Marilyn the Wild (2 page)

“Mordecai? He's a leftover from World War Two. He minded all the Victory gardens from Chinatown to Corlears Hook, but he didn't save a carrot for himself.”

What could Isaac tell his chauffeur? Mordecai squatted down a hundred yards from his high school, Seward Park, and never stirred. Isaac had nothing against fixed perimeters. He was born on West Broadway, in a block owned by London Jews, men and women who had a more powerful vocabulary than their Yankee neighbors. Yet he preferred Essex Street, where his mother kept a junk shop, to the London Jews of West Broadway, or the Riverdale of Brodsky and Kathleen, Isaac's estranged wife.

The chauffeur stopped at the pickle factory on Essex and Broome for a jar of grated horseradish roots, pure and white, without the sweetening effect of red beets. Only dehydrated women and quiffs from the District Attorney's office would buy red horseradish. He put his nose in the jar, sniffed until his eyes went blind, and recovered in time to watch Isaac pass Sophie Sidel's junk shop.

“Isaac, aren't you going to sit with your mother?”

The Chief wouldn't answer. “Brodsky, the First Dep needs his car. Bring it to him.”

Isaac was hoping to skirt away from his mother. He had too many unexplainable items in his head. He'd visit her after Paris, not before. He went into Hubert's delicatessen, five doors up from Sophie's. The place seemed in perfect order, with fish balls steaming the counter glass, and the juice of several puddings bubbling down off the stove, but Hubert himself was in disarray. A little man, with pointy shoulders and a lion's shaggy scalp, he had lumps on his brow and pieces of toilet paper covering dark spots along his chin.

“Hubert, what's wrong?” Isaac said, occupying his favorite chair. “Did you shave with one eye this morning?” Isaac couldn't have anticipated any evil. The delicatessen was his roost. Other Deputy Chief Inspectors sat in the chosen clam-houses of Mulberry and Grand, elbows away from Mafia lieutenants and princelings. But Isaac ate alone. At Hubert's he could follow the cracks in the wall without interruptions. Hubert hadn't lost a dime from his cash register in fifteen years. East Side pistols learned to steer south of the delicatessen by habit. If they did come inside Hubert's, to warm their hands over a cup of winter tea, they made sure to leave an elaborate tip.

The Chief wasn't insensitive. When that big lion's head didn't come back at him with a pout, and splash barley soup on the tablecloth with customary verve, Isaac took a different turn.

“Who did it to you? Were they white or black?”

“White as snow,” Hubert said.

“How much did they take?”

“Nothing. They didn't touch the register. They broke a few chairs, slapped me, and left.”

“Hubert, what did they wear?”

“Army coats, navy coats, who remembers? Their faces were covered up. With ski masks.”

“Then how can you be sure they were white?”

“By their hands, Isaac. By their hands. One of them was a girl. I'm no detective, but I can tell the outline of a tit.”

“When did it happen?”

“Yesterday. Just before closing.”

“How come it takes a whole day for me to hear about it?”

“Isaac, close the inquisition, please. It isn't a police matter. Crazy kids. They could have picked on anybody.”

“Absolutely,” Isaac said, with a thickened tongue. “They were playing trick-or-treat. Only Halloween doesn't come in February. Your cash was too good for them. So they took their profits on your skull. How many of them were there?”

“There were three.” Hubert's mouth was crammed with spit.

“I'll be gone for a week. My man will look into it.”

The lumps grew dark on the lion's head. “Isaac, I don't want a bully in my store. Brodsky has wide elbows. He doesn't give a person room to drink his soup.”

“I'll send you Coen. He's small. He'll charm your customers to sleep with his blue eyes.”

Isaac knocked in the window of the dairy restaurant on Ludlow Street; it was a place he liked to avoid. It was crammed with hungry playwrights and scholars who tried to tangle Isaac into conversations about Spinoza, Israel, police brutality, and the strange brotherhood of Aaron and Moses. The playwrights weren't scornful of him. They recognized Isaac as the patron saint of Ludlow and East Broadway. He kept bandits off their streets, but his strength was no surprise to them. He'd been suckled on strange milk. His mother was a woman with an obstinate heart. She befriended Arabs and Puerto Ricans over Jews.

They laughed at the reaction of the cashier lady to Isaac's knock. Ida Stutz threw off her uniform and smacked powder on her face. This one was Isaac's fiancée. They knew Isaac had an Irish wife up in Riverdale, but it would have been unwise of them to offend Ida. She furnished the scholars with toothpicks, sneaked them pats of butter and extra rolls, because she had a kindness for undernourished men. Ida was a girl with ample arms and legs. Whatever prettiness she had came from such proportions. She made her own lunch hours at the Ludlow restaurant. She was a dray horse most mornings and afternoons. The owners of the restaurant worked her silly. They could count on Ida's sweat, and Ida's husky back. So they allowed her one oddity. When the Chief knocked, Ida disappeared.

Isaac kept two stunted rooms on Rivington Street. He had to share a toilet with an ancient bachelor who peed wantonly. He washed his body in a kitchen tub that couldn't accommodate all of Isaac until his ears crept between his knees. It was in this undignified position that Ida found the Chief. She saw his suitcase on the bed, burgeoning with starched underwear, notebooks, and unbleached honey.

“Isaac, I know you. Soaping your belly is just a blind. Your brains are already in Paris.”

Squirming in the tub, a prisoner to his own knees, Isaac had to smile. His wife Kathleen had been an extraordinary beauty. Even at forty-nine (she was five years older than the Chief), she had bosoms that could make Ida blush. But Isaac had never been a connoisseur of flesh. He gave up his home in Riverdale because Kathleen had grown independent of him. She was a woman with spectacular real estate. She had properties in Florida that ate up most of her energy. Isaac didn't have to crawl to the lower East Side for love. He could have stayed uptown with handsome widows, starlets who were hungry for intellectual cops, or bimbos with penthouses and rebuilt behinds. Ida pleased him more. She had a tongue that could scold him properly, and a mouth that could suck up all his teeth. It didn't matter to her how Isaac behaved. Ida wasn't fragile. She could match the Chief in kisses, bear hugs, and bites. She began to undress.

“This is your last bath in America. Aren't you sorry you don't have a bigger tub?”

“Ida, there's a tub at Headquarters that could fit you, me, and five more cops. Should we go?”

“We'll go,” she said. “When you're not in a rush.” And she dried him with Florentine talc from Mulberry Street, a powder so fine that it could cure the most subtle rash. She lay on the bed near Isaac's sweetened body, without bothering to push the suitcase aside. His bull neck, evenly talced, couldn't intimidate her. Ida didn't suffer from delusions about her fiancé. He had torn out the eye of a bandit from East New York, broken the arms of suspicious characters, survived gunfights with Puerto Ricans and hardened Jews. But she'd seen the infant inside the bear. He was a man who loved to be babied. Under the talcumed skin was a dread that Ida knew how to smother. The Chief made no pretense of masculinity. He shuddered in Ida's arms. His passions were the primitive clutch of a drowning man.

The bear was quiet after loving her. Ida wouldn't give in to his sulkiness while she dripped with Isaac's sperm. So she pulled his nose. The Chief kicked one leg over the honey jar and a stack of underpants.

“Where are your troubles coming from, Isaac?”

“Ah,” he lied. “I was thinking of a case.” He mumbled Hubert's name. “A gang beat him up. They didn't touch the register. It sounds flukey to me.”

“They're probably rejects from the Jewish Defense League. Maybe Hubert isn't kosher enough. He serves butter with meat”

“Don't, Ida. That's not the work of Jewish kids. Giving an old man puffs on his head.”

“You think that's special? Look at my arms.”

He glanced at the bruises on Ida's flesh, thumbprints turning brown. The halo surrounding each bruise told him the pressure that must have been applied.

“Same gang,” she said “They visited me too. They stole blintzes, not money.”

“Ida, what else did they do?”

“Little stunts. One of them grabs my arms, while the other sticks a hand in my blouse.”

The Chief scattered underwear off his bed.

“Ida, I'll find that hand and chop it off when I get back.”

With two fingers Ida straightened the curl in his lip. “Should I tell you the number of times a customer has tried to grab a handful of me?”

“These weren't customers,” the Chief said. But Ida had him by the ears. She was massaging the tiny bones at the back of his head. Isaac should have been putting on his tie. He didn't have ten minutes to spare. His face was deep in Ida's chest. The suitcase fell.

Isaac couldn't wrestle free of old questions. Ida's milky smell brought Marilyn home to him. The Chief wasn't playing incest on his bed. He didn't confuse the girls. But kisses could hurt. He was coveting Ida's milk, when he had a daughter who went from husband to husband, and couldn't confide in him.

2.

M
ARILYN
survived on lumps of tuna fish. She didn't peek about until Blue Eyes could assure her that Isaac was on the plane for Paris. The First Dep's office had verified the news: Isaac embarked at 7
P.M.
She'd been lazing with Coen since noon. She watched him button his pretty neck into the collar of a white shirt. The holster went on last “Manfred, wait I'm going with you.”

Coen was minding Isaac's car. Blue Eyes hated to drive. There were too many stirrings in doorways, beggars jumping into the street, dogs chasing buses or crawling under his wheels, old women losing their memories in the middle of the road, to thwart a cop's eye.

“You suppose Isaac is going to revise the entire French police?” Marilyn was bored. She couldn't get Coen to jabber. So she enticed him with her father's secrets. “Manfred, you have a tricky boss. He won't be mingling with detectives over there. Isaac went to visit his father.”

Lines formed on Coen's chin. Marilyn was ashamed of her crude tactics. Coen's father had killed himself. Ten years ago, while Blue Eyes was stationed in Germany, Papa Coen decided to take gas. Coen wore his sad face ever since.

“I didn't know Isaac had a father … a father that's alive.”

“It's an embarrassment to him. Like having a brother in jail.”

Coen had learned not to mention Isaac's baby brother Leo, who was entombed in Crosby Street, in a temporary annex to the old Civil Jail, because of alimony trouble. The Police Department shrugged at this indignity to itself. But the First Dep was powerless. Leo refused to step out of jail.

“Marilyn, what's embarrassing about a father?”

“He deserted the family yean ago. Isaac had to leave school. Didn't he tell you? His father was once a millionaire. Joel Sidel, the fur-collar prince. He threw it over for a stinking paint brush. He had a long nose, like Gauguin. He thought Paris was the new Tahiti. He wanted to paint the jungles around Sacré Coeur.”

Jungles in Paris meant nothing to Coen. “Why did Isaac pick now for a visit?”

“Because he's had intimations of mortality.” Coen's starved cheeks made her sorrowful of her rotten vocabulary, fed at Sarah Lawrence and at the dinner tables of her many husbands. “Manfred, he's going on forty-five. That's a dangerous age. Isaac needs his father. Seeing Joel will prove to him that he's got years to go.”