Montezuma's Man (The Isaac Sidel Novels)

by Jerome Charyn

  “Boss, you’ll need our masks in Palermo.”

  “It’s one Twin to a continent, Joey. That’s how it has to be while Mario is in the mansion and Wig is running loose.”

  “You have a battalion of detectives.”

  “I have you.”

  “You could close Mario’s shop.”

  “Rebecca would open it again. She’s under his influence … Joey, did you ever sell drugs to the melamed’s people?”

  “I’m not that dumb.”

  “But you were out there, Joey, buying and selling. You had your customers, Mario himself. And your contacts. Didn’t you have a hint that the melamed was doing heavy business?”

  “He’s a rabbi, boss.”

  “Not a rabbi, a schoolteacher without a school.”

  “Isaac, if he was dealing, I would have known.”

  “He tricked us, surrounded himself with his own fucking piety.”

  “He’s not the invisible man.”

  “But he’s the melamed. He hasn’t left a trace.”

  “There’s always a trace, and I’ll find it.”

  “Watch the street, Joey. And my brother Leo … and Marilyn. But no romance.”

  “Boss, how can I promise?”

  “No romance.”

  Isaac had a sudden pull of dread. He was leaving Barbarossa in a mine field, but he didn’t want Joey to die on him, to become another Manfred Coen. Ah, he missed that dead angel.

  Joey brought him to JKF. They were the Black Stocking Twins. They had certain rights and privileges. They hugged outside the Alitalia lounge. “Boss, did you forget your mask?”

  “Nah. I have it in my pocket.”

  “It’s your only weapon. They’ll shit in their pants when they see you wearing the mask. They’ll think you’re the Devil.”

  “I am the Devil,” Isaac said, and Barbarossa left him there.

  Isaac had to borrow off his pension to finance the trip. He had no money in the bank. He gave all his excess capital to the Delancey Giants. He didn’t have the Catholic Church behind his team. The cardinal could beg or borrow to finance the Manhattan Knights. Isaac had to steal from his own pockets. He’d booked a room at the Palazzo Palme. It cost a billion lire a night, something like that. Isaac couldn’t seem to count in Italian money. He wasn’t searching for bargains. He could have discovered some pensione near the railroad station, but he had a sentimental attachment to the Palme. Richard Wagner had stayed there with his family, had completed Parsifal in the middle of a plague. Isaac had done his homework.

  Palermo was a poor miserable town until the Saracens captured it in 831 from the Byzantine kings, who couldn’t have bothered with a dusty island outpost. It flourished under Arab rule, became a second Cairo, with palaces and libraries and mosques, with scholars and magicians who settled there and lived without violence. The Normans took it from the Arabs in 1072, kept some of the magicians, and Palermo continued to thrive. It flowered in the twelfth century, had its own small renaissance, while the rest of Europe was pissing in its pants. But the renaissance didn’t last. Palermo fell into its own dark age. There was insurrection after insurrection. There were bloody wars. The Bourbons seized Palermo, then the British. But it prospered in the nineteenth century, was known as “Paris of the Palm Trees.” The Palme was a British inn when Wagner lived there and wrote about Parsifal, that melancholy knight, and his quest for the Holy Grail. Isaac was on his own uncertain quest in Paris of the Palm Trees.

  There were two uncertain characters waiting for him in the lounge. Frannie Meyers and his fickle fiancee, Margaret Tolstoy. Her hair was polished silver this afternoon. Isaac would have to make an inventory of all her wigs. Her almond eyes bored right into his gut, where the worm had been. He was hopeless around Anastasia, a puppet strangling on his own strings.

  Isaac managed a growl. “Go on home to LeComte.”

  “Can’t,” Frannie said. “We’re your official babysitters.”

  “I don’t need Judases and Jezebels.”

  “He’s nice, isn’t he, Fran?” Anastasia said.

  “He can’t help it. He’s the big cop. He has to complain.”

  “Are you getting married in Palermo?” Isaac asked, his brown eyes on Anastasia.

  “No, darling,” Anastasia said. “We’re all sharing the same suite at the Palme.”

  “Hell we are. I’m not living around lovebirds.”

  “Commissioner, watch your mouth,” Frannie said.

  “Isaac, you’ll never find Robert without us. And you’ll never leave Palermo alive.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “There are no chances in Sicily,” Anastasia said. “There are dogs and children and lots of dead people … I visited Palermo in ’forty-three, with my Uncle Ferdinand.”

  Frannie started to brood. “Uncle Ferdinand?”

  “Didn’t you know, Fran?” Isaac said. “Margaret was married when she was eleven. Her uncle was emperor of Odessa and the Black Sea. He was a fucking war criminal with his own puppet state, Russian Roumania.”

  “I was in Palermo during the Allied bombings … with a bunch of Gestapo generals.”

  “She was everywhere,” Isaac said. “Paris, Palermo, Lower Manhattan. The little wandering bride.”

  She slapped Isaacs face. The slap seemed to vitalize him. It was almost as savage as a kiss.

  “The prefect of Palermo had his tongue cut out for annoying the mistress of a certain general. Rats slept in my shoes. All the heroes of the Luftwaffe had to pretend that the piss they were drinking was champagne.”

  “I hate champagne,” Isaac said. “And I’m not a hero.”

  He crept onto the plane with Anastasia and Fran. Isaac had the window seat, above the starboard wing. Anastasia sat between her two warriors. Fran was very troubled. “Margaret, I’ll start to worry that you’re holding his hand and I won’t be able to sleep.”

  “Shhh,” Margaret said. “Close your eyes.”

  Fran obeyed her and fell asleep.

  Margaret curled against Isaac, while he thought about that prefect who’d lost his tongue to the Nazi war machine.

  There was a short delay in Rome. Fran had bloodshot eyes. He kept changing hundred-dollar bills for packets of lire. Isaac had spent eight hours in the air stealing kisses from Margaret Tolstoy. He could imagine his old age, looking for Margaret among all her boyfriends and basket cases.

  “I don’t want Frannie in our bed,” he told her.

  “He’s my fiancé.”

  “I’ll kill him, I’ll bury him at the Palme.”

  “He’s fond of you, darling, or you wouldn’t be here. Frederic gave him the golden route, Palermo to Poe Park. You shouldn’t begrudge Fran.”

  “And Sal’s so generous that he lends Fran his nurse?”

  “Sal has no choice. He’s a little doll-crazy, like you. And he smells dollars. He can’t afford to lose Palermo.”

  “I’ll smash the whole operation, I swear.”

  “It’s Palermo, darling. Remember that. You’ll have to study the art of whispering.”

  They arrived at Punta Ráisi, where the airport cops wore handguns above their pelvises like obscene toys. A coach with ancient wooden chairs that reminded Isaac of a donkey cart drove them along the sea. Anastasia pointed to a tiny clot of land with a tower in the middle.

  “The Isle of Women,” she said. “It’s empty, dear. It was once the pasture for girls who got pregnant by Norman knights. The locals were superstitious. They would have ripped apart the wombs of these girls and squashed their unborn babies against the rocks. But the knights were civilized. They rowed their sweethearts to the little island and left them to live or die. The girls had to eat grass. They built a tower with their own bloody hands. They went into labor, howling like wolves. The children were born with green spit on their bodies. The locals were terrified. They begged the knights to do something about these devil babies, and the Normans did. They rowed out to the Isola delle Fémmine, but they didn’t have the w
ill to destroy their old sweethearts and a brood of children with a green crust. They rowed this strange family to a much more isolated island, but it didn’t matter much. They all died of some disease, like loneliness or heartbreak.”

  Isaac couldn’t get those mothers and their green children out of his mind.

  They rode into Palermo on the Via Libert, passing palm trees and a garden that made Isaac dream of Miami. Libertà was very wide. Palermo had that curious smell of talcum powder and gasoline. It wasn’t unpleasant to Isaac. Mothers and daughters in the streets had the same swollen faces. Isaac wondered if they were secret survivors of that deserted island. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the skeletal men of Palermo, who peered into his little bus with broken, brutal looks.

  It’s the sun, Isaac sang to himself. It reduces everything. Robs you of your brains.

  He arrived on the Via Roma and the Grand Hotel delle Palme. It was a sunburnt palace, darkened with time. Young men rushed out of the hotel in military tunics and tore the luggage from Isaac’s fists. Miami, Isaac muttered. Miami with a touch of the Sicilian sea. The front desk was near the door. It was very discreet. Isaac signed a little card for Anastasia, Fran, and himself, collected all their passports, handed them to the clerk, and was taken to his suite. It was a field of windows decorated with dark furniture.

  Margaret wouldn’t let him shower or shave, or worry where he would sleep and who he would sleep with. “Fine,” he said, “bring me the doll maker. I have to talk to young Robert.”

  “Darling,” she said. “We’re being watched. I picked this suite on purpose. It’s a glass cage. We have to go sightseeing.”

  He couldn’t even comb his hair. He went down into the lobby with Anastasia and Fran, crossed a maze of sitting rooms, with an enormous flow of people. The lights were very dim. Isaac had found his proper cave, a dark, forlorn city of dreams inside the Grand Hotel. He recognized Papa Cassidy in one of the rooms where Richard Wagner must have contemplated Parsifal. Papa sat alone, reading some darkly inked edition of the Financial Times.

  Isaac bolted from his babysitters and sat down next to Papa, nearly in his lap. “How are the lions?”

  “What?” Papa muttered. Then he recognized Isaac and started to moan. “You’re out of your element, Sidel. This isn’t baseball in Central Park.”

  “No. It’s lion country. And the Sahara is just outside the door.”

  Papa appealed to Margaret Tolstoy. “Put him in some kennel, please, before he hurts himself.”

  Isaac pulled the newspaper out of Papa’s hands and sat nose to nose with the potentate. “I memorized all your fucking routes. Are you buying dolls, Papa? Are you dabbling in the heroin market?”

  “Sidel, you’ve gone over the edge. You don’t even have City Hall behind you. And Palermo is none of your business. I don’t have to check my itinerary with a rotten little police commissioner.”

  “But you ought to check Delia’s itinerary. I loved dancing with her at the Chinaman’s.”

  “Shut your mouth, Sidel.”

  Margaret and Frannie Meyers seized Isaac by his armpits and dragged him away from Papa Cassidy. “Darling, we’re only guests here, and Papa is part of the furniture. The Sicilians like his money. He does an awful lot of laundering for the little kings of Palermo.”

  “Take me to the kings.”

  “Shhh,” Margaret said. “The Palme is their personal souk, not ours.”

  “Yeah,” Isaac said, “it’s a clearinghouse for mutts like Papa Cassidy.”

  “Whisper, darling, it’s essential. The walls have ears. And I’m not talking about microphones. The grandmas at this hotel are loyal to their kings.”

  “Kings,” Isaac said, “every mother is a king.”

  The Maf of Palermo was a very special breed. Mountain rats in stone caves, they weren’t like the barons of Castellammare del Golfo, who’d maintained their medieval roots and familial ties with the dons of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Bath Beach, lending out their underlings or selling them off. But the dons of Palermo had little sense of family. They’d kept to their own caves, these princes and kings of chaos. They bribed and killed and had little focaccerias where they devoured pieces of flat bread baked in olive oil. And when the carabinieri came after them, the kings dove into the depths of their caves. No one, not even the kings themselves, could determine the beginnings or endings of their domains. Two kings could rule the same street. They had their own nurseries, where young children could be educated as “ghosts” who would disappear from ordinary school life and start to steal and deliver special favors to a king. The graduates of these ghost schools might die at ten or eleven or become future kings.

  It was Palermo, where an unpopular judge might find ground glass in his soup. Journalists who delved into the mysteries of the kings might not survive their supper. Omertà, the vow of silence that every Mafia buff talked about, was misunderstood. Silence wasn’t a vow in Palermo. It was a way of life. Skeletal men and enormous women. The perfume of talcum powder mingled with gasoline. Ah, Isaac was getting to like Palermo. But Anastasia wouldn’t let him off his leash.

  She drew him out of the hotel and got him onto a bus with Fran. Isaac couldn’t find a single person who paid the fare. It must have been a city of Robin Hoods, where bandits robbed everybody and subsidized the rich and the poor.

  “Anastasia,” Isaac groaned, “we’re too conspicuous.”

  “Darling, we’re supposed to be conspicuous. The safest ride in Sicily is on a bus. Anyone who’s curious can tell that I don’t have a shotgun under my skirt.”

  “And what about me?”

  “You’re the sleepy-eyed magician, Isaac of Delancey Street.”

  The three of them changed buses and passed under the Porta Nuova, with its own Chinese chapel on top. The road started getting narrow. Anastasia shoved Isaac down the stairs of the bus. They went into a coffee bar and had a briosch con gelato, ice cream inside a bun. It seemed like a crazy idea, munching ice cream and a regular roll. But he had four brioschi con gelato with different flavors. He would have had five if Anastasia hadn’t dragged him out of the coffee bar.

  They landed on the Via Cappuccino, turned several corners, and entered a catacomb. It was a fucking house of the dead, filled with mummified corpses and skeletons, arranged according to rows. There was a line of bishops, wearing pointy hats, soldiers with smiling jaws, a panel of children in dolls’ costumes, doctors in rotting clothes, all held up by wires and strings. Isaac was startled by the different expressions a skull could have. The skeleton soldiers and bishops seemed more alive now, with all the deep pain of the living. The women had their own separate wall in this society, like some segregated synagogue of the soul.

  The Pink Commish started to cry.

  “What’s the matter?” Margaret whispered in his ear.

  “I’m crazy about all these skeletons.”

  “Darling, that’s why I brought you here.”

  “Now I know where Peppinninu got his inspiration. From these dolls of Palermo. He must have been an embalmer or a monk who dressed up skeletons on a lot of walls.”

  Fran looked very pale. “I’m sick,” he said. “I need fresh air.”

  “In a minute,” said Isaac of Delancey Street, who wanted to grab his own inspiration from these dolls. He saw skulls with tufts of hair, skeletons wearing neckerchiefs, like banditi. He saw looks of such sorrow, he could have demanded his own niche in the wall.

  A professor arrived with a mob of students. He spoke English with a German accent. His clothes were a bit too tailored in this catacomb. He had a magenta-colored jacket.

  “It’s ingenious, eh? To visit your loved ones after they’ve departed. And it’s not as morbid as you think. Do I sound sacrilegious if I say the soul is still there? Or at least the reminder of a soul. The body dies, but you still have your loved one. You can visit a mother, a father, a child who died in infancy. You can talk to the dead, even as the fluids drain.”

  Fran rushed out of the catacomb
. And Isaac had to follow. But he would have liked to have a dialogue with this professor of the dead.

  25

  Anastasia brought him to a palace where the Normans had lived. He found the throne room of Roger II, first king of Sicily, whose palace had risen out of the ruins of an old Moslem fort. There were mosaics in Roger’s room: antelopes and Sicilian tigers in a big heavenly garden. But he wanted young Robert, not the dream park of a twelfth-century king.

  “No more sights.”

  “We’re hunting,” Anastasia said.

  “Yeah. Tigers on a wall.”

  He returned to the hotel. Anastasia claimed one of the bedrooms for herself. She closed her door and Isaac sat with his other babysitter, who couldn’t stop shivering.

  “I’m dead.”

  “Ah, you miss Poe Cottage, Fran, that’s all.”

  “I’m dead, I told you … she’s not my fiancée. I live in a fucking circus. I stretched myself too far. I should have given the Bronx back to Jerry D.”

  “And lose Poe Park?”

  “Commish,” Fran said, “I already lost it.” And he vanished into his own bedroom.

  Isaac knocked on Anastasia’s door. She called out to him. “I’m asleep.”

  He entered the bedroom. She stood beside the bed, wearing a holster.

  “Fran isn’t my babysitter. You are. You’re dumping him in Palermo. Fran is the reason for this trip.”

  “He went into the wrong cellar. He didn’t have any license to kill Don Roberto. He took money from Sal. He freelanced with his children’s army.”

  “But young Robert was his accomplice.”

  “Robert’s a psychopath, like most artists and magicians. He was paid to deliver dolls, not to sacrifice his own teacher.”

  “I’m in the dark,” Isaac said.

  “Darling, that’s what makes you adorable.”

  “Where’d you get that Glock? You weren’t wearing a holster on the plane. I would have felt it near your heart. Was some Sicilian CIA man on our bus? Did he pass you the gun while I was watching the palm trees?”