Secret Isaac (2 page)

Certain men would step out of shiny Buicks and whisper to the old bum. They were much too regal to be members of any vice squad, and they didn't wear the wide trousers of homicide boys. The pimps would wonder to themselves: who is this geek? Their friends at the nearest precinct grew mum when you mentioned the old man with the worm.

He developed a lousy odor. He didn't think much about changing his pants. He wouldn't shave more than once a week. He fed his worm at a Greek dive on Eighth Avenue and Forty-fifth. He would eat salads and whole wheat bread. Then he'd give in to his appetite and crawl to Ninth Avenue for a cappuccino. It was a weakness he had. Strong coffee and steamed milk.

The coffee was bad for his worm. Its thousand little hooks grabbed at the old man's intestines, and he would stumble through the street, saying, “Fuck, God, shit,” or whatever madness came into his head. He would avoid the coffee for five or six days. Then he couldn't help himself.

It was after one of these cappuccino fits, when the worm was twisting him half to death, that he saw her on Forty-third Street. It wasn't a good corner for a prostitute. There was always a heavy load of cops that guarded the trucking lanes around the
New York Times
building. The Mayor was scared of the
New York Times
. He had his Police Commissioner, Tiger John, flood Forty-third Street with cops in and out of uniform. So who had stationed this girlie over here? Some forlorn “player,” a beginner's pimp who hadn't learned the truths of Times Square? She was no mulatto queen. The old bum watched her in profile. A white whore who didn't have that hard glint of a manhater. She was beautiful. She should have been a rich man's escort, not a bimbo in the street.

The old bum wasn't filled with lecheries. He wouldn't have brought this beauty to his hotel. He had a daughter with the same skinny ankles. The daughter was a sucker for men. She couldn't keep from getting married and divorced. She was on her seventh husband, and she was only twenty-nine. He decided to play the father to this beauty, chase her from Forty-third Street before the Chief Inspector's men picked her up. But he was trembling at the fineness of her nose. Why didn't some Cadillac whisk her off to White Plains? She was a girl to marry, not whore with. Then the old man saw the other side of her face.

It was scarred, wickedly scarred. She had the imprint of what seemed to be a knuckle, as if she'd been gouged with a metal fist. He took a closer look. The letter “D” had been scratched into her face. Christ. A scarlet letter on Forty-third Street.

“Miss, you can't stay here. The cops are fond of this corner. You'd better shove up to Forty-fifth.”

“I can't.” She smiled, and that gruesome letter wriggled on her cheek. “I don't have a union card. The other girls would bite my ass.”

“Who's looking after you?”

“Martin McBride.” The smile ended, and the “D” corrected itself.

“Well, this Martin is an idiot. Is he the one who put you in the street?”

The scarred beauty turned agitated.

“Mister, take me somewhere, or go away. Martin doesn't like me talking to strangers.”

She didn't have a bimbo's voice, and it confused the old bum. He had no plans to undress her. “What's your name?”

“Annie.”

“Annie what?”

“Isn't Annie enough for you?” she said. “It's Annie Powell.”

He smuggled her into a French restaurant on Forty-eighth Street, Au Tunnel. The headwaiter was frightened to throw him out. The old bum had twenties in his pocket and a Diners Club card.

Annie Powell laughed. “God, you're crazy.”

“Who's Martin McBride?”

“Somebody's uncle,” she said. “That's all.”

The old man pointed to the scar. “Did he do that?”

“No.”

They drank a muscatel, had scallops, green beans, trout, and a chocolate mousse.

“Mister, how are you going to make me earn this meal? I might not be kinky enough for you.” He hadn't told her his name.

The bum gave her forty dollars. “Do me a favor, Annie Powell. Stay off the street for the rest of the night.”

The old man was irritated. He'd gone to his hotel room, but he couldn't sleep. He had visions of Annie being pawed by bull-dykes in some detention cell. “Shit,” he said. He put on his clothes, and walked downtown to Centre Street. It was the site of the old, neglected Police Headquarters. Its rooms were abandoned now. The Police had moved to a giant red monolith in Chinatown. Only a few extraneous cops watched the floors of Centre Street, for rats and other vermin. Most of the files were removed. Even the photo unit in the basement was gone. There was a guard at the main desk, but the old man had no trouble getting into the building. He didn't have to flash any identification card. He went up to the third floor, walked through a clutch of rooms, and entered an office with an oak door. The office had a telephone. It was the only phone in the building that worked. He dialed the new Headquarters and shouted into the phone. “I told you,” he said. “A cunt named Annie Powell. If she's taken off the street, if she's bothered, if she's touched, I'll flop the whole pussy patrol. And find out who this Martin McBride is. Does he have a nephew with a name that begins with a big D?… yes, a
D
… like dumb … or dim … or dead.”

He hung up the phone, and managed to fall asleep. He didn't have much of a rest. A boy from the Mayor's office rang him up. His Honor had fled the coop again, walked out of Gracie Mansion in his pajamas on a midnight stroll.

The old bum took a cab uptown. He had the cabbie rake the streets around Carl Schurz Park. Then he got off. His Honor, Mayor Sam, had gone down to Cherokee Place. He didn't seem deprived in striped pajamas and a red silk robe. When he saw the old bum he began to weep. He was sixty-nine, and he'd turned senile on the Democratic Party over the past two years.

“Laddie, what happened to you?”

“It's nothing, Your Honor,” the old bum said. “Just the clothes I'm wearing.”

“You gave me a fright,” the Mayor said. “We have to fatten you up.”

His own aides accused him of being a decrepit fool. He belongs in a nursery, they said. Ancient Sam. But he had no difficulty recognizing the old bum. The Mayor was as lucid as a man in pajamas could ever be. It wasn't a drifting head that brought him out of his mansion. It was a fit of anxiety. All his politics was shrinking around him. Most of his deputies had abandoned Sammy Dunne. He was a Mayor without a Party. He'd become a ghost in the City of New York. You didn't speak of Mayor Sam.

He still wept for the old bum.

“Isaac, I know the enemies you have. They'll eat you alive after I'm gone.”

“Let them eat, Your Honor. I've got plenty of hide for them.”

“Laddie, what are you talking about? You're skin and bones.”

The old bum was thinking of Annie Powell. That scar of hers stuck to him. Annie's “D.” He walked the Mayor home to Gracie Mansion and went to his hotel without a name.

3

W
HY
should a whore have turned his head, a bimbo with damaged goods? She couldn't have fared very well with that gash on her face. The worm was biting at him. “Cunt,” he told the worm, “are you in love with her too?” He would stroll down to Forty-third to be sure no one molested her. His shuffling with his hands in his pockets didn't please Annie Powell. She couldn't have too many clients with an old bum hanging around. “We're having lunch,” he would say. “Come on.” It sounded like a threat to her, not an invitation. And she had to leave her corner.

This time he took her to the Cafe de Sports. A bum and a girl in a whore's midriff eating liver pâté. “Annie,” he said, “there's going to be a raid at two o'clock. The Commissioner has decided to grab single women off the streets. So you'd better have a long, long lunch.”

They had three bottles of wine. “What's your name?” she said, with a drunken growl, “and what the hell do you want from me?”

“Just say I'm Father Isaac.”

“A priest,” she said, mimicking him, “a priest without a collar … is it your hotel or mine, Father Isaac?… I perform better in strange hotels.”

“Don't bluff me, Annie Powell. You haven't done too many tricks … I want to know who put you on the street?”

“Mister,” she said, “that's none of your business.”

The old bum had to let her go. The worm dug into his bowels when he thought of her going into doorways with other men, getting down on her knees for them. He had to find this Martin McBride and break his Irish toes. But Father Isaac had an appointment today. He washed the dirt off his neck. He shaved the hairs under his nose that might have been construed as a crooked mustache. He bought a half-hour's time of the hotel's single bathtub. You wouldn't have recognized him when he stepped out of the tub. The old bum had shed twenty years. He had a pair of argyle socks in his room. He unwrapped the only suit in his closet. A silk shirt materialized from his drawer. A tie from Bloomingdale's. Underpants that were soft enough for a woman's skin. The ensemble pulled together. A younger man, fifty, fifty-one, emerged from the hotel. He had a sort of handsomeness. The worm had helped redefine the contours of his face. It gave him character and fine hollows in his cheeks.

A cab brought him to a lounge at the New School for Social Research. People shook his hand. He was more despised than worshiped here, but everybody knew him. Isaac Sidel, First Deputy Police Commissioner of New York and mystery cop. He was fond of disappearing, of putting on one disguise after the other. He wouldn't sit at his offices on the thirteenth floor of Police Headquarters. Isaac called the new brick monolith a “coffin house.” He did all his paperwork at the old, abandoned Headquarters. You had to search him out at Centre Street, or in some hobo's alley. Isaac was unavailable most of the time. His deputies were loyal to him. They ran his offices without a piece of discord. Isaac could always get a message inside.

The PC, Handsome Johnny Rathgar, couldn't scold him. Isaac was becoming a hero with all the news services. He would walk into a den of crazed Rastafarians and come out with a cache of machine guns. He settled disputes with rival teenaged gangs in the Bronx, parceling out territories to one, taking away bits from the other. Arsonists and child molesters would only surrender themselves to First Deputy Sidel. Isaac had no fear in him. He danced with any lunatic who came up close. You could throw bricks at him off the roofs. Isaac wouldn't duck his head. The First Dep was in great demand. Most organizations in the City wanted to hear him speak. Synagogues, churches, political clubs. Either to heckle him or clap. The Democrats had to live with him for now, because he was close to Sammy Dunne, and it was a little too early to drive “Hizzoner” out of Gracie Mansion. But the Mayor was about to turn seventy, and he couldn't hold a squabbling Party together. The Democrats would lash at Isaac when Sammy vacated City Hall. Republicans were frightened of Isaac's popularity, and the Liberals hated his guts. He was only a cop to them. Isaac despised them all, hacks and politicians who would grab the coat of any winner, and sneer at a Mayor's loss of power. He liked the old Mayor, who was being jettisoned by his Party. The Mayor didn't have a chance in the primaries. He was too dumb, too weak, too old. The
Daily News
had already spoken. New York would have its first Lady Mayor, the honorable Rebecca Karp, who'd come to politics via the beauty line. She was Miss Far Rockaway of 1947. She grabbed votes for Democrats with her bosoms, her bear hugs, and her smiles. She'd been a district leader in Greenwich Village. Now she was Party boss of Manhattan and the Bronx. Rebecca needed
two
boroughs to fight the pols of Brooklyn and save New York from the bumbling political machine of Samuel Dunne.

Isaac was here, at the New School, in liberal territories, to act as the Mayor's dog in a debate with Melvin Pears, sachem of the Civil Liberties Union, and a defender of Rebecca Karp. Isaac could have told Rebecca to shit in her hat, but Mayor Sam was in trouble. He hardly went downtown to visit City Hall. His margins were being eaten away. Isaac was the only voice of strength he had.

Pears was seated with the First Dep at a table near the end of the lounge. The Mayor swore that Melvin was romancing Becky Karp, but Isaac didn't always believe Mayor Sam. Melvin came from an aristocratic family, and he had a pretty wife. He was a man of thirty-five, with a fondness for rough clothes: he had workingman's boots at the New School and a cowboy shirt with a button open on his paunch. The boy likes to eat, Isaac observed, thinking of the worm he himself had to nourish. The wife sat next to Melvin. She had unbelievable gray-green eyes that sucked out Isaac with great contempt. He wondered where her shirts came from. The wife wasn't wearing Western clothes. Isaac felt uncomfortable sitting near those boots of Mel's. He shouldn't have arrived in argyle socks. His bum's pants would have held him better in this lounge.