Paradise Man by Jerome Charyn

groin without ever looking into Holden’s eye.
    The doctors redid his turban, unwinding yards of bandages until the room was like one long white carrousel. Took them half an hour to dress Holden’s skull. Then Gottlieb arrived with a full set of clothes. Holden couldn’t be friendly with his rat while La Familia was around.
    Muriel peeked into the room. Her eyes swelled with anger and alarm. “Gentlemen, is he going out on a date?”
    “I’ve recovered.”
    “You’d better leave some instructions, Holden. In case you happen to die on my stairs.”
    Holden Sr. had suffered a heart attack at Muriel’s. Died near the debutantes. Holden stood up. The ceiling seemed to press hard on his head. The mirror registered his likeness: a turbaned ghost in a London jacket. Gottlieb leaned against his shoulder until Holden stopped swaying. He arrived at the door and cured his vertigo with one deep look down the stairwell. He wasn’t going to fall.
    Don Edmundo had a convoy waiting for Holden in the street. Cadillacs, Lincolns, and a Rolls Royce. Edmundo didn’t like to travel alone. Cousins and uncles followed him everywhere, Batista babies who sat behind bulletproof glass with 9 mm rifles. But it wasn’t a simple retinue of soldiers. Edmundo had his own storyteller in one of the cars, his own priest, women from the family compound in Westchester. He’d given up Manhattan as his residencia years ago. But he had offices in three boroughs, at the back of a beauty shop or travel bureau. Edmundo controlled a thousand betting parlors. Every one of his daughters had been married at the Pierre. The husbands were librarians, college professors, novelists who’d never have to starve. Edmundo was establishing his own rabbinical line. He loved the idea of having scholars in his family. None of the husbands was an outlaw like himself. That’s why he tolerated Holden’s eccentric tricks. Holden was a comanchero, a trader with a gun ...
    Holden sat in the Rolls Royce with Edmundo and Jeremías, who lent himself as the driver. Edmundo shut his eyes and listened to Mozart on the way to Queens. He dealt with all the Italian chiefs through his counselor, Robert Infante, but he had contempt for the Five Families, rústicos without politics or art. Edmundo had become a bandit only after the Bay of Pigs. Stuck in the swamps, trapped like a featherless bird, without the American air support he’d been promised, fifteen hundred exiles against the whole Cuban army. He was wheeled through Havana in a cart, the notorious Comandante O, who’d led one of the invasion teams. He was removed from his own men and jailed with murderers and child molesters in the penitentiary at Pinar del Río, where he rotted eight months, a scarecrow in commandant’s fatigues ... until the gringos ransomed him, returned Comandante O to Miami. People kissed his hand on the street. Grandmothers blessed him while he drank coffee in Little Havana. “Comandante O.” But he wouldn’t sit on the Revolutionary Council or dream of yet another invasion with air support that would never come. He left Miami and went “uptown” to the Yankeeland of New York. All his lieutenants followed him, uncles, cousins, aunts. He didn’t have to fight for a living. He had his own Familia.
    And now he was taking a bumper to Queens, an assassin with a code of ethics that Edmundo admired and deplored. Holden was a dangerous man. Edmundo couldn’t tell where the bumper’s honor would bring him. A girl brains Holden and Holden has to see that the girl’s all right. Edmundo wasn’t sure how long he could afford the luxury of such a man.
    The convoy arrived at Red Mike’s simple estate near the veterans’ center in St. Albans. Sometimes soldiers and sailors would drift out of the center in their uniforms and Holden would think of his dad, while he was having lunch on Red Mike’s lawn, the soldiers staring through Mike’s wire fence, starved for company. Mike would often let them through