They could have met in Geneva’s Old Town, with its fairyland flavor, or in Amsterdam, where he would have had a perfect escape route along the canals, but he picked Paris to meet with all these money launderers, maniacs, crypto-bankers, and ministers of crime. They had billions at their disposal in hard cash. Viktor had found a nondescript hotel in the thirteenth arrondissement, near Chinatown, with its vast plain of high-rises. He’d booked every room in the hotel. He was wary of his own partners, but the waiters and laundresses at the Hotel des Artisans worked for him. They all carried silencers under their blouses and bibs. He might have to turn the hotel into a killing ground, so he sent the manager on a month’s vacation. He was aware that his partners had their own accomplices and also plotted among themselves, but he couldn’t operate without such risks. There was too much wealth at stake. His partners were angry at him because he refused to initiate measures that would have favored them. They could have made a killing in Mother Russia, but Viktor hesitated, Viktor stalled. So they sank their talons into America’s soft underbelly, but Viktor wouldn’t share his paper with these princes, wouldn’t give them access to his prize plates. Their own paper was crude, and couldn’t have weakened the American economy. Half their associates were already in prison, and they didn’t want T-men on their tail.
“But you, Viktor, you are our Rembrandt,” said Rainer Wolff of West Berlin. Rainer owned newspapers, publishing houses, and nightclubs. But he couldn’t expand his holdings without Viktor and his apprentices, with their little sacks of engravers’ tools. “You must give us these children—or share them with us.”
The others seemed to agree, or perhaps they wanted to give the impression that they were within Rainer’s reach. There was Pesh Olinov, who’d just come from Moscow, and who worked for and against Gorbachev at the same time, crippling him while he held him aloft; there was Michael Davit from Manchester, who’d made his fortune with a string of tobacco shops and had his own snug little school for assassins who were almost as invisible as the besprizornye, and Viktor was convinced that Davit had brought some of these thugs from Manchester and had put them at Rainer’s disposal; there was Pavel Lind from Poland, a publisher of pornography who owned a fleet of truckers in a collapsing communist empire; Pavel also controlled the Eastern Bloc’s black market in dollars and had the most to gain from Viktor’s magical paper.
Pavel was desperate for dollars, and half crazed. He watched Viktor like an embattled hawk.
Then there was Pierrot, the Baron de Robespierre, who was one of Viktor’s messengers and confidants, but the baron had his own allegiances, and Viktor’s other partners kept their money in the baron’s invisible vaults inside a bomb shelter in Basel. Thus it was hard to tell where the baron’s real allegiances lay, and at what price he would sell out. And then there was Rosa Malamud, who had her own line of fashion shops on the Left Bank; she’d done a bit of freelancing for Shin Bet and MI6; her weapon of choice was a sharpened knitting needle that she would dig between a man’s eyes. Viktor wasn’t frightened of her violence or her volatility. She was quicker on her feet than Viktor’s partner-princes. She was fifty years old and had all the cash she would ever need, yet she sat in the darkened dining room at the Hotel des Artisans. It wasn’t greed that had brought her here, or adventure. She was curious about this pakhan with the wooden box. Perhaps she’d slept with Viktor’s father once upon a time and her maternal instincts had turned deadly. Viktor watched for any signs of the knitting needle.
They must have elected Rainer Wolff as their spokesman. Viktor had avoided West Berlin, because Rainer had enough punch to bribe every single border guard, and Viktor might have ended up in some Stasi cell in East Berlin without his passport. He was more comfortable in Paris, even if it was Rosa’s roost, and he had a lot to fear, but his father had settled in Paris, as much as a pakhan could settle in any one place, and he felt nimble in its streets. He loved the odors of each Metro station, loved the little parks with their ping-pong tables topped with marble and mosaics. Paris was his bled, his personal canteen, his wanderer’s home, and he wouldn’t allow a clever maniac like Rosa to ruin it for him. So he listened to his partners’ grievances.
“Mensch,” Rainer said, “you cannot have a monopoly on those dollars of yours. You must share.”
“I have shared,” Viktor said. “Rainer, you have a very short memory. When you were in a hole and needed my paper to settle your debts with some gangster from MI6, I did not hesitate for a second. I prepared a special plate.”
Rainer whistled through his teeth. “A masterpiece! And I am forever grateful. But gratitude can only go so far. We have to stop the Yankee invasion. Their spooks are everywhere. We cannot conduct our business.”
“And you think my paper will end your problems.”
“Yes,” Rainer said. “They’ll pull their bloodhounds from our territories if their own market is flooded.”
Viktor stared into the heat of those hostile faces. “They’ll come at you more and more. They’ll close your shops. Pavel, they’ll arrest all your traders. You won’t be able to move the paper you have. And they’ll whack you in the head out of pure spite. We’ve seen it happen before.”
“Ah,” Michael Davit said, “but we never had paper of your quality—we have our own atom bomb and you tell us we can’t use it.”
“Stop that,” Viktor said, “I’ve given you enough to make you all rich.”
“What about Sidel?” Rosa asked, looking like a delirious spider in a designer dress. “We paid Tollhouse a fortune to get rid of him. You contributed to the pot. And I thought we had the whole Republican Party in our pocket. Didn’t we bribe those bastards?”
“Ah, the good old Republican Party,” Viktor said. “It’s like bribing a sea of sand.”
“So what? Sidel’s a dreamer. He’ll turn Yankee Land into one big welfare state. All our holdings will be flushed into the toilet. We can’t afford him, Viktor. People will riot. I’ll lose all my shops. Tollhouse has killed for us. Why did you stop him now?”
“Because,” Viktor said. “I did not fancy killing Sidel.”
“Is that how we conduct business?” asked Pesh Olinov, the dwarf. Pesh was the only one at this table who had been with the besprizornye, who’d risen up from the ranks, and he was the only one with the mark of a werewolf on his chest. The others weren’t werewolves. They were ruthless entrepreneurs, but they hadn’t been reborn in a prison camp.
“Brother,” Pesh said, “it is out of your hands. Assassins have been sent.”
And Viktor knew in his bones that this meeting would end badly. But he had to make one last attempt to avoid a bloodbath in a hotel that didn’t have a decent view—the high-rises that flashed in the sun could have been a land of graves above the ground. He would have liked one final stroll along the Place des Vosges.
“Assassins can be recalled,” Viktor said.
Rainer chortled to himself; he’d been a young captain in the Abwehr during World War II, a master spy involved in the Abwehr’s gigantic counterfeit racket. It was their last desperate fling; they hoped to flood the world market with American dollars and bring down the currency. But their engravings were rushed, and the thieves they hired were no better than amateurish louts. The paper these men produced would have been rejected at every bank and couldn’t have fooled the simplest of shopkeepers. The entire operation was botched. Rainer was demoted and sent to the Eastern Front. But he never lost that desire to bring down America and its currency.
“I will recall no one,” Rainer said. “You cannot stop us this time, Viktor. Even if none of us leaves this hotel alive, it will not change a thing. Come, we’ll all do our little dance of death. I don’t mind. But you have your proof, Viktor. Isaac the Pure will never change. Didn’t we woo him while he was mayor? We buttered up his lieutenants, but we couldn’t get near him. He was too busy visiting shelters for the homeless. We wanted to rebuild the Lower East Side and all its crumbling dreck, turn it into a shopping center and an amusement park for foreign tourists. We spent millions in lawyers’ fees, and what did Sidel say? He’d rather have his pickle barrels than our amusement park.”
“It wasn’t out of malice,” Viktor said. “He’s like a child with this enormous toy at his disposal—the presidency.”
“A preposterous child, a child we can’t afford.”
Rainer stared at Michael Davit with a kind of crushing omniscience. Viktor had to prepare himself for the worst; his partners had met without him and planned this escapade. “And now you want revenge, Rainer, because he wouldn’t let you invade Manhattan.”
It was the spider lady who answered him. “Don’t belittle us, Viktor. We’re not in the revenge business. Sidel should have stayed in Manhattan where he belongs. He threatens all our enterprises. He’s a disaster as a president. You know this. His secret services run rampant around him. We could deal with Bull Latham. He understands the truth of your paper, but Sidel tilts at windmills while our profits go down and down. He must be replaced. You agreed with us. What changed your mind?”
Viktor had no reasonable answer. Perhaps it had something to do with his waiflike mother and Isaac’s battles to preserve rent control. He saw Sidel as some kind of zek, entombed in his own spiritual prison camp—the first werewolf to inhabit the White House. Viktor didn’t have the will to launch him into eternity. That was not his gift. He knew now that his partners had bribed the waiters and laundresses who were meant to ensure his own safety. The Hotel des Artisans had turned into a trap. He shouldn’t have been that naïve. Paris was as much a graveyard as Geneva or West Berlin.
“Tell me, Little Brothers and Sister Rosa, how do you mean to flourish without my paper?”
“We have reckoned with that possibility,” Rainer said. “One of your own apprentices now works for us.”
“Mensch, even if you had them all, you would still have nothing. They are wonderful engravers—I taught them all my strokes—but they still lack the final touch. A crooked line in Grant’s bowtie, a missing curlicue in his beard. I have to improve upon their artistry. Bull Latham would spot these errors even without his loupe.”
“Ah,” said Rainer, “then we will keep you here as our guest until you are in a more negotiable mood.”
One thing in this conspiracy enraged Viktor. “And you, Pierrot, my littlest brother, who was my father’s pet, why did you join these plotters? You have all the wealth in the world, and I have made you even wealthier.”
The baron didn’t apologize. “My dear Viktor, your besprizornye are now middle-aged, some are old men. They’ve lost their teeth. And many of them grumble about you. They worry about their pakhan.”
“Still,” Viktor said, “I trusted you with my life. And you, Brother Olinov, you were one of my cheloveks. You carry the tattoo of a werewolf. I painted your chest.”
“I am a werewolf,” said Pesh, “and proud to be one. I was born in the prison camps. But you have betrayed us with this sentimental attachment to Sidel—a policeman who probably pisses in his pants. You must share your art with us—you must.”
“Don’t appeal to him,” Rosa said. “We will have his paper.”
Viktor noticed her knitting needle, as it glistened like an elongated ice pick. She lunged at him with all the art of an MI6 assassin, perhaps to graze his cheek as a warning, or to stop him in his tracks with a hole in the head. Did his erstwhile partners have their own magic, their own Talmudic engraver? Why should Viktor care? He stepped outside the arc of her lunge like a matador, or a chelovek in the middle of a knife fight in Kolyma, and watched her crash into a wall. She sat there in a perfect daze.
A laundress appeared with a silencer and a lunatic smile on her face. That smile cost her, that moment of arrogance. She was rejoicing in her act of betrayal. Viktor seized an ashtray from the table and hurled it at her. It bounced off her forehead and sent her flying. But he couldn’t defeat the entire staff. Waiters arrived with their own silencers.
“Slow,” Rainer said. “We want to taste his agony. He might relent and allow us a little pinch of his paper. If not, we’ll bury him in the cellar, and who will mourn a werewolf?”
“Not me,” Michael Davit said. “Not me.”
“We’ll inherit his besprizornye,” said the dwarf who wasn’t a dwarf.
Michael Davit was amused. “Those tits? We’re better off without them.”
Viktor watched the merriment in the waiters’ eyes, that sense of their own sadistic pleasure, as if they were about to take target practice on a scarecrow. And that’s when he heard the sirens. He’d phoned the Sûreté just before the meeting began. He knew a certain chief inspector, had done him some favors. Told him to arrive at noon with a little fleet.
“Bravo,” Rainer said. “You’ve walked your way out of this, Viktor, but how will you survive on your own, even with your band of aging orphans?”
“You’re the ones who should worry,” Viktor said. “Rosa, you won’t have your shops very long. I will ask your landlords to have another look at all your leases. And the rue du Cherche-Midi will become a labyrinth. Deliveries will be impossible, customers will be scarce. Your little clothing empire will be without a clientele.”
Rosa sat calmly on the floor, awakening from her little nap, but the princes started to panic. “It’s silly to declare war,” said Rainer. “We will find a solution, but it must be without Sidel. His heartbeat is not negotiable.”
Viktor shoved past Pesh and Michael Davit, slapped a laundress and two waiters as he left the dining room, and marched out onto the tiny, hidden boulevard near the riverbank. There was a blaze of white from the high-rises that nearly cut into Viktor’s eyes. He saluted the police cars in front of the hotel. The chief inspector stepped out of his own sedan to greet him. They spoke French, a language Viktor had explored as a little boy on the Place des Vosges. With his father and the other pakhans he was perfectly fluent in English and Russian. But he couldn’t find much melody in his voice with the chief inspector. He was stuttering, in fact. He could have had the entire troupe at the Hotel des Artisans taken into custody, yet what would he have accomplished? There were no corpses inside the hotel, no signs of conflict. Yes, the waiters and laundresses had their silencers and might have sat six months inside La Santé. But Rainer and the rest would have snaked out of reach of the Sûreté. Rainer’s million-dollar lawyers could have outwitted any magistrate.
The problem’s been solved, he said, and slipped a packet of money into the chief inspector’s sleeve.
“Impeccable, Monsieur Viktor.”
The cars drove off, leaving Viktor with that slash of sunlight off the high-rises. He’d had a very bitter revelation at the hotel. He could trust no one—not his apprentices, not his associates, not even Sidel.
The baron was sitting with his two bodyguards in a mini compartment on board the bullet train to Basel. He’d already cut off Renata Swallow’s monthly allowance. He’d closed Viktor’s accounts, and he was warehousing whatever paper “Rembrandt” had left with him—immaculate fifties that could have been hung on the walls of museums as works of art. He had to side with Rainer and his other partners. Viktor had become as temperamental—and reckless—as a prima donna. He was a pakhan who had lost his touch. He spent half his time marking the skin of random people—soldiers or convicts and high-class whores like Renata Swallow—with little memorials. What did it all mean? He carried around his wooden box of ink and tools rather than his engraver’s kit. The baron couldn’t afford that luxury, not in the winter of ’89 when the Soviet Union was caving in and the economies of Eastern Europe were up for grabs—it was like stealing into a barnyard with a bunch of sacks and shovels. The loot was everywhere.
His mobile rang, but there was very poor reception on the bullet train. He fiddled with the antenna, and a voice came through like the echo of some familiar ghost. It was Rainer Wolff from West Berlin, as if he were speaking from the netherworld.
“Rainer, I cannot hear you.”
“Your bodyguards,” the ghost said.
“They’re tip-top. The best in the business. They come from Michael Davit’s crew.”
They had to be careful, since they weren’t on a landline, and the baron couldn’t tell who was listening. “Yes, yes, I am disposing of Rembrandt’s assets—he must be submerged somewhere, like a submarine. Davit’s lads will find him. It is a great pity. But we never asked him to self-destruct . . . indeed, it is time to cash in on our lottery. And we’ll start another—for Rembrandt. Goodbye, Rainer.”
The first bodyguard was gone. “Where is he?” the baron asked his second bodyguard, who sat across from him.
“Ian?” the bodyguard said. “He’s in the loo, love. He’ll be back. Ian’s a good lad.”
But Ian didn’t return after ten minutes. And the baron snapped at the second bodyguard. “Find him. I don’t want to be here alone.”
“Right you are.”
And the second bodyguard left. Viktor sat down in his place, and the baron could feel his bowels twist.
“I’ll scream,” he said. “This is an exclusive train. And there are many more conductors in first class.”
“Scream your head off,” Viktor said. “I bought out every ticket in this car—it’s empty.”
“But I have two bodyguards. The best in the business. Michael Davit’s lads.”
“They won’t be back.”
“But they’re incorruptible,” the baron said. “Ian and his partner can’t be bought.”
“They won’t be back.”
The baron started to cry. “They threatened me, Viktor. Michael Davit put a gun to my head, and Rainer was behind that gun.”
“Pierrot, please. I let you in close, and you saw how indecisive I was about Sidel. You read that as weakness. It wasn’t. We can’t always kill. Sometimes it’s a question of civility.”
He slit the baron’s throat with a razor. The baron didn’t scream—it was a gentle stroke, without effort, it seemed. Bubbles appeared in the baron’s mouth. He started to say something and stopped. Viktor laid his head back, as he would have done with a sleeping child. He sat there. Not a single conductor came. He got off at the next stop with his besprizornye, millionaires in their fifties, with scars on their faces, like Viktor.
Pierrot had been right. Michael Davit’s men couldn’t be bought. Viktor and his besprizornye had to strangle them in the corridor, with a wire. They had to wear leather gloves, or the wire would have cut deep into their own hands. They’d hurled both bodyguards out a broken window of the bullet train. Michael Davit’s men should have been more attentive, should have noticed the empty seats, some of them filled by the besprizornye. They had covered Pierrot with the latest copy of Paris Match and wiped off the surplus blood.
The conductors wouldn’t discover him until the bullet train arrived in Switzerland. They would talk about the banker from Basel for days. A corpse in a first-class car. It would remind them of an unsolved murder they had read about in Paris Match. Italian gangsters from the Riviera, no doubt. Or a feud among Corsican cutthroats.