His boys had an uncommon knack. Jorge snapped awake a block from the candy store. Papa’s stools were filled. The girls were waiting for their ice cream. The hard smudges under their eyes, all their piggy looks, told him he’d better not dally with the steerer. So he sent the car back to the dairy restaurant with one slap of the fender. And he had the girls in their plates, breathing hot fudge, before Jorge could count the quarters in his pockets.
“Isaac, Isaac the Prick”
DeFalco, Rosenheim, and Brown, snugged up in fiberglass vests, were berating Coen’s old Chief; they couldn’t understand why their own squad commander had surrendered them over to Isaac. Brown and Rosenheim carried riot guns from the borough office. The pump gun that DeFalco was cradling belonged to Coen. DeFalco had snapped open the door to Coen’s locker with a common pair of pliers, but he wouldn’t take Coen’s shopping bag along.
“Why doesn’t Isaac get the rat squad to chauffeur him around?” DeFalco snarled; none of them was anxious to ride shotgun for the First Dep.
“Maybe he knows what shitty work they do, all them blue-eyed gloms,” Brown said. “He wants a decent team.”
“Bullshit,” Rosenheim said. He had more cunning than the other two. “It must be a cover. Isaac can’t be seen with First Deputy boys.”
They saluted their dispatcher with shotguns and trundled down the stairs; outside their own offices they walked with a pronounced slump. Their backs curved more on the ground floor, inside the territories of the uniformed police; they were contemptuous of all the hicks in blue bags. Brown stopped at the switchboard to bother the portorriqueña Isabel; she had been subtle with him this past week, refusing to crouch in the lockerroom, near his fly.
“Isobel, we’re going to blow on Shotgun Coen. He’s sleeping with César Guzmann—you know, the nigger Jew, and if we catch them together, it’ll be their last embrace in a while.”
Isobel wouldn’t play. She was worried about Coen; and she couldn’t satisfy Brown with the israelita in her head.
“O boy,” Brown mumbled, rolling his eyes in memory of Isobel’s knobs and the warm spit between her teeth. He would have crashed into the desk if Rosenheim hadn’t steered his elbow another way. The three bulls pushed through the door.
“Where’s Arnold?” DeFalco laughed, looking at an empty stoop. “Where’s the little rat?”
“Fucking ungrateful crip,” Brown said. “Didn’t we throw him a dime for every coffee he brought up? I’d like to piss on his gimpy toe.”
“It’s true,” Rosenheim complained to himself. “I had softer bowel movements with Spanish around.”
DeFalco was snarling again. “Blame Isaac. The Chief owns the Puerto Ricans. Didn’t he recruit Arnold for Coen? How many spies do you think Isaac used to run? Maybe a hundred, I swear.”
“Bullshit,” Rosenheim said. “The man’s lucky if he had ten guys working for him, all rejects.”
They noticed Isaac sitting in their Ford.
DeFalco hefted the stock of Coen’s pump gun; he could sense the imperfections in the wood. “The prick’s waiting.”
“Let him starve,” DeFalco said. Close to the car his snarl disappeared The bulls shook politeness into their fiberglass vests. They ate their own teeth wearing rubber smiles. They prayed Isaac would adopt them; no detective was feared like one of Isaac’s angels.
They piled into the front seat, Isaac squinting at them from the rear. None of them volunteered to sit with the Chief. But Rosenheim and DeFalco moved to the back when they saw Isaac step out of the car. They were afraid to risk Isaac’s displeasure. Hunching under the range of the mirrors, DeFalco slapped Rosenheim’s hand. They smiled; Brown had Isaac to himself. They hoped he enjoyed the glom. Brown felt prickles on his neck. He couldn’t drive without orders.
“Where we going, Isaac?”
“Touch the handbrake,” Isaac said. “You’re burning rubber.” Then he relented a bit “Bummy’s. We’re going to Bummy’s.”
“Are we wasting him, Isaac?” DeFalco said. He was nervous. The First Deputy men were supposed to be shotgun crazy.
“No. I’m looking for the Chinaman.”
DeFalco began to leer. “Can I break one of his legs, Isaac?” He had misjudged the Chief; Isaac was pure genius, the First Deputy’s sweetheart, disgraced or not.
I expect to jump on his tail,” Isaac said. “We’ll follow him uptown. See where he lands.”
“Could be he’ll marry up with Zorro somewhere in the seventies or the eighties,” Rosenheim said, anticipating the Chief.
Brown was unconvinced. Isaac didn’t act like a man who had given up any of his glories. Certain Bronx detectives told him Isaac had grown to fat in the Guzmanns’ candy store, that Papa had scarred him for life. Where were the signals? His coat wasn’t shabby. His famous sideburns cloaked portions of his ears. Brown and his partners were the shabby ones. They didn’t have Isaac’s feel for a good piece of cloth. They were only detectives with chubby fists. None of them could have survived Isaac’s fall.
“Where’s Coen?” Brown sputtered, his thoughts jumping ahead. Why isn’t his wonderboy with him?
“Coen’s asleep,” DeFalco answered for Isaac. But Brown wasn’t pleased with this remark. The Chief wouldn’t commit himself. Maybe Coen got stuck with the Guzmanns in Isaac’s spot, Brown was moved to speculate. This shotgun party made no sense. Why so much firepower for one smelly chink? Brown could have taken the Chinaman apart with his thumbs. He pressed a finger into his own cheek.
“Isaac, you sure Chino will run uptown?”
DeFalco answered again. “I know all the bandit’s moves. He gets lonely on the Bowery. He’ll run.”
Brown parked across from Bummy’s, DeFalco and Rosenheim edging toward their door. Isaac didn’t move. “Stay put,” he said.
The caper was perplexing Rosenheim. He wouldn’t mind being a hammer for the First Dep, but he couldn’t tell where he stood with Isaac. “Chief, don’t you need an advance man, somebody on the point, who can coax the Chinaman out of the bar? A handy broom.”
“Don’t call me Chief,” Isaac said.
Rosenheim shifted the riot gun to his other thigh. “What?” He wasn’t taking guff from a dropped inspector, one who came begging for shotguns from the homicide boys because he couldn’t be seen with his own squad of angels.
“I’m not your Chief, and the Chinaman isn’t in there.”
Rosenheim couldn’t back off. Fuck the brass. Fuck the squadroom. Fuck Isaac. Fuck Coen. “Honest to God, Inspector Isaac? The Chinaman isn’t eating kreplach with Bummy?”
DeFalco sat on his partner’s riot gun; he wanted to avoid a showdown in the car. “Isaac, are you saying you spoke to Bummy? The bar is minus a chink at the moment?”
“That’s correct.”
DeFalco wished he had been more tolerant of Coen’s shopping bag; he might have snoozed with the bag over his brains. “Wake me when the Chinaman shows.”
The Chinaman was three doors down, enjoying a mocha egg cream in a candy store owned by Roumanians. He also had a woolly head from being deprived of Odile. His tongue began to labor after the third or fourth sip. He spit the dark water over the Roumanians’ counter. “Ansel, who told you you could fix an egg cream?” He squeezed up his eyelids. “This is mocha? Papa knows egg creams. You know shit You should take lessons from the Guzmanns, Ansel, no lie.”
The counterman wiped Chino’s egg cream spit with a dishrag. “I’m sorry, Mr. Reyes. It’s the syrup. They’re using synthetics. They color the water, yes, but they can’t duplicate the mocha.”
The Chinaman stole halvah off the counter, and gave up in one chew. Stale. The candy store was a grave for stale goods. Slapping Ansel wouldn’t get him where he wanted to go. He had to slap another Jew, Coen. And he didn’t have slapping tools. The sink’s gone dry. If he’d known there would be a shortage this season, he might have stocked up. He could get bombs, sledgehammers, ice picks, no Colts. He was Zorro’s triggerman, a pistol without a gun. “Ansel, goodbye
.”
He left the candy store doing the Chinaman’s strut, a bowlegged walk he’d developed on Mulberry Street twelve years ago when he hunted for sicilianas from the seventh grade, with a pinkie curled around each suspender. It was time for his comida at Bummy’s, black coffee, sugar, rye whiskey, and whipped cream in a heavy bowl. DeFalco, Rosenheim, and Brown laughed at the grinding knees and other peculiar notions of the Chinaman’s strut. The wig didn’t fool them; they recognized Chino once he hit the street. They grew shy in Isaac’s presence; now they could appreciate the hard brilliance of Isaac’s technique. “Isaac,” DeFalco said, “how did you figure out his schedule? You tracked him to the nearest second.”
Brown strummed the barrel of his shotgun. “Isaac, should I lay one in his ear? The charge will straighten the bends in his ass.”
Isaac wouldn’t give in to their jubilation. “We’ll wait for the man. He won’t hold us long.”
The Chinaman greeted Bummy’s Italian barkeep with the two-fingered salute famous in SoHo. Unable to penetrate the surface chill of uptown North America, the Chinaman considered himself a proper Sicilian from Mulberry Street. He might have been even more of a polyglot if he’d had a less active life (pistols weren’t paid to spit foreign verbs). Aside from Spanish, Italian, Manhattan English, and Cuban Chinese, he could jabber phrases in Yiddish and creole French (one of his father’s native tongues). His loyalties were singular; he respected no other holiday than the feast of San Gennaro, which spilled into the northern tip of Chinatown and fattened him with sausages and smooth cottage cheese. A precinct captain, familiar to the Chinaman, was snoring at Bummy’s table. Chino didn’t have to muffle his steps; waking or sleeping, this captain accepted the Chinaman’s red hair. He wasn’t going to cooperate with a squad of midtown detectives and nab Chino in Bummy’s place, so long as the taxi bandit didn’t operate in his precinct. The pretty boys from homicide and assault could do their own stalking. The captain slept better with his gun on the table; otherwise his paunch interfered with his nap, the holstered Police Special rubbing his kidney or his groin whenever he snored too loud.
Chino hadn’t been this close to a piece of hardware since Mexico City. He imagined how Coen would look staring down the bore of a captain’s gun. The Jew’s face would crumple into piss-colored dots. Either Coen begged Chino’s forgiveness or he’d get his fingers shot off. The Chinaman had to afford this mercy because the Jew was once a friend of Zorro’s. Still, the Chinaman stalled at the table, weighing his choices. If he swiped the gun, Bummy would lock him out for the duration. Yet if he didn’t punish Coen by the end of the week, he’d have to admit that a Polish, a blond Jew, could touch his face. The Chinaman leaned on one heel. Already his ankles were growing numb: The gun slid out of the holster with a simple crush of leather and a delicate whine. The captain chewed his gums.
DeFalco timed the Chinaman’s stay; six minutes and eleven seconds. Brown was working the clutch. Isaac placed a leg over Brown’s. “Don’t. Give him half a block. He’ll smell us from here. Green Fords are a giveaway.”
“Isaac,” DeFalco said, “how did you guess he’d come out so fast?”
Brown wagged his head. “He’s got pins in his ass, that Chinaman. He can’t sit too long. Isaac knows.”
Rosenheim settled into the car, resigned to his job; he’d bounce wherever the Chinaman took him, but he wouldn’t join in any celebrations of Isaac.
15 Coen expected Isaac. He tried to figure the route his Chief would take. Isaac was fond of fire escapes. When he wanted to visit Coen unannounced, he’d come in through the window wearing gloves and a scarf to protect him from the draft in Coen’s alley. On formal occasions he’d leave a note with Schiller or have his chauffeur (Brodsky, of course) ride around the block until Coen recognized the car. Isaac never telephoned. He couldn’t guarantee who else was sitting on Coen’s wire. Coen felt sure Isaac wouldn’t make any cheap entry. Isaac didn’t have Pimloe’s flashy tastes. He wouldn’t have met Coen in a supermarket, with sacks of grapefruit between them. It would have been Arnold’s room or the ping-pong club. Isaac had a certain amount of affection for the Spic. It was Isaac who first pulled Spanish Arnold into the stationhouse, made him a stoolie and a buff. Whatever sources of information Coen had, disgruntled pickpockets, unemployed triggermen, marginal pimps, came through Isaac. Coen would have humped dry air without the Chief.
Isaac didn’t show. Coen put on his trousers and went into the street. Mrs. Dalkey was sitting on the stoop with Rickie, her Dalmatian. Coen couldn’t get around the Widow’s knees and the dog’s thick jowls. Smug with the knowledge that she had trapped the lipstick freak, Dalkey wouldn’t even look at Coen. She had no use for a detective who pampered dog poisoners and befriended Puerto Ricans from the welfare hotel. So Coen stepped over her knees and brushed Rickie’s two chins. Dalkey growled. Coen excused himself. He didn’t want tallies against him on the block captain’s sheet. He’d have to dodge all his neighbors or go live in some garage.
“It’s a kind night, yes Mrs. Dalkey? How’s the poodle?”
She swabbed Rickie’s ears with a Q-tip, and Coen walked uptown. The fruitmen gestured at him with cantaloupes, which were coming into season. The waiters at the Cuban restaurant knocked their hellos on the windows. Coen stepped around some dogshit and smiled into the restaurant. He was hungry for Cuban coffee but he wouldn’t eat without Arnold. The gay boys were wearing their summer outfits (it was only the fifth of May), jerseys with low necks that revealed the split in their pectorals; they sat in a long file at the drugstore adjoining the Cuban restaurant and watched Coen’s blue eyes. There had been friction over the winter between the cubanos and the gays, and the boys could no longer pick fellows off the street under the Pepsi-Cola sign. They rode the stools, winking at Coen and angling themselves so that their wings and pecs could be seen in full. “Hey blondie. Look over here.” They knew he was a cop. But this one wouldn’t come in and catch their genitals under a stool with handcuffs or spill soup down their jersies like some of the bulletheads from the precinct. He didn’t make war on fags. So they hooted in appreciation, they thanked him for leaving their fellows on the stools. A woman holding a tiny purse made of antelope skin waylaid Coen at the end of the block. She swore the subways had run out of tokens. There was more than meanness in the temerity of her grip. She had mousy eyes that roamed over Coen’s shirt. Only half her mouth would close.
“I’m a mother,” she said! “I’m a citizen. I raised boys for the Army. Why shouldn’t I be able to pass through a turnstile?”
Coen tried to give her a subway token but she wouldn’t accept favors from strange men. So he had to sell her one and curl his hands to receive the pennies that she shook out of the antelope purse. A few of the single boys outside the SRO hotel spotted the transaction and they reviled Coen for taking pennies off an old lady. He ducked under the stairs and emerged in the damp vestibule of the ping-pong club. It was Schiller’s rush hour. Coen got bumped with hot air off the tables. The freaks were hitting balls without mercy tonight, gearing themselves for a tournament at the Waldorf Astoria. They wouldn’t nod to Coen or recognize that he was alive. They had no time for cops. They were perfecting their loops and taking the kinks out of their other shots. So Coen avoided their playing zones and took the long way to Schiller’s frying pan. He had scrambled eggs, clutching an onion in his fist like Schiller, and gnawing into it. “Emmanuel, any messages for me?”
Schiller had never trifled with Coen’s correspondences. “Mister, do you have a note on your table? The net’s clean.”
“Sorry, Emmanuel. I thought Isaac might get in touch. He owes me a visit.”
“Isaac’s with the dead. He wouldn’t have missed my omelettes otherwise. That man knew how to eat an onion with the peel.”
“Emmanuel, your onions improved his nose. He’s been so busy smelling for Guzmanns, he forgot who we are.”
“You’re misjudging him. Isaac isn’t a forgetful man.”
Coen retired to S
chiller’s closet. In half an hour the tables began to clear, and Schiller found a partner for Coen, a Cuban dishwasher named Alphonso, with a raw, unorthodox style that made trouble for you in the corners. With the freaks gone, Coen came out of the closet in his ping-pong clothes. Alphonso wasn’t intimidated by the shield and the gun butt. He had played this chico with the yellow headband once before. Both of them dusted their Mark Vs with a rag that Schiller provided. They warmed up with a house ball, then switched to a heavier, three-star ball that wouldn’t pucker under the pressure of their thick-handled bats. Coen might have hugged the table with eggs on his mind, but the cubano wouldn’t allow it. He had Coen cracking at the hips, and forced him into the game. So Coen put away the morbid turns of his past, mother, father, Papa, Isaac, Sheb, to contain Alphonso. He served the ball off the side of the bat, showing Alphonso only negligible amounts of rubber and sponge. His push shots traveled so close to the teeth of the net, Alphonso couldn’t return them without scraping the elbow of his playing arm. “Maricón,” he cried at the ball. “Bobo.” But he gave it back to Coen. Lunging for a corner shot, the cop would stab his holster against the edge of the table and lose the point. He might have untrussed himself, leaned the holster on a chair, but he didn’t want to change his style on account of Alphonso, who would have sucked the ends of his moustache with great satisfaction if he had made Coen undress. Alphonso saw the fresh white scars in Coen’s holster, and he played with half a moustache in his mouth. Coen had to work. He was pushing the cubano into the gallery with his wrist slams, setting him up for a lob that would have landed Alphonso’s nose on the table, when a thought stuck in his head. He couldn’t finish the point. He walked around the table to Schiller’s cubicle and destroyed Schiller’s nap. “Emmanuel,” he said, poking him with the bat. “I never kissed my father.”
Blue Eyes Page 18