“That old man doesn’t own the world,” Isaac muttered.
“But he owns me. . . . Darling, don’t you get it? I’m his captive. He has my little son and my daughter.”
“But you said they were at boarding school—in Connecticut.”
“And who boards them? David Pearl. They live in his house, with his housekeeper, his bodyguards. I have to beg each time I want to see them. . . . Isaac, I’m scared. Sometimes I blank out, forget their faces, their names.”
“But you have a husband.”
Her hands trembled, and her whole body began to heave, until her silver helmet whipped about in its own wind. And then it all stopped.
“Husband, that’s what I call him. Arno is one of David’s gunmen. He watches over me.”
“A gunman without a gun.”
“Arno doesn’t need a gun,” she insisted. “The holster is just for show. The whole place is surrounded. Why, why did you come here?”
“I love you,” Isaac said without the least hesitation.
“Damn you, I’m just a trick. David hired me to worm my way into your heart. And he knew I’d fall for an adorable idiot like you. That’s why he kept his insurance—my kids.”
“But I’ll rescue them,” Isaac said.
“Keep away. You’ll get them killed. . . . Darling, you can’t even rescue yourself.”
Isaac looked deep into the puzzle of her eyes. “But I have Bull Latham outside. And he has the full firepower of the FBI.”
And now the witch of Connecticut looked like a sad little waif.
“Isaac, he’s the one who led you into this trap. He’s David Pearl’s best bounty hunter.”
“Come on,” Isaac said. “Not even David can bribe the whole Bureau.”
“David doesn’t have to do a thing when he has the president on his side.”
“But how can Cottonwood help him?”
She put her hands over her eyes and started to shake again. “Stop talking,” she said. “I’m the only one who can get you out of here alive—not your Glock, not Bull Latham. . . . What is it you want? To sleep with Inez one last time? Isaac, I’m nothing but a dream inside your head, a ghost who walked out of a museum.”
The Big Guy was terribly aroused. He couldn’t help himself—pain had become his aphrodisiac, pain woke him out of his slumber, pain and his own hunger for Inez. She shucked off her sweater and her skirt. Her lovely arms were dappled with goose bumps. He didn’t have to reconnoiter in the bedroom. Isaac wouldn’t have known where it was.
He made love to Inez on the flat of the table. And for the first time in his life, Isaac felt safe, wondrously safe, while he could hold onto her dappled flesh.
He couldn’t even say what pleasure he had given Inez. His spittle mingled with hers while they were on that tabletop. Her goose bumps disappeared. She got dressed.
And then she called for Arno. That demented wolf returned with his cruel mouth. He was smiling at Isaac. He took a pouch of Bugler’s from his pocket and rolled a cigarette for himself and Inez. He couldn’t have been a local hood. Bugler wasn’t cultivated in Manhattan or the Bronx. Arno must have come from West Texas or the Alamo. Isaac wondered if he’d ever seen this killer in the cattlemen’s bar at Menger’s. Meanwhile, Inez signaled with the palm of her hand that he should stay where he was and not interfere in her business.
“Arno,” she said with the Bugler in her mouth. “You’ll take him home—in one piece.”
“And ef I don’t?” he said in a West Texas drawl.
“Then Isaac is gonna move in with me.”
“Fat chance, Miz Inez. He might not breathe another ten minutes. You’ll be the widuh lady before you’re a bride.”
And he started to titter. Inez slapped his face. He was flooded with anger, but he wouldn’t hit her back.
“If you hurt him, Arno, you know what will happen next.”
“Yes’um. Mr. David’s gonna give me a big fat reward.”
“And after that? I’ll crawl into your bedroom while you’re fast asleep, and I’ll cut your prick off with the sharpest knife I can find.”
Arno’s eyes began to dart inside his skull. Then he laughed. “Miz Inez, you shouldn’t give your plans away. I’m liable to hurt ya real bad.”
“And what will Mr. David think when he discovers your own paw prints on my arm? You’ll escort Mr. Isaac home, and God help you if anything happens to him.”
She wouldn’t even let Isaac say good-bye in front of Arno. She shoved him out the door with just a little bit of a caress. Inez didn’t even wait there. She went back inside and shut the door. The sound broke into the night like a melancholy whisper. Isaac couldn’t see much. But he knew that Bull Latham wasn’t out there. Bull had abandoned him.
David’s lieutenants, wild little men, wearing medieval vests they must have swiped or borrowed from the NYPD, drove him out of Connecticut in some crazy vintage car with armored windows and maroon-colored seats. With all his gloom, it took him a whole hour to realize that it was David’s Pierce-Arrow, inherited from AR himself. He could imagine the first Inez, the real one, on these cushions with David . . . and AR. But even that memory couldn’t melt his gloom. His melancholy grew as they arrived at the front gate of Gracie Mansion.
The guards were curious, but they let him through. He climbed out of the Pierce-Arrow and trudged across the gravel. Marianna was waiting for him at the front door, like the mayor’s own little wife. She must have grown an inch in the last couple of days. Her shoulders seemed to burst. She had as much vitality as a mountain lion.
“Uncle Isaac, where have you been? We were worried to death.”
The Big Guy wove around Marianna and went inside.
Part Six
24
SHE’D GROWN UP IN A bagnio, the best in New Orleans. Her favorite “aunt” was a whore with a head of silver hair. Auntie looked after her, made sure none of the customers sniffed her underpants. Some of the other girls had been cruel. But Auntie protected her in this constant tug-of-war. And after a while, Auntie became manager of the Blond Moon, its very own madam, and she managed other bagnios for the mob. She sent her little orphan to school, but it was a waste of time. Trudy had become the bagnio’s bookkeeper. She could toss off figures on her fingertips, add magnificent sums in her head. She never cheated the girls who had been unkind to her. And she always prepared the correct “cut” for mobsters and members of the Orleans Parish police—there wasn’t much of a difference between them.
She fell in love with a crooked cop, as handsome as a blue-eyed sailor. But he had one wife in the Garden District and another in Algiers. Trudy didn’t care. She fed off his blue eyes. She had two kids with this cop. She raised her kids right in the bagnio, where her lovely cop could sleep when he wasn’t with his other wives. He gave Trudy a silver ring and told her not to wear it. The other girls called him Jew Boy, because he didn’t like hard liquor and he never beat any of his wives. But he must have been part of the wrong patrol. He was shot in the head by another member of the Parish police. The cops called it the result of a drunken brawl, but her Jew Boy never drank.
No one was ever prosecuted. Other cops knocked on her door, said they wanted her to become their little mama. She’d cackle at them and wield a kitchen knife. They called her a fruitcake and found new mamas for themselves, ones who were a bit more docile and wouldn’t mind the protection they could offer. But she managed to survive under Auntie’s wing. It was Auntie who had pulled her right out of the public orphanage with the help of mobsters who ran the Parish. Auntie had seen “Little Miss Sad Eyes” washing clothes and decided that she would fit into the landscape of the Blond Moon. It was like picking a puppy she didn’t have to pay for.
The girl had been saddled with a preposterous name—Marissa Dawn. No one could find her birth certificate, but that’s what she was called at the orphanage. Auntie didn’t dare use it at the Blond Moon. It was a whore’s moniker. And it might give her customers ideas. They were always looking to pierce
some child’s cherry. And so Auntie shielded her with her own name. And this orphan with the big brown eyes would become Little Trudy Winckleman. . . .
She worked like a dog, and was the bookkeeper of Auntie’s bagnios by the time she was fifteen. She was a mother before she was twenty. She was twenty-six when Auntie died. Now she herself had to manage the bagnios. And now she had a scalp of silver hair. The children went to private schools and lived with her in the Quarter. Daniel and Darl. All the new mamas at the Blond Moon would turn up their noses and tell her that Darl wasn’t much of a name.
“It’s short for Darling,” she’d shout and silence those mamas. But she was still ashamed. She shouldn’t have kept her children in a bagnio, but she worked night and day, and where else could she keep them? Darl smoldered a lot. She was as tall as any mama at the Blond Moon, and she was only ten.
There were brutal fights between the old Creole gangs and the gangs of black New Orleans. The white overlords were dying out. The cops harassed her. And she didn’t like how they looked at Darl, following her home from school, offering to give her a ride.
They’re after my little girl’s cherry, Trudy sang inside her head. She ran out of New Orleans with Daniel and Darl. She didn’t have much cash in her pockets. And she had to leave the bagnios’ strongbox behind, else the crime lords would insist she had stolen from them and might harm her babies. She landed in another “Parish,” the isle of Manhattan, and found a sublet at a building that could have been part of its own French Quarter—it had turrets and gargoyles that reminded her of bearded little devils right out of Mardi Gras. But she couldn’t pay the rent. Suddenly, she had a rescuer.
She wouldn’t have accepted anything from him, but he was kind to Daniel, and he didn’t steal looks at Trudy or her little girl. She’d knocked on his door and discovered a hobo in velvet slippers, a hobo who was also a billionaire. And he startled her.
“I always wanted to meet Marissa Dawn.”
How could he have known her name at the orphanage? Had he been friendly with the crime lords of Orleans Parish? Would the hobo collect on their debt? Would he steal Darl from her? It was even more mysterious than that. He’d been one of the Blond Moon’s secret owners, had been familiar with her Auntie. He was a landlord who had never sold a single property, he said. And he had a proposition for her.
“The bosses will find you, and they’ll break your bones. But I can hide you, Miss Marissa Winckleman Dawn, hide you and your children.”
They weren’t safe at the Ansonia, he said. But he’d enroll them at a school in Connecticut, the best that money could buy, and she could visit the children, have her own pied-à-terre, when she wasn’t working for him. But she had to decide in half a minute. He introduced himself as David Pearl, the protégé and former partner of Arnold Rothstein, Manhattan’s first king of crime. He told her all about Inez, the Ziegfeld Follies girl Rothstein had adored, and how David had also adored her. He’d never leased out Inez’s old apartment on the thirteenth floor. . . .
And so she became Inez. It was an ideal way of submerging her identity. The crime lords of Orleans Parish would never find her now. And suppose she was the curator of an eccentric museum? This old man was in love with a creature who had died fifty years ago, and he never asked her to talk or dress like his own personal phantom. She played out her part, lived in that museum, but he went too far. He threw her at this crazy cop, Isaac Sidel, who happened to be mayor and vice president–elect.
“You don’t have to romance him,” David said. “Just drive him out of his mind.”
She smiled at this potentate in the velvet slippers. “The way Inez did to Rothstein . . . and you?”
“Yeah, yeah. But Sidel doesn’t have much of a future. He’ll be dead within a month. Distract him, and there’ll be a bonus for you and the kids.”
And that’s what crippled her, having to entice a mayor with a death sentence hanging over his woolly ears. He was another Jew Boy, another cop, but he didn’t have washboard abdominals and blue eyes. And he wasn’t the father of her two babies. But something stirred in her, like a strange twist in her loins. He felt like the father of her children, as if he could love them with a lunatic devotion without having met either one. That was her dilemma. She wanted to introduce this cop to Daniel and Darl, and yet it would compromise their cover and might be dangerous for them. And while she deliberated, she fell in love with the big, burly bear.
She’d slept with no other man since her blue-eyed cop, had wanted no other man, and here was Isaac Sidel. He worshiped Arnold Rothstein, worshiped the museum, and might have worshiped her as its curator, but he never once confused her with Rothstein’s Inez. And she kept thinking to herself, Will the idiot live long enough to meet Daniel or Darl? And she realized she didn’t want him to die.
But she couldn’t become his accomplice. The old man would turn into an ogre, tear her babies to shreds. And so she tried to rid herself of Isaac Sidel. But the old man must have sensed her ambivalence. His gunmen pulled her right out of the Ansonia and hid her in Connecticut. She thought she was safe from Sidel. But the dummy appeared like her own forlorn knight when Daniel and Darl’s existence was at stake. And the chief of all the gunmen, a psycho called Arno, whom she had to placate with an occasional kiss, and who was known as her “husband” among those other maniacs, chortled at the sight of Sidel.
“Ef’n it ain’t the boogeyman?”
And she had to become his savior now. She had to frighten the psychopath, this gunman without a gun, and soothe him at the same time, or Sidel would never have escaped. Ah, it was her best performance as Inez. And she didn’t even have to wiggle her tush. She hadn’t been the bookkeeper to an arcade of whores for nothing. She managed to twist the wires in Arno’s head, to shock him into letting Sidel go free.
But she couldn’t even pull on the dummy’s ears and give him a genuine kiss in front of that psychopath, or Arno would have succumbed to a jealous rage. But she panicked once Sidel was gone, had a sadness she might not survive. She missed his bearish ways. And when Arno came near her, she lashed at him.
“Smoke your Buglers, or I’ll make you strangle on your own tobacco.”
“Ef you ain’t nice, Miz Inez, I’ll hurt your chilrun, I swear I will.”
He shouldn’t have threatened her like that; she imagined Daniel and Darl with broken faces and eyeless eyes, and she lunged at him. And that’s when the old man came through the door in his slippers, with her chilrun. Daniel seemed utterly self-sufficient, as if he were a character in his own dream and was having a discussion with himself. He wasn’t much older than nine, but he could survive better than his sister. She’d given him the old, tattered bear she’d had at the orphanage, an animal without eyes or a name, and he carried it everywhere. But Darl didn’t have the same kind of talisman. Darl was a sufferer, like Marissa Winckleman Dawn. Her eyes were as sad as Sidel’s.
“Mother,” she said with her practiced imperial tone, “how long will we have to live alone? I adore Daniel, but a nine-year-old boy can’t be my only companion. I’ll wither away.”
She must have seen the whores in front of their mirrors, even when she was a child. It was their imperiousness she had copied.
“Baby,” Inez said, “I’m doing whatever I can.”
“But that isn’t enough, is it, Mr. David?”
“Ah,” the old man said, “we’ll see, we’ll see.”
And he turned on his own gunman. “Arno, you let that Isaac walk away?”
The gunman began to whimper. “It’s her fault, Mr. David. The bitch threatened me.”
David slapped him with his own delicate fingers, and that slap must have cost him more than it did the gunman without a gun.
“Arno, if you ever disparage a mother in front of her children again, I’ll have you executed.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. David,” the gunman said. And he was so nervous that he began to make a sucking sound. David wanted to talk to Inez in private, but Darl clung to her, dug into
Inez with her own sharp hip. Inez didn’t mind. It was like being kissed by a pet shark.
“It’s an emergency,” the old man said. “It’s like walking through a street of trained crocodiles. And I’m stuck in the middle.”
“But, Mr. David,” Darl said, “there are no crocodiles in Connecticut.”
“Yes there are, if you look hard enough.”
And he turned to Inez. “You’ll have to say good-bye to the kids. If Isaac finds them, I’m all out of ammunition. He’ll ease up on his crocodiles while I have them . . . and you. I might even survive the century.”
She could have scratched his eyes out and raced from this ranch house in the middle of nowhere—her husband would have been in shock for half an hour. She pitied Arno and his stinking tobacco. But where could she go? The crime lords would have found her and sold her back into slavery. And she’d have to live above the Blond Moon with Daniel and Darl. Sooner or later, her own daughter would have to perform tricks.
“David, when will I see them again?”
“That depends on Sidel. I’ll be safe once he drops dead.”
But she couldn’t wish the death of her own big bear, not even for her children’s sake. So difficult as it was, she had to separate herself from Darl.
“Baby,” she whispered, “go with the bad man.”
And she knew that Darl would rebel, would hurl herself away from Inez in her anger.
“Mr. David isn’t bad, Mother. You are.”
And now Daniel started to cry. His sister had confused him, and Daniel was plucked out of his own comfortable dream. He clutched his eyeless bear.
“Mommy, would you send us away with a bad man?”
“Not unless that bad man could save you, darling.”
And now David Pearl began to pick at the patches of his sweater like a raw wound.
“I’m touched,” he said. “I’m melting away with tears. But we have no more time to kill. And if Connecticut gets into my blood, I’m a goner.”
The children went with him, vanished from the house. She didn’t even ask for a kiss. If she had sniffed Daniel’s hair, caught herself in his own sweet sweat, she wouldn’t have had the heart to relinquish him. And now she’d have a little eternity with Arno and the other gunmen. And she could start plotting her escape, even if she had nowhere else to go, and knew her plots would unravel into nothing, just like the old man’s sweater.
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