Secret Isaac

by Jerome Charyn

  Dermott was abrupt with him. He didn’t enjoy having to mingle with Sammy’s toad. “Where’s the Fisherman?”

  “Are you daft?” the Tiger said. “McNeill can’t be seen with you. Not in this country.”

  “Explain that, will you, Tiger John? Why you can sit with me, and McNeill can’t.”

  “I’m the PC. I can do whatever I like.”

  This idiot had thirty thousand cops under his command. He could break a full inspector, knock him down to captain if he chose. Or drop a branch of detectives, decimate a squad. He was as gullible as a monkey in the Bronx Zoo. You fed him bankbooks once a month, like a banana in his mouth, and he was delighted with himself. He banged through Headquarters making mischief in the offices he entered. His rages were an enormous bluff. The PC had nothing to do. McNeill ran the Department for him.

  “He’s angry with you,” the Tiger said, “for coming back to America without asking him first.”

  “Since when do I need Coote’s permission to fly?”

  “Boyo, that was the bargain you struck.”

  The Tiger had a crafty approach for an imbecile. Mayor Sam must have given him lessons in the art of Irish persuasion.

  “Coote doesn’t have to worry,” the king said.

  “You’ll spoil his retirement if you don’t get out of here fast.”

  “I’ll be home in Dublin by tomorrow night.”

  The Tiger looked at him out of a pair of tiny, nervous eyes. “Boyo, tomorrow could be too late. Sheeny Isaac is crawling around. He followed me and Sam into the sauna room at the Dingle. He didn’t have the decency to take off his clothes. All he did was talk about Dennis Mangen.”

  “He’s your First Dep. Can’t you quiet him down?”

  “Jesus, I’d love to get rid of him. But he’s the darling of the press. The newspaper lads bruise their own two feet begging interviews off the boy.”

  “Was that your shotgun party that Isaac was complaining about?”

  “Not mine,” the Tiger said. “McNeill’s. The Fisherman sent over two retired sergeants to drop a neat kite on Isaac’s room. But Mangen had his shooflies in the hall. The sergeants were lucky to get out of there alive.”

  The king laughed to himself. The cops of New York made a mad, struggling army. Mangen was biting everybody on the ass. Except for Isaac. Isaac was the great survivor. He could rise out of a curtain of shotgun smoke in his stinky pants. The First Dep was so smart and so dumb. Isaac had each point of Dermott’s history in his heavy brain, but he couldn’t pull them into a straight line. The Devils were a local club. They didn’t have the firepower to terrorize a boroughful of gangs. They couldn’t have gone out on rampages to enforce the peace without a little help from the cops. McNeill lent his youth squad to the Devils. The gang was a baby wing of the NYPD. Coote wouldn’t deal with Arthur Greer. He touched Dermott on the shoulder, made him the king.

  “Boyo,” the Tiger said, “where are we going now?”

  “To a cemetery in Queens.”

  “At this hour?” Tiger John bristled in his coat. “The harpies are walking about. Why are we going to a graveyard?”

  “To meet a lady of mine.”

  Isaac had blabbered about a loss of memory. The poor demented boy couldn’t picture Dermott’s face among the Devils. The king remembered the old gang. They had to use a shack in Claremont Park as a clubhouse, the Devils of Clay Avenue. They didn’t have the funds to buy colored jerseys. The Devils were nothing until the cops picked them up. They had to run to the cellars and the trees whenever the Fordham Baldies arrived on Clay Avenue. The shabbiest nigger gang could have destroyed them in an even fight.

  The Devils were without a single patch of honor. They were the scavengers of the borough, mocked by other clubs. Only the worst pariahs came over to the Devils’ side, outcasts and imbeciles. The Devils lacked the scars of open combat. They would fall upon the isolated members of some gang more craven than themselves. It took twelve of them to beat up one boy. They would whoop and scream, steal a pocket off the boy’s shirt, and run back to their clubhouse in the park. They shivered summer and winter long, with the hysterical passion of cowards and invalids. They feared that an enemy might retaliate and burn down their miserable shack. But few gangs would bother with them.

  Then McNeill wed his cops to the Devils. It was the only bunch of kids that the youth squad could control. He gave the Devils a bit of fighting blood. His motor pool would taxi them to different parts of the Bronx, so they could hit an unsuspecting gang and disappear. The Devils became known for these lightning attacks. They still couldn’t have won if McNeill hadn’t dressed his toughest boys in the Devils’ jerseys to smack Fordham Baldies over the head. The king began to earn a reputation with his knife. He could slash out and rip a shirt sleeve, shave an enemy’s skull, with Coote’s boys behind him.

  Things went according to McNeill. He could slap any gang in the Bronx through little Dermott and the Devils of Clay Avenue. But the king had ambitions of his own. He wasn’t satisfied with his existence as Coote McNeill’s knife and stick. He met in secret with the man. They stood outside the Webster Avenue shul, smoking cigarettes. No one would suspect an Irish captain and an Irish pug to declare new policies in the shadows of a synagogue.

  “Ungrateful brat,” McNeill said. “Haven’t I blessed you enough? I picked you over that jigaboo, Arthur Greer. You’re the goddamn lord of the Bronx. The Baldies piss on their toes when the king takes out his knife.”

  “I want more,” Dermott muttered from the side of his mouth.

  “That’s grand. Should I pin a badge on your chest and call you Sergeant McBride?”

  “No. You’d better gimme a college education.”

  McNeill had a laughing fit on the steps of the old shul. He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “They don’t let donkeys into college. You’re too old. You must be twenty, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m seventeen.”

  “You never finished high school.”

  “So what? I want college from you, Captain McNeill. Or find yourself another baby.”

  They grinned at each other. The kid was bluffing. They both knew that. Little Dermott was stuck in his shack. He had nowhere else to go. But Coote liked the idea of a little gangster in college. The Department could raise up a lovely, educated pigeon. Coote went to see his boss, First Deputy O’Roarke. “Ned, that dark bitch will be useful to us. We’ll have ourselves a cutthroat with a college degree.” But even the great O’Roarke couldn’t convince a college to take him. They had to groom him first. Only one lad in Ned’s entire office could jabber about Karl Marx. That was young deputy inspector Sidel. “Ned, will you lend us the brain?”

  “You can have him,” O’Roarke said.

  Isaac was a natural for them. The brain had ties to Columbia College. They could shove the king in that direction. But they didn’t tell Isaac about their plan to educate little Dermott. They sent Isaac over to sit with the Devils. He brought Dostoyevsky into the clubhouse. Most of the Devils yawned. They wanted to go on a scalping party. The king took Isaac’s prattle in. He had to make up for years of neglect. He memorized every murder in Prince Hamlet of Elsinore, and he got into Columbia College.

  “Graveyards,” Tiger John smirked into his coat. It took him and his driver hours to locate the cemetery at Esau Woods. John wouldn’t step out of the car. He wasn’t going to carouse near the tombstones in a Jewish yard, and let the harpies grab at him from the trees. Why was this Annie Powell buried with the Yids?

  “That’s an odd priest that would let her lie down in Esau Woods,” he said to Dermott.

  “The priest was Isaac.”

  Dermott walked over to the caretaker’s shack and knocked on the window. The caretaker wouldn’t come out. Dermott crumpled fifty dollars under the door. The caretaker smelled the money and stuck his head in the window. He wore a thick wool cap. “What do you want?”

  “A grave,” Dermott said.

  “For yourself?”

  �
��No. A girl was buried here.”

  “Under what auspices?” the caretaker asked.

  “I don’t know. She came with Isaac Sidel.”

  A sense of recognition grew out from under the cap. The caretaker smiled. “The Christian girl, you mean … they can’t fool us, those big commissioners. She’s in Lot Eleven, Row B … you’ll find a marker with a red flag.”

  Dermott moved away from the shack. The caretaker shouted between Dermott’s shoulder blades with genuine scorn. “What’s the matter with you? You can’t go in there naked? This is holy grounds.”

  He gave the king a skullcap to wear. He also put a huge flashlight in Dermott’s hand. Half the graveyards in the borough of Queens could have heard those batteries knock. Dermott clumped through Esau Woods with a big, loud metal canister that couldn’t light up his shoes: the bulb was nearly dead. He came to that marker on Lot Eleven, Row B. It was a stick on a smudge of earth, with a filthy rag knotted to it. That was all of Annie Powell. The king trembled near that grave. The cold burrowed through him. Why? It wasn’t winter yet.

  That rag knotted to a stick was the king’s sign: a dirty sniveling crook he was, in a silk necktie, who rode out of the Bronx like a cannonball, with police money and police wit, and bribed a judge in Connecticut to shorten his name, so he wouldn’t sound like a shanty Irish boy. Dermott Bride. Dermott Bride. Funny coloring for a mick. Dark the hair and dark the eyes. Would you believe it now? They have Irish niggers in the New Country. They live in a land called the Bronx. His dad couldn’t explain this complexion of the male McBrides. The old man was a dark-haired janitor. He kept his family outside the Church. He wouldn’t have child Dermott beaten by any bald witch of a nun. The boy went to public school. All the other micks in his class were so ruddy. Green-eyed girls. They grew taller than little Dermott. He fought those big Irish mules, boys and girls, biting, scratching, gouging with his thumbs, or he would have been eaten alive. They still wouldn’t have much to do with him. He couldn’t join the Salters, the Green Bays, the Emerald Knights. He had to go with the Devils, a mangy gang without a clubhouse, that took sheenies in, and had a nigger for a president.

  The Devils couldn’t smoke out his lineage for him. Dermott went to the history books. How do you look up Irishman, Dark Hair? He read about the Gaels, and the rude island that Caesar bypassed when he conquered the world. An island of savage people with bulls and cows. But where, where was the dark eyes? He read some more. The English conquerors, and the Pale they established around Dublin, where only Englishmen could tread. The Irish kings had to shiver in the booleys, with their cattle and their priests. And then little Dermott discovered his own history in the drowning of the Spanish Armada. A few of the ships were knocked into the coast of Ireland by a storm. It was 1588. Pockets of Anglo-Irish militia stood on the shore with clubs in their hands. The dark-haired sailors were beaten to death, one by one, as they crawled out of their ships. A handful escaped into the interior, and were hidden in some obscure Irish village beyond the Pale. Dermott’s true fathers came from such a handful. He was a Spanish mick, an Irisher with eyebrows. He’d solved the obscurity of his line. It made no difference what his dad was doing in the Bronx. The boy was descended from Spanish-Irish pigherders, or something close to that. The McBrides had walked in pigshit for two hundred years. Dermott swore to himself that he’d climb out of the muck.

  “Johnny, are you sleeping now?”

  The king gave John a fright. The Tiger shut his eyes while little Dermott went creeping in the Jewish graveyard for his Anne, and Holy Mother ofGod, the lad returns before John could take a blink!

  “Did you catch any harpies in the woods?”

  “None at all.”

  “Too bad,” the Tiger said. “If they pluck one eyebrow, it’s supposed to charm you for a month. But harpies can be dangerous. God help you if they nest in your hair.”

  “The harpies weren’t out tonight.”

  “It’s the warmth,” Tiger John said. “They won’t come to you in October.”

  The Commissioner had an idiotic mythology for every beast that stirred in the woods. Let the harpies nest in Dermott’s hair. He’d take them into Dublin and tickle them to sleep. Then he’d root them out with his knife.

  “Did Isaac provide for the lady?”

  “He did. A rag and a stick on a hump of dirt.”

  “Ah, that’s the Hebrew law. You go to lots of Jewish funerals when you’re the Commish. We have sheenies in the Department, you know. Thousands of them. It’s years and years before they put a stone on a grave. So it has to be a rag for Annie Powell.”

  “I’ll order a stone tomorrow,” the king said, sucking with his teeth.

  “The Jews won’t deliver it. Not for six years.”

  “I’ll hire my own deliverers.”

  “The rabbis will run them out of the graveyard.”

  “Then I’ll buy rabbis to fight the rabbis of Esau Woods.”

  The Tiger chuckled to himself. “That will be a sight. Rabbis clawing each other’s holy shirt … boyo, you don’t have the time. No playing with rabbis. Mangen’s not a fool. He’ll wonder why you’re here. You might never get to Dublin with Mangen around. His grand juries are notorious for latching on to boyos like you, so they can’t leave the country.”

  “Dennis won’t find me.”

  “That’s good news,” the Tiger said. “I’ll pray for you.”

  You’re the lad that needs praying for, the king understood. Someone would have to take a fall. It wouldn’t be Sam. The bankers might cry over the prospect of a Mayor in jail. It could eat into the worth of municipal paper. But a crooked Police Commissioner wasn’t that much of a liability. You could always put another toad in his place.

  This one, John the tiger-toad, looked out at Dermott with a strange compassion in his eyes. He winked and blew his nose. “I can calm the rabbis for you. I’m the PC … you’ll get your stone for Annie Powell.”

  The king nodded once. The old, dumb Commissioner meant no harm. Whose fault was it that he didn’t have Sammy’s wit or the Fisherman’s brains? He could only bluster through Headquarters doing his Tiger dance. Dermott had already gone way, way into his Spanish skull. The bumping of the Mercury didn’t register in his ears. The king despised himself. He was no better than a pimp who marks his woman for some small sin, like holding back five dollars, or daring to talk to one of the dudes at an after-hours club. The pimp would take a wire coat hanger and twist it into his main initial, heat it on the burner of his woman’s stove, and stick it in her face. Dermott used a knife.

  It was an old Bronx ritual that existed long before the Devils got their start. Girls didn’t have an independent status in any gang, no matter how tough or beautiful they were. A girl was property, like an ice pick, or a tamed pigeon. And if she “wounded” you, if she roused your jealousy, if she shamed you in the eyes of the gang, you cut her with a knife, to show her and everyone else in the Bronx where the lines of your property ought to begin and end.

  That was a dumb ritual for a king to follow. He’d been away from the Devils for sixteen years. He should have curbed his jealousies. Annie Powell. He’d left her alone in Dublin with those ancient bodyguards, while he sat in Connemara with the Fisherman, and established how many pieces they could get from a whore’s pie, and where the pieces would go. What did he expect from Anne? Coote had pulled Jamey out of Ireland. She didn’t have the king’s donkey to watch over her anymore. It’s a brave lad who gives his wife a scar and sends her back to Ameriky. Prick that he was, he should have cut his own face.

  A noise blasted through the king. It was Tiger John’s radiotelephone. It rang and rang from a niche in the upholstery. “Answer it,” the king said. “Go on, Johnny. Scream your hello.”

  Dermott picked up the receiver and clapped it to the left side of John’s head. John mumbled, “Yes … no … yes …”

  Then he put the receiver into its place. But he didn’t offer any information to little Dermott.

  �
�Who was that?… Coote?”

  “No.” Tiger John took to whispering in the rear of his car. “It was Mayor Sam.”

  “Why didn’t he talk to me?”

  “Jesus, you’re poison to Sam. The Mayor wants you out of the country on the next aeroplane.”

  “The Mayor can go fuck himself. I’m not leaving until I pay my respects to the mother of O’Toole.”

  John was certain the king had a draft in his head. “Mangen is closing in, and you can’t leave until you kiss the mother of O’Toole? We’ll send flowers in your name to that old hag.”

  “Don’t send shit. The Fisherman killed my man.”

  “Swear to God, Dermott. It was sink or swim. Your man grew a beard and went crazy. He was going to run to Isaac and snitch on us all.”

  Coote was right about little Dermott. The king had lost his grip. A man with a nose for business wouldn’t have come to New York to buy tombstones for an Irish bitch. Where’s the value of it? The girl was already in the ground.

  “John, are you driving me to the old woman, or not? If I have to walk to Chelsea, I won’t be in Dublin until the day after tomorrow.”

  God forbid. “Hold your horses,” the Tiger said. “I didn’t say I wasn’t driving you, did I now?” He’d have to get himself a castle, just like Coote. Then he could give the Mercury back, and retire to Kerry and Dingle Bay.

  27

  THE king had never been a shylock, a gombeen-man, like Arthur Greer. He didn’t have a countinghouse in Dublin or New York. His bagmen collected a fee from the pimps of Manhattan and the Bronx, and the king took this pimping money and scrubbed it the best way he could. He threw it into restaurants, bowling alleys, limousine services, and rare books. A good portion of it was churned back, so the king could stock a yellow lake with salmon for Coote McNeill, provide a secret pension fund for the Mayor, create bankbooks for Handsome John.

  It was smooth and lovely work. The pimps would swagger in their long coats, because Mr. Dermott Bride had arranged a charter of principles for them with the Police. They were shrewd enough not to ask about the details of this charter. The sweetest mack always gave a dumb picture of himself. He had a harem to protect, a stable of “brides,” little snow queens, and all his number-one ladies who broke their humps in his behalf. The macks realized that some of their nickels and dimes were going to the Police Commissioner. If Tiger John Rathgar lived off their bounty, what could happen to them?