Education of Patrick Silver Read online

  The Education of Patrick Silver

  Jerome Charyn

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  “An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold on to one blade of grass and not fall off the face of the earth.”

  —from a plate on the wall

  of the Bally Bay bar,

  Christopher Street

  Part One

  1.

  PATRICK Silver left the baby in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. The baby, who was forty-four, sat in an upholstered chair, with his knuckles in his lap. His name was Jerónimo. A boy with gray around his ears, a Guzmann of Boston Road, his education had stopped at the first grade. He lived most of his life in a candy store, under the eye of his father and his many brothers. But the Guzmanns were feuding with the police. They couldn’t protect the baby on their own. They had to put Jerónimo in Patrick Silver’s care. Patrick was his temporary keeper.

  Jerónimo had blackberries in his head. With a carpet under his feet, and candelabra around his chair, he was thinking of the Guzmann farm in Loch Sheldrake. It was the blackberry season, and Jerónimo wanted to stick his fingers in the briars and drink blackberry juice. But he was a hundred miles from Loch Sheldrake, waiting for Patrick Silver in a hotel with rust-colored wool on the floor.

  Patrick Silver rode the Plaza elevators in a filthy soccer shirt. The elevator boy was uncomfortable with a giant who stank of Dublin beer. Silver had a ruddy look. He came to the Plaza without his shoes. He was six-foot-three in simple black socks.

  Patrick began roaming the corridors of the third floor. Chambermaids pushed their linen carts out of his way; a shoeless man was anathema to the maids, who glanced at Patrick’s socks with their noses hidden in the carts. They returned to their business once Patrick knocked on a door. He muttered three words. “Zorro sent me.”

  He walked into a room that seemed uncommonly small for a hotel that had elevators with gold walls and carpeting that could hide a man’s feet. A girl stood behind the door in a sweater that once belonged to Jerónimo; it swam around her shoulders, but it couldn’t tamper with the shape of her breasts. Patrick didn’t have divided loyalties. He was paid to protect the Guzmanns and all their interests. Still, he wasn’t a man who could ignore the impression of nipples inside an old sweater.

  The girl smiled at Patrick’s socks. She’d heard of this crazy bodyguard who lived in the basement of a synagogue and wore soccer shirts and a holster without a gun. She liked the scratchiness of his face, the white hairs on his knuckles, and his imperfect nose. She was Odile Leonhardy, the teenage porno queen, and she admired men with enormous beaks. She had moved uptown, taken a room at the Plaza, to break into legitimate films.

  “Where’s your yarmulke, Patrick Silver?”

  “In my pocket,” he said.

  “Why don’t you put it on?”

  “I wear it when I’m praying, miss. Or when I have the shivers.”

  “What happened to the baby?”

  “He’s downstairs.”

  “Is it safe to leave him alone?”

  “Miss, no cop would ever lift him from the Plaza Hotel. I ought to know. I was a detective for thirteen years.”

  “Don’t call me miss. I’m Odile. Didn’t Zorro tell you to bring Jerónimo to me?”

  The girl was confusing him. “No. Zorro went to Atlantic City. He asked me to visit you and say he’d be gone for a while.”

  “What’s he doing in Atlantic City? Zorro hates the ocean. Did you ever see him take off his shirt?”

  “He didn’t go there for a swim. He has some business in New Jersey.”

  “Good for him. Now do your job, Patrick Silver, and show me Jerónimo.”

  Did she intend to play clap-hands with the baby? It wasn’t Patrick’s affair. He ducked around the chambermaids’ carts and pulled Jerónimo out of the lobby. What kind of power did Zorro have over the girl? She unbuckled Jerónimo’s belt and growled at Silver. “Wait outside.”

  Patrick was becoming a middleman in his old age (he’d be fifty in another eight years). The Guzmanns had made him into an Irish pimp: he was the one who steered Jerónimo to Odile’s bed.

  Patrick had to listen to a whore’s music; he couldn’t stray from the door. Odile mumbled “Jerónimo, Jerónimo,” and the baby began to groan. He didn’t cry out of displeasure, Patrick understood.

  The groans stopped coming through the wall. Jerónimo couldn’t have been inside more than three minutes. His belt was buckled when Odile brought him out. She had the same rumples in her sweater. “Tell Zorro Odile wishes him luck in Atlantic City.”

  “I’ll do that, miss.”

  Patrick took the baby’s hand and held it on their stroll through the corridors. Jerónimo had a wet palm. He walked with great swipes of his head, his shoulders dropping on the downswing and his chest whistling as he dragged Silver to the elevator cars.

  Jerónimo exhausted his Irish keeper. Patrick had to fight for air. The two ancient boys stepped into the elevator. Passengers stared at them. Patrick and Jerónimo had huge tufts of gray-white hair; their thick clothes had a winter smell; the giant with the soccer shirt didn’t believe in shoes.

  They walked out of the elevator holding hands again; the baby had Patrick by the thumb. He led his keeper beyond the edges of the Plaza awning and into a damp July.

  There were quiffs at the terminal, quiffs and spies, with the imprint of shotguns under their dashikis, police aerials climbing up their backs, newspaper stuffed in a brassiere; behind the bushy wigs they were blond “angels” from the First Deputy’s office. They belonged to Isaac Sidel. Their Chief had lost his war with the Guzmann family, a tribe of Bronx pimps and policy rats, Marranos from Boston Road. Papa Guzmann and his five sons, Alejandro, Topal, Jorge, César, and Jerónimo, had irritated the Chief by crossing the Third Avenue Bridge to run a whore market in the middle of Manhattan. Isaac the Brave couldn’t trap César, who was called Zorro in the Bronx, with his gang of baby prostitutes. So the Chief had himself pushed out of the First Deputy’s office, disappeared into the Bronx, and emerged as a factotum to Papa Guzmann, on Boston Road. But his nearness to the Guzmanns brought him few advantages. He came out of the Bronx with a tapeworm, a black tongue, and no arrests.

  The blond “angels” were going to avenge their Chief’s disgrace. They scoured Port Authority for hints of Zorro and his brothers. They would have broken Alejandro’s neck, drowned Topal’s brains in a toilet bowl, shoved nickels and quarters in Zorro’s eyes.

  They didn’t catch a thing. Zorro stepped around the dashikis in silk underpants. His face was smeared with the wax of a melted brown crayon, and he carried a straw suitcase like the Chicanos who were smuggled into New Jersey every summer to farm for sweet potatoes. His brother Jorge had come with him. The melted crayon left tiny bits of rubble under Jorge’s ears.

  The brothers climbed aboard a coach with ancient rattan seats. Zorro had a Bronx banana for his brother and a suitcase full of apples from his father’s orchard. The apples were slightly bruised. The Guzmanns had picked them just before Isaac’s friends in the FBI sneaked onto the property with an acetylene torch and put an end to Papa’s farm.

  The boys endured rattan spears in their buttocks for Papa’s sake. They were going to visit a bagman named Isidoro, who was one of Papa’s distant cousins.

  The bagman owed his existence to Papa. He was starving in a shanty outside Bogotá when Papa rescued Isidoro and delivered him to a candy store in the Bronx. This candy store had a multiplicity of lives: it was the Guzmanns’ headquarters, hospital, bedroom, and numbers bank. Isidoro would have been content eating bitter chocolate and growing bald in the candy store if Isaac hadn’t come
along. Unable to corrupt any of Papa’s five boys, the Chief whispered in Isidoro’s ear. He frightened the poor bogotano, advising him what the Manhattan police did to bagmen. “They’ll drill holes in your tongue unless I help you, Isidore. You have no future here.”

  He turned Isidoro around with this and other blandishments. The bagman became a spy for Isaac. His revelations were small; he would only sell the Chief isolated scraps of information. After Isaac shucked off the candy store, the bagman skipped to Atlantic City. The disappearance of Isidoro and Isaac made Papa scratch his head. He began to guess the cozy relationship between his cousin and Isaac the Shit.

  The brothers arrived at the old terminal on Arctic Avenue. Jorge was having hunger pains. He clutched his belly and made pathetic squeals, searching for candy vendors who didn’t exist. Zorro had no more bananas in his pocket. But he had to quiet Jorge; squeals from a man with a twenty-inch neck would call attention to them, place the Guzmanns in Atlantic City. “Jorge, don’t cry. You’ll get candy on the beach.”

  They took the Arkansas Avenue route to the boardwalk, stopping at a Hadassah thrift shop to buy Jorge a hat that would keep the sun out of his eyes. They passed a row of forlorn hotels crouching near Pacific Avenue, with little beaten porches and stoops, and old men behind the screens. The great mildewed cupola of the Claridge blinked at them from South Indiana. The smell of suntan oil oppressed the brothers soon as they struck the beach. Without the shelter of Arkansas Avenue, they had to suck hot wind.

  The curve of the boardwalk made Zorro grumpy. He couldn’t go very far on wood that bent away from his feet. He led Jorge to a fudge shop. Jorge smiled at the conveyor belt that carried roasted peanuts from the window to an oven deep in the shop. A puppet with lively hands was mixing fudge in a copper bowl behind the peanuts. The puppet’s bushy hair reminded Jorge of his older brother. “Jerónimo,” he grunted, forgetting his belly for a minute. He didn’t want fudge—black, white, green, or yellow. Zorro had to buy him red-hot dollars, candy fish, and almond macaroons.

  They crept over the hump in the boardwalk, avoiding the linked trolley cars that were swollen with passengers in banjo hats who licked on miniature bottles of rum and laughed at Zorro’s coloring. “Follow us, Crayola Face.” Jorge would have bumped the trolleys, spilling every banjo hat under the boardwalk, if Zorro hadn’t restrained him with a thumb in his pants. “Papa warned you not to feud with idiots. We’ll lose track of Isidore. Brother, remember what Isaac did to us. He tried to kill Jerónimo. He took our country home.”

  Jorge hurled pieces of macaroon at the trolley cars. He grunted curses that only the Marranos could have understood. He spoke in muddled Portuguese. But he didn’t knock fenders off the cars. He fell in behind his brother. People stared at them from the sun decks of monstrous stone hotels that pushed into the edge of the boardwalk. The rust on the hotels’ copper roofs had turned a slimy green. The stone walls of the sun decks were splintering under the surface. Jorge followed the lumps in the nearest wall.

  The impurities in the stone shimmered under the soft bill of his cap. Jorge would have dawdled with a hand on the wall, but Zorro steered him away from the sun porches. A tug of his pants brought him inside a gypsy booth that was nothing more than an ugly gash in the wall. The word “Phrenologist” was painted over the booth in a pretty yellow. It frightened Jorge, who couldn’t read thick words, although he was smarter than Jerónimo. Jorge could iron a necktie, utter whole sentences, and pee with fortitude into the heart of a toilet bowl. Like all his brothers he had no specific birthday (his father was superstitious about such events), but he was a summer child, born in January, during the dry Peruvian season, just under forty years ago.

  Jorge felt a breeze on his neck in the gypsy cave. A pregnant woman sat near the entrance of the booth in a man’s under shirt. She welcomed the brothers into her cave with a powerful yawn, wrinkling her undershirt and sending fissures through her belly. Zorro didn’t interest her. She liked small ears on a big head. Jorge had to stoop for the gypsy. The woman breathed into his scalp. Without fingering Jorge she could interpret the design of his earlobes and the magnitude of bumps on his skull. “This boy covets women,” she said. “Be careful with him. His knees aren’t strong. He’s going to fall.”

  “Fine,” Zorro said. “Terrific. I’ll watch my brother’s knees.” He dropped five dollars into the gypsy’s undershirt. “Madame Sonia, save your forecasts. Our religion doesn’t allow us any future. We’re Catholics in a prehistoric way. We love Jesus but we don’t have much use for his mother. So don’t expect pity from us. My father’s getting lonely for his cousin. Where’s Isidoro? You’re supposed to be his landlady now.”

  The bogotano was short on brains. Half of Papa’s runners and pickup men vacationed on the boardwalk between Texas Avenue and Steeplechase Pier, because Miami was too far away. The runners had seen Isidoro with the pregnant witch.

  “Sonia, don’t be mean. You counted the ridges in my brother’s hair. He’s getting homesick. Can’t you tell? He has gas pains whenever he leaves the Bronx. Where’s Isidoro?”

  A boy sprang out from behind the witch’s chair. He put a small revolver against Jorge’s head. He had crooked teeth, Zorro noticed, and the revolver’s taped barrel shivered in Jorge’s ear. “That’s my son,” the pregnant gypsy said. “He listens to me. He’ll blow your brother’s face off, I swear. Get out of Atlantic City.”

  Jorge didn’t turn glum. A gun in his ear couldn’t make him freeze. He swallowed a candy fish and stuck two fingers around the cylinder of the boy’s gun. The flight of Jorge’s hand puzzled the witch; it seemed idiotic to caress a gun with two lazy fingers.

  Zorro rubbed his cheek. The Marranos despised firearms (guns were for city bandits and cops like Isaac the Toad), but Zorro understood the tenacity of his brother’s grip. He dug a fingernail into the witch’s belly. “Bring me Isidore.”

  The boy hissed at Zorro and tried to curl the trigger; he couldn’t get the cylinder to spin. Jorge’s two fingers had smothered the action of the gun. The witch rolled in her chair. The Guzmanns had to be less than human, creatures with stinking souls; who else would eat lead bullets with the pounce of a thumb? “Misters, don’t hurt my boy.”

  The gun disappeared into Jorge’s sleeve. The gypsy wagged her head. Only men who drank the boiling piss of Christian-Jewish saints could be such strong magicians. Sonia had heard of the Marranos, who could call upon Moses of Sinai, Jesus, Jacob, and the kings of Babylon to protect them. She led the brothers out of the cave and into the dense grass of her private lot, a wedge of ground behind Pennsylvania Avenue. There were no boardwalk trolleys in the witch’s grass, just the signboard of an old restaurant, The Merman’s Roost, pieces of tin meant to look like a gondola, or another long ship, rusting on the ground, the gondola with its edges bitten off and enormous pocks in its middle.

  Jorge was confused by a gondola in the grass. He could shred his pants crossing a boat that had teeth in its two gi gantic ears. Zorro had to walk his brother over the signboard, knee by knee. The rust disfigured Jorge’s shoes.

  The gypsy brought them to a bungalow at the end of the lot. The brothers couldn’t find a serviceable door. They had to crawl through a hole in the porch screen to get into the gypsy’s house. The bagman didn’t give them any trouble. He yelled to Zorro from the kitchen. “César, what can I make you? I miss your father’s tea. I don’t have the patience to say prayers over the kettle. Not like Papa.”

  “Isidore, my tongue isn’t dry today! I’ll live without your tea.”

  The bagman shuffled through the kitchen in his pajamas. Zorro’s spite was gone: he shouldn’t have been harsh with his father’s cousin. The Guzmanns drank deep red tea with Isidore. Jorge burnt his fingers on the glass. Isidore allowed himself a timid smile. The crypto-Jews of Spain, Portugal, Holland, Brazil, Peru, and the Bronx could only enjoy scalding tea; the fire in their gullets told them they were still alive.

  With red tea inside him, Zorro’s anger slowed. He h
ad finances to discuss. “Isidore, Papa owes you a hundred and seventy dollars. I saw it in his ledger. How should it be paid? To the gypsy and her son?”

  “Half,” the bagman said. “Half to Madame Sonia, and half to the orphans’ home on Stebbins Avenue.”

  “Isidore, you know the fools who administer that place. Your charity will go into some rich doctor’s pocket.” The bagman’s puffy eyes clipped Zorro’s arguments. He penciled in a figure on his shirt cuff, where the Guzmanns did most of their arithmetic. “Eighty-five dollars to the orphans of Stebbins Avenue,” Zorro announced. Then he and Jorge hugged Isidore; the three of them swayed near the gypsy’s stove. The brothers hadn’t lost their affection for the bogotano.

  They held their embrace while Jorge sniffled and the bagman enquired about Jerónimo. “The baby’s in good hands. Papa hired a bodyguard for him. An Irish baboon.” Zorro began to smell Isaac on the bagman’s pajamas. He finished the embrace.

  “Isidore, you shouldn’t have taken Isaac the Shit for a sweetheart. Why didn’t you sing to a different cop?…”

  Jorge clapped his elbow under the bagman’s mouth. Isidoro didn’t writhe against Jorge’s chest. His eyeballs didn’t have a bloody expression. The veins didn’t rise on Isidore’s cheeks in slow, horrible clusters of blue. The bones cracked once behind his ears, and the bagman was dead.

  A truck would arrive late in the afternoon. The Guzmanns weren’t sacrilegious people. Provision had been made for Papa’s cousin. He wouldn’t have to lie under Jersey soil. The truck would transport him to the Guzmann cemetery in Bronxville, where a company of mourners would rip their clothes in Isidore’s behalf and wail until the sky got black.

  The brothers left the bungalow through the same hole in the screen, crossed the rusty gondola, and came out of the gypsy’s cave. They locked themselves in a toilet on Steeplechase Pier. Zorro spilled articles out of his suitcase. Apples, two bandannas, skirts, a blouse, high-heeled shoes. Jorge left the pier with the two bandannas on his head and apples in his blouse. This was the way Zorro would sneak him back to their father’s candy store. Isaac the Shit had cops everywhere on Boston Road. Only niggers, children, and girls in bandannas were safe.