Under the Eye of God by Jerome Charyn

Author:Jerome Charyn [Charyn, Jerome]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Hard-Boiled, Mystery & Crime, Detective
ISBN: 9781453266991
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2012-08-30T17:49:00+00:00

15

IT WAS AN ELABORATE GAME of hide-and-seek, romance in the middle of a war maneuver. She’d run from him and he’d find her. Or she would find him. Isaac didn’t care how prominent he’d become. He would have loved to squire his dark lady of New Orleans around town. But she was frightened of losing her children. If her picture appeared in all the papers with or without Isaac, her past might pop out, and some government agency would call her an unfit mother. So the dark lady met Isaac in the dark. They’d tiptoe into a movie house after the feature started, or find a whacked-out Cantonese restaurant at the border of Chinatown where Isaac Sidel was just another name. He was almost content in his delirium over Inez. He would drink in the musk of her body, fondle her knee while they had tofu and spinach with garlic sauce.

But they had no real venue of their own. She couldn’t spend the night with him at his mansion, no matter how secretive he was—they would have woken to the noise of reporters on the lawn. He couldn’t stay with her in that mausoleum on the thirteenth floor. It would have been like undressing in front of David Pearl and Arnold Rothstein’s ghost. So they camped out at Isaac’s headquarters. And no matter what their passion, and their hunger to touch, she’d wake up in the middle of the night and return to her mausoleum.

His dark lady began to develop deep furrows in her brow. She’d pour sugar into her wine at the Cantonese restaurant. “Isaac, I can’t sneak around. That old man will steal my babies. I’ll never see them again.”

“I’ll steal them back.”

The furrows deepened. “Stay out of this, darling, you have to leave me alone.”

“And if I can’t.”

“Then both of us will suffer.”

“But we could run away with your kids. I don’t care. The Democrats can find another vice president.”

“Shut up,” she said. “I’m running away every time I’m with you. . . . Don’t you dare follow me, Isaac, or I’ll scratch your eyes out.”

“Scratch,” he said. “You might pity a blind man.”

She got up from the table in that ruinous restaurant, had her last gulp of sugared wine, and said, “I’m the one you ought to pity.”

She ran from him again. He found a note under his door when he returned to the Ansonia.

I love you. Leave me alone.

That plea broke the Big Guy’s heart. He stopped pursuing her. His life had become one long mirror and mirage. He loved her kids without ever having met them. He didn’t even know their names. She’d never shown him a picture of her “babies.”

He was forlorn without Inez. But at least the Wall Street Journal hadn’t disappointed Sidel. It talked about his flagrant land grabs, said the mayor was acting like an African potentate, and that if he wasn’t stopped, half the Bronx would fall under eminent domain. It was the usual sound and fury. Isaac would

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