Manhattan Noir 2 (20 page)
The door opened. Stoney stood with a beer mug, his little eyes like rodents. He talked that crazy talk of the button men.
“Come in, will ya, love? Don’t stand there like a silly cow.”
And Isaac, with a blush on his face, entered the heartland of Mendel’s. It stank of beer and sawdust and foul breath. Isaac didn’t mind. He’d never seen women in a bar, but the women of Mendel’s had broad shoulders and a thick, raucous laugh. They inspected Isaac as if he were some prize cattle. They felt his arm and reached down to stroke his thigh. Isaac was ashamed, because he had on his winter underwear.
“A cute one, Stoney, will you lend him out?”
“Not a chance,” the warden said, basking over Isaac. “The twit is my property.” He winked at the barman, who brought Isaac a glass of seltzer water with a cherry at the bottom. The warden whispered in Isaac’s ear. “Make a toast, will ya, you ungrateful little sod.”
Isaac clutched the glass of seltzer, but he didn’t know what to say.
“To hell with Tom Dewey!” shouted one of the women.
“May he rot with Kid Twist!”
Twist was a Murder, Inc. gunman until he became a stoolie for the Brooklyn D.A. He fell out the window of a Coney Island hotel while he was in the company of six cops. He was the shame of Mendel’s bar, because in the old days Twist would come over from Brooklyn to sit at Mendel’s and buy drinks for the whole population.
The gassy water must have woken Isaac. “To the Bomber,” he said, “the greatest center-fielder in the world.”
“To the Bomber.”
“To the Bomber.”
Harry “Bomber” Lieberman was a utility man the Giants had brought up in the second winter of the war, while their best men were overseas. But he didn’t play like a utility man. He was an antelope, crashing into fences and catching fly balls on a team that had already died.
“To the Bomber,” Stoney said, smiling at Isaac. “Now kid, what the hell is it you want?”
“You owe me money, Mr. Whitehall. I came to collect.”
The warden turned to Mendel’s clientele, his nostrils flaring with pretended rage.
“I made this boy. God is my witness. I gave him his start. I bring him through the door, and this is the thanks I get.”
“I came to collect.”
Mendel’s women were beginning to admire the brevity of Isaac’s style. They liked his bearish looks and the scratchy feel of his long johns. They shut their eyes and imagined Isaac riding them in one of Mendel’s back rooms.
“Leave the boy alone,” said Diana Moon, the huskiest of these sisters. “Leave him alone.”
“None ya business,” said Stoney, and he went to slap Isaac. But Diana Moon hooked her fingers into his belt. And the boy began to pound Stoney Whitehall in the middle of a long afternoon. Stoney fell under the bar, and Mendel’s forgot about him. He was only an air raid warden who’d delivered contraband ration booklets to Eric Fish, a renegade police captain and survivor of Murder, Inc. Fish had escaped the prosecutors because he wasn’t flamboyant or greedy. It was Fish who’d complained about Stoney’s fallen quota of stamps, Fish who’d promised to set the warden’s little house on fire if the quota didn’t rise. He was a Clinton Street boy who’d become a cop, made captain, and then resigned to run with Dasher Abbandando and Kid Twist. Dasher died in the electric chair. And Captain Fish? He had a dark, unsmiling face. He could walk into headquarters on Centre Street and drink coffee with his old chiefs.
He didn’t sell any of the contraband books. He had the names on the covers removed with eradicating ink. His own forgers wrote in the names of particular police commanders, and the captain offered these dun-colored books as gifts. That’s how he’d built his own immunity during the war. He loansharked a little, always careful to waltz around his former comrades at 240 Centre Street. He got rich, but he never smiled. He must have been a student of Euripides, like Florsheim, the assistant principal.
Fish had his own table at the far side of the bar. He was always there. He sat in his old captain’s tunic, the sleeves gone gray, the ribbons on his chest leaking a strange liquid. He called to Isaac across the smoke and gloom of Mendel’s, beer mugs hanging upside down from the wall. “I want the child that beat up my air raid warden.”
Isaac approached the captain’s table, shivering with a curious joy. He imagined himself among the retinue of Eric Fish, the captain’s own little specialist in ration stamps. He looked upon the darkest face he’d ever seen. All Isaac could catch were eyes and the wings of a nose.
“Who are you, then?”
“Isaac Sidel.”
“Son of Joel, the fur-collar prince?”
“The same,” Isaac said, refusing to falter in front of that black mask.
“Did you know that your father hires scabs?”
“I’m not surprised,” Isaac said.
“I threatened to kill him a couple years ago.” Isaac said nothing. “Tom Dewey got between me and your dad … Did you know I can never leave Manhattan? The D.A.’s men got together with the Treasury boys. They decided it might not look good on their scorecard to prosecute an ex-captain who had enough medals and ribbons to paper a district attorney’s ass. So I made a deal. I promised never to leave this fucking island. Otherwise you think I’d be sitting here, smelling piss? I’m a prisoner, Mr. Isaac.”
Like the Man in the Iron Mask, Isaac thought, because the captain himself had become a mask in the darkness of Mendel’s.
“Twist,” Isaac said.
“What? Are you talking about Abe Reles? Go on. Ask me anything.”
“What happened to the Kid?”
“Loved him like a brother. But I couldn’t protect no songbird. They hid him on Coney at the Neptune Hotel. But I got to the cops that were minding Reles. It was simple business. Because Abe would have ratted on everybody.”
“I figured you were the Coney Island connection,” Isaac said.
“You figured right. But I’m still short one air raid warden. Stoney’s my butcher. He supplies me with stamps.”
“But I did all the work.”
“You? Your father’s a fucking millionaire.”
“But he’s forgotten about the Sidels.”
“I could break his head … as long as I don’t have to leave Manhattan island. How old are you, Mr. Isaac?”
“Fourteen,” Isaac muttered, adding a year to his personal calendar.
“One of Florsheim’s brats?”
“Yes. But I’ve decided to leave school, Captain. I have a talent for stealing stamps.”
“What do you think of Florsheim?”
“He has egg on his tie. He’ll always be what he is. A smalltime philosopher.”
“Ah, you’re not particularly fond of him.”
“I am. He taught me Euripides. But Euripides can’t put food on the table.”
“And I suppose you’d like to become my new air raid warden.”
“You won’t regret it, Captain,” Isaac said, looking into that bloodless mask. “I could diversify. I don’t have to stick to stamps.”
“And you’d break heads for me, keep whoever I wanted in line.”
“Anything,” Isaac said.
The captain leaped from his chair and pummeled Isaac into the ground. Ribbons fell off his chest. Medals flew everywhere. And Isaac felt the captain’s fists. Knobs of stone. Mendel’s women began to shriek. Diana Moon begged Eric Fish to stop this terrible vocation of slaughtering Isaac Sidel.
The captain breathed on Isaac. “Go to school. If I catch you in Mendel’s, I’ll kill you to death.”
Diana Moon washed his swollen face with a wet rag, and Isaac crawled out of Mendel’s. He returned to school, convinced that Florsheim was the captain’s favorite cousin. The world belonged to Euripides. And Isaac was left with the grief of having to become a student again. He envied the clarity of other people’s lives. The button men had their malt and cream soda. Sophie Sidel had her rags. Joel had the Salmagundi Club. Leo Sidel had the piss in his pants. Isaac looked in the mirror. There were lines of bitterness. The boy was beginning to grow some kind of mask.
He went to Euripides. The assistant principal had been avoiding Isaac in the halls of P.S. 88. But Isaac sneaked into Euripides’s office. “How did you do it?”
Euripides wouldn’t look at Isaac’s wounds. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“How did you do it?”
“I went to school with Eric Fish. I coached him in geometry. He wouldn’t have graduated. He does me favors from time to time. We talk on the phone. I told him about the stamps. But I never dreamed he would hurt you, Isaac. I thought …”
“I could have had a brilliant career. Now I’m Euripides…like you.”
Isaac walked out of P.S. 88. He passed the copper dome of police headquarters, with its four clocks, its stone figures representing the five boroughs, its porches, its balustrades, its two lions out front with their big teeth, and he wondered about his fall from grace. The policemen had their own palace. But it wasn’t Mendel’s.
He took the subway up to the Polo Grounds, crawled under a gate, sat in the bleachers while the wind howled in that empty shell. He wasn’t lying to conjure up Harry Lieberman. It felt safe among the empty seats, the green railing, the dead grass. He wasn’t a soldier or a center-fielder. He was a retired thief.
A groundsman saw him in the bleachers. “Hey, you, you son of a bitch.”
Isaac didn’t run. He sat in his green chair. The groundsman arrived with a hoe. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Waiting for the Bomber.”
“Jesus, you from out of town? Harry don’t play in winter. The Giants are asleep … You figuring to sit until April or May?”
“If I have to,” Isaac said.
The groundsman laughed. He tried not to stare at Isaac’s face.
“Sit, but don’t pee on the benches.”
He abandoned Isaac, shoved across the stadium, and started to dig along some imaginary line between second base and the Bomber’s own big country of center field.
(Originally published in 1992)
Charles Dickens knew his stuff, you know. Listen to this: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Right on. You adjust the numbers for inflation and what you’ve got right there is the history of Wall Street. At least, so much of the history of Wall Street as includes me: seven years. We had the good times and we lived high on that extra jolly sixpence, and now we live day by day the long decline of shortfall. Result misery.