Under the Eye of God by Jerome Charyn Read Free Book Online

the Bull said.
    Isaac adored every vein on her arm, every pucker where some needle had pierced the skin. She released the Big Guy’s hand and started to remove her hospital gown. “Darling,” she said, “you can’t give me a sponge bath without a sponge.”
    He had to wind her back into her gown. Her beautiful white hair had begun to grow wild. She was much lovelier without a wig, and Margaret had always worn wigs, as she romanced some gangster for the FBI. She’d lost her childhood somewhere in Odessa, had been a courtesan at twelve, a secret agent at thirteen. Her life had been carved out of one brutal void after the other.
    He stroked her arm with the bumpy cusp of his hand, the lord and master of a sponge bath without a sponge. She closed her eyes and fell back onto her pillow. He didn’t have the heart to banter with her. He tiptoed out of her room. The nurses had never seen a vice president–elect with tears in his eyes.
    The Bull lent Isaac his own handkerchief. They’d been battling for almost a year.
    “Bull, did your fingers ever break?”
    “What?” Bull Latham asked.
    “When you were with the Cowboys, did they ever break? You don’t have a linebacker’s hands. They seem much too delicate.”
    “I had to tape them all the time . . . but it’s not the hands that give you trouble. It’s the knees. They’re a linebacker’s nightmare. That’s why I had to leave the Cowboys. If I’d remained another year, I would have become a gimp.”
    “I want to visit her without notice,” Isaac said.
    “Understood.”
    “And I don’t want any interference from the Prez.”
    “You have my guarantee. Calder won’t bother you.”
    “If I have an urge in the middle of the night . . . ”
    “Every door will be open for you,” the Bull said. “You shouldn’t have shot up Dennis Cohen.”
    “Come on, he was Calder’s man. He would have been an embarrassment. He’s more valuable to you dead than alive. And I didn’t have a choice. He was going to put out Martin Boyle’s lights.”
    “But you could have winged him.”
    “Not a chance,” Isaac said. “He was Frank Costello’s own gunman. He would have gotten off a shot. And I’d have had to sit shivah for Martin Boyle.”
    “But Boyle isn’t Jewish.”
    “I’d still have to mourn him, wouldn’t I?”
    And Isaac left that clandestine place near the Cloisters. The vice president–elect didn’t have much of a future without Margaret. Nor did he have much of a past. All he had left was Arnold Rothstein’s favorite building in Manhattan. And he marched down to the Ansonia from Fort Tryon Park.

6
    T HE BIG GUY COULD HAVE carried all fifty states on his back, won Mars and the moon, but J. Michael was flawed beyond repair, and it had nothing to do with his alcoholic wife. The kid was Isaac’s own creation. He’d been a student radical at Columbia in ’68, and Isaac had kept him out of jail. J. was almost a sharecropper. Both his parents had been kindergarten teachers in the South and had to break their humps to put food on the table. But Michael had risen up like some proletariat Monte Cristo to become the players’ chief representative in the middle of a wildcat strike. He made the owners eat crow. Baseball had never had its own czar until J. Michael Storm, who could ride right over the commissioner and presidents of both leagues. He’d shuttled between Manhattan and Houston, where he had his law firm and was registered to vote. Clarice had been a gray-eyed beauty from Abilene before she became a guzzler. She was seventeen when he plucked her out of a fancy finishing school and married her. And now Michael lived at the Waldorf, which had once been Jack Kennedy’s home away from the White House. J. wore sunglasses, like Jack, had mistresses in every corner, but he didn’t have Jack’s aristocratic veneer and magical looks. He had kindergartens in his blood, not Hyannis Port. Poor J. had to invent himself.
    He wasn’t much of a mogul. He