Secret Isaac

by Jerome Charyn

  “The Chief Inspector.”

  “You worked for Coote, you prick and a half?”

  Smiley must have seen the devil in Isaac’s face. His jaw dropped out from under his chin.

  “And what did you lads do when I called this office?”

  “We took the message upstairs. To the McNeill.”

  Isaac flailed the air with both his arms. “Out,” he said. “All of you. Get the hell out of here.”

  Captains and clerks ran from him. They didn’t know how to please the new “Commish.” They stood in the hall, with their pencils, holsters, and gum erasers. Coote had smuggled a whole team into the First Dep’s office. McNeill got rid of Isaac’s men a bundle at a time. They were probably licking dust off fingerprint cards in the five boroughs.

  One flight up and he was in the Chief Inspector’s office. Coote’s people hunched behind their desks. Isaac studied the walls. Then he cursed himself. He was stupid as a cow. McNeill had fishing paraphernalia tacked up all over the place: thin, beautiful rods that could whip into a perfect fisherman’s arc, trophies with such tiny lettering, it would burn your eyes to read, fishhooks, maps of a hidden trout stream, photos of amazing salmon catches, pieces off an ancient lucky boot. Isaac had seen the bloody things before. McNeill had the same paraphernalia up in his old rooms at Centre Street. Isaac had to look at this shit on the wall to give his head a little shake. Coote was the Fisherman Annie had told him about. Coote, Coote the Fisherman. God, he might have saved that girl, if he could have remembered those hooks, salmon, and trout.

  Isaac pointed to a fat clerk. “Take that junk off the wall and ship it to your old chief with the compliments of Isaac Sidel. No … tell him, Love from the Commissioner. He’ll understand.”

  Cops were gathering outside the Chief Inspector’s office. Stories had spread like a crazy fire in the building: the “Commish” would march into a room, breathing hell on his captains. You couldn’t avoid the scrutiny of Isaac. He had a menace sitting on his brows. One wrinkle of his eye, and a man was doomed. Isaac snatched a lowly sergeant from the hall and brought him into the Commissioner’s office, made him a master clerk. “Sergeant, I want you to take every cunt in the First Dep’s office, every creature who worked for McNeill and Tiger John, and throw them to the Badlands. Give them precincts in the South Bronx.”

  That’s how Isaac began his reign at 1 Police Plaza.

  29

  THEY drifted into Headquarters, blue-eyed boys rescued from the provinces. Their boss had come home. The boss seemed gloomy in his Commissioner’s coat. His eyes had shrunk since they last saw him, months and months ago, when he sank into the ground and disappeared, in order to destroy the pimps of New York City. They understood part of his gloom. He missed his old sweetheart, Manfred Coen.

  They talked about the worm in his belly. “It’s eating him up. Soon there’ll be nothing left of Isaac.” But Isaac survived. He was teaching again at the College of Criminal Justice.

  It was just before election time. People in the class were wearing buttons that Becky Karp produced in less than a week: VOTE MS. REBECCA. It was her war cry to women and men.

  The buttons enraged Isaac. He built his lecture around them. “Flotsam,” he said. “Politics. Ms. Rebecca Karp.” The Commissioner had developed a machine-gun language. He shunned sentences, threw words and particles out at the class. He pounced in front of the room in a coat that hung on his body. He could have been a scarecrow, or any ragged man, with coal-black eyes.

  “Buttonface. Whorehearts … lovely hour to vote.”

  He snickered on his feet. Then he turned articulate, muttered a complete sentence to the class. “They know how to fuck us, the lords and ladies who manage our lives.”

  His stalking near the blackboard had begun to mesmerize the student firemen and cops. It didn’t matter what the Commissioner said. The class would have gone to hell with Isaac. “Those darlings have picked a beauty for us. Rejoice. The people’s candidate, strong as apple cider. Our Lady of the Buttons, Ms. Rebecca Karp. How do you become a Mayor in such times? You step on an old man’s back, that’s how. You rise up on his shoulders and watch him sink. Then you manufacture a million buttons. You distribute them to the faithful. And you promise a lot. A white borough for the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews. Dental clinics for the Latinos and the blacks. A paradise in Far Rockaway for the over-sixty-fives. Boys, girls, it don’t mean shit. The planet is running low. The subways are having a heart attack. You can’t tell the difference between garbage and pennies in the street. But go on, pin Rebecca to your blouse. Who knows? It might do you some good.”

  There he was, insulting the next Mayor of New York. How many Police Commissioners are prophets and fools in one gulp? The worm drove through him with its many tails. There had to be a spy in the class.

  Isaac hovered close to the door. He couldn’t escape the green eyes of Jennifer Pears. He looked for signs of growth in her belly. Isaac wanted evidence of his child. He found nothing but natural curves.

  “What month is it?”

  Jennifer stared at him. “November.”

  “No, no,” Isaac said. “For the child.” He couldn’t recall the pregnancy of his own wife. What was Kathleen when she was carrying Marilyn the Wild? Did she have a gargantuan waist by the second month? Blast an old cop’s memory! He’d have to go before the Medical Board and prove he was a sane “Commish.” He’d curtsy for the bastards and count the fingers on his left hand.

  “It’s the third month,” she said. “You can see a little bulge if you pull my skirt apart.”

  She took Isaac by the elbow and led him out of John Jay.

  “Have you decided to marry me?”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “We can’t go to my hotel. The pimps would cut our throats. They’re not fond of Police Commissioners and their girlfriends.”

  She brought him home in a taxi cab. Isaac could feel the doorman smirk at him. He never liked the East Side.

  “Where’s Mel?”

  “He’s working, you idiot.”

  “And the little boy … Alexander?”

  “He’s at school. Isaac, what’s wrong with you?”

  He was a lost, anxious child under his Commissioner’s coat. He shivered in his socks. Jennifer had to unlace his shoes while Isaac growled at her. “Woman, I won’t sleep with you until the husband goes …”

  He crept into the coverlets, a frightened dog-boy with hair on his arms and a wild fur over the rest of his body. Nothing could sooth a “Commish.” He had a foulness in his heart. The dead seemed to follow Isaac. They wouldn’t lie still. He’d buried Coen, he’d buried Annie Powell. He brought rabbis in for them. What more could he do?

  He made love to Melvin’s naked wife. He touched that thickening in her belly. The fur smoothed on him as he pushed into Jennifer Pears.

  He couldn’t stay very long. Jennifer’s digital clock blinked twenty to three. Alexander was coming from the Little Red Schoolhouse. Jennifer didn’t wear any clothes to the door.

  “Can I see you tomorrow?” Isaac said.

  “Tomorrow’s Election Day.”

  “So what?”

  “Mel will be here.”

  “I thought the husband’ll be out capturing votes for Ms. Rebecca.”

  “Isaac, don’t be a prick. Rebecca doesn’t need votes from Mel.”

  She went out naked into the hall and kissed Isaac on the wrinkle over one eye. “Come Thursday. For lunch.”

  He scowled in the elevator. Doormen couldn’t intimidate him. He had the monkey at the plugboard dial Headquarters and ask for the Commissioner’s car. A surly boy named Christianson, who’d chauffeured Tiger John, arrived in a black Mercury. Isaac could have changed drivers. But he liked the boy’s silences, his contempt for every other vehicle on the road. Christianson swept around fire trucks, pushed buses out of their lanes, challenged any police car that dared crawl in front of the “Commish.” The boy had a telegram for Isaac. It wasn’t in its usual cel
lophane jacket.

  “Who opened this?”

  Christianson shrugged his boyish shoulders. “Dunno, boss. I found it on your desk that way.”

  “You,” Isaac said. “Look at my face. I’m not Tiger John. You tamper with my mail again, and you’ll have to drive without your kneecaps.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  Isaac unfolded the telegram.

  POLICE COMMISSIONER

  N.Y. CITY-N.Y.

  SIDEL MEET ME ST. STEPHENS WED

  10 AM URGENT

  THE KING

  “Christianson, what does this say to you?”

  “Sounds like crazy talk.”

  “Do you know where St. Stephen’s is?”

  “Could be a church somewhere.”

  John must have taught his chauffeur never to commit himself. He’d have to sack the boy very soon.

  “Christianson, take me to Aer Lingus. Right now.”

  Isaac left for Ireland on Election Day. He wasn’t curious about the results of Rebecca’s little pilgrimage to glory. She’d become Mayor-elect soon as the polls shut down, and the City would have a broken duck, His Honor, Samuel Dunne. Sammy deserved whatever crippling he got. He shouldn’t have grabbed at whores from City Hall. But the Party wouldn’t forsake its Old Man. Who can tell? Ms. Rebecca might give him the gatekeeper’s job at Gracie Mansion.

  Isaac had his own problems. The “Commish” was rocking over the water (in an Irish plane) on the strength of a miserable telegram. He didn’t trust the words. Little Dermott wouldn’t have begged for Isaac in such a bald way. He wasn’t a showy man. He had too much breeding to sign a telegram with his pet name. The King. Someone else had signed it for him, and written the goddamn message. Whatever it was, Isaac couldn’t avoid it. Urgent, it said. St. Stephens. Wed. 10 AM.

  He was at Dublin airport on Wednesday morning, around half-past eight. He wasn’t Moses Herzog on this trip. Isaac had little use for camouflage. He didn’t come over to kill a man. He was only the “Commish.” He hadn’t booked a room at the Shelbourne. He was returning to New York on the afternoon flight.

  A cab brought him into Dublin. He hadn’t bothered to convert his dollars into Irish pounds. The driver took his money without any qualms and let him off at the northwest gate of St. Stephen’s Green. It could have been August. Isaac had the same chill about the ears. He strolled along the rim of the park. Men and women churned by him in their November clothes. It was a school day. You couldn’t find laddies hunching in the grass. The white and brown ducks were gone. Isaac didn’t see a bird in the old pond. He passed the stone bridge. A man was sitting inside the gazebo. His head was upright, under an eight-piece woolen cap.

  Isaac could recognize a king by his ears. Aristocratic they were. Without points, or hanging lobes. But that dark Irish-gypsy face had a strange, unbending manner. A live man don’t sit with a perfectly cocked head. Dermott’s eyes were open. He had a Crotona Park grin. His neck was wired to the gazebo wall. His throat had been slit. The blood congealed under a napkin that had been thrust into the collar of his shirt. Isaac didn’t have to guess. The king’s bodyguards must have murdered him. They’d done a terrific patching job. His ankles and wrists were wired up, and you’d have to look down his collar to peek at the blood. “Ah, you poor son of a bitch, you shouldn’t have come here. Dublin aint for you …”

  What was the use of unwiring him? His neck might drop off. The blood began to soak through that bib inside his collar. Isaac left the king undisturbed. A park warden would discover the dead man in the gazebo and call the Irish gardai. The cops would shrug it off. They’d hold the corpse at Dublin Castle for twenty hours and declare it a “painful case,” altogether unsolvable, like any gangland killing, American style.

  It was a fine touch to put that eight-piece cap on his head. The king’s scalp of black, black hair might have brought attention to itself. You can’t be much of a killer without a love for detail. Isaac strolled back to the northwest gate. The king’s bodyguards were there, four old men in identical eight-piece caps. Isaac nodded to Tim Snell, that old sergeant from the Chief Inspector’s office.

  “Morning, Tim … lovely work, that … wire a man by his neck.”

  Timothy smiled. “We thought you’d appreciate it, Isaac.”

  “Did you cut him with his own knife?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “Then that telegram came from you.”

  “Naturally,” Tim said. “I composed it with the king’s fountain pen. Took me half the day. To find the right wording, you see … we wanted to celebrate your new job. Congratulations, Isaac. It’s not every old bugger of a cop who can stand in Stephen’s Green and talk to the Commish.”

  “Don’t let the title fool you, Tim. I’m the same lad you drove through the quays three months ago. It’s a bit crude to murder your boss.”

  “Him? He was nothing to us. Dirt under your thumb, that’s all. Mr. Dermott Bride. A stoolpigeon he was that licked his feathers and walked out of the Bronx … we work for a real king.”

  “The Fisherman … you slit throats for Coote McNeill.”

  “Shhh,” Tim said, with that smile of his. “It’s not nice to mention names in a public park. Why don’t you come with us, love? We have the automobile across the road. We can continue this conversation with cushions under your ass … and don’t you scream for the cops. They’re good boys, the gardai. But dumb. They won’t be much help to you.”

  It was instinct that preserved Isaac the Brave. He caught Timothy with an elbow and shoved him into the other old men. The teeth clattered in their heads, and their caps fell to the ground as they gave a little sigh. Isaac bolted out of the park like a rabbit in city pants and shoes. The old men recovered their hats and chased after the “Commish.” You could hear them huff along on Grafton Street. Isaac ran with his elbows wide. He could outwit four old murderers who had a hard time breathing.

  He took to the alleys, chose a crooked trail from Grafton to Dame Street. He crossed the Liffey at Temple Bar and Wellington Quay. The river had lost its dirty color. It wasn’t frog-green, like a piss-pond or a spittoon. It was almost purple under the bridge. November had cleared all the mud.

  Isaac didn’t keep to the south wall. He crept up to Mary’s Lane and found a car-for-hire agency on Constitution Hill. He wouldn’t get out of Ireland this afternoon. That corpse in the gazebo had interrupted Isaac’s plans. He was going to pay a visit to Coote McNeill.

  The “Commish” had done a bit of homework before he got on the plane to meet Dermott in an Irish park. His blue-eyed boys tore the Chief Inspector’s files apart until they unearthed an address for Coote. The Fisherman’s place was next to Screeb in County Galway. Screeb was where Isaac had the mind to go. The man from the agency lent him a map. Isaac bumped down Constitution Hill into the lower regions of Church Street. He was driving a little French car. The “Commish” was used to having his body chauffeured around. He had trouble with the steering column. It wasn’t where it ought to be. It had moved from the left side to the right. Damn the French and the little cars they brought into Ireland. Didn’t the Irish have their own make of wagon? A Phoenix Spark? A Donnybrook? A Cromwell Cadet? A Grand Drummartin? Holy Mother! He was on the wrong half of the road. The Irish were a mad people. They invented their own traffic laws to confound a man and tire him to death. Left is right, me boy, and right is left. The “Commish” had to reeducate himself on King Street North. Isaac, stay left, left, left.

  He had a baby’s crawl. He crossed the Liffey by mistake and got stranded in Dolphin’s Barn. It took him three hours to break out of Dublin and find the road to Mullingar.

  He drove thirty miles, then it grew dark on him. He stayed in a cottage that night, with an ironmonger’s widow and her seven kids, near the town of Kinnegad. The children’s whining came through the walls. It was a relief to Isaac. It kept him occupied. He didn’t dare fall asleep. Coote’s old men might be at the window. He had his bed and breakfast and crept back on the road early in t
he morning.

  He wasn’t dispirited on his second day in the Irish countryside. Teaching himself how to maneuver a wicked car on a wicked road had done remarkable things to Isaac. Pushed like a heavy thumb through the matting in his brain. Dermott didn’t belong in an eight-piece cap. The king had to die before Isaac could remember him as a boy. Isaac’s chief, First Deputy O’Roarke, had sent him out to tame a wild gang, the Devils of Clay Avenue. He traveled to the Bronx, a young inspector growing bald behind the ears. He couldn’t understand where the gang got its reputation from. The Devils were a bunch of shivering boys. These were the lads who had conquered a borough? Their single property was a shack in Claremont Park. Who was it that led those raids into every corner of the Bronx? Not their president, Arthur Greer. Sweet Arthur always stayed at home. Isaac had to poke behind their idiotic grins. Only one other boy appealed to him. Little Dermott McBride. Short and dark he was. A cop’s intuition told him this was the leader of the raids. He had a sadness around the eyes that reminded Isaac of his “angel,” Manfred Coen, whom he’d pulled right out of the Police Academy. Isaac happened to need a sad-looking boy to infiltrate a gang of Polish thieves that was causing mayhem in the garment district. Coen was on special assignment to him. Isaac wouldn’t give him back to the Academy. He liked having Blue Eyes around.

  Twenty miles out of Kinnegad it struck Isaac that Coen and Little Dermott began to mix in his head. Isaac’s batteries had crossed somewhere. It was his sorrow over Manfred, his own fucking guilt, and not that worm in his gut, that had eaten into Isaac’s memory. He must have had a wish at the time that Manfred could enter into Dermott and steal away some of Dermott’s intelligence. Then Isaac would have had an “angel” who was more than beautiful and dumb. It would have meant a reshuffling of brains, a lessening of the king to puff out Manfred Coen. But Isaac wasn’t a ghoul. He wouldn’t harm one boy to glorify another, just because they had the same sad eyes …

  He got to Screeb. It was nothing but a fork in a road. He’d been traveling a good eight hours. He got lost in Galway City until a baker’s boy led him out of that trapping of streets. He went along the coast. Isaac had the Atlantic under him. He had to stop for cows and sheep. He left the car and began to walk. Stones and trees weren’t a proper landmark. You could have blindfolded him outside Centre Street and dropped him anywhere in Manhattan. Isaac would have felt his way. He had the gift. He could nose out the contours of a neighborhood. Boys, I’m in the Heights. Around Audubon Avenue, I’d say. West of Highbridge.