Under the Eye of God (9 page)

The seven grand inquisitors had secured General Douglas MacArthur’s old suite in the Waldorf Towers. MacArthur had been a Democrat, and a holy warrior, who had napalmed North Korea and wanted to bomb the Chinese back into the Stone Age. These inquisitors sat with their stone faces in MacArthur’s drawing room. They were worried that J. Michael wouldn’t last, that he would fold before the Electoral College convened, and that could provoke a crisis.

The DNC’s legal wizards had already met and declared that Cottonwood couldn’t hide behind the Constitution, couldn’t demand another election, since the Constitution was silent about a disappearing Democrat who happened to be the president-elect. The country had had its say. And it was up to the winning Party to pick a new team at the helm. Isaac had all the validity of the election process. He would move into Michael’s slot, and now these inquisitors had to scratch their heads and find another vice president. The Party wanted a senator or governor from the southland to balance Isaac’s New York credentials. Scared as he was, Isaac told the inquisitors to stuff themselves.

“I won’t run with any cracker,” he said.

Tim Seligman began to sway like some mystical rabbi. “Isaac, Isaac, we have to create a new ticket.”

“Then go with someone else. I’ll step away.”

“Impossible,” said Ramona Dazzle, the DNC’s own chief counsel. “We’ll lose all our credibility, and Cottonwood will creep right back into the process.”

“It’s worse than that,” said Tim. “The Electoral College could revolt. . . . There will be faithless electors all over the place.”

Isaac couldn’t understand all this mumbo jumbo; the inquisitors had a votive talk of their own—technical
and
bewitched.

“Jesus, Tim, will you speak my fucking language?”

Ramona Dazzle glared at Isaac. A Rhodes scholar from Stanford, she sat at the pinnacle of the Democrats’ brain trust and was the fiercest of all the inquisitors. Very few lawyers dared confront her in open court. She was like a gorgeous cybernetics machine. She had big brown eyes, sandy hair, and the thinnest nostrils in the world.

“Sidel, are you insane? If you abandon us, the electors will do whatever they want. And then a Republican Congress will declare Cottonwood the winner by default and hand him a second term.”

“All right,” Tim said, “we’ll play hardball with this prick. . . . Sidel, who the hell do you want? Give us five choices.”

“I only have one,” Isaac said. “Bull Latham.”

A strange calm had descended upon the Democrats. And then there was a collective groan. Isaac could have sworn that General MacArthur’s ghost had come into the room.

“The Bull’s a diehard Republican,” Ramona shouted from her seat.

“The better for us in a constitutional crisis,” said Sidel.

The seven inquisitors gaped at Isaac, meaning to drive him out of MacArthur’s drawing room with stony stares. But Isaac never winced. Suddenly they realized that there might be an eighth inquisitor in the room—Isaac Sidel. And they began to listen.

“A fusion ticket,” he said. “The country will go for it. And the Republicans won’t dare rebel, not with one of their own on our team.”

“But will the Bull come into our camp?” Ramona asked, her big brown eyes darting everywhere at once.

“I’ll offer him a sweetheart deal,” Isaac said with a smile that was at least as cryptic as their own icy demean.

“But the Bull can hurt us,” Ramona said. “What if he doesn’t sever his links with the FBI?”

Isaac glanced at her across the table. “Ramona, tell me what powers the vice president has?”

“None,” she said. “He has to nurse his own dick. But I still don’t like it.”

“Then convince Michael to stay.”

“He’s collapsed on us,” said Tim. “He sits in the dark and cries. He won’t meet with his transition team. It’s a disaster.”

“Then who’s your man?” Isaac asked. The inquisitors couldn’t even look into Isaac’s eyes. He’d pummeled them by riding right over their own little Inquisition. “Who’s your man?”

“Isaac Sidel,” said the DNC.

“I’ll have Michael back in harness for you. Just give me an hour.”

And he rushed out of General MacArthur’s suite.

T
HERE HAD ALWAYS BEEN AN
air of abandon about him. As a young inspector in the NYPD, he’d taken his daughter, Marilyn, into a hoodlum’s bar on the Lower East Side. It was filled with remnants of Murder, Inc. Marilyn was four at the time. And the bar’s resident gangster, Melvin Warsaw, hated the sight of young girls. He promised that he’d demolish every cop’s daughter who wandered into his territories and would eat her alive. Isaac couldn’t tolerate such a challenge to his own esteem.

Like a crazy man, he ventured into the bar with Marilyn riding on his shoulders.

She was wearing a white dress, like some half Jewish saint. Warsaw closed his eyes, and his cheeks grew purple with rage. “I can sniff Isaac Sidel. Mister, you brought your little girl here at your own peril. Little girls remind me of the misery of my own life. Sidel, I’ll give you a second chance. Run away from here.”

“Not until you shake my daughter’s hand.”

The whole bar was stupefied. Isaac went up to Warsaw with the little girl right under the chandeliers. She was singing to herself. But suddenly she looked into Warsaw’s eyes. She held out her hand to him, and Melvin Warsaw of Murder, Inc. was caught within her sway. He began to sob.

“Whoever harms this little girl will hear from me.”

Marilyn had a new godfather, and Melvin became Isaac’s stoolie for the rest of his natural life. The Big Guy was just as reckless with J. Michael. Student radicals at Columbia had wanted to bury Isaac in the catacombs of Hamilton Hall. But he walked through their barricades with his badge pinned to his coat in the spring of ’68, talked Marx and Hegel and Ho Chi Minh with the radicals and was able to arrange a truce with their leader, Michael Storm. . . .

He had to pick the lock on the front door of Michael’s suite. The president-elect was lying in his underpants on the Waldorf’s king-size bed. He was muttering to himself,
“It’s no use, it’s no use.”

The Big Guy didn’t turn on any of the lights. He let J. Michael continue with his mourner’s kaddish. And the moment Michael turned silent, that was when Isaac pounced.

“Fine,” he said, hurling Michael off the bed in his underpants. “Don’t think that David Pearl and his friends at the Pentagon are going to grant you immunity. I’ll prosecute the shit out of you the moment I’m Prez. I’ll have my attorney general chase you under the ground.”

J. Michael blinked at Isaac from his perch on the floor. “You can’t shove me like that. I’m the president-elect.”

“Not if you run away from your own election—Michael, be a mensch. What the fuck do they have on you?”

“Everything. Old man Pearl has me by the balls. I signed documents . . . I had buildings torched in Sidereal’s name. For the good of the borough, Isaac. I thought they were going to build a new Yankee Stadium in the middle of Crotona Park. It would have revived the whole South Bronx.”

“And you would have been the savior—our little Joan of Arc. They’re not reviving the Bronx, Michael. They’re gonna kill it.”

“I know.”

J. Michael crawled toward the Big Guy, his buttocks in the air, like a wandering turret.

“Isaac, he has the president eating out of his hand. Cottonwood can’t take a leak without a nod from Pearl. That’s why he pissed in the Rose Garden—he was so fuckin’ distraught.”

“And you?”

Michael began to blubber. “I can’t fight him. He has too big a net. It’s all run out of Texas—Houston and San Antone.”

The Big Guy’s ears perked like a deranged rabbit. The cattlemen’s bar at the Menger had been no divine accident.

“What’s in San Antone?”

“Brooks Air Force Base and Fort Sam Houston. They have their own little conclaves all over the map. New Mexico, Florida, California . . . and Texas.”

“But David Pearl never travels. He doesn’t stray from the Ansonia’s seventeenth floor. He’s like a monk.”

And now Michael’s own smile was deranged. “Monks don’t have to travel. The military have their own mystical flying machines. . . . Isaac, I want out.”

“Have you met Trudy Winckleman?”

“David’s mistress, you mean.”

Isaac’s heart squeezed like a merciless ventilator. He had to sit down on David’s bed. No wonder she was such a museum piece. Why shouldn’t the wizard claim his own Inez? And Isaac was the fool of fools. One kiss and he was willing to protect Trudy Winckleman against the whole planet. It was Isaac who needed protection.

“Michael,” he said, “don’t give up. While I’m still mayor, that old man doesn’t have shit. I’ll dismantle him, I promise. He’s not turning the Bronx into a military utopia.”

“And what if he dismantles me first? Each fuckin’ day there’s another revelation, another misdeed in the sorry life of Mr. Michael Storm.”

“They still can’t bring you down. We walloped the Republicans in forty-seven states. Trust me.”

And Isaac raced out of Michael’s suite like an antelope. He returned to his headquarters at the Ansonia.
Headquarters
. It was the wizard’s lair, not his own. David ruled the Ansonia, but he didn’t rule New York, not while the Big Guy was mayor. He went upstairs to David’s little labyrinth. A woman opened the door. She had the wizard’s own sweet face. She was a distant cousin of David’s who’d fallen on hard times and was his housekeeper.

“But where’s Mr. Pearl?” Isaac asked, with a glum look. This cousin had recognized the mayor of Manhattan. Isaac had to give her his autograph on a napkin.

“I have no idea,” she said, and she couldn’t even tell him when David would be back.

“Mr. Mayor,” she said, “don’t forget the handicapped when you get to the White House.” And she revealed her own withered left arm.

“But I won’t get near the White House,” he said, “except for an office in the West Wing that’s just for decoration. Vice presidents have little to do.”

She must have been her own clairvoyant. “Michael Storm’s a crook. He won’t last in the White House one week.”

Jesus, everybody was jinxing him. He preferred to have a vacation at the Naval Observatory, where vice presidents had their own little nest. Isaac could catch up on his sleep. He dreaded his next move, but he still strode downstairs to Inez. Would she lie in his face, swear that she wasn’t the old man’s sweetheart? Suddenly, David wasn’t so old. The Big Guy himself wasn’t that far away from collecting Social Security. It would save his skin. He was always broke by the end of the month.

He was trembling by the time he reached Trudy Winckleman’s door. She didn’t answer any of his knocks.

“Inez,” he muttered, “it’s me.”

He was filled with spite—cuckolded before he even slept with Inez. He took out his lock picks and entered that little museum. It had a fragrance—a sudden perfume—that walloped the Big Guy, barely left him standing on his own two feet.
Inez’s aroma
. The world would always remain a mystery to Isaac Sidel. This calendar girl, this fraudulent Inez, was enough to derail a guy. He had no scruples. Margaret Tolstoy was lying like a mummy in Bull Latham’s sanitarium, and all he could think about was this delicious spider with her silver hair, woven right out of David’s web.

He wasn’t a burglar. He wouldn’t go through Inez’s drawers. He looked at that picture of Arnold Rothstein and the first Inez on the museum’s mantelpiece. AR seemed more authentic than his protégé. He didn’t have David’s angelic mask. And AR’s Inez wasn’t cluttered in mystery. She was a showgirl who had caught Arnold’s eye. But she didn’t preside over a club for billionaires.

Then the Big Guy had another revelation. There was no billionaires’ club. Cassandra’s Wall was just a phantom, meant to suck in Sidel. He abandoned Inez’s aromas and went into the bowels of the Ansonia. He broke into the place. It was utterly deserted. There were no signs of a human habitat. Rats scurried across the old mattress room of Plato’s Retreat. The baths were bone dry. Isaac went out onto the street. He wanted to howl his own lament. But he cried somewhere deep inside his own bowels. The Big Guy was sitting shivah for himself.

I
T MUST HAVE BEEN 1924.
The busses were as tall as skyscrapers. A sedan could seat nine or ten passengers. There was a bit of wonder on every block. Manhattan had become the new colossus. The cafeterias were flooded with dancers on a little break from some rooftop restaurant, and they all crowded into Lindy’s for a glimpse of AR or their favorite bootlegger. It was a long, narrow delicatessen right on Broadway. No one could reserve a table except AR himself—it was near the window, and one of Arnold’s enemies could have shattered the glass shooting at him. But no one dared. It would have been like shooting some deity.

The boy sat at Arnold’s feet, worshipped the fluff on his collar. Little David and the Jewish Goliath. AR had had an older brother, Harry, whom his father adored. Harry had been a scholar, a religious Jew, and Arnold had always been an outcast. He preferred the downtown gambling dens. His father was a millionaire from Bessarabia, a manufacturer of cotton goods who kept synagogues and religious schools afloat. There was peace at home while Harry was alive. But Harry died of pneumonia before he was twenty-one. And AR blamed himself, swore he had willed Harry’s death.

He became more and more of a lone wolf. He gambled, bought up properties while he was still in his teens. David himself was eight or nine years old when he chanced upon AR at Lindy’s delicatessen. And Arnold was a man of forty-two, half worn out. There was little luster in his eyes. He had a gorgeous blond wife at home, and she threatened to leave him unless he dropped his “whore” at the Ansonia. But AR was addicted to Inez.

David was at the delicatessen with his dad, a clerk in a department store who idolized AR and sent his son over for an autograph. Arnold stared at David with his habitual melancholy.

“What is it you want from me?” AR asked in that musical voice of his—and when David had to think back at that moment, had to recollect, it seemed that Rothstein resembled J. D. Salinger, not that sinister greenhorn, Meyer Wolfsheim—Salinger and AR had the saddest eyes in the world. At least that’s what he thought when he discovered a photo of Salinger many years later.
Lord, he looks just like AR
.