Secret Isaac Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œIsaac, I know the enemies you have. They’ll eat you alive after I’m gone.”
    â€œLet them eat, Your Honor. I’ve got plenty of hide for them.”
    â€œLaddie, 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.

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    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?”
    â€œJust say I’m Father Isaac.”
    â€œA priest,” she said, mimicking him, “a priest without a collar … is it your hotel or mine, Father Isaac?… I perform better in strange hotels.”
    â€œDon’t bluff me, Annie Powell. You haven’t done too many tricks … I want to know who put you on the street?”
    â€œMister,” 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.