If Isaac tried to reason with him — “Dad, Dad, you have your business in Manhattan” — the West Broadway Picasso would cuff him on the ear.
“What would you know? You’re a truant. You lie. You steal.”
Isaac could have returned the cuff. At thirteen he was a head taller than Joel. But he wouldn’t have hit his own dad. He loved the old man, as much as he could love a father who played the Bedouin with his own family. If Isaac had become a thief, wasn’t it out of some dread that Joel would abandon him? Joel had his new Jerusalem: the hills of Montmartre. And Isaac had his wealth of ration stamps.
The stamps came in buff-colored booklets issued by the OPA, Office of Price Administration. It was a federal offense to traffic in stolen stamps. “Persons who violate rationing regulations are subject to $10,000 fine or imprisonment, or both.” That’s what it said on the front of each book. But Isaac prized the blue and red stamps, with their pictures of cannons and tanks, aircraft carriers and fighter planes...
He never sold a book to individual clients. That would have been dumb. Because the OPA had their own detectives. Isaac always used a middleman, Stoney Whitehall, the air raid warden. Stoney could work up a deal during air raid drills, while he wore his white helmet and poked around with a whistle and a flashlight, snarling, “Close the blinds, will ya? It has to be midnight.”
He took whatever merchandise Isaac had, paying him in old, crumpled bills that could never be traced back to Stoney himself. When Isaac’s supply was low, the warden would mutter, “I need product, kid. I can’t go out empty-handed. I might get killed.”
Isaac wasn’t a wholesaler. He could clip only one book at a time, from absentminded mothers who left their purses open or forgot to lock their doors, from housewives at the Essex Street indoor market who were much too busy counting their change to notice Isaac Sidel. He was very agile for a boy who resembled a bear. He had none of the obvious signs of a thief. He wasn’t nervous. His eyes didn’t wander. He didn’t drool at the mouth, or play with himself in front of the housewives. He could linger at a merchant’s stall. He was the son of Joel Sidel. He would buy fruit for his woeful family. There was always an alibi for Isaac.
But the warden wouldn’t leave him alone. He waylaid Isaac outside the Essex Street market.
“Stoney,” Isaac said, “you shouldn’t come here. People will talk.”
“Never mind. Gimme what you got.”
He ripped at Isaac, removed the single booklet Isaac had pocketed in his pants. The booklet cost Isaac an hour’s work. The boy had waited like a spider, hovered between two stalls, to catch the right victim. And now Stoney was ruining Isaac.
He slapped the boy. Isaac swallowed blood. Merchants wandered in and out of the market. Stoney walked away.
It was one more piece of bitterness Isaac had to bear. He was losing his dad to the Salmagundi Club and some phantom idea of art. His mom had opened a junk shop to show the fur-collar prince she could survive without him, while his baby brother Leo still pissed in his pants.
Isaac couldn’t forget that slap. He met Florsheim, the assistant principal, near the Loew’s Delancey. Florsheim was a failed scholar of Greek. He’d abandoned Euripides to become a glorified custodian in the public schools of New York. It was from Florsheim that Isaac had learned about the terrible fate of men and women in a wounded world. Isaac had been his best pupil before he eloped from P.S. 88 to begin his career as a criminal.
“I know,” Florsheim said, sadness on his scholar’s face. He looked like a consumptive child. He was much more delicate than the girls and boys he had to guard. Isaac had disappointed him.
“Fourteen days.”
“I don’t feel good,” Isaac said. “I need the fresh air.”
“Is that why you live inside a market, breathing chicken feathers?”
“I have to shop,” Isaac said. “We’re alone. My father’s new address is the Salmagundi Club.”
Florsheim touched him with a hand that felt like a broken wing. Isaac couldn’t even consider it a slap.
“You’re stealing ration stamps.”
“Prove it,” Isaac said.
“Fourteen days. I can’t cover for you, Sidel. Soldiers are dying and you steal stamps.”
It’s a living, Isaac wanted to say, but he wouldn’t provoke the scholar into another pathetic slap. He liked Florsheim the way he liked the button men, with their crazy talk.
He left Florsheim and marched to the air raid wardens’ barracks, a storefront on Attorney Street. Isaac had no fear of the wardens, who were idlers and opportunists, peddlers of other people’s merchandise. They wore white armbands, sleeping with helmets over their eyes, like some slothful army. He would have enjoyed shaking them out of their bunks, copping their helmets, and tossing those hard white hats over the Williamsburg Bridge.
“Where’s Stoney?”
He had to ask again, going from bunk to bunk, before one of the wardens sang from under his hat, “Mendel’s. He’s at Mendel’s if anyone wants to know.”
Isaac was disheartened. He could never walk into Mendel’s bar. He wouldn’t have dared. Mendel’s had been the Manhattan headquarters of Murder, Inc., until Governor Dewey kicked all those gunmen in the pants. The bar was on Clinton Street, near the Williamsburg Bridge. It had beer mugs in the window, rotting flowers from one of the brethren’s funerals, a peeling photograph of FDR, whom the gangsters considered their President, old hunting scenes of New Amsterdam, with bare-chested Indians and peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant, who was as unkind to criminals as Dewey himself. Isaac dreamt that he would be welcomed into the brotherhood of Mendel’s some day. Nothing seemed more important. Not ration stamps. Not the war. Not the New York Giants, who sat in the cellar in 1943, orphans of their own little war. Nothing mattered as much as an open ticket to Mendel’s. Isaac arrived on Clinton Street, his nose against the glass, watching and waiting for a miracle to happen.
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.