Secret Isaac (18 page)

“Maybe he loves you, who knows?… I could send a message up to him and find out.”

“Don't bother. I'll ask him myself.”

“I wouldn't do that, Jamey boy. It's best to leave Isaac out of it.”

“Listen, old man, if you hit Annie Powell again, if your little helpers touch her one more time with their sticks, I'll scream … scream to Isaac, and if Isaac doesn't hear, I'll go to the PC himself. Tiger John isn't much, but he'll have to protect his reputation … he'll throttle you … tell me, how are all the McNeills? Has your clan inherited the earth yet? You might retire a bit too soon, and your ass will get shaved, just like mine … you're a fouler cop than I ever was, Coote McNeill.”

The Fisherman left the table. He didn't motion to the little people on the stools. He walked out of the Kilkenny and got into his car, a blue Chevrolet. The Fisherman drove himself downtown, while Robinson Crusoe rocked at his table. He ordered whiskey in a bottle. He wasn't going to drink one thimble at a time. The little sergeants frowned at him. So he drank without their blessings. He didn't like his conversation with Coote. He was trying to protect Annie girl, but he hadn't jabbed the Fisherman hard as he should. He couldn't run to Isaac now. The bastards would be crouching in the doorways. Coote had people everywhere. They were too short to reach his head. Their sticks would clatter around his shoulders and break. The donkey would get past Twenty-third Street, all right. He'd have splinters in his back from all the sticks. But he'd go deeper and deeper into Chelsea, crawl on his knuckles to find his mother's house. He banged on the table to get the barman's ear. “Another bottle, you fat son of a bitch. Put it on Coote's bill. I wonder if a cheap old fart like that will give me a decent wake.”

The little people began to smile. “We'll bury you fine, Jamey, we will.”

“You'll be burying Coote before you bury me. I have a whole other bottle to drink”

Part

Five

21

F
UCKING
Isaac.

He was the freak of a Department that had been fed the Irish way: on loyalty, discipline, and devotion to the cause. Isaac had no sense of camaraderie. He was a commissioner who fiddled on his own. He wouldn't move into Headquarters. He sat in that old, dying box on Centre Street, a huge limestone hut that was beginning to crumble and sink into the ground. Give him another year, and the boy will be swimming in mud. No one could pull him out of his corner room. The First Dep was an ally of Mayor Sammy Dunne. “Hizzoner” had split Becky Karp's brains in the primaries, beaten the regular and reform wings of his own Party, and now everybody was paying homage to Sam. You couldn't touch Isaac because of him.

Isaac the Pure kept a blanket in his desk. He would sleep at the old building whenever he liked. The one janitor who serviced the place couldn't throw out the First Dep. Isaac was free to stroll the long marble corridors past midnight. The floors had weakened tiles that would break loose under Isaac's feet. He would trip in the dark and curse the old Police Headquarters. But he loved it, tile for tile, with its dented iron rails, the roof that leaked on his head, its cracked dome and useless clock tower. He'd made his house in these ruins.

But his triumph was small. A desk, a blanket, and marble floors weren't much comfort to Isaac the bum. He had a bad dream in his corner of the building. Three women were chasing him: Sylvia, Annie, and Jennifer Pears. Their faces would intermingle in Isaac's dream, twist into odd amalgams. Annie had Jennifer's green eyes. Sylvia had a mark on her cheek. Jennifer began to look like Isaac's dead angel, Manfred Coen.

He muttered “Blue Eyes” and coughed himself awake. His room seemed clogged with a kind of soft gray smoke. It was dust, moving bands of dust. He poked into the hall. The dust was thick as Moses. Isaac could barely see. He felt his way to the landing. There were plasterers on the ground floor, teams of them. They stood on ladders and knocked through the walls. They wore masks with little nose cones and mouth protectors. They had a woman with them. Isaac recognized her under her mask. It was the fallen mayoral candidate, Rebecca Karp. She motioned to Isaac. They walked out of Headquarters and faced one another on the street. Becky took off her mask. She smiled.

“Cocksucker, I warned you to get with me.”

Isaac slapped the dust off his shoulders. “Rebecca, Sam would have destroyed you without my help. This town loves a little man. It never votes for big, ballsy women.”

“Isaac, you're such a baby. How did you survive so long? Schmuck, we've taken over this building.”

Isaac stopped slapping himself. “Who says?”

“Don't you read the papers? I'm president of the Downtown Restoration Committee. We're turning this shithole into a cultural center. And we're kicking you out.”

“The City owns the building,” Isaac said.

“I know. We leased it from the Department of Real Estate for a dollar a month. Isaac, you can't win.”

Isaac went to Broome Street and dialed the Mayor's Office. He couldn't get Sammy on the phone. “Tell him again … Isaac wants to see him.”

He had to hike down to City Hall. He could never be anonymous in the Mayor's territories. Reporters sniffed him from “Room Nine,” their closet near the main door. They ran out to grab hold of Isaac and badger him. Why wouldn't he give press conferences any longer? Was Sammy going to make him a super “Commish” in charge of all corruption?

“Children,” Isaac said, “this is a private call. Catch me at my office.”

They had their spokesman, a boy from the
Daily News
. “Isaac, don't bullshit us, please. You come in and out of your own whirlwind. Who can ever catch you?”

He got around them and entered the Mayor's wing. All that swagger he'd enjoyed with Sam was gone. He had to confront the Mayor's three male secretaries. He couldn't get past the third secretary without snarling and rolling his eyes. The second secretary was less afraid of him. Isaac's jaw burned from gnashing his teeth. “Sonny, I don't make appointments with the Mayor.” The first secretary had Isaac by the seat of his pants. “Lay off. We're blood brothers, me and Sam …”

The cops outside the Mayor's door laughed at the spectacle of Isaac being chased by three male secretaries. They were a pair of plainclothesmen who had sworn to guard Sammy with their lives. They would have had to club the First Deputy Police Commissioner behind the ear. But Sammy heard the commotion and peeked out of his office. The vision in front of his eyes saddened him. “It's only Isaac,” he said. “Let him through.”

Isaac got into that office on the heels of Mayor Sam. His Honor wouldn't look at him. He stared out the window at City Hall Park. His aides had bolted the window for him. Sam was frightened of September drafts. He was a different Mayor now. That meek illiterate who took to a hospital bed before the primaries had become the fierce Old Man of City Hall.

“You made up with Becky Karp, didn't you, Sam?”

“Not at all.”

“She would have broken your neck, and you're kissy with her. I should have figured that. It's pinky politics. All the Democrats roll out of the same barracks room. It's bite, bite at the primaries, and then you lick each other's navel.”

“Don't be so harsh. I hate the bitch.”

“Then why did you make her a landlady over me?”

“I did not. You're accusing the wrong man.”

“You gave her Centre Street. You leased
my
building to her fucking arts committee.”

“Jesus,” His Honor muttered. “I only lent her one wing. She can't abuse you, Isaac … it's your fault.”

“How come?”

“I wanted to get rid of Tiger John and give you the PC's job.”

“Give it to Chief Inspector McNeill. He's your best cop.”

“McNeill's too old.”

“Old? He's younger than you are, Sammy Dunne.”

“But McNeill's not the Mayor of New York. The people won't stand for a decrepit Police Commissioner.”

“Sam, I won't be your Tiger John.”

“Then help us out, for God's sake. Mangen is on our back. What can I do? He's the Special Pros. Come in with me, Isaac. Take one of my chairs.”

“Is that some title you're thinking of?”

“
Yes
. An assistant mayor to watch the Police.”

“A rat, you mean, a rat working out of your office. Sammy, it's not for me.”

The Mayor turned glum and retired to the golden-knobbed desk that Fiorello LaGuardia had used. “Isaac, Isaac, you know that job of yours. The First Dep is always a vulnerable man.”

One of his inspectors ran up to Isaac outside City Hall. It was fat Marvin Winch. Marvin was out of breath. “Sir, we've been looking all over for you. Our boys found Jamey O'Toole. Looks like he was kicked in the face by a lot of people.”

“Is he still alive?”

“No, sir.”

“I hope you didn't bring Jamey to Bellevue? I don't want him in the morgue … not yet. Those medical examiners will chop his fingers off and put them in a jar.”

“Isaac, he's in a yard behind his mama's place. They tried to stuff him in a garbarge can. But he's too big.”

Marvin Winch drove him up to Chelsea so Isaac could stand in the carnage around Jamey O'Toole. Broken sticks. Blood. Teeth. Patches of wool. A crushed eyeglass frame. A third of someone's sleeve. Jamey had done a bit of dancing before he died. The bastards had left him in an awkward position. He sat with his rump in a garbage can. Nothing more of him could fit. The donkey must have been punched and kicked a thousand times. His head was swollen with bump upon bump. You couldn't see the man's nose. He'd clutched at them in a blinded state. There were clots of blood where his eyes had been.

Isaac didn't examine the sticks and teeth near O'Toole. The lab boys could squat with their clippers and sensitive gloves and play Sherlock Holmes. Isaac left things to Inspector Winch. “Marvin, they'll accuse us of body snatching if we don't watch out. You'll have to bring Jamey's mother downstairs to identify the son of a bitch. You ride with him to Bellevue, hear? The kids from the ambulance like to steal a dead man's shoe. They think it's good luck.”

He strode uptown with ambulances in his head. The logistics of getting Jamey to Bellevue were uncertain at best. It would take more than one attendant and cop to move that corpse. Four detectives,
five
, would have to squeeze him into a body bag. A normal stretcher would collapse under O'Toole. They'd be smart to borrow a dolly from a grocery store and trundle him into the ambulance. Isaac's love of detail had gone macabre ever since he returned from Ireland.

Annie Powell wasn't at her corner. Isaac asked the young dudes about her. “You mean the crazy one who sings without her underpants? She's on Ninth Avenue, with all the bag ladies.”

He knew that spot. Three old women had built an enclave of cardboard boxes on Ninth and Forty-first. It was an open-air fort; the old women lived inside the enclave with their belongings stuffed in shopping bags. Isaac would permit no cop to drive them out of their fort.

They were Irish hags from Clonmel, Wicklow, and Dun Laoghaire. Annie was drinking coffee with them. Isaac approached that enclave of boxes. Annie's legs were crossed. Her brow wrinkled up when Isaac's shadow fell on her. The three hags said hello. Annie didn't have to raise her eyes; she could tell from the persistence of his shadow who it was.

“You're standing in my sunlight, Father Isaac. Do me a favor and shove your ass a bit.”

The hags had a stove in their fort put together from pieces of tin. They were baking sweet potatoes in the stove, and they offered Isaac one. He couldn't hold the potato. He had to slap it and push the potato from hand to hand. Annie laughed at his clumsy routine. She was beginning to like him all over again. Finally he gobbled the bark off the potato and chewed the inside. It was an inherited trait. His crazy mother also loved sweet potatoes. She had a junk shop downtown, and she slept in it with her Arab boyfriend Abdul. Then a gang of kids beat her up. She lay in a coma for months before she died. Those kids had some wild grievance against Isaac, and they got at him through his mother. He was a dumb prick with a worm in him and a host of scars that stayed soft and wet. He bumbled through the City now like a wounded bear. Who was Isaac? The worm, or the bear that grew around it?

“Jamey's dead. Some people kicked him in an alley.” Annie blinked at Isaac. “How do you know?”

“I could take you to the morgue and let you have a look … they didn't leave him much of a face.”

“Jamey's killers, were they little people with brooms in their hands?… then they work for the Fisherman.” She couldn't say Coote, Coote, because she'd promised the king never to utter that name. “He's an old man with high boots. He owns a house on a yellow lake. If you get up early in the morning, you can watch the salmon jump.”