“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.
“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 thro
ugh 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.
4
ISAAC 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?”
Under the Eye of God Page 3