“Davey,” she cooed, because that’s what the other Inez had called him. “What if I fall in love with the big dope?”
“Ah, that would be a pity,” said the billionaire—she’d heard the rumor that he owned more real estate than the Rockefellers, that his holdings could dwarf any empire.
“Isaac’s lovable, but you’d better hold the line.”
“And what if I can’t? He’s wooing me, for Christ’s sake.”
“A lot of men have tried to woo you, and they haven’t gotten into your pants.”
“And what if I wanted to let him into Inez’s pants? Because I don’t have a single pair of my own.”
“That would be a catastrophe.”
“Were you really going to shoot his head off, Davey? You should have warned me that I was going on a death march in the park.”
“And if I’d warned you?” David Pearl asked like some menacing beggar boy.
“I would have taken him into some hollow and kissed him for half an hour . . . to warm him up for the kill.”
He started to cackle. She pulled his ears, and he really was a beggar boy, Inez’s beggar boy.
“Davey, if you come downstairs again without knocking on Inez’s door, I’ll take your whole head into my mouth and you’ll never get it back.”
He shuddered with terror and delight.
“You’ll woo the big dope, but my way.”
And he paddled out of the museum in his slippers.
PART THREE
10
THE DEMOCRATS WERE FRIGHTENED TO death of leaks. A phantom shooter in Riverside Park? The vice president–elect with a mystery woman who was connected to Arnold Rothstein’s own phantom lady? It was too much for Tim Seligman to bear. Isaac couldn’t be seen in public with this bitch in a silver helmet, not until Michael’s coronation. Meanwhile the owner of the Mossberg Mountaineer was tracked to a hunting lodge in Montana. The deer slayer had been reported stolen a month ago. The owner himself was a registered Democrat who had voted for Storm-Sidel. He couldn’t have been the phantom shooter. He was at his hunting lodge on the day the shooter had stalked Sidel.
There wasn’t a word about it in the press. But Michael himself wasn’t so lucky. Another one of his mistresses had surfaced with her own tattletale in the National Enquirer. Democrats called her a Republican plant . . . and a slut.
Meanwhile Isaac busied himself. He’d been an absentee mayor for months, but his aides ran City Hall without him. He went into Manhattan’s deeds and records with his property clerk and discovered that the Inez Corporation and its affiliates owned more buildings and lofts in Manhattan than Columbia University and the Catholic Church. But David hadn’t lied to him. Inez never sold a piece of property. It held whatever it had. And its properties wove from the tip of Manhattan to the edge of Spuyten Duyvil Creek. The little wizard had to be wealthier than John Jacob Astor, Manhattan’s first real estate baron. And still he sat in the Ansonia, like some forgotten man.
Was it AR himself who had sent him on a quest to buy up as much of Manhattan as he could? The Inez Corporation owned entire blocks. It had secret fiefdoms in Fort George and Washington Heights. But Isaac still wasn’t satisfied. He ventured into the Bronx with his Secret Service man, looked down upon the ruins from that same hill in Claremont Park where he had spotted the army engineers. And he had his own sudden illumination. There was a certain symmetry to the widening swaths of waste. The torchings that helped break the Bronx weren’t as random as they seemed. Isaac could have been looking down into the gigantic bowl of God’s own football field.
And while he pondered in Claremont Park, Bull Latham arrived without his usual contingent of FBI men. He’d strayed far from his habitual watering hole in Manhattan, the Bull & Bear, a stockbroker’s bar and restaurant within the Waldorf. He wore a Siberian coat of white fur with all the elegance and grace of a movie star.
“Mr. Mayor,” he said. “I’m not here. You’ve never seen me.”
“I know,” Isaac said with the same complicity. “You’re at the Bull and Bear . . . and I’ll pay particular attention to what you never told me.”
“Exactly,” the Bull said, while Isaac motioned for Martin Boyle to move out of earshot and he turned off his own button mike. Only God or the devil could have listened in.
“Bull, there’s a pattern out there in that heart of darkness down the hill.”
“Mr. Mayor, I’ve been thinking much the same thing. . . . It’s like driving Indians off the reservation.”
“And then putting up a new reservation without the Indians.”
“Think Pentagon,” Bull said. “That’s what this land grab is all about.”
Isaac began to shiver—suddenly, the surveyors and engineers made a lot of sense.
“I suppose there’s a new Peter Minuit . . . and he’s buying up bits and pieces. He’ll make a killing on this reservation. Will it be a missile training site?”
“Nothing as fancy as that,” said the Bull. “Just a military base that will stretch across the southern half of the Bronx, below the Grand Concourse. The Pentagon wouldn’t want to mess with the New York Yankees. Its generals will let the Bronx Bombers have their castle and some room to breathe. Wouldn’t want the stadium to be an isolated island. But the man who leases or sells this Indian country will make a fortune beyond our own ability to imagine. He has to be stopped.”
“But can you pin him to any crime?”
“Probably not. But he’s had people killed. I’d be willing to bet that the shooter in San Antone was attached to the Pentagon in some weird way. And Mr. David Pearl means to stifle you.”
“But he’s my mentor,” Isaac groaned. “I learned about the city at his feet. He’s a disciple of Arnold Rothstein, did you know that?”
“Rothstein wasn’t half as ruthless. It’s your being mayor that worries him, not presidential politics. Vice presidents can’t harm him, but a mayor can.”
“But until a month ago I thought he’d vanished without a trace.”
“Isaac, if you found him, it’s because he wanted to be found.”
The Big Guy wished now that he’d never been tagged as J. Michael’s VP. He could control Party politics in Manhattan and the Bronx. But even Staten Island scared him a little. It had too many hills, and its politicians were too much a part of the American mainland. Cottonwood had squeaked past Storm-Sidel and had taken Staten Island by a hair—517 votes. Rothstein’s protégé, David Pearl, wanted to bump Isaac upstairs. The Big Guy was embarrassed to talk about his brand-new sweetheart, Inez, who guarded David’s reliquary at the Ansonia. But the Bull mentioned her before Isaac had the chance.
“Careful, Mr. Mayor. We have photos of you kissing Mata Hari in the park. She’s poison. She seduces businessmen for that little potentate, turns them into swine.”
Isaac was heartsick. “Never mind her. What about the shooter with the deer rifle? Do ya have any photos of him?”
“We don’t need any photos. He was just a kid that David hired, a delivery boy with a stolen gun. I’m not even sure he knows how to shoot. We snatched him right away. But he lawyered up and I had to let him go, or I’ll have the Civil Liberties Union hot on my tail.”
Martin Boyle wandered over to Isaac and Bull Latham.
“Sir, Tim Seligman is on the horn. He says it’s urgent. He wants you downtown—at the Waldorf.”
The Bull barely hid his smile. “Good,” he said. “Then I can bum a ride with you guys . . .where would we be without the Waldorf?”
11
THE BIG GUY WAS FRIGHTENED to death of the DNC. He’d rather have faced the Inquisition. He could talk to Tim, could deal with Tim’s strategies, but not the little gang behind him—the lawyers and politicos who picked presidents and also sank them. They’d pulled Michael out of obscurity, and were probably planning to dump him. They choreographed the Democratic Convention, decided on the Party’s new stars. They were the ones who saw Marianna’s possibilities with the media and decided to lock Clarice away somewhere. The presid
ent could only have one First Lady.
And so he had to meet with the seven grand inquisitors of the Democratic National Committee, plus their spokesman Tim. There wasn’t a smile or hint of recognition among them. They’d stolen out of Washington, DC, and descended upon the Waldorf, having laid siege to the president-elect until Michael was almost a prisoner in his rooms. But they wouldn’t greet Sidel in one of the Waldorf’s public salons. They’d turned the election into a holy war; and a holy war could only be battled out in secret.
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.
12
THERE 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.
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