Under the Eye of God

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Under the Eye of God Page 2

by Jerome Charyn


  “I could promise you the sun and moon, Sidel, but my boys and girls will clobber you if they can.”

  Isaac hung up on Calder Cottonwood. “Tim, I’d like to consult with my astrologer, please.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Shall I fetch her myself? I’ll knock on every fucking door at the Menger. I’ll go there in my hospital gown.”

  Tim whispered into his button mike, and Mrs. Markham appeared. He must have taken her out of storage at the Menger and kept her in Isaac’s yellow bus. She was very pale. She’d probably realized that the Dems were as capricious as Calder.

  “Mrs. Markham, where would you put the eye of God? I mean, in what part of the Zodiac, what particular house?”

  “I’m not equipped to answer that question.”

  “But that’s what the mad soldier said. ‘I’m the eye of God.’ And you saw him coming, you anticipated him.”

  She stared at the wall. “I’m not equipped to answer that question.”

  “Timmy, what have you done to her? There are worse things than breaking a woman’s nose. . . . Boyle, will you find my pants? I’m taking a stroll.”

  “You can’t leave,” Tim said. “There are a hundred reporters outside this room. You aren’t ready to face them.”

  “Boyle, do you have my Glock?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Good. Then dress me, please.”

  Isaac sat up in bed, and Boyle shucked off his hospital gown. Isaac’s ribs were taped. Boyle helped him into his shirt, pants, and shoes. Isaac wore a corduroy jacket that he’d picked up at a bargain counter in Waco. He looked like a catcher of criminals, a philosopher-clown.

  “What’s our destination?” Boyle asked.

  “Billy Bob Archer.”

  Timmy groaned. “Isaac, they won’t let us into the lunatics’ ward.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “You’re not to walk with Amanda Markham. We have to camouflage her as a volunteer.”

  “Come on. She’s been on Letterman and Larry King. She’s a star clerk. The biggest in the business. Didn’t you say that?”

  “She just happened to be near you when the gunman got there, thanks to Boyle’s negligence.”

  “Don’t knock Boyle. He can’t attend to all the crazies.”

  “He should have been guarding you. That’s what he’s paid for.”

  “Tim, don’t irritate me.”

  And Isaac sailed out of the room, holding Mrs. Markham’s hand.

  “The Citizen’s up and running,” Boyle sang into his mike, and the Secret Service had to clear a path for Isaac and prevent reporters from crushing him.

  “Mr. Sidel, do you believe in the stars?”

  “Ah, the real question is: Do the stars believe in me?”

  “But don’t you and the president share the same astrologer?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Markham is just a friend.”

  “Who’s your biggest hero, Sidel?”

  “AR,” Isaac said without a bit of hesitation.

  “AR? Did he die at the Alamo?”

  “Nah. He was a gambler, the king of crime. Arnold Rothstein.”

  “Rothstein,” Seligman hissed into Isaac’s ear. “You’ll sink us, for Christ’s sake.”

  And Boyle steered the whole menagerie down one flight to the mental ward, where Isaac was stopped by an army captain and two MPs.

  “Sorry, sir,” the captain said, “but you can’t go in there. It’s off-limits, even to vice presidents.”

  “Do you have a phone, Captain?”

  Isaac rang the White House, screamed until the switchboard put him through to President Cottonwood.

  “Isaac, I’m on the crapper. What the hell do you want? I thought we’d finished talking.”

  “I found Mrs. Markham. You owe me one. I’d like to get into the mental ward and see Billy Bob, but the captain says no.”

  “Who’s Billy Bob?”

  “The man who tried to shoot up the Menger.”

  “But he’s a nutcase. I can’t interfere.”

  “Aren’t you commander in chief?”

  Isaac handed the telephone to the captain, who listened, mumbled a few words, put down the phone, and saluted Isaac.

  “Captain,” Isaac said, “Mrs. Markham goes with me.”

  “But the president said . . . ”

  “Do I have to call the White House again? It’s absolutely critical that Mrs. Markham meet with Billy Bob.”

  The captain unlocked the gate to the mental ward.

  Seligman seemed chagrined. “Isaac, shouldn’t I—”

  “No,” Isaac said, and swept Mrs. Markham through the gate without Tim or Martin Boyle. They’d entered a kind of no-man’s-land, a long, long corridor, with an MP marching in front of them.

  “Isaac, I’m touched,” said the astrologer, “that you took me into the cave with you.”

  “Shut up,” Isaac said. He grabbed Mrs. Markham and pulled the bandage off her nose. She didn’t scream. Nothing was broken or bruised.

  “You’re an actress, aren’t you, playing Mrs. Markham?”

  The roly-poly woman nodded her head.

  “Poor Tim. Thinks he’s bugging the White House. Calder has the best National Security boys. He lets Tim record whatever traffic he wants Tim to hear. What’s your name?”

  “Amanda . . . Amanda Wilde.”

  “You come into our camp with your little bona fides, and you’re paid to unravel me. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Wilde?”

  “Yes . . . but I’m not married. I’m only—”

  “Where did you pick up your astrology?”

  “From a book.”

  “But you warned me at the Menger Bar . . . about Billy Bob.”

  “An actress’s intuition. I felt—”

  “Wait a minute. Is Billy Bob Archer an actor, too? Does he come from your own little company? Or is he one of Calder’s commandos?”

  “I don’t . . . he shot you, didn’t he?”

  “A trifle. Calder could have risked a little flesh wound . . . if he had a marksman on his hands.”

  “At the Menger? Where people could . . . ”

  The MP brought them into a tiny cell that was isolated from the rest of the ward. Billy Bob Archer wasn’t lying in bed. He sat in a leather chair, with his arms and legs shackled, and Isaac wondered if he was caught in the middle of some crazy drama.

  “Billy Bob, remember me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why would God lend His eye to you?”

  “He didn’t lend. I’m God’s only eye.”

  “Then the Lord Himself is blind.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Fancy Pants. And I’ve got to lead Him out of the darkness. Who’s the fat girl?”

  “My astrologer.”

  The shooter smiled. “Then she knows that you were born in God’s house.”

  “Is that why you came after me with a cannon, Billy Bob? What’s my birthday got to do with God?”

  “A May baby is a mournful baby. . . . She knows.”

  Isaac inched up to the leather chair. “What does she know? Does God live at the White House? Does He have dreams in the Oval Office? Did Calder Cottonwood hire you?”

  The shooter started to cry. “You’re desecrating me. I had a mission. To shoot your eyes out. And I failed . . . on account of the fat girl.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  The ward’s chief resident arrived in Billy Bob’s cell. He was furious with Isaac, this army psychiatrist who was also a colonel. Trevor Welles. He had the whitest hair Isaac had ever seen on a man.

  “This is a psychiatric ward, Mr. Mayor. It doesn’t welcome nonsense.”

  “Aw, Doc,” the shooter said. “Don’t pick on the May baby.”

  “Do I have to gag you again, Corporal Archer?”

  “But I want to hear what the fat girl has to say. Did you see God at the Menger, missy?”

  Amanda blinked. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m not sure
.”

  Isaac kept looking at Welles’ uniform: it seemed a little too familiar. “Colonel, did Billy Bob steal your tunic and wear it at the Menger?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he get his hands on it?”

  “Is this an interrogation? You shouldn’t even be here. . . . He broke into my locker.”

  “And got past two MPs at the big gate?”

  “This is a hospital, not a prison.”

  “Did you coach him, Colonel Welles? Did you scrub him proper, lend him a rodeo gun?”

  “Sir,” the colonel said, “you will have to vacate this ward immediately.”

  “Not until I say good-bye to Billy Bob.”

  Isaac bent over the leather chair, kissed the shooter on the forehead. “My poor sweet Bob.”

  Then he clutched Amanda’s hand, marched past Colonel Welles and his white, white hair, and got to the gate. His shadow, Martin Boyle, was on the other side of the thick, brutal wire. His hands were twitching. “You shouldn’t have gone in there all alone.”

  “Alone?” Isaac said. “I had Amanda to protect me.”

  There was still a mob of reporters near the gate.

  “Mr. Sidel, Mr. Sidel, did you meet with the crazy assassin?”

  “Billy Bob’s not an assassin. He mistook me for someone else.”

  “Who, sir?”

  “A heavenly angel,” Isaac said, and turned to his shadow.

  “Call our driver, Boyle. Tell him to rev up the bus. We’re getting out of San Antone.”

  * * *

  The bus appeared outside the medical center in nine minutes. Isaac hopped aboard with the reporters who were covering his romp through Texas. He had a secretary and a small staff, but he almost never used them. He had no deals to cut. He wasn’t a political strategist, like Tim. He was a hooligan with a gun. He got into fistfights. He had scars all over his body, like God’s own warrior. He watched Amanda, waited until she sat down. He didn’t want to panic his astrologer. And he didn’t have to signal to Tim.

  Seligman approached Isaac, sat down.

  “We have to dump the bitch. . . . Isaac, she’s in the public eye. My people checked. She’s a plant.”

  “Timmy, darling, did they also check that your wire at the White House is a piece of fiction? Calder has his own script. He sucked you in.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  Isaac stroked Tim’s ear. “The ruckus at the Menger was a little assassination party. Amanda must have balked at the last minute. . . . Use your bean, Tim. How did Billy Bob waltz out of a locked facility in a colonel’s uniform . . . and who supplied the cannon?”

  “If it was Calder, I’ll kill him. And I’ll grab the bitch, make a citizen’s arrest.”

  “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.

  3

  ISAAC 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 t
he 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?”

 

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