“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.”
“Dennis the Menace.”
“He’s waiting for me to come out onto the stairs.”
“But he could have knocked you down if he really wanted to,” said Sidel.
“That’s not Dennis’ style. He was Frank Costello’s bodyguard once upon a time. But Costello wouldn’t adopt a Jewish kid from the Lower East Side. Dennis was always on the outside. He had to freelance. I used his services on a couple of occasions.”
“Then why is he coming after you?”
“I told you. He’s a freelancer. A hired gun. He’ll sit and wait. Dennis has all the time in the world.”
“Not with me in the house. I’ll bring you his scalp.”
“Isaac, I’m fond of Dennis. We have a history together. Like me and you.”
Isaac returned to the landing, found Martin Boyle.
“Sir, we checked. The mystery man is Dennis Cohen. He’s a tough cookie, with three or four convictions. I had to call the Bureau.”
Isaac groaned. “Is the Bull coming here with one of his joint task forces?”
Isaac was feuding with the FBI and its director, Bull Latham. “What if I went after Dennis myself?”
“Then I’d have to cover you and forget all the other rules.”
“Come on. Help me find Dennis.”
“Sir, we know where he is. Our boy’s in the attic.
“He isn’t a boy,” Isaac said. “Show some respect.”
David wasn’t alone in his labyrinth near the roof. They found an opening in the hallway, climbed a flight of winding stairs and, for a moment, Isaac had a touch of vertigo, thought he was rocking on the sea. Ah, David’s castle was an ocean liner, after all. Boyle snapped the chain on a narrow door with a pair of wire clippers. They ducked their heads and dove through the door. Isaac’s vertigo was gone. They’d entered an unbelievable country. The attic was stuffed with debris and ancient artifacts. Mirrors that had lost their silver backing, sideboards that had begun to peel, a chipped water fountain that must have been home to the Ansonia’s seals. They’d come to the land of mirrors and mirages, and Isaac envied David all of a sudden. That realtor with the white hair had a richer life than the Citizen, with all the brouhaha of a mayor and a Commish.
“Boyle, let’s get out of here. This is a holy place.”
“It’s an attic, sir. And Bull Latham is right behind us. He’ll get the glory when his marksmen shoot Dennis down like a dog.”
“But I want to capture him . . . alive. He’s practically a landsman of mine.”
“I saw his chart, sir. He’s zapped entire families. He’s . . . ”
Something stirred among the debris. A rat scattered between Isaac’s legs. He looked up. Dennis Cohen was in the rafters, right above Isaac, his .22 short aimed at Boyle’s heart. Isaac didn’t think, didn’t measure Boyle’s life against a gunman’s. He glocked Dennis Cohen, shot him six times, and Dennis nosedived, crashed into a mirror, created an enormous sprinkle of glass . . .
* * *
Isaac avoided Bull Latham, left the Ansonia with the Secret Service. Dennis Cohen was carted to the morgue. There were pictures of Isaac and the dead gunman in every paper on the planet. Isaac’s face was more familiar than Caruso’s had ever been. The Democrats’ capital began to rise again. But nothing could soothe the Citizen. He belonged in the attic, with all the debris. He’d have tossed the vice presidency into a garbage can, if he could have been at the Ansonia in 1903 and watched those seals swim. He’d killed his brother, Dennis Cohen. Isaac had to sit shivah for Dennis, do his seven days of mourning.
He sat on an old wooden crate, in a ripped overcoat, the visible sign of his grief. Rothko’s overcoat, he mumbled to himself. The telephone rang on his second day of mourning. Martin Boyle picked up the phone.
“It’s your astrologer, sir.”
“Tell her to soak her head.”
“She says it’s urgent, Mr. President.”
Isaac grabbed the receiver. “Amanda darling, are you going to sing me a lullaby about the stars?”
“I’d rather sing about Dennis Cohen. I was fond of that little man.”
“You met Cohen? Where? When?”
“At the White House.”
Isaac groaned. “He worked for Calder?”
“Occasionally.”
“Jesus, it’s Billy Bob Archer all over again. I ought to move into the Menger Hotel.”
�
��It might be safer than a birdcage on Broadway.”
“What birdcage?”
“The Ansonia,” she said. “Are you wearing your Glock?”
“How can I? I’m in mourning,” Isaac said.
“I didn’t really call about Cohen. I have a new job. . . . I babysit for Marianna Storm.”
“Where is she?” Isaac asked.
“Right here.”
Marianna crept onto the line.
“I miss you, Uncle Isaac. Monstrously.”
The Big Guy sobbed in his torn coat.
“Couldn’t we meet, Marianna? I’ll wear a disguise.”
“And wreck your future? . . . I’m Lolita, the little firebomb. I can’t even bake you a batch of cookies. Mr. Seligman says people might call it provocative. You aren’t wounded, are you?”
“No. I wasn’t even scratched. Marianna . . . ”
“We won’t be able to talk until January. This is the last time.”
Marianna abandoned Isaac. He sat there on his wooden crate in Rothko’s overcoat, grieving for Dennis Cohen . . . and Citizen Sidel.
Part Two
5
HE WAS IN HIS OWN strange kind of limbo, no longer quite the mayor and not much of a vice president–elect. Tim Seligman didn’t want him near the Waldorf, near J. Michael or the Little First Lady, Marianna Storm. He felt much closer to the Prez. Both of them were in love with Margaret Tolstoy, that orphan from Odessa who’d drifted into Isaac’s junior high school class dressed in rags, half a million years ago, and had intoxicated Isaac with her almond eyes. She’d been trained in a KGB kindergarten, and now worked for Bull Latham at the Bureau. She also protected the Prez and was his personal Scheherazade, who entertained him with tales about her and Isaac Sidel. But no one could be on Calder’s safe side. He’d nearly gotten her killed, and she lay in a coma for two weeks. The Big Guy blamed himself. If he hadn’t attached himself to the Democratic ticket, it might never have happened.
Isaac had to cast about in the Bureau’s own waters to find her. She was in one of Bull Latham’s “blinds,” a clandestine nursing home in the woods of Upper Manhattan, near the Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park. This home didn’t even have a name. It’s where the Bull delivered his most important agents to mend. Sometimes they didn’t mend at all. And they lived out the rest of their lives in this little cloister.
He panicked that Margaret might never really recover, and that she would be mummified in Upper Manhattan at Bull Latham’s retreat, like a home for retired nuns. He had the devil of a time getting in. The nurses all wore guns. But they recognized Sidel and didn’t want to buck a future vice president. Margaret had her own room. It was as lavish as the Waldorf and looked out upon the Jersey cliffs. She was already mummified, with a bandage around her head. Her almond eyes gazed at Isaac, took all of him in. She smiled, as if she’d met some wild and woolly stranger.
“Have you come to give me a bath?”
He started to blubber, with the Glock still in his pants.
“Don’t cry,” she said in the sweetest voice. And Margaret had never once been sweet. She held his hand. And that’s when Bull Latham ventured into the room, with all the bravado of a linebacker who had once played for the Dallas Cowboys. His aura was as great as Isaac Sidel’s. The head of the Bureau wasn’t a rattlesnake, like J. Edgar Hoover had been. He wasn’t a poisonous man with manicured nails. He didn’t rant about the reds. He had a Texas drawl, even though he’d come from Minneapolis. If Calder had dropped Teddy Neems, his bagman of a vice president, and picked the Bull, he might have won. At least it would have been a contest, with Isaac debating Bull Latham, another guy with a gun in his pants.
“Your Honor,” he said, “she can’t recognize you. . . . I’ve tried. Margaret thinks I’m her butler or something. It breaks my heart.”
Margaret sat up in bed with her bandage. She flirted with the pair of bandits beside her. “My two boys,” she cooed. She was still holding Isaac’s hand.
“I’ll wait outside,” the Bull said.
Isaac adored every vein on her arm, every pucker where some needle had pierced the skin. She released the Big Guy’s hand and started to remove her hospital gown. “Darling,” she said, “you can’t give me a sponge bath without a sponge.”
He had to wind her back into her gown. Her beautiful white hair had begun to grow wild. She was much lovelier without a wig, and Margaret had always worn wigs, as she romanced some gangster for the FBI. She’d lost her childhood somewhere in Odessa, had been a courtesan at twelve, a secret agent at thirteen. Her life had been carved out of one brutal void after the other.
He stroked her arm with the bumpy cusp of his hand, the lord and master of a sponge bath without a sponge. She closed her eyes and fell back onto her pillow. He didn’t have the heart to banter with her. He tiptoed out of her room. The nurses had never seen a vice president–elect with tears in his eyes.
The Bull lent Isaac his own handkerchief. They’d been battling for almost a year.
“Bull, did your fingers ever break?”
“What?” Bull Latham asked.
“When you were with the Cowboys, did they ever break? You don’t have a linebacker’s hands. They seem much too delicate.”
“I had to tape them all the time . . . but it’s not the hands that give you trouble. It’s the knees. They’re a linebacker’s nightmare. That’s why I had to leave the Cowboys. If I’d remained another year, I would have become a gimp.”
“I want to visit her without notice,” Isaac said.
“Understood.”
“And I don’t want any interference from the Prez.”
“You have my guarantee. Calder won’t bother you.”
“If I have an urge in the middle of the night . . . ”
“Every door will be open for you,” the Bull said. “You shouldn’t have shot up Dennis Cohen.”
“Come on, he was Calder’s man. He would have been an embarrassment. He’s more valuable to you dead than alive. And I didn’t have a choice. He was going to put out Martin Boyle’s lights.”
“But you could have winged him.”
“Not a chance,” Isaac said. “He was Frank Costello’s own gunman. He would have gotten off a shot. And I’d have had to sit shivah for Martin Boyle.”
“But Boyle isn’t Jewish.”
“I’d still have to mourn him, wouldn’t I?”
And Isaac left that clandestine place near the Cloisters. The vice president–elect didn’t have much of a future without Margaret. Nor did he have much of a past. All he had left was Arnold Rothstein’s favorite building in Manhattan. And he marched down to the Ansonia from Fort Tryon Park.
6
THE BIG GUY COULD HAVE carried all fifty states on his back, won Mars and the moon, but J. Michael was flawed beyond repair, and it had nothing to do with his alcoholic wife. The kid was Isaac’s own creation. He’d been a student radical at Columbia in ’68, and Isaac had kept him out of jail. J. was almost a sharecropper. Both his parents had been kindergarten teachers in the South and had to break their humps to put food on the table. But Michael had risen up like some proletariat Monte Cristo to become the players’ chief representative in the middle of a wildcat strike. He made the owners eat crow. Baseball had never had its own czar until J. Michael Storm, who could ride right over the commissioner and presidents of both leagues. He’d shuttled between Manhattan and Houston, where he had his law firm and was registered to vote. Clarice had been a gray-eyed beauty from Abilene before she became a guzzler. She was seventeen when he plucked her out of a fancy finishing school and married her. And now Michael lived at the Waldorf, which had once been Jack Kennedy’s home away from the White House. J. wore sunglasses, like Jack, had mistresses in every corner, but he didn’t have Jack’s aristocratic veneer and magical looks. He had kindergartens in his blood, not Hyannis Port. Poor J. had to invent himself.
He wasn’t much of a mogul. He went deep into the wilds of the Bronx and purchased parcels of land with a ricke
ty enterprise called Sidereal Ventures. He wanted his own empire near Yankee Stadium after he rescued baseball from a crippling war. But Sidereal was rife with illegal land grabs. On paper, it owned a quarter of the Bronx, but no one had been able to figure who ran Sidereal, certainly not its principal officers, Michael and Clarice.
J. had almost been indicted in Miami for another one of his deals. And prosecutors all over the country wanted to bring down the president-elect. It was Calder who kept him alive, Calder who had Justice hide J. Michael within its own muzzle. Tim Seligman was blackmailing the Prez. The Dems had pictures of Calder with his prick out in the Rose Garden. And Tim wouldn’t even discuss whatever else he had on the Prez. But Justice could no longer protect Michael. Prosecutors had begun to bark for his blood.
Sidereal was on the front page of the Times. The New York Post called J. Michael the emperor of the Bronx. There were rumblings in the Milwaukee Sentinel and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, talk of a constitutional crisis. If J. Michael was indicted, what would happen to the presidential process? The Electoral College could vote for Mickey Mouse.
Still, Michael soldiered on at the Waldorf, behaved like the president-elect, while Tim Seligman fumed and tore at his own scalp. Isaac himself was banned from the Waldorf. Party chiefs didn’t want the Big Guy to show his face. He could provoke the crisis. How could he replace Michael before the Electoral College met? Suddenly, the election itself was a wisp in the wind. And so Party theoreticians scribbled for a week, and Michael held a press conference in the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf, with Clarice and the Little First Lady at his side. No one bothered about Clarice, but reporters shivered at Marianna’s poise and the green of her eyes. They were electrified before Michael spoke a word.
“I may have gone too far,” he said, “but I wanted to rebuild the Bronx. And so I had to play the emperor, as some reporters have said. But I didn’t make a dime from Sidereal—in fact, it ate up whatever cash I had. But I’d wander half a mile from Yankee Stadium and see a wasteland that left me numb. Torched buildings and mounds of rubble on both sides of the Cross Bronx, a borough ruined by a mad highway right down the middle of its spine. For the Bronx and its residents, it will always be a highway to nowhere. And so I was rash, ladies and gentlemen. I pushed too hard, and my accounting wasn’t always correct. But I had to push, or nothing would ever have been done.”
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