Under the Eye of God

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Authors: Jerome Charyn
Davey? You should have warned me that I was going on a death march in the park.”
    “And if I’d warned you?” David Pearl asked like some menacing beggar boy.
    “I would have taken him into some hollow and kissed him for half an hour . . . to warm him up for the kill.”
    He started to cackle. She pulled his ears, and he really was a beggar boy, Inez’s beggar boy.
    “Davey, if you come downstairs again without knocking on Inez’s door, I’ll take your whole head into my mouth and you’ll never get it back.”
    He shuddered with terror and delight.
    “You’ll woo the big dope, but my way.”
    And he paddled out of the museum in his slippers.

PART THREE

10
    T HE DEMOCRATS WERE FRIGHTENED TO death of leaks. A phantom shooter in Riverside Park? The vice president–elect with a mystery woman who was connected to Arnold Rothstein’s own phantom lady? It was too much for Tim Seligman to bear. Isaac couldn’t be seen in public with this bitch in a silver helmet, not until Michael’s coronation. Meanwhile the owner of the Mossberg Mountaineer was tracked to a hunting lodge in Montana. The deer slayer had been reported stolen a month ago. The owner himself was a registered Democrat who had voted for Storm-Sidel. He couldn’t have been the phantom shooter. He was at his hunting lodge on the day the shooter had stalked Sidel.
    There wasn’t a word about it in the press. But Michael himself wasn’t so lucky. Another one of his mistresses had surfaced with her own tattletale in the National Enquirer . Democrats called her a Republican plant . . . and a slut.
    Meanwhile Isaac busied himself. He’d been an absentee mayor for months, but his aides ran City Hall without him. He went into Manhattan’s deeds and records with his property clerk and discovered that the Inez Corporation and its affiliates owned more buildings and lofts in Manhattan than Columbia University and the Catholic Church. But David hadn’t lied to him. Inez never sold a piece of property. It held whatever it had. And its properties wove from the tip of Manhattan to the edge of Spuyten Duyvil Creek. The little wizard had to be wealthier than John Jacob Astor, Manhattan’s first real estate baron. And still he sat in the Ansonia, like some forgotten man.
    Was it AR himself who had sent him on a quest to buy up as much of Manhattan as he could? The Inez Corporation owned entire blocks. It had secret fiefdoms in Fort George and Washington Heights. But Isaac still wasn’t satisfied. He ventured into the Bronx with his Secret Service man, looked down upon the ruins from that same hill in Claremont Park where he had spotted the army engineers. And he had his own sudden illumination. There was a certain symmetry to the widening swaths of waste. The torchings that helped break the Bronx weren’t as random as they seemed. Isaac could have been looking down into the gigantic bowl of God’s own football field.
    And while he pondered in Claremont Park, Bull Latham arrived without his usual contingent of FBI men. He’d strayed far from his habitual watering hole in Manhattan, the Bull & Bear, a stockbroker’s bar and restaurant within the Waldorf. He wore a Siberian coat of white fur with all the elegance and grace of a movie star.
    “Mr. Mayor,” he said. “I’m not here. You’ve never seen me.”
    “I know,” Isaac said with the same complicity. “You’re at the Bull and Bear . . . and I’ll pay particular attention to what you never told me.”
    “Exactly,” the Bull said, while Isaac motioned for Martin Boyle to move out of earshot and he turned off his own button mike. Only God or the devil could have listened in.
    “Bull, there’s a pattern out there in that heart of darkness down the hill.”
    “Mr. Mayor, I’ve been thinking much the same thing. . . . It’s like driving Indians off the reservation.”
    “And then putting up a new reservation without the Indians.”
    “Think Pentagon,” Bull said. “That’s what this land grab

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