Under the Eye of God (4 page)

“He’s a criminal,” Joel said.

“But he’s
our
criminal,” Sophie answered, the cigarette dancing with each stroke of the broom.

“I’ll divorce you,” Joel shouted.

“Be my guest.”

And the battle ended right there. No Treasury agents arrived to question Isaac. David Pearl, Rothstein’s heir apparent, was in all the newspapers. The mob’s personal banker. The venture capitalist of crime. David was indicted, but he didn’t have to sit very long in jail. His lawyer called him a philanthropist, the secret benefactor of a hundred hospitals and settlement houses. It was David Pearl who found a roof for every orphan whose home had been torn down by realtors like Dodge Stokes, David Pearl who sent kids from Harlem to a summer camp in the Catskills. No jury would convict him. The government’s case was feeble compared to Pearl’s largesse. He began receiving marriage proposals through the mail. He looked like Tyrone Power in his photographs. Manhattan’s magnificent son. But he didn’t return to the Ansonia. All the publicity had unsettled David. He vanished from Broadway. . . .

Joel didn’t survive so well without his silent partner. He lost his government contract. Goons destroyed his shop. He lingered through the war, battling with Sophie. Then he also disappeared. Isaac and his younger brother, Leo, grew up without their dad. Leo became a kleptomaniac, and Isaac became a cop, so successful that he would soon be vice president.

I
SAAC CAMPED OUT AT GRACIE
Mansion and kept a small apartment on Rivington Street, but the building had burnt down while he was campaigning. And Seligman decided that Citizen Sidel had to have his own headquarters and residence outside Gracie Mansion.

“It’s a hornet’s nest, Isaac. People will think you’ve living off the city’s dime. Can’t have Michael’s VP eating up city resources. We’ll rent a suite at Trump Tower where you and your team can entertain and do whatever you like.”

Isaac groaned. He didn’t have a team. He hated all the glass towers that had gone up after the war and had turned Manhattan into a monolithic forest. He’d have dynamited half the town if he’d been a dictator like Stalin.

“Then where would you like to live, sonny boy?”

And Isaac had a sudden mirage of a white castle rising out of the mist.

“The Ansonia,” he said.

Tim grabbed the telephone, whispered for five minutes, winked at Isaac, and said, “It’s a deal. I got you a sublet on the fifteenth floor.”

“Timmy, I’m the mayor. I own New York. And you hop on the horn and get me into the Ansonia. Just like that.”

“That old whore,” he said. “The building’s dilapidated. I wouldn’t even put an enemy into the Ansonia, but you’re our bohemian prince. The country loves you, Isaac.”

Isaac wasn’t listening. He had to defend the Ansonia, the one single landmark of his childhood. “Caruso lived there. And so did the Babe. Arnold Rothstein dreamt up his biggest gambling coups on the Ansonia’s stairs.”

“Ancient history,” said Tim. “Rothstein’s a dinosaur.”

“He was the king of crime.”

“Sounds like a comic book to me. I bow to the Party’s new prince. Go on. Live at the Ansonia.”

And Isaac did. The Secret Service moved Isaac into the Ansonia, and Martin Boyle had his men interview every single tenant.

“That’s ungracious,” Isaac said.

“Sir, it has to be done. We have to weed out the potential crazies, anyone who bears a grudge against you.”

“And what happens if you find a couple of people like that?”

“Well, we give them a cash incentive to leave.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“We hound the hell out of them.”

“Wait a minute. That’s not legal, Boyle. We have rent laws in New York City. And I’m the guy who defends those laws.”

“Then there’s a conflict of interest. But I can’t allow a crazy to live in the same building with you.”

“Fine,” Isaac said. “We’ll have a lawsuit. The United States versus Citizen Sidel. . . . Boyle, it’s my new home, and I don’t want to be a pain in the ass. Kill the Gestapo tactics, understand?”

There were no crazies in the building other than Sidel, but on his very first day he found himself in the middle of a squall. There was a tenants’ strike. The Ansonia was being converted into a condominium, and the building’s new owner was putting pressure on tenants to get out. The owner lived in the building but wouldn’t reveal himself. He was stockpiling vacant apartments, warehousing them. Yet Tim Seligman had sneaked Isaac into the Ansonia.

He had his bay windows, a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan, his own nest. He would march up and down the stairs, which had grown shoddy and lost their shine, but Isaac could still bathe in the sun that broke through the enormous windows like great bells of light. He shivered with his own sense of the past, the recognition that this staircase in a rundown castle felt more familiar to him than his mansion in Carl Schurz Park or his boyhood home on West Broadway. And he understood why Arnold Rothstein had treasured it, why Caruso had practiced his arias on these stairs, why the Babe had swung an invisible bat in the stairwell’s dreamy light.

It was a universe unto itself, forlorn, complete, with an astonishing silence where Isaac could listen to iron and glass and marble breathe.

He wished he could confront Maurice, the concierge from 1940 who’d been so rude to Isaac. He would have saluted this concierge in his military cap and frock coat, and said, “Maurice, now I know why you were so fucking fastidious. You were the Ansonia’s watchdog, guarding its dignity, and I was an interloper, trying to crash the gate.”

A little man came up to Isaac while he was playing Caruso, practicing his soliloquy on the stairs. But Isaac didn’t have a chance to greet him. Martin Boyle jumped out onto the landing with a .22 Magnum and spoke into his button mike, “Possible flounder, possible flounder on the fifteenth floor.”

“Jesus,” Isaac said, “this isn’t the Kremlin. Will you learn how to let go?”

He chased Boyle off the landing and twisted his body toward the man on the stairs. “I’m—”

“Citizen Sidel.”

Even the Ansonia’s incredible sunlight couldn’t mask the little man’s gray complexion and fishy eyes.

“The Democrats bought the building, didn’t they?”

“I doubt it,” Isaac said.

“Then who’s been paying big bucks to get rid of us?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The Citizen moves in, and soon we’ll have a whole circus of Democrats. The Ansonia’s your headquarters, isn’t it?”

“On paper,” Isaac said, “only on paper. I’m on the road a lot of the time, singing for my supper.”

“That’s cute, very cute.”

The little man was clutching a pocket pistol, a .22 short. Isaac wondered if he’d ever been to San Antone, ever haunted the Alamo and that cattlemen’s bar at the Menger. But Isaac didn’t have his own star clerk inside the Ansonia to shove him out of harm’s way. He almost missed Amanda Wilde.

“What’s your name?” Isaac asked.

“The wife is sick. She has dizzy spells. I can’t afford to take her to a heart doctor.”

“What’s your name?”

“Archibald Stearns.”

Isaac had to be quick. He didn’t want Martin Boyle to reappear with a gaggle of Secret Service men. Isaac would be stuck with a permanent shadow.

“Well, Archie, I’m the mayor, or did you forget? No one’s gonna drive you out of the Ansonia. Trust me.”

“Like I’d trust my mother,” Archibald said, his fishy eyes wandering around with a rapid, lunatic rhythm. Isaac plucked the gun out of his hand and tossed it into the stairwell.

“That’s better, Archie. Shouldn’t point a gun. I’m only human.”

Archibald Stearns ran down the stairs, and Isaac would have chased after him, but the sun got in his eyes, blinded him for an instant, and Stearns was already gone. Isaac went back to his apartment like a sleepwalker and said to his Secret Service man, “Call Columbia Presbyterian and ask for the biggest heart specialist. Have him come to the Ansonia.”

“Are you having palpitations, sir?”

“No, no. It’s not for me. It’s for Archie’s wife.”

“Who’s Archie?”

“The guy on the stairs. Archibald Stearns. Find out where he lives . . . in the Ansonia. And charge the doctor’s visit to my election fund.”

Isaac dismissed Boyle and got Seligman on the horn. “Tim, will you tell me who owns this goddamn white elephant, huh?”

“An admirer.”

“That’s grand. Will ya give me his name?”

“I can’t disclose that. I’m sworn to secrecy. But he’s contributed to your campaign in a big way.”

“Then Archie’s right,” Isaac muttered. “I am driving people out of the Ansonia. I am the villain of this little piece. . . . Do I have to start digging, Tim? I’ll find the fucker and break his neck. Should I call the
Village Voice
, tell them that the Democratic National Committee is pro-landlord? That will really make us the hit of Manhattan.”

“Isaac, I still can’t deliver him. But if you’re that suicidal, we might as well let the Prez piss in the Rose Garden forever. Good-bye.”

Isaac had a dead phone in his fist. Fuck the Democrats. He’d have to do a little “detectiving” at the Ansonia, but where to begin? And then he noticed an envelope on his desk. It contained the lease for subtenant Isaac Sidel, c/o the Democratic National Committee and a certain Inez Corporation. Isaac was a dope.
Inez
. Rothstein’s beautiful blond mistress with legs as silky as an ostrich feather. David Pearl hadn’t fled the Ansonia. He’d exiled himself to his eagle’s roost on the sixteenth floor.

Isaac climbed up one flight, slid along the Ansonia’s carpets, and knocked on David’s door. But he’d misfired. An opera singer now lived in David’s old roost. And by chance, on a sudden whim, he climbed up to the seventeenth floor. The maids of rich men had once been shelved here. That’s what David had told him. The ceilings were low, the rooms were tiny, and comprised a labyrinth of cubicles, a rat’s maze.

Isaac could only find one door. He wasn’t shy.

“Open,” he said. “I have my lock picks, David. And I could ask the Secret Service to lend me a battering ram.”

“Who is it?” someone growled from inside the door.

“The Citizen. Isaac Sidel.”

“Are you still wearing short pants?”

“I’ve outgrown them lately.”

The door opened, and Isaac recognized David Pearl’s big brown eyes. The boy banker hadn’t aged, like the Citizen himself. His hair was white, but his beautiful features hadn’t coarsened a bit. Isaac perused David’s labyrinth—the tiny, rattish rooms, cluttered with cardboard boxes and books. Isaac had to duck his head before he could enter. That’s how low the ceilings were. He felt like some loutish Gulliver in the land of the small.

“Why did you move into this maze?” Isaac growled.

“It fits my temperament. I’m a recluse.”

Isaac glared at him.

“How’s your heart, David?”

“Beats like the devil.”

“When did you buy the building?”

“Years and years ago.”

“Was it your own homage to Rothstein?”

“I’m not that sentimental. I got it at a steal.”

“Then why the Inez Corporation?”

“It was a perfect cover,” David said. “Who else but the Ansonia’s historian would have remembered Inez’s name?”

“I’m not the Ansonia’s historian.”

“Yes, you are,” David said. “I saw it in your fucking eyes almost fifty years ago. You were hooked. The building was like your own magic mirror. You went right through the looking glass, and you’ve never climbed out.”

“Mirrors and mirages,” Isaac said. “But at least I saw a little of the planet. You’ve been like a privileged tramp in a limestone castle. Do you ever go out for coffee?”

“Why, when all the coffee in the world can come to me.”

“What forced you into exile, David? The humiliation of a judge and jury?”

“Not at all. I was holding too many markers. A lot of bankers were in my debt. They decided to get rid of me in an easy way. They snitched to Uncle Sam and the IRS. Tax evasion. When I’d helped those sons of bitches hide their own cash. But they hadn’t counted on Manhattan’s crazy venue. I had my own mirrors and mirages. I played the sly philanthropist.”

“And you won, David.”

“It didn’t matter. I’d been betrayed. I called in every marker. I ruined the men who tried to ruin me.”

“Like the Count of Monte Cristo. And you sit in your jail.”

“Jail, Isaac? The Ansonia’s hardly a jail. I lost my taste for mercantilism.”

“But you could have traveled.”

“How? To be a common tourist and salaam in front of the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben? I had the Ansonia. That was enough. I followed your career. You’re like one of my orphans. I helped where I could.”

Isaac was gloomier than ever. He didn’t like the
thread
of this conversation.

“Helped?”

“How does a policeman rise and rise? With baksheesh.”

“You bribed City Hall and the goddamn NYPD?”

“I didn’t have to. I contributed to the Fresh Air Fund, let a particular cardinal know that the Irish mafia who ran the police had to make room for Isaac Sidel.”

“It isn’t fair,” Isaac said. “I’d still be a cop on the beat if it hadn’t been for you.”

“No. I feathered your way a little. You had the goods. A kind of honest cruelty.”

Honest cruelty.
The wizard in his labyrinth had Isaac’s number.

“Should I dance for you, David?”

“I don’t expect any favors from Citizen Sidel.”

“You just happened to lend the Ansonia to the Democrats, huh?”

“Did you look at your lease? Seligman is paying through the nose.”

“And why are you warehousing apartments?”

“I’m waiting for the market to rise. There’s nothing sinister about it.”

“But I met a man on the stairs. His wife is sick. . . . ”

The telephone rang. It was Martin Boyle. He’d tracked Isaac to the seventeenth floor.

“Sir, I went through the building’s directory. There’s no Archibald Stearns at the Ansonia.”

“Boyle,” Isaac said, “I’ll be with you in a minute.” He hung up the phone. “A little man with fishy eyes. Swore he was a tenant. Archie Stearns. His wife has heart problems.”

The ex–boy banker started to laugh. “Was he packing a tiny pistol? Isaac, you’re lucky to be alive. He’s no tenant of mine. He’s a hired gun. Dennis Cohen. Works for my competitors, a gang of real estate moguls who’d like to grab the Ansonia. He’s dangerous, Dennis is.”