Secret Isaac

by Jerome Charyn

  Sweat poured down from Isaac’s eyes. He could feel a hot blowing in his ears. “Your Honor, you ought to notify a few of your aides when you have long hours at the club. They worry about you, and then they call me on the phone.”

  “Jesus,” the Mayor said, “you can’t have a dry bath away from home without disturbing the peace … Laddie, you didn’t have to come on my account.”

  “I thought you’d like to know something. Mangen visited me at my hotel.”

  “Ah, the great god himself. What did he want?”

  “He had some crazy tale about whores and cops.”

  “Whores and cops?” His Honor said. The Tiger’s belly continued to heave up and down.

  “It wasn’t important,” Isaac said. “Mangen’s on his usual crusade.”

  The bear had to get out. His coat and pants were boiling on him. He left Sammy Dunne and the PC on their wooden deck, with the rocks burning in the corner. The Dingle Bay boys cursed and flung their poker chips behind Isaac’s dripping back. A blue Chevrolet was parked in front of the club. It had a curious chauffeur, Coote McNeill. McNeill shared the fourteenth floor with Tiger John at the new Police Headquarters. He had the longest tenure in the Department. He’d risen out of the youth squad twelve years ago to become Chief Inspector. His underlings called him “the McNeill,” because he was supposed to be descended from a famous tribe of kings that controlled the lands of Galway until Oliver Cromwell beheaded the last McNeill. Isaac thought it was a lot of shit, but if the old man wanted to make up his own line of kings, who was Isaac to begrudge him?

  The McNeill poked his head out the car window. “Sidel, where did you get such a red face?”

  “It’s my fault. I was in the bath with Sammy and John. I shouldn’t have worn my socks … are you waiting for His Honor?”

  “Yes,” the McNeill said. “Somebody has to take him home. Sam’s not the walker he once was. He’s forgetful now. He could turn the wrong corner and lose that mansion of his.”

  “McNeill, did you ever know a boy named Dermott? Mangen swears he’s a police spy.”

  Coote McNeill spit into his palm like any king of Galway. “It’s a bit of a scandal, son … believing Mangen over us. You should come to Headquarters with your own kind. There’s too much dust on Centre Street. Isaac, it’s gotten into your eyes.”

  “The dust will clear,” Isaac said. “Fat Becky is throwing me out … you’ll have me for a neighbor sooner than you think.”

  Before the cops moved to Chinatown, Isaac was the strongman of the Department. All the unsolvable items, all the mysteries, went to him. His blue-eyed boys flashed in and out of the five boroughs, grabbing for clues. But Isaac had gone to sleep. He crept among rats and mice at the old Headquarters. Now Coote McNeill had sway over Chinatown and 1 Police Plaza. With a fumbling PC like Tiger John and an absent First Dep, McNeill had a house to himself. He owned the new Headquarters. He was a little old man about to retire.

  Isaac crawled back to his hotel. Sammy’s hot box at the Dingle must have smoothed the worm in Isaac and unstuffed his head. Mangen wasn’t daft at all. Some fucking dance was going on with Mayor Sam and the McNeill. Tiger John shuffled between them. The Police Commissioner was an errand boy. That senile old Mayor had been stringing Isaac along, playing him for a goose. Herzog’s Bellow, His Honor had muttered at the synagogue in Queens. Herzog’s Bellow. Sammy was the shrewdest one of all.

  Where did Dermott belong? Was he a silent member of the Dingle Bay club? It was crazy to Isaac. Crazy shit. Should he mount an investigation against the Old Man of City Hall? He couldn’t even marshal two good boys to protect Annie Powell. Things were slipping past Isaac the Pure. Was the McNeill Annie’s goduncle? It was a happy family that Isaac was trying to bust. What did a few corpses mean? The Mayor had his sauna bath. The world had to be all right.

  Annie Powell was lonely without her Robinson Crusoe. He’d been a kind roommate to her. Jamey O’Toole. He wasn’t a nuisance in the end. He didn’t have to climb into the hall when a customer arrived. Annie had lost most of her trade. Even the decrepit Irish sailors wouldn’t come to her. She ranted at them, cackled songs that didn’t remind them of the Old Country. It wasn’t Dublin she sang about. It was a fish between her legs for somebody named the king. She was serenading Dermott across an ocean, calling to her man. She didn’t believe in weather or the ravages of time. She refused to wear underpants, stockings, and blouses in the fall. She had a coat, a ragged slip, and one of the king’s old undershirts to put on.

  She was lonely, lonely, lonely without O’Toole. Tiny Jim was her last tie to the king. She could smell Connemara on him, sheep droppings, Castledermott—the house that wasn’t Dermott’s house—salmon struggling in the water, the smoke of a turf fire, bananas and cream, that dead cow in the road. Jesus, she was a girl in a jewelry store, selling her smile to customers, until Dermott pulled her out of there. But he shouldn’t have bought Annie from her mother though. She didn’t like a man to pay for her in cash. She could forgive the mad look in his eye, the twitch of his knife. A man could mark Annie Powell if he loved her enough. The king shouldn’t have left her alone.

  She sat with the three friendly witches of Ninth Avenue, Margaret, Edna, and Mary Jane. They had whiskey and hot potatoes that the witches chewed without their teeth. Margaret, Edna, and Mary Jane wouldn’t live indoors. They hated the contraptions of a kitchen, pots and things, the flush of a toilet, radiators, windows, pipes. They couldn’t have tolerated a roof over their heads. They needed the howls that came off the river at night. So they camped in the street. They had their home of boxes, crates, and rags strewn around them in a kind of haphazard open fort.

  The girls welcomed Annie Powell. She had all the signs of a rag lady. She was a younger, more beautiful version of themselves, a witch with a damaged cheek. She muttered like the girls. She told obscene stories about the Irish male, who had to tuck in his balls for centuries because he was always on the run. She wore the same misspent articles on her body as they did. Nothing matched. One of her socks might be brown. The other green or yellow. The girls were natives of Clonmel, Wicklow, and Dun Laoghaire. They could accept a witch from Sunnyside. County Queens it was. A patch of the Old Country. She secured whiskey for them. They passed the bottle from mouth to mouth. They were widow women, girls who had lost their husbands forty and fifty years ago. They knew about love. They could remember nights under the quilt. Mother Mary, that’s a man inside me sleeping gown! What’s he doing in there? Those husbands had died young. When the memory of it shook them, they would raise a horrendous cry on Ninth Avenue. They could stop traffic for twelve blocks with their keening. They looked at Annie Powell and realized that she was a lovesick girl.

  Annie didn’t keen with Margaret, Edna, and Mary Jane. How can you mourn a live man? Oh, there were deaths aplenty. But her king was in Dublin town, having his sausages and marmalade with the Fisherman’s people. What was a girl to do? A car passed near the fortress of boxes, a blue car with an old man hunched behind the wheel. The crook of his back wasn’t unfamiliar to Annie Powell. When did Coote the Fisherman get from Castledermott to Ninth Avenue and North Ameriky? She stepped over the boxes in her ragged skirts and called after the blue car, so she could interrogate the Fisherman, ask him about the king. “Coote,” she said, “wait for me.”

  The car paused at the end of the block. Annie the witch went over and stuck her face in the window. “How are you, Mr. Coote?”

  The Fisherman smiled. “Fit as a fiddle,” he said. “And you, love? Have you been stuck in any fogs lately?”

  “It don’t fog much in New York,” Annie said.

  “It’s a pity I can’t help you the way I did in Connemara. I brought you down from Cashel Hill. Me and those lads of mine. But you shouldn’t go on picnics in foul weather …”

  “Would you like a sweet potato, Mr. Coote? I can ask Edna to bake one up for you.”

  “Thanks, love, but I’ve got the indigestion. Sidel must have given me his wor
m.”

  “Who’s Sidel?”

  “You know him. The boy who walks around in bum’s clothes.”

  “Father Isaac,” she said.

  “Have you been talking to him, love? Did you tell him about Dermott and me?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “He’s a nasty fellow, that Father Isaac. Has he made any indecent proposals to you?”

  “None. He likes to buy me champagne. He thinks I’m his daughter.”

  “You mean the famous Marilyn? That girl’s been married seven times.”

  “She must have the itch … I wouldn’t want seven husbands under my skin … how’s the king? Does he have a new girl by now?”

  The Fisherman said, “No, no. You’re his sweetheart. He worries about you, love. He says, ‘Why is my Annie on the street?’”

  “I owe him money. I have to pay it off.”

  “What kind of money?”

  “He stole me from my mother for five thousand dollars.”

  “Five thousand? You can borrow that from me.”

  “What’s the use? I’d only push my debt around … if he wants his Annie off the street, Mr. Coote, tell him he has to come for me.”

  “I will,” the Fisherman said. And he drove off, leaving Annie with the king awash in her head. She had a sweet potato with the girls. She guzzled Irish whiskey. She thought of Marilyn. How did it feel to be seven times a bride? Annie was only married once, but she was twice a bride. Dermott’s bride she was. Bride’s bride. It was all a hoax. Blame it on the king and his donkey. The donkey had given her away in the cool of an Irish church. She had to take the wedding band off her finger. There was small magic in that church. She was still Annie Powell, the same Annie. Dermott’s secret bride.

  She drank whiskey with Margaret, Edna, and Mary Jane. The three witches understood the restless agony of knees jumping under Annie’s skirts. Like a cow she was, a cow gone wild in the head without its mate. The whiskey had maddened her with a hoarse fever. “Bridey,” she muttered. “The bride of Little Bride Street.” Ah, she had the hallucinations. She was counting the streets of Dublin in her wild talk. Annie climbed over the barricade. Boxes tore around her feet. Rags spilled out. “Good night,” she said, with the sun shining in her hair. Even the girls had enough sense in them to declare the difference between night and day. “Night,” she said, “good night,” and she shuffled into the gutters. She didn’t have a penny in her skirts. She was going to hop from bar to bar singing Irish songs like any street musician and collect pints of whiskey for the girls. But she never got to the south side of Ninth Avenue.

  The girls had been watching the traffic for her. Housed in their fort, they’d developed a certain prescience. They could feel most disasters, the witches of Clonmel, Wicklow, and Dun Laoghaire. They would have yelled if the cars grew thick in front of Annie. But a cab scuttled out of nowhere to bump Annie Powell. It hadn’t been part of the traffic. A willful, angered machine it was, that could throw a girl over a fender and disappear. The blood whipped from Annie’s mouth in long, long strings. She shuddered in the air, rose with the force of that machine, her back nearly ripping into two separate wings as she fell into the gutter, with her thighs pulling loose from her shredded skirts. “Mother of Mercy,” the witches shrieked, breaking through their barricade to get near Annie Powell.

  Part

  Six

  24

  HE’D killed the girl, him, Isaac, the big chief. He’d trusted Annie to pairs of strange boys from his office. He should have interviewed all the bodyguards he assigned to her. Only the schmuck couldn’t even walk into Headquarters. He ran his office from an old dungeon that would soon belong to Rebecca of the Rockaways. He couldn’t tell who was working for him anymore. He had to telephone his office to find out every piece of news. His blue-eyed angels should have been the scourge of the City. But these angels were falling down. They would bump into each other on various assignments and quests. They didn’t have Isaac to pamper them and coordinate their attacks. They were disarmed without Isaac the Pure.

  Their chief had a worm in him. The worm fucked his head. He’d gone into seclusion, lived in a ratty hotel, to lay bare the whore markets of New York. His bum’s clothes taught him nothing. The pimps mocked the charcoal on his face. His hotel was a canteen for twelve-year-old prostitutes from the Midwest. The traffic in baby women flourished around Isaac. He couldn’t make a dent. He scrounged here and there, and forgot to keep Annie alive.

  Isaac grew active once she was dead. He couldn’t locate the cab that ran her down, but he got in touch with Annie’s mother. Mrs. Powell cursed him on the phone. She wouldn’t come to the morgue and look at Annie. “My daughter’s in Ireland. She went with a lousy thief. I wish I could say he’s a Yid. But he’s as Irish as Cardinal Cooke. Dermott Bride has my Annie … he has my girl. So don’t tell me stories about this corpse you collected. I don’t care if you’re the commissioner to Saint Patrick. If you bother me again, I’ll sue.”

  She hung up on Isaac. Should he give her daughter a Catholic burial? The worm wiggled no. He had to smuggle some kind of ceremony for Annie Powell. Apostate as he was, he still belonged to the Hands of Esau. This was the brotherhood of Jewish cops. Isaac had buried his Blue Eyes, Manfred Coen, through the Hands of Esau. He also tricked a grave out of them for Annie. “Jewish girl,” he said. “Never mind her name … I need a good plot.”

  The Hands of Esau hired righteous men to say the kaddish for Annie Powell. Isaac rode out to Queens in the funeral car. He threw bits of earth on top of Annie’s coffin, as if he’d been a father to her. The gravediggers had mercy on Isaac. They offered him a cigarette. The First Dep wouldn’t smoke near Annie’s grave.

  He returned to Manhattan and ended his apostasy for seven days. He camped out on Ninth Avenue with the witches of Clonmel, Wicklow, and Dun Laoghaire. He sat shiva behind their barricade, while the witches shrieked. They frightened merchants and cops with their long cries. When they grew exhausted from their keening, Isaac would stuff potatoes in their mouths. He wouldn’t let the witches starve.

  Sitting on his box, he stirred only for coffee and the needs of his bladder. He didn’t wash. He didn’t move his bowels. He didn’t feed the worm. His chin darkened from the whiskers that were growing there. He got terribly thin.

  After those seven days of mourning he stood up and walked to his hotel. He’d come home in the middle of a crisis. The black whores, girls of nineteen, had begun to rebel. They felt betrayed by their pimps, who were bringing twelve-year-olds into the house, white trash from the barns of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The black whores couldn’t scare a gentleman off the street. Their trade had dwindled altogether. No one would take them but freaks. Everybody wanted the little snow queens with baby tits. So the black whores had to turn mean in the halls. They went after the little “whiteys,” tore the clothes off their skinny backs. The snow queens couldn’t scrounge for men in tattered underwear. They hid five and six to a room, trembling against the wrath of the black whores, who patrolled the hotel with hellish eyes.

  It couldn’t last. The “players” left their purple Cadillacs when they couldn’t find one little “whitey” in the street. They marched into the hotel and finished off the rebellion. They freed the little “whiteys” from their rooms, dressed them in different clothes, and pushed them out like big ravaged dolls to draw the customers in. Then the “players” took their revenge.

  They were beating and kicking the black whores just as Isaac entered the hotel. The pimps paid no mind to the old bum who had been sitting shiva for seven days and had dust and dark stubble all over him. Isaac saw bloody mouths everywhere. The black whores gave up most of their teeth. It was as if Isaac had stumbled upon the slaughter of twenty cows. The noise was the same. The moaning was horrible to him. The pimps’ assault on the black whores didn’t make him think like a cop. He couldn’t produce handcuffs for every “player” at the hotel. The moans he heard, that constant cowlike moo, gripped Isaac in the belly
and maddened him. Isaac was encouraged by the worm. He trucked through the halls slapping blindly at each pimp he met. He knocked off their hats. He bit them on the ear in a show of fury. He ruined their fifty-dollar vests. The black whores were amazed. They’d never had an avenger like this old bum. Isaac muttered to himself as he threw down one pimp after the other. “Pray to Dermott, you lovely boys … I’ll close this fucking hotel … Annie died because of me and you … the king can’t protect you now.”

  The “players,” the last of them, the ones who were still on their feet, did the best they could: they called the pimp squad at Midtown Station South. “Bring the cops, man … we got a maniac on the grounds. He’ll murder people, swear to Moses, he will.”

  Eight detectives arrived. They were part of the First Deputy’s office. Isaac himself had created them, a special squad to keep the pimps of Manhattan from hurting their own women. But the pimp squad suffered without any visibility from their chief. Isaac was only a phantom to them. No one on the squad had ever seen the First Dep. The squad’s morale was low. Instead of protecting the whores, the squad became friendly with the pimps.