Under the Eye of God Read Online Free PDF

was the king of crime.”
    “Sounds like a comic book to me. I bow to the Party’s new prince. Go on. Live at the Ansonia.”
    And Isaac did. The Secret Service moved Isaac into the Ansonia, and Martin Boyle had his men interview every single tenant.
    “That’s ungracious,” Isaac said.
    “Sir, it has to be done. We have to weed out the potential crazies, anyone who bears a grudge against you.”
    “And what happens if you find a couple of people like that?”
    “Well, we give them a cash incentive to leave.”
    “And if that doesn’t work?”
    “We hound the hell out of them.”
    “Wait a minute. That’s not legal, Boyle. We have rent laws in New York City. And I’m the guy who defends those laws.”
    “Then there’s a conflict of interest. But I can’t allow a crazy to live in the same building with you.”
    “Fine,” Isaac said. “We’ll have a lawsuit. The United States versus Citizen Sidel. . . . Boyle, it’s my new home, and I don’t want to be a pain in the ass. Kill the Gestapo tactics, understand?”
    There were no crazies in the building other than Sidel, but on his very first day he found himself in the middle of a squall. There was a tenants’ strike. The Ansonia was being converted into a condominium, and the building’s new owner was putting pressure on tenants to get out. The owner lived in the building but wouldn’t reveal himself. He was stockpiling vacant apartments, warehousing them. Yet Tim Seligman had sneaked Isaac into the Ansonia.
    He had his bay windows, a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan, his own nest. He would march up and down the stairs, which had grown shoddy and lost their shine, but Isaac could still bathe in the sun that broke through the enormous windows like great bells of light. He shivered with his own sense of the past, the recognition that this staircase in a rundown castle felt more familiar to him than his mansion in Carl Schurz Park or his boyhood home on West Broadway. And he understood why Arnold Rothstein had treasured it, why Caruso had practiced his arias on these stairs, why the Babe had swung an invisible bat in the stairwell’s dreamy light.
    It was a universe unto itself, forlorn, complete, with an astonishing silence where Isaac could listen to iron and glass and marble breathe.
    He wished he could confront Maurice, the concierge from 1940 who’d been so rude to Isaac. He would have saluted this concierge in his military cap and frock coat, and said, “Maurice, now I know why you were so fucking fastidious. You were the Ansonia’s watchdog, guarding its dignity, and I was an interloper, trying to crash the gate.”
    A little man came up to Isaac while he was playing Caruso, practicing his soliloquy on the stairs. But Isaac didn’t have a chance to greet him. Martin Boyle jumped out onto the landing with a .22 Magnum and spoke into his button mike, “Possible flounder, possible flounder on the fifteenth floor.”
    “Jesus,” Isaac said, “this isn’t the Kremlin. Will you learn how to let go?”
    He chased Boyle off the landing and twisted his body toward the man on the stairs. “I’m—”
    “Citizen Sidel.”
    Even the Ansonia’s incredible sunlight couldn’t mask the little man’s gray complexion and fishy eyes.
    “The Democrats bought the building, didn’t they?”
    “I doubt it,” Isaac said.
    “Then who’s been paying big bucks to get rid of us?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “The Citizen moves in, and soon we’ll have a whole circus of Democrats. The Ansonia’s your headquarters, isn’t it?”
    “On paper,” Isaac said, “only on paper. I’m on the road a lot of the time, singing for my supper.”
    “That’s cute, very cute.”
    The little man was clutching a pocket pistol, a .22 short. Isaac wondered if he’d ever been to San Antone, ever haunted the Alamo and that cattlemen’s bar at the Menger. But Isaac didn’t have his own star clerk inside the Ansonia to shove him out of harm’s way. He almost missed Amanda