Isaac’s numbers leapt over the moon. Republicans adored him as much as the Democrats did. He had seventy-nine dollars in the bank. The Big Guy wouldn’t need a blind trust. There was nothing to relinquish, nothing to hide. The country saw the dark blood beat over his temples and loved his brooding, his gravitas. It was ready to give him anything, even the Bronx.
27
BRENDA BROWN WAS LIKE A miraculous juggler who had all the details in her head. Isaac didn’t have to meet with a living soul. She knew that he wanted Bull Latham as his VP.
“You won’t announce until after the inauguration,” she said.
“Why not?” he growled. “Brenda, don’t mix in.”
“Because we don’t want to give him his moment of glory. We’ll keep him in the background, like a common shill. He’ll be naked without the FBI. We’ll bury him and pick a new director.”
And that’s how his days went. Brenda was his quarterback and she tossed nothing but bullets. Isaac remained in seclusion at his mansion. He lived on a diet of butternut cookies. He’d shut down his offices at the Ansonia. He had little reason to go there now that AR’s museum was gone. He brooded over his silver-hatted Inez and her children. But he’d promised not to interfere in her life. His cop’s intuition told him to free Inez and shoot the shit out of Mr. David’s men. But he kept to his promise.
And then Inez called. Somehow she had his private line at Gracie Mansion. Isaac whimpered at the sound of her voice. He would have followed her to Mars.
“My big darling baby,” she said. But she wasn’t cooing. He could hear her tremble—he was listening very, very hard.
“Inez,” he said with a thickened throat. “Can I see you?”
There was a pause, and then she told him, “Why not?”
“Just tell me where? We can go back to New Orleans if you want. I’ll skip my own inauguration.”
She laughed, but something was wrong.
“Darling, you know where I am.”
“In Connecticut?” he asked like a bad little boy.
“Isaac, be careful. Someone very near is going to betray you. That’s why I called.”
“Did David tell you that?”
“I have my own little secrets,” she said and hung up on Sidel. He couldn’t even trace the call.
He kept brooding over possible betrayers. Could it be his son-in-law? Joe hadn’t shopped drugs in a very long time. He’d gone into battle with the Big Guy, had taken an arrow in the chest. And Joey wasn’t even interested in gelt. Was it the black Crusader? Isaac trusted Rondo Raines with his life. Rondo was the last holy man in the Bronx. Could it have been the Paramount lady, Brenda Brown? She ran from Hollywood, and she wouldn’t have run into David Pearl’s arms.
He began to pace up and down the stairs. Was it Marianna Storm? There was too much character in her butternut cookies. And what about Marilyn? Was his daughter getting even for Blue Eyes? She might have shunned Isaac, chastised him, but she wouldn’t have harmed her own blood. And then the answer came with his cop’s intuition. Inez was talking about herself. She was the betrayer, and she was warning the Big Guy. He groaned, because he knew that he would never see her again.
* * *
Isaac sulked. He wasn’t resolute like Richard, blessed with a magical hump on his back. He was Hamlet’s second cousin, a murderer who waited much too long. After another day of sulking, he went to his guns; he only had two—Joe Barbarossa and Rondo. He would mount a raid on Connecticut, rescue whatever was left of Inez. He didn’t trust the Secret Service, not while Calder was still Prez. And he didn’t trust Bull Latham’s boys at the Bureau. He had to steal a whole squad of detectives from Manhattan North. It was his very own kind of vandalism. But he would be commander in chief in a couple of days. And who would have dared argue with an uncrowned king?
And just as he was about to ride up to Waterbury in his own wagon train, the Bull arrived out of nowhere. All his swagger was gone. He didn’t have that look of a linebacker. He was as sad as Isaac Sidel.
“You found her, didn’t you?” Isaac muttered.
“Outside Waterbury, at the edge of the road. A car had swiped her. . . . She wasn’t even wearing any shoes.”
“She must have been trying to escape from the wizard. Did she suffer a lot?”
The Bull was shivering now. “Mr. President, how the fuck would I know?”
“Can I see her?”
“I wouldn’t. It’s not a pretty sight.”
“Can I see her?”
“Jesus Christ, they marked her all up,” the Bull said in a cracked voice. “And they left her there in the cold.”
“Her children,” Isaac said. “We have to save her children.”
“We sent them to her mother, in New Orleans.”
“I could adopt them,” Isaac said, like some cavalier.
“Absolutely,” the Bull said. “Just like you adopted Inez.”
And he fell upon Isaac, grabbed him around the ears. Isaac’s Secret Service men were appalled. No one had ever wrestled with the director of the FBI. They rolled along the carpets of Gracie Mansion, knocked down tables and lamps. It was Isaac’s chief of staff who kept a clear head.
“They’re bonding,” Brenda whispered to his aides. “The Prez and his VP.”
Isaac’s Glock fell out of his pants. It was the Bull who reached for it first. The Secret Service men mumbled into their button mikes. “The Citizen is down, the Citizen is down . . . possible casualty.”
They stood frozen, without the least panache, as Bull Latham shoved the weapon back into Isaac’s pants. “Mr. President, come with me.”
They walked out of Gracie Mansion, a couple of sad sacks in ruffled coats.
A black van suddenly appeared in the driveway; Isaac figured it was one of the Bureau’s sound trucks. Bull Latham opened the rear door.
“Hop in.”
But the Big Guy seemed hesitant, and Latham shook his head. “You have my word, Mr. President. It won’t bite. It’s a temporary morgue. Come on, before the coroner gets here.”
Isaac climbed into the van. His knees fell out from under him, and he swayed against the walls of the van. Fucking FBI. It was a morgue. His own dead darling was on a metal table, bundled in a white sheet. Some mother had already undressed her. But Isaac didn’t undo the bundle. He wasn’t a voyeur. There were bruises on her face, dried blood and bits of dirt under her eyes, so that the blood was like some beguiling mask in the dark of the truck. Her silver hair was all messed up. He’d never realized how small her hands were. Inez had the hands of a little girl.
He held her in his arms, wept like a wild man, while he fondled the dirt on her face. No one interrupted his grieving. No one knocked on the door of the van. He sat in there for six hours.
“Ah,” he cried. “I should have taken care of you. Would AR have abandoned his Inez like that? Not in a million years.”
28
THEY FOUND HIM. HE’D BEEN wandering in the woods with blood and filth on his face—Inez’s errant “husband,” Arno, the gunman without a gun. He’d been muttering to himself, and the agents who captured him had recorded what he said. Tell the fuckin’ Big Guy it wasn’t my fault. The Bull had him sequestered inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a holding pen for federal prisoners, male and female, in Lower Manhattan; it was a behemoth where the Bull could hide some bad guy who had never been charged. What the hell did they have on this demented wolf from Texas?
Had he murdered Trudy Winckleman? Only this stinking wolf knew. And the wolf wouldn’t say a word.
David couldn’t rescue him, because David didn’t know where the hell he was. And the Bull was keeping the gunman as a gift for Isaac Sidel. The Bull had to show what he was worth, or Isaac would cast him aside and pick another VP. So he hid Arno, a.k.a the Waco Kid, in the FBI’s own legal room and library deep in the bowels of the MCC—this library had a steel door three inches thick and didn’t even possess a table, a book, or a chair.
Isaac rejoiced when
the Bull told him that Arno had been apprehended. No one would interfere. The gunman was one more “ghost” in the Bull’s personal files. Isaac could do whatever he wanted. But Arno’s personal plea bothered him. Tell the fuckin’ Big Guy it wasn’t my fault.
He went into the bowels of the MCC. Clerks and correction officers stared at him. They were in awe of a policeman-president. There had never been anyone quite like Sidel. He wasn’t unfriendly or wanton with them. He was just obsessed. It took three clerks to unlock the library door. Arno sat in the dark like the wolf he was. The Big Guy could barely see his face.
“Jesus,” Isaac said, “will you get him some water? And give me some fucking light!”
He could have been the voice of God. The fluorescent lamp in the ceiling suddenly began to sizzle—and Arno’s face was lit up like an enormous macaroon. The Bull must have pummeled Arno himself. Both his cheeks were swollen, and his eyes had vanished between several lumps of skin. A clerk came into the library with two gigantic jugs of water. Isaac handed Arno one of the jugs. They could have been drinking moonshine together.
“Well,” Isaac growled, “I’m here. What did you want to discuss?”
Arno still sat scrunched in the corner, shielding himself with his own arms. He began to sob, and the sound of it was terrifying. He could have been a wounded animal.
“Don’t kill me,” Arno said, his shoulders heaving up and down.
“Jesus, would I glock you in the Bureau’s own recreational center? Tell me what happened with Inez.”
“Ef I tell ya, swear it won’t be the end of Waco.”
“What happened to Inez?”
It was hard to comprehend this crazy man, but Isaac had to crack into him like a codebook. Inez kept talking about her chilrun, he said, chilrun Isaac had never met. And she talked about the Big Guy. She was worried about him, worried that he wouldn’t survive David’s tricks. That was part of the conundrum. David wanted him alive and didn’t want him alive. His gunmen were very confused. Would they get a reward for waxing Isaac, or a hole in the head? And their confusion leapt like wildfire to Inez. Was she a princess or their personal kitchen maid? But they sensed her weakness—the chilrun.
“Mr. Isaac, I swear on the Lawd’s name, I only kissed her once.”
Isaac was ready to pummel him now, but he didn’t. He gulped that water in the whiskey jug.
It seems Arno had found a way to smuggle in the chilrun, but he wanted more than kisses.
“She had to show her titties and her blackberry bush. That ain’t askin’ much.”
Isaac lost his control for a second and crowned him with the jug. And Arno couldn’t stop crying. She tried to fool them, he said. Inez pretended to drink their whiskey, and when they caught her pretending, they kicked her and dragged her around the room. But they couldn’t do much damage. They were as cockeyed as Irish fiddlers at a fiddlers’ ball. And Inez ran out onto the road.
“But where to hell was she goin’, Mr. Isaac? Her chilrun were in Mr. David’s pocket somewheres, hundreds of miles from Waterbury. Was she tryin’ to whistle her way to you? It was dark and lonely on a lonely road. We didn’t run her down. We was too sick to drive.”
Arno drifted in his own silent world, but Isaac wouldn’t let him fall into a mindless funk.
“Tell me about the girl, her little girl.”
“Darl?” the gunman said. “I only saw her once or twice. She had the cutest look. And if you shut your eyes, Mr. Isaac, you’d swear it was her mother, the Princess Inez. But the princess, she slapped us ef we started to stare.”
Isaac walked out of the library and left Arno in the bowels of the MCC. He wouldn’t have wept if the gunman remained invisible for the rest of his life. He’d have to grieve for Inez without the Waco Kid.
Isaac imagined her out on the road, in that Waterbury midnight, half-crazed, worrying that she might never see her kids again. He had witnessed the bruises on her face. The gunmen must have battered her during their own drunken stupor. The real assassin was David Pearl, not the car that broke her bones. . . .
The Big Guy couldn’t have his seven days of mourning, or he would have missed his own coronation. Isaac was in no mood to become a king. And he had much more important business than a ride down Pennsylvania Avenue at the front of a parade. There wasn’t much evidence against the wizard; no one couldn’t tie him to Inez’s death. He’d always given his orders from afar, like some Fu Manchu.
Isaac would have gone to David’s roost all alone, or with his pair of Crusaders, Barbarossa and Rondo Raines. But Bull Latham had to protect Sidel. Besides, he didn’t want to miss all the fun. So he decided to “flake” the wizard; he manufactured a couple of charges, called David a public menace who wanted to murder the president-elect, which wasn’t so untrue, and he had a federal judge in Lower Manhattan issue a warrant. Who would have dared question the director of the Bureau?
It was all done in secret, but with the Bull’s usual flair. Didn’t he have jurisdiction over each nook and cranny in the United States? He could have deputized Sidel, made him some sort of federal marshal, but it would have been beneath Isaac’s dignity. And he wouldn’t supersede a mayor in his own town. So Isaac appeared as himself, a future president and king who was assisting in the arrest of a notoriously elusive king of crime.
It wasn’t much of a task force: Isaac, Rondo, Joey, and the Bull, with a few of his agents and a battering ram. But Isaac didn’t want a ruckus at the Ansonia. He wouldn’t hurt a landmark that was listed in the National Registry. And he loved every stone.
He saluted the concierge, who asked him and the Bull for their autographs.
“Later,” Isaac said. “Can’t you see? We’re busy. You’ll stop the show.”
They wouldn’t take the elevator. They couldn’t be sure how much firepower would greet them once the elevator opened on the seventeenth floor. So they climbed the Ansonia’s magnificent stairs like a bunch of crusaders. But Isaac was riven by his own memories. He marveled at the enormous windows on the landings midway between every floor, as the light blazed down upon them. They were all dizzy by the time they reached the tenth floor. The Bull began to cough into his fist.
“Mr. President, we’ll be lame if we have to climb another seven flights.”
“Move your butt,” Isaac rasped. “I don’t want any surprises at the top of the stairs.”
And so they plodded on with their battering ram and arrived on the seventeenth floor, after coughing their brains out. The echo of their own sound and fury should have alerted David’s gunsels, but there were no gunsels on the landing. They didn’t even have to use the battering ram. David’s door was open. All his gunsels had abandoned him; they must have heard about the phony warrant and decided to save their own skin; the wizard’s wealth of cash couldn’t have kept them out of jail, not with Isaac and the FBI.
They knew how vindictive Bull Latham could be; the Bull was a bigger ball-breaker than Sidel.
David sat under the low ceilings in his slippers and tattered sweater. His apartment looked like an endless dollhouse. He wouldn’t even acknowledge Bull.
“Kiddo,” he said to Sidel. “I knew you would come for me. I’m sorry about your loss. I was fond of that bitch.”
“Shut up,” Isaac said, “before I bite your fucking head off.”
“Isaac, Isaac,” David said, wagging his own head of white hair. “How long do you think you can hold me? I’ll have a whole battery of lawyers at the MCC before we get there.”
The wizard was much too notorious to be stashed away in an underground dungeon with that gunsel of his, the Waco Kid. David Pearl had too many “gonnegtions.” But he should have realized that Bull Latham was also a wizard.
“Sweetheart, we’re not going to the MCC.”
The wizard’s face froze with panic. “I can’t sit in the dark. I’ll die. . . . Isaac, I’ve bribed Bull Latham. I’ve given him pocket money.”
“So what?” Isaac said. “Nobody’s perfect. All that matters is where
you are right now.”
* * *
Isaac never even asked the Bull about their destination. Their little wagon train rode right into the Bronx. At first, Isaac thought they were going to bury David somewhere in the dunes. Under Robert Moses’ highway. That would have been a just reward. The wizard could have had the whole Reservation for himself, all the bitter ground, with every mote of dust from the buildings he had ruined. But their wagon train went right over the badlands and bumped onto Fort Schuyler Road. They’d come to the edge of the world, according to the Bronx. It was land’s end, with its own lighthouse and little fort at Throgs Point, which jutted into Long Island Sound.
Isaac loved the fury of the sea. He would have swum to China, if he hadn’t been preoccupied with the wizard. He had to sing his mourner’s song out on the road. The lighthouse was under repair, and its roving yellow eye had been plucked right out of its skull. It stood like some Samson Agonistes in the mist. The fort had been built after the War of 1812, in the hope of expelling the British or any other invader. Its guns would forever protect the Bronx from any naval attack. It held five hundred Confederate prisoners during the Civil War and deserters from the Union army. It became defunct as a fort around 1910 and was soon converted into a maritime college. But the old fort was also in disrepair; many of its stones had fallen into the sea; its gun turrets were like ragged, useless sockets; its roofs leaked. It was under six feet of water half the year. The maritime college had moved momentarily across the creek to Locust Point. And the fort was turned into a secret brig.
Isaac didn’t like the whole fucking setup. It smelled of fascism, of military maneuvers in his own town. Someone should have told him that this old fort had a new landlord—Bull Latham’s Bureau. But he didn’t argue. The wind blew against Isaac’s beleaguered bones as he stepped out of Latham’s van with the wizard. David Pearl was shivering in his tattered clothes; one of his slippers had come off. The wizard had no socks. Isaac saw a naked foot, as bleached and dry as an old skeleton. He had to prosecute such a pathetic case. But then he recalled Inez’s body in the Bull’s makeshift morgue.
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