PART ONE

1

His honeymoon was over before it began. He didn’t even have his ninety days of wonder, that period of immortality granted all modern presidents, the good, the bad, and the mediocre. He’d swept his party back into power in what was soon known as the Slaughter of ’88, as he captured sixty-two percent of the popular vote on his credentials as a cop. People thought they’d elected a mayor-sheriff with a Glock in his pants, not Spinoza with a bald spot. They couldn’t seem to remember that he was a political philosopher as well as a sleuth and had once been called the Pink Commish.

Isaac Sidel wanted to eliminate poverty on his first day in office; he talked of subsidies for the disenfranchised. His top aides had to hem and haw. Finally they cleared their throats and hinted to Isaac that the disenfranchised hadn’t catapulted him into office and created a Democratic landslide, hadn’t cast a single vote.

“So what?” Sidel said. “It’s still a crying shame.”

He’d lost his hand-picked chief of staff, Brenda Brown, who was even more of a maverick than Sidel. She wanted the Big Guy to sidestep Congress and govern by presidential decree. Brenda was preparing executive orders that would have overturned rulings of the past three Republican presidents. But Brenda had a breakdown after a month, as she realized that the White House was a hornet’s nest of compromises, and she ran off with a summer intern, a voluptuous magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke—it was the first scandal of the Sidel administration.

The Democratic National Committee climbed on Isaac’s back and thrust Ramona Dazzle upon him, a Rhodes scholar who wouldn’t stray into uncharted waters at the White House. And soon Isaac began to suspect that his own party had planted a spy in the West Wing; where once he’d had a tapeworm he now had a dybbuk, who gobbled his intestines piece by piece. Ramona handled all the details of his daily life; she hired and fired until he couldn’t recognize a soul. The White House had become an alien hotel. It was Ramona who presided over the menus—the Big Guy had to feed on crumbs—and had furniture shunted around to suit her fancy. The Oval Office was a hovel compared to Ramona’s suite of rooms. Isaac had no sense of décor. But Ramona had plucked Dolley Madison’s music box and chiffonier out of a secret storage facility in Maryland that collected the residue of former First Ladies, and her own corner office had become the jewel of the West Wing, half museum and half war room for skull sessions with her brats.

Isaac could have defied the DNC and kicked Ramona out on her ass, but it would have caused another crisis. Yet he could feel himself grow invisible, become the Shrinking Man of Pennsylvania Avenue. He was Ramona’s shadow, the proxy president, swimming in his pants. He had a hard time carrying his Glock under his belt. It would crash to the floor and alarm the Secret Service. The Big Guy could barely look at himself in one of the White House’s antique mirrors; his cheeks were hollowed out, and the curl that once covered his bald spot had disappeared. So he marched across the hall to Ramona’s enclave.

It was a queen’s residence, with antechambers for her brats, all furnished from that secret storage facility. Her aides treated Isaac like an intruder, an unwanted desperado. “You fuckers,” he growled, “you work for me.” They still defied the president, dared him to make a move. He was an orphan in his own palace, an outcast, like King Lear, with a trove of poisonous daughters and sons. He didn’t want to look ridiculous in front of these retainers. He clutched the Glock to his belly, so it wouldn’t land on Ramona’s cream-colored carpet, did a curious entrechat, and found himself in the queen’s corner office. It was roomier than Isaac’s, with a grand mahogany conference table, a relic from FDR’s White House. Isaac was still haunted by that crippled president. He’d seen Roosevelt ride down the Grand Concourse in 1944, when he himself was a young delinquent, a dealer in stolen goods. He’d given all his swag to Roosevelt’s reelection monitors. He was born at the very beginning of Roosevelt’s reign and it seemed logical to Isaac that FDR would rule forever—at least for a fifth and sixth term. He was like a big baby who couldn’t quite recover from FDR’s sudden death in 1945.

He didn’t covet Ramona’s conference table, but it conjured up a past that left him like a permanent mourner in a mourner’s ripped coat. His chief of staff ignored him, pretended he wasn’t in the room. She was on her speakerphone, surrounded by interns and aides. She had her own defiant charm, sat with her legs in the air, in black pantyhose. Isaac had to look away from the knitted wrinkles of Ramona’s crotch. She had large brown eyes, like a doe’s, and very thin nostrils.

“Yes,” she said, “POTUS doesn’t like to travel. I can’t get him to sign anything. We’ve been feuding from day one.”

“Ramona,” Isaac whispered, “get off the fucking phone.”

She swiveled slightly in her chair. “POTUS doesn’t want campaign contributors sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom. He says it’s sacred ground. Lincoln never slept there, for shit’s sake.”

“But it’s where he signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” Isaac shouted into the speaker and pressed the mute button on her telephone console.

“Idiot,” she said, rolling her big brown eyes. “That was one of our biggest donors. We’ve been bleeding hard cash ever since you were sworn in. Our first Yid in the White House, and I can’t get him to visit the Holy Land. K Street calls you an anti-Semite. I can’t battle the whole Jewish lobby, not while we have Hamlet’s ghost on the second floor.”

He was a ghost, wandering about the White House residence, falling asleep in different bedrooms when he could fall asleep. Half the time he drifted in and out of his dreams. Harry Truman had called this presidential palace “the great white jail.” And Harry wasn’t wrong. Isaac was homesick for the wilds of Manhattan. He no longer had his pied-à-terre on Rivington Street; the building had burned to the ground while he was on the campaign trail. And he couldn’t tour the Lower East Side as some invisible guy with a Glock. He would snarl traffic for an entire day with his Secret Service caravan, even if he landed at some remote heliport on the East River; his very presence caused chaos and confusion. And God forbid if he wanted to dine at some little Italian dump on Ninth Avenue—he had to sit with the Secret Service in his lap, while other diners were scrutinized as potential terrorists and saboteurs. And he ended up playing patty-cake with his own retinue of Secret Service agents, plus a doc from Bethesda, a speechwriter or two, a policy wonk, members of the White House press corps, and Isaac’s military aide, who carried the “football,” a black briefcase which held the doomsday codes that would allow the president to launch a nuclear counterstrike. This satchel accompanied Isaac everywhere. And he wondered if the President of the United States—POTUS—was a mountebank, who had to live near a doomsday satchel, like a character in one of Gogol’s surreal tales.

“You ought to be nicer to me,” Isaac said. “I have all the codes to the football.”

Ramona dismissed her aides with a swanlike flap of her hand and then she burrowed into Isaac with her brown eyes. “Don’t you come in here with your swagger, Mr. President. I’m more concerned about your Glock than the football. You could shoot off one of your toes. You’re an accident waiting to happen. And we might not be able to afford you much longer.”

Isaac knew Ramona was conspiring with his own vice president, Bull Latham, former director of the FBI, who still pulled all the strings at the Bureau. Ramona and the Bull were preparing some sort of a coup and had to wait for Isaac’s numbers to drop. His popularity could vanish in the blink of an eye. He’d forsaken the middle class, talked of food stamps and housing subsidies. But Ramona had to be cautious. Isaac was flamboyant and fearless. He might ride anywhere aboard Marine One, land on the roof of a rural high school, where some madman was holding a class of tenth graders hostage, and talk that gunman down—that was Isaac’s enigma. He could connect with people in some primitive way. Ramona had to chop at him by degrees until little was left of the Big Guy. She outmaneuvered him at every turn. Democrats didn’t want him in their districts. He was a president with a growing rebellion within his own party.

“Sir, you can’t have federal marshals arrest teenagers for smoking cigarettes. You’ll involve us in a million lawsuits. You’ll bankrupt your own government.”

“But I want to bury Big Tobacco,” Isaac said.

Ramona didn’t have to perform in front of an absent audience. All the innocence had gone out of her doe’s eyes. She treated Isaac like a boorish child rather than the president, looked right past him and pictured Bull Latham in the Oval Office.

“You’re sitting where you are, sonny boy, because of Big Tobacco. You couldn’t have had much of a campaign without those three giants. They abandoned the Republicans and backed us to the hilt.”

Isaac wanted to rip Ramona out of her Renaissance Revival chair. “I never said a kind word about the cigarette companies.”

Ramona mocked him without mercy. “They’re not looking for a sympathetic glance, darling. They’ll continue to thrive with or without you.”

“What did you promise them?” Isaac had to ask, like a beggar in his own palace.

“Nothing. They like to be on the winning side.”

“That’s grand,” Isaac said. “And I sit here and watch people cough their lungs out?”

“Make your speeches—I’ll help you write them. But you’ll never get a piece of legislation passed against Big Tobacco. Jesus, we took every tobacco state. Do you really think senators from those states will badmouth Lorillard and the others?”

The Big Guy shouldn’t have left Gracie Mansion. He knew how to govern the maddening whirlpool of Manhattan. He overrode his police commissioner; he built school after school, and created Merlin, a program where kids from firebombed neighborhoods could mingle with the wizards of Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. Real estate barons shivered in his presence. They couldn’t get near a city lot without Isaac’s approval. He was the master builder, not the barons. He flourished, despite the chaos and the crime. He could march into City Hall and break the will of rebellious council members. But the White House was a mansion in the middle of nowhere. It couldn’t connect him to the nation’s pulse. He lived in a presidential park surrounded by ripples of poverty. Yet Isaac couldn’t have created another Merlin in the District of Columbia. Congress held sway over Washington, ruled its budget, wouldn’t relieve its slums.

“Wake up,” Ramona said. “You’re not Santa Claus. You can’t gift a whole population of slackers. You have certain responsibilities. If you abandon your warriors, Mr. President, they’ll abandon you.”

Who were these phantom warriors? Ah, her minions and volunteers on the DNC. Isaac was never a party politician—he was a Roosevelt Democrat at a time when “entitlement” and welfare programs had become taboo. Isaac should have been vice president, but the Dems had to get rid of their own president-elect, J. Michael Storm, a serial philanderer and a thief. It was Isaac who picked Bull Latham, a Republican, as his vice president. He liked the idea of a pistol like Bull at his side, a former linebacker on the Dallas Cowboys, who bent the law while he was at the Bureau. Isaac had also bent the law, had used the resources of the Mob to help him solve the thousand riddles of disorganized crime. But Bull was a bigger gangster than Isaac had ever been. Bull had plundered to feed his own pocketbook, while POTUS had a ravaged bank account and five dollars in his pants. Isaac rose higher and higher, like a big fat fireball, with every bad guy he killed. He’d glocked his way to the White House.

“You have no idea,” she said. “I never volunteered to be your babysitter, but that’s what I am. POTUS is everyone’s personal target. I’m the gal who has to keep you alive.”

Isaac wasn’t fooled by this grandiose picture of herself. Ramona was there to keep him tucked away in a closet while she ran the country from her corner office. He didn’t give a damn that she’d sacrificed her status as a killer attorney at a killer law firm. She would be welcomed back after Isaac’s wake. But he was jealous of her other credentials. She’d studied literature and philosophy at Oxford, had written a book on Saul Bellow, while Isaac had one stinking semester at Columbia College. He’d devoured Augie March, reveled in the tales of Jewish swindlers and lowlifes from Chicago, but she was the one who had dined with Bellow.

The Big Guy had a sudden brainstorm. “Why don’t we ask him to the White House? We’ll have a banquet in his honor. I’m sure you can drum up some kind of medal.”

Ramona smirked at Isaac, hoping to make him suffer. “If you mean Saul,” she said, “you’re a little too late. He was given the National Medal of Arts last year. I pinned it on him myself, in front of President Cottonwood.”

Isaac groaned. He despised Calder Cottonwood, who’d had his own hit squad at the White House and declared open season on Sidel. But that’s not what troubled Isaac. “You had a son of Chicago hobnob with Republicans?”

“Indeed. He sat with the nation’s best conservative philosophers. Saul wouldn’t have accepted an invitation from you, Mr. President. He calls you a Stalinist. He hardly set foot in Manhattan while you were mayor. The subways were filled with hoboes, and he says you allowed petty criminals to run rampant.”

Isaac had a touch of vertigo, having to defend his tactics to the father of Augie March. “Yes, I cleared out some of the holding pens at Rikers every six months. I couldn’t let young men and women—half of them children, really—linger at Rikers while they were awaiting trial on trumped-up charges that could have been settled out of court in five minutes. I wasn’t that kind of a mayor.”

“And what kind of president are you?” Ramona asked with a stingy smile. “You’ve lost the respect of your own constituents. You’re a clown with a Glock. I had to quash a wholesale mutiny within the ranks, and it wasn’t fun. I’m not your private hammer . . .”

She paused for a second, and Isaac knew where that hammer would drop next. She’d been dreaming of this moment, nursing it along.

“You can’t invite Ariel Moss to Camp David,” she said. “That’s final. The party won’t allow it.”

“Didn’t he win the Nobel Peace Prize? He was prime minister for six years.”

“But he’s become an outlaw—and a hermit.”

“He was always an outlaw,” Isaac said. Ariel Moss was the alias of an alias. No one knew Ariel’s real name. He was born in some lost territory of the Pale, a Polish enclave ruled by the tsar. His father was a timber merchant who owned an entire forest, while his mother was descended from a royal line of rabbinical scholars—at least that was the tale Ariel told of his lineage. He claimed to have studied law at the University of Lodz, but none of the students remembered an Ariel Moss. The first time that name surfaced was in 1942, when he joined a ragtag of Jewish commandos within the Free Polish Army, a suicide squad that went into Nazi headquarters in some provincial town and killed the local commandant. Ariel was the only one to survive. The Nazis put a price on his head, and the Poles sent him to Palestine, where he was meant to train with a bunch of British saboteurs. Here the myth began that Ariel Moss was a double agent, striving for both the radical Jewish underground of Irgun and the masters of British intelligence. If so, Ariel must have been the best damn double agent around. He robbed British banks in Jerusalem, kidnapped British officers, bombed the headquarters of the British high command inside the King David Hotel, broke into the impregnable fortress of Acre Prison, and walked out with captured members of Irgun. This anonymous man with one lazy eye would become the boss of Irgun, as he plotted to kick the British colonials out of Palestine.

Isaac grew up with a picture of Ariel on his wall; actually it was a mug shot of the terrorist under yet another assumed name, Sasha Klein, at a Soviet labor camp in Siberia; he looked like a common criminal, an urka with a shaved head. He’d been arrested sometime in 1940, as a zhid who was trying to smuggle other zhids out of Poland. Sasha Klein escaped from the gulag with a band of thieves and morphed into a resistance fighter and member of the Jewish underground.

He visited the U.S. in November 1948, now the leader of his own political party in the new state of Israel. He was trying to raise hard cash, but Ariel Moss was attacked by Albert Einstein and other illustrious Jews as a right-wing fanatic who had brought a reign of terror to the Holy Land. Isaac, who was fifteen at the time and still a purveyor of stolen goods, attended a rally for Ariel Moss in Seward Park. Socialists from Brooklyn and the Bronx had come to the Lower East Side to taunt and spit at the renegade who was locked in a long struggle with Israel’s ruling socialist party. Ariel didn’t look like much of an outlaw. He had stooped shoulders and a narrow chest, and his eyes were hidden behind thick lenses that gave him the aura of an owl.

“Satan,” shouted one of the socialists, “did you murder children?”

Ariel peered at the socialist with his owlish eyes. “Yes, there were children in the debris when we bombed the King David. I held one in my arms. I couldn’t revive him. I was a demolition man, not an angel of mercy. But I warned the manager of the King David, told him to clear the hotel of all his guests. He didn’t listen, comrade.”

“I’m not your comrade,” said the socialist. “You’re a killer and you come here begging for money.”

Isaac put whatever loot he had into Ariel’s collection box. And Ariel returned to Israel, still an outcast. It took him thirty years of finagling to discover mainstream politics. He appealed to the downtrodden, Jewish refugees from the Muslim countries of Africa, descendants of Babylonian tribes—grocers from Iraq, bakers from Uzbekistan—rather than the educated Ashkenazi of Eastern Europe, and this ghostly graduate of the law school at Lodz was elected prime minister in 1977. He startled his own nationalist party when he signed the Camp David Accords with Anwar Sadat in 1978, promising to hand back the Sinai Peninsula in return for Egypt’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist. The Egyptians were no more pleased with the accords than the Israelis were. Sadat was assassinated three years later by a jihadist in the military, and Ariel escaped one assassination plot after the other by fanatics among the religious right and gunmen within the moribund Irgun. He was hospitalized six times. His own children stopped talking to him. His wife died. He grew more and more morose and resigned in 1983. No one could reach him, neither journalists, nor his wife’s relatives, nor the few friends he once had. He moved from location to location, from a shack in Haifa to a shed in the Jerusalem forest. There were reports that he had become a beachcomber and a vagabond, perhaps had even gone back to robbing banks, but that the internal security agents of Shin Bet protected Ariel Moss from harming himself and others.

Ramona Dazzle wondered why this hermit would reach out to Isaac Sidel.

“Did he ever visit you while you were mayor?”

“No,” Isaac had to insist. Ariel seldom came to Manhattan while he was prime minister. He shunned the UN and every sort of lobbyist. Perhaps he couldn’t recover from the ferocity of the socialists on his first trip to America in 1948. But he did come to New York while Isaac was still police commissioner. Ariel had been mugged in the street and landed on the ward at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. Isaac was shy about disturbing his boyhood hero. But he couldn’t understand what Ariel Moss was doing in the badlands, and without a bodyguard. So he crept onto the ward out of curiosity. He had no desire to interview Ariel, just to sniff around on his own. He spoke to a nurse and a few of the residents. They had no idea who Ariel Moss was, thought he might be an amnesiac wandering about in the most dangerous square mile in North America. And while Isaac sniffed and sniffed, Ariel opened his lazy eye.

“I know you—you’re the Pink Commish. But we met once before, at a rally in Seward Park. The socialists were tearing off my flesh, and you gave me some gelt.”

Isaac was startled by the hospital patient’s prodigious memory. How could Ariel recollect one lone boy? “That gift wasn’t kosher,” Isaac said. “I gave you money I got from stolen merchandise.”

Ariel laughed in his blue hospital shirt. His teeth were all black. He looked like a vampire who relished black blood in his mouth.

“Well, then we’re both a couple of desperados. It’s no secret. I was once a bank robber.”

“But there are no banks along this stretch of Southern Boulevard. Very little happens here. Why did you come to such an unholy place?”

“I was on a pilgrimage,” said Ariel Moss.

Isaac was even more perplexed. He wondered if that mugger had rattled Ariel’s mind.

“You must have heard of Sholem Aleichem, the Yiddish Mark Twain. When I was in the gulag, it was his stories that kept me going. He spent his last years in the Bronx, on Kelly Street. He couldn’t write. He was a legend who’d lost his substance. He had diabetes and tuberculosis, among other ailments. If a few of his devoted readers hadn’t left food outside his door, he and his family would have starved. Yet he had a hundred thousand people at his funeral. And I never got to Kelly Street.”

That was the last encounter Isaac had with Ariel Moss, in his blue hospital shirt. And then a week ago, out of nowhere, the Soviet acting deputy foreign minister, Pesh Olinov, whispered in Isaac’s ear at a reception in the East Room that the Hermit of Haifa had fled his chicken coop and wanted to see the Big Guy. Those were Olinov’s exact words—fled the chicken coop. Why should a Soviet diplomat, whose sudden success was tied to the KGB and the crime bosses of Moscow and Kiev, have become the messenger of a derailed ex–Israeli prime minister? It made no sense. Egypt was Soviet Russia’s client, not the mad Jews of Tel Aviv. But then Isaac recognized the tattoo on Olinov’s knuckles—a dagger piercing the eye hole of a skull. Isaac had seen that tattoo before, among the cheloveks of Brighton Beach. It was the mark of a werewolf. And Isaac realized the connection. Ariel and Pesh Olinov must have served in the same gulag, many years ago, must have belonged to the same crime boss, and must have escaped together. But the cheloveks wouldn’t have gathered among themselves a Jewish intellectual from the law school at Lodz—unless that law student was as much of a werewolf as they were. Intellectuals and zhids always died first. That was the rude sign of Siberia. Ariel Moss couldn’t have survived the brutish life of a labor camp without the protection of a pakhan, or crime lord. And Olinov must have been that lord’s lieutenant. Born in Siberia, the son of a whore and a chelovek at the camp, he was raised as a werewolf who sat at his pakhan’s knee. He had scars on his face from knife fights with rivals of his pakhan and other cheloveks. He looked like a gourd with ruts down the middle; his eyes, a luminous green, were half hidden among all the marks. Isaac felt an immediate kinship with Pesh Olinov; they were like bounty hunters in a sea of diplomats and politicians. Yet this former KGB colonel and intimate of crime bosses was Mikhail Gorbachev’s deputy foreign minister; Olinov had helped shape glasnost and perestroika, was instrumental in making overtures to the West and bringing about social and political reform in the Kremlin’s bewildering bureaucracy.

The Pink Commish wasn’t blind. Moscow ranted against alcohol consumption, destroyed distilleries, while it lost billions of rubles to Olinov’s pals in the black market. Pesh grew richer with every one of his decrees. He spent months in our capital, like any lobbyist from K Street. He lived across from the White House, at the Hotel Washington, where he dined with six bodyguards surrounding his rooftop table. He still had to step out of explosions, his body covered in bits of glass. Who knows how many Moscow gangsters and graduates of the gulag were gunning for Pesh? Having become one of the masterminds of perestroika had made him an easy target among conservative politicians and members of the Politburo. So a day after this mysterious encounter in the East Room, Isaac met with his intelligence chiefs in a dungeon under the Oval Office to discuss Olinov’s overtures. Bull Latham had been there with Ramona Dazzle. Isaac felt like a schoolboy having to repeat word for word his conversation with Pesh.

“The deputy kept saying that Ariel wouldn’t come to the White House—the walls had too many ears. He would only come to my dacha. I didn’t know I had a dacha.”

Isaac remembered the chiefs chortling among themselves. His national security advisor, Tim Vail, spoke first. Vail was a boy genius, a graduate of Harvard and Georgetown, who had published the definitive paper on Soviet geopolitics. “Olinov meant Camp David, Mr. President. That’s where Ariel signed the peace accords with Sadat. That’s where he must have felt most comfortable. But why would Pesh volunteer to be his angel? There’s nothing in the chatter we’ve picked up so far that links them. And we’ve been diligent, sir. That’s why we don’t trust this gambit. It’s some kind of a stunt to suck you into Ariel’s orbit, whatever it is.”

But Isaac trusted Ariel’s roundabout summons more than he did the advice of his intelligence chiefs. And Ramona must have sensed this. Her boss was a hopeless romantic and a loose cannon. And now she tried to ruffle Isaac, catch him off guard, while he stood in her office with his Glock.

“Ex–prime ministers don’t come out of hibernation like that and suddenly decide to visit POTUS at his dacha in Maryland. He must have a motive. And I don’t like it, particularly when the SOS is from that thug at the Kremlin. Ariel hasn’t revealed himself yet. And when he does . . .”

“You’ll have our thugs leave him to wander as much as he likes.”

Her lower lip trembled. She couldn’t find her magic potion with Sidel. “We’re not like the Russians,” she said. “We don’t employ thugs. Some of our best agents have PhDs.”

Yes, Isaac muttered to himself, they can whack you on the ears while they recite one of Hamlet’s soliloquies.

“He shouldn’t have been allowed to get on a plane. He has forged documents. We’ll find him.”

“That’s what the Brits said after he bombed the King David. He’s landed, Ramona, and he’s much too clever to be found. He’s been a hunted animal half his life.”

An ancient, ravaged prime minister on the lam must have caused havoc among the ranks of Shin Bet. Perhaps Ariel Moss once had his own nuclear football, with all the doomsday codes, and Shin Bet didn’t want this Hermit of Haifa to fall into the wrong hands with whatever codes he still had. Isaac could tell that Ramona had been in touch with Israeli counterintelligence, and she’d kept it a secret from him. Shin Bet didn’t trust the Pink Commish, even if he was a zhid from the Lower East Side. His horizons were too far to the left. His own intelligence chiefs were suspicious of him, fueled by all the neoconservative think tanks. The neocons were convinced that President Sidel was a sleeper who took his instructions from Moscow. The Secret Service had dubbed him the Citizen, and that name stuck. Fanatics on talk radio took to calling him Citizen Sidel of the Soviet Union. He couldn’t light out for the territory, like Huck Finn, his favorite character in American lit. There was no territory now, in Isaac’s mind, except perhaps Antarctica and Tierra del Fuego, and he had little desire to go there. He was stuck in this “great white jail” with a chief of staff who was plotting to dismantle him. She sat with her pantyhose in the air, as if he was some sidebar she had to tolerate for a little while longer.

He hated her smugness, her certainty that he was a transient who would fall into ruin. He had to resist tugging at her pantyhose and spinning her around until she couldn’t recapture her comfort zone. But Isaac would have ended up in handcuffs, charged with assault.

So he smiled that errant smile of his—like a Chinese mask that couldn’t be pierced.

“Ramona, I bailed you out,” he said. “You would have shoved me into the tar pits if your own candidate had survived his inauguration. But he couldn’t, and now you’re stuck with me. Either we have a marriage, or it’s civil war, and it will ripple right through the DNC. You’ll lose all your donors.”

Those thin nostrils of hers flared. “Are you threatening me, Mr. President?”

“Yes,” he whispered. They were all alone in her labyrinth of rooms. Ramona’s brats must have fled to a bar in Georgetown, where they could mock Isaac’s torn cuffs and bald pate over whiskey sours and a pot of British ale.

Ramona tugged at her pantyhose, stood up, strode around her antique desk, and walloped Sidel. His jaw tingled. His mouth bled, and he had a roaring in his ears that was like the crash of the Atlantic against Ramona’s private seawall. The Big Guy didn’t bother to wipe the blood from his teeth. The ground had shifted. He’d riled Ramona Dazzle.

“We’ll have that Russian dwarf Olinov recalled to Moscow. He won’t play Mercury for a miserable old man from Haifa.”

“Pesh isn’t a dwarf,” Isaac said, with a sudden lilt to his voice. “And you can’t have him recalled—it’s the age of glasnost, the era of cooperation between East and West. We’re downsizing our nuclear arsenals, in spite of their generals and ours. If you let your hatchet men go near Olinov, I’ll have their peckers cut off and hung on display in the Rose Garden. You can watch their wrinkled remains from your patio.”

“You’re disgusting,” Ramona screamed into the void. “You’re uncouth.”

She walloped him again. The Big Guy tottered for a moment and grabbed her wrists. It was his first moment of pleasure since he’d arrived in the White House.

“Let go of me,” she screamed at Isaac, who had to sidestep her flicking heels like a matador and also protect his groin. A Secret Service man arrived, his .357 Magnum unholstered, like an obscene toy. With him was Isaac’s naval aide, carrying the nuclear football. And behind them both was the vice president, Bull Latham, barreling in and shoving everyone out of his way, until Isaac’s naval aide and the nuclear football landed in the dark well under Ramona’s desk.

“Can this lovers’ quarrel, Mr. President. There’s been some disturbing chatter.”

He sat Isaac and Ramona down at her conference table. “It’s not a joke. Oh, we’ve heard rumors about Colonel Gaddafi sending hit men after your hide—that’s been going on for months. But he wouldn’t want his ass bombed out of Tripoli. He’d have to retire to the desert in a woman’s scarf and join my list of favorite cross-dressers.” The Bull was basking in his new glory. He’d set his own rules as Isaac’s vice president. He reigned over the FBI and went into the deepest pockets of Isaac’s other agencies. His Herculean shoulders held him in good sway wherever he happened to poke around. “The Colombian drug lords hate you because we’ve been busting up their cartels. But they consider themselves crusaders. And you’re popular in the barrios. They call you the israelita with a Glock, so the clamor comes from another direction. We don’t bother with anti-Semitic dreck—fruitcakes who rant against that ‘Heimie in the White House.’ ”

The Bull paused to lick his lips and capitalize on his own sense of drama.

“Something came in from the Aryan Brotherhood, those jailhouse freaks. It’s a fucking tattoo. They’re tattoo artists, I know. But this one is a little scary. It’s a caricature of you, Mr. President, with an ice pick in one eye, and your neck sewn onto your head, like some Frankenstein, with the stitches as fat as a finger.”

“Then we ought to round up those tattoo artists and teach them a lesson,” Ramona rasped.

“Whoa,” said Bull Latham. “They’re only the clerks. That’s why we have to shake their little tree.”

Isaac was wary of Bull Latham. The Secret Service should have notified him of any danger, not his vice president. And Matthew Malloy, chief of the White House detail, hadn’t said a word.

“What sort of tree?” Isaac asked, with that false naïveté of an ex-cop.

“A poison tree, Mr. President, but the tree’s not important. We should concentrate on the gardeners who’ve been watering it. They’re the ones who would profit from your demise. They lured the Brotherhood with a secret load of cash.”

“And who are these ghostly gardeners?”

“There’s the rub,” said Bull Latham. “I haven’t a clue. I’d squeeze the neo-Nazi bastards, but most of them are lifers who are loyal to one another, and they’d only lie. Could be anybody under the sun with a grievance against you, yet tough enough to tangle with the Brotherhood and relieve them of their art. That’s no small accomplishment. The Brotherhood doesn’t like to part with their tattoos.”

Now Ramona saw her chance. “I’ll bet Ariel Moss is involved. He could be one of the gardeners.”

The Bull chuckled to himself and chided her. “That hermit? He has to wear diapers—that’s in my logs, swear to God. He was always incontinent, even during the Camp David Accords. Shin Bet had to run up and down the paths with a fresh pair of nappies for their prime minister. He had some sort of dysentery when he was in the gulag, and it was never cured—a horrible case of the worms. He’s not one of the gardeners. I can guarantee that.”

“But he’s out there doing mischief,” Ramona chanted, like a little helpless girl, while the Bull winked.

“We’ll catch him. All we have to do is sniff the wind.”

Isaac grew weary of his vice president. He left Ramona’s labyrinth without a nod to the Bull, walked under the colonnade that Thomas Jefferson had built, rode upstairs to his private quarters in the president’s elevator, two Secret Service men at his tail. He had his own labyrinth of rooms. He couldn’t seem to settle in. He inhabited the entire second floor of the White House, with its rosewood tables, astral lamps, satinwood commodes, its cut-glass chandeliers that left irregular shadows on the walls, and a little treasure of Cézannes with clumps of earthlike color that crinkled against the fanlight windowpanes. The residence also had a kitchen, sitting rooms, a balcony, and a beauty salon, with a salmon-colored lounge chair, multiple hair driers, a manicurist’s stool, and a porcelain shampoo bowl, meant to accommodate the First Lady. Somehow, Isaac preferred this room, with its coral-colored rug. He wasn’t wifeless. But the wife he had, known as the Countess Kathleen, a voluptuous redhead whom he had married when he was nineteen and had never bothered to divorce, preferred an empire of Florida real estate to the White House. She was five years older than the Big Guy and a rabid Republican. He could never have become mayor or police commissioner without Kathleen, who had stroked the Irish mafia of the NYPD for Isaac. She might have slept with a few of the chiefs before her own marriage, bewitched them with her wild Irish ways.

The Countess was an embarrassment to Ramona and the DNC, having donated millions to Republican coffers during Isaac’s campaign and not a dime to the Democrats. But Isaac never abused her, never sang an unkind song, even when Ramona’s detectives came up with every sort of dirt about Kathleen’s land deals in the Florida swamps.

“Sweetheart, leave my wife alone,” Isaac had to warn. “Whatever you uncover will only come back to haunt us.” Isaac was clever enough to see the Countess’s own cleverness. Who would be dumb enough to prosecute a president’s wife for some arcane land deal in the Okefenokee? And it gave him pleasure to sit in the White House’s Cosmetology Room and dream of the Countess rinsing her red hair.

The Pink Commish was about to shut his eyes when he noticed a slip of paper beneath one of the hair driers, like a primitive greeting card. On the front was written in a very ragged script:

Welcome to the Brotherhood,

Big Balls

That’s what his enemies would call him when he was police commissioner and had locked up badasses in every borough. They meant to mock him, but Big Balls soon became a mark of respect. He followed child molesters and bank robbers and sadistic gang leaders across the landscape until he cuffed them. He went into a burning warehouse once to capture a homicidal maniac and had to be hospitalized for six weeks. But that couldn’t sideline Sidel. He simply moved his office into his hospital room, and was surrounded by detectives and assistant DAs.

His nom de guerre didn’t follow him to Gracie Mansion. He wasn’t Big Balls on the mayor’s circuit. So why should that name suddenly haunt him at the White House? He unfolded the greeting card and saw an imprint of the tattoo that the Bull had described, a sample of the Aryan Brotherhood’s art in bold red ink—Isaac with his bald patch, an ice pick stuck in his left eye and his head sewn onto his body with a thick cord.

The artist had captured Isaac’s stern look, as if the Pink Commish had sat for his own portrait somewhere in hell.

Below the drawing were the habitual swastikas and runes of the Aryan Brotherhood. Isaac brooded over this greeting card. How did it get here? Who had sneaked it into his sanctuary? Someone had to be aware of Isaac’s habits and haunts. He didn’t shout for the Secret Service, didn’t alert Bull Latham. He plucked a telephone out of its cradle near the manicurist’s stool and had the White House operator dial the Hotel Washington and ask for Pesh Olinov’s suite. Some Soviet gorilla answered the phone.

“Who is talking? Please to answer, yes?”

“Big Balls,” Isaac shouted. “Tell that to Pesh.”

2

He couldn’t cross the street without his caravan. He would have stopped traffic cold on Pennsylvania Avenue for an hour, as District detectives and the Secret Service scrambled about and lined the gates of Lafayette Park. Every one of his moves had to be mapped out and diagrammed, his destination logged in. It would have taken him five minutes to travel on foot from the White House to the Hotel Washington, but he’d never have gotten out the North Portico on his own. He was embalmed in his own trappings as president. The White House operator must have snitched to Ramona and Matthew Malloy. Isaac’s chief of staff flew at him like one of the Furies.

“Imbecile,” she said. “Do you want to create an international crisis? The dwarf’s thugs could shoot you in the shoulder—just for fun. You can’t amble into the Washington. You have to follow protocol. Tell him, Matt.”

The head of the White House detail rocked on his heels. Ramona had managed to henpeck him after she first strutted into the West Wing. He was almost fifty, and intended to retire. He must have looked like a blue-eyed Apollo once, but Calder Cottonwood had involved him in some shady deals, and that blond handsomeness was gone; his face had turned soft, as if he’d begun to rot like an exotic flower.

“I’ll put a package together, sir. We’ll have everyone in place, and we’ll secure Dragon.”

Dragon was Isaac’s armored Lincoln Town Car with bulletproof glass; he’d have had to exit the White House in a fleet of sedans and ride two blocks, with his own “double” sitting in one of the sedans.

“That’ll take an hour, and Pesh will have time to prepare a whole scenario. I want to catch that prick with his pants down. We’re going on foot, Matt.”

He’d still lose precious time. Matt would have to alert the hotel and secure the perimeter, which meant agents outside Pesh’s room and on the floor above and the floor below. It was like the choreography of a mad king, and Isaac had to reside within the pretense of Matthew Malloy’s “chaos control.” He refused to strap on a fiberglass vest. His Glock was good enough. But he had to wait and wait for his protective team to gather its gear—the magnetometers, the .357 Magnums, the button mikes, the Ray-Bans, the metallic cups—and rise out of its roost in the cellars of the West Wing.

Matt and his men never wore topcoats in the winter chill. It would have slowed them down considerably if they had tried to reach for their .357 Magnums. They’d discovered a thing or two from Shin Bet. The two secret services liked to trade professional tricks. And last year Matt invited Shin Bet for a week of exercises at his own training facility near Laurel, Maryland. “They’re tough customers, those Izzies,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to fart around with them.” And now Isaac’s protective team scrambled across the leafless landscape of Lafayette Park, with its little world of windswept trees with rotting silver bark, and rushed into the lobby of the Hotel Washington like a human sledgehammer, with the Big Guy wedged in the middle. They looked sinister in their Ray-Bans—and slightly comical.

The entire lobby was in their thrall. POTUS and his protectors had just entered a slow-motion paradise, where all movement stopped and not a sound was heard. They commandeered an elevator for themselves, while two agents fell away from the team and guarded the elevator bank. The others rode up with Isaac. They leapt out on the sixth floor and surrounded Isaac again. Two of the agents were carrying portable magnetometers. It didn’t matter who Pesh was—diplomat, crime boss, or king of Siam. They would still have to shake down his suite. There had been no preliminary search, and they couldn’t allow POTUS to enter uncharted territory.

Isaac himself knocked on Pesh Olinov’s door; for a moment he felt like a young deputy chief inspector out on his first raid. One of Pesh’s gorillas opened the door with a growl. He had a shaved skull with a red birthmark on its crown that could have been a map of Siberia.

“What you bother, eh? Pesh asleep.”

“Wake him,” Isaac said, as the Secret Service barreled through the door in their Ray-Bans and button mikes. Pesh Olinov appeared from the bedroom of his suite in a magnificent velour robe. Another bodyguard stood behind him, waving a document in a leather wallet.

“You cannot interfere. We are Soviet diplomats.”

“It’s no use, Sasha,” said Olinov with a smile that moved like a trembling worm across his mouth. “We are with the barbarians.”

“Sir,” said Matt, “we’ll have to sweep the room and give the Russkies a toss with the magnetometers.”

“Not now,” Isaac said. “Forget the body searches. I have business with Pesh.”

He turned to the acting deputy foreign minister, bowed, and whispered in his ear, “You’ll have to forgive my own protectors. They have their protocols. It can’t be helped.”

He walked into the bedroom with Pesh and shut the door, just as Matt began to scream, “You can’t go in there, sir. It isn’t safe.”

Isaac had expected to meet a couple of call girls under the satin covers of Olinov’s king-size bed. He’d heard about his kinky habits from Bull Latham’s informants at the FBI. But Isaac was bewildered by Olinov’s companion. She wasn’t even undressed. She sat in a rosewood chair that could have been a replica of his own prize furniture at the White House. It was Renata Swallow, the doyenne of Georgetown, and one of the principal Cave Dwellers, the elite of Washington’s elite. The Cave Dwellers had never had much truck with presidents or their wives. They and their ancestors snubbed Mary Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mamie Eisenhower with the same icy venom. They were listed in their unique social register, the Green Book, had their charity balls and concert subscriptions, and rarely meddled in politics. But Renata wasn’t like the other doyennes, or Queen Bees. A recent widow, who hadn’t relied on her late husband’s fortune, she was thirty-seven years old, defiantly blond, preferred martial arts to charity balls, and was a buoyant member of the Republican National Committee. She despised Isaac’s chief of staff and never missed a chance to hurl a poisoned dart at “Dizzy Ms. Dazzle.”

Isaac had met Renata once before, not in the District, but at a gala honoring George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet while Isaac was in his honeymoon as mayor. He was captivated by her voice. She spoke to the maître in a lyrical Russian that was like the cry of a desolate bird. He’d never realized how sad a language could be. And it seemed out of place with her almost masculine beauty and clipped blond hair. He was delirious about this matron of the arts from the District until she grabbed him by the shoulder and roared at him in a voice with its own martial music—“What are you doing here, Mr. Mayor? Have you ever seen a ballet in your life?”

Issac’s tongue twisted, and he couldn’t utter a word in front of Renata, who went right back to Balanchine and warbled in Russian. She had only daggers for Isaac Sidel. To spite her, and displace his own curious attraction to this Cave Dweller, he began to attend the New York City Ballet, and he marveled how the prima ballerinas danced only for Balanchine, who sat in the last row of the orchestra, his nose twitching incessantly, while he watched like a warrior hawk. Balanchine was hospitalized soon after that and never returned to his seat. Without Balanchine’s gaze to guide them, the primas fumbled through their dance, like moribund, frenzied dolls, and Isaac stopped going to the ballet. He meant to write Renata, but somehow he couldn’t seem to find the vocabulary. And here she was, in the bedroom of a Russian gangster-politician, who was Gorbachev’s conduit to the crime lords of Moscow and Kiev.

Renata wasn’t even embarrassed. She extended her hand to Sidel. “How lovely,” she said, staring at his Glock. “I’m delighted to see that you haven’t lost your affection for firearms.”

She’d already disarmed Isaac, and he hadn’t said a word.

“Balanchine,” Isaac managed to whisper. “I saw my first ballet thanks to you.”

The doyenne fondled the soft material of the Russian gangster’s robe for an instant, then turned to Isaac as if to remind herself that he was still there. “I’m so glad. And what did you learn, Mr. President?”

“That it’s a catastrophe if you separate the creator from his creation. The ballerinas were all in a trance after Balanchine died.”

“Yet the company still exists, and I’m one of its patrons. I’m sure you have a lot to discuss with Pesh. Goodbye.”

And she marched out of the bedroom in her lambs’ wool coat, as if she’d spent the afternoon with her fellow bluebloods at the Salamander Club rather than with a political pimp. But Isaac wasn’t as courteous with the gangster as he had been with the lady from Georgetown. He grabbed the lapels of Pesh’s robe.

“What was she doing here? Are you selling caviar to the Cave Dwellers?”

“No, Madame Renata was worried about the Kirov and the Bolshoi—Russian ballet. She knows how inflation has been tearing up the roots of my country. We’ve been eating into our foreign reserves, and—”

“Since when are you a cultural commissar?”

“You shouldn’t belittle me,” Olinov muttered. “I’m one of the last allies you have left. Why did you settle in the White House? You won’t survive very long, my friend.”

“Congratulations, Pesh. You’ve become a mind reader.”

Isaac took the greeting card from the Aryan Brotherhood out of his pocket. “Those jailbirds smuggled this into my quarters. Are they sending me a kite?”

Pesh savored the word “kite,” allowed it to settle between his teeth. “This didn’t come from those amateurs at the Aryan Brotherhood. The work is much too fine. Their tattoos are primitive and childish. They never had access to a master artist, and they never endured the endless winters of Kolyma. None of them was born into the craft. They’re copycats. You’ve received an epistle from the Sons of Rossiya. And you should be proud.”

Pesh explained who the Sons were: orphans plucked from the streets of Moscow and shipped to Siberia, they had grown up in the gulag, protected by one pakhan or another, or else they would have become the sexual toys of the camp guards and the cheloveks. They all had a specific talent, either as engravers or tattoo artists, or experts with the pickaxe and the knife. Mostly, they were counterfeiters, and they made millions for their pakhans and for themselves. And when the camps began to close down during the political upheavals after Stalin’s death, they felt lost, abandoned, homeless. They were werewolves, like the other cheloveks, reborn in the camps, but still, they managed to survive. They didn’t tear at each other’s throats, didn’t wage mortal combat between Moscow and Kiev. They remained neutral and half dead. They were the Sons of Rossiya, counterfeiters and killers with an unbroken loyalty oath. Many moved to the West, settled in Milan, London, Madrid, crossing borders with all the agility of a werewolf.

“Then why haven’t I heard of them?” Isaac asked.

“Because these were the besprizornye—street children. You must have had your own besprizornye in Manhattan.”

Yes, Isaac recalled; wild boys who stole from the pickle merchants and lived on the brine. They had a perilous existence in the back alleys of Hester Street. They perched on the rooftops like gargoyles with warm blood. Isaac could never tame these orphans no matter how hard he tried, never get them to attend school at Gracie Mansion and become Merlins, like children from the South Bronx he managed to rescue from the oblivion of broken streets.

“But these boys perished,” Isaac said. “They couldn’t survive the Manhattan winter year after year.” Big Balls nearly broke down and cried at the recollection of these winter boys. “I had to bury most of them in Potter’s Field, without a name tag, and nothing to eulogize them with but a primitive pine box.”

“Not our besprizornye,” Olinov said. “They survived Siberia. Their greatest feat, once they left the camps, was to exist without an identity, recognizable only to themselves. And as the Russian empire falls into ruin, with rubles that aren’t even worth enough to copy, they’re the ones who have had to pick up the pieces. That’s why they sent you a kite, as you say, only they would call it a winter warning—it was always winter in the taiga, you see.”

“And that greeting card is some kind of a threat?”

Olinov appraised the portrait of Isaac with an ice pick piercing his left eye.

“I don’t think so. They consider you a werewolf, like themselves. And that’s a mark of respect. Perhaps they would like to meet with you—the presidency means nothing to them. It’s not your power that interests the besprizornye. In their eyes you have none. Perhaps it is a real winter warning, and they are telling you to be more careful with your steps. The Secret Service cannot protect you with their magnetometers, my friend.”

Isaac was still baffled. The Sons of Rossiya were as remote to him as Teutonic knights. “How did they smuggle their greeting card past all the lines of security? We have bomb-sniffing dogs in the mail room. We have X-ray machines. Every damn letter is sifted and unsealed. And that card ends up under a hair drier in the White House beauty parlor.”

Olinov laughed. “The besprizornye have all the money in the world—they bribe and kiss and kill. On top of that, they’re wizards. Their souls could probably pass right through an X-ray machine.”

Pesh’s mystical ballyhoo didn’t appeal to Isaac. He wouldn’t have been surprised if this gangster invented the besprizornye, orphans with a magical twist. “And where does Ariel Moss fit in? He’s no wizard.”

“But he’s become an orphan in his old age.”

“Who escaped his keepers at Shin Bet.”

Pesh frowned for the first time. “Don’t patronize me, Mr. President. It was Ariel who created the model for Shin Bet when he was with the Irgun—silent ghosts with a protective shield. Didn’t he float into Acre Prison and float out with half his gang? Shin Bet worshiped him when he was prime minister. The same silent ghosts kept him alive. How many suicide attacks did they thwart? At least a dozen. They were his family, my friend, his shield. Shin Bet would never harm Ariel Moss.”

And now Isaac was the policeman again, prickly as ever. “So where did you bump into the Hermit of Haifa? At a Black Sea resort?”

Olinov scratched under the collar of his robe, and Isaac glimpsed at the paws of some imaginary beast tattooed on his chest, like a marvelous totem. “No, my friend—not the Black Sea. The old man knocked on my door. He was starving. But he couldn’t swallow American roast beef. We had to scour the markets for Russian rye bread, blackened potatoes, and balanda.”

“What’s that?”

“Prison soup,” Olinov said. “Once you’ve feasted on such watery slop, it destroys your appetite for anything else.”

Isaac didn’t believe a word. “Where did you find your precious soup ten thousand miles from Siberia?”

“I prepared it for him on a hot plate at the hotel. We’re all zeks from the same zone. My balanda revived the old man.”

Pesh revealed how emaciated Ariel Moss was, and how he and his own gorillas—all graduates of the same penal colony—had to feed the recluse with a wooden spoon, how they sang their favorite prison songs about cocks and cunts and Stalin’s swollen testicles. But Ariel kept insisting that he had to see the Pink Commish.

“Your enemies, the old man said, will eat you alive. And it was only safe for him to meet at your dacha.”

It made no sense to Isaac. Why would that hermit leave his private garden for Isaac Sidel? He could have gone to Shin Bet. He must have been on familiar terms with half its retired generals. Yet he went back to robbing banks, or something close to that, to help finance his own disappearing act. He crosses two continents like a silent ghost, knocks on the gangster’s door at the Washington, fills himself with balanda, and talks about cannibals in the White House. It made no sense.

Isaac could hardly trust anything the dwarf said—yes, Ramona Dazzle had been right. Pesh was some kind of a dwarf. He didn’t even reach Isaac’s shoulder blades. Perhaps all that balanda had stunted Pesh’s growth. And the Cave Dwellers’ Queen Bee hadn’t come here to talk with Pesh about the Bolshoi. All the scars on his face—the souvenirs of knife wounds gathered in the gulag—hadn’t suddenly turned Pesh into a balletomane. Renata was searching for something much more enigmatic, something she couldn’t find among all the bluebloods at the Salamander Club—it was the tattoos of a Russian gangster. That’s why he stood in his velour robe, while she sat around in her winter coat. Isaac had interrupted a striptease act.

“Chelovek,” Isaac said like an inmate at Kolyma, “get undressed.”

Pesh stared at Isaac with that face of a mottled gourd. “Are you crazy?”

“Strip, little man. I want to see your colors.”

Pesh lunged at Isaac with a sailor’s paring knife cupped in his hand. The Big Guy smiled. This was a world he understood, not the invisible knife-throwing of all his military and intelligence chiefs, where it was useless to dodge; the knives always landed in some forlorn spot under his ribs, and Isaac had to survive with that perpetual nagging pain. But an ex–wild boy from the gulag was another matter. Isaac cracked Pesh’s knuckles with the blade of his hand, and the tiny hooked knife fell to the carpet. Then he grabbed Pesh’s velour collar and spun him out of his robe. And there was the bird that rippled across the gangster’s chest—a griffin of some kind, with majestic, multiple claws, a lion’s haunches, a feathery tail, and a half human head, with whiskers, a wolf’s ears, luminous eyes, and a cavernous mouth that seemed to stifle a scream.

It must have been a creature born in the gulag, the personification of a werewolf, with symbols that only other wild boys and their pakhans could master—stars with seven points on the griffin’s shoulder blades, swastikas on its expanding wings that ruffled in front of Isaac’s eyes. The gangster had mesmerized Renata, made her dream. That’s why she’d come to this hotel—not to flirt or do business with a Moscow minister without much of a portfolio.

“You cannot look at me,” Pesh whispered. “It is sacred. You could be killed. Only the besprizornye are permitted to stare and count the stars. Each star tells a tale.”

“And yet you stripped for Renata.”

“As a special favor. She has powerful friends. And we are beggars with an abundance of nuclear warheads. The Kremlin has become a whorehouse for hire. There’s talk every week of a coup. Look,” he said, kicking a gigantic suitcase near his bed. “Open it, Mr. President, and you will understand our plight.”

Isaac sprang the lock with a click of his thumb; the suitcase was crammed with rolls of toilet paper, like packaged snow.

“My bodyguards went on a shopping spree in Chinatown. It was God’s country to them. You know, we have every flavor of ice cream in shops along the Arbat—peach, white chocolate, caramel—but a singular absence of toilet paper. In Moscow you learn to wipe your ass with Pravda or with the back of your hand . . .”

They heard the thump of a warring army outside the bedroom. Pesh wrapped himself up in his robe, covering that strange, grounded bird on his chest, and the two of them leapt into the parlor, where the Secret Service was engaged in a battle royal with Pesh’s bodyguards, fighting over the magnetometers—like wild boys, Isaac muttered to himself. Besprizornye.

“That’s enough,” Olinov said, slapping at the shaved skulls of his men. “Sasha, let them have their toys.”

And Isaac marched out of the room with his detail, their Ray-Bans all awry.

He was overwhelmed by the wanton crush of people in a lobby crammed with spectators and members of the White House press corps, and stragglers who’d wandered in from the street—it seemed as if the whole damn capital knew of POTUS’s impulsive peregrination across Lafayette Park. Isaac was no less a recluse than the Hermit of Haifa. Washingtonians seldom had a chance to catch him in the flesh. He must have looked a bit ragged and drawn in his suit and tie from the clothing barrels of Orchard Street. He wouldn’t change his habits, no matter what his advisors said. He would have felt ridiculous in an Armani label.

Isaac was trapped in a swirl of bodies, and his detail couldn’t help him now. He had to bob and weave with the prevailing rhythm, or he would have been swept back toward the elevator bank. Hands gripped at him like the colossal talons of that mythical bird under Olinov’s robe; his face was scratched; he was beginning to suffocate amid that furnace of human flesh. It was Matt Malloy who had the presence of mind to reach for his holster and shoot into the ceiling with his .357 Magnum. His superiors would crucify him for firing his hand cannon in a crowded hotel. But that explosion—like the crack of a whip in an echo chamber—smashed the relentless rhythm of the mob. Isaac lurched forward and tumbled out of the hotel. There was an aura of irreality about the episode. Isaac, Manhattan born, could have been a minor character in Augie March.

“Sir, are you hurt?” asked Matt Malloy, with anguish in his eyes.

“Matt, I’m fine. I had the time of my life.”

But his team wouldn’t let him recross Lafayette Park on foot. Matt hunched over and kept nibbling instructions into his ear until Dragon arrived, Isaac’s bulletproof Lincoln deluxe. And now he’d have to ride two blocks in his chariot, with a Lincoln behind him and a Lincoln in front.

Back to the asylum, he muttered, as he stepped into the chariot.

3

Colonel Stefan Oliver, code name Rio, was in the rec room at Quantico, immersed in a monumental ping-pong match with the base champion, a sergeant from the Philippines, when he heard a crackle in his earpiece and instantly halted the match. He had to wear a button mike whether he was wielding a ping-pong paddle or sitting on the crapper. The duty officer at the White House was communicating with him on one of the Secret Service’s encrypted channels. “Tango One to Rio, clear the decks. The Citizen is riding high.”

“Roger that, Tango One, but what the hell is going on?”

“You have to arrange a lift package in about twenty minutes.”

“That’s absurd,” said the commander of the most elite unit in the helicopter corps. “I’m wearing silkies, and I’m playing the match of my life. I can’t put together a lift package in twenty minutes.”

“Sure you can, Rio. You’re the president’s fucking pilot. Now clear the decks. The Big Guy is at your facility, sir.”

He had to banish the Filipino sergeant and every other player from the rec room—clear the decks. Then he heard that unmistakable clatter of the presidential detail. Son of a bitch. POTUS had come to Quantico.

Sidel walked into the rec room in a blue sweatshirt and silkies—the Marines’ traditional nylon running shorts. He had to borrow a paddle.

“Hit with me, Stef. I always think better when I hear the sound of the ball. That’s why I came to fetch you. I couldn’t wait.”

He knew firsthand of the president’s fabled softness for ping-pong. Sidel had the Seabees and the gardeners at Camp David rip up the miniature golf course that earlier gardeners and engineers had cut out of the forest exclusively for President Eisenhower—it was modeled after the grounds at Burning Tree, the capital’s premier private golf club. Every president after Ike had used it as a putting green. But Sidel couldn’t bear the sight of that golf course outside his picture window at Aspen Lodge—it offended his proletarian pride. And he had Ike’s little green turned into a bumpy playground with marble-topped ping-pong tables that summoned up his childhood in Manhattan, when every park had its own ping-pong tournament, summer and winter. Isaac hadn’t counted on the perpetual wind off Catoctin Mountain that sent the ball sailing after every shot.

And so Stefan Oliver, the thirty-seven-year-old commander of Squadron One, stood in his silkies at Quantico and slapped at the ball with his president. He wasn’t trying to score points. For whatever reason, the Big Guy had glommed onto his personal pilot, and the Marine generals at Quantico were uncomfortable about this sudden coziness. The colonel was a widower; his wife, Leona, had died of a blood clot that had gone to the brain, and left him with Max, a moody eleven-year-old boy. And since the colonel had complicated hours, with the added complication of a boy who attended a school for the learning disabled near Rock Creek Park, Isaac insisted that father and son sleep at the White House on those days when his pilot was too involved with lugging him around. Stefan Oliver had a bedroom in the “attic,” on the third floor; he and the boy were the White House’s semipermanent guests.

But Isaac hadn’t come to Quantico before; the visit seemed strange, almost a kind of burlesque. He’d never involved himself in his pilot’s lift packages, and he had his own ping-pong table in the White House attic, where he could have scheduled a match with members of the Secret Service and won in a sneeze. Yet he’d come to the rec room at Quantico, where he could be alone with Stef and risk losing point after point.

“Kid,” Isaac said, “I’m being set up.”

“Then shouldn’t we tap Malloy and Bull Latham? I’m an amateur when it comes to intel.”

“But you have a keener eye than Matt. And the Bull is compromised. He’s loyal to his own career. He’d love to watch me stumble. No, I need your calibrations, Stef. You were at Camp David during the accords.”

“Yes, sir, but I wasn’t involved with the big show. I didn’t have any presidential lifts. I was a babe in the woods, the youngest pilot on the watch.”

Isaac studied him for a moment, pursed his lips. “Did you meet the Israeli prime minister?”

“A couple of times. He liked to ramble, but his security was tight as a rat’s ass. I did carry him once. He wanted to go up on one of our Night Hawks. Shin Bet had a fit. But they couldn’t stop him. He wouldn’t stay aft with all the generals. He sat in the cockpit with me, sailed right through the mist.”

“And what was your take on him?” Isaac asked. “Was he suicidal, or in complete control?”

Stefan Oliver stared at his boss. “I’d say he was a prisoner of protocol—a lot like you.”

Isaac laughed and tossed his paddle into the air. “I knew it! You’re a natural, much more clever than Matt and the Bull. Colonel, let’s get cracking.”

“I wasn’t told about this lift package. Where to, sir? What’s our destination?”

“My dacha.”

Sidel wouldn’t change out of his silkies, and Stefan had to give him fatigues and one of his own flight jackets. He’d consult the weather charts, talk to the tower. If the fog was too thick, they couldn’t approach the mountaintop. They’d have to land at Thurmont, and drive the rest of the way to the presidential retreat. The military team at the White House had choreographed this damn lift, and the colonel had been left to piss in the wind on his own command. He didn’t like it at all. He radioed the duty officer.

“Tango One, can you hear me, Tango One?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Weather uncertain. Will Dragon be at the Thurmont rendezvous?”

“Dragon on target, Rio. Not a worry in the world. Roger and out.”

Why had they bothered to include him in this mystery tour? The entire crew had assembled without him. His crew chief and copilot were in place. Stefan scowled, and they busied themselves with the control panels like a couple of innocents, while the president climbed the air stair, and the helicopter with the distinct white top assumed the designation of Marine One the moment he was aboard. There were two Hawks on this lift package, Marine One and a decoy.

Stefan had the stick between his legs, but the Hawk seemed to hover on invisible strings. He didn’t like it at all. Still, he couldn’t soliloquize to himself while he was in the air. He cruised toward Maryland and the mountaintop. The weather had begun to break. He could see clear to Gettysburg and some of the battle sites, like little green bumps. He confirmed his coordinates with the tower and radioed the duty officer.

“Tango One, we’ll survive without Dragon. I’m heading toward Camp David.”

“Are you sure, Rio? What if the sky falls on your head?”

“Then you’ll suffer, son. I didn’t authorize this lift. I was never briefed. I’m a ghost rider. Roger and out.”

It was always a bitch to land on the mountaintop. It didn’t matter how many times he’d been in the captain’s seat. You still had to squint like a hawk to spot the landing zone that had been cut out of the forest and that also served as a skeet range. He worried all the time that some son of a bitch of a sharpshooter would be out on the range popping at clay pigeons like Buffalo Bill while Stef was bringing in a White Top. And sure enough, a sharpshooter was right on the range with headphones and a target gun, as if he was lord and master of these bucolic grounds and there had never been or would never be a metal bird known as Marine One.

Stefan had to radio the camp commander. “Shoofly, Shoofly, what the fuck is Buffalo Bill doing on my lawn?”

And the commander shot back at him, “Rio, you have God’s word, the lawn is bare-assed.”

Stef had to squint again at the skeet range—Buffalo Bill was gone. Neither the copilot nor the chief steward had seen him. And Stef began to doubt his own instincts, that sixth sense he had of the terrain. He allowed his craft to hover a bit as he surveyed the lawn and then landed Marine One on a dime, as he always did. The president didn’t stride into the cockpit to chat with Stef and thank him for the lift, which had become his “protocol” on board Marine One, but climbed down the air stair instead with his military aide and Matt Malloy. There were the usual motorized golf carts that would carry the Secret Service men on board the second White Top to their cabin. But Isaac detested these carts and everything that reminded him of golf and all the aristocrats at Burning Tree. And unless he arrived from Thurmont on board Dragon during a foul-weather lift, he preferred to hike from the landing pad to the presidential digs at Aspen Lodge.

The Big Guy could relax a bit. He didn’t have to follow the protocol of a full presidential detail, since his dacha on the mountain was a fenced-in fortress. And the airspace above this fortress had been dubbed “the doughnut of death,” considering that no unauthorized craft couldn’t possibly penetrate it.

Isaac had deposited the colonel’s flight jacket on his seat and wore one of the traditional blue windbreakers that were coveted by all those who visited the mountain.

So he was almost invisible at his dacha, since everyone—from the Seabees to the carpenters and the kitchen patrol—was decked out in identical windbreakers with the words CAMP DAVID stitched in gold on the back.

Stef couldn’t accompany POTUS on his little pilgrimage to Aspen Lodge. He had to button up the aircraft, put it to bed. He was tired and also pissed off at the president. He’d always been informed, even when there was a sudden shift in POTUS’s schedule. If something went wrong on this ride, and Marine One had been knocked about in a blizzard, Stef would still bear the blame, even though he hadn’t designed or approved the lift package.

He rode in a caravan of golf carts across the wooded terrain, past the camp commander’s quarters, past the dispensary, past the nurses’ station, past a row of horseshoe pegs, past the primitive cabins with their green-painted boards and shake roofs, and leapt out at Walnut Lodge, his own digs at Camp David, this hidden resort with roads that were hard to find, where the sun could sink behind Catoctin Mountain and leave a blood-red trace, and where time had a lulling yet ferocious tug that was beyond the clockwork of any president and his keepers. FDR was the first president to visit the mountain and he’d dubbed it Shangri-La, where he could escape the furor of politics in wartime Washington and have his own rustic paradise. His aides had to live without running water and wash themselves in wooden troughs, while Stef had all the perks of a Marriott at Walnut Lodge.

He couldn’t even settle in. The duty officer at Camp David was on the horn: POTUS wanted to see him at his dacha.

“How soon?” Stefan asked. “Can I unwind a bit? Have a cup of fruit cocktail out of my fridge?”

“Colonel, the boss expects you to come riding into Dodge as pronto as you can. If you’re screwing one of the nurses from Chestnut, tell her to diddle herself.” There was a deadness on the line, as the duty officer realized his blunder. Stef was still in mourning. “I didn’t mean to be untactical, sir . . .”

He put on his own windbreaker and a Baltimore Orioles cap and went out into the winter chill that had settled on the mountain months ago and would last until spring. It could make a man crumple up on a bad day. He had no official status at Shangri-La once the lift package landed. He was one of the president’s invited guests, marking time on the mountain until the president decided to leave and Stef had to prepare another package, like a mummy called back to life. That was the strangeness of the squadron commander’s role once he arrived at Shangri-La.

He kept seeing other men in windbreakers and Oriole caps, men he had never seen before. They didn’t mask their gaze. They saluted Stef.

“Evening, Colonel.”

It still unnerved Stef. They were his duplicates or triplicates, who rode the wind, like he did. He could have had a dozen twins out there—two dozen. Dammit, he knew his own Marines, and he was familiar enough with the Secret Service. These weren’t Park Rangers, who had clearance at this site, who gardened a lot and often provided mounts for the president’s guests.

He stopped one of these strangers. “Who are you, son?”

“Chief Petty Officer Tatum. I’m with the Seabees, sir. I belong to Captain Cotter’s detail.”

Tatum’s tags were in order, and he knew the abracadabra that the Secret Service had arranged with Naval Intel to spirit out any rogues on the mountain: Blood on the Moon.

So Stef passed the swimming pool that President Nixon had the Seabees build for him near the patio of Aspen Lodge; Nixon had kept the pool heated summer and winter during his stay at the dacha—it was called Dickie’s Birdbath, since crows seemed to populate the pool more than presidents, riding over the surface with their raucous chatter. Isaac also kept the pool heated, and might go for a midnight dip when there wasn’t too much blood on the moon. POTUS was a mystery unto himself, a ping-pong playing police chief who had become president by mere chance because the president-elect, J. Michael Storm, had to resign. Still, it was Isaac who had gathered in the votes, who had campaigned with a Glock in his pants, while J. Michael hid out at the Waldorf. But Isaac was beginning to suck up more and more of Nixon’s habitat. He’d become as reclusive as Nixon after Watergate. Isaac wasn’t plagued by any scandal. But he withdrew into the mountain mist, and allowed Ramona Dazzle to run the palace.

Aspen Lodge was barely visible in the steam clouds that rose above the water, even with the spotlights that surrounded the president’s cabin. The colonel had to climb the patio steps through a shroud of wintry air—it was like holding a moist web in his hands. POTUS was on the patio with his chef, Charles, a huge black man with scars on his face as vivid as tattoos. Charles was a Seabee assigned to Aspen Lodge, and had also been with the Seabees in Nam. He’d had a concession booth at the Polo Grounds when he was still a boy. Isaac loved to talk with his Seabee chef about the late New York Giants. POTUS was still grieving Willie Mays, who was plucked from the Polo Grounds and sentenced to San Francisco. But Charles had another tale to tell.

“Look, Mr. President. I was there. I saw Willie walk down the steps of St. Nicholas Terrace and slide into the Polo Grounds on his own two feet. I watched him play stickball with kids in the Valley. He took to Harlem, and Harlem took to him, but you won’t catch Willie walking on St. Nicholas Terrace—gone is gone.”

Charles marched back inside the cabin, and Isaac was left in that wintry web, as the colonel climbed onto the patio.

“You know, kid, I can always see the deer at first light—from this porch. They come to the salt lick. The Seabees replenish that lick whenever I come to the mountain. Those whitetails were all bled out by local hunters, but I suspended the hunting season on this mountain, put a moratorium on whitetails. That’s the last bit of power Ramona’s left me.”

“You could always fire her,” the colonel said.

Isaac smiled in that curl of steam clouds. “And risk a coup? The military’s on her side.”

“I doubt that, sir.”

“I didn’t mean to dis you, Stef. But I had to get out of the Hotel”—that was the Secret Service’s code name for the White House. “And I didn’t want Ramona here. So I improvised and covered my tracks. She won’t find this little maneuver in the logbooks.”

Stef had to grin at Sidel’s childlike perversity. “You can’t keep her off the mountain, sir. A lift package is always countersigned. She’ll see the signatures.”

“But I’ve locked down all the other Night Hawks. And she can’t get through the gates. I’m still commander-in-chief. I need twenty-four hours, Stef.”

“Then it really is Blood on the Moon,” Stef muttered.

“What’s that?” Isaac asked with the same childlike perversity.

“It’s kind of the code name to identify unauthorized personnel.”

“And I’m the last to hear about it?”

The president seemed in real pain, and Stef was puzzled. POTUS was wild-eyed and wooly on his mountain. “I didn’t want you to bring Max,” Isaac said. “That’s why I excluded you from the package.”

Stef usually brought his son along on the lift, and the boy would go back to the District on Dragon if Stef had to linger. Max had a live-in nurse who stayed with him when the colonel disappeared on long lifts. Half the time they all lived in the White House attic and had breakfast with the Big Guy.

“I’m worried,” Isaac said. “And I didn’t want to add Max to the mix. I’m expecting a visit from Ariel Moss. It seems a lot of folks would be much happier if he didn’t make it here alive. And I’d like to know the reason. Do you have a sidearm, son?”

The president’s paranoia was beginning to gnaw at Stef. He wondered about all those unfamiliar faces in Oriole caps. Was the mountain overrun with professional body snatchers?

“I left my Beretta back at the base, sir. None of us are sanctioned to carry sidearms on a lift. We’re not meant to be Buffalo Bill. We’d only add to the confusion in a firefight.” He was disheartened by the president’s woeful look. “I could go to the Marine barracks and get a sidearm. I have that privilege.”

“No,” Isaac said. “It might alert our enemies if you suddenly appear with a sidearm on the mountain.”

What enemies? Had the Big Guy gone gray in the head?

“Do you want some company, sir? I could spend the night at Aspen.”

“I’ll be fine,” Isaac said. “But indulge me. Don’t make any new friends, not on this mountain.”

The colonel had to promise the president, like a Boy Scout making a pledge of honor. Some kind of shit was going down and Stef had to juggle in the dark. But a promise was a promise. He walked out among those body snatchers in Oriole caps and went to the officers’ mess at Hickory Lodge. And that’s when he saw her, a Marine lieutenant attached to some other detail. She didn’t belong to Squadron One. She was wearing rubber boots, tucked into her fatigues. She had dark, curly hair, like Leona, and it filled him with remorse, as he dreamt of his wife. The lady lieutenant was sipping a Dr. Pepper.

They were in a Mickey Mouse canteen, like everything on this mountain. Officers and enlisted men had to suck whiskey on the sly. She had hazel eyes, and he had to calibrate the contours of her body like a pilot on a presidential mission. Even a widower in his grief had to admit that she was gorgeous. But not a soul in this mess hall was hitting on her, and she was the only female in sight. Then he noticed how lithe she was, how she leaned on the steel toes of her boots, like a night fighter.

She smiled at him, and it wasn’t a seductive, slit-eyed smile. He returned her salute, though she didn’t have to salute him in the mess hall, not in a company of officers at Camp David. The president’s retreat was getting weirder and weirder—it was like tumbling into the rabbit hole with little Alice, but this rabbit hole was on a mountain.

“We’re proud of you, Colonel,” she said, with a Southern lilt in her voice. “Lieutenant Sarah Rogers, with the camp commander’s office. I’m in charge of the commander’s books. You know, I count up all the cans of asparagus.”

A camp accountant wouldn’t have worn steel-tipped boots. But he went along with her play and decided to become POTUS’s perimeter detective. What if the Big Guy wasn’t paranoid at all, and Lieutenant Sarah was some kind of a key? He was drawn to her despite her phony claims. He hadn’t expected to discover a siren in a glorified snack bar. Leona had been his high school sweetheart, and he’d never flirted with another gal.

“You’re a Southern belle, aren’t you?”

Her hazel eyes crinkled a bit, but her smile was genuine. And Stef began to wonder if playacting was as difficult for her as it was for him.

“Lord,” she said, “I’m a Texas cowgirl. I rode the bulls at Gilley’s, and grew up on a ranch outside Austin. And where are you from, Colonel?”

“Peoria,” he said. But it was a bit of a lie. Stef was a military brat, and he’d lived in Peoria just long enough to graduate from high school. He sensed the same rootless longing in this lieutenant with the steel-tipped toes. He’d have bet that Sarah Rogers, the Southern belle, was also a military brat, and that the “ranch” she grew up on was a swarm of airfields and training camps between Okinawa and Stuttgart.

“It’s hot in here,” she said. “Shall we sit on the verandah?”

The snack bar didn’t have anything like a verandah; it had a tiny landing on top of a staircase that led down to the camp garage. Two men in windbreakers wobbled up the stairs, with metal flasks sticking out of their pockets. The colonel couldn’t tell if they were soldiers or civilian contractors assigned to the mountain. Both of them had mean whiskey eyes. They doffed their baseball caps at Sarah and pretended to salute Stef.

“Well, well,” said the first whiskey man, “if it ain’t the celebrity himself? What does it feel like, Mr. Oliver, to ferry the big Jew around in one of your Night Hawks? Does he recite his evening prayers in a yarmulke?”

“I think you had better shut your mouth,” the colonel said, “and show a little respect for the commander in chief. You’re both standing on his mountain.”

“Well, well,” said the second whiskey man. “Ain’t he gallant? But the big Jew is nothin’ but a crook. He stole the election. He doesn’t deserve to be at David, unless he’s here to clean the garbage bins. Why don’t you lend us the young lady, Mr. Oliver? We’ll waltz her into the forest and be as gentle with her as Jesus.”

Stef moved toward these whiskey boys, ready to “waltz” with them on the landing, in his own way, but Sarah was much too quick for him, leaping out like the Catoctin wind. She battered their kneecaps with her steel toes, and they tumbled down the stairs with the crazy flip-flop of mannequins.

“Those two dirtballs,” Sarah said. The Southern lilt was gone. She had that neutral, staccato tone of a military brat who’d spent her childhood hopping from place to place like a gal on an endless circus caravan.

“We could be charged with assault,” Stefan said.

“I doubt it.”

She had too many puckers around her hazel eyes for a brash young lieutenant. But why would she conceal her true rank?

“You’re not the camp’s bean counter, are you?”

“No,” she said. “I’m a captain with Naval Intel. And this isn’t POTUS’s mountain. He’s a tenant here. Cactus belongs to us.”

Stef had to live in a wonderland of code names. Cactus. That’s what the various intelligence services called this mountain retreat.

“And are you here to protect your property, Captain?”

Sarah smiled. “Sort of,” she said. “This lift package was kind of a curveball. It wasn’t on our radar. So I came out from Quantico to have a look. But you can call me Sarah.”

Naval Intel had its headquarters somewhere in the bowels of the Marine base. It was the most mandarin of all the intelligence services. One or two of the fliers under his command probably belonged to Naval Intel, and Stef would never know. But he had a crazy urge to stroke the auburn hair of this mysterious captain. He wondered if it was the backlash of his own grief. He no longer trusted himself, or his instincts.

It was Sarah who reached out, kissed him, and fondled his hair.

“I couldn’t resist,” she said with a very soft smile, while the two contractors groaned at the bottom of the stairs. “I guess I’m a groupie. I saw you at Quantico in your flight jacket. You’re a legend, you know. The young colonel who ferries POTUS around. I’m sorry about your wife.”

Stef clapped his hand over her mouth. Sarah didn’t struggle; she nibbled at his hand—they were love bites.

“Please,” he said. “I have a headache, and . . .”

He removed his hand, and they stood there in the afterglow of the sinking sun, like dancers in their own invisible, motionless circle. But the two contractors got to their feet and started up the stairs with menace riding on their backs. Sarah plucked a Beretta M9 from her windbreaker without taking her eyes off Stef and pointed it at the two men.

“Don’t you dare,” she said, and they scuttled into that strange ellipsis from the final scraps of sunlight.

Her eyes were still on Stef. “I’ll walk you to your quarters.”

It wasn’t much of a hike to Walnut. She held his hand. And Stef began to feel that he was tumbling into a dream. Her sleek semiautomatic was the exact replica of his own. Was Sarah the phantom sharpshooter he had seen on the lawn as he hovered over the landing pad on Marine One? It couldn’t have been her.

“Would you like a cup of fruit cocktail? That’s all I have in the fridge.”

She rubbed at his chin with her knuckles. “That’s the sweetest invitation I’ve had in a long time. But I’m still on duty, Stef. I haven’t checked the perimeters. And I wouldn’t want to lose our chief tenant to some ghost who’s wandered in through the wires.”

“But this is the most secure facility we have.”

“I know,” she whispered, and then she vanished into that final scrap of light.

4

He asked to be woken if a stranger appeared on the mountain in the middle of the night—it was four A.M. and Charles, his Seabee chef, who sometimes served as his barber and his bodyguard at Aspen, tugged on his pajama top. “Mr. President, there are two fuzzy white men at the front gate, old geezers, and they don’t know any of the call signs.”

“Two geezers?”

“That’s what I get from the gate. And they have no business being there. But one of ’em insists that it’s a personal checkpoint between him and you.”

“Did he give a name?” Isaac asked, putting his windbreaker on over his pajamas.

“No, but it sounds like he’s one mean motherfucker, sir, and he has that awful smell of privilege.”

“Like a president—or a prime minister.”

Isaac went out into the cold in the same slippers he’d worn at Gracie Mansion—slippers he’d found in an Orchard Street barrel—but Charles made him put on a pair of wool, all-weather socks. Isaac’s detail was already outside in a caravan of golf carts, with Matthew Malloy in the lead cart.

“Jesus,” Isaac said, “I don’t need the whole fucking brigade. You’ll scare the pants off the prime minister.”

“And what if it isn’t him?” Matt asked, in harness with his holster, his hand-held metal detector, his Ray-Bans, and a stun gun.

“Hey, Sherlock Holmes, who else could it be?”

Isaac would have preferred to walk, but he couldn’t wait. So he sat in the saddle, while Matt steered the cart, and Charles climbed onto the baggage seat. Matt drove at a maddening speed, and the entire caravan nearly spilled into a ditch. But he got to the gatehouse with his package, Citizen Sidel, and there they were, two geezers in rumpled trench coats and hats with enormous earlaps, like refugees of some long-forgotten winter war.

Isaac recognized Ariel Moss, with his sunken shoulders and that one lazy eye. He looked like a lunatic; his hair hadn’t been cut, and he had wild roots at the back of his neck. Isaac also recognized the other man, Mordecai Katz, one of the founders of Shin Bet, whose physique would have rivaled Bull Latham’s if he hadn’t been so hunched over.

Suddenly Ariel Moss’s secret voyage made no sense. Why wouldn’t Shin Bet have sponsored him if Mordecai was still at the helm? And then he realized that Mordecai had come as Ariel’s bodyguard and not as a spokesman for Shin Bet. No one inside Israeli counterintelligence had sanctioned this move. Mordecai had left the service years ago. He was a retired general and a rogue secret agent. That’s why Ariel could come out of his seclusion and go back to robbing banks at will. Shin Bet wouldn’t have interfered with their idol, Mordecai Katz. And Ariel couldn’t have made it to America without him.

Matt Malloy was about to wave his magic wand—that magnetometer of his—over Mordecai when Isaac started to protest. “Matt, these guys are my guests. You can’t do a body search on an ex–prime minister and the former chief of Shin Bet.”

But Mordecai intervened in Matt’s behalf. “Please, Mr. President, you must allow this young fellow to perform his duties. It’s a matter of protocol. Ari and I could be assassins on the run,” he said with a grin that revealed a mouth full of battered, broken teeth.

Shit, Isaac mused. Didn’t Israeli generals have a decent dental plan?

But the Hermit of Haifa and his giant of a companion stood with their paws in the air while Matt probed them with his magic wand. Then the caravan returned to Aspen, with Ariel and Mordecai in separate carts. But a dispute broke out at the bottom of the stairs.

“Mr. President,” Mordecai said, “we cannot begin our talk with the Secret Service in the same house.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Matt said.

“Perhaps, but it is my protocol.”

Matt might have had some violent tango with Mordecai if Isaac hadn’t overruled him.

“Charles can protect me.”

“Sir,” Matt said, “Charles is a cook.”

“He’s also a Seabee—end of discussion.”

Ariel had to hold onto the handrail or he couldn’t have climbed the president’s stairs. Isaac should have known how fragile he was. Mordecai stood right behind Ariel, who could have been wandering across some infinite line—that’s how long it took him to arrive at the top of the stairs.

Mordecai went into the cabin first. Isaac couldn’t imagine what predators Ariel’s giant hoped to find. Mordecai went through every room, opening and shutting doors, peering into closets. Then he closed the curtains that surrounded the sun room, and Isaac had a touch of panic as he lost the sweep of the forest that always managed to calm a city boy. Now he couldn’t watch the whitetails wander over to the salt lick as the light broke through the trees.

Mordecai could see how unsettled Isaac was. “Mr. President, I assure you, it is absolutely necessary that we are not observed during this discussion. Also, I am a camel. I can survive for days on my own cud. But the prime minister has a special diet. And . . .”

“I know,” Isaac said. “Balanda. It is already being prepared, General.”

Mordecai pulled on the strings of his cap, suspicious of Sidel. “But who could have told you about his diet?”

“Pesh Olinov.”

“Ah,” Mordecai said, tossing his head back, “that Kremlin gangster.”

“He must have been some kind of cutout,” Isaac said. “How else would I have known that Ariel was coming?”

“Motke,” Ariel said, leaning back on Isaac’s sofa, with his lazy eye wandering about in his head. “We shouldn’t confuse the president. Yes, I reached out to the gangster. But I wasn’t sure how dependable he was. He’s too busy buying and selling mountains of toilet paper.” Suddenly Ariel grimaced, and his face turned white. “Dear Isaac, I must have something to eat.”

Charles arrived from the kitchen with a steaming pot of balanda, with Russian rye bread, a jar of kosher pickles, and blackened potatoes that resembled nuggets of coal.

They could have had their balanda at the dining room table, but Ariel preferred his own tray. His lazy eye stopped wandering once he slurped his soup. He tore at the Russian rye, bit into a blackened potato. Isaac could hardly believe the metamorphosis. Ariel Moss belched like a Cossack.

Isaac couldn’t fathom the healing powers of balanda. It tasted like tepid dishwater. But he drank the soup, wondering how the zeks could have survived Siberia on such a weak potion. He gobbled the rye bread with a pickle that didn’t have the same brine as the pickle barrels along Essex Street.

“Good,” Ariel whispered, “I’m refreshed,” as Charles vanished into the kitchen and shut the door. Ariel and Mordecai removed their hats and coats; they wore sleeveless sweaters over their winter underwear.

Ariel was silent for a moment, a very sly fox. “It could have been the rumor of a rumor of a rumor,” he said with his lazy eye shut. “That’s how it started. A drug lord from Medellin sends me a fan letter out of the blue. He admired my raid on Acre Prison, how I had freed my brothers from the Irgun. And this minor drug lord—call him Pepito—met with his banker in Basel. And the banker said that he and his associates all contributed to a lottery.”

The sly fox paused again. “Dear Isaac, can you guess what the lottery was about?”

Isaac was no connoisseur of lotteries. “I haven’t a clue. What could interest a banker in Basel? The sudden rise of the Swiss franc?”

“Not at all,” Ariel said. “The winner had to pick the exact date of your death.”

Isaac smiled. “I suppose I should be flattered.”

“It’s not a joke!” Ariel said. “The lottery had become a fashion—a craze—in certain banking centers. This alone meant nothing to me. Bankers love to bet. But the lottery spiraled out of control. And whoever won would be a very rich man.”

Ariel fell silent again. He puffed on a pipe with a very short stem; there wasn’t a pinch of tobacco in the bowl.

Now Isaac was annoyed. It was as if he had to wade through a world of smokeless smoke. He longed to see the forest through his picture window, wait for sunrise, and watch the whitetails assemble under his stairs. He preferred his salt lick to spymasters and a loony ex–prime minister.

“You traveled all the way to America to tell me this?”

“Yes,” said Ariel with a deep shiver. “It was imperative.”

Mordecai sat with his huge paws on his lap. “Mr. President, you were once a policeman, yes?”

“I still am—I earned my gold shield. I still have it.”

“Then you are familiar with our craft. We look for signs, for vectors, really, millions of them traveling in the dark, disappearing into the void, never touching their destination once. But when these vectors collide, you have what is called a smash point.”

“That’s very poetic,” Isaac said. “Are we in the middle of a tennis match? What the heck does it mean?”

Ariel grabbed Isaac’s gnarled hand for a moment as his lazy eye wandered again. Lincoln also had a lazy eye, Isaac recalled. You could see it in the portraits, with or without Mary, where the Great Emancipator seemed to squint, or look out into some dark unknown. Isaac was terrified to live in Lincoln’s house. No other president haunted him, not even FDR. Roosevelt had his stamp albums, his poker games, his dalliances, and Lincoln had nothing at all to lighten the load of the presidency, nothing perhaps but his little boy Tad.

“Do you trust me?” Ariel asked, and it felt like a religious question, as if Lincoln and the Lord’s own better angels were involved.

“With my life,” Isaac answered without an instant of hesitation.

“And your soul,” Ariel said. “I want that, too. I must have it, or we will never solve this riddle. Do you remember when I was beaten up in the Bronx—mugged, in your American argot. And you visited me at the hospital. The doctors and the nurses were all startled—and impressed. The police commissioner of Manhattan had come to visit some poor, bruised schlemiel, a nobody. I had stature now. The best doctors in that broken-down hospital listened to my heart. And the day before these doctors had left me there to rot. I was a perfect candidate for the icebox in the basement. Isaac, I am in your debt. Do you trust me?”

“Yes, dammit!” Isaac said. “I trust you, heart and soul. You and your emeritus general.”

“Then you must listen when we talk of a smash point, of vectors that meet with an explosive force. It was not the bankers’ lottery that mattered. There are endless games of chance. It was the mischief and the ferocity of their bet. They weren’t gambling, Isaac, they were proselytizing, converting people to their cause. It was well beyond prediction. They were willing your death with their lottery, that’s how certain it was to this one banker in Basel, who laundered money for the Colombian cartel.”

“But you have Mordecai—Motke,” Isaac said. “You could have gone right to Shin Bet.”

The two old warriors looked at Isaac as if he had lost his mind. “They’re part of the problem,” Ariel said. “All the clandestine services are. They’re pulled along into the maelstrom.”

“Then I suppose I should be frightened of Matt Malloy and my own Secret Service.”

Isaac realized that the giant’s great paws were as substantial as a pair of catcher’s mitts.

“Frightened, no? But they can’t protect you with all their gadgets, not the way this lottery is growing.”

Isaac had walked into hell houses alone, had sniffed the devil’s ass, and walked out alive.

“What’s your advice?” he asked with a bitterness in his voice that the two warriors must have noticed.

“Resign,” Ariel said. “You don’t have any other escape routes. Even I have to admit that you’re a catastrophe as a president. That’s why we admire you so much. Look, Pepito, the drug lord, is your biggest fan. He can’t wait to build schools in the worst barrios of Medellin—just like the israelita, he says—but he would kill you in a minute. You’re a threat to his narco dollars. The whole banking system could sink with you in the White House, and his numbered account would be washed away with it. The president can’t afford to be Robin Hood.”

“Why not?” Isaac asked, wounded by this old warrior and his accomplice. “Why not?”

“Because,” said Mordecai, “Sherwood Forest wasn’t Robin Hood’s sanctuary. It was his prison.”

Isaac was mortified. The White House had dismantled him, whittled him down to a mess of skin and bone. He’d been a defiant mayor. He could fight the governor and state senators from his perch in City Hall, since he had the realtors under his thumb. He was the ultimate landlord. He owned the lots where all the pharaohs wanted to build their apartment palaces, even owned the little rivers that flowed beneath the lots. He could find revenue for all his pet projects. The Republicans couldn’t field a candidate against Sidel. They capitulated, let him play Robin Hood within the five boroughs. But there were fifty Sheriffs of Nottingham he now had to battle, more than fifty. His generals could barely look him in the eye. His cabinet grumbled behind his back. His chief of staff pretended he didn’t exist.

“Mr. President,” Ariel said, “we can’t be the only prophets of doom. Forget the bankers and their morbid bet. You must have had some other sign?”

Isaac showed Ariel and Mordecai the mysterious greeting card on a folded slip of paper he had found under one of the hair driers in the White House’s Cosmetology Room. They weren’t surprised. They studied the ragged greeting to “Big Balls” from “the Brotherhood” and the imprint of the tattoo, revealing Isaac as a raffish clown with an ice pick in his left eye and his head sewn onto his body.

The slip of paper excited Ariel, woke him from his habitual gloom.

“Motke, didn’t I warn you that the White House was compromised? Isaac has enemies under his own roof, or at least the servant of some other master. That’s why we had to come here, to this dacha in the wilderness.”

Isaac watched the path of that lazy eye. “And to your own tight memories, I assume. This was your Garden of Eden during the Camp David Accords.”

Ariel cackled in his winter underwear. “Eden, eh? With Sadat in the next cottage, it was a nest of thorns. We nearly came to blows half a dozen times. But at least I had Motke at my side—and Shin Bet. Sadat was scared of his own security team—and his generals. He was convinced they meant to poison him before he could sign the accords. It was our Motke who watched over Sadat, who had to prepare his food in President Carter’s kitchen.”

“Balanda?” Isaac asked.

“No, no,” Ariel said with a frown. “Sadat wasn’t a zek. That soup would have been worse than poison for a man who’d never been near the gulag. We fed him clear chicken broth, rice, and boiled potatoes. He ate kosher for the first time in his life. It’s possible that his own chef may have been peppering his food with arsenic. The fanatics in his country and mine didn’t want any pact—no one did. He walked around Shangri-La like a ghost—he was a ghost, and I wasn’t far behind. Motke, how many wounds do you have on your body, wounds that were meant for me? Please strip for the president.”

Mordecai sulked. “Ari, I’m not a showoff.”

“Strip, I said.”

Mordecai removed his sweater and his ruffled woolen undershirt. Isaac saw a gallery of punctures along the giant’s enormous chest—some looked like indented arrowheads, others like fingers and the imprint of a webbed foot. Mordecai’s wounds had all the panorama of cave art.

“See,” Ariel said, “now you know how lucky I am to be alive. I returned from Shangri-La to a storm of anger. My own party wanted to scalp me. I would drown in spit every time I walked into the Knesset. And there was Motke at my side.”

“But this mountain must have meant something to you,” Isaac said. “It must have worked its magic, or you wouldn’t have traveled this far. You could have sent me a kite.”

“Perhaps I did enjoy myself a little in Roosevelt’s retreat. Even with all the nasty bargaining, the shuttling between cottages, the meetings with that evangelist, President Carter, I felt outside politics. I wasn’t Ari Moss, the reformed terrorist. I was someone else at Shangri-La, a stranger to all the madness. Isaac, you must grow invisible if you want to survive. You can offer the illusion of change, nothing more. That’s why you’re such a threat. You believe in your own beliefs, or you never would have gotten this kite, as you call it,” Ariel said, clutching the slip of paper. “And where did it come from? You spoke to your wizards at the White House . . .”

“I have only one wizard, Bull Latham, and he never saw the card. But he said that a caricature of me with the ice pick in my eye had been floating around, and that it seemed to come from the Aryan Brotherhood.”

The ex–prime minister scoffed at the idea. “Amateurs! They could not have conceived such a masterful design in a million years.”

“That’s what the dwarf said—Olinov.”

Ariel’s hands were trembling now. “And who were the creators of this art?”

“The besprizornye,” Isaac said.

“Then it should become clear to you.”

“As clear as the broth that Motke made for Sadat. The Sons of Rossiya sent me that kite—a band of orphans who are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, who can strangle stock markets, murder diplomats, and mint money whenever they want. I’m not sure I believe in the mystical powers of the besprizornye.”

“And did the dwarf tell you about the CEO of the Sons?”

Isaac was getting pissed off. Were the Sons as grandiose as Big Tobacco? The Fortune Five Hundred champions of crime?

“His name is Viktor.”

Ariel wouldn’t have survived Siberia without the friendship of Viktor’s papa, Karl, the patriarch of all the besprizornye. Karl grew up in one of the camp orphanages. He had a rare gift. He knew how to draw with a child’s crayons, to seize the world around him and his own interior landscape. And the pakhans got wind of the boy. They apprenticed him to one of their own drawing masters, a zek who had strangled men and women with his powerful hands. He taught this boy the language and ritual of tattoos, a language more sophisticated than a medieval monk’s illuminated manuscripts. Each stroke, each color, each animal, each star had meaning in this hierarchy of urkas and their pakhans. The tattoos marked the history of a chelovek’s rebirth in Kolyma, and his ascent within his own pack of werewolves, cat men without whiskers who preyed upon the weak, and those intellectuals who landed in Kolyma for some fabricated political sin.

But this boy, Karl, soon surpassed his own master. No one could instruct him now. He was a prince with his own self-propelled royal line. Karl had learned another art from his drawing master. He strangled whoever stood in his way and welcomed all the besprizornye from the orphanages in Kolyma, Moscow, and Kiev.

“But you weren’t an orphan,” Isaac said. “You were a political prisoner. Why would Karl welcome you into his clan?”

Ariel often wondered himself, but Karl must have looked into Ariel’s eyes and seen a werewolf as well as a lover of books. The young pakhan had mastered the tattooist’s art but was utterly blind to the Russian alphabet. So Ariel read to him all the classics he could find at the camp. Sophocles. Shakespeare. Pushkin. And he would recite in a multitude of voices until the pakhan was struck dumb with the modulations and music of words. He cried into a silk handkerchief that had come from the commandant’s own laundress. Ariel dined with pakhan Karl, had Turkish coffee, and oriental sweets.

Where did such a paradise of treasures come from? It was wartime. The Germans had made their push into Soviet territory. But Karl was also a counterfeiter and the camp’s one millionaire—military trucks arrived in the dead of night with stolen goods from as far as Turkey and Iran. And Ariel enjoyed other sweets—Karl’s own concubines.

“And still you escaped from Kolyma.”

“With Karl’s blessings,” Ariel said. “He despised the Germans as much as I did, even if he had to do business with them. And he gave me one of his orphans to guide us out of the tundra.”

“Pesh Olinov,” Isaac whispered.

Karl could have flown off on a magic carpet of money. But he stayed in Kolyma, a werewolf among werewolves. And when the camp closed, he kept his millions and had his own little army of besprizornye. They worked all the “gold mines” of the West, went from capital to capital, sucked up what wealth they could, as counterfeiters, contract killers, bankers, real estate barons, black marketeers, and then moved on, leaving behind a ravaged landscape. Karl had a son, born in West Berlin or Basel—nobody knows. The boy’s mother is as much of a mystery. Was she one of Karl’s concubines from Kolyma? He did not have a Siberian Salome in his baggage train. Was she a baroness or a banker’s daughter he had met in the middle of a land deal? Little Viktor couldn’t have been attached to his mama. There are no recollections of her at all. But he had an excellent drawing master—his own papa. He went to private schools in Switzerland, learned the art of handling and manufacturing money.

Meanwhile, Karl dodged his rival pakhans, eliminated every one. He had many scars from his battles with the pakhans, who envied his rise from a tattoo artist to criminal overlord, but their knives couldn’t kill Karl. He had too much paté at La Tour d’Argent with his bodyguards. And when Karl died suddenly of a heart attack, Viktor inherited the besprizornye.

He didn’t repeat his father’s mistakes. He dined with his wolf pack on balanda and lived out of a suitcase. He could have bought and sold La Tour d’Argent, but it would have been futile to take revenge on a restaurant. Viktor moved about, kept modest apartments in many places, seldom traveling with a bodyguard. Yet his aura was great. He might appear at a Russian nightclub in Tel Aviv, or at Little Odessa in Brighton Beach, while some half-starved minstrel thrummed the balalaika—it must have reminded Viktor of a past he didn’t have. His spiritual home was the gulag, even if he’d never been near the tundra. His art had been born in the camps. His tattoos were sought by princes and moguls and movie stars. But he wasn’t interested in their money. Bankers courted this young billionaire. He had no desire for their business. He was a counterfeiter whose “originals” were impossible to find. Even Treasury agents marveled at the details of Grant’s beard on one of Viktor’s immaculate fifty-dollar bills. His paper was of the purest silk. He could have brought down the U.S. currency—created a blizzard of false fifty-dollar bills—but he had no real argument against the United States. He wouldn’t flood the market. Besides, tattoos intrigued him much more than cutting into a soft-steel plate. And he never put a price on his tattoos, never charged a penny for his designs.

People who understood the power and the workmanship of his tattoos began to wonder if he chose his subjects at random. But it wasn’t random at all. Most of his subjects were besprizornye, the werewolves of his own pack.

“I saw one of his tattoos,” Isaac said. “I’m positive—on Olinov. It was a fabulous bird, a griffin that poked right across his chest, with a bunch of claws, and a face that was almost human. I got dizzy looking at such a bird. But why would Viktor pick Pesh?”

The two old warriors winked at one another.

“What kind of policeman are you, Mr. President?” Ariel asked in a rough tone. “Pesh was a chelovek. Viktor owed him that tattoo. Pesh had once belonged to his father’s clan, probably saved his life. He certainly saved mine. I would never have come back from the taiga without him. He had eyes in both cheeks of his ass. We’d have been devoured by Siberian wolves if he hadn’t tossed sticks of fire at them. You cannot imagine a timber wolf with white fur and pale blue eyes that blend right into the dark. Pesh had a way with wolves. He could growl at them, flap his arms like an engine. These wolves would crawl under the wires and rip the throats of guards on the perimeter and attack cheloveks. That’s why the dwarf was so valuable, and Karl could trust him and only him to get us through the taiga. The griffin you discovered on the dwarf was Viktor’s version of a god-man who could scare away the Siberian wolf. And it was a warning to other cheloveks that the dwarf was not to be trifled with.”

“A winter warning,” Isaac said. “It was Viktor who sent the greeting card.”

Ariel nodded.

“And he had Pepito write you that letter about the lottery.”

Ariel nodded again.

“He might even have invented the lottery to flush those bankers out.”

“Yes,” Mordecai said, “to bring them closer to the smash point.”

The giant began to sniff around him with his enormous nostrils. “Ari, we have to leave. I can smell the snow. We do not want to be trapped on this mountain—it will be worse for us than timber wolves in the taiga.”

The two of them put on their trench coats and crazy garrison caps. Isaac had gotten used to these warriors, would miss them now.

“You could stay,” he said. “Whatever’s out there, Aspen is like a fortress.”

But they wouldn’t listen, or wait until Charles could prepare a sack of bread and cheese. They were already halfway out the door, and Isaac had to clutch at Ariel.

“You’ve come this far,” he said. “Tell me why Viktor should care whether I live or die.”

“Mr. President, he’s a businessman as well as an artist. He doesn’t want all his assets to go into the toilet. Besides, he has a weakness for Robin Hood.”

Isaac didn’t catch one fleck of snow as Ariel and Mordecai began to negotiate the stairs. Mordecai was the navigator. Ariel clutched his shoulders as they descended one stair at a time. It was excruciating to watch. Isaac went back inside Aspen, as sad as he had ever been.

He opened the curtains. The light had begun to break, and he could see down into the valley through a narrow cut in the woods. A whitetail arrived, its legs like great jumping sticks, with the picture window serving as a natural screen. A block of salt sat on a stake driven into the ground, but that whitetail never got near the salt lick. It bounded back into the forest in one arcing leap that was both lyrical and violent—the whitetail trembled in midair and was gone. And that’s when Isaac saw the gray wolf, with its spindly legs and winter fur. The wolf must have come out of a taiga all its own. Its eyes appeared a brilliant green in the breaking light. It was staring at Isaac with its own timid defiance. Disdaining the salt lick, it loped back into the woods with a lazy motion. Isaac stood against the window, an easy target, and still couldn’t find that first snowflake of Mordecai’s.