Under the Eye of God (14 page)

She sat with five men in the lobby, laughing and drinking. How could he not listen to that luscious roar of hers, the growl of her voice? It echoed under the Warwick’s chandeliers. Of all the hotels in Houston, she had to pick his. But he didn’t need Sherlock Holmes’ guidebook to tell him that she’d come here on purpose, to eat his heart out. Isaac couldn’t even appraise the five men. Were they generals, assassins, captains of industry, or actors playing their own cruel parts?

She didn’t trot off with any of them. She left these five clowns and wandered across the Warwick’s endless lobby. Isaac followed her into that labyrinth. It was as complicated as the Houston Ship Channel. He caught Inez as she was about to enter a tiny corridor. She wasn’t even startled to see the Big Guy. He should have kissed her and shut up, but he was too delirious.

“Did David send you here?”

“Yes and no,” she said. “I’m his eyes and ears.”

“Just like Eleanor Roosevelt. She went into coal mines for FDR, and you’ve come to the Warwick.”

“Isaac,” she said, “run home before Texas becomes your tombstone.”

“I can’t. But I could steal you from the old man and take you into the bayous. We’ll ride on an alligator’s back.”

She laughed, but that deep growl had gone out of her voice.

“Darling, it’s too late for alligators.”

He wanted to hit her, but he would have broken himself, not Inez. He appealed to her like a rat-poor minstrel.

“Stay with me tonight, and I won’t bother you again.”

She fondled his ears. “Isaac, we already had our honeymoon . . . at the Ansonia. And I can’t afford a second one.”

She shoved right past Sidel. He didn’t have the heart to stop her. If he had to have a tombstone, he wanted to share it with Inez. Texas couldn’t have been as deep a heart of darkness as the Bronx. He wouldn’t rush home. The Big Guy would have to be more vigilant than he’d ever been.

* * *

It pained her to see his shoulders slump. She was no longer certain whether the mask she wore belonged to Trudy or Inez. Perhaps she was the monster who had been bitten by her many names. She watched the big bear shuffle across the carpets. There wasn’t much sense in loving him. She loved him anyway. What would happen to Daniel and Darl if she moved close to Isaac and his crazy fire?

Ah, she was Inez tonight, Inez in a blue dress, and she didn’t have to think of how her identities spiraled back and forth. She returned to the lobby. The barman had come to her with a telephone. But she sent him back to the bar. All she had to do was wait.

He arrived around three in the morning with that linebacker’s grace of his. Bull Latham had always been light on his feet. He had half a dozen of his acolytes—men and women with bland faces and brutal eyes. They could have cracked her spine before she ever blinked.

The Bull sat down next to her. He had a bottle of Jameson in his coat pocket. Would he drink them both into oblivion or douse Inez in whiskey and set her on fire inside the Warwick?

“Inez, you’ve been a naughty girl. You had no license to come here.”

“But I had the names of some generals in my head. They were happy to meet with David’s social secretary. I had a delightful chat with them. They’re going to stuff the Bronx inside their shoes and shuttle between Houston and Claremont Park.”

The Bull took out his Jameson and drank right from the bottle. “That doesn’t concern you,” he said.

“It might not if Isaac Sidel didn’t have to be sacrificed.”

The Bull looked into her brown eyes. He wasn’t half as cruel as his own acolytes. “Sidel is a luxury you can’t afford. I could put you on a cargo plane and ship you back to the Ansonia in a dog kennel. David says he can’t sleep unless you’re on the thirteenth floor.”

“Tough,” she said.

But he knew how to menace her without his bottle of whiskey. “Did I tell you how I visited Darl’s school?”

“Shut up,” she said.

“David has appointed me her godfather. It ain’t every little gal who can share a milkshake with the director of the FBI. You’re a delinquent mother who cohabited with criminals in New Orleans. I can send Daniel and Darl into the courts, and they’ll be lost in the maze. You’ll never see your kids again.”

Inez reached out to scratch his face, but he laughed and clutched both her hands inside his paw.

“Don’t you ever go near my Darl again,” she spat at him.

“Why, she’s just about the prettiest gal in creation. She’s a pure delight. . . . And you listen to me. Stop meddling in Sidel’s business. You signed on with David, and I’m here to see that you stay signed.”

She didn’t even resist. She had no more feeling in her fingers. The Bull released them from his paw. She’d been on a fool’s journey. She flirted with the generals, tried to wean them away from the Bronx, but she did Isaac more harm than good. The generals had called David, who sent a distress signal to Bull Latham. Bull was both the puppet and the puppeteer. He did David’s bidding, but he had to be cautious around Sidel. Who knows? A miracle could happen, and Isaac might survive his Texas tombstone. So she winked at Bull’s acolytes and walked out of the Warwick with the FBI.

H
E’D BECOME A KIND OF
prince regent in the wake of a faltering king. No one listened to Michael, or bothered to interrogate him, but he was the president-elect, not Sidel. The yellow bus arrived on a cargo plane the very next afternoon. But Isaac had to wait for Marilyn, Marianna, and Michael. It was near the holiday season, and Marianna would only miss nine or ten days of school. But the Big Guy was adamant; he found her a Texas tutor and charged the tutor’s bill to the DNC. He didn’t know how Marilyn and Marianna would get along, but they were already like sisters conspiring against Isaac Sidel.

It was hard for Michael. His own advisers deferred to the Big Guy. But it was even harder for Martin Boyle, who’d arrived on the same plane with Michael. Boyle had fallen out of favor. He could barely get an interview with the Big Guy, who didn’t even have to depend on Trevor Welles and his Crusaders. He had his own “secret service,” detectives from Barbarossa’s old squad, burly men who guarded the mayor when he was on the road.

And while Martin Boyle brooded, Isaac went up to him and kissed his forehead, like some kind of pontiff. “How much did David Pearl pay you, huh?”’

“Not a dime. I serve my country. I can’t be bought.”

“Shut your fucking mouth, Boyle, or I’ll flay you alive—no, I’ll have my son-in-law do it. That’s what he did to the Vietcong.”

The Secret Service man swayed on his feet, like some crooner, but he had little to croon about. “Calder promised you wouldn’t get hurt.”

“You were sworn to protect me, Boyle, not to become a rat in my own camp.”

“Then why haven’t you kicked me off the detail?”

“Because you’re part of my family now, and I can’t discard my own bad sons. But if you betray me again, Boyle, I’ll have you pensioned off without a pension. You’ll have to beg like a blind man . . . get the fuck out of my sight.”

The yellow bus took to the back roads. They went through a town of shanties that wasn’t even on the map; it was a colored ghetto on a forgotten hump of prairie grass between Houston and Corpus Christi. The children never even bothered about Isaac. They were in awe of the Little First Lady. Marianna went into a shack and baked butternut cookies for the entire town. There wasn’t a school or a library that Isaac could see.

“We have to fix this place,” Isaac said to one of the town fathers. “Mayor to mayor.”

“We don’t need fixin’, Mr. Isaac,” said the mayor of this very visible invisible town. And he pointed to the television cameras and the reporters who had wandered into his dusty landscape with Isaac’s yellow bus. “And we sure as hell don’t need the damn publicity of politicians who have nothin’ better to do than ramble in the dust. We’re in love with the Little First Lady, but we’d rather love her from afar. Do you get my drift?”

“But we’ve come to help,” Isaac said like a supplicant.

“Sir, it’s better for us that white folks aren’t so aware that we exist—no neighbors are the best neighbors, that’s my opinion. We were near decimated a while back by our white neighbors. We pay taxes, even vote at the votin’ booth in Goliad. But that’s as much traffic as we can bear. . . . Be gone, Mr. Isaac.”

And the Big Guy had to drag his tail out of there. He wondered what other town he might ruin with his entourage. He passed through the craziest place he had ever seen, a ghost town filled with books rather than people. It was run by some lunatic bibliophile, who lived and bathed among his mountains of books. He welcomed the Pilgrimage of ’88, as this Democratic whirlwind was now called by the press. His name was Carter Greenhut. He’d made a fortune manipulating stocks and bonds and now withdrew into a wonderland of books. He had neither wife nor child, not even a pet alligator on a leash. He survived with just a servant-cook, who repaired broken pipes, fixed Carter’s meals, and had to drive fifty miles to the nearest 7-Eleven.

“Armageddon is a-coming,” said the bibliophile. “And I have to prepare for the prince of darkness.”

“With a battlefield of books?” Isaac asked.

“Satan is frightened of the Word. . . . The printed page can blind him.”

And Isaac wondered if Carter Greenhut had come out of the same mental ward as that shooter Billy Bob. He drank a cup of tea with Carter that had all the delight of tepid alligator piss and had to fly from the town of books before he himself went mad. Perhaps the Big Guy could outrun his own Armageddon. He wasn’t so sure. The people who lined the back roads waiting for the Democratic ticket had the look of the damned; they had reddish, raw eyes and mumbled to themselves. Isaac had to feed them whatever food he had.

He couldn’t really sniff the lay of the land. Something was wrong. It was too fucking allegorical, this descent into darkness. A little hamlet of poor blacks that seemed outside the usual rub of time, and another hamlet, bereft of people, where the only real citizens were books. Isaac might have been less suspicious if he’d seen one live alligator. But it was as if their little caravan of Democrats was trapped inside the brainstorm of a wizard in a limestone castle. . . .

They slept in motels among the bayous or in some dead orchard, where they could park the yellow bus. Isaac had his own bungalow. But it couldn’t protect him from having the same bad dream. A boy again, in short pants, he was bumping along when he discovered a cafeteria right on Broadway, with electric signboards above his head. The women painted on them were twenty feet tall. They looked ready to leap out of the signboards and crush a boy in short pants.

He ran into the cafeteria, but he had to pay a premium of fifty cents if he wanted to sit at one of the tables. These tables were much too tall, and the chairs were treacherous. It took him the better part of an hour to find his way onto a bruised leather seat. And he couldn’t command any of the waiters no matter how hard he signaled. He didn’t have an ounce of pedigree inside this cafeteria. No one would listen. He began to sob.

And then he saw her. She sat next to Isaac in a tall chair. But she wasn’t harsh and overweening, like the women in the signboards. She had a silver hat clapped to her head. He wished it were Trudy Winckleman, come to haunt his nights in a humdrum motel. But this cafeteria lady had very long legs. And then he recognized her. He was looking at the original Inez, Rothstein’s blond beauty, but what was Inez doing in a strange cafeteria, with a silver hat that some conquistador might have worn? This wasn’t Lindy’s, where Legs Diamond walked from front to rear, as a warning to anyone who welshed on a bet with the Brain or forgot the interest on a loan. Isaac couldn’t even sample some sauerkraut.

Inez heard his stomach growl. She bent over him like one of those colossal ladies in the signboards and patted his eyes with a napkin. He was certain that Inez would sit him on her lap and feed him something from the counter, which was very far away, or at least whistle at a waiter. But the dream always ended with Inez stuffing the napkin—a rag, really—into his mouth until Isaac could no longer breathe.

And he’d wake out of this nightmare in some no-man’s-land between Texas and the Ansonia, wishing he’d never, never agreed to become the nation’s VP.

* * *

It wasn’t that much better during the day. He was tied to a yellow bus on a pilgrimage he didn’t believe in. He had to protect his loved ones, who traveled with him on a sinister route.

The villages and hamlets they visited along the Gulf had been half-destroyed by some hurricane; the restaurants were shuttered; the gas stations had no gas. Children stared at them from cardboard windows. They could have been born in the Bronx. “Jesus,” Isaac said to Michael. “Will you take some notes? We’ll have to come back here after the inauguration and help these forgotten people.”

“There won’t be an inauguration,” Michael moaned. He had fallen into a drunken stupor since their first day on the road. Isaac cursed himself. He had to swallow dust and drink alligator piss just because the Constitution had neglected to deal with a president-elect who ran from his own election before Congress and the Electoral College could ratify him. But the College did convene in all fifty states while the yellow bus approached the wetlands of some lost lagoon. And the votes cast by the College with its own strange mystique would be sent on to the Capitol in DC and remain unanswered and unopened until Congress itself convened in January to count the electoral votes and declare who had really won the election. Until then, the Big Guy and Michael would have to diddle around in the wetlands and backwoods.

But suddenly, their yellow bus had become the Little White House. Senators and congressmen arrived in that lost lagoon, Democrats and Republicans alike, to pay homage to the new powerhouse, Isaac Sidel. Michael wasn’t even mentioned. A clique of senators wanted Isaac’s opinion on a particular appropriations bill. Others asked him whether he might consider having a woman as secretary of state. Isaac was saddled with a transition team, in spite of himself. He tried to defer all questions to the president-elect, but no one wanted Michael.