Under the Eye of God (20 page)

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.

I
SAAC 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 he 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.”

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.

B
RENDA 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.