Free Under the Eye of God by Jerome Charyn Page A

of her. He was already unfaithful to Margaret Tolstoy, who lay near the Cloisters, her mind half gone. Why was he always running after some femme fatale?
    He was the knight-protector of fallen ladies. Inez shivered under Isaac’s rough material.
    “Darling,” she whispered, “you’d better watch out. David is betting that you won’t live very long.”
    “Ah,” Isaac said, “he’s my mentor.” His knees were shaking, and it had nothing to do with the wizard on the seventeenth floor. He wasn’t thinking of politics, or of Marianna’s sea-green eyes. He had a vision of that bleak landscape near the Cross Bronx Express, the gutted buildings, mile after mile of debris, and he remembered how comfortable he was amid all the rubble. It was home to him. And Inez could have risen out of that rubble.
    They kissed. Her tongue tasted of almonds. It was sweeter than his own life. He was already devoted to this gorgeous masque, who had to hide within another woman’s history, live among her expensive ruins. But something had startled her. She broke from Isaac’s embrace.
    He turned around, looked into the barren trees. Martin Boyle was standing there, clutching a Mossberg Mountaineer with a sniper scope.
    “Jesus, did you have to follow me into the park with a fucking deer rifle?”
    “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I was following whoever followed you.”
    “What are you talking about? Can’t you see? I’m with Inez.”
    Boyle tried not to glimpse at Inez’s helmet of hair.
    “Sir, the shooter was standing behind a tree. . . . Your brains would have been scattered in another minute.”
    “Enough,” Isaac said. “Where is this shooter of yours?”
    “He got away. I couldn’t track him. I thought . . . ”
    “And he left his calling card. A Mossberg Mountaineer.”
    Inez was much more civil than the Big Guy. She shook Boyle’s hand, thanked him for saving Isaac’s life. Boyle had been bitten by her, too. He blushed when she slid her hand out of his. Isaac wondered to himself—two Adams and their Eve.
    They walked out of the park together, while Isaac’s Secret Service man still held that deer slayer in his arms.
    * * *
    She had to get rid of Isaac. Inez, or whoever she was that afternoon, feigned a headache. She kissed him between the eyes, as if she were aiming some bullet, and ran upstairs to her retreat on the thirteenth floor. Why did she always have to get involved with desperados? No one had to whisper in her ear that Isaac was a doomed man. She’d have to get out of Manhattan. She wasn’t going to be David Pearl’s Cassandra. But she didn’t have any of her clothes in this rotten tomb with windows. Trudy Winckleman was the phantom, not Inez—Inez had a bureau, photographs on the wall, boas from the Ziegfeld Follies, satin panties, and the sheerest gowns in the world.
    She puffed on a cigarette from one of Inez’s pearl and silver holders. She didn’t have to wait very long. The old man had come downstairs in the velvet slippers of a billionaire who was loathe to leave his labyrinth.
    “Fuck you,” she said. “And fuck all your plans. I’m not staying.”
    He started to shiver. She knew that the first Inez had often blown her fuse. And no one could contain her, not Arnold Rothstein or David Pearl.
    “Davey,” she cooed, because that’s what the other Inez had called him. “What if I fall in love with the big dope?”
    “Ah, that would be a pity,” said the billionaire—she’d heard the rumor that he owned more real estate than the Rockefellers, that his holdings could dwarf any empire.
    “Isaac’s lovable, but you’d better hold the line.”
    “And what if I can’t? He’s wooing me, for Christ’s sake.”
    “A lot of men have tried to woo you, and they haven’t gotten into your pants.”
    “And what if I wanted to let him into Inez’s pants? Because I don’t have a single pair of my own.”
    “That would be a catastrophe.”
    “Were you really going to shoot his head off,