Montezuma's Man (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “Leave a message for me at Schiller’s club.”

  “I left sixteen messages. You didn’t answer one … you belong to us, Joe.”

  “I never took a dime from the Bureau. I’m not a fucking paid informant.”

  “Dimes aren’t everything.”

  Barbarossa had killed an undercover agent in a dumb duel. LeComte got the Feds off Joe’s back, and now Joe had to do him little favors from time to time.

  “Isaac’s in trouble.”

  “Frederic, why the fuck should you care?”

  “Because he’s going to be the next mayor of this town, and a dead mayor does me no good.”

  “You could be wrong. He might not run for mayor.”

  “He’ll run,” said the blue boy of Justice. “But Jerry DiAngelis wants to waste him.”

  “He loves Jerry. Isaac’s a Mafia man, a member of the tribe.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Frederic, what can I do?”

  “Stick close to him, become his shadow.”

  “He’ll sniff me a mile away. He knows I’m your fucking scout. He’d never trust me.”

  “Try.”

  “There’s an easier way. Just indict Jerry.”

  “I’m working on it, Joe. But even if I sit him down in jail for a while, he’ll still have his shooters out on the street.”

  “Then get Margaret Tolstoy to babysit for Isaac.”

  “I can’t,” LeComte said. “She’s minding Sal Rubino’s wheelchair.”

  Margaret was one of LeComte’s undercover girls. She’d had a long history with Sidel. They’d met in junior high school, when she was a Roumanian refugee. And the Commish was crazy about her ever since. LeComte was using her as a nurse for Sal Rubino.

  “Margaret’s your answer. Margaret can sleep with all of Jerry’s shooters. They’ll forget about Isaac.”

  “Margaret’s occupied. I’m counting on you, Joe. You killed a Drug Enforcement agent.”

  “The guy was the biggest dealer in town.”

  “But a dealer who belonged to the DEA. They’re possessive people. I had to dance around them, Joe, pull a lot of strings. I put out for you. Don’t leave me with an empty basket. Get close to Isaac. I don’t care how you do it, but get close.”

  “I’ll become his pingpong instructor,” Joe said.

  “He doesn’t do pingpong. It reminds him of Manfred Coen. I hear you inherited his table.”

  “I’m not Coen.”

  The same two Mormons ushered Joe out of the room. LeComte called to him. “Joe, if you have it in your head to hit on Frannie, forget about it. I need him in the Bronx.”

  Frannie had closed the north Bronx to DiAngelis’ people. He was LeComte’s little soldier. He sold crack to schoolchildren. He had an army of twelve-year-olds with machine pistols and Glocks. They were Frannie’s elite guard. They couldn’t be prosecuted in open court. They were a little too young. But they could maim each other and kill rival cadres of twelve-year-olds.

  Barbarossa couldn’t get back to Charlotta’s suite. The Mormons stuck to him. But he’d damage Frannie one day soon. And LeComte could go fly a kite.

  3

  He returned to Schiller’s. He wasn’t Blue Eyes, even if he lived at Blue Eyes’ table. He was Barbarossa, the great-grandson of the Nez Percé. He couldn’t connect with a woman. He had a small society of whores. He’d visit them and run away, like some wild Indian. He had no real hours at Sherwood Forest, he had nothing to do. Isaac had left him in a kind of limbo, had avoided him for months. Barbarossa would play pingpong at the precinct, wander around in his white glove. He didn’t like to play at Schiller’s. He wasn’t Manfred Coen. He could balance his checkbook, but he was already overdrawn. He couldn’t get to Isaac unless he grew some wings.

  “Joey,” Schiller shouted, “phone call.”

  “Schiller, I never take a call while I’m meditating. You know that.”

  “It’s the police.”

  Some sergeant-secretary was summoning him to the fourteenth floor at One PP.

  He rode downtown to City Hall, walked under the arcade of the Municipal Building, and entered Police Plaza. He’d never been comfortable here. It reminded him of some red bunker in Saigon. It was an enormous anthill where all the good policemen pretended to run the City of New York. It was like playing pingpong with a bunch of spooks. You’d hit the ball over the net and it would land in an impossible country.

  Joe arrived on the fourteenth floor. Malik, the trials commissioner, could barely bring himself to say hello. Malik would have loved to capture Joe inside his court. But Internal Affairs couldn’t get near Barbarossa. He had a fucking angel on his shoulder, Frederic LeComte.

  He didn’t have to wait for Isaac. He was let into the PC’s office, with its plants that climbed the wall. Isaac was near the window, looking gaunt. His sideburns had swallowed half his face. He was glocked last winter by some phantom who turned out to be Lucas White, Barbarossa’s own captain at Sherwood Forest. The Cap had been half crazy. He took money from the Maf to hit Isaac under the Williamsburg Bridge. Isaac lay in a coma for two months, and the Cap killed himself.

  Isaac mourned Captain White, he mourned Blue Eyes, he mourned every fucking child in the City who couldn’t spell. He was the hairiest PC the town had ever had.

  “My chauffeur has died on me.”

  “Malone is dead?” Barbarossa asked. “Since when?”

  “He’s not a corpse, Joey. He’s in the hospital, with a bleeding ulcer. He can’t drive. And his doctors keep telling him that I’m the one who made him sick. He’s loyal, Malone is. He’d like to come back. But I’d rather not ruin the man. I need a chauffeur.”

  Barbarossa’s gray hand started to pulse. “I’m not a hackie, Isaac.”

  “Well, I’m making you one. You get free meals when you drive the Commish. I’m like a gravy train.”

  “And if I refuse? You’ll bounce me back to the Police Academy. You’ll put me in a kennel with all the bomb-sniffing dogs”

  “I could do a lot worse. Your hours are my hours, Joey. Day and night. You’ll have to wear a beeper. You won’t be able to go to the toilet without dreaming of the Commish.”

  “Isaac, you could have a thousand other candidates. Why me?”

  “I trust you, Joe.”

  “Am I supposed to laugh, Isaac, or cry? LeComte has me on a fucking string. I belong to the little boy blue.”

  “You can report our conversations word for word. I have no secrets from LeComte.”

  “He traps me in a room at the Sheraton Centre. He says, ‘Get close to Isaac. Isaac’s gonna be the next mayor.’”

  “I never said I’d run.”

  “That’s what I told LeComte. But he still worries. He thinks Jerry DiAngelis wants to pull your plug.”

  “It’s a temporary crisis. It’ll pass.”

  “Isaac, I can’t keep up with all your wars. You kill Sal Rubino, but he doesn’t stay dead. Sal hires the Cap to hit you. He whacks you six times.”

  “Five,” Isaac said. “Only five.”

  “You go into a coma. Sal sits in a wheelchair with a fucking manufactured face. He gets his clan back from Jerry, has Jerry on the run. You come out of the coma, kidnap Sal, break the Rubinos’ backs. So why is Jerry after you?”

  ”Because I wouldn’t let him murder Sal.

  “You murdered him once.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Ah,” Barbarossa said, “I’ll inherit Malone’s ulcer if I listen anymore … I’ll be your chauffeur. Boss, when do I start?”

  “Today, tomorrow. I don’t care.”

  And Joe Barbarossa walked out of One PP with a two-hundred-dollar pager hooked to his belt. It had a clock radio that could sing him to sleep and a tiny window that could read whatever borough Isaac was in. Barbarassa felt trapped. How could he make his drug scores while he was married to Sidel? But it was LeComte who bothered him, not Isaac.

  He wandered through Manhattan, seeking out LeComte
’s little cribs. The first four were unoccupied. Barbarossa had his usual skeleton keys and picks. He broke into the fifth crib, fumbled in the dark. He heard a strange noise, like the bark of a wounded animal. He put on the light, saw a whirling mass of hair, and couldn’t tell if he was being attacked by an orange dog or what. The dog knocked Barbarossa on his ass. But he’d never met an orange dog that could clutch a pistol in its paws. He was angry and confused and frightened until the orange hair materialized into Margaret Tolstoy.

  “Can I stand up, Margaret, or are you gonna waste me?”

  “Barbarossa, what are you doing here?”

  “I’m Barbarossa now, huh?”

  He’d slept with Margaret, made love to her in one of LeComte’s cribs, because he had no cribs of his own, and neither did Margaret. But all their kissing had been professional, a way of feeling each other out, like dogs sniffing new territory. But she hadn’t worn an orange wig on that occasion. He was guilty. He’d slept with Isaac’s fiancée. But how could Barbarossa respect all the nuances of a forty-year romance? And he was turned on by the bitch.

  “You were always Barbarossa,” Margaret said. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m looking for that little shit LeComte.”

  “To ambush him or kiss his ass?”

  “Both,” Barbarossa said.

  And she laughed with her almond-colored eyes. She was centuries older than Barbarossa, Isaac’s age, but he could understand how half the Mafia chieftains in America had fallen for Margaret Tolstoy. She seduced mobsters for the FBI. She’d lived with Sal Rubino, spied on him, until Sal tried to wax her in New Orleans, where she’d gone to flirt with his cousins, Martin and Emile. It was the Pink Commish who’d saved her life. He’d come down to Bayou St. John with Jerry DiAngelis and shot Sal, who liked to play Lazarus.

  “I’m also looking for LeComte. But I didn’t expect you, Joe. You shouldn’t sneak up on a lady in the dark.”

  “You’re not a lady,” Barbarossa said. “You’re a walking arsenal, a human torch.”

  “That’s not what you told me in bed.”

  “I lied. I thought if we kissed, you might have a sentimental attachment to me.”

  “I don’t have sentimental attachments.”

  “But you’re in love with Sidel.”

  The almond eyes delivered cold sparks. “That’s none of your business, Barbarossa.”

  “I’m Joey,” he said. And LeComte walked through the door with a pigskin attaché case. He stared at Barbarossa.

  “I have an appointment with Margaret, Joe. This isn’t one of your safe houses.”

  “I had to get in touch.”

  “Then you signal, you write me a letter.”

  “I didn’t feel like doing one of our post-office tricks.”

  “What’s so urgent that you had to come here?”

  “I don’t like it when you and the Bureau pull my prong. You set me up at the Sheraton, you put on the pressure, tell me to babysit for Isaac, and the next thing I know, I get a call from the fourteenth floor, and Isaac, who hates my guts, asks me to become his chauffeur.”

  “That’s perfect,” LeComte said. “Even better than I could have imagined.”

  “Then your imagination stinks. I’m tainted. I could go down any minute.”

  “You’re the most decorated cop in New York. Two medals of honor.”

  “Three.” Barbarossa said. “But everybody knows I do drugs.”

  “So what?”

  “Either Isaac bugged your little office at the Sheraton, or he’s playing some kind of three-dimensional chess that’s beyond me, you, and Einstein.”

  “Einstein didn’t play chess. He couldn’t memorize the moves.”

  “Frederic, tell me what’s going on, or I walk.”

  “The man’s getting lonely for Blue Eyes.”

  “Fuck yourself. I’m not Manfred Coen.”

  “It’s a coincidence. Or part of some chaos theory. Isaac believes in all that crap. He couldn’t have bugged my office. I’m untappable. Margaret, isn’t that right?”

  She had all the chaos a man could ever want in her almond eyes. She was worth twenty LeComtes.

  “Maybe it’s the kid who’s right,” she said.

  “What does that mean, Margaret?”

  “We want to guard Isaac without him ever knowing it, and he hires Barbarossa. He’s on to you, Frederic.”

  “On to all of us,” LeComte said. “But the fact is we have Joey behind the wheel.”

  “And Isaac has you by the balls,” she said. “He lets Barbarossa drive him where you expect him to go. He could have ten other drivers.”

  “Joey will be able to tell.”

  “How’s Sal?” Barbarossa asked.

  “Behaving,” Margaret said. “He’s in love with me, but I can handle it.”

  “Loves you so much that he wanted to kill you.”

  “Men are like that. They can’t make up their minds.”

  “I never wanted to kill you,” Barbarossa said.

  “But you’re not in love with me, kid.”

  And Barbarossa marched out the door.

  4

  He got the keys to Isaac’s black Dodge from the caverns under Police Plaza. The Commish had his own tiny garage. And Joe stopped caring if Isaac was manipulating him, using him as the propeller of some prescribed, public life. He soon realized that the PC had no other existence. That’s all there was. Barbarossa drove him everywhere. He was putting in sixteen-hour days. But he didn’t declare any overtime. His own little business was shot. He had to deal while Isaac was at the office or in bed. And the PC’s bedtime was unpredictable. He could wake in the middle of the night and ask Joe to drive him across the Brooklyn Bridge. Isaac would sit up front with Joe, wrapped in a blanket, because he was always cold, and he would watch the streaks of moonlight in the water. Then they’d go into some secret diner in one of Brooklyn’s black belts and sit with a bunch of Rastafarians and ask for mocha ice cream. Several of the Rastas saluted Isaac. They must have lived with him inside the house of detention at Riker’s. The Commish had been to the clink, accused of conspiring with Jerry DiAngelis and his father-in-law, and now Jerry wanted him dead.

  They returned to the car, rode out to Gowanus, and passed a social club near Owls Head Park. The club belonged to Jerry’s people. It was on Senator Street.

  “Joey, do you have a mask for me and you?”

  “Mask?” Barbarossa said in his own mechanical way.

  “Come on. The black stockings you wear during your drug capers.”

  Barbarossa handed Isaac one of his stocking masks. Isaac put it on backwards, and the eye holes revealed two patches of gray-black hair. Joe had to twist the stocking around, or Isaac would have stayed blind.

  “Boss, what are we gonna do with our masks?”

  “Rob that social club.”

  “Jerry aint gonna like it. He’ll see blood when he hears about two masked men knocking over one of his sanctuaries.”

  “That’s the point. I want him to see blood.”

  “It won’t heal your feud with him.”

  “Joe, would you rather talk or make some pocket money?”

  And they both leapt out of the car with their Glocks and black masks. It was five in the morning. They looked like a pair of harlequins under the harsh light of the lamp posts, local badasses who’d had too much to drink. The club’s door wasn’t locked. Isaac turned the knob and entered with Joe Barbarossa. The club was packed with old men who spent their nights playing cards because they couldn’t sleep. They weren’t alarmed by the masks. Joe collected three hundred and eighteen dollars in cash, one old pistol, and two blackjacks. He prayed to his ancestors, the Nez Percé, that he could avoid a shooting war. He wouldn’t have known what to do with these old men.

  Isaac tore the telephone wires, smashed the coffee machine, and ran out of the club with Joe. He was smiling under his mask. Barbarossa carried him away from Senator Street in Isaac’s black Dodge. They took off the
ir masks.

  “Boss, what if we’d had to whack a couple of old guys?”

  “Don’t complain. You have your pocket money … Joey, I wouldn’t have hurt a bunch of old geezers.”

  “War is war. You could have had a shotgun in your eyes.”

  “Not on Senator Street. Desperadoes never come to Gowanus … I’m rich. I can afford a pair of spectacular shin guards and a first-class catcher’s mitt.”

  Isaac managed a baseball team, the Delancey Giants, for the Police Athletic League. He was always short of cash. He would scrounge nickels and dimes from every cop on the fourteenth floor. Barbarossa had already contributed twice. Isaac was obsessed with his Giants. He had baseball on the brain.

  They knocked off two more social clubs. Barbarossa brought Isaac to his flat on Rivington Street, went uptown in the Dodge, and parked outside Schiller’s. He slept in the back room, distressed about the cash in his pocket. He didn’t know anything about Isaac’s chaos theories. But he couldn’t go on hitting clubs like that without bumping into a little chaos. And if Joe had to whack someone, he hoped it wouldn’t be an old man.

  He was earning an extra thousand a week with the mask and becoming famous as one of the Black Stocking Twins. The social clubs never reported a crime. That’s how the Maf did business. But a legend was already growing around the Twins. And during their fifth week together, as Joe was pulling out of the caverns under One PP, a fucking black giant stood in his way. It was Sweets, Isaac’s first deputy commissioner, who had to manage the Department while Isaac was on his escapades with Joe. He looked like a refugee from the Harlem Globetrotters, with a cat’s glowing eyes in the damp, dark tunnels of the garage. The most distinguished law firms were trying to woo him away from Police Plaza, but he wouldn’t abandon Isaac.

  He climbed into the back seat of the Dodge. His knees were almost as high as Isaac’s chin.

  “I’ll kill you motherfuckers. Show me your masks.”

  “Sweets,” Isaac said.

  “You shut up.” He turned to Joe. “Mr. Barbarossa, do you realize you’re riding with a maniac?”

  “He’s the boss,” Barbarossa said.

  “And you’re the big innocent, aren’t you? I’ll bust your hump, Barbarossa. Are you hearing me? It’s time to retire. No more team of stick-up artists.”