Under the Eye of God

by Jerome Charyn

  But the woman’s face was still on fire. She must have been thirty or thirty-five. Isaac began to stutter.

  “Your n-n-n-name?”

  “Inez.”

  And suddenly, Isaac felt murderous, as if he were part of some random kindergarten class and had been tricked and pummeled by his own teacher. Inez. Arnold Rothstein was alive and well . . . and living in the Ansonia.

  He didn’t bother to chat her up. He bowed to all the billionaires and left Cassandra’s Wall without Amanda Wilde.

  8

  HE CLIMBED UPSTAIRS TO DAVID Pearl’s own retreat on the seventeenth floor. He had to wonder why the ex–boy banker would live in a labyrinth with low ceilings when he could have had a lavish piece of the castle all to himself. The Big Guy didn’t even knock. David was sitting on his window seat in a worn sweater. He wasn’t surprised to see Isaac.

  “Dennis hadn’t come to the Ansonia to kill you, David. He was your very own gunsel.”

  David smiled his wizard’s smile. “Indeed. Frank Costello lent him to me—the most loyal kid I ever had.”

  “Jesus, Dennis was a grandpa. He was growing senile. He would have had to wear diapers all over again. Why did you send him after me?”

  David whistled under his breath. “He would have nicked your arm, that’s all.”

  “He was aiming for Martin Boyle’s heart.”

  “I don’t have a moratorium on Secret Service men. They’re Calder’s peons.”

  Isaac saw blue spots in front of his eyes. He wanted to strangle David, crack him open on his window seat. His own mentor, David Pearl, his muse, had been stringing him along.

  “And Billy Bob Archer, did you hire him, too?”

  “Sort of,” David said. “He was put there to shake you up, not kill you.”

  “I suppose I’m your indispensable man.”

  David laughed with that childish face of his. He hadn’t aged much in his castle. He had that same devilish enthusiasm he’d had when Isaac first met him. “You’re dear to me—part of my little family.”

  “And is Amanda Wilde part of your family, too?”

  “You could say that. She was my private secretary, still is.”

  “But hasn’t she wandered rather far afield?”

  “No, I catapulted her right into the election process . . . let her become the president’s astrologer—and mistress.”

  “And is the president your own personal peon?”

  Isaac was mortified. Had he been one of David’s peons from the moment his father had introduced them, almost fifty years ago?

  “Isaac, you give me a little too much credit. I’m one lone bachelor with a dinosaur of a building.”

  “Stop it,” Isaac said. “Calder is scared shitless of you . . . and so is J., I suspect. You’re the man behind Sidereal.”

  David clapped his very delicate hands; the sound was like an echo from another world. “Bravo,” he said. “I buy up properties, and I sit on them. I never, never sell.”

  “How much of the Bronx do you own?”

  David picked at his scalp like some man in the middle of a brainstorm.

  “You’d have to ask Amanda. She’s the one who keeps count. . . . I would say at least half.”

  Isaac could have been sitting with Dr. Mabuse, the mad emperor of the underworld, or with another mad emperor, like Merlin. But this Merlin was a recluse and a landlord.

  “And did your own minions torch the Bronx?”

  The emperor smiled. “Some of them did, but I purchased most of the properties after they were torched.”

  “And what could you possibly gain?” Isaac asked. “The Bronx will never come back. It’s been dying for thirty years.”

  “Isaac, Isaac, that’s just a pinch of time. You have to think in centuries if you want to rebuild a borough.”

  “But, David,” Isaac pleaded. “You won’t be here.”

  “That’s not the point. You can’t create an empire on mortality charts. My strategy is crisp as a church bell. One day, Sidereal Ventures will tear down the Cross Bronx Express and build a highway under the ground. And I won’t put up a maze of shopping malls and warehouses in the old, deserted lots near the Cross Bronx. We’ll have brand-new neighborhoods.”

  Isaac began to wail. “Why couldn’t you have told me? I would have helped you swallow up Robert Moses’ fucking tunnel in the sky.”

  “Ah,” David said. “But not with Sidereal’s help. And I would have had to step out of the shadows. It was much too risky. I’ll stay where I am.”

  That wizard with the narrow chest was the reincarnation of Rothstein. He was Manhattan’s new king of crime. The first AR sat with senators. His whisper went all the way to the White House. He could buy an apartment on Park Avenue, which had a covenant­ against Jews. Rothstein could bankroll any operation, legal or not. He’d had gambling dens, had owned a piece of the New York Giants, had invested in Broadway shows. That’s how he must have discovered Inez.

  “David, are you as secretive as AR?”

  The wizard smiled again. “Arnold wasn’t secretive enough. That’s how he got killed. Half the planet knew his steps. He had his own table at Lindy’s, sat there like a clerk. How many times did I meet him there, while he was writing up the day’s receipts on a lick of paper? He would send me out on errands. I’d deliver thirty thousand dollars in a paper sack to some politician or police chief. . . . ”

  “But why didn’t you tell me you had your own Inez?”

  Isaac had startled the wizard, caught him in a snare. “I don’t visit graveyards, Isaac. Inez is under the ground.”

  “But I just said hello to her . . . at Cassandra’s Wall. She has her own helmet of silver hair.”

  The wizard’s worry lines disappeared. “Ah, that Inez. She comes with the furniture. She’s a tart.”

  “But she didn’t seem out of place with a little band of billionaires.”

  “A tart,” David muttered again. “I found her, groomed her, gave her the clothes on her back.”

  “Then why is she with those billionaires?”

  “Why else? To distract them, to eat out their hearts . . . your lady with the silver hair is my secret agent.”

  Isaac didn’t believe the wizard. “What’s her real name?”

  “Trudy Winckleman. She was the sensation at a cathouse in Detroit—Isaac, you need all the edge you can when you’re betting a hundred million on one shot.”

  Was Manhattan’s king of crime also an imbecile? Wouldn’t those other billionaires have perverted his plans and plied Ms. Trudy Winckleman with hard cash? But Isaac didn’t like David’s tricky smile.

  “Did you know that AR once bet half a mil on one toss of a coin? He had to line his pockets with thousand-dollar bills. And he was always broke. He had betting fever.

  He’d watch a cockroach climb up a wall and have to bet on its progress. He’d bet on a ball game. . . . ”

  “Isn’t he the man who fixed the World Series of 1919?”

  “A fishwives’ tale,” David said. “Gamblers bribed ballplayers in Arnold’s name. He had nothing to do with the fix. I wanted to sue fucking F. Scott Fitzgerald while he was still alive. He defamed Arnold, turned him into Meyer Wolfshein, a greenhorn with a forest of hair in his nose. AR had the softest voice. He spoke like a duke. He was much more elegant than an Irish scribbler from St. Paul.”

  Isaac adored The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s portrait of Meyer Wolfsheim, who understood that the world couldn’t thrive without some business “gonnegtion.”

  “David, what was your hundred-million-dollar bet about?”

  The wizard began to purr. “What else? The presidential election of ’88.”

  All of Isaac’s goodwill was gone. He wanted to rip off David’s scalp.

  “You bet against the Democrats, didn’t you?”

  “Kid, I’ve always been in your camp.”

  Isaac cursed himself. He didn’t need Cassandra’s Wall to tell him what was going down. David had bet on him, and him
alone, bet that Isaac would be the new president, not J. Michael Storm. All the rumblings in the press had started from the Ansonia’s seventeenth floor.

  “You fucker,” Isaac said. “You’re betting that Michael will take a fall.”

  “Like Humpty Dumpty,” David said. “But Calder won’t be there to pick up the pieces. You’ll inherit the White House from him.”

  “And what if I don’t let it happen?”

  “Ah,” David said. “Play Cassandra. Be my guest. I’ll double my bet.”

  “I could run to Tim Seligman,” Isaac said.

  “And have him sink his own Party? Not a chance. Tim will behave.”

  “Then I’ll shove Teddy Neems into the top spot. I’ll give all the marbles to Calder’s own vice president.”

  “Teddy’s my bagman. He’ll do whatever I say. . . . Isaac, you can run around like a renegade, shoot up half of Manhattan with your Glock, and you’ll still be Prez.”

  “And my first act as president will be to fry your ass. . . . David, tell me, where does Trudy Winckleman live?”

  Isaac was already defeated. It was Manhattan, where any hunter could become the hunted in a matter of minutes.

  “Where else?” David said. “At the Ansonia. In Inez’s old apartment. It’s poetic justice. I put her where AR kept his own true love. Did you know that Inez died in my arms? I didn’t abandon her after Arnold was killed. She always went to bed with AR’s picture under her pillow. She could have gone back to dancing, joined some revue. I told her it wasn’t dignified. I paid her bills. We had tea every afternoon. . . . ”

  Isaac grew delirious with David’s recollection of Inez. Most of his rancor was gone. He was in love with the first Inez and the second. David had kept Inez’s apartment intact, not as a museum, but as a devotional, with cherry wood dressers, an armoire, a mirror that had once belonged to Lillie Langtry . . .

  Isaac’s head swam with all the details. David didn’t have to tell him where Trudy Winckleman’s apartment was. Like most gamblers, AR had suffered from triskaidekaphobia, a morbid fear of the number thirteen. But he’d tried to wean himself away from that fear, according to David. So he parked Inez on the thirteenth floor. She griped and griped, but Arnold wouldn’t relent. He had to place his own mistress and himself in jeopardy. It titillated him.

  Isaac didn’t care. Triskaidekaphobia, he muttered to himself and ran out of David’s labyrinth.

  9

  THE BIG GUY WASN’T BASHFUL. He knocked on Inez’s door. No one answered, and he wondered if she was still in the bowels of the Ansonia with her billionaires. And just when he was about to give up, she came to the door in an old cashmere bathrobe that must have belonged to Arnold Rothstein’s original lady. Her smile hurt the hell out of Isaac.

  “Mr. Mayor,” she said in that raucous voice he remembered from Cassandra’s Wall. “Did you want to play cops and robbers? Are you here to frisk me? Come in.”

  It was a museum, no matter what David said. The drapes seemed out of another century. There was a photo of AR and Inez on the mantle in Trudy Winckleman’s elongated living room. AR seemed a little coarse in the photo; he didn’t have the beauty that Isaac liked to imagine for him. His mouth was too large, his forehead too broad, his eyes a little too far apart. But Inez had a voluptuous, staggering blondness. She stared out at Isaac like the most brazen of girls. She must have been a handful for AR. Did she flirt with Babe Ruth? Did she conspire with other kept creatures in the building? Flo Ziegfeld had his mistress on one floor, his wife on another. God knows the damage Inez must have done.

  Trudy Winckleman caught him looking at the picture. She was as bold as Inez in her helmet of silver hair.

  “Mr. Mayor, would you like to move in?”

  Suddenly, Isaac began to fumble with his words. “Miss W-w-winckleman,” he muttered.

  “Call me Inez. Everybody does. What did that madman upstairs tell you about me?”

  “Said he snatched you out of a bordello in Detroit. But I didn’t believe him.”

  “Darling, don’t apologize for David. Like everything he says, it’s half true. It was New Orleans, not Detroit. But I didn’t work on my back. Sometimes I wish I had. I was the accountant for a string of very fashionable whorehouses in the Garden District and a single mother with two kids. One of the clients mistook me for a whore—offered me thousands to live with him in New York.”

  “Was it David?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “David never travels. It takes a whole army to deliver him to Wall Street once or twice a year. My new beau was a banker, nowhere as rich as David. With a wife and kids in the suburbs. He paid me more than I could have earned in a year.”

  “But how did you meet David?” Isaac asked, not even sure he wanted to know the truth.

  “In the Ansonia,” she said. “That’s where my banker found an apartment for me. But he was a very tiresome man—jealous and stupid. He stole back all the money he had put in my account. I was left stranded. I couldn’t pay the rent. But I wasn’t thrown out. And that’s when the madman appeared in his flea-bitten sweater. He said I could have an apartment rent-free on the thirteenth floor. And he had a proposition.”

  “He wanted you to play Inez.”

  “Isaac dear, it isn’t easy. I feel like a relic. And David doesn’t even traffic me around. I mingle with his gambler friends, but not as their personal siren. I’m not at their beck and call.”

  “And your two kids?”

  “Both at a private school in Connecticut. The madman pays the bills. I visit them as often as I can. I keep a small apartment near the school. I wouldn’t want them to see me here. I’m not allowed to disturb a picture on the wall.”

  “Then why do you stay?”

  “Habit, I suppose. And laziness. And the power I have over men. I’m an icon. How can I fail? Isaac, be a darling and take me for a stroll.”

  Inez preferred the loneliness of Riverside Park. There were no picnickers or jugglers or panhandlers, just a few old men practicing their golf strokes on the bumpy hills and the secretive men and women who kept their boats in the marina. The trees were all barren in early December; the ground was strewn with dead leaves that had begun to turn into dark red dust. It was Isaac’s favorite time of year, when the park was mostly devoid of people. He and Inez had a long, narrow kingdom to themselves.

  The wind blew right at them, and Isaac draped Inez in the folds of his foul-weather coat. His blood began to heat up at the nearness of her. He was already unfaithful to Margaret Tolstoy, who lay near the Cloisters, her mind half gone. Why was he always running after some femme fatale?

  He was the knight-protector of fallen ladies. Inez shivered under Isaac’s rough material.

  “Darling,” she whispered, “you’d better watch out. David is betting that you won’t live very long.”

  “Ah,” Isaac said, “he’s my mentor.” His knees were shaking, and it had nothing to do with the wizard on the seventeenth floor. He wasn’t thinking of politics, or of Marianna’s sea-green eyes. He had a vision of that bleak landscape near the Cross Bronx Express, the gutted buildings, mile after mile of debris, and he remembered how comfortable he was amid all the rubble. It was home to him. And Inez could have risen out of that rubble.

  They kissed. Her tongue tasted of almonds. It was sweeter than his own life. He was already devoted to this gorgeous masque, who had to hide within another woman’s history, live among her expensive ruins. But something had startled her. She broke from Isaac’s embrace.

  He turned around, looked into the barren trees. Martin Boyle was standing there, clutching a Mossberg Mountaineer with a sniper scope.

  “Jesus, did you have to follow me into the park with a fucking deer rifle?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I was following whoever followed you.”

  “What are you talking about? Can’t you see? I’m with Inez.”

  Boyle tried not to glimpse at Inez’s helmet of hair.

  “Sir, the shooter was standi
ng behind a tree. . . . Your brains would have been scattered in another minute.”

  “Enough,” Isaac said. “Where is this shooter of yours?”

  “He got away. I couldn’t track him. I thought . . . ”

  “And he left his calling card. A Mossberg Mountaineer.”

  Inez was much more civil than the Big Guy. She shook Boyle’s hand, thanked him for saving Isaac’s life. Boyle had been bitten by her, too. He blushed when she slid her hand out of his. Isaac wondered to himself—two Adams and their Eve.

  They walked out of the park together, while Isaac’s Secret Service man still held that deer slayer in his arms.

  * * *

  She had to get rid of Isaac. Inez, or whoever she was that afternoon, feigned a headache. She kissed him between the eyes, as if she were aiming some bullet, and ran upstairs to her retreat on the thirteenth floor. Why did she always have to get involved with desperados? No one had to whisper in her ear that Isaac was a doomed man. She’d have to get out of Manhattan. She wasn’t going to be David Pearl’s Cassandra. But she didn’t have any of her clothes in this rotten tomb with windows. Trudy Winckleman was the phantom, not Inez—Inez had a bureau, photographs on the wall, boas from the Ziegfeld Follies, satin panties, and the sheerest gowns in the world.

  She puffed on a cigarette from one of Inez’s pearl and silver holders. She didn’t have to wait very long. The old man had come downstairs in the velvet slippers of a billionaire who was loathe to leave his labyrinth.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “And fuck all your plans. I’m not staying.”

  He started to shiver. She knew that the first Inez had often blown her fuse. And no one could contain her, not Arnold Rothstein or David Pearl.