf child,” a changeling dropped on the stairs of the hospital by some rich uptown woman who didn’t want the nuisance of being a mother. Thus Irene became aware of her illegitimacy. At P.S. 23 on Mulberry Street (fifty years later the Chinaman would attend this same school), Irene began to ponder the doubleness of her life: rich lady’s girl fobbed off to the Frankensteens. She fell behind in her studies and was taken out of school to serve as a laundress (Irene was under twelve). Boys and older men fumbled with her at the laundry, undoing the strings of her apron while she soaped table linen from a Twenty-third Street mansion and continued to ponder the possibilities of another life.
At fifteen she ran off with a broom salesman who came to the laundry once. The salesman called himself Mr. Dalkey. Owning a wife and three sons in Hartsdale, New York, he installed Irene on Columbus Avenue, then a neighborhood of stores and dumpy apartments for carpenters and grocers who served all the mansions near the park. The salesman visited his Columbus Avenue “missus” maybe twice a month. The Missus Dalkey, Irene, threw him out after nine years and became the Widow Dalkey. She was twenty-four and a laundress again.
The Widow had a succession of dogs, Everett, Stanley, Chad, Noah, Raoul, before her current Dalmatian Rickie. She took no more beaus. Men were only a trifle short of being monsters in the Widow’s eyes. The salesman wasn’t part of this scheme; he didn’t even enter the Widow’s visions of herself. She was thinking of the man who had ruined her mother, the rich lady, compelling her to turn her own baby into an elf child.
She watched the neighborhood deteriorate as the grocers screamed for more money and the mansions could no longer support a whole battery of slaves. Hotels became rooming houses. The grocers sold out to hardware stores. Jews crawled uptown from the Bowery, blacks moved in, then Puerto Ricans, and finally the cubanos. Dalkey resisted these petty immigrations as best she could. She became the captain of her block, fighting for high-intensity lamps, church attendance, curb space for dogs, tree plantings, and the return of the white grocers. Until Coen sided with the cubano, she could forgive his Jewishness. She liked having a detective in the house. But she wouldn’t accept favors from Jews any more. Dalkey was serious. She instructed Rickie to pee on Coen’s door.
The evening of the cubano’s capture she saw a black man through her peephole. He had a badge in his hand. Dalkey panicked. She wished Coen hadn’t abandoned her. She might have summoned him from her fire escape. She looked through the peephole again. It was hard times when a nigger could carry a badge. She wouldn’t answer the man until she propped Rickie against the door. “Speak your business. Who are you and what do you want?”
“Mrs. Dalkey, I’m a detective from the hotel up the street. Alfred, in charge of security over there.”
The mention of the hotel frightened Dalkey; she wondered if the cubano had influencial friends. “Well, what is it you expect of me?”
“My boss, Bogden, Smith, and Liveright, the company that runs the hotel, asked me to thank you, Mrs. Dalkey. There’s a reward coming. Can we talk? Inside, Mrs. Dalkey?”
Mrs. Dalkey sprang her locks, keeping Rickie between her and the nigger. Alfred didn’t take to the dog. He would have scratched Rickie’s nose with the eye of the badge if he hadn’t been on an official trip. Dalkey led him into the foyer, but she didn’t offer him a chair.
“Mrs. Dalkey, I have fifty dollars if you promise not to advertise where the freak comes from. You know the city, ma’am. They shove the welfare people in on you, and you’re stuck with them. If not we’d have a first-class clientele. This Ernesto, he’s a retard. We knew it. But does the government care? They protect all the sissies. I caught him licking them dolls of his. Voodoo stuff. He sits them down with wet cheeks. Should have flinged him off the stairs. But the government’s looking after his rights, and my badge isn’t special enough. What do you say, Mrs. Dalkey? Are you with us? Will you help the company?”
The Widow threw Rickie into Alfred’s knees. I don’t trust a company man,” she said. “You can tell your employer that Irene won’t accept their bribe. It’s blood money. I hope your hotel falls to the ground.”
“Kiss my ass,” Alfred said, going out the door. He put on his shades, spit at the lightbulbs in the hall. “Kiss my ass. Kiss my ass.”
Dalkey was clicking bolts. She trembled into the door, Rickie whining at her different shapes. “Shut up,” she said. “Why didn’t you massacre him?” She wouldn’t feed the dog. She drugged herself with swipes of honey in black tea. She crossed her knuckles over her heart. Dalkey was seventy-four. She vowed to destroy the singles hotel in her own lifetime. But the nigger hotel detective had made her grumpy. She refigured the routes of her girlhood, her sofa bed in a cellar shop, both Frankensteens, the ignominy of living so close to a plumber’s shit-stained boots. Dalkey began to cry. She had no husband to protect her, only a sniveling dog. Her history seemed to unwind like kitchen paper on the spindle over her sink; useless crinkled throwaways. Why should she have to absorb the horrors of a neighborhood? Let the housewives woo back the white grocers. Dalkey was finished. She would resign her block captaincy. She wanted her rightful mother, not Mrs. Frankensteen. She was tired of being the Widow. Rickie buried his head in Dalkey’s underskirts. Now she could pity the dog. “Rickie, do you remember your dad? We’re orphans, dear. We’ve fallen out of the bag. Elves’ children, that’s what the missus said.” She rubbed the bald patches on Rickie’s skull. She peeled crust off his eyes. She fed him carrots, salmon, and liverwurst. Dalkey was herself again. She would plot a new campaign for trees.
13 Coen dialed the First Deputy’s office after his morning tea.
“Give me Isaac Sidel.”
The receptionist asked him to spell the name.
“We have no listing for Sidel,” she said.
“Look for him in Herbert Pimloe’s private book.”
“Who’s calling, Sir?”
“Manfred. M like Monday, A like Athlete, N like Neglect, F like Fishingpole, R like Ruler, E like End, D like Dollar.”
Pimloe’s chauffeur got on the line. “Coen, what do you want?”
“Brodsky, tell Pimloe I want to sit down with Isaac. Make it Papa’s stoop, my apartment, anywhere Isaac suggests. If he won’t sit with me, Brodsky, I’m going to play a little pinochle with the Guzmanns.”
“Stay with ping-pong, Coen. Pimloe doesn’t need you any more. Your buddies at homi
cide have been asking for you. Coen, you’re back on the chart. You should be catching stiffs by tomorrow.”
“If Pimloe wants me in the squadroom, he’ll have to drag me. I take my orders from Isaac.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, glom? Isaac doesn’t work here.”
“Then maybe I’m not Coen. The Guzmanns never left South America, and Boston Road isn’t on the map.”
He went across the park in smelly trousers and a shirt with missing sleeves. Child’s doorman mistook him for one of the painters who were crawling through the apartment house. He was told to use the service entrance next time. Child was having a demitasse with croissants. He sat Coen down at the table and wouldn’t let him wolf his croissant dry. He spread blueberry jam for Coen with a thin silver knife that could have fit inside Coen’s index finger. Child assumed Coen had come around and would now work for him. But Coen wasn’t smiling, and he wouldn’t move his chin further than his coffee cup. “Vander, are you Pimloe’s stoolie, or Isaac’s?”
Child finished both wings of his croissant. He pushed crumbs off his face with the edge of his napkin. When he tried to sip coffee, Coen put his hand over the cup. “Vander, you’ve been jobbing me all along. You wanted your daughter out of the country so you’d have more room for your porno shows. Why’d you run César’s brides into Mexico? Did you get a kick out of delivering the girls? Scumbag, how much did you pay the pimps at the bus station? Twenty dollars a head? Or maybe you clipped the girls off the bus yourself to save on shipping expenses. Whatever deal you made with Isaac might not go down. No judge in America would appreciate a Fifth Avenue man who gives away underaged brides.”
The table rattled across from Coen, so he put the cup to Child’s lips. “Drink, you bastard.”
“Money,” Child said, his mouth thick with coffee. “I was in a bind.”
“You’re supposed to be the big Broadway angel. Why would you need César’s crumbs? You know where his father lives? In a candy store. Papa Guzmann mixes ice cream sodas. A hundred a day. He has two sons who aren’t totally there, and two more on the border line. César’s the youngest and the brightest, but you could have done better than that.”
“Coen, I lose a hundred thousand a year backing Broadway shows. The apartment costs me another thousand a month. I have a wife in Florida, and a limousine to support I couldn’t invest a nickel without those films. Coen, who kept Harold Pinter in New York? Who revived George Bernard Shaw? Who paid to translate Gorky?”
“Vander, I never saw a play in my life except when I escorted ambassadors’ wives for the Bureau of Special Services. And all of them were musicals.”
Coen recognized Odile by her tittering. She joined them at the table in a towel robe and immediately stuck her bare feet on Coen’s double-tone shoes. She wouldn’t stop scowling.
“The classic confrontation,” she said. “The culture freak takes on the caveman cop. Both of you make me puke.”
Coen licked jam off his fingers. “Odette, you don’t look all that pure from where I sit You helped smuggle Carrie into Mexico for your own sake. None of you figured I’d ever get close enough to César to bring her back. Meantime you could have your little circus in Vander’s apartment and keep another room downtown. Maybe Carrie didn’t like smelling you all over her father.”
“Uncle, shut him up. He’s a fat liar. He tours girls’ bars so he can catch a free nipple. He sleeps with a gun on the couch.”
Vander washed the cups, the knife, and the coffee spoons. Odile tangled herself in Coen’s legs without remembering what she had done. She hated the cop, she wanted to float jam in his eyes. She had missed his stringy body in her bed after having been with him half of one night She didn’t want to be beholden to any man. She could parry with her uncle, push him around like her toy bear, because he was still afraid of César Guzmann and she was one of César’s girls. But she couldn’t lead Coen by the nose. He didn’t gawk at her like the Chinaman did. He didn’t show her his tongue. He was more like César, who wasn’t a fairy exactly but didn’t have much need for a woman more than once or twice a month. She had even slept with Jerónimo, seduced him while he was in hiding on Jane Street, because she thought this would please César, and the baby had the same scornful expression on his yellow face before he dropped his sperm in her, a mouthful of teeth, that independence, that hard, motherless look. She wondered if a woman had ever touched Jerónimo’s eggs before her. But she was too frightened to ask César. And now she had Coen. In bed he screamed a little like Jerónimo, short and dry. She couldn’t understand what thrust her toward such a sullen tribe of men. She tried to get up from the table but she was stuck to Coen.
“Get off my feet,” she said.
Coen reached under the table and pushed her ankles free. Child didn’t offer him another demitasse, and Odile gobbled crumbs off the croissant dish without looking up, so Coen disappeared. He took an irregular route across the park and landed high in the eighties. Coming down the street he saw a head of thick gray hair, big as a cabbage, shooting toward Columbus. The head moved at an incredible rate, bobbing over car roofs, missing lampposts by an inch. Coen didn’t have to calculate. No one but the baby could carry his head around with so much accuracy. And with Isaac in the city, after Guzmann blood, he worried for the baby’s life. “Jerénimo, why did César bring you home so fast? Did Mordeckay eat up all your candy?” Coen breathed hard but he couldn’t run with the baby. He lagged a block behind. He knew where the baby was going. To visit uncle Sheb. They used to sit for hours in the Bronx and pick each other’s gray hairs. Coen was lucky to slow down. He might not have noticed that the baby had a tail. Brodsky was following him in a First Deputy car. Coen let himself in at the next light. “Brodsky, tell me again you and Pimloe aren’t married to the Chief. Didn’t you say you never met the baby?”
“Coen, out of the car, fast, or I’ll run you over to the precinct. You won’t be too happy sitting in the cage. They’ll throw peanuts at you, Coen. That’s how much they love you over there.”
“Lay off the baby, Brodsky. He gets along fine without a shadow. Cruise somewhere else. I swear, I’ll ground your car into the window of the First National Bank.”
“You’re an animal, Coen. They ought to give you to the zoo patrol. You don’t belong in the street”
Coen twisted Brodsky’s key and stalled the car. “What does the First Dep want with Jerónimo? The gloms from the Fourth Division already found the lipstick freak. Didn’t you hear? He’s a dollmaker at the singles hotel where Arnold lives. He also poisons dogs. What’s the matter, Brodsky? Can’t you check it out? Is the Detective Bureau holding out on the First Dep? Are they feuding again? Then Isaac must be in his old chair.”
Coen stood outside Manhattan Rest. He didn’t want to interrupt the baby’s communion with Sheb. He bought dried pears for his uncle and finished half of them waiting for Jerónimo. The baby tried to swerve past him on the stairs. He had no greeting for Coen. Indentations appeared on both his temples after Coen blocked his path.
“Jerónimo, where are you coming from?”
César must have warned him not to talk with Coen. Did he stick it in the baby’s head that Coen was Isaac’s rat?
“Jerónimo, please, don’t visit Shebby during the day. The nurse will take you up to him at night Here, I’ll write you a note for her.”
The baby tore the note and chewed the pieces of paper. The veins stuck out like knuckle joints on his head. Coen didn’t want the baby’s brains to spill. He had to let him go.
“Jerónimo, take the side streets. Don’t stop for anybody in a car. There’s a man with sideburns looking for you.”
The baby was on a different block before Coen could finish his shout. He watched the cabbagehead turn a milky color. Then he walked upstairs to Sheb.
They munched pears in the dormitory. Shebby could tell something was wrong from the bites Coen took. The nephew didn’t bother to suck his pears. Shebby pulled his blankets up. He was glad there were oth
er men in the dormitory so he wouldn’t have to listen to these bites all alone. He offered around the last sticky pear. The nephew was crazy; either he brought too little or too much. Couldn’t he figure the number of pears to feed a dormitory of four constipated bachelors and widowers?
“How’s the baby, uncle Sheb?”
Sheb squinted at Coen. He stuffed the two dollar bills he had through the hole in his pocket. The nephew wouldn’t search an uncle’s pissy pajamas. Then he forgot why Jerónimo always brought him two singles wrapped in toilet paper.
“Uncle, what did Jerónimo say?”
“He said the walls stink in Mexico. The ice cream has straw in it. Flies sit in the cakes. He didn’t have enough centavos to buy a decent stick of gum.”
The dollars fell through Sheb’s pajama cuffs. He swatted at them until their edges ripped. Then he scooped them into his waistband and tried to flatten them against his stomach. Coen wouldn’t mention the dollars no matter how hard Shebby rubbed.
“Manfred, how much is twenty-four dollars times thirteen years?”
Coen picked old raisins off his uncle’s pillow. A foot from Shebby’s pajamas he lost the power to accuse. How many uncles could a cop have? The Guzmanns had relatives to spare, Papa could twease them like hairs out of his nose, trade a cousin for a cousin, but they were the only two Coens.
“Sheb, I could bring you nuts tomorrow. The pears have been in the window too long. They taste better when they’re not so bleached.”
Shebby wouldn’t consider the disadvantages of sun-bleached fruit. The nephew stumbled uptown to be with him maybe eight, maybe nine times a year. If he offered to come again tomorrow, it couldn’t be out of simple love. So Sheb cleared the dormitory. “Boys, go sit with the mademoiselles. The nephew and me have to talk. Morris, pick up your ass. It’s dragging on the floor. Sam, you listen through the keyhole, I’ll plug your big ears with a fig. Irwin, I want private, I want alone.” And with his roommates gone, Sheb’s tonsils began to sweat. He could get by without a nephew. All he needed was two dollars a month, and enough toilet paper in his fist. He sneezed.
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