Under the Eye of God (8 page)

“Call me Inez. Everybody does. What did that madman upstairs tell you about me?”

“Said he snatched you out of a bordello in Detroit. But I didn’t believe him.”

“Darling, don’t apologize for David. Like everything he says, it’s half true. It was New Orleans, not Detroit. But I didn’t work on my back. Sometimes I wish I had. I was the accountant for a string of very fashionable whorehouses in the Garden District and a single mother with two kids. One of the clients mistook me for a whore—offered me thousands to live with him in New York.”

“Was it David?”

“Of course not,” she said. “David never travels. It takes a whole army to deliver him to Wall Street once or twice a year. My new beau was a banker, nowhere as rich as David. With a wife and kids in the suburbs. He paid me more than I could have earned in a year.”

“But how did you meet David?” Isaac asked, not even sure he wanted to know the truth.

“In the Ansonia,” she said. “That’s where my banker found an apartment for me. But he was a very tiresome man—jealous and stupid. He stole back all the money he had put in my account. I was left stranded. I couldn’t pay the rent. But I wasn’t thrown out. And that’s when the madman appeared in his flea-bitten sweater. He said I could have an apartment rent-free on the thirteenth floor. And he had a proposition.”

“He wanted you to play Inez.”

“Isaac dear, it isn’t easy. I feel like a relic. And David doesn’t even traffic me around. I mingle with his gambler friends, but not as their personal siren. I’m not at their beck and call.”

“And your two kids?”

“Both at a private school in Connecticut. The madman pays the bills. I visit them as often as I can. I keep a small apartment near the school. I wouldn’t want them to see me here. I’m not allowed to disturb a picture on the wall.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“Habit, I suppose. And laziness. And the power I have over men. I’m an icon. How can I fail? Isaac, be a darling and take me for a stroll.”

Inez preferred the loneliness of Riverside Park. There were no picnickers or jugglers or panhandlers, just a few old men practicing their golf strokes on the bumpy hills and the secretive men and women who kept their boats in the marina. The trees were all barren in early December; the ground was strewn with dead leaves that had begun to turn into dark red dust. It was Isaac’s favorite time of year, when the park was mostly devoid of people. He and Inez had a long, narrow kingdom to themselves.

The wind blew right at them, and Isaac draped Inez in the folds of his foul-weather coat. His blood began to heat up at the nearness of her. He was already unfaithful to Margaret Tolstoy, who lay near the Cloisters, her mind half gone. Why was he always running after some femme fatale?

He was the knight-protector of fallen ladies. Inez shivered under Isaac’s rough material.

“Darling,” she whispered, “you’d better watch out. David is betting that you won’t live very long.”

“Ah,” Isaac said, “he’s my mentor.” His knees were shaking, and it had nothing to do with the wizard on the seventeenth floor. He wasn’t thinking of politics, or of Marianna’s sea-green eyes. He had a vision of that bleak landscape near the Cross Bronx Express, the gutted buildings, mile after mile of debris, and he remembered how comfortable he was amid all the rubble. It was home to him. And Inez could have risen out of that rubble.

They kissed. Her tongue tasted of almonds. It was sweeter than his own life. He was already devoted to this gorgeous masque, who had to hide within another woman’s history, live among her expensive ruins. But something had startled her. She broke from Isaac’s embrace.

He turned around, looked into the barren trees. Martin Boyle was standing there, clutching a Mossberg Mountaineer with a sniper scope.

“Jesus, did you have to follow me into the park with a fucking deer rifle?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I was following whoever followed you.”

“What are you talking about? Can’t you see? I’m with Inez.”

Boyle tried not to glimpse at Inez’s helmet of hair.

“Sir, the shooter was standing behind a tree. . . . Your brains would have been scattered in another minute.”

“Enough,” Isaac said. “Where is this shooter of yours?”

“He got away. I couldn’t track him. I thought . . . ”

“And he left his calling card. A Mossberg Mountaineer.”

Inez was much more civil than the Big Guy. She shook Boyle’s hand, thanked him for saving Isaac’s life. Boyle had been bitten by her, too. He blushed when she slid her hand out of his. Isaac wondered to himself—two Adams and their Eve.

They walked out of the park together, while Isaac’s Secret Service man still held that deer slayer in his arms.

* * *

She had to get rid of Isaac. Inez, or whoever she was that afternoon, feigned a headache. She kissed him between the eyes, as if she were aiming some bullet, and ran upstairs to her retreat on the thirteenth floor. Why did she always have to get involved with desperados? No one had to whisper in her ear that Isaac was a doomed man. She’d have to get out of Manhattan. She wasn’t going to be David Pearl’s Cassandra. But she didn’t have any of her clothes in this rotten tomb with windows. Trudy Winckleman was the phantom, not Inez—Inez had a bureau, photographs on the wall, boas from the Ziegfeld Follies, satin panties, and the sheerest gowns in the world.

She puffed on a cigarette from one of Inez’s pearl and silver holders. She didn’t have to wait very long. The old man had come downstairs in the velvet slippers of a billionaire who was loathe to leave his labyrinth.

“Fuck you,” she said. “And fuck all your plans. I’m not staying.”

He started to shiver. She knew that the first Inez had often blown her fuse. And no one could contain her, not Arnold Rothstein or David Pearl.

“Davey,” she cooed, because that’s what the other Inez had called him. “What if I fall in love with the big dope?”

“Ah, that would be a pity,” said the billionaire—she’d heard the rumor that he owned more real estate than the Rockefellers, that his holdings could dwarf any empire.

“Isaac’s lovable, but you’d better hold the line.”

“And what if I can’t? He’s wooing me, for Christ’s sake.”

“A lot of men have tried to woo you, and they haven’t gotten into your pants.”

“And what if I wanted to let him into Inez’s pants? Because I don’t have a single pair of my own.”

“That would be a catastrophe.”

“Were you really going to shoot his head off, Davey? You should have warned me that I was going on a death march in the park.”

“And if I’d warned you?” David Pearl asked like some menacing beggar boy.

“I would have taken him into some hollow and kissed him for half an hour . . . to warm him up for the kill.”

He started to cackle. She pulled his ears, and he really was a beggar boy, Inez’s beggar boy.

“Davey, if you come downstairs again without knocking on Inez’s door, I’ll take your whole head into my mouth and you’ll never get it back.”

He shuddered with terror and delight.

“You’ll woo the big dope, but my way.”

And he paddled out of the museum in his slippers.

T
HE DEMOCRATS WERE FRIGHTENED TO
death of leaks. A phantom shooter in Riverside Park? The vice president–elect with a mystery woman who was connected to Arnold Rothstein’s own phantom lady? It was too much for Tim Seligman to bear. Isaac couldn’t be seen in public with this bitch in a silver helmet, not until Michael’s coronation. Meanwhile the owner of the Mossberg Mountaineer was tracked to a hunting lodge in Montana. The deer slayer had been reported stolen a month ago. The owner himself was a registered Democrat who had voted for Storm-Sidel. He couldn’t have been the phantom shooter. He was at his hunting lodge on the day the shooter had stalked Sidel.

There wasn’t a word about it in the press. But Michael himself wasn’t so lucky. Another one of his mistresses had surfaced with her own tattletale in the
National Enquirer
. Democrats called her a Republican plant . . . and a slut.

Meanwhile Isaac busied himself. He’d been an absentee mayor for months, but his aides ran City Hall without him. He went into Manhattan’s deeds and records with his property clerk and discovered that the Inez Corporation and its affiliates owned more buildings and lofts in Manhattan than Columbia University and the Catholic Church. But David hadn’t lied to him. Inez never sold a piece of property. It held whatever it had. And its properties wove from the tip of Manhattan to the edge of Spuyten Duyvil Creek. The little wizard had to be wealthier than John Jacob Astor, Manhattan’s first real estate baron. And still he sat in the Ansonia, like some forgotten man.

Was it AR himself who had sent him on a quest to buy up as much of Manhattan as he could? The Inez Corporation owned entire blocks. It had secret fiefdoms in Fort George and Washington Heights. But Isaac still wasn’t satisfied. He ventured into the Bronx with his Secret Service man, looked down upon the ruins from that same hill in Claremont Park where he had spotted the army engineers. And he had his own sudden illumination. There was a certain symmetry to the widening swaths of waste. The torchings that helped break the Bronx weren’t as random as they seemed. Isaac could have been looking down into the gigantic bowl of God’s own football field.

And while he pondered in Claremont Park, Bull Latham arrived without his usual contingent of FBI men. He’d strayed far from his habitual watering hole in Manhattan, the Bull & Bear, a stockbroker’s bar and restaurant within the Waldorf. He wore a Siberian coat of white fur with all the elegance and grace of a movie star.

“Mr. Mayor,” he said. “I’m not here. You’ve never seen me.”

“I know,” Isaac said with the same complicity. “You’re at the Bull and Bear . . . and I’ll pay particular attention to what you never told me.”

“Exactly,” the Bull said, while Isaac motioned for Martin Boyle to move out of earshot and he turned off his own button mike. Only God or the devil could have listened in.

“Bull, there’s a pattern out there in that heart of darkness down the hill.”

“Mr. Mayor, I’ve been thinking much the same thing. . . . It’s like driving Indians off the reservation.”

“And then putting up a new reservation without the Indians.”

“Think Pentagon,” Bull said. “That’s what this land grab is all about.”

Isaac began to shiver—suddenly, the surveyors and engineers made a lot of sense.

“I suppose there’s a new Peter Minuit . . . and he’s buying up bits and pieces. He’ll make a killing on this reservation. Will it be a missile training site?”

“Nothing as fancy as that,” said the Bull. “Just a military base that will stretch across the southern half of the Bronx, below the Grand Concourse. The Pentagon wouldn’t want to mess with the New York Yankees. Its generals will let the Bronx Bombers have their castle and some room to breathe. Wouldn’t want the stadium to be an isolated island. But the man who leases or sells this Indian country will make a fortune beyond our own ability to imagine. He has to be stopped.”

“But can you pin him to any crime?”

“Probably not. But he’s had people killed. I’d be willing to bet that the shooter in San Antone was attached to the Pentagon in some weird way. And Mr. David Pearl means to stifle you.”

“But he’s my mentor,” Isaac groaned. “I learned about the city at his feet. He’s a disciple of Arnold Rothstein, did you know that?”

“Rothstein wasn’t half as ruthless. It’s your being mayor that worries him, not presidential politics. Vice presidents can’t harm him, but a mayor can.”

“But until a month ago I thought he’d vanished without a trace.”

“Isaac, if you found him, it’s because he wanted to be found.”

The Big Guy wished now that he’d never been tagged as J. Michael’s VP. He could control Party politics in Manhattan and the Bronx. But even Staten Island scared him a little. It had too many hills, and its politicians were too much a part of the American mainland. Cottonwood had squeaked past Storm-Sidel and had taken Staten Island by a hair—517 votes. Rothstein’s protégé, David Pearl, wanted to bump Isaac upstairs. The Big Guy was embarrassed to talk about his brand-new sweetheart, Inez, who guarded David’s reliquary at the Ansonia. But the Bull mentioned her before Isaac had the chance.

“Careful, Mr. Mayor. We have photos of you kissing Mata Hari in the park. She’s poison. She seduces businessmen for that little potentate, turns them into swine.”

Isaac was heartsick. “Never mind her. What about the shooter with the deer rifle? Do ya have any photos of him?”

“We don’t need any photos. He was just a kid that David hired, a delivery boy with a stolen gun. I’m not even sure he knows how to shoot. We snatched him right away. But he lawyered up and I had to let him go, or I’ll have the Civil Liberties Union hot on my tail.”

Martin Boyle wandered over to Isaac and Bull Latham.

“Sir, Tim Seligman is on the horn. He says it’s urgent. He wants you downtown—at the Waldorf.”

The Bull barely hid his smile. “Good,” he said. “Then I can bum a ride with you guys . . .where would we be without the Waldorf?”

T
HE BIG GUY WAS FRIGHTENED
to death of the DNC. He’d rather have faced the Inquisition. He could talk to Tim, could deal with Tim’s strategies, but not the little gang behind him—the lawyers and politicos who picked presidents and also sank them. They’d pulled Michael out of obscurity, and were probably planning to dump him. They choreographed the Democratic Convention, decided on the Party’s new stars. They were the ones who saw Marianna’s possibilities with the media and decided to lock Clarice away somewhere. The president could only have one First Lady.

And so he had to meet with the seven grand inquisitors of the Democratic National Committee, plus their spokesman Tim. There wasn’t a smile or hint of recognition among them. They’d stolen out of Washington, DC, and descended upon the Waldorf, having laid siege to the president-elect until Michael was almost a prisoner in his rooms. But they wouldn’t greet Sidel in one of the Waldorf’s public salons. They’d turned the election into a holy war; and a holy war could only be battled out in secret.