Secret Isaac (21 page)

She drank whiskey with Margaret, Edna, and Mary Jane. The three witches understood the restless agony of knees jumping under Annie's skirts. Like a cow she was, a cow gone wild in the head without its mate. The whiskey had maddened her with a hoarse fever. “Bridey,” she muttered. “The bride of Little Bride Street.” Ah, she had the hallucinations. She was counting the streets of Dublin in her wild talk. Annie climbed over the barricade. Boxes tore around her feet. Rags spilled out. “Good night,” she said, with the sun shining in her hair. Even the girls had enough sense in them to declare the difference between night and day. “Night,” she said, “good night,” and she shuffled into the gutters. She didn't have a penny in her skirts. She was going to hop from bar to bar singing Irish songs like any street musician and collect pints of whiskey for the girls. But she never got to the south side of Ninth Avenue.

The girls had been watching the traffic for her. Housed in their fort, they'd developed a certain prescience. They could feel most disasters, the witches of Clonmel, Wicklow, and Dun Laoghaire. They would have yelled if the cars grew thick in front of Annie. But a cab scuttled out of nowhere to bump Annie Powell. It hadn't been part of the traffic. A willful, angered machine it was, that could throw a girl over a fender and disappear. The blood whipped from Annie's mouth in long, long strings. She shuddered in the air, rose with the force of that machine, her back nearly ripping into two separate wings as she fell into the gutter, with her thighs pulling loose from her shredded skirts. “Mother of Mercy,” the witches shrieked, breaking through their barricade to get near Annie Powell.

Part

Six

24

H
E
'
D
killed the girl,
him
, Isaac, the big chief. He'd trusted Annie to pairs of strange boys from his office. He should have interviewed all the bodyguards he assigned to her. Only the schmuck couldn't even walk into Headquarters. He ran his office from an old dungeon that would soon belong to Rebecca of the Rockaways. He couldn't tell who was working for him anymore. He had to telephone his office to find out every piece of news. His blue-eyed angels should have been the scourge of the City. But these angels were falling down. They would bump into each other on various assignments and quests. They didn't have Isaac to pamper them and coordinate their attacks. They were disarmed without Isaac the Pure.

Their chief had a worm in him. The worm fucked his head. He'd gone into seclusion, lived in a ratty hotel, to lay bare the whore markets of New York. His bum's clothes taught him nothing. The pimps mocked the charcoal on his face. His hotel was a canteen for twelve-year-old prostitutes from the Midwest. The traffic in baby women flourished around Isaac. He couldn't make a dent. He scrounged here and there, and forgot to keep Annie alive.

Isaac grew active once she was dead. He couldn't locate the cab that ran her down, but he got in touch with Annie's mother. Mrs. Powell cursed him on the phone. She wouldn't come to the morgue and look at Annie. “My daughter's in Ireland. She went with a lousy thief. I wish I could say he's a Yid. But he's as Irish as Cardinal Cooke. Dermott Bride has my Annie … he has my girl. So don't tell me stories about this corpse you collected. I don't care if you're the commissioner to Saint Patrick. If you bother me again, I'll sue.”

She hung up on Isaac. Should he give her daughter a Catholic burial? The worm wiggled no. He had to smuggle some kind of ceremony for Annie Powell. Apostate as he was, he still belonged to the Hands of Esau. This was the brotherhood of Jewish cops. Isaac had buried his Blue Eyes, Manfred Coen, through the Hands of Esau. He also tricked a grave out of them for Annie. “Jewish girl,” he said. “Never mind her name … I need a good plot.”

The Hands of Esau hired righteous men to say the kaddish for Annie Powell. Isaac rode out to Queens in the funeral car. He threw bits of earth on top of Annie's coffin, as if he'd been a father to her. The gravediggers had mercy on Isaac. They offered him a cigarette. The First Dep wouldn't smoke near Annie's grave.

He returned to Manhattan and ended his apostasy for seven days. He camped out on Ninth Avenue with the witches of Clonmel, Wicklow, and Dun Laoghaire. He sat shiva behind their barricade, while the witches shrieked. They frightened merchants and cops with their long cries. When they grew exhausted from their keening, Isaac would stuff potatoes in their mouths. He wouldn't let the witches starve.

Sitting on his box, he stirred only for coffee and the needs of his bladder. He didn't wash. He didn't move his bowels. He didn't feed the worm. His chin darkened from the whiskers that were growing there. He got terribly thin.

After those seven days of mourning he stood up and walked to his hotel. He'd come home in the middle of a crisis. The black whores, girls of nineteen, had begun to rebel. They felt betrayed by their pimps, who were bringing twelve-year-olds into the house, white trash from the barns of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The black whores couldn't scare a gentleman off the street. Their trade had dwindled altogether. No one would take them but freaks. Everybody wanted the little snow queens with baby tits. So the black whores had to turn mean in the halls. They went after the little “whiteys,” tore the clothes off their skinny backs. The snow queens couldn't scrounge for men in tattered underwear. They hid five and six to a room, trembling against the wrath of the black whores, who patrolled the hotel with hellish eyes.

It couldn't last. The “players” left their purple Cadillacs when they couldn't find one little “whitey” in the street. They marched into the hotel and finished off the rebellion. They freed the little “whiteys” from their rooms, dressed them in different clothes, and pushed them out like big ravaged dolls to draw the customers in. Then the “players” took their revenge.

They were beating and kicking the black whores just as Isaac entered the hotel. The pimps paid no mind to the old bum who had been sitting shiva for seven days and had dust and dark stubble all over him. Isaac saw bloody mouths everywhere. The black whores gave up most of their teeth. It was as if Isaac had stumbled upon the slaughter of twenty cows. The noise was the same. The moaning was horrible to him. The pimps' assault on the black whores didn't make him think like a cop. He couldn't produce handcuffs for every “player” at the hotel. The moans he heard, that constant cowlike moo, gripped Isaac in the belly and maddened him. Isaac was encouraged by the worm. He trucked through the halls slapping blindly at each pimp he met. He knocked off their hats. He bit them on the ear in a show of fury. He ruined their fifty-dollar vests. The black whores were amazed. They'd never had an avenger like this old bum. Isaac muttered to himself as he threw down one pimp after the other. “Pray to Dermott, you lovely boys … I'll close this fucking hotel … Annie died because of me and you … the king can't protect you now.”

The “players,” the last of them, the ones who were still on their feet, did the best they could: they called the pimp squad at Midtown Station South. “Bring the cops, man … we got a maniac on the grounds. He'll murder people, swear to Moses, he will.”

Eight detectives arrived. They were part of the First Deputy's office. Isaac himself had created them, a special squad to keep the pimps of Manhattan from hurting their own women. But the pimp squad suffered without any visibility from their chief. Isaac was only a phantom to them. No one on the squad had ever seen the First Dep. The squad's morale was low. Instead of protecting the whores, the squad became friendly with the pimps.

The eight detectives were appalled by the blood and squalor inside the hotel. They'd been sleeping in their squadroom for the past two days. They despised anything to do with the ugly smells of the street. They were on loan from the burglary squad. Some idiot from Isaac's office had fucked up their lives. They were dangling men, cops on a “telephone message.” A phone call from Headquarters had reshuffled them, thrown them in with the pimp squad. No orders had been written up. Another phone call could take them away, parachute them into the Bronx. You couldn't depend on shit when you were doing a “telephone message.”

They weren't in the mood to placate an old bum on the rampage. They wanted to get back to their squadroom at Midtown Station South, so they could sleep the rest of the afternoon. They caught Isaac on the second floor, with a pimp's ear in his mouth. It was dumb stuff. They couldn't smooth this out. They'd have to arrest the crazy son of a bitch. Six of them fell on top of Isaac. The other two grabbed his feet. They could either kill him, or handcuff him and bring him along to Midtown South. There were a lot of black whores in the hall. The whores were watching Isaac. Now the detectives would have to go through the entire rigmarole of collaring the bum. Their senior man, a detective-sergeant, shook the “rights” card out of his wallet and began reading it to Isaac.

“Hey, you glom, you're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions. Do ya understand?”

Isaac growled up at him. “Eat your ass,” he said.

“What's your name, you?”

“Moses Herzog McBride.”

“Listen, McBride, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. Ya understand?”

“Eat your ass.”

Some of the detectives dug their knees into Isaac's groin.

“You have the right to consult your attorney before speaking to the police. And to have an attorney present for any questioning now or in the future. Ya understand?”

“My attorney's Tiger John. Go play with the Tiger.”

“A clown,” the detective-sergeant said. “And a fuckin' moron … you have the right to remain silent until you have the chance to consult with your attorney. So don't give me a hard time. Are you willing to answer our questions or not?”

“Eat your ass.”

They dragged Isaac out of the hotel, sat him in one of their cars, and drove him to Midtown South. The pimp squad had autonomy over here. They were specialists, assigned from Headquarters. The precinct commander was nothing to them. They could ignore any cop who existed outside of their squadroom. They whisked Isaac past the desk sergeant and brought him upstairs. The bum refused to undress for a strip search. They punched him and shucked off his clothes. They took Polaroids of Isaac with his prick between his legs. They pulled him over a table, spread his cheeks, and looked up his rectum for suspicious foreign matter. This Moses Herzog McBride could be carrying diamonds or coke up his ass. The bum was clean, but he was riddled with pocks and many scars. You could tabulate the different warfares on Isaac's back and chest. The bum must have been knifed and gouged thirty times. He had a welt under his right nipple, a circular piece of raised skin, that looked like it had come from the plunge of an ice pick. The detectives began to finger Isaac's wondrous scars. “Hey, McBride, were you ever in Korea?… did the chinks do a job on you?”

“No,” Isaac said, with his ass high on the table. “I got banged up at the Police Academy, wrestling with recruits.”

They couldn't get a thing out of the joker. They locked him in the squadroom cage, and wouldn't give him back his clothes. Let the bastard shiver for a while. They would search through their pimp files for faces that resembled the old bum. Maybe he was a psycho with a grudge against pimps. If they could get his MO and his full pedigree, they might make a big score with this bum, and receive a commendation from the mysterious First Dep, who was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

The bum began to piss in the cage. The detectives were furious with him. They were going to flip him upside down and use his scalp for a mop when they noticed another old man in the room. The man looked like a detective who'd gone downhill. His coat was shitty and he needed a shave. Isaac recognized him: it was Mangen's shoofly, Captain Mort.

“Hey,” the detective-sergeant said, “what the fuck do you want?”

“I want your prisoner,” Morton said. “Dress that boy … and give him to me.”

The pimp squad yelled at Captain Mort. “We haven't booked him yet. This is just a friendly interview. We have to escort him down to Elizabeth Street.”

The shoofly glared at them. “I wouldn't book him if I was you … you'll embarrass yourselves.”

“Schmuck, how did you get into this room?”

“I always follow the pimp squad,” Morton said. “That's my specialty.”

The detectives' bark wasn't so fierce. “Who are you?”

“Schapiro. I work for Dennis Mangen.”

Sleeping in the squadroom morning after morning hadn't dulled their minds. They knew all about the Special State Prosecutor. Mangen. The mention of him was enough to turn your testicles gray. No commissioner could protect you from the great god Dennis. But suppose this Schapiro was telling a lie? Anybody could bluff you with Mangen's name.

“Why do you want this guy so bad?” the detective-sergeant muttered with a little more respect.

“I don't want him,” Schapiro said. “He's Mangen's baby.”

The detectives peeked inside the cage at Isaac's scars and Isaac's prick. “Who is this fuckin' bum?”

Captain Mort showed his contempt for the pimp squad. He had a disgusting grin that almost swallowed his own two ears. “That's your boss. Isaac the Brave.”

The detectives stood frozen in the squadroom. Their mouths were brittle and puffy white.

“Don't listen to him,” Isaac shouted from the cage. “Take me to Elizabeth Street. I want to be booked without my clothes.”

The pimp squad didn't know what to believe. “We frisked him … we didn't find a commissioner's badge.”

“You think he's a dummy like you?” Morton said. “The First Dep don't wear a badge when he's on a caper.”