“Mommy, Mommy, go away.”
And Darl would smile at her like the whore of Babylon . . . or Basin Street. God, she’d picked up every habit—she was as mean as a walking hurricane.
“Mother, how nice of you to visit.”
“Don’t get sassy,” she said.
Darl’s eyes were the color of honey. She could have sashayed out of the schoolyard, gone to the nearest bank, and gotten a job. She was twelve . . . and looked twenty-five. Inez didn’t want any of the teachers or custodians at this school to handle Darl. She’d told that to David Pearl. I’ll kill them myself, she’d said. And David had put the fear of God into the trustees at Walden Pond School. He was the school’s biggest benefactor. Walden Pond was where David sent children he or one of his associates had to hide. But Inez didn’t trust that old man, and she didn’t trust Darl. She could see the trace of lipstick on her daughter’s mouth.
“Darl, if you misbehave . . . ”
Darl’s eyes turned the color of smoke. Then that smoke disappeared and she started to imitate her own mother, with one hand on her hip. And the three of them laughed and cried. Daniel had crept out from behind his sister’s shoulder. He hugged Inez and Darl with all his heart.
“Stay with us, Mommy, stay.”
And it no longer mattered to Inez what she had to do. She’d lead Sidel by the nose, play Mata Hari for the rest of her life, as long as her babies were snug in their uniforms. She’d make love to the devil himself if it would guarantee that Darl could keep her cherry for another five years. But Isaac wasn’t the devil. He was Inez’s own strange troubadour. And a girl like her from New Orleans was a sucker for troubadours.
15
IT WAS AN ELABORATE GAME of hide-and-seek, romance in the middle of a war maneuver. She’d run from him and he’d find her. Or she would find him. Isaac didn’t care how prominent he’d become. He would have loved to squire his dark lady of New Orleans around town. But she was frightened of losing her children. If her picture appeared in all the papers with or without Isaac, her past might pop out, and some government agency would call her an unfit mother. So the dark lady met Isaac in the dark. They’d tiptoe into a movie house after the feature started, or find a whacked-out Cantonese restaurant at the border of Chinatown where Isaac Sidel was just another name. He was almost content in his delirium over Inez. He would drink in the musk of her body, fondle her knee while they had tofu and spinach with garlic sauce.
But they had no real venue of their own. She couldn’t spend the night with him at his mansion, no matter how secretive he was—they would have woken to the noise of reporters on the lawn. He couldn’t stay with her in that mausoleum on the thirteenth floor. It would have been like undressing in front of David Pearl and Arnold Rothstein’s ghost. So they camped out at Isaac’s headquarters. And no matter what their passion, and their hunger to touch, she’d wake up in the middle of the night and return to her mausoleum.
His dark lady began to develop deep furrows in her brow. She’d pour sugar into her wine at the Cantonese restaurant. “Isaac, I can’t sneak around. That old man will steal my babies. I’ll never see them again.”
“I’ll steal them back.”
The furrows deepened. “Stay out of this, darling, you have to leave me alone.”
“And if I can’t.”
“Then both of us will suffer.”
“But we could run away with your kids. I don’t care. The Democrats can find another vice president.”
“Shut up,” she said. “I’m running away every time I’m with you. . . . Don’t you dare follow me, Isaac, or I’ll scratch your eyes out.”
“Scratch,” he said. “You might pity a blind man.”
She got up from the table in that ruinous restaurant, had her last gulp of sugared wine, and said, “I’m the one you ought to pity.”
She ran from him again. He found a note under his door when he returned to the Ansonia.
I love you. Leave me alone.
That plea broke the Big Guy’s heart. He stopped pursuing her. His life had become one long mirror and mirage. He loved her kids without ever having met them. He didn’t even know their names. She’d never shown him a picture of her “babies.”
He was forlorn without Inez. But at least the Wall Street Journal hadn’t disappointed Sidel. It talked about his flagrant land grabs, said the mayor was acting like an African potentate, and that if he wasn’t stopped, half the Bronx would fall under eminent domain. It was the usual sound and fury. Isaac would have had to plead with a hundred boards and commissions, sit with the city’s own chief counsel, to even contemplate building one junior high in the heart of darkness. But the damage was done. Raphael Robert’s column in the Journal gave the illusion that Isaac and his city planners had already moved into the Bronx and were seizing enormous tracts of land.
And Isaac decided to disappear for a little while. He was retracing his steps. He would commune with Billy Bob Archer, learn more about the eye of God. He had an itch to see that first shooter, even if he had to break into the mental ward at Fort Sam. But it wasn’t so easy. He couldn’t ask the DNC to charter a plane, and if he had to fly to San Antone, the Secret Service would have to go over the logistics of his journey. There’d have to be a sky marshal aboard the trip to Dallas and the connecting flight, and he would bring havoc to any airline that accommodated him.
It took three whole days, and when he arrived at JFK, half the airport was blocked. He was rambling around, signing autographs, with Martin Boyle a few feet away, when he was grabbed under the shoulder and whisked in another direction. In five minutes he couldn’t be found. He was wearing a fake nose. Jesus, are they gonna whack me right in the terminal?
He wasn’t even scared . . . until he recognized the white glove of his son-in-law, Joe Barbarossa. Joey’s hand had been burned in Saigon, and that hand never really healed. So he had to wear the white glove. He was the most decorated cop in Manhattan, and he’d also been the biggest drug dealer in Nam. He’d freelanced a lot until he fell in love with Marilyn, Isaac’s wild-eyed only daughter. Isaac didn’t want Marilyn to marry that lunatic, who’d become his own adjutant. Vietnam Joe was invaluable. The whole of Manhattan and half the Bronx were frightened of him. He knew all the dealers, most of whom had been his partners in Nam. And he knew all the assassins.
“Jesus, Joey, why the fuck are you following me? You ought to be home with Marilyn.”
He’d avoided Marilyn and Joe during the campaign, wouldn’t pose with them, because he didn’t want his daughter to become the easy target of some insane assassin, like Billy Bob. Yet here was Joey in the flesh. . . .
“Are you listening? Martin Boyle will put you in a cage? I’m going to Dallas.”
“There’s been a change of plans,” said Joe Barbarossa, who was a much bigger bandit than Legs Diamond or any of AR’s other button boys. Most of the cops who’d worked for Isaac were heavy hitters. He drew madmen and freaks into the undercurrent of his own mad wake.
“We’re going to Houston,” his son-in-law said.
“But Houston’s not on my itinerary. You’ll have to tell Martin Boyle.”
“Dad,” Joe said, grinding his teeth like a wolf. “Boyle’s part of the problem.”
“What are you saying? He’s sworn to protect me.”
“But he hasn’t sworn enough.”
“I’ll kill you,” Isaac said. “He’s my favorite Secret Service man. And how do I know that someone hasn’t hired you to put out my lights?”
“That’s the problem, Dad. Someone has hired me . . . or else I wouldn’t be here.”
* * *
He was glum on the flight. No one recognized him with that fake schnozzola he had to wear. He began to brood as his son-in-law told him a very tall tale about Saigon. Half the ville was dealing drugs, he said. The war was winding down. “Dad, it was fucking surreal.” Saigon wasn’t much safer than Indian country. It was called El Paso East. “And Cholon, where all the chinks and the deserters lived, with the other crazie
s, was called Tijuana West.”
“Joey, Joey,” Isaac said, nursing a glass of milk and an airline cookie, “what does this have to do with Billy Bob Archer and Martin Boyle.”
“Hold your horses,” his son-in-law said.
Joey dealt drugs right out of the American embassy. It was a madhouse in 1974. The war had never been winnable, according to Joe. Charlie was the only one who had a real stake in Nam—but the Americans had Saigon and had turned it into West Texas. The half-breed whores spoke with an El Paso drawl. Enchiladas were sold on every corner, along with Corona beer.
“Joey, get to the point?”
“We needed protection.”
The drug dealers had their own crazy wars, which were an outgrowth of the war itself, where corporals shot their own sergeants, and every officer was fair game for some grunt who didn’t like the color of his captain’s eyes. There was complete chaos in ’74. Kissinger was talking peace behind the generals’ backs. And everybody wanted to rip off Vietnam Joe. He had to hire the Crusaders. They’d been a special unit inside military intel. They turned invisible once they hit Indian country. “They could tear the fucking heart out of a Vietcong village.”
“Joey, you mean they were assassins who improvised.”
“Something like that. And I hired those scary mothers to protect my ass. They cut off fingers, took scalps. And I never lost an ounce of my shit. . . . Dad, what was the name of that colonel at the military madhouse in San Antone?”
“I can’t recall.”
“A colonel with white, white hair and eyes as pale as Mr. Death.”
“Trevor Welles,” Isaac groaned.
“He was the Crusaders’ main man. There was nothing to do anymore, no tribal chieftains to kill, none of Charlie’s tunnels to smoke out, so they hired themselves out to the highest bidders. I paid them in dope and huge bricks of cash . . . but I never realized they had gone domestic, not until yesterday. I thought they had disbanded years ago. And that makes me suspicious. I think they’re freelancing for some mavericks inside the Pentagon. It’s El Paso West all over again.”
“How do ya know?”
“That crazy colonel called me on the phone, asked me to smoke you . . . said the Ansonia billionaire would pay me more scratch than I had ever seen.”
“But he’s not stupid. He knows you’re my son-in-law.”
“That’s the whole point, Dad. The colonel is sending me a kite. I play along with him, say you’re all zippered up with Secret Service men, that Martin Boyle is practically your son. You drink Dr Pepper out of the same tin can.”
The Big Guy had begun to shake. He didn’t want to hear the rest . . . and had to hear it.
“And what did that devil say?”
“Dad, I swear to God. The colonel says that Martin Boyle wasn’t such a good son in San Antone, or they never could have gotten to you.”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Isaac said. “Dennis Cohen had to be tied to the same conspiracy, and he wanted to whack Martin Boyle in the Ansonia’s attic.”
But it no longer mattered what Isaac said in this madcap game of chess. Joey had the black and white queens in his pocket, and he hit Isaac with both queens at once.
“Boyle had second thoughts. That’s what I figure. And Mr. Ansonia tried to get rid of him. But none of them considered your Glock.”
“And now Mr. Ansonia wants to get rid of me.”
“He’s been trying, Dad. But that little mother can’t make up his mind. He’s like that other fucking assassin.”
Isaac grew as dizzy as little Alice hurtling down the rabbit hole. Everywhere he went was a new mirror and mirage.
“For God’s sake, Joey. What assassin?”
“You know, Dad. He’s in a book—a prince who leaves a trail of corpses. His sweetheart drowns herself because of him, his own little mama gets poisoned, and he stabs his stepfather in the heart on account of hearsay from a ghost.”
“Hamlet,” Isaac muttered.
“That’s the guy. Hamlet is living in the Ansonia right now. And he still can’t make up his mind about you.”
“Then why are we going to Houston?”
“To meet with Mr. Death.”
16
HE PLUCKED OFF HIS FALSE nose once he got to the Warwick and registered as Isaac Sidel. This dinosaur of a hotel had once been the watering hole of rich cattlemen, when they rode off the plains and could watch boys wrestle with the crocodiles in the bayous. Isaac had never seen a crocodile in Houston, but the cockroaches were as big as a man’s finger and the flies as fat as a strawberry. From his windows on the seventh floor, he could survey the ribbed streets and brown grassland of Rice University, and the various beltways that looked like the bluish veins on Isaac’s own arm.
“Jesus,” Isaac said, “couldn’t we go to the Galleria? I want to have some fun.”
“Dad, Dad, your life’s in danger. We have to wait for Trevor Welles.”
They ordered a light dinner. But Isaac couldn’t eat his lamb chop. He had some crackers and goat cheese, drank a glass of Medoc. And Trevor Welles arrived without a knock on the door. He wasn’t dressed as a colonel this time. He wore a sweat suit, like some harebrained college coach. But he had the same startling white hair. Even in his clownish costume, he was Mr. Death.
They all sat on a sofa near the Warwick’s picture windows, with Houston’s beltways below them, those bluish arteries jumping across the plains. Isaac could have been looking down onto a futuristic Bronx, with all the badlands swept away.
“I apologize, Mr. President,” said Trevor Welles. “But there was a rotten turn of events. And we never realized how close you were to your son-in-law. We had bad intel.”
“That’s grand,” Isaac said. “Now tell me what the fuck is going on before I strangle both of you.”
“Sir, you might catch me. But not Vietnam Joe. The gooks shit a brick whenever Joe was in Indian country.”
“I thought he never left Saigon,” Isaac said.
“Unless he was with the Crusaders. He had more kills than my very best man.”
Isaac began to sulk in front of the two assassins. “Then you lied to me, Joey. It was like a cover story. Barbarossa of Saigon, who dealt dope next door to the American ambassador. . . . I trusted you, let you have Marilyn.”
“But lying saved your life, sir. If he hadn’t married your daughter, you wouldn’t be here.”
Isaac was still in that rabbit hole, more confused then ever. But he was drawn to the crazed chivalry of assassins.
“Who hired you, Mr. Welles?”
“Ah,” said Trevor, “that’s a complicated tale. In the long run, I work for Calder Cottonwood. The presidency has impoverished him. But when he returns to Texas, he’ll be one of the richest men on the planet.”
“Are you telling me that he wanted to lose the election?”
“Want, sir, is too weak a word. But he was still playing the percentages. It’s called Texas poker. There’s no united front among the bankers and oilmen. A good number of them gave millions to Mr. Storm’s campaign. They despise the president-elect, but they’d sell one of their own kidneys for you.”
Now the Big Guy was really groaning. “Then all they wanted was a shitstorm.”
“That’s right. They were betting on a constitutional crisis. But they misjudged you, sir. They thought they could get you to lie down. But you’re like a West Texas badman. The more people you kill, the more you’re loved.”
“Come on,” Isaac said, “you’re talking with cotton candy in your mouth. Who hired you to hit me inside the cattleman’s bar?”
“Mr. David Pearl. Oh, he didn’t want you dead, just permanently disabled. But his own fat bitch got in the way, little Amanda. We would have finished the story, and then Joey stepped into the frame. We can’t afford to have him on our blind side.”
“What happens now?” Isaac had to ask. He’d drawn another madman into the fold.
“The Crusaders will protect your life for three weeks . . .
until the Electoral College votes and Congress certifies that vote in January. Then we’re done. Both you and Mr. Storm can piss in the bucket after that. But until then, God knows who will be gunning for you.”
“And what about that fucking fort in the Bronx, with David Pearl leasing land to the Pentagon?”
“Mr. President, I can’t protect you on every front.”
“Stop it,” Isaac said. “What kind of commission will you get if that fort is built?”
“More than you’ll ever make if you lived in the White House for a hundred years.”
Isaac got up from the sofa and began to pace across his grandiose sitting room at the Warwick.
“Dad, Dad,” Joey said, “will ya listen to Trev? The clock is ticking while we talk.”
“All right, what do I have to do?”
“Stay in Texas. You’ll go out on the road again. We’ll ask the Dems for their yellow bus. We’ll avoid the big cities.”
“And what do I tell the American people?”
“That the vice president–elect is on a special mission to introduce himself to the real America—not the bankers, not the fat cats, but the hardscrabble farmers, the fishermen along the bayous, the dirt poor . . . ”
“In the woods and the wetlands, the back roads of Texas.”
“Where else, Mr. President, where else?”
* * *
He wouldn’t bother with Tim Seligman. He went right into the lion’s mouth, called Ramona Dazzle at Rifkin, Rifkin & White.
“Ramona dear, you’ll have to airlift the yellow bus. I’m going on a pilgrimage. . . . Yes, darling. And I’ll need Michael. We can’t leave him alone. He’ll cave at the Waldorf. I’d prefer him with me. We’ll reach out, Ramona, shake hands with Texas pioneers. Reporters will have a field day. The elitist president-elect working in the fields of West Texas . . . I’ll need Marianna, too. You’ll airlift her and Michael with the bus. . . . No, Clarice stays where she is. And no arguments, Ramona, or I’ll jump ship and you’ll have Michael on your hands.”
Isaac had to close his entire shop. He couldn’t have easy targets lying around while he was on the road. Marilyn would have to join him and Joey in Texas. But he was worried about Margaret Tolstoy. David Pearl might wreak vengeance on Isaac’s loved ones if he lost all his bets and couldn’t convert his acreage in the Bronx into hard cash. But Isaac couldn’t airlift Margaret from her sanitarium near the Cloisters. He got Bull Latham on the horn.
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