Marilyn the Wild

by Jerome Charyn

  The team broke apart to encircle Isaac. The squire, a boy with a scarred nose, bumped Isaac into the dip. The boy heard a terrible scream. The dip’s hand was caught inside Isaac’s raincoat Isaac crunched the girlish fingers with a squeeze of his fist. He brought the dip down to his knees.

  He didn’t forget the other boy. The squire was the vicious one, Isaac could tell. The squire had his blade, a pathetic kitchen knife without a handle. He meant to skewer Isaac with it. But he couldn’t draw blood from the Chief. Isaac cracked the boy once, behind the ear, and the squire shot across the Place des Etats-Unis. The Chief was growing fond of Paris.

  He made the Tuileries with over an hour to spare. He liked the measurements of a long, dead garden. The tramps who collected at the borders of the Tuileries had an independence Isaac could admire. Dressed in warm coats, none of them shuffled after him, or acknowledged his presence.

  Isaac’s exhilaration began to fade on the rue de Rivoli. A gorgeous line of mounted police, with plumes down their backs and silver pots on their heads, made him think of his father’s uniform. Isaac scowled. His anger increased against Joel. My father’s a clown, he muttered to himself. A clown in a snot-green shirt.

  The rue de Rivoli became a region of shabby department stores, with windows that had the defiled look of a battlefield, and soon Isaac was in the Marais. Narrow streets with hump-backed buildings spilled over into each other’s lap at crazy, undefined angles. Chimney pots cropped out over Isaac’s head like warts on a monstrous finger. He passed kosher butcher shops, restaurants that sold “Boercht Romain” and “Salami Hongrois,” signs that spit competing slogans (“Israël Vaincre!” and “Halte à l’Agression Arabe”), and a synagogue strictly for North Africans. Joel, who cursed the rabbis of New York, had gone religious in his old age.

  Isaac regretted his trip; he should have visited London instead, the London of Whitechapel, where Joel’s father came from; he’d been a petty merchant, hustling bloomers on Princelet Street, and a “deacon” of the Spitelfield synagogue. Even then the Sidels didn’t pray; they were in charge of the synagogue’s economic affairs and its soup kitchen for indigent Jews. They were all charitable men.

  Isaac discovered Joel’s place on the rue Vieille-du-Temple. There seemed to be no court in reach, no passageway for him to use. He stood by the house until an old woman emerged from an opening in the wall. Isaac went inside.

  He groveled in the dark, searching for nonexistent bannisters with both his palms; he touched greasy wood and roughage on a low ceiling. He came out in the back somewhere, sliding against a tricky doorsill. He was in a court with ravaged blue ground and a nest of sinking trees. He clumped towards a set of stairs. His father lived on the top floor.

  Joel’s mistress was Vietnamese (Sophie had never bothered to divorce her wandering husband); a woman with delicate jaws and exquisite bones around her eyes, she worked as a chambermaid at The Iroquois. Joel called her Mauricette. She couldn’t have been over thirty, but away from The Iroquois Joel was a much younger man. He abandoned his bottle-green smock and the trappings of a portraitist, and sat in an old velvet shirt that forced Isaac to contend with the handsomeness of his father. Joel wasn’t a clown at home. The rouge had been wiped off.

  “Isaac, who ripped your coat?”

  “It’s nothing, papa. I met two pickpockets in the street They wanted to dance with me. I refused. They won’t be so nimble for the next couple of weeks.”

  Joel shrugged at Isaac’s delivery; he couldn’t unravel detective stories. He summoned Isaac to the table. The fragrance of perfectly cooked rice caught Isaac by the nose. He softened to his father’s circumstance. Joel didn’t need more than one room. All his articles were here.

  They ate fish with their hands, sucking between the bones. Isaac drank a silky wine that growled in his throat Joel didn’t plague him until the end of the meal.

  “A super detective with his kid brother sitting in jail—Isaac, there has to be a moral in it. Did he rape the Police Commissioner’s, wife?”

  “Papa, he isn’t inside with criminals, I swear. It’s only a civil complaint. I wouldn’t let perverts near Leo. I have a brother who thinks it’s chivalrous to be deaf, dumb, and blind. He’s free with his own guts, that Leo. He scratches his ass with a leaky pen and signs his life away. Now he’s a slave. His ex-wife owns the teeth in his mouth. Leo runs with his testicles stabbing the floor. He can’t catch up on his alimony.”

  “Isaac, I could raise five hundred dollars. How much does he need?”

  “Don’t talk money, papa, please. Wouldn’t I help that miserable prick? He won’t take a nickel. He enjoys his misery.”

  Isaac walked down the stairs with bandied knees. The wine had put a blush on his neck. He groped against the walls giggling like an idiot boy who’d escaped from his father’s house. Wavering in the moist blue earth of his father’s court, he grew lenient with Joel. His mother had been crazy long before Joel left. She picked through garbage cans, collecting foul cardboard and ugly pieces of string, while Joel had his millions. Isaac loved her, and had a fondness for her piles of junk, and the Arabs she brought home, beggars, failed musicians, and unemployed cooks, after scavenging on Atlantic Avenue, but why should his father elect to stay with a woman who had permanent whiskers and rust on her fingers that couldn’t wash off?

  Isaac liked Mauricette. She was no mean stepmother to him, and no simple appendage to his father, no superficial wife. She mingled her spit and blood with Joel’s in that one salty room.

  Isaac returned to his hotel near the Place Vendôme. He tried to nap; the metallic click of the telephone tore through his drowsiness. He didn’t need the help of overseas operators. He recognized Coen’s nasal hello.

  “Come home, Isaac. Your mother’s been hurt.”

  4.

  HEADQUARTERS was invaded with shock troops. You couldn’t miss them in the corridors, the locker rooms, and the johns. They collected near the marble pillars on the ground floor, sucking bitter lozenges, men in black leather coats, with dirty eyes. They barked at each other and spit at low-grade detectives and ordinary clerks, who called them “crows” and “undertakers” because of the vast amounts of black leather. The “crows” worked out of competing offices. They were rivals, members of elite squads that belonged to the Chief of Detectives, the First Deputy, and the Police Commissioner himself. The PC had spoken with uncommon bluntness: he wanted the scumbags that wounded Sophie Sidel.

  Isaac shunned the leather boys. They scattered behind their pillars when they saw the Chief. Isaac had his own squad, boys without leather coats, blue-eyed detectives, marksmen who never sneered. He went to his office, across the hall from “Cowboy” Rosenblatt, the Jewish Chief of Detectives. Isaac had been gone three days, but his great oak desk was cluttered with memorandums and personal notes, letters of condolence from all the Irish chiefs at Headquarters, from the Mayor’s office, from Newgate, the FBI man, who played gin rummy with the First Dep, from Barney Rosenblatt and the PC, and an old-fashioned blue card in the fine scrawl of First Deputy O’Roarke. His phone had been ringing continuously for an hour. He held the earpiece over his cheek and growled his name. He wasn’t in the mood for Mordecai.

  “Isaac, I heard about your mother. The neighborhood is up in arms. We’re forming patrols, Isaac. We’ll repay slap for slap. How’s Sophie?”

  “She’s still in a coma.”

  “Sophie’s a tough girl. She’ll pull through.”

  Isaac understood the habits of an old friend. Mordecai wouldn’t have called him at the office to cluck words about Sophie. He was a delicate man, Mordecai. He had to be angling for someone else.

  “Is it Honey?” the Chief said. “She hasn’t fled the coop again, has she? I can’t grab her this morning. But I can lend you Brodsky, or Coen.”

  Isaac heard a sound that could have been Mordecai sighing, or an electrical hiss. “Honey’s at home … it’s Philip. Can’t you visit him? Isaac, he’s in a terrible way.”

  �
��Jesus Christ, my mother’s lying in Bellevue with tubes sticking out of her, and you pester me with Philip. Has his chess game been deteriorating? Philip doesn’t move off his ass. So long, Mordecai.”

  Mordecai, Philip, and Isaac had been the three big brains of Seward Park High. Stalwarts of the chess club, devotees of Sergei Eisenstein and Dashiell Hammett, they were inseparable in 1943, 1944, and 1945. But Mordecai and Philip remained visionaries, and Isaac joined the police. He screamed for Pimloe, who ran the First Deputy’s rat squad whenever Isaac was away. Pimloe arrived with his clipboard and a goldnubbed fountain pen. He was wearing his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa key. Isaac despised Pimloe’s key. He’d had four miserable semesters at Columbia College, living in a monk’s closet on Momingside Heights.

  “Where’s Coen?”

  “He’s out tracking leads, like everybody else.” Pimloe waved the clipboard, which held a detailed map of lower Manhattan, with green boxes for City parks, and a blue star for Headquarters; the map was littered with marks from Pimloe’s fountain pen. “Isaac, they hit twenty places last week. Six between Essex and the Bowery, six in Chinatown, five in Little Italy, one in SoHo, and two on Hudson Street. Barney calls them the lollipop kids. Some old guinzo in Little Italy swears they came into his store sucking lollipops.”

  “Herbert, are you cooperating with Barney Rosenblatt?”

  “Isaac, you can’t shove Cowboy out of this. The PC is backing him up.”

  “I’ll shove when I have to shove. Herbert, there’s more than one gang working the streets. Could be your map is a little off, and we’ve got a whole bunch of lollipops on our hands.”

  “Isaac, it fits. They punch old people. They wear masks. They won’t take money.”

  “What’s your theory, Herbert? Tell me your thoughts.”

  “Freaks. Definitely freaks. They attack, hide, and attack. A fucking lollipop war.”

  “Is my mother included in your theory?”

  “Isaac, what do you mean? That was strictly random. It could have been any old woman in a store.”

  “Random, my ass. Somebody’s sending me a kite, and I can’t figure why. Herbert, what have you got?”

  Pimloe led the Chief to his favored niche outside the interrogation room on the second floor. They stared through the one-way mirror at the suspects Pimloe, Barney Rosenblatt, and the “crows” had rounded up for Isaac: retards from an Eighth Avenue hotel, winos fresh from Chinatown, a black whore with scabs on her knees, runaways from a New Jersey mental hospital, and two Puerto Rican cops disguised as pimps, so that Isaac could have a spectacular lineup. He scanned the faces only once, his lip curling high. “Let ’em go.”

  Isaac went around the corner to Margedonna’s Bar and Grille. The barman wouldn’t grin. Isaac tried the back room, where the Chief of Detectives was sitting with his “crows,” their black leather coats humped against the wall on a line of pegs. Isaac approached Barney Rosenblatt’s long table. None of the “crows” stood up for him. They stuffed their cheeks with eggplant and watched.

  Barney Rosenblatt was the number-one Jew cop in the City of New York. He hated Isaac more than the Irish chiefs who surrounded him. Isaac undermined Barney’s detectives with his squad of rats and personal spies. Both of them were officers in the Hands of Esau, a police fraternity for Jews. They squabbled here as much as they did at Headquarters. The Hands of Esau was in constant jeopardy on account of them.

  Barney wore a Colt with his name and rank engraved right over the trigger, and a quick-draw holster with tassels at the bottom, like Buffalo Bill. Sliding out from the table, he gripped the holster’s beard to prevent the Colt from stabbing him in the belly. The “crows” had swallowed too many red peppers: their eyes watered at the vision of Barney embracing Isaac. Were these burly men or dancing bears?

  There was nothing sanctimonious about Cowboy’s embrace. He squeezed Isaac’s ribs with devotion. Barney wasn’t a piddling warrior; he shared the grief of his enemies.

  But Isaac hadn’t interrupted Cowboy’s lunch for a bear-hug, and the smell of Chianti in a bottle brushed with straw. “Don’t try to steal chickens off me, Barney. Stay out of my coop. I can handle this alone.”

  “Who’s a chicken thief?” Cowboy said. He fought back his desire to take Isaac by the ears and throw him under the table.

  “If there’s a riddle, I’ll solve it. The persons who touched my mother will have to deal with me.”

  “No vendettas, Isaac. This is police business. I can bring the whole Manhattan South down on those freaks, whoever they are.”

  “Barney, I don’t want your boys rushing in and out. It’s my caper. Hands off.”

  “Isaac, who have you got? Blue Eyes? That imbecile couldn’t find his dick in the street.”

  “Barney, don’t curse. You’re talking about my man.”

  Cowboy had to let him go. As Chief of Detectives, he stood above the ladders that inspectors had to climb. But the First Deputy was dying of cancer, and the cop that inherited the First Dep’s chair controlled the City police. Barney didn’t have to guess who O’Roarke’s heir would be. Still, he was in a celebrating mood. His oldest daughter, a spinster of thirty-two, would be a bride in eight days. This was Barney’s last unmarried child. What had Isaac accomplished? He’d married off the same daughter three times.

  Isaac didn’t signal upstairs for Brodsky; a chauffeur could distract his mind. He rode in a cab, unwilling to discuss sugar scares, crime, or the weather.

  The driver figured Isaac was a pornography czar, or a manager of small-time queens: no one had ever asked him to cruise the all-night movie houses on Forty-second Street. “That’s the one,” Isaac said, jumping out of the cab. The driver saw him disappear into the foyers of the Tivoli Theatre. He couldn’t believe Isaac’s gall. “The guy must think he’s invisible. He walks through ticket windows.”

  Isaac foraged in the back rows. He couldn’t borrow a flashlight from a Tivoli usher. Wadsworth, the man he wanted, would have hidden from him. He avoided the male prostitutes who were soliciting near the aisles. “Need a finger, baby? It’ll cost you. Six dollars an inch.” Isaac could have put them away, but he would have lost his man. He had to protect Wadsworth’s house.

  He heard a low crackle behind him. “Vas machst du, Isaac?” The Chief had to laugh. Wadsworth wouldn’t recognize the fact that Isaac was an English-American Jew without a Yiddish vocabulary.

  “Wadsworth, I’m doing fine.”

  Wadsworth was an albino, a milky nigger with pink eyes. He couldn’t survive in sunlight. Wadsworth needed twenty-four hours of dark. He lived at the Tivoli, rinsing his mouth in the water fountain, doing his underwear in the sink, sneaking out after midnight, and returning to the theatre before the sun had a chance to rise. He existed on buttered popcorn and candy bars from the Tivoli’s machines. He could sit through cartoons, features, and coming attractions in one position. Wadsworth claimed he never had to sleep.

  “Did you look after my uncles, Isaac? My uncles are important to me.”

  “I’m trying, Wads. I can’t jump over the civil service lists. But there may be room for a typist with the Department of Parks.”

  “Isaac, my uncles can’t type.”

  The Chief had to groom Wadsworth with favors, little and big. He found temporary jobs for Wadsworth’s long family of uncles, cousins, and friends. Wadsworth would take no profit for himself. He was the best informant Isaac ever had. A burglar by trade, and a sometime arsonist, he sold watches and shoes to firemen, sanitation workers, and the sons of mafiosi. Connected uptown and downtown with pickpockets, shylocks, and pinkie-breakers, Wadsworth cornered information before it hit the street.

  “Isaac, if you’re here about your mom, I can’t help. Motherfuckers with masks, busting faces without putting a finger in the till, that sounds like amateur stuff.”

  “Or a hate job. Wadsworth, do you know anybody who dislikes me so much he’d send a gang of rotten kids to grab my tail?”

  “Isaac, you asking me if you got
enemies? I can name ten cops who’d love to murder you, including Cowboy Rosenblatt.”

  “I could name twenty, but this isn’t the work of a cop. What about the Guzmanns?”

  Gamblers and pickpockets from the Bronx, the Guzmanns were becoming a tribe of pimps. They had entered Isaac’s borough to find chicken bait, thirteen-year-olds, all of them white, and Isaac vowed to drive the Guzmanns out of Manhattan. He stationed his men at the bus terminals to frustrate their ability to snatch young girls. “Wadsworth, are the Guzmanns paying me back?”

  “Na,” Wadsworth said, showing his pale lip. “The Guzmanns have feelings. They wouldn’t hit on your mother. They’d come direct to you.” The deep red of his pupils burned in the dusty air of the Tivoli; Isaac had to look away from Wadsworth’s eyes. Wadsworth said, “Try Amerigo.”

  “Why would Amerigo come after me?”

  “He’s been grumbling, Isaac, that’s all I know. He thinks you’re sleeping with the FBI’s.”

  “Wadsworth, that’s office politics. The First Dep has to be polite. We use their labs sometimes. But Newgate’s a dummy. Why would I sleep with him?”

  “Don’t explain it to me, man. Save it for Amerigo.”

  Isaac blinked in the raw sunlight outside the Tivoli. He was a cop who wasn’t used to caves. He scowled at Inspector Pimloe’s theories on the lollipop gang. His office had come up with shit, stupid shit. Pimloe brought Isaac a gallery of hobos and talked of random attacks. Isaac had other ideas about these lollipops. They scared Ida, his fiancée, raided his hangout on Essex Street, and beat up his mother in a single night. They wanted Isaac to get the news. Could Amerigo Genussa be their benefactor, the man who fingered Isaac, and supplied the kids with masks and all-day suckers?

  Amerigo was president of the Garibaldi social club and the padrone of Mulberry Street. Before he went into real estate and bought up a sixth of Little Italy, he’d been a miraculous chef. He had to give up the Caffè da Amerigo to supervise his holdings and safeguard the streets. The Puerto Ricans were making inroads, Chinamen were grabbing vacant buildings north of Canal, but Amerigo had kept out the blacks. His hirelings liked to boast that their mammas and girlfriends couldn’t see a black face a half mile around the Garibaldi social club, unless it belonged to a cop, or an FBI man.