Marilyn the Wild Read Online Free PDF

giggling like an idiot boy who’d escaped from his father’s house. Wavering in the moist blue earth of his father’s court, he grew lenient with Joel. His mother had been crazy long before Joel left. She picked through garbage cans, collecting foul cardboard and ugly pieces of string, while Joel had his millions. Isaac loved her, and had a fondness for her piles of junk, and the Arabs she brought home, beggars, failed musicians, and unemployed cooks, after scavenging on Atlantic Avenue, but why should his father elect to stay with a woman who had permanent whiskers and rust on her fingers that couldn’t wash off?
    Isaac liked Mauricette. She was no mean stepmother to him, and no simple appendage to his father, no superficial wife. She mingled her spit and blood with Joel’s in that one salty room.
    Isaac returned to his hotel near the Place Vendôme. He tried to nap; the metallic click of the telephone tore through his drowsiness. He didn’t need the help of overseas operators. He recognized Coen’s nasal hello.
    â€œCome home, Isaac. Your mother’s been hurt.”

4.

    H EADQUARTERS was invaded with shock troops. You couldn’t miss them in the corridors, the locker rooms, and the johns. They collected near the marble pillars on the ground floor, sucking bitter lozenges, men in black leather coats, with dirty eyes. They barked at each other and spit at low-grade detectives and ordinary clerks, who called them “crows” and “undertakers” because of the vast amounts of black leather. The “crows” worked out of competing offices. They were rivals, members of elite squads that belonged to the Chief of Detectives, the First Deputy, and the Police Commissioner himself. The PC had spoken with uncommon bluntness: he wanted the scumbags that wounded Sophie Sidel.
    Isaac shunned the leather boys. They scattered behind their pillars when they saw the Chief. Isaac had his own squad, boys without leather coats, blue-eyed detectives, marksmen who never sneered. He went to his office, across the hall from “Cowboy” Rosenblatt, the Jewish Chief of Detectives. Isaac had been gone three days, but his great oak desk was cluttered with memorandums and personal notes, letters of condolence from all the Irish chiefs at Headquarters, from the Mayor’s office, from Newgate, the FBI man, who played gin rummy with the First Dep, from Barney Rosenblatt and the PC, and an old-fashioned blue card in the fine scrawl of First Deputy O’Roarke. His phone had been ringing continuously for an hour. He held the earpiece over his cheek and growled his name. He wasn’t in the mood for Mordecai.
    â€œIsaac, I heard about your mother. The neighborhood is up in arms. We’re forming patrols, Isaac. We’ll repay slap for slap. How’s Sophie?”
    â€œShe’s still in a coma.”
    â€œSophie’s a tough girl. She’ll pull through.”
    Isaac understood the habits of an old friend. Mordecai wouldn’t have called him at the office to cluck words about Sophie. He was a delicate man, Mordecai. He had to be angling for someone else.
    â€œIs it Honey?” the Chief said. “She hasn’t fled the coop again, has she? I can’t grab her this morning. But I can lend you Brodsky, or Coen.”
    Isaac heard a sound that could have been Mordecai sighing, or an electrical hiss. “Honey’s at home … it’s Philip. Can’t you visit him? Isaac, he’s in a terrible way.”
    â€œJesus Christ, my mother’s lying in Bellevue with tubes sticking out of her, and you pester me with Philip. Has his chess game been deteriorating? Philip doesn’t move off his ass. So long, Mordecai.”
    Mordecai, Philip, and Isaac had been the three big brains of Seward Park High. Stalwarts of the chess club, devotees of Sergei Eisenstein and Dashiell Hammett, they were inseparable in 1943, 1944, and 1945. But Mordecai and Philip