Secret Isaac Read Free Page B

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.
    Pears called Isaac a lackey of the Mayor, an instrument of repressive law. Isaac, he said, who drives prostitutes off the street at the Mayor’s convenience, without considering the plight of these girls, or their histories. “I’ll defend every prostitute you haul in,” Pears said. “His Honor always sweeps out before the primaries. You’re Sammy’s broom.”
    Isaac growled inside his head. Sammy had enough trouble getting in and out of his pajamas. Isaac couldn’t figure what was going on in the