Free Under the Eye of God by Jerome Charyn

when he was about to give up, she came to the door in an old cashmere bathrobe that must have belonged to Arnold Rothstein’s original lady. Her smile hurt the hell out of Isaac.
    “Mr. Mayor,” she said in that raucous voice he remembered from Cassandra’s Wall. “Did you want to play cops and robbers? Are you here to frisk me? Come in.”
    It was a museum, no matter what David said. The drapes seemed out of another century. There was a photo of AR and Inez on the mantle in Trudy Winckleman’s elongated living room. AR seemed a little coarse in the photo; he didn’t have the beauty that Isaac liked to imagine for him. His mouth was too large, his forehead too broad, his eyes a little too far apart. But Inez had a voluptuous, staggering blondness. She stared out at Isaac like the most brazen of girls. She must have been a handful for AR. Did she flirt with Babe Ruth? Did she conspire with other kept creatures in the building? Flo Ziegfeld had his mistress on one floor, his wife on another. God knows the damage Inez must have done.
    Trudy Winckleman caught him looking at the picture. She was as bold as Inez in her helmet of silver hair.
    “Mr. Mayor, would you like to move in?”
    Suddenly, Isaac began to fumble with his words. “Miss W-w-winckleman,” he muttered.
    “Call me Inez. Everybody does. What did that madman upstairs tell you about me?”
    “Said he snatched you out of a bordello in Detroit. But I didn’t believe him.”
    “Darling, don’t apologize for David. Like everything he says, it’s half true. It was New Orleans, not Detroit. But I didn’t work on my back. Sometimes I wish I had. I was the accountant for a string of very fashionable whorehouses in the Garden District and a single mother with two kids. One of the clients mistook me for a whore—offered me thousands to live with him in New York.”
    “Was it David?”
    “Of course not,” she said. “David never travels. It takes a whole army to deliver him to Wall Street once or twice a year. My new beau was a banker, nowhere as rich as David. With a wife and kids in the suburbs. He paid me more than I could have earned in a year.”
    “But how did you meet David?” Isaac asked, not even sure he wanted to know the truth.
    “In the Ansonia,” she said. “That’s where my banker found an apartment for me. But he was a very tiresome man—jealous and stupid. He stole back all the money he had put in my account. I was left stranded. I couldn’t pay the rent. But I wasn’t thrown out. And that’s when the madman appeared in his flea-bitten sweater. He said I could have an apartment rent-free on the thirteenth floor. And he had a proposition.”
    “He wanted you to play Inez.”
    “Isaac dear, it isn’t easy. I feel like a relic. And David doesn’t even traffic me around. I mingle with his gambler friends, but not as their personal siren. I’m not at their beck and call.”
    “And your two kids?”
    “Both at a private school in Connecticut. The madman pays the bills. I visit them as often as I can. I keep a small apartment near the school. I wouldn’t want them to see me here. I’m not allowed to disturb a picture on the wall.”
    “Then why do you stay?”
    “Habit, I suppose. And laziness. And the power I have over men. I’m an icon. How can I fail? Isaac, be a darling and take me for a stroll.”
    Inez preferred the loneliness of Riverside Park. There were no picnickers or jugglers or panhandlers, just a few old men practicing their golf strokes on the bumpy hills and the secretive men and women who kept their boats in the marina. The trees were all barren in early December; the ground was strewn with dead leaves that had begun to turn into dark red dust. It was Isaac’s favorite time of year, when the park was mostly devoid of people. He and Inez had a long, narrow kingdom to themselves.
    The wind blew right at them, and Isaac draped Inez in the folds of his foul-weather coat. His blood began to heat up at the nearness