Paradise Man

by Jerome Charyn

  “But you told me it’s dangerous.” Every time his chauffeur had come for her, and she’d gone to the Algonquin to visit Paul, he’d said how dangerous it was to live on Tenth Avenue, how she could get swallowed up, or disappear, and he was kissing her all the while he said that, standing in his undershirt at the Algonquin, and she could sniff Eau Sauvage on him, because he had aristocratic tastes for a district attorney, and she didn’t trust him on the subject of Sidney Holden.

  “It is dangerous. This is Holden’s craphouse. And his enemies might mistake you for his new secretary ... can I come in, or should we have a little chat in front of Holden’s neighbors?”

  “There aren’t any neighbors,” she said. “I haven’t seen a soul.”

  But he’d already stepped inside and he took the gun out of her hand and undid that leather stocking as if he were removing her bra. He sat her down at the kitchen table with his Christian Dior perfume and she served him crackers that must have been in storage for a year, because that’s how Holden lived, like a man who went from bunker to bunker, and she preferred those crackers to steak au poivre at Mansions or Mortimer’s. Paul chewed the crackers. He didn’t mention the Algonquin, didn’t declare his need for her. He hadn’t come to kiss her in his Cadillac.

  “Holden,” he said. “You can’t stay here.”

  “I don’t understand you, Paul.”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Did you hurt him?”

  “I made you a promise. I’d protect your little frog.”

  “He’s not a frog,” Fay said, but she understood the world according to a district attorney. Paul would pounce on Sidney soon as he could. But he couldn’t pounce and keep her. So he planned Sidney’s destruction in his offices, mapped whole routes for getting at Sidney, but the routes were no good, because he couldn’t work Fay into his plans.

  “You’ll have to go back to Rex,” he said, like a father-in-law who hadn’t dug under her dress in the back seat of his Cadillac.

  “I’ll wait for Sidney here.”

  “He’s wounded ...”

  “Take me to him.”

  She clutched at Paul.

  “I can’t take you,” he said. “Holden’s with some African priests. They sacrifice chickens, drink the blood.”

  “You can find anybody, Paul. No one escapes you and your squad.”

  “We’re talking about madmen,” he said, “Mariels. They have tattoos inside their mouths. They’ll blow your head off if you look at them the wrong way.”

  She had no idea what Sidney did outside of killing people and collecting bad debts. “What’s Sidney doing with Mariels?”

  “He was guarding one of their saints.”

  “Barbara? She’s just a little girl. Sidney didn’t talk about her much. I thought she was some kind of a niece. She helped me with the cooking. She sang to herself ...”

  It was beginning to start, the nervous chatter that possessed her when she was excited or upset. She’d talk like that in the Cadillac, and Paul must have known that her mind was elsewhere, not with him. “I’m waiting. Sidney will come back.”

  “I told you. He’s gone. And his enemies are prowling all over.”

  “Then it’s simple,” she said. “Have one of your detectives sit with me. I’ll be safe.”

  “I can’t get involved. I’m not a small-town sheriff.” His mouth twisted into a sad grin. “And you’re a mother. You have two children at home.”

  Good old Paul. He couldn’t use the children against her. “They’re in Arizona,” she said. “Adrianne is. I forgot where Tina went.”

  “They’ve been home for a month.”

  “Rex can feed them. We have a maid.”

  She was the cruel one now. Paul was crazy about the girls. He chauffeured them everywhere in his Cadillac, delivered them to department stores with his siren on, stood them in front of mirrors while he proceeded to buy out the store. It was Paul who dressed them, Paul who took them to the dentist, because he loved them and he had this terrible guilt about his courtship of their mother in the Cadillac.

  “If you don’t come with me,” Paul said, “I’ll bring Adrianne and Tina on my next trip to Tenth Avenue. They’ll love Sidney. He can take them on target practice, go with them into the woods ... if he ever comes out of Cuban country alive.”

  “And what should I tell them about their grandpa? That he paws me in hotel rooms, puts his hand on my ass while we’re listening to Beethoven.”

  His hand started to shake. It wasn’t some kind of miserable palsy. It was punishment for loving a woman who couldn’t love him back. “Fay,” he said, “either you walk with me, or you get carried.”

  She watched herself in Holden’s mirror. Her face curled like an enigmatic cat. And Paul couldn’t interpret her looks, even if he’d had all his pathologists in the room.

  “Carry me, Paul. Carry me down into the street, shove me into your car and put me under the rug, like Michael did.”

  “What Michael?”

  “Michael. Red Mike.”

  “I won’t discuss that son of a bitch.”

  “Why not? Sidney thinks you set it up for Michael to kidnap me.”

  “I don’t care what Sidney thinks.”

  “He says it was your way to get Michael killed.”

  “He’s a psychopath. I could have had Red Mike on my own. Why would I have risked your skin?”

  “Because you’re always scheming ... and you hate me almost as much as you love me, Paul.”

  “I don’t hate you,” he said. “I don’t.” She’d complicated his life until he’d arrived at some border he couldn’t bear. If he stepped across he’d be in a phantom town, like the Mariels who had her Sidney. He was the chief prosecutor of an enormous village, but he spent his days at the Algonquin, dreaming of her. She started to pack, found her red shoes at the rear of Holden’s closet. Party shoes. But she wouldn’t be going to another lieutenant governor’s ball. She’d felt the language that seemed to loom under the table, like a dry and bitter storm. Paul should have been the next governor. But he’d ruined his chances courting Fay. He’d rather bite her hair in a hotel room than sit in Albany on some wooden throne.

  He watched her clothes fly about. Paul could get excited by the cotton engineering of a bra.

  “I’m ready,” she said, putting on those party shoes.

  He looked at her, wondering, she supposed, if it was a trick, a means of seducing him out of Holden’s hiding place and locking herself back in. But it wasn’t a trick. She left with Paul and didn’t even lock the door.

  He brought her down into the Cadillac, shoving her suitcase under the jump seat. He signaled to his man, silent Dimitrios, who always drove her to the matinees. And she knew Paul could feel her flesh, her perfume, the polish on her nails and feet, the redness of her shoes, and suddenly, without warning, he held her hand. She didn’t resist; they drove uptown like that, the district attorney and his daughter-in-law.

  20

  “FROG.”

  Holden stirred. He was on a cot in a room he couldn’t recall. He didn’t panic. If he’d found a VCR, he would have closed his eyes and considered himself a happy man. He had an ache above his groin. He looked down and saw a black lotion, thick as pudding, on that side of his body where Jean-Paul had shot him in the street. The pudding stank. Holden wasn’t lost. He’d taken a holiday among the Mariels. But he still couldn’t understand who the hell was calling him Frog.

  “Dada. Froggy the Frog.”

  He searched between his legs and saw those leopard eyes under a table. He wondered about his wound. What if the bullet hadn’t stopped twisting yet and couldn’t find its home? It was like a satellite that went from station to station in Holden’s guts and could trigger little time explosions. He’d come to kill the Parrot again. He’d discovered a leopard girl under the table. He’d brought her to Goldie ...

  “Frog.”

  “Stop that,” he said. Holden started to get up, but the pudding leaked and he lay dow
n again. “Barbara, is that you?”

  But those animal eyes crept deeper under the table until Holden saw a darkness he’d been used to all his life. He could have been born under a similar table in Avignon. He was the leopard, not the little girl. He’d stalked from the age of two or three. But he hadn’t really become a hunter until he arrived at Aladdin’s door. It was his own father he pursued. He’d been weaving designs around Holden Sr. He was the bumper his daddy should have been. His rise to vice president was like some kind of revenge on the house of Holden. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get close to his dad.

  “Querida, come to me.”

  A voice boomed at him. “She’s frightened. You’ve been saying things in your sleep.” Holden was surrounded by flesh. He stared into the tiny, tiny eyes of Huevo’s godmother, Dolores, the fat madrina who must have applied the pudding to his wound. Dolores occupied half the room. She swayed with a melodic lilt. Holden’s Carmen Miranda.

  “What did I say in my sleep?”

  “Wild things. You asked everybody to call you the Frog. You shouted at the little one. You were merciless with her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Holden said. “I shouldn’t have shouted at the girl. I love her.”

  “I know,” Dolores said.

  “Where am I?”

  “With Changó,” she said. “You are in our lord’s house.”

  “But where?”

  And the priestess smiled. “He has many houses, Holden. And it’s not so gracious to ask. He has tended your wounds. Our lord takes care of melancholy people like yourself.”

  “I smile when I have to smile,” Holden said in his own defense. He looked around for chicken heads, cauldrons, and mounds of rust, but there were no signs of the god. Changó had a cot and a table in his room.

  “You must be in mourning,” he said to the madrina.

  She laughed so loud, the table shivered. “Why?” she asked. “Do I look like a melancholy person?”

  “You’ve lost your son.”

  “I’ve lost many sons,” she said. “And I will lose more.”

  “I understand. But Huevo. He was—”

  “Special to me? Yes, Holden. Like my other godsons. And he was arrogant and foolish. He disobeyed our lord.”

  “Mother,” Holden said, because he didn’t know how he ought to address a madrina. “Huevo wanted to get the santita back from Don Edmundo.”

  “What santita are you saying?”

  “The little one,” Holden said, “the little one who’s under the table.”

  “She is a girl, señor.”

  “Then why do all the Mariels piss in their pants when she rolls her eyes at them?”

  “Because they are sinners and she has holy powers.”

  “But where does she come from?”

  “She comes from Queens.”

  “You talk like a district attorney,” Holden said. “Mother, I killed a man and his mistress. I slapped them silly and I found a little girl under a table. No one wants to tell me what she was doing there.”

  “Playing,” the madrina said.

  “Yes, without a mom and dad. And when I asked her, she said you had raised her.”

  “I?” the madrina said, her enormous body tightening into a screw until it looked like Carmen Miranda was about to dance. “I did not raise her.”

  “Pardon me, but she said Dolores, fat Dolores.”

  Dolores punched her own chest. “See. I am Chepita. I have a sewing shop and a room for homeless men. I love the saints. And I am in the service of our lord. But I did not raise this child.”

  “You’re Dolores,” Holden said. “And you heal gunshot wounds. The homeless men in your room are bandits and bumpers ... like me. Don Edmundo’s been after you for years. But you disappear in thunder and smoke.”

  “You have the thunder,” she said. “I was only a nurse.”

  Holden felt satisfied. The circuits began to connect. The pudding hardened while he chatted with the madrina. “And you were Barbara’s nurse.”

  “For a little while,” the madrina said.

  “What about her parents?”

  Carmen Miranda pulled a bitter face. “Bad people. A barber from Havana and his wife. They were mean to the little one. They lent her out to parties. They forced her to sing in a white dress and wear a bride’s veil. Old men put their hands on her, touched her under the dress. The barber hired me to escort his child. He didn’t want anyone to steal her. So I became her bodyguard. Because I was the godmother and the friend of Big Balls, Lázaro Rodriquez. And Lázaro was a thief for hire, without a conscience, subhuman, like all the Mariels. Why would Lázaro complain? He was wanted by the police. The barber could have him for a couple of pesos. A convict, Castro’s filth. But he was a murderer, Holden, not a pimp. We brought the little one to the party in a truck. It was January, and Lázaro wore a white suit. He loved winter in New York ...

  The madrina was an enchantress, and Holden was like her child. He lay on his cot and listened. Winter, the madrina said. The party was in the penthouse of a Cuban lawyer. Lázaro stood in his white suit, a wanted man, among lawyers and doctors who’d never been to jail. They fed him wine and asked him about Taco-Taco and other penitentiaries. Then the little girl sang, clutching candies and flowers and a doll Lázaro had made for her with pieces of wire. She was passed from lawyer to lawyer, like a great stuffed doll, and her own dolly was lost under the heels of an admirer. The lawyers never noticed the blue veins in Lázaro’s head, where the guards at Taco-Taco had kicked him for tattooing convicts without paying them their usual fee. The anger swelled in Lázaro until his skull was like a dark blue lamp, but he allowed the lawyers to fondle the girl. He wouldn’t interfere. He’d been paid to do a job. He took the girl home to the barber and his wife, and while the madrina watched, he hissed into their eyes.

  “She is not our child,” the barber said. “We borrowed her from an aunt.”

  And Lázaro had the barber shave his own head and the head of his wife, then he removed his needle and his dyes from a little sack and decorated their skulls with a swan, the mark of a child molester. The barber delivered his savings to Lázaro. “A dowry,” he said. “For little Tita.”

  “Tita? Was she born with that name?”

  The barber shrugged. “I don’t know, señor. We called her Tita.”

  And he ran to East Miami with his wife. Lázaro had a daughter all of a sudden. He lodged her with Dolores. “We will call her Barbara,” he said.

  Santa Barbara was the Marielito saint, the protector of bumpers like Big Balls or Holden and Billy the Kid. Whoever was frightened of thunderstorms or wished for a happy death prayed to Barbara. She was Changó’s Catholic “sister,” his womanly side. And the madrina warned Lázaro that he should not burden the little one with Barbara’s name, or Changó might grow jealous.

  “It will be a secret,” Lázaro said.

  “But you cannot fool our lord,” Dolores told him, while the girl went to live with the Mariels as Changó’s sister saint. She learned prison songs. She sat down during certain ceremonies, where the heart was ripped out of a rooster and blood was sprinkled near the statue of lord Changó, who had a man’s shoulders and a woman’s hips, who laughed with his eyes closed, loved to wear bracelets on his arms and seemed to enjoy the company of little girls. The Bandidos noticed all that. The little girl would sway her hips like Dolores and go into a trance in the middle of a song. And pretty soon she was never absent from a ceremony.

  Lázaro made her lots of wire dolls. He put on a disguise and took her to the circus. There were Bandidos in the audience, and they recognized the little girl. They bowed to her ten or fifteen times. They brought her garlands of candy until a fort rose in front of her feet. But Lázaro had to stop attending circuses.

  Edmundo’s men began slaughtering the madrinas around Lázaro. They set fire to Dolores’ little estates. And Lázaro had to run from hole to hole. He worried about the little girl. He hid Barbara with families that had nothing to
do with the war. And because he’d tempted Changó, the madrina said, because he’d mocked their lord by making the little girl into a santita, one of the families farmed the girl out to a cousin, and the cousin neglected her, left the santita in her apartment with a pair of crooks, the Parrot and his mistress, and it was Holden’s luck to find the Parrot with the santita under the table.

  Lázaro destroyed the family that had rented his child, and he would have destroyed Holden too, but he was concerned that a kind of divinity might be attached to Holden, that Holden was one of Changó’s children, because the god was known to have dozens of brats, and a few of them were pink, like Holden, and Lázaro couldn’t afford to anger the god, so he tested Holden, taunted him, but he couldn’t solve the question of Holden’s divinity. And when he met the bumper in El Norte, looked into those wistful eyes, Lázaro was as confused as ever. He went up to Riverdale with Changó’s red and white collares, certain he had a god’s thunder in the firebombs and the pistols under his coat, and landed in a dark field.

  “Big Balls,” Holden said from his cot. “He had a lot of character, like Red Mike.”

  “He was a fool,” the madrina said. “He died chasing Changó’s tail. I have met this Red Michael. Another fool.”

  “Mother, I grew up with Mike. But where did you meet him?”

  “In a room.”

  And Holden remembered the pact Lázaro had made with Red Mike to keep Edmundo out of Queens. And now Edmundo had the borough to himself, with Paul Abruzzi’s blessings. And Holden was the monkey who’d murdered Red Mike and led La Familia to Big Balls. His thunder belonged to Aladdin. He was as much of a chauffeur as his dad had ever been.

  “What about the little one?” Holden asked. “Will she ever leave her hideout?”

  The madrina started to coo in that prison patois the Mariels talked among themselves. The santita came out from under the table. She was clutching the mutilated doll Holden had gotten for her off Stumfel’s mountain.

  “Froggy,” she said, and Holden frowned.

  “All right. I’ll make an exception. I’ll be your frog.”