Under the Eye of God

by Jerome Charyn

  David began to cackle. “Kiddos, I had a similar thought. Look around you. Every fucking customer in this little cafeteria belongs to me. You can call yourselves my prisoners.”

  “He’s bluffing,” said Mr. Abilene, a general at Brooks Air Force Base. “Let’s show Mr. Manhattan our firepower.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Inez, with a neutral smile. “Just ask for our waitress.”

  The waitress appeared. She looked like an aging flower child.

  “Miss Inez, should I tell these big bad men what they can expect if they don’t behave?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “There’s a little tub of plastique molded right into the table. It’s enough to blow up half of New Jersey. . . . Can I take your orders, gentlemen?”

  The barons had lost their appetite. They spread out a map of the Bronx across the table. Mr. Abilene was their spokesman.

  “Sir, can you promise us an unrestricted path from Webster Avenue downward, across Tremont and Morrisania, including Crotona Park? Of course, the streets themselves will disappear.”

  “And the housing projects?” asked Mr. San Antone.

  “We’ll relocate the projects,” said David. “We won’t leave a living soul without a much better apartment, on the far side of the Bronx River.”

  “And it’s a question of public relations. We can’t steal land from the living or the dead. And we can’t push the city around. Our pitch is that we’re revitalizing the Bronx; we’re creating a community. We’ll lease the whole shebang and convert it into federal land. We can’t put up a teepee without that conversion. New York will have a windfall—its own military base a mile from Manhattan. We’ll put up hundreds of housing units. We’ll grow new wetlands. We’ll build a river right into the rocks. But we won’t have a bunch of local Commies picketing us. It’ll look bad for the United States.”

  “You’ll be the white knights of Texas,” David said, “saviors of a dying borough.”

  “Not all white,’ said Mr. Abilene. “We’ll need a black general or two on our board . . . and a Native American, if we can find one.”

  “It’s good for the Reservation,” said Mr. Dallas. That was the code name for their future Bronx base: the Reservation. “And there aren’t any holdouts in your portfolio, are there, Mr. Manhattan? We wouldn’t want any sudden surprises . . . picking up land that doesn’t belong to us.”

  “It’s ninety percent in my pocket,” David said.

  “And the other ten? We can’t move in without acquiring all the leases. The Prez is dying to make an announcement. It would be a real feather in the poor fucker’s hat. Calder Cottonwood, champion of the Bronx.”

  “Mr. Dallas,” David said, “you can tell Cottonwood that he’ll have his last stand in the Bronx’s own Indian country—or I’ll tell him himself.”

  “And if Sidel interferes, if he gets in the way?”

  David didn’t stumble. “Then I’ll dispose of him myself.”

  He got up from the table with Inez and never looked once at his silent partners.

  “Should I call your driver?” asked Mr. Abilene.

  “No,” David said. “I have my own man . . . and should you decide to follow us, I’d look around you first.”

  The delicatessen was deserted—it was as if locusts had descended upon the new Lindy’s and wiped it clean. There wasn’t a loaf of bread or a pickle jar to be found. The waiters and waitresses were all gone. There wasn’t a single customer.

  “I wouldn’t move for half an hour,” David said. “The plastique is a bit temperamental. Sometimes it has a mind of its own.”

  And he rushed out in his slippers, Inez right beside him.

  * * *

  The Inez Corporation owned Manhattan’s biggest limousine service, and David had a hundred drivers at his disposal. But he didn’t want a limo. It would have been much too easy to derail. Who could trust these madmen from the Alamo? They were all kissing cousins from another planet. But he had to lease the land to them. No one else was big enough to buy up “the whole shebang,” as Mr. San Antone had said. David had fond memories of San Antonio. He’d accompanied AR to the Menger Hotel in ’25, before there was a River Walk, and that bend in the San Antonio River was little more than a downtown sewer. AR had gone there to gamble. David fell in love with the gold spittoons. He was AR’s portable bank, with cash in every pocket. That lunatic lost three hundred grand in less than an hour. He didn’t have three hundred grand. David had to sign all the markers. . . .

  He’d rented an armored bus. It stood outside the delicatessen. He climbed aboard with Inez. He had a couple of shooters, but that was just for show. If the Texas barons wrecked his bus in the middle of New Jersey, it would have created much too big a stink. They would have to kiss their Bronx Reservation good-bye and look for some painted desert in the badlands of South Dakota. David was still valuable to the barons, but for how long?

  He began to shiver on board the bus. Inez had to rock him in her arms. He couldn’t have maneuvered the barons without Inez. Her appearance at his side had stunned them. They could deal with their relic of a partner in his velvet slippers, but not with Inez.

  He was still shivering when he arrived at the Ansonia. Inez brought him upstairs to her own apartment. She undressed him, as if he were a fanciful child with white hair, and she ran a bath for David, helped him sit down in the light-blue porcelain tub that AR had installed for his blond mistress. But this Inez wasn’t even ashamed to soap David’s balls.

  “Sweetheart,” he said. “I’ll surprise you one afternoon, and I’ll rape you to pieces.”

  She laughed, but it wasn’t unkind. And he thought of Sidel. That miserable man didn’t have much of a future. Someone would have to fix his wagon.

  14

  THEY WERE BACK AGAIN, THOSE army engineers. This time they camped in Crotona Park, which was much more desolate than that other park on a hill. There was talk that the wild dogs of Crotona Park had once been as tame as pussycats. They had belonged to the drug lords of Tremont and Morrisania, and their wives and children. Wars and police raids had scattered the gangs, and now their dogs roamed the badlands, rooting with their noses right into baby carriages. But they weren’t clever enough for the army engineers, who left dolls in baby carriages on the shores of Indian Lake; the dogs were decimated with the arms and legs of dolls in their mouths. . . .

  Isaac mourned Indian Lake; it had once been the preferred vacation ground of poor Italians and Jews near the park. There was nothing like it in the midst of the mating season, when young gallants with gold wristbands fluttered around the prettiest girls of Crotona Park, who paraded in summer midriffs that revealed a single band of flesh. Isaac wished he had been one of those gallants. But he was already a cop. And Robert Moses’ tunnel in the sky would ruin that mating season, as it passed right over the northern edge of the park in the late 1950s. Perhaps it would have been ruined without Robert Moses. But at least the Bronx wouldn’t have had a concrete ribbon across its spine.

  And it might not have had an epidemic of army engineers. But Isaac couldn’t seem to catch them in their tracks. They would appear in one location, then move into some mirror or mirage. The Bronx itself had become an enormous mirror, and was as much of a mirage as David Pearl’s limestone castle. But Isaac couldn’t master mirages. So he sat down with his property clerk, his finance chiefs, and other mavens before the army engineers could finish mapping the badlands. Isaac went through the city’s books, block by block. He closed his eyes, and his finger landed on Bryant Avenue in Morrisania, which contained a whole mountain of rubble. His commissioners called it East Berlin.

  “That’s where we’ll build it,” Isaac said.

  “Build what?” said one of the mavens. “Mr. Mayor, what are you talking about?”

  “A junior high school—for ghetto geniuses. It will rise right out of the rubble as the new home of the Merliners—Marianna will attend the school.”

  “But she’ll be in the White House,” said h
is maven from the Board of Ed.

  “Means nothing,” Isaac mumbled. “Marianna can commute from Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’ll also build a shelter for the homeless.”

  “Boss,” said his own executive assistant, “you can’t do diddle without the City Planning Commission.”

  “Well, don’t I sit on that commission?”

  His mavens looked at him as if he were the mayor of another planet. “Not a chance, sir. And even if you did, they’d run you out of their rooms at Spector Hall. You’re something of a lame duck.”

  “Where’s Spector Hall?” he groaned. The city itself was a labyrinth beyond the mayor’s control. He had no idea who worked for him and who didn’t. He had more commissioners than Alexander the Great.

  He dismissed all his mavens and called in his press secretary. He’d have to plot a media campaign, plant an interview here and there. He could have met with the New York Times. The Times had called him the best mayor the city had ever had, after Fiorello La Guardia, the Little Flower. La Guardia had raced to fires in a fire chief’s helmet, had tossed slot machines into the Hudson, had been the guest conductor of the city’s own orchestra, had read the funny papers to children over the radio, and Isaac was only a thug with a gun. He couldn’t compete with the Little Flower. Also, the Times was considered a Commie rag in Texas. Isaac would have to connect with the Wall Street Journal.

  The Journal was one of the few dailies in the land that had supported Calder Cottonwood. It despised Isaac Sidel and called Michael a crook. And it wasn’t so wrong when it claimed that Isaac had ties with the Mob. Jesus, how else could you preside over a labyrinth? The Maf could catch a child molester, settle a strike between the city and its cantankerous unions. Isaac would have disappeared inside a shitstorm without the Mob.

  He invited Raphael Roberts, his severest critic on the Journal, to the vice president–elect’s suite at the Ansonia. Raphael was a gnome of a man who’d been excoriating Isaac ever since his days as police commissioner. He wore a rumpled suit; his shoes were as battered as the mayor’s. And Isaac had to wonder what kind of picture this unpolished gnome presented in the offices of the Journal.

  Raphael ranted from the moment he arrived at Isaac’s headquarters. But he was astonished that the vice president–elect didn’t have one assistant, one extra desk.

  “I’m not sympathetic to anything you’ve done, Mr. Mayor, or anything you’ll ever do. And I doubt that the Journal would take kindly to one of your so-called scoops.”

  “Jesus,” Isaac said, “will ya listen before you bite my head off? I’m not that different from the Prez. He wants to rebuild the inner cities. Hasn’t he swooped down over the Bronx in his eagle?”

  “What eagle?” asked the columnist.

  “Marine One. He wants to resurrect the bombed-out streets, and so do I.”

  Reluctantly, Raphael began to scratch a few words in his notebook.

  “And what’s your program, Mr. Mayor?”

  “Satellites,” Isaac said. “I’ll build a junior high school for my Merliners and a shelter for the homeless . . . and a golden age club right in the middle of those mean streets. I’ll have satellites everywhere, and surround them with new neighborhoods.”

  “And how will you acquire all that property?”

  “Through the right of eminent domain.”

  Raphael continued to scratch with his pen. “But won’t that cripple small-property owners? You might have to tear down the corner candy store.”

  “Raphael, wake up. There are no corner candy stores in that heart of darkness. They were swept away with all the fires. And Moses couldn’t have built his highway without eminent domain. He ripped through entire neighborhoods near Tremont, left a fucking desert.”

  “Ah,” Raphael said. “You’re not going to suck me into that old argument. The South Bronx would have died with or without Robert Moses. And it would have fallen off the map long ago without Yankee Stadium. And don’t think I’m going to praise that prick Michael for bullying the owners into submission. I would have preferred a long baseball strike. Without a salary cap, you’ll turn every pint-sized slugger into a multimillionaire.”

  “I didn’t bring you here to talk baseball,” the Big Guy groaned.

  “Then why did you bring me?”

  And for a moment Isaac thought that Raphael himself might be part of the Texas Mafia.

  “Why?” Isaac said. “To give you and the Journal a chance to crucify Isaac Sidel . . . I’m going to make Moses look like a pygmy and a piker. I’ll tear down his highway if I have to. I’m going to build and build in all the debris.”

  Raphael had stopped scribbling. “Mr. Mayor, you’re going to leave office in little more than a month. What can you hope to accomplish?”

  “As much as I can.”

  Raphael Roberts left without shaking Isaac’s hand. But the Big Guy was ebullient. He was convinced the Journal would lacerate him by the end of the week. He could already imagine Raphael’s column: The Great Dictator’s Last Mad Days in Manhattan.

  But he didn’t even have much time to gloat. He could sense someone outside his door. Had another silly assassin come to shoot out his lights? Isaac was getting sick of these staged affairs. He opened the door while his Glock fell through the waistband of his pants and bounced off his left loafer. He didn’t even bother to pick it up. And there she was in her silver helmet, as substantial as a wraith.

  “Isaac,” she whispered, “that isn’t nice. It’s bad luck to leave a lady standing in a door.”

  And he swept her inside with all his bearish charm. It could have been part of some primitive mating season. His tongue was inside her face while they danced across Isaac’s own political parlor. He hadn’t slept here once, preferring to ride uptown to Gracie Mansion after midnight. It had nothing to do with the comforts of a mayor’s bed. He was still in mourning without the Little First Lady, who’d been his houseguest until Tim Seligman and the DNC stole her from him. But he liked to wake up and find a breakfast tray outside his door. The mayor’s bedroom was a fortress, under a keyless lock. No one could enter without the combination.

  There’d always be a flower with his pot of coffee and his morning mail. And if he was lucky enough, his chauffeur might have driven to Sutton Place South and returned with a batch of butternut cookies from Marianna Storm. And here he was without a mattress in his own Bedouin encampment at the Ansonia. But the Big Guy didn’t need a mattress. He lay with Inez on the Ansonia’s hardwood herringbone floor. For all his anger and deep distrust, he was tender with her.

  Isaac couldn’t help himself. He was forever falling in love with some faithless creature. And why should this false Inez be any different? But perhaps his emotion was all twisted up with AR and that first Inez. He didn’t need Einstein or Freud to tell him that the simplest of suitors was most often a voyeur. He was like a baby who’d ravished his very own ravisher.

  What more could Isaac say? He was in love with Trudy Winckle­man of New Orleans, a.k.a. Inez.

  “It’s David who sent you here, isn’t it? There is no Cassandra’s Wall. David hired some starving actors to play billionaires. And you’re the biggest actress of them all.”

  “But that’s what turns you on,” she said.

  Isaac wasn’t much of a grand inquisitor. Even a false Inez had to have her own AR. But they kissed with a hunger that couldn’t have been rehearsed. Isaac’s mouth was swollen after five minutes. His sudden delight took him out of that land of woe he seemed to live in. Her aromas made him delirious.

  “Live with me,” Isaac muttered.

  She laughed. “Shall I become the official mistress of Gracie Mansion?”

  “No,” he said. “Move out of that mausoleum on the thirteenth floor. We’ll go someplace—hide. I don’t care.”

  “Darling,” she said. “I can’t run. It’s a little too late. But you should get out of the Ansonia. It will give you a lot of grief.”

  “Ah,” Isaac said. “It’s my sacred font. I grew up
with the Ansonia in my blood. And without the Ansonia, I wouldn’t have met you.”

  “Darling, I’m David’s employee.”

  “You’re a miracle,” he said.

  She laughed again. “But some miracles are good, and some are bad. You’ve been like a son to David, but he’ll have to kill you in the end. Maybe it’s a sign of respect. He’s a very troubled executioner. But I won’t stop him, Isaac. Each hour you survive, you get more and more in his way. The next time I visit you . . . ”

  “It will be with a dagger in your hand.”

  “Then don’t open your door to strangers,” she said.

  “But you aren’t a stranger.”

  “Oh, yes, I am.”

  She gathered her articles of clothing, and she was gone, dancing out his door half-undressed, her thighs like magnificent, supple sticks. It took him less than a minute to mourn her absence. He still had his Mafia “gonnegtions.” He could have kidnapped Inez. But what a price he’d have to pay. And he wasn’t worried about the wizard’s wrath. He was worried about Inez. She would have mocked Isaac without a moment of mercy in her eyes. And that he couldn’t have borne.

  * * *

  It was her babies, her babies. She’d brought them with her from New Orleans. Daniel and Darl. She didn’t want to ruin them in the ruins of her own life. Her babies were almost as tall as she. They’d grown up in a bordello. And they had the wild-eyed habits of whores, though Daniel was very shy. She was cultivating them at a private school in Connecticut, where they had to wear uniforms and pledge allegiance to their school song. Daniel would be fine, protected by an older sister who would claw out the eyes of anyone who wanted to harm him. But who would protect Darl? She stood out at school, a twelve-year-old woman among children of the privileged class—no uniform could hide the contours of her body.

  It tore at Inez’s heart to see her there, the lone female in an infants’ world, hungry for something else. Inez fought with her every time she visited that damn school. Daniel would start to bawl and hide behind his sister’s shoulder.