Under the Eye of God (19 page)

“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.

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.

I
SAAC 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.