Under the Eye of God (12 page)

“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.

“
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.

I
T 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 crazies, 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?”