Isaac shoved a helping of walnuts and anchovies into the nearest bowl. His hand came out stiffened with egg white. The Garibaldis glowered from their tables. The landlord smiled.
“Play, Isaac. You can be the new macaroni man. No cock-sucker’s going to provoke me into a fight The City pays you to kill. Wait … be careful at the corners, Inspector. You could get run over by a bicycle thief.”
Isaac couldn’t blame Amerigo too much. The landlord had to avenge the old people of Little Italy for the trespasses of Rupert Weil. But Isaac wouldn’t tolerate baboons peering into the windows of Puerto Rican and Jewish grocers. The snow was thickening on Mulberry Street An enormous Chrysler cruised behind Isaac. The Chief scowled at the car.
“Brodsky, who told you to hang a tail on me?”
The chauffeur stuck his head outside the Chrysler to gape at Isaac and spit a few words into the snow. “Chief, the dispatcher’s been paging you for fifteen minutes. Wadsworth bought it in the neck.”
“With a slug?” Isaac said, getting into the limousine.
“Isaac, there aint a hole in the nigger’s body. It must have been a crowbar.”
The Chrysler hugged the ground with the help of Brodsky’s miracle “snowshoes,” tires that could climb walls and stick to any ceiling. They weaved around ordinary sluggish automobiles and arrived at the Tivoli Theatre in under ten minutes. The theatre had already been roped off. Patrolmen in high galoshes and yellow raincoats kept civilians outside the rope and planted “crime scene” placards behind the ticket booth. Brodsky had to hold his belly while he ducked under the rope. The lobby was swollen with homicide boys and “crows” from the Chief of Detectives’ office. Isaac paddled between them. He didn’t have to fish for the corpse. Isaac’s milky nigger was huddled over a chair in the middle of the orchestra, surrounded by a small band of detectives. He had a blue hump where his neck was broken. His eyes stared out of his skull. His tongue was in his shoulder. “Jesus,” Brodsky said, with the taste of puke in his nose. He put his hand over his mouth and ran for a drink of water, his trousers falling to his knees. The chauffeur had flowered underpants. The skin on his thighs was pale white. One of the detectives turned to Isaac.
“Any ideas, Chief?”
“No,” Isaac said.
“I thought the little nigger belonged to you.”
“So what,” Isaac growled. “Get him into a goddamn body bag. I don’t want him lying around like that.”
“Isaac, have a heart We can’t interrupt the investigation. We’ll bag him soon as we can.”
The police photographer was on his knees snapping pictures of Wadsworth from different angles. Two “latent” experts dusted the chairs in Wadsworth’s row. The man from “forensic” was busy chalking the outline of Wadsworth’s body, the exact fall of his arms and legs. Isaac had scant respect for these laboratory freaks. Chalk marks made pretty clues, but they couldn’t sniff out a murderer for you. Brodsky came back from the water fountain. He whispered in Isaac’s ear. “It was a crowbar. I’m telling you. You can’t twist a human being like that without a piece of iron. Look, they gave him a hunchback.”
Isaac couldn’t see the bite of any metal; Wadsworth had no scrapes on his neck. The “crowbar” was Jorge Guzmann’s elbow. He walked out of the Tivoli, Brodsky chasing after him. “Isaac, don’t leave me behind.”
“Why not? I don’t need you until tomorrow.”
The chauffeur shuffled on the sidewalk. “Isaac, what should I do?”
“Talk to yourself. Sit in the car. Read a porno book.”
Isaac trudged to Tenth Avenue in search of Zorro’s great-uncle Tomás, the haberdasher who dealt in seconds and thirds. The snow had begun to penetrate Isaac’s shoes; their tongues were growing wet. The haberdasher had a tight cellar door. Isaac wouldn’t fiddle with locks today. He toppled the door with a heave of his shoulder. Zuckerdorff wasn’t alone. A Puerto Rican gunsel sat with him, a killer from Boston Road. Isaac raised the gunsel by the tufts of his sideburns, carried him around the cellar until a rusty pistol and a roll of quarters in a handkerchief spilled out of the gunsel’s shirt Then he placed him gingerly at Zuckerdorff’s feet. The gunsel was in agony. He had a torn scalp from this loco policía. “You pull on my brain, man? You crazy motherfucker.” Isaac booted him behind Zuckerdorff’s chair.
The haberdasher put his head in his lap, leaving Isaac to stare at blue veins on a chiseled skull. He’s older than my father, Isaac realized. The Chief hid his compassion from Zuckerdorff. “Uncle Tomás, your grandnephews have committed atrocities in my borough. They murder innocent men. If Zorro wanted a neck to crack, he should have come to me.”
Isaac couldn’t vent his fury on blue veins. He attacked Zuckerdorff’s haberdashery boxes, kicking them with his snowy shoes. The boxes crumpled around Isaac; he buried the gunsel under a pile of smashed lids. Zuckerdorff didn’t move. Isaac stubbed his toes. He found no murderers inside a box. Isaac was the guilty one. He fed Wadsworth to the Guzmanns. He allowed his own feud with Zorro to compromise his stoolie. He’d forced Wadsworth to reveal a piece of informa tion that could only point back to him. Like a schmuck, a police animal, he’d turned Wadsworth into expendable merchandise. The Chief was through with boxes. He lacked his way out of Zuckerdorff’s cellar showroom.
Ida wasn’t fickle with her best customers. She put paprika in their cottage cheese. But her mind wasn’t on blintzes and petty cash. She forgot to shave the celery stalks. The spinach bled into the egg salad tray. The dollar bills sitting in the register turned orange from paprika thumbs. The dairy restaurant wasn’t used to such shabby tricks. What could Ida’s bosses do? They were helpless without this horsey girl.
Ida Stutz was seeing snow, not pishy water, a mean Manhattan trickle, but dark Russian snow, the kind that could swallow lampposts and suffocate a pack of wild dogs. The Ludlow Street professors had to blow into their split-pea soup. None of them could get Ida out of the window. The girl had her nose in the glass. Let her dream, the professors advised. She’ll get pains in her calves. And then we’ll have our Ida. They smiled when Ida shook, tearing at the flesh on her hips. They figured she was coming back to them. It wasn’t so. Ida saw a face on the other side of the glass, the face of an uptown savage, with harsh lips and rubber cheeks, a chin that dandled in and out of a bullish neck, piggling eyes, and a pumpkin’s ingrown ears. Ida ran out of the restaurant.
“Isaac, did you lose something uptown? Maybe your life?”
She didn’t think a man could sweat with snow in the air. The Chief was burning up. Ida scrutinized him. Poor inspector, he has engines that work overtime. “Where are you going, Isaac? That isn’t the way to Rivington Street”
Do powerful engines make you dumb? The Chief kept marching towards Broome Street “Your place,” he mumbled with his big teeth.
“Isaac, how come?”
“Marilyn has a guest”
Ida fell in behind hurt She wasn’t frail. She had her own combustion machine. “God bless that Marilyn of yours, is she keeping company again? A fourth husband?”
“No. I put him there. One of my detectives. Coen.”
Ida didn’t enjoy his abbreviated talk Does a simple “Coen” solve everything? She knew about this handsome cop. Why was he throwing Blue Eyes at his daughter? She couldn’t pluck more words out of him. The Chief had sinking shoulders. She tried to take him by the hand. He slapped at her fingers, Isaac the snarling bear. “I can walk,” he said. She’d have to feed him honey at home.
Ida lived on the sixth floor. The Chief was hugging bannisters. He could be exhausted by a flight of stairs. Ida pushed. The Chief arrived on her doorstep. She poked her key in the lock. Ida didn’t bother with herself. She fixed a tub for Isaac, with perfumed bubble water from a town in Roumania. It said so on the box. She undiessed him, got him out of his slipover, sharkskin trousers, and holster straps. She tested the bath with a whirling finger under the bubbles. She sat him down in the tub. She combed his sideburns. She brushed his teeth with th
e clear toothpaste that came as a sample in yesterday’s mail. She couldn’t find Isaac’s scrotum. The Chief was shriveled up. He blinked at her with a hooded eye.
“Take off your sweater, Ida. It’s warm in here.”
She brought him brown honey in a tablespoon. Isaac took the honey in one lick. He rose out of the tub, refreshed. Was the bear ready to dance? Sweet Isaac, he had foam on his pectorals. Ida blotted him with the inside of her sweater. The Chief was playing with her clothes. Buttons snapped under the pressure of a thick hand. Isaac was into her cups; he could nurse a nipple as well as any other man. The brassiere dangled at her side. Isaac was on his knees. He had her navel in his mouth. The suction on her belly produced an incredible shiver. Ida couldn’t hold on to her legs. She crashed into him. He fell back with Ida, but he wouldn’t come out from her belly. Ida thought she would have to pee. Her thighs contracted with the force of a mule. She couldn’t throw the Chief.
“Don’t stop, Isaac. Please don’t stop.” But she could feel his mouth begin to drift. Her belly was no longer occupied. He wouldn’t graze her with his tongue, nuzzle the walls of her chest. It was Isaac’s turn to shiver. The bear had blood between his toes. Uptown bruises? She should have explored him better in the tub. Ida wasn’t alarmed. She would rub off the anxious spots. She stroked the bumps of skin behind his ears.
15.
THE prisoners’ ward at Bellevue suffered a whiteout. Its windows were going blind. Snow packed into the spaces between the grilles, and froze to wood and glass. Stanley Chin was tripping out on the hard blinks of snow in the windows. Rupert Weil was full of shit. Only a tilted brain would compare Hong Kong with New York. There were no white storms in Kowloon. None of the orderlies would lend him a cigarette. They were asking fifty cents a smoke. Stanley wouldn’t trade with robber barons. He had a quarter in his pajama pocket. He wished Blue Eyes would come back.
The ping-pong table was growing bald without Detective Coen. The net had droops in its bottom line. The balls were getting yellow. A shrill song from the edge of the ward drove Stanley into the slats of his hospital crib. The noise was spooking him. He hadn’t heard a telephone ring since yesterday night. Bellevue was supposed to be snowbound. “Hey Chico,” he said to the orderly on call inside the prisoners’ room. “You told me nobody could get through. What’s happening?”
“I dunno,” the orderly snapped. His eyes were red from staring into blind windows too long. “Maybe it’s the Holy Spirit.”
The orderly picked up the phone. “Yeah, yeah … speak louder, huh?” He plucked a portable wheelchair from the wall, opened it, climbed in, and wheeled himself to Stanley’s crib. “The ding-a-ling, it’s for you.”
“Who is it?”
The orderly laughed. “Your favorite boy. Blue Eyes. You got luck with that cop. You must be a special customer.”
The orderly lowered the slats, but he wouldn’t give the wheelchair over to Stanley. “Let him wait. You don’t want him to think you’re an easy lay.”
“Chico, I got a quarter in my pocket. Take it, and push me to the telephone.”
The orderly reached into Stanley’s pajamas, stroked the quarter, flushed it out, and made Stanley climb into his lap. He paddled them both around the ward at a reckless clip, bumping off bedposts, shaving walls, heckling the other prisoners, who were groggy with snow, then slid out of the wheelchair, and left Stanley with the phone in his elbow. Stanley had to dig with the side of his face to clutch the earpiece. “Mr. Coen?”
He heard a horrible buzz, scratching that had a murderous resonance against his jaw. Then a giggle came through the wire. “It’s me.”
“Rupe?” Stanley was befuddled, but he turned away from the orderly to shield the voice of this crazy giggler. “Chico said it was Blue Eyes.”
“Schmuck, how could I give my real name? Would they let Rupert Weil call Bellevue? Blue Eyes gets you anywhere.”
The static began to suck at Stanley’s cheek. “Rupe, the hospital’s closed to the world. They can’t find milk for the babies. The nurses go ’round asking prisoners for blood. How’d you make the call?”
“With my middle finger. You know another way to dial?”
“Don’t sound on me, Rupe. I got warts in my ear from the telephone.”
“Ah, I’ll pull you out of that dump. Not today. I’m running errands for my father.”
“Who does errands in a storm?”
“I’m going to fuck Lady Marilyn.”
Stanley burrowed his head into the earpiece. “Rupe, what’d you say?”
“I’m going to fuck Isaac’s daughter … in the face.”
The phone spilled out of Stanley’s elbow and knocked into the wall. “Chico, could you bend down for a guy?”
The orderly scooped up the phone. “Hey man, send Blue Eyes a kiss and say goodbye.”
Stanley grabbed with his cheek; the static could burn holes in a boy’s mouth. He dropped the telephone. Rupert wasn’t there. The orderly dumped him into the crib. “Chico, write a message for me … please. It’s important.”
“Write it yourself. We got a union, man. I aint your slave.”
Stanley wagged his plaster mittens. “Would I bother you if I could write? … I’ll give you a dollar.”
“I touched your pocket, man. You aint got no green.”
“I’ll owe it to you. Don’t be scared. Blue Eyes will pay.”
The orderly leered at him. “Is Coen into sponsoring rats?” He unclipped his ballpoint pen, twirled it in his mouth for a second, and started doodling on the back of a hospital menu. “What’s the message?”
Stanley was reluctant to recite his dread to the orderly, but he had no choice; he couldn’t buy wheels to Manfred Coen. He hadn’t been asleep at St. Bartholomew’s. The detectives who guarded him reviled Coen. They also hated Isaac and his daughter, whom they called a skinny cunt. Stanley learned from them that Blue Eyes was in love with Marilyn. He wouldn’t snitch on Rupert, but he didn’t want Coen’s girlfriend to die. So he dictated to the orderly: “Dear Detective Coen, please watch out for Marilyn the Wild. She’ll be in big trouble if she opens her door tonight. Sincerely, Stanley Chin.”
The orderly scratched out an I.O.U. Clamping the pen to Stanley’s mitten, he forced him to sign his name. The signature was a series of bumps. “It goes to Police Headquarters,” Stanley said. “Blue Eyes will pay you more than a dollar.”
The orderly smiled. Leaving Stanley, he shoved the message through a slot in the prisoners’ iron door, placed his tongue in the peephole, and whispered to the guard on the other side of the door. “Freddy, you see that paper. Stuff it in the toilet, fast. It’s a poison-pen note from the lollipop gang.”
The orderly had a horselaugh behind his fist. He wasn’t worried about the I.O.U. Stanley would have to pay up with a little skin, blood, or Bellevue chocolate pudding.
Rupert was stuck inside a telephone booth at the corner of Essex and Grand. A quartet of goons from Little Italy, fellows in long coats who had been stalking Rupert for a good two weeks, drifting in and out of grocery stores, restaurants, and horseradish stalls, eating bialys and kosher pickles, were standing on a snowbank in front of the booth. They rubbed shoulders to stay warm. All four of them carried odd bits of Amerigo Genussa’s plumbing tools: lead pipes to pin back Rupert’s ears, a metal snake to twist out his eyes, wrenches and screwdrivers to play with nostrils and lips. Rupert cursed his rotten luck. He’d have to huddle in the booth until the goons picked another snowbank. Rupert had no shirt on under the coat he had stolen from the housing police; his nipples were about to freeze to the lining.
He dialed Headquarters to badger Isaac before the goons disappeared; he got a recorded voice that whispered husky things to him. Rupert couldn’t understand a word. He had weapons in his pocket: a fork, a spoon, a blunted can opener. They were sharp enough to go under the skin of a woman’s neck. He would undaughter Isaac with the push of a spoon.
“Mister, once in your life you’ll know what it means t
o lose.”
Rupert held no grudge against Lady Marilyn. Being Isaac’s daughter was a question of circumstance; her one misfortune was Isaac himself. And Marilyn would have to pay for that. Rupert was no ordinary butcher; Philip’s boy wouldn’t have been able to bleed a duck, or a cow. But he had to take something from Isaac that was more valuable to him than his own police inspector’s skin. Rupert wasn’t unmerciful. He would bleed Marilyn faster than Isaac had bled Philip and Mordecai, and the whole East Side.
Rupert had all the cunning of an Essex Street coyote. From the stairwells and soft walls of abandoned buildings he learned how to live on the fly. He always kept a source of nourishment somewhere on his body. Ruffling his coat, he pulled a yellow lollipop out of the sleeve. Esther had been addicted to lollipops, and he caught his sweet tooth from her. He watched the gorillas on the snowbank and manufactured some yellow spit. The lollipop disabled him; yellow spit could only suck up images of Esther. Enclosed in a booth, with a candy brick in his cheek, he flashed on Esther’s bosoms. He was smelling Esther Rose, feeling the stripes of fuzz on her back. He had to crumble the lollipop, or go silly in the head.
He jumped out of the booth. The shivering of the door must have reached the snowbank. The gorillas turned their heads. They were much too cold to make a significant leap. Girding themselves, they began to plod after a hopping overcoat.
Mordecai Schapiro faced snowstorms with cucumber slices, schnapps, and a lick of salt. These were the limits of his appetite. He was grieving over his daughter Honey, who couldn’t stop running away from him. Would she catch pneumonia in such a thick porridge of snow, with her short skirts and flimsy stockings? Why should he kid himself? His daughter was a whore. She walked the streets in all kinds of weather. A strict professional, she even had a manager, a pimp with a silk handkerchief, Mordecai supposed, and a card saying she was free of the crabs. The schnapps mingled with the salt on his tongue, and the cucumber eased his bitterness, the pain of a father who felt mislaid.
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