Paradise Man

by Jerome Charyn

  “What?”

  “How can I dress you with your clothes on. Take them off.”

  “In front of the girl?”

  “Holden, she must have seen men in their underpants. I guarantee you. She’s quite mature.”

  Holden got undressed and stood around in his socks and shorts, like a doll in the window. Goldie gave him a silk shirt. The silk sent shivers along his spine. The tailor himself knotted Holden’s tie. Then he took a blue Beretta out of a bag and attached the gun to Holden with its leather cup. And he dressed Holden in a dark wool suit that was made to wear with this gun. Holden saw himself in the mirror. The suit hugged his skeleton like some armor of skin out of the Middle Ages, and there wasn’t the hint of a holster under Goldie’s wool.

  Goldie had draped him like Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the best-dressed man in the world. London elite, Goldie called it. Wine-colored shoes and a display handkerchief that cost twice as much as a hat. Holden couldn’t walk in off the street and visit Doug Jr.’s tailors. He had to depend on Goldie to steal the tailors’ styles. Goldie had a carton of patterns from all the best shops. The classiest tailors didn’t have a public address. Would lords and earls wander into the marketplace with wild, anonymous men? The quality of a tailor was determined by who he wouldn’t dress.

  “Goldie, what about the kid?”

  “Offer her to Mrs. Howard.”

  “I don’t get it. She’s not a nursemaid.”

  “That’s the point. Nobody will know where to look.”

  Mrs. Howard was a widow who’d once worked in the shop. She’d been a tailor up in Harlem with some tough gang, but she fled St. Nicholas Avenue years ago to stick pins in trouser cuffs for Goldie. She’d dress Holden when Goldie was ill. She’d had as good a hand as Goldie himself but she suffered from arthritis and could no longer grab a needle or a pin. Holden hid his file cards with Mrs. Howard, and the record books of the spies he carried. Holden had to keep spies, or he couldn’t have lasted. He’d almost been killed twice on a poisoned contract. His rats had saved him. And she ran them for Holden on her telephone line. She’d become Holden’s answering service. He hadn’t bought her loyalty. He loved her. She’d lived with his dad for a while. She was the only one of his father’s women he’d ever liked.

  He walked out of Goldie’s with the Marielita, her lollipop, and his quarter million and took a cab to Mrs. Howard, who kept a flat on Oliver Street across from the old mariner’s church. She had her own back yard, with pigeon coops and a tiny barn for neighborhood cats. She wore a holster, like Holden, and the same blue Beretta, because he didn’t want anyone to surprise her in that yard, not a thief, or one of Holden’s enemies.

  He rang three times and let himself in with his key. Mrs. Howard was waiting for Holden. Goldie must have phoned ahead. She had pudding for the Marielita. She was tall as Holden, a beautiful black bitch with arthritis. Holden wished she’d shed a generation somewhere. He’d have married her then. His own marriage had left him with a fist inside his heart.

  “Holden, that’s one hell of a suit.”

  “Cost three thousand for the pattern alone. Goldie uses expensive gyp artists ... Loretta, will you mind the girl? She was part of that trick in—”

  “You don’t have to explain. She’s a lovely creature, Holden. We’ll do fine.”

  “There’ll be an extra allowance ... for the girl and everything.”

  Her eyes tightened, and he recalled how angry she could get at his dad. She was Holden’s dream girl when he was twelve. She’d parade in her panties and high heels, and he’d want to disappear into her flesh. He hated his father for having her. And hated him more when his father ditched her after a drunken brawl. She’d wanted to take Holden, and his father threw her down the stairs. That instant of Loretta flying, her long legs kicking out at random, stayed with Holden.

  “Shut up about money,” she said. And he was that unhappy child again, mourning the loss of Loretta Howard.

  “Any messages, Mrs. H.?”

  “Nothing important,” she said.

  The Marielita spooned her pudding, oblivious of him. Don’t forget dada, he almost said. He kissed Mrs. H. on the mouth, felt her gun against his heart, while the Marielita looked at dada once with her leopard eyes and returned to the pudding with a pledge of chocolate on her mouth.

  3

  IT WAS NEAR MIDNIGHT when Holden arrived at the fur market. The streets were black around Seventh. The storefront gates were locked on West Twenty-ninth. Holden had to ring for the watchman. He took the elevator up to Aladdin Furs, toyed with the alarm, and walked in. He could see the factory lights. His partner, Nick Tiel, was preparing for the Paris show. Nick hired fur cutters who went into the gloom with him. The cutters were faithful to Nick. Holden saw to that. One cutter, who’d waltzed off with a paper sleeve, was found with a bullet in his head.

  It was a business where everybody stole. Manufacturers, cutters, mannequins, office boys. Nick Tiel didn’t care about the sables.

  He could survive the loss of a few dozen skins. But he guarded every scribble. No one could enter the designer’s room without a nod from Nick. He was the most inventive designer in New York. The company whirled around Nick Tiel. He controlled the cutters, design assistants, salesmen, some of the buyers themselves. He could always anticipate a shift in the market. He was months ahead of other manufacturers’ lines. But Nick had been knocked senseless by a gang of Greeks when he’d first come into the business. And he never quite recovered from that beating. He’d fall down after one of his flurries, and Holden had to fit him together again. Holden was his gun and his glue. He guarded Nick when the madness appeared, kept him away from people, or Nick would have offered his designs to any beggar, and sold his company to the Greeks.

  The Greeks had more than half the fur market to themselves, but they couldn’t contend with Nick’s genius to marshal a company for an important show. The Greeks were waiting for Nick to fall and not have Holden around. But Holden was always there.

  It might have been a marriage. Nick Tiel was president, Holden was senior vice president and service man. And Holden’s services went beyond sables in a drawer. He killed people for Aladdin Furs. That was the complication. Nick had another partner. He owned Aladdin with Bruno Schatz, a Swisser who lived in Paris and was eighty years old. Schatz scheduled Holden’s calendar of hits. Holden and Nick barked and wore the best clothes, but they were the Swisser’s slaves. It irked them, but they didn’t have the capital or the connections without Schatz. They would have been adrift in a universe of Greeks.

  Holden caught Nick Tiel eating a sandwich in the designer’s room with a team of cutters around him. They’d completed half a coat. Nick would never allow the same cutters to see a whole design. He himself was the joiner, the ultimate pattern man. “Kids,” he said. The cutters were as old as Nick Tiel. “There’s no money in couture. You’re much better off putting your money in shoelaces than sables.”

  The cutters agreed, but they’d have sold their sisters for Nick Tiel’s ability to design a coat. And they were all snobs. Nick abused them, but they were sable cutters, princes of the line.

  “Go into laces,” he said and dismissed the cutters, ordered them out of the designer’s room.

  When a coat was very important, Nick lured Goldie uptown, because a thief like Goldie would never steal from him. Goldie would pin the canvas model onto the designer dummy, and Nick Tiel could walk around the dummy and imagine it in sable.

  He offered Holden half his sandwich. “How was it in Queens?”

  “Satisfactory,” Holden said, dumping the vinyl bag on Nick Tiel’s table.

  “That’s no answer. Give me a nibble. Did the woman have a moustache? Did she make you?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “ ’Course she’s dead. That was the idea ... any particular problems?”

  “No.”

  Holden had a sliver of Nick’s ham. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

  “I’ll give you somethi
ng to dream about ... your next case.”

  “I thought I’m going to Paris tomorrow with your prelims.” Holden always brought Nick’s patterns to the Swisser before the Paris fair.

  “Something came up,” Nick said. “You’ll have to cancel the flight.”

  “What could be as important as prelims?”

  “Abruzzi’s daughter-in-law.”

  “What the hell is she to Nick Tiel?”

  “I love you, Holden, but don’t you ever watch the tube? She was kidnapped this morning.”

  “Who would be crazy enough to kidnap a district attorney’s daughter-in-law?”

  “The Pinzolo brothers,” Nick Tiel said.

  Paul Abruzzi was the grand old man of Queens. He was waiting for the right judgeship to come along. Meanwhile he hunted the Mafia in his own county. He’d begun to make a stink about an undiscovered tribe of garbagemen, the Pinzolos, whom he liked to call the Sixth Mafia Family.

  Holden yawned. “I’m going to bed.”

  “You ran with those imbeciles once upon a time.”

  “I did not. I went to high school with Mike Pinzolo. We were friends. And why are you so sure Red Mike grabbed the Abruzzi bitch?”

  “I’m not sure. But it makes sense. He’s a Pinzolo. His father is in jail. The family suffers from malnutrition and a million other diseases. They’re out of their heads.”

  “Nick, I’m not buying this one. I took the Parrot. I’ll have my rest. I don’t do anything back to back. It’s a bad policy.”

  “You’ve been sworn to it, Holden. By the Swisser.”

  “Fuck him. I’m going to bed.” Holden walked out of the designer room, past the nailing boards of silver foxes and sables, that marvelous assembly of skins he’d never understand. A fur coat was a miracle to him. Skin upon skin, like the perfect bolting of a bat’s wing. He went into an office with his name on the glass. S. HOLDEN, VICE PRESIDENT. The S. was for Sidney. But no one had ever called him that. He was Holden at home, Holden at school, Holden in this fur factory.

  The office was a huge loft, with windows over Manhattan. Holden moved in here after his marriage broke up. He was still in love with his wife. He’d found her in the showroom at Aladdin Furs. She was a mannequin who belonged to Nick Tiel. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She called herself Andrushka. She was seventeen, and she was sleeping with half the buyers. Holden went crazy. He’d just turned twenty-seven. He was the boy wonder who’d been bumping people for nine years. He walked up and down the showroom with deep splits in his forehead. The buyers fled from Andrushka.

  “Mister,” she said, “who are you and what do you want?”

  “I’m Holden, vice president.”

  “Well, Holden, vice president, you’re scaring my best customers away.”

  She was a little taller than Holden liked, and built like a twig, but her hair was wild, and she wasn’t like the other mannequins, who traveled the circuit of showrooms with a bored, lascivious look. This Andrushka had a rough innocence. She probably loved every man who bought her a meal. Holden didn’t dare mention marriage. She’d start screaming.

  “So talk?” she said, painting her eyes.

  “I’m one of your bosses.”

  “I’ve got lots of bosses, Holden, vice president.”

  “I’d like to take you to lunch.”

  “Salami and cheese?” she asked.

  “No. Caravelle, if we can get in. Or Lutèce.”

  “I’ve been there,” she said. “All the men stare down my tits.”

  She had no tits. But Holden wouldn’t call her a liar.

  “Then what would you prefer?”

  “The kosher deli on Twenty-ninth.”

  “They won’t serve you salami and cheese.”

  “They will if I ask for separate sandwiches.”

  He took her to the kosher deli and she wondered why in the middle of the twelve o’clock rush, with furriers everywhere, Holden got a table.

  “I remember now... you’re the bumper.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I listen,” she said.

  They were married in three weeks. Holden had to doctor her birth certificate, because Andrushka had no legal guardian, and she was a lousy minor. Her real name was Ann Rosshoven. The Russian princess had been born in Green Bay.

  They lasted two and a half years. Andrushka ran to Europe before she was twenty. She married the Swisser without divorcing Holden. He dreamt of murdering them both. But it was one hit that would never happen. He lay down and watched The Deer Hunter on his video machine. Then he started Destry Rides Again.

  The phone rang at five in the morning. He recognized the wind and static of a European call.

  “Holden, are you up?”

  “Wait,” he said. “I’ll turn off the cassette.”

  The machine froze on Marlene Dietrich’s face.

  “What can I do for you, Swiss?”

  “It’s a pity you’ll have to postpone Paris for a while. Somebody’s daughter is missing. And you’ve been elected to locate her.”

  “I elect my own projects, Swiss. There’s too much notoriety attached to this one. I might disappear after the package has been returned.”

  “Your safety’s been assured,” the Swisser said.

  “Too bad.”

  “Holden ...”

  “What?”

  “You’re an original, and I tolerate your bad manners and all your moods. But I’ve promised you, Holden. And I can’t go back on my word. You’re invaluable to this project.”

  His head throbbed. Where the hell is Andie, he thought, his Andrushka, wearing silks with an eighty-year-old man?

  “I’m freelance, Swiss. That was our bargain. I can say no.”

  “Not when it involves the lives of our friends.”

  Holden understood the Swisser’s Morse code. The Mafia didn’t like the idea of Italian mavericks stealing a district attorney’s daughter-in-law. It killed their bargaining power with all the U.S. attorneys who were after their skin. The Pinzolos were making the Mafia look like pigs.

  “Why can’t our friends use their own material? They have the best merchandise in town.”

  “Don’t play dumb with me, Holden. They can’t afford the publicity right now.”

  Was Andrushka undressed? What time was it in Paris? One in the afternoon? She wouldn’t rise before two.

  “I’ll think about it, Swiss. I had a hard afternoon.”

  “There’ll be a bonus. That bundle you were carrying. Half of it is yours.”

  The Swisser was nuts. A hundred and twenty-five thousand for some bitch no one had heard about until today? The best Mafia piece man would have done it for free in honor of his padrone. And they had to reach for Holden. Because they couldn’t get near the wild man, Red Mike, and his brothers.

  “Swiss,” Holden said through that wind in the wire. “We have a problem. I can’t go in wearing a mask. The daughter will see my face and tell the district attorney.”

  “No harm in that, Holden. He won’t disturb whatever angel brings her out.”

  “What about the other side? I’ll have a family of crazies on my back once it’s finished.”

  “That family doesn’t have much of a future. The garbagemen will go to their graves. The daughter’s the ticklish thing. We can’t have her damaged. We need some custom work.”

  The wind cracked in Holden’s ear and the line went dead.

  He didn’t think about daughters-in-law. Not even the Pinzolos he’d have to kill. He thought about the man with Andrushka, eighty years, and that Swisser would outlive Holden.

  He tapped his video machine and Dietrich’s face unfroze. She was round and lovely, not like that twig he’d married. Destry Rides Again.

  4

  HOLDEN GOT OUT OF BED at noon. He didn’t need a file card on Red Mike Pinzolo. He’d had target practice with Mike and his brothers, Eddie and Rat, a month ago. They used the old police range at Rodman’s Neck. An Italian detective was always smuggling
them in. Mike was the family’s main enforcer. He controlled half the garbage routes in Queens. He’d walk into some restaurant and kill a rival with thirty men and women eating around him. All the witnesses went dumb. Abruzzi couldn’t indict him. But Mike’s father, a kindly old man who fed Holden gnocchi he’d made with his own hands, was caught trying to strangle a bartender who happened to be an undercover dick. Red Mike considered that unfair. Two of his sisters had been fingerprinted and shoved inside a detention cell. Mike wanted Abruzzi to understand the insult of having your father and your sisters fondled by cops.

  A neighbor had once stolen Mike’s parking spot. He brooded for a month and then shot the man’s home with a submachine gun. It was this romantic, Red Mike, who had the district attorney’s daughter-in-law.

  Holden began seeing her picture in the papers. Fay Abruzzi, who’d gone to Swarthmore College with Abruzzi’s boy. She was a year younger than Holden, thirty-six. She’d been a sociologist until she had her second child. Red Mike had plucked her off the streets of Manhattan. The Post called her the Vanishing Ph.D.

  She wasn’t Holden’s type. She wore eyeglasses and her figure was much too full. He almost sympathized with Red Mike. But it was a stupid act. Crooks should leave civilians alone.

  Holden went to his spies. It took six days to uncover Red Mike. The idiot had brought Abruzzi’s daughter-in-law to a house in Far Rockaway, a half-deserted stretch of summer bungalows. Holden didn’t have to wonder why he’d found Red Mike. The cops and all the Mafia families were helping his spies. It should have been a honeymoon hit. But he was too damn fond of Mike.

  He rode out to the Rockaways in a Lincoln that was registered to a dairy farm in Pennsylvania. Goldie had come along. He was Holden’s package man. He provided guns as well as silk ties. Holden couldn’t trust some kid with a suitcase of hot guns to sell. Goldie’s guns came out of a freezer that couldn’t be traced. They were assembled for Holden, custom-built. Goldie himself buffed and filed each grip. Because Holden’s life would depend on how he pulled.