She began singing to herself.
Sidel will save them, Sidel will save them.
But then she recalled that Sidel had never met Darl, had never seen Daniel’s face. She withdrew into her own melancholy, and the gunmen decided that it was best to leave the bitch alone.
Part Seven
25
ISAAC SURVIVED THE JANUARY BLUES. Both houses of Congress convened and certified the election. Isaac and J. Michael were no longer in limbo. The nation had an official president-elect. Michael couldn’t be tampered with. No indictment could get rid of him now. The Democratic National Committee began to crow. Ramona Dazzle had picked out her dress for the inauguration balls, designed by Givenchy. She commuted between Washington and Paris for the fittings. Like Clarice Storm, she began to live on the Concorde. But the papers couldn’t have cared less about either of them.
The Little First Lady was seen on the cover of Vogue in a gown she had fashioned for herself at Isaac’s mansion. The inaugural parade was already mapped out. Isaac would sit with the Little First Lady in the presidential procession. She alone would be Isaac’s escort. She had to have her own press secretary and her own office at Gracie Mansion. She hardly had time for school. Her press secretary was that star clerk, Amanda Wilde. Isaac felt that he had a spy in his own house. But he couldn’t fire Amanda. It would have broken the Little First Lady’s heart.
His face went black around the star clerk. He would capture her in the hallway, on a remote landing. He felt as deformed as Richard III, and just as cunning in his own dark cloud.
“I’ll strangle you,” he said. “No one will weep for you, not even Marianna. I’ll bury you in the garden with my own bare hands. What is David plotting? You were his secretary.”
“And his accountant,” Miranda muttered. “I kept his books. But I haven’t betrayed you—or Marianna. I helped her with the inaugural gown. I picked out the colors.”
“You’re still a star clerk . . . and David’s own Cassandra. What is that wizard betting on? It doesn’t matter now if Michael falls or doesn’t fall. I’ll inherit his mantle. And I’ll make war on that old man.”
“He might welcome a war from you,” Miranda said. “But he doesn’t trust Michael. He never did. Michael is much too greedy.”
He left her there on the landing, like a lonesome dove. And he had a terrible wound in his own gut as he recalled Trudy Winckleman’s words. David doesn’t have to do a thing when he has the president on his side. Dummy that he was, a son of the Loew’s Paradise, with a movie palace’s stars still in his skull, he should have realized that she wasn’t talking about Cottonwood. She was talking about David’s other partner, Michael Storm, the guy who would sacrifice his own fucking daughter to the billions he might make in the Bronx. Isaac would have to destroy Sidereal once and for all. But none of the city’s own lawyers would assist him in the wreckage.
“Your Honor, we have no case.”
Sidereal was wrapped in its own enigma. Besides, he might hurt Marianna, who was one of Sidereal’s officers, together with Michael and Clarice. The city’s lawyers explained everything to him. Michael couldn’t sit on Sidereal once he wore the president’s crown. He’d have to relinquish his holdings in Sidereal and put all his assets into a blind trust. There’s the rub. He’d sell out to the wizard and remain a silent partner. And he’d really cash in once the wild lands and burnt terraces of the Bronx became the biggest fort in the USA.
He couldn’t even run to Ramona Dazzle; she was much too involved with Givenchy to meet with the vice president–elect. Isaac’s own stock had fallen once Congress confirmed Michael as the country’s next king. Tim Seligman was blunt with him.
“Isaac, you should have gotten rid of Michael when you had the chance. America can’t have more than one king at a time. It’s much too confusing.”
The DNC had stopped answering his calls. It was ensconced with Michael at the Waldorf. That’s how it was with presidential politics. The vice president was always a pariah. He would have to sulk within the walls of his own mansion at the Naval Observatory. Minutes from the White House, on a lovely hill near Rock Creek, Isaac’s new dwelling was an eternity away from the White House. He would have his own office in the West Wing, with his own staff, but Isaac knew that his staff and Michael’s would never meet. He’d have to take advantage of his last few moments as mayor of Manhattan and the Bronx.
He’d never been so ostracized, so alone. He couldn’t rely on anyone but an invalid, his son-in-law, Joey, who’d been knocked on the head. But Joey had disappeared from his hospital room. And just as Isaac began to brood, his son-in-law found him. Barbarossa had a whole racial salad in his bones. He was descended from the Pierced Noses, or Nez Percé, an Indian tribe known for its chivalry—it never harmed a single prisoner. Barbarossa also had a pinch of African blood in his veins. Every single cop at the NYPD was afraid of Vietnam Joe.
“Joey,” Isaac said, “we have to go to the guns.”
“Dad, we have no guns.”
“But they’re gonna steal the Bronx from us and turn it into some huge tent for the military. It has its own landlord—David Pearl.”
“Dad, who the fuck is he?”
“Arnold Rothstein’s ghost.”
Isaac groaned as he said it. AR wouldn’t have plundered an entire borough, wouldn’t have sent an army of arsonists into the streets. And AR had protected his Inez, and wouldn’t have banished her to Connecticut.
“And this ghost has gone to his own gunsels. They’ve been rounding up people left in the dunes and hurling them into huts on the far side of the Bronx River.”
“Dad, the Bronx doesn’t have a real river—it’s just a stream to piss in. But I have a solution. Rondo Raines.”
Raines presided at the Abyssinian Baptist Church on Webster Avenue—a rogue minister who had fought firebugs and federal marshals from the smoldering ruins of his church. Rondo was making his own last stand in the Bronx. He’d been in and out of Riker’s during the past six months. But Isaac had never bothered to learn Rondo’s pedigree.
He hadn’t always been the minister of a black church in the Bronx. He was once a marine chaplain in Nam who supplied dope to his “parishioners.” The dope kept these men sane and alive. He was also the one and only black Crusader in Nam. He’d grown up in Colorado County, Texas, as the thirteenth son of a sharecropper. His folks had tilled the same soil for generations, had been the grandsons of slaves. He’d attended a black seminary in East Texas and had gone right from the seminary to Saigon. He’d moved to the Bronx after the war as minister of a church in the Bronx that no one else wanted. Its earlier ministers had met with some fatality after six months or so. He was the longest-surviving minister that the church on Webster had ever had.
It took half the day for Joey and Isaac to find him. Rondo Raines had become the Bronx’s vanishing Zapata—he ran from dune to dune, helping people hide from David’s bloodhounds and taking a stand whenever he could. Joe had tracked him to the church’s bombed-out basement. He wasn’t wearing any clerical garb. He couldn’t travel very far in a maroon robe. He wore a tattered military tunic and a pair of Old Gringo boots with hammered silver down its sides. He wasn’t very tall. He was a slight, delicate man with a goatee.
He was pleased as the devil to see Joe, but he eyed the mayor and vice president–elect with suspicion.
“Joey, I forgive you for your father-in-law, but why did you have to bring such a godless man into the House of the Lord?”
“He wants to help you,” Barbarossa said.
“Help me? Politicians only help themselves.”
Barbarossa muttered something, but Isaac interrupted him.
“Jesus, Joey, will you let me get in a word?”
Rondo rose up from the floor of the basement and walloped Isaac on the jaw with one knuckle. The Big Guy landed on his ass, in the dust of this disemboweled church. Surely he could trust a man who socked him like that.
“Sidel, if you ever dishonor the Lord
’s Only Son again, I’ll give you a hernia inside your head.”
“Joey,” Isaac sang, “who is this guy? I love him.”
“Mr. Mayor, I’d be much happier if you loved me a little less.”
And Isaac told him his plan—to catch David Pearl’s private sheriffs in the badlands of the Bronx and shoot the shit out of them.
Rondo Raines was bewildered. “And you can protect me from the law? Sidel, you are the law.”
“Not when I’m in the Bronx,” Isaac said. “Then I’m the meanest motherfucker around.”
“Hey, dog, what if I don’t believe you? I start shootin’, I go right to jail.”
“And I’ll sit in the same cell with you,” Isaac said. “Me and Joe.”
“But they’re firebugs. They got fuckin’ flamethrowers.”
“Then we’ll have to put out their flames.”
* * *
David’s sheriffs arrived in the dunes in their own armored car. They’d come to chase out the inhabitants of the last building that stood on Hoe Avenue and 172nd. It was a six-story tenement of burnished brick that still housed the Nuyoricans of Southern Boulevard and the South Bronx. It was a neighborhood that had no protection, not even from dope dealers. These were the last cave dwellers in the Bronx. The cops wouldn’t patrol streets of rubble; there was neither electricity nor gas, and you couldn’t hear the sound of a single telephone.
Still, the sheriffs arrived in the middle of the night with their flamethrowers and their little packets of cash. They called up to the windows.
“Muchachos, we don’t mean any harm. We have a cash incentive. Three hundred dollars and a new home with a fridge that spits out ice. We’ll give you half a minute to decide.”
A voice sang to them from a certain window. “Hey, dog, I’ll be right down.”
These sheriffs didn’t like the sound of it. They’d dealt with Rondo Raines before, but he’d never serenaded them from a window. It was always hit-and-run with Rondo Raines.
He waltzed right out of the building in his Old Gringo boots. He didn’t seem to have his pair of sawed-off shotguns that he carried around like pirate pistols. They meant to murder him. And they even saw that wacko Sidel, who was in love with Mr. David’s whore. Well, they’d murder him, too. And then Barbarossa appeared on their blind side. Vietnam Joe. And they didn’t even have a chance to turn him into a tar baby with their flamethrower. It was these maniacs who shot first—didn’t ask for a truce. It wasn’t fair. There’d never been the least element of danger in their rides into the Bronx.
Rondo pulled pirate pistols out of his sleeves. But it wasn’t like a gunfight in the Wild West where bullets went astray, pistols exploded, and it was hard as hell to shoot a man. This was the Wild, Wild East. And when the dust cleared, all five sheriffs lay dead, slumped against the cracked windows of their armored car.
26
ISAAC HELD A PRESS CONFERENCE right in the dunes, at the very scene of the crime. Not a hair had been touched. Reporters arrived from all over the planet. How many vice president–elects had ever been involved in a firefight? The media dubbed it O.K. Corral in the Bronx. The French and Germans had their own television crews. The Japanese had a little army of cameramen. All the networks were there.
Isaac stood near Barbarossa and Rondo Raines and held up the flamethrower. “These were murderers,” he said. “As brutal as they come. They meant to burn up the building and us with it. Folks, we had to defend ourselves.”
The coronation was a week away, and no one talked of Michael and Clarice, or cared if she brought her own bodyguard, Bernardo, into the White House. Even the Inquirer wasn’t interested in Bernardo Dublin. It was all Isaac Sidel. Democratic voters began to grumble that their ticket was topsy-turvy. Sidel had the gravitas, not J. Michael Storm. And Sidel had the Glock.
Suddenly, Ramona Dazzle wasn’t so interested in her inauguration gown. She wanted to sit down with Sidel. He ducked her and the DNC. He would meet with no one but his son-in-law and that rogue minister from the dunes of the Bronx. Reporters were eager to learn what role Rondo Raines would have on Isaac’s team.
“I have no team,” Isaac said. “Rondo is my whittle mate.”
Reporters scratched their heads. “Whittle mate?”
“Yeah, dog, we’ll sit under a tree at the Naval Observatory and whittle wooden ducks. What else does a vice president have to do?”
Finally, it was his own daughter, Marilyn, who had to ride right under the radar and shake him out of his stubborn sleep.
“Father dear, you’ll have to name a chief of staff.”
“What for?” he growled
She was the only one who could cuff him on the ear and get away with it.
“Because that’s what vice presidents do while they’re whittling wooden ducks. They have a chief of staff.”
There was only one possible candidate, a reclusive film teacher at the New School, where Marilyn had registered for an occasional course. Her name was Brenda Brown. She’d been chief of production at Paramount Pictures before she was twenty-five and was considered the girl wonder of Hollywood. She’d had a liaison with one of Paramount’s star actresses, but the actress shot herself in Brenda’s Malibu mansion, after a lover’s quarrel, and Brenda quickly fell from grace. She was locked out of her office at Paramount. Agents wouldn’t answer her calls. She fled her own mansion and moved to a house in Greenwich Village where Edna St. Vincent Millay had once lived.
A little before the election, Isaac had accidentally bumped into her while he was giving a lecture at the New School. She was a short, dumpy woman who wouldn’t wear makeup; she had long eyelashes and was beautiful in spite of her fleshy face. She’d spent half an hour telling him what a lousy mayor he was. Isaac adored her critique. She wouldn’t pander to the Big Guy.
“Mr. Mayor,” she had told him, “think of the city as one colossal film production company. And how can you run it if you can’t delegate power? You’re marvelous for publicity—the mayor with a gun. But you can’t Glock every problem out of existence.”
Brenda and Marilyn knew how to bust his balls. But the Big Guy had a problem. He might fancy himself as Richard III, who had the will to woo queens and princes, but he wasn’t sure whether he could woo Brenda out of her hermit’s life. He met with her at Gracie and started to stutter.
He wanted to tell her about the Queen Anne chairs at 1 Naval Observatory Circle, how she would have to take charge of the furnishings and the staff.
“I’m not into decor,” she said. “And that’s the least of your problems. But you have to decide what to do with Michael. When should we get rid of him? After the inauguration—or before? But he has to go. We can’t let a prick like that have so much power. Americans will suffer from his mistakes . . . and his greed.”
But Isaac stalled, couldn’t seem to make up his mind. And then Michael began to reveal the heart of his new administration. The president-elect wanted a “unity cabinet.” Sumner Mars would remain as secretary of defense. The new man at Treasury was a heartless son of a bitch who’d had dealings with Sidereal. A dark pulse beat above Isaac’s left eye. Brenda worried that her boss was having a stroke. Isaac did see blood. He looked like a madman in this own mirror.
“We have to get rid of Michael right away.”
“Listen, dog,” Rondo said. “We can’t use a flamethrower on him. It’s illegal.”
But Brenda understood all the mental machinery of her new boss. She went into her files and found the name of a PI who had worked for her at Paramount. The PI was considered a miracle man. Within two days, a story broke on all the wire services that J. Michael Storm, president-elect, had a love child. The mother of the child produced scabrous photos of J. and herself. She appeared on a local TV show in Denver—the narrative bounced from network to network. Ramona Dazzle and the DNC couldn’t even shield Michael. It was a little too late for damage control. The DNC called her a harlot who had taken advantage of the president-elect right before his coronation ball, but h
e began to look more and more like a serial seducer and a heartless man. It was the Little First Lady who delivered the coup de grâce. “I’d love to say hello to my half brother,” she purred in front of the cameras. She must have known what folly it would have been to have her dad in the White House. She had the makings of a killer politician and a movie star.
Michael held on for two days, and then he had to run for the hills. Ninety percent of the populace declared that he wasn’t fit to be president. He didn’t even hold a press conference. He scribbled a letter of resignation to the DNC. Clarice had a nervous breakdown and called Marianna a witch. Tim Seligman and Ramona Dazzle hiked up to Gracie Mansion. Their faces had a bitter white color as they saw their own leverage slip.
“We’re not crazy about Brenda Brown,” Tim said. “She’s much too controversial. She’ll hurt the Democrats.”
“Well, dog,” Isaac said, “then tell me who should be my chief of staff?”
“Ramona. She’s a perfect fit. She can fend off the Republicans when they try to attack.”
“Timmy,” Isaac said, “you’re a sweetheart.”
He left them stranded at Gracie and rode up to the badlands with Rondo and Brenda Brown. He stood in the rubble on Hoe Avenue, next to the building that had nearly burnt down. He waited for fifteen minutes, while the reporters and camera crews began to appear in the wind and dust. He stared into the merciless eye of each camera, the Glock sticking out of his pants. He was mayor and sheriff and the new president-elect.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “these streets are mine, and whoever would steal them from me will pay a bitter price. But I’m still not satisfied. I’ve seen some of the same streets in Texas, in Illinois, in South Carolina, the same hunger, the same sad eyes, and I mean to do something about it. I’ll build satellite schools wherever mayors and governors will let me in. The Little First Lady went to one of these satellites. She welcomed the mean streets. And I intend to have many more Merliners like Marianna once I’m in the White House.”
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