Isaac hadn’t taken advantage of Coen’s prettiness, turned him into a herringbone cop, simply out of love for his own department. He figured Coen would be better off without a wife. When the deputy inspectors under him got on his nerves, he would climb Coen’s fire escape, sit with the cop over checkers and strong tea. Coen encouraged Isaac to come through the window. He was a boy without ambitions. The double and triple jumps he gave up to Isaac weren’t meant to flatter the Chief. Coen had no head for strategies on a board. And Isaac could appreciate an hour away from whining inspectors. He trusted the boy enough to take off his shoes and nap in Coen’s presence. Brodsky would honk at him from the street if any emergency arose. And Coen would rouse him with a finger. “Isaac, get up. They can’t survive without you.” Nudged out of sleep, Isaac had the comfort of a smile, blue eyes over him, a boy with a gun near his heart, one of Isaac’s deadly angels (most of Isaac’s deputies were marksmen with good manners and sweet faces).
The longer Isaac scrounged in the Bronx, the more bitter he grew about Coen. The boy was as much Guzmann as cop. Isaac had bottled Coen, restricted him to homicide squads in the southern boroughs, because he didn’t want to compromise his angel, force him to choose between Papa and the First Dep. Then Isaac reversed himself. Humiliated by Papa, licking syrup in a dark store, he threw Coen at the Guzmanns, pushed him into the middle of César’s marriage bureau, pointing him toward Mexico, Fifth Avenue, and Vander Child. The boy irritated the Guzmanns, but he couldn’t harm them. Instead of luring César out of the closet, he got a bullet in the throat. And Isaac sat in his office, repatriated, his minor sins absolved by the Hands of Esau, the letters of his name moving across the door (it took the stenciler a whole hour to scratch out Pimloe and complete I-S-A-A-C), his handgrips in their old place on his desk, his locks and fountain pens restored by the property clerk, his deputies milling in their cubicles, waiting for the word, his office toothbrush on the sink, his stockings gartered, his suspenders tight, but without César, without Papa, without Coen.
Part 4
16 Schiller lived amid the rubble. He wouldn’t clean. His voice came back after sucking lozenges for a week but he had little to say. The freaks might have remained loyal to the club. The first three tables were unharmed, and Schiller was too distracted to collect more than a few pennies from them. But the lights buzzed in their eyes, the walls began to sweat, and they were worried about getting glass in their sneakers. So they went to Morris’ on Seventy-third, where the ceilings were low and the wire cage around every bulb left shadows on the ball, or else they played at Reisman’s on Ninety-sixth, which was roomier and better lit but cost them a quarter more per hour. If they did think of Coen, it was only to remind themselves that such an odd cop deserved a ping-pong grave. And they would advertise to their relatives how they had seen the Chinaman’s bullet land under Coen’s neck, carry him eight feet, rupture an artery, and squeeze blood through his ears, although not one of them had been inside the club when the Chinaman shot Coen.
Arnold lost his ambition to move out of the singles hotel. He added marmalade to the jars on his window and put a coat of yellow shellac on his orthopedic shoe that was guaranteed not to eat leather or melt the foam in his arch. He couldn’t blame the Chinaman. In his mind Isaac and the Guzmanns murdered Coen. He received an invitation from Rosenheim, DeFalco, and Brown (countersigned by a borough chief) to reenter Coen’s district and preside over the cage in the squadroom, but Arnold declined. He had no tolerance for detectives without Coen. Schiller gave him Coen’s bat and headband (the shield, holster, and gun went to the First Deputy’s office). Arnold wore the headband in his room. He took the Mark V with him on his walks around the block, the handle under his strap, rubber against his ribs. The bat gave him a certain prestige among the SROs, who couldn’t worship Coen until after he was dead, and the Cuban waiters, who had been fond of the agente with the blanco complexion. He would descend the steps of the club, his big shoe pointing into the rails, clear the vestibule in twenty swipes, find Schiller, and say, “Jesus, open your lungs. Hombre, go upstairs.” Schiller wouldn’t move. Maybe Arnold had a candy bar for him, or yesterday’s newspaper. They sat together on Schiller’s bench, not knowing what to do with their thumbs. Arnold couldn’t breathe glass and live near wall dust without having to sneeze. He would touch Schiller goodbye, most likely on the knee, make it to the vestibule, and start the climb with both hands on the rail and the shoe pointing north.
Even with César scarce and the Chinaman dead, Odile didn’t have to sacrifice any of her routines. She traveled in a triangular sweep from The Dwarf to uncle Vander to Jane Street to The Dwarf again at least twice a day. She danced hip to hip with her girlfriends at The Dwarf but wouldn’t kiss them on the mouth. She balanced dessert spoons on her labia to satisfy Vander’s cameramen, had climaxes off the edges of the spoons. She didn’t need the Chinaman to solicit for her. Bummy Gilman came to Odile of his own accord. She washed him in a milky solution (89 cents at the drugstore) with all her skirts on and collected a hundred dollars. It was here, shampooing Bummy’s genitals, rinsing down his thighs, that she appreciated Coen. The cop hadn’t itemized her, hadn’t inspected her longish nipples and the moles on her back, hadn’t asked her for tricks with her labia or white shampoos. Odile believed in fatalities: Coen had to the this year, but she wished he would have avoided the Chinaman one more month. She might have lured him to Jane Street then, studied the scowl bumps over his eyes, made a hollow for herself under his arm, slept there an hour, and still have gotten up in time to dance with Dorotea at The Dwarf.
Odile would be nineteen in June. She had starred in eleven features and thirteen featurettes, she had worn vaginal jelly for a hundred and five men, not counting Vander, whom she seduced while she was twelve; Bummy, who hadn’t been inside her clothes; the Chinaman, who had gone no further than to dribble sperm on her left thigh; Jerónimo, who had her with his eyes shut; César, who owned her more or less and didn’t need invitations to Jane Street; the four remaining Guzmanns (Topal, Alejandro, Papa, and Jorge), or Coen. (Odile, who had seen Jewish men in their nakedness, men like Bummy and the cop, still couldn’t understand why all six Guzmanns had to be burdened with pieces of skin on their pricks. She got no explanations from César. She had to figure that the Guzmanns made poor Jews.) She began lighting the green memorial candles César gave her after her dog Velasquez choked on a wishbone. But she forgot the prayers that went with the candles, and she wouldn’t saw them in half with a butterknife the way the Guzmanns did. So she ran out of her short supply and stopped bothering with Coen.
Convinced that he was under a benign form of house arrest, Vander hoarded his croissants. The First Deputy’s office had advised him to sit in Manhattan. He was supposed to maintain contact with the Guzmanns, but Zorro wouldn’t nibble. He had no misconceptions about his value to the chiefs. When his usefulness plunged deep enough, he would be fed to the grand jury like a vile animal. Isaac had fingered him at the airport in January coming home from Mexico with vouchers from Mordeckay on the brides (most of them were in a Marrano code and couldn’t be deciphered). It took Isaac under an hour to turn the Broadway angel around, and Vander left the airport a spy registered to Deputy Inspector Herbert Pimloe (Isaac wouldn’t accept informants in his own name). Hurrying to dismantle his cameras and liquidate his production company, Vander discovered that being a spy gave him immunity from the local police. He could operate as a pornographer without fear of a raid. He was untouchable for the moment, on the First Deputy’s rolls. And if he couldn’t make Spain this year to collect pesetas from his investments in Castilian construction firms and visit his favorite Goyas in Madrid, he could walk Odile through a film a month. He remembered nothing more of Coen than their ping-pong. He assumed that the Chinaman’s death prefigured the collapse of the Guzmanns. But there was no evidence of this.
César didn’t neglect Isaac’s restoration. He juggled his addresses, hopping from Eighty-ninth Street to Ninety second to a room o
ver the dairy restaurant on Seventy-third, where he used the name Morris Shine. He had a fuzzy attitude about Coen’s death. He missed the Chinaman more. One of his Bronx cousins claimed the body from the morgue. He buried Chino in the Guzmann plot, outside city limits, with a Marrano crier in attendance, Papa, Topal, and Jerónimo wearing the gray Marrano death shawls, Jorge guarding the entrance to the cemetery, a spike in either hand.
The smell of barley soup and mushroom pancakes came up through the woodwork to badger César. Coen was the dairy boy. César was a porkeater, and the memory of his meals with the Chinaman, stringbeans and minced pork, pork rolls, five-flavored pork, pork and Chinese cabbage, made him spit into the toilet with anger and spite. César rang downstairs (he had a special line hooked into the cashier’s stall at the dairy restaurant). “Get me Boris Telfin. I want his bus outside in eight minutes. Lady, this dump stinks.”
The cashier said, “I’m sorry. He isn’t at his table, Mr. Shine. What should I do?”
César muttered whoreboy, whoreboy, until his steerer came on the line.
“Zorro, I was in the men’s. I can have the car. But where’s the rush? You know how many eyes this Isaac has? He carries binoculars in both tits.”
“Boris, you told me a room with a first-class view. You forgot to mention that it’s choked with kitchen pipes. Get the bus.”
César rode to Jane Street. He was wearing a winter coat in May, with the collar up around his ears, and a seaman’s cap pulled against his eyebrows. Odile recognized him under all the baggage. She couldn’t tell whether Zorro had come to kill her or maim her limbs because of her alignment with Vander, but she had to let him in. Her belly tightened as he passed her in the hallway. Her heart thumped into her ribs. Would he undress her before he snapped her neck? Would he have her perform disgusting tricks? She saw his pallor when the hat and coat came off. He collapsed into a soft chair. Odile felt a mild rage against César; he wasn’t going to make any overtures at all.
“Zorro, would you like a snack?”
“None of your sandwiches,” he said. “Save them for the Johns. Who are the green candles for?”
“They’re for Coen.”
“I should have figured you’d be mourning Isaac’s boy.”
César wouldn’t stroke her with pieties. Twenty years apart had deadened him to Coen. He had his brothers and his whores and one Chinese pistol. César reformed the taxi bandit, deflected his violent streak by giving him a string of whores to supervise, and took him into the Bronx for Marrano wine; he couldn’t distrust a man who loved pork. César regretted losing Chino (he should have realized the Chinaman would kiss himself into the ground chasing Coen), and he worried about Jerónimo’s new hideaway (with Isaac sitting on Manhattan, César had to cancel his trips to the baby), but he had no trouble sleeping in Odile’s chair. César snored like his brothers, and slept with a hand on his balls. Getting nothing from Zorro, Odile wanted to run to The Dwarf, dance with whoever was on call, feel a hipbone in her groin, but she didn’t dare leave the room. César had strict habits. He would send his brothers to smash up The Dwarf if there was no Odette when he woke. So she had to be content eating wax off the bottom of a green candle and watching Zorro blow air.
Papa was preparing to shut the candy store. He never fixed sodas beyond the second week of May. Alejandro would remain in the Bronx. He would move into a bowling alley for the summer months and preside over Papa’s accounts from there. If Papa’s better customers preferred to do business with the nigger banks while Papa was out of town, it didn’t matter too much. Papa would get them back in the fall. He wasn’t going to sacrifice Loch Sheldrake for a pile of ten-dollar bets. He had his orchard to think about, his garden, the strawberry and blackberry seasons, and the safety of his boys. Jerónimo couldn’t get run over in an orchard, and Jorge could survive without being plagued by street signs and traffic lamps. Papa burned candles for the Chinaman and Coen on the shelf above his malted machines. He prayed to Moses with a dishrag on his skull, spit three times according to Marrano law, so Coen and the Chinaman might be able to rest in purgatory. Still he had only a passing confidence in the efficiency of his prayers. He didn’t believe one solitary man could heal the miseries of the dead. Papa was no moneygrub. He could have hired professional mourners to trick the three judges of purgatory (Solomon, Samuel, and Saint Jerome), with powerful cries from the lungs. These mourners had sensible rates. They could tear through walls with a cry for anyone who could meet their price. But to Papa cries weren’t enough. The dead needed whole families to intercede for them, brothers, sisters, fathers, nephews, mothers, sons, to wear dishrags and shawls, to offer pennies to the Christian saints, to appease Moses with a candle, to recite Hebrew prayers transcribed into sixteenth-century Portuguese; Coen and the Chinaman were familyless men without the Marrano knack to survive. Papa discarded any notions of immortality for himself. He had lived like a dog, biting the noses of his enemies, smelling human shit on two continents, sleeping in a crouch to safeguard his vulnerable parts, and he expected to drop like a dog, with blood in his rectum, and somebody’s teeth in his neck. But Papa didn’t intend to the from an overdose of Isaac, or offer his sons to the First Deputy’s shotgun brigade. He believed Isaac was more than a simple son-of-a-bitch. What cop would want to erase six Guzmanns, almost an entire species of men? Isaac had to be one of those destructive angels sent by the Lord Adonai to torment pigeaters, the Marranos who had slipped between Christians and Jews for so many years they could no longer exist without Moses and Jesus (or John the Baptist) in their beds, and had defied the laws of Adonai with their foreskins and their rosaries. Unable to snatch a Guzmann, Isaac settled for a blond Jew and a creole with Chinese ancestors.
So Papa wailed. The dishrag surrounded his ears. He screamed for the Chinaman in English and fine Portuguese, but he screamed louder for Coen. Papa had fattened himself in North America after sitting on his rump in Peru. He owned earth, a farm with Guzmann berries, and fixtures in the Bronx. And in Papa’s head all four Coens, father, mother, lunatic brother, and son, came with the fixtures and the berries. The Coens were Papa’s North America. Papa didn’t have to scan outside Boston Road; he could measure his strides against the cracks in Albert’s eggs. When he wound the Marrano phylactery—tiny leather box containing Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese words from the books of Moses—through the opening in his sleeve, he prayed first for the health of his boys, then for the maintenance of the Coens. He couldn’t discount Jessica, who gnawed at his guts with her independent smiles, who must have understood Papa’s game; Papa needed a stumbler like Albert to add some bulk to his own success. But it wasn’t plain exploitation. Papa loved the Coens. He might have been disgusted by their vegetable meals, but he admired Albert’s gentleness, he pitied Sheb for his swollen brains, he was attracted to Manfred’s blond demeanor (the Guzmanns were a hairy black), and he was bothered by Jessica, terrified of the scorn she could produce with a smile, and adoring the ambiguity in her face. So he wailed. Not because he had turned three Coens toward their graves and left the fourth to rot in a home with a river view, by compromising Albert and romancing Jessica with a piece of string, by keeping them prisoners in an egg store with his small loans, by letting Manfred stumble into a war zone meant for Isaac and the Guzmanns, and fanning Sheb’s isolation with dollar bills. Papa had wiggled too hard staying alive to be deformed by a sentiment so unprofitable as grief. But he was bound to the Coens, in the Bronx, Manhattan, or purgatory, and his wails only reminded him that he could never get clean of them.
The steerer was holding Jerónimo until the strawberry season when he would drive the baby to Loch Sheldrake together with Papa, Jorge, and Topal. There were too many sharks on Boston Road (police cars under Isaac’s control) to satisfy Papa. So Boris Telfin sat with the baby in a rented room on Ninetieth Street with a steampipe that would knock through July, and made no more than one or two trips per day to his window seat at the dairy restaurant. He suffered from the loss of spinach pancakes an
d bean pie. And he was frightened of César. With his crazy Guzmann head Zorro could intuit if Jerónimo had an insufficient supply of chocolate or a grease spot in his hair. Boris groomed the baby, evening his sideburns with a pair of scissors, and cursing Zorro while he shampooed Jerónimo’s scalp.
The baby demanded more. He ripped through the steerer’s pockets in search of Brazil nuts and black halvah. Boris had to endure fingers in his pants. And if he didn’t acquiesce to the baby’s walks, he would have gone to the dairy restaurant with long scratches on his face. “Jerónimo, look before you cross. This is Isaac’s village. If they kidnap you, I won’t need burial insurance. Your father and your brother will treat me to a stone.” He dressed the baby in slipovers, peacoat, and earmuffs. “Better warm than cold. The weather can change. And the dicks won’t expect you in such a bundle.” Boris felt for his wallet and patted nothing but cloth; the baby had already picked his side pocket. Just like monkeys, Boris concluded. A family of thieves. But the baby hadn’t stolen money from him before. “Two dollars? Jerónimo, why two dollars?” Boris didn’t quarrel with the steal. The Guzmanns were paying him a hundred a week for the baby’s room and board, and he could deduct two dollars from his profits without getting hurt. “Jerónimo, the key’s under the garbage pail in the hall. It fits the top lock. Not the bottom. Turn it with both hands. You’ll lose your grip otherwise.”
Blue Eyes Page 20