Under the Eye of God (3 page)

“You’ll do nothing, Tim. We can’t prove a thing. Calder will laugh at us. Then he’ll grind me into the dirt. We’ll look like amateurs, hurling assassination theories at the president of the United States. . . . What’s our next stop?”

“Houston,” Tim said.

“Good. Wake me when we get there.”

And the Citizen fell fast asleep.

I
SAAC TOURED THE HOUSTON SHIP
Channel, rode the mechanical bull at Gilley’s, kneeled inside the Rothko Chapel, where he found a bit of peace contemplating that eccentric millionaire, Mark Rothko, who couldn’t afford to buy an overcoat and would freeze his ass every winter . . . until he finally killed himself. Rothko’s paintings, with their stark ribbons of color, soothed the Citizen, forced him to recognize his own isolation, the symbolic overcoat that he, too, would never wear.

He dialed his mavens at City Hall. He couldn’t get that team of army engineers in Claremont Park out of his mind. His mavens did some digging on their own. The engineers were still around. Claremont Park had become their headquarters. They’d gone across the ruined meadowland of Morrisania with their magic tripods, surveying all the rubble and burnt bricks. Morrisania was a beggar’s paradise. It suffered from more poverty than any other district in the whole United States. Isaac didn’t like conundrums. He called the Pentagon, got some unctuous colonel on the line.

“Army engineers in the Bronx, Mr. Sidel? It must be a training mission.”

“Training for what?”

The colonel couldn’t say. There was a long silence until another colonel crept onto the wire.

“They have no authorization, Mr. Sidel. They shouldn’t have gone into your backyard. And I’m sorry about the shooting in San Antone. The president has stuck a stick up our ass for allowing it to happen. We all hope you’ve recovered.”

His mavens at City Hall got back to him in a couple of hours. The army engineers had disappeared from Claremont Park. But the Big Guy wasn’t satisfied. Something still galled him, and he wasn’t even sure what it was.

He returned to New York without Amanda, tried to ring up Marianna Storm, but couldn’t seem to get her on the line. The Democrats had locked her out of his life.
Lolita
. And Isaac did what he often did when he was very blue. He camped outside the Ansonia, like some lost soul. It was his personal pilgrimage, deep as history. The Ansonia
was
history to Isaac Sidel. David Pearl had lived there, Arnold Rothstein’s last pupil. Ah, if only he’d been born a bit earlier, and had met Rothstein on the Ansonia’s stairs. AR might have taught Isaac a trick or two. . . .

He made his first pilgrimage to the Ansonia around 1940. It was a castle that rose above Broadway like some Alhambra with curving balconies and turreted rooftops, where kings could rule and play with or without their mistresses and wives. This castle was a whole block long. Isaac’s dad, Joel Sidel, a glove manufacturer, would visit his silent partner, David Pearl, who had his own turret. Pearl was a boy wonder, twenty-five or so, and already a recluse.

Isaac would accompany his dad, sit in that turret, while Joel talked to David and drank champagne that had a slightly bluish color. There was a fever about the war in Europe, and the boy banker had helped Joel secure a contract from the army for “foul-weather gloves.” The contract should have gone to a manufacturer with much deeper pockets, but it was David who understood the dynamics of a bidding war, and the particular palms he had to “smear.” Joel was like a baby in the land of politics, but he could produce the finest kidskin gloves. David himself had a hundred pairs.

He was a smallish, almost beautiful man with delicate fingers and dark brown eyes. He was considered Arnold Rothstein’s protégé, though Rothstein died of a bullet in the groin when David was fifteen. Rothstein had adopted him, and David went to “college” with the king of crime. Rothstein took him to the racetrack, to meetings with gamblers, to roadhouse gambling casinos, where David discovered his new “uncles,” Legs Diamond and Frank Costello. With the aura of Rothstein around him, David had become a venture capitalist at sixteen, and the businesses he backed, like Joel’s, never had any problems with labor racketeers and the law.

David loved to reminisce. He’d grown fond of Isaac, would let him ride his tiny knees, tell him stories about a Manhattan that Isaac could never have dreamed.

“It was Arnold who introduced me to the Ansonia. ‘It’s the only address worth having,’ he said. Caruso lived there. Toscanini. Chaliapin. Babe Ruth. ‘When I’m at the Ansonia,’ he said, ‘I don’t ever want to go back out onto the street.’ ”

“But why didn’t he live here?” Isaac asked.

“Please,” Joel said, “don’t pester David.”

“It’s a legitimate question. Arnold had a mistress on the thirteenth floor. Inez. He was crazy about her. What a creature. Tall and proud as a pelican. People would gawk at her when she took the elevator down to the swimming pool. Arnold had to hire a fiancé for her, or she would have had twenty marriage proposals a month. He’d plucked her out of the Ziegfeld Follies, a dancer with legs that shot to the sky. . . . ”

“Mr. Pearl,” Isaac muttered. “Inez’s legs couldn’t have locked him out of the Ansonia.”

“Don’t be fresh,” Joel said. “You’re interrupting David.”

But the boy banker laughed, and then he started to cough. He was born with a weak heart.

“Look,” Joel said, “you’ve aggravated him.”

“Not at all. I enjoy Isaac’s company. The kid is shrewd. He can visualize, see with his ears, like a detective. He understands the details. Inez was just
too
gorgeous. Arnold couldn’t keep to the shadows with Inez around. He was a gambler, and gamblers have to hide. They have too many debts. The Ansonia had been one of his favorite haunts. But after he installed Inez, he had to give it up. ‘David,’ he said, ‘it’s a pity. Every time I’m on the stairs, with the wrought-iron rails, it’s like having my own little piece of Europe. I never want to travel again.’ ”

The boy banker blew his nose with the help of a silk handkerchief, his initials sewn into the silk.

“Isaac, you can’t imagine what the Ansonia meant to Arnold. It was like a love affair. He watched the building go up in 1901, watched it rise to seventeen stories, watched the stone masons work on the towers, when he was only a runt, a rich kid who despised other rich kids, and became a runner for Tammany Hall, a common cockroach.”

“Rothstein a cockroach?” Joel mused. “Impossible.”

“Arnold was at the opening ceremony. The Ansonia wasn’t even finished. But its developer, Dodge Stokes, couldn’t wait. He’d knocked down an orphan asylum to find a perfect site where he could build and build. And Arnold was there at this first, unofficial opening, with live seals swimming in the lobby fountain, and a tearoom that didn’t have a single teacup. He was the representative of Big Tim Sullivan, boss of Tammany Hall. He recognized a couple of gamblers, but he didn’t mingle with them. He tasted the punch and found the Ansonia’s staircase, with its marble floor and iron grille, and he climbed all seventeen flights. And that’s when he had his revelation. ‘David,’ he said, ‘Dodge Stokes is a genius. He built Manhattan’s first unsinkable ocean liner. It doesn’t tilt with the wind. It sticks to its own street. But it leaves you with the impression of gliding along an invisible grid.’ ”

“Ah,” said Joel, tipsy from the blue champagne. “Long live the Ansonia! But it’s a shame I can’t shake Arnold’s hand. Didn’t some stinking gambler gun him down in front of the Plaza?”

“The Park Central. And it wasn’t really a gambler. It was the banks. Arnold had become a liability. He was too powerful. He’d funneled hard cash away from the biggest banks. He was prepared to ruin them, to form his own banking system with mob money. The bankers had to strike back. They hired the best gunman, a police captain who had a grudge. He cheated at poker, and Arnold tossed him out of the game.”

“David,” Joel said, “you’re talking like a Marxist. Bankers don’t send out killers. This is America. . . . What will Isaac think?”

“That the good
and
the bad die young. . . . Isaac, lose yourself, explore. The Ansonia is an entire territory. Your father and I have business to discuss. And it would bore you to death.”

“But somebody could kidnap him if he strayed too far.”

The boy banker looked into Joel’s eyes. “Who would dare?” he asked.

And Isaac wandered around in his short pants. Ten years old. He’d never seen a circular living room like David’s and windows made of etched glass. Joel’s silent partner had been right. Isaac longed for details.

He walked out of the apartment, heard his father groan.

“I’m used up. . . . We never had to deal with gangsters. Not like this.”

“Joel, welcome to the modern world.”

“But a manufacturer who has to sit with hired gunmen so his workers won’t strike . . . ”

His father’s groans gnawed at him, seemed to grate his own heart. He ran to the stairway, imagined himself as Rothstein visiting Inez. Each landing had a window that climbed to the top of the wall, and the whole landing was flooded with light. It was like being on a planet where the sun existed only to caress a boy in short pants.

And then, all of a sudden, the Ansonia fell out of his father’s vocabulary. Joel stopped visiting his silent partner, could barely mention his name. “He’s a crook, like his beloved Rothstein. And he’ll end the same way. I don’t want you near the Ansonia. David Pearl pollutes whatever he touches.”

But Isaac wouldn’t follow his father’s instructions. He hiked from the Lower East Side to David’s citadel, which seemed to dominate half the sky with its limestone skin.

“I’ll live here,” he said. “With Caruso’s ghost.”

He announced himself to the concierge, who stood behind a black marble desk that was like a many-sided maze.

“Mr. Pearl, please.”

“Which one?”

“The man in the tower. David Pearl.”

“And who should I say is calling?”

“His partner’s son. Isaac Sidel.”

The concierge was dubious of Isaac’s credentials. But David sang his “OK” on the house telephone. “Maurice, let the kid upstairs. And don’t give him a hard time. He’s precious to me.”

Isaac shunned the elevator. He took the magic stairwell, like a young mountain climber, caught in the windows’ blaze.

The boy banker was waiting for him at the top of the stairs, and he himself was all ablaze, in a scarlet robe.

“I figured you’d climb. But I couldn’t manage sixteen flights. I don’t have enough air in my lungs.”

He brought Isaac into his eagle’s lair, fed him caviar and blue champagne.

“Any messages from your dad?”

“No, David.”

“I see. You’ve come here without Joel’s consent.”

“I’m your silent partner,” Isaac said.

“And what does our partnership consist of?”

“The past,” Isaac said. “Papa doesn’t have the time. Papa dreams of gloves. . . . Tell me about Arnold and the Ansonia.”

“I’ve already told you.”

“Tell me again.”

And David relived the tale of Rothstein’s arrival at the Ansonia in 1903 as a Tammany lout. Rothstein wore the colors of Big Tim Sullivan, a red blazer and an orange neckerchief. He’d come to the carriage porch without a carriage, pretended to step down from a horse. Big Tim had wrangled an invitation from the master builder Dodge Stokes. The mayor, Seth Low, was there, a big fat reformer with a walrus mustache, looking like the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert. Isaac had never heard of Flaubert.

“Idiot, he changed the whole landscape of the novel.”

“I’m not interested in landscapes,” Isaac said.

David laughed and continued with his tale. Seth Low had defeated Big Tim and the other bosses and chased “the Tammany tigers” out of City Hall. He’d resettled the orphans who lost their home when Dodge Stokes destroyed the asylum. He began building high schools in the poorest neighborhoods. He railed against the slums. He was the first honest mayor the town had had in years. And when he saw Rothstein’s orange neckerchief, his jowls began to twitch. He demanded that Dodge Stokes kick out “this disgusting little tiger.”

But Rothstein had his own razzle-dazzle. He bowed to Gustave Flaubert.

“Your Honor, I’ve contributed to your Homeless Orphans’ Fund. Look it up. Rothstein. Twenty dollars. I’m your biggest fan among the tigers. Couldn’t we get along? For one afternoon.”

The mayor measured Rothstein’s brown eyes. “Dear boy,” he said. “I’ll do anything, but take off that abominable scarf.”

Rothstein obliged, and the mayor introduced him to Dodge Stokes and a certain Monsieur DuBoy, the French architect whom Stokes had hired to build his Beaux-Arts palace. Rothstein mingled with them, drank punch, aware all the while that Tammany was working day and night to beg and steal the necessary “tickets” that would unseat Mayor Low.

“That’s politics,” Isaac said. “What about the seals?”

“Ah, the seals in the fountain. They had sleek, wet backs. But one of them escaped and bounced up the stairs to the Ansonia’s tenth floor. It took nine policemen and the Central Park zookeeper to capture the seal, according to Arnold. But I wasn’t there.”

Isaac would have come every week to have his caviar and blue champagne. But on his sixth or seventh visit, he bumped into a catastrophe. Maurice, the concierge, told him that David Pearl had been snatched from his eagle’s lair in handcuffs, charged with tax evasion, and that Isaac had better leave the premises or Maurice would have him arrested for vagrancy.

“I’m not a bum,” Isaac said, but he went downtown where he had more grief. His dad slapped him and clutched his scalp. “Treasury men were here. They wanted to know how much money I was hiding for David Pearl. They’d already been to the shop, frightened my employees. And they were looking for you, my little Arnold Rothstein. I had to learn from them that you were running up to the Ansonia on the sly, sitting at David’s feet. Did he stuff your pockets with cash?”

Joel had clumps of Isaac’s hair in his hand. But Sophie Sidel arrived with a cigarette in her mouth. Isaac’s mom looked adorable. She slapped at Joel with a broom.