Patrick Silver left the baby in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. The baby, who was forty-four, sat in the upholstered chair, with his knuckles in his lap. His name was Jerónimo. A boy with gray around his ears, a Guzmann of Boston Road, his education had stopped at the first grade. He lived most of his life in a candy store, under the eye of his father and his many brothers. But the Guzmanns were feuding with the police. They couldn’t protect the baby on their own. They had to put Jerónimo in Patrick Silver’s care. Patrick was his temporary keeper.

Jerónimo had blackberries in his head. With a carpet under his feet, and candelabra around his chair, he was thinking of the Guzmann farm in Lock Sheldrake. It was the blackberry season, and Jerónimo wanted to stick his fingers in the briars and drink blackberry juice. But he was a hundred miles from Lock Sheldrake, waiting for Patrick Silver in a hotel with rust-colored wool on the floor.

Patrick Silver rode the Plaza elevators in a filthy soccer shirt. The elevator boy was uncomfortable with a giant who stank of Dublin beer. Silver had a ruddy look. He came to the Plaza  without his shoes. He was six-foot-three in simple black socks.

Patrick began roaming the corridors on the third floor. Chambermaids pushed their linen carts out of the way; a shoeless man was anathema to the maids, who glanced at Patrick’s socks with their noses hidden in the carts. They returned to their business once Patrick knocked on the door. He muttered three words, “Zorro sent me.”

Part One – The Education of Patrick Silver – Jerome Charyn

 Who would have known that Jerome Charyn's third Isaac Sidel novel, The Education of Patrick Silver, was inspired by Richard Harris and that the principal protagonist of the novel, Patrick Silver (shoeless and filthy) was in fact the very same Richard Harris?

I found out this and much more just reading (and reading over) the wonderful introduction to Charyn's latest Isaac Sidel Winter Warning in which the man, President of the United States, now, walks into the White House with his Glock.