Under the Eye of God by Jerome Charyn Page B

said. “Once he leaves the mayor’s office, he’s harmless. He’ll have less teeth in his mouth than I have.”
    “We can’t take a chance,” said Mr. Abilene, who was worth half a billion and had a scar under his mouth.
    “Then I walk away from this deal,” David said. “And you’ll have bubkes in the Bronx.”
    “Don’t get so hairy,” said Mr. Houston, an oil magnate who was a graduate of Rice. “You want to leave this table with your own two feet, don’t you, son?”
    David began to cackle. “Kiddos, I had a similar thought. Look around you. Every fucking customer in this little cafeteria belongs to me. You can call yourselves my prisoners.”
    “He’s bluffing,” said Mr. Abilene, a general at Brooks Air Force Base. “Let’s show Mr. Manhattan our firepower.”
    “I wouldn’t,” said Inez, with a neutral smile. “Just ask for our waitress.”
    The waitress appeared. She looked like an aging flower child.
    “Miss Inez, should I tell these big bad men what they can expect if they don’t behave?”
    “Yes, darling.”
    “There’s a little tub of plastique molded right into the table. It’s enough to blow up half of New Jersey. . . . Can I take your orders, gentlemen?”
    The barons had lost their appetite. They spread out a map of the Bronx across the table. Mr. Abilene was their spokesman.
    “Sir, can you promise us an unrestricted path from Webster Avenue downward, across Tremont and Morrisania, including Crotona Park? Of course, the streets themselves will disappear.”
    “And the housing projects?” asked Mr. San Antone.
    “We’ll relocate the projects,” said David. “We won’t leave a living soul without a much better apartment, on the far side of the Bronx River.”
    “And it’s a question of public relations. We can’t steal land from the living or the dead. And we can’t push the city around. Our pitch is that we’re revitalizing the Bronx; we’re creating a community. We’ll lease the whole shebang and convert it into federal land. We can’t put up a teepee without that conversion. New York will have a windfall—its own military base a mile from Manhattan. We’ll put up hundreds of housing units. We’ll grow new wetlands. We’ll build a river right into the rocks. But we won’t have a bunch of local Commies picketing us. It’ll look bad for the United States.”
    “You’ll be the white knights of Texas,” David said, “saviors of a dying borough.”
    “Not all white,’ said Mr. Abilene. “We’ll need a black general or two on our board . . . and a Native American, if we can find one.”
    “It’s good for the Reservation,” said Mr. Dallas. That was the code name for their future Bronx base: the Reservation. “And there aren’t any holdouts in your portfolio, are there, Mr. Manhattan? We wouldn’t want any sudden surprises . . . picking up land that doesn’t belong to us.”
    “It’s ninety percent in my pocket,” David said.
    “And the other ten? We can’t move in without acquiring all the leases. The Prez is dying to make an announcement. It would be a real feather in the poor fucker’s hat. Calder Cottonwood, champion of the Bronx.”
    “Mr. Dallas,” David said, “you can tell Cottonwood that he’ll have his last stand in the Bronx’s own Indian country—or I’ll tell him himself.”
    “And if Sidel interferes, if he gets in the way?”
    David didn’t stumble. “Then I’ll dispose of him myself.”
    He got up from the table with Inez and never looked once at his silent partners.
    “Should I call your driver?” asked Mr. Abilene.
    “No,” David said. “I have my own man . . . and should you decide to follow us, I’d look around you first.”
    The delicatessen was deserted—it was as if locusts had descended upon the new Lindy’s and wiped it clean. There wasn’t a loaf of bread or a pickle jar to be found. The waiters and waitresses were all gone. There wasn’t a single customer.
    “I wouldn’t move for half an