It was all confusing to Stefan Oliver. The Marine commandant at Quantico avoided him; the admirals at Navy Intel whispered in his presence; the FBI instructors and recruits stared at him as if he were some idol touched with leprosy or the plague. His fellow pilots and crew were careful around him; that pure sense of play was gone. He couldn’t even set up a ping-pong match with any of his rivals. He had to race around the gym all alone in his silkies. Stef had become the pariah of his own squadron; as the president’s pilot, he was caught in the middle of a feud between the admirals and his boss. He had problems with every lift package on account of his mechanics, who were loyal to the admirals at the base. Stef was living permanently at the White House with Max and their Serbian maid, Karina, while the FBI harassed her with background checks that never seemed to end. He was a Marine at odds with his own service. The duty officer at Quantico was very blunt with him.
“Wildfire to Rio, how’s life in the attic? Are they fattening you up with peanut butter pie?”
“Rio to Wildfire, it’s none of your fucking business.”
“Well, homeboy, you’re getting back your roommate.”
Stef wasn’t even listening. “Roger that,” and he tuned out the frequency.
But Wildfire wasn’t wrong. Sarah Rogers returned to the attic, in Isaac’s bathrobe and all. Her eyes couldn’t focus. All her flintiness was gone, that rough edge he admired. Her skin was very sallow. She looked like a wraith in curly black hair. The bastards must have kept her in deep cover at Quantico. She began to weep like a child. He’d never seen Sarah cry. It tore at him, and for a moment he wasn’t a widower and could grasp beyond his own grief.
“What’s wrong? I’ll never hurt you. I promise.”
“Stef, I’m their spy. I have to report back to them—Navy Intel. All our intimate acts. Every time you eat me out I have to describe it in detail. They’re gunning after you and the president.”
“Does the boss know?”
“He says he still wants me around, even if I have to wear a wire—I missed you, Stef. All the while they kept me in the freezer at Quantico, I missed you more and more. I could feel my hand slide down the fur on your chest.”
They kissed in one of the attic’s utility closets. She never bothered to take off Isaac’s robe. He was tender and fierce with her, as fierce as any satyr. It excited Stef that she was tattling on him about their sexual exploits to her bosses at Quantico. He felt like a porn star.
The daily briefings grew more and more urgent. Secretary of State Colin Fremont had just returned from a whirlwind tour of Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin. Fremont was elegant, brash, and brittle as sandpaper. He never wore a necktie, not even at an embassy dinner. He replaced it with a red scarf and a black silk shirt with a soft collar. That was Colin’s uniform. He spent more time in the air than he did at his bachelor pad near Dupont Circle or his ancestral home in Boise. Isaac didn’t give a damn that there had been rumors of a love affair with a male professor while Colin was a student at Swarthmore.
“Isaac,” said the chief counsel of his selection committee, “this gay business could come back and bite you on the ass.”
“I still want Colin Fremont,” Isaac said. And here he was, arrogant as always, and the shrewdest member of Isaac’s court.
“They did a dance at the Kremlin, Mr. President. We fed on wild boar and drowned in Veuve Clicquot. The Russkies are all curious about you. The Pink Commish—Stalin with a Glock. But I could see the terror in their eyes. The Veuve Clicquot tasted like piss. They’re running out of dollars. And they print their rubles on toilet paper.”
“What are you driving at, Mr. Secretary?” Tim Vail asked in that superior tone of his.
“They’re desperate. We don’t dare make a hostile move. But the Bolshoi goes on with five-hour performances and their ice-cream factories hum with new flavors. I learned more in Prague from a junior finance minister than I did in Moscow. The Russkies can’t buy dollars, so they’re trying to kidnap some master engraver and print their own product, but they can’t afford high-quality silk. Whatever they touch is atrocious.”
Isaac muscled his way in. “Tell us about Prague.”
“The president’s castle is filled with mousetraps. The maids can’t afford panties and bras. They have to settle for military underwear. Half of them are whores and all of them are members of the StB—the secret police. The whole country trades in counterfeit dollars. I think we ought to help. A high-quality product of their own would make them less dependent on the Soviets. We’d be the first ones in Prague Castle, Mr. President, ready to pounce when the shit begins to fly, and it will.”
“Are you suggesting that we give those Czech gangsters a fortune of fake fifties?” Ramona asked with a growl.
“Yes.”
Isaac was falling in love with his Secretary of State. “Bull, do we have any of Viktor’s paper on hand to show Mr. Fremont?”
Bull Latham removed a fifty-dollar bill from a plastic case in his pocket and handed the bill and a jeweler’s loupe to Colin Fremont.
Fremont peered at Ulysses Grant through the loupe. “This stuff is priceless—pure gold. We’ll put the Kremlin out of the business. Who’s the engraver?”
“He uses many names, Mr. Secretary. We call him Rembrandt. He’s one of my prize informants. I have enough of his product on hand to supply the Czechs—if POTUS approves.”
“What will it do to our economy with queer fifties floating around?” asked Tim Vail, who liked to serve as the Cromwell of Isaac’s court.
“It won’t leave a dent,” said Felix Mandel. “As Mr. Fremont says, the product is pure gold. And if we control the supply, where’s the harm?”
The Secretary of State rubbed his hands together as a sign of his appetite for the deal. “That will make Karel Ludvik a happy man.” Karel was current occupant of the Castle. The Soviets had put him into power after the Prague Spring of ’68, with its quiet revolution that was crushed by Soviet tanks and artillery. He was a minor poet, novelist, and diplomat with sterling communist credentials. He’d also been a colonel in the StB. But Colin Fremont found him “a man of culture” who rebelled against the atrocities of the secret police. “Karel’s eyes have turned toward Washington rather than Moscow, Mr. President. He’s one of your biggest fans—in camera, of course. But he would welcome a visit.”
“So would London, Paris, and Bonn,” said Bull Latham. “But POTUS can’t travel. There’s a price on his head.”
“Indeed,” said Colin Fremont. “We’ve heard rumbles about some mysterious raffle that predicts the president’s demise. What does it mean?”
“A lot,” said Tim Vail. “There are rogue agents everywhere—in the Kremlin, in the StB. They’d all like to collect.”
“That’s what Karel told me,” said Colin Fremont. “Can’t even trust his own men. ‘It’s open season on Isaac Sidel,’ he said.”
“Kafka,” Isaac muttered to himself. His mavens pricked their ears and listened to the president. “I want to walk the streets where Kafka walked, sit in the cafés and coffeehouses where he sat.”
Tim was exasperated with Sidel. “That Prague is long gone. You can’t go on a sentimental journey, sir. You’re the prince of West—”
“I’m no prince,” Isaac snapped at his Oliver Cromwell. “I’m a cop who landed in the White House.”
“Still a prince in the eyes of the world,” said Tim, “and this is hard-nosed politics. We have to catch Karel at his own game, bend him to our will with a bargaining chip—Rembrandt’s paper.”
“No, no, no,” said the Secretary of State with his own flair for drama. “POTUS is right. We take politics out of the picture, at least as an appetizer. The president isn’t visiting Prague to cause problems for the Russkies. He’s recapturing his own literary past. That will play, but there’s a slight dampener—President Ludvik says Prague isn’t safe. We can’t mount every spire with sharpshooters. And the Castle itself is compromised; it’s filled with so many palaces and gardens, you could wander around for days and never find yourself; it’s like a souk for secret agents, a clearinghouse, and everyone has murder on his mind.”
“Then what’s our strategy for the president?” Ramona asked.
“We accept Karel’s invitation,” Colin said. “We make it strictly a cultural tour—POTUS is making a pilgrimage to Franz Kafka’s birthplace. But he can’t go to Prague, not in public, at least. Karel has his own dacha about fifty clicks northwest of Prague Castle. It’s an old hunting lodge, a haven once upon a time for Czech noblemen and their mistresses. It’s isolated and impenetrable. Very few people know its whereabouts.”
Ramona grinned. “That was the word on Cactus—impenetrable. And look what happened.”
“I don’t give a crap,” Isaac said. “Get back to Karel. We’re going to Prague.”
He had to see Kafka’s birthplace, suck up the atmosphere and vanish for a moment within the famous Czech fog, even if the fog itself was an American fairy tale. He didn’t care what the communist regime thought of Kafka, a Prague Yid who left around unfinished manuscripts in crystalline German prose, a tubercular werewolf who told about miraculous transformations and hunger artists. Isaac was mystified when he discovered that Kafka had been six feet tall. He’d always imagined him as a tiny man in a bowler hat who could have walked into a cafeteria on East Broadway and asked for a bowl of barley soup.
Ah, Air Force One. It was a traveling media circus where Isaac had to play juggler, wise man, and magician-clown. The press had its own compartment at the back of the plane, but reporters wandered about like petty cannibals prepared to devour the skin and bones of presidential advisors who had tagged along on the flight. Their favorite was Colin Fremont, who sat in his red scarf and black silk shirt and served as the president’s portmanteau. Colin had his own spies at State, and he was aware of what these reporters knew. He was like a dentist in the middle of a probe, revealing what he wanted to reveal.
“Of course it’s political. Every time POTUS gets on a plane it’s a political act. We’re bailing out the Czech president. His tenure at the Castle is a bit shaky. But he’s smiling now, as well he should. Karel’s the beneficiary of POTUS’s first trip abroad. And we’re not brandishing missiles or challenging the Soviets.”
“Why not?” asked a political correspondent from Time who’d been invited aboard by the Secretary of State.
“Because we’re the USA, and POTUS is making a spiritual mission. That’s our policy. It’s a cultural package. The president’s going to revisit the cobblestones of Prague’s greatest writer.”
“Sir,” said one of the bureau chiefs at the Washington Post, “Prague isn’t even on our agenda.”
“That’s a bit of a wrinkle,” said Colin Fremont. “But it will be resolved before we touch down.”
“Isn’t it true, sir,” asked the same bureau chief, “that there’s a price on the president’s head, and we have to hide out at some half-pint castle miles from Prague?”
“That half-pint castle is President Ludvik’s country estate,” Colin declared, but Isaac had to wander into this hornets’ nest.
“There’ve been threats, and we have to take precautions, but I will cross the Charles Bridge and retrace Franz Kafka’s steps.”
“Why is Kafka so important to you?” asked a correspondent from Atlanta. “He’s not an American author. He didn’t invent Gatsby’s green light. He writes about cockroaches and castles that cannot be penetrated.”
A fury began to build in Isaac. He could have been back at Columbia College, during his one season of classics, sitting somewhere at the back of Hamilton Hall, in a freshman humanities seminar.
“Well, isn’t Air Force One some kind of a castle? And Kafka didn’t write about cockroaches. Haven’t we all woken up from a bad dream and felt a sudden metamorphosis?”
“Mr. President,” answered the most sympathetic member of the press pool, “what do you mean?”
“Metamorphosis,” Isaac repeated, wearing his Camp David windbreaker on Air Force One. “That your whole life had changed, that you weren’t even human—that you could have become a pathetic creature with spindly legs.”
“Oh,” said the same reporter, “we’ve all had the blues like that.”
And Isaac trundled off to POTUS’s suite with Captain Sarah and Colonel Oliver, who should have flown ahead to Prague on a military transport to reassemble the presidential package of Night Hawks. But Isaac wanted Stef with him on Air Force One.
“I can feel it,” he said, once they were all alone in his private compartment. “Somehow, somewhere, I’m going to get fucked. What’s the word on Karel Ludvik?”
He knew that Sarah was sharing her secrets with the admirals at Quantico, but she was still the intelligence maven he trusted the most.
“He might be the genuine article, sir,” she said. “He climbed the usual commie ladder, but Moscow is imploding. And you may have a much better lifeline to him than the Kremlin and the KGB.”
“He’s still a thug—he’s had people tortured and killed.”
Sarah perused the Prince of the Western World. “Give him a little credit. He managed to survive a police state. No one has toppled him—not yet.”
“Does he have a family?”
“He did. A wife and two daughters. But they were killed in front of his eyes—in a car bombing.”
Isaac brooded for a moment. “And it’s impossible to identify the perps, I suppose.”
“Oh, there are the usual suspects,” Sarah said. “Rogue bankers, or a rival in the StB. Karel owes millions to his handlers, whoever they are.”
“And was there a lottery out on his life?”
“I have no idea, Mr. President, but I wouldn’t walk around without your vest. We can’t tell what company we might meet at the hunting lodge. I’m not as sanguine about it as the Secret Service. They might have sharpshooters on the battlements, but it’s in the middle of nowhere. I’d have taken my chances in Prague, sir.”
“So would I, but Karel was against it. And we’re his guests. Stef, I hope you brought a sidearm or two with your Night Hawks?”
“Roger that, sir. I managed to smuggle a Beretta on board the lift package.”
And Isaac laughed for the first time in his flying fortress.
There was too much politics involved in every one of his sorties. He preferred a landscape of Berettas and Glocks.
It was an airstrip, a secret military base, used by the Russkies, Isaac imagined, whenever they wanted to drop in on Prague. He saw the meanest looking soldiers.
But the Night Hawks were there, in enormous barns. Isaac had to endure a military salute, since the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic couldn’t allow the Prince of the Western World to enter its domain unnoticed. He returned the salute as he descended the air stairs. There was even a military band, a ragtag troupe that swayed like drunken men. They missed half the notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the national anthem sounded like an aria out of Looney Tunes.
He’d only traveled to Eastern Europe once, when he was mayor of New York. He’d gone through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin with a little gang of other mayors and some mid-career viceroy at the State Department. He had to exchange his Yankee dollars for eastern marks, which looked like Monopoly money to Isaac; the paper was pathetically thin. They crossed the border into some no-man’s-land of gigantic murals, revealing the wonders of the worker state; behind the murals were mounds of rubble. The State Department viceroy was very smug. “It’s all one big façade,” he said. But Isaac felt a crippling sadness. He mourned something he didn’t quite understand. Perhaps this violent pull into East Berlin was the finale of his socialist dream. He saw goose-stepping soldiers in front of monuments celebrating some Russian victory in the late world war. He was ushered into an enormous restaurant replete with chandeliers and marble walls. The headwaiter wore spotless white gloves. There must have been a hundred tables. But only two were in service, where the mayors sat with the viceroy. The rest of this food palace was an enormous, silent cavern with its own odd celestial music. Isaac tried to strike up a conversation with one of the waitresses, a plump woman with blue eyelashes, a natural flirt. The other waitresses stared at the ceiling, never looked once into Isaac’s eyes.
“Guten Morgen,” Isaac said in a guttural growl he’d picked up from German Jews at the Garden Cafeteria. The viceroy frowned at him. And the plump woman disappeared into the kitchen.
“Sidel,” said the viceroy, “no intimacy is allowed.”
“Jesus, how will I learn anything if I can’t talk?”
“You’ll meet scientists and poets, Mr. Mayor. You’ll be more in your own arena.”
But the scientists and poets must have been plucked right out of those murals on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie. They all babbled about their freedom to create.
“We feel so sorry, Herr Sidel, for the problems you have in the West. Will you ever get rid of Rikers Island?”
Sidel tumbled back into silence. The poets had all been rehearsed. But one scientist in a ragged collar did manage to tease Isaac out of his surly mood. “How is the Pink Commish? You’re famous in these circles, Herr Sidel, as the proletarian Bürgermeister, the one mayor in America who has helped the poor.”
Isaac didn’t argue. He couldn’t win. He met with a bunch of police chiefs who tried to convince him that all crime had been erased from the German Democratic Republic. Isaac nodded his head. But he must have gotten into trouble with the viceroy. After he arrived back at the Kempinski in West Berlin, he discovered that his room had been ransacked . . .
The airstrip outside Prague reminded him of the gigantic murals hiding mounds of rubble; half the hangars were made of cardboard, and many of the Czech planes were wooden replicas of the latest Soviet aircraft. Isaac was glad when the soldiers and musicians vanished from the parade grounds, and he was left with these strange wooden toys.
He climbed aboard Marine One with his White House staff and the Secretary of State, while the Secret Service and Colin’s staff rode in the second Night Hawk, and the third was a decoy. The three White Tops must have looked like ships from another planet to farmers in the Czech countryside. They swerved north across hilly terrain, past gardenless gardens and orchards where nothing seemed to grow, and hovered near Karel Ludvik’s dacha, a hunting lodge that resembled a miniature castle. The castle overlooked the fortified town of Terezín, which had been a transit station for Jews during the war, a kind of model camp. Terezín was the most diabolic of all the death camps. It had its own children’s chorus, an opera house, its own philharmonic orchestra, a theater troupe, and an artists’ colony. Many of its inmates had come from Prague—musicians, actors, poets. They performed for the Red Cross at Terezín, for German generals on leave, for Czech industrialists. The Germans made propaganda films about this Jewish utopia. But the children’s chorus went right from one of these idyllic performances and propaganda films to Auschwitz. Ottla Kafka, Franz’s youngest sister, who had been an inmate at Terezín, looked after these children, and accompanied them to Auschwitz as their companion and “nurse.”
And when Isaac looked into the heart of Terezín, which was now a sleepy garrison with many of the same barracks, he felt a rage he could barely control.
The Czechs had built a helipad on the battlements for Marine One. And Colonel Oliver landed his White Top on two red markers with all the precision of a gigantic metal glove. Isaac could see Matt Malloy and his coterie of sharpshooters on the ramparts like medieval warriors with sniper scopes. Matt had been the first of Isaac’s crew to arrive and had made a sweep of the hunting lodge and Ludvik’s grounds with his metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs; the dogs had come in their own kennel.
The Czech president stood alone on the ramparts to greet this Jewish prince of the West. He wore a blue blazer with silver buttons, a white shirt with a soft collar, and a brilliant red tie. The president had tiny feet. He was slightly stooped and had unruly brows and the crisp gray eyes of a hunter. Isaac felt an immediate kinship with him.
He’s a werewolf.
“Mr. President,” Karel Ludvik said, “I’m most grateful that you have honored us with your visit.”
“The honor is mine. Call me Isaac.”
“And you shall call me Karel.”
From the battlements Isaac could see inside the walls of Terezín, with its orange rooftops, and it irritated him that Karel Ludvik would select a dacha near one of the Nazis’ model camps. But he kept his own counsel and descended the winding, windy stairs to Ludvik’s living quarters. He’d left his Secretary of State to deal with Ludvik’s own diplomats, and he sat alone in the president’s study. He found a rocking horse in the corner.
The two presidents drank some wine and shared a poppy seed cake.
“I’m sorry about your loss,” Isaac said, as he looked at the rocking horse.
Karel scratched his cheek. “Mr. President, I would rather mourn alone.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .”
“Forgive me,” Ludvik said. “I was told that the Americans might have been involved.”
“I don’t understand,” Isaac said.
“The trigger mechanism, it was of an American design. We are not fools, Mr. President. I would not allow my wife and little girls to wander about. We have our own tracking devices. And this bomb was beyond our abilities.”
“And you think people around me . . .”
“No. But perhaps the people around the people around you. I tried to reform the banking regulations in my country. I did not want farmers squeezed out of their own small farms. The bankers allied themselves with the StB. There were battles in parliament, fistfights. I was stabbed twice in the halls of Prague Castle. I put down a rebellion of StB colonels—had them shot. That’s why I could not invite you for an official visit to the Castle. There would have been chaos. And in the confusion . . .”
“But I wanted to see the house where Kafka was born.”
Karel laughed bitterly to himself.
“The bankers can’t wait for this regime to fall. They will build their own Disneyland devoted to Kafka—with cafés, gift shops, and a museum. They count up all the Western tourists and salivate like mad dogs whenever his name is mentioned. Don’t talk to me of Franz Kafka.”
“Have you read a single line of his?” Isaac asked with a growl, aware that Karel was a novelist and a poet.
“I could recite A Hunger Artist by heart. But I do not want Prague to become a theme park—a toy town.”
“And yet you have your country estate on the hills above another theme park.”
Karel’s cunning gray eyes narrowed with a hunter’s alarm. “What theme park?”
“Terezín,” Isaac hissed. “The devil’s own Disneyland, a Jewish menagerie with deportation as the very next stop. Did you know that Ottla Kafka was a volunteer nurse at—”
“Kafka,” Karel muttered, “always Kafka.” And he strode toward Isaac as if he meant to harm him. “Terezín was a transit camp with lace curtains, a lavish second act. I felt all the fury, the hot air—violinists and dramaturges fighting for the last crumbs of bread. Isaac, I was an eyewitness.”
Seems Karel Ludvik had spent his childhood in Terezín. His father was one of the “essentials,” shopkeepers who were permitted to remain when the town was converted into a camp. He was a shoemaker with a little shop next to the main square and served the SS and other officers and journalists who were always in transit, preparing reports about this strange Jewish utopia. Karel was seven or eight when the camp opened, in 1942. He had his pick of tutors among the doctors and professors of law who were “pensioners” at Terezín. And he had a special task. He met once or twice a week with the camp commandant, who was half blind and hid his worsening eyesight from fellow officers in the SS. The commandant was a bibliophile, and he would rave to Karel about a Yid from Bohemia who could scribble Deutsch like a Teutonic demon. Karel’s task was to read A Hunger Artist and other tales to the commandant. They were like conspirators, the SS commandant and the shoemaker’s boy.
“Isaac, I was no innocent,” Karel said. “I made a profit from the camp. But I wasn’t cruel. I found bread and cheese—at a price. I repaired shoes with my own hands. I fell in love with a little Jewess. I kept her and her family from starving. I removed their names from the deportation list. I had that power. I told you—the commandant was nearly blind. He was in my power. I served as his little secretary . . . and yes, yes, I know you’re dying to ask. I was well aware of Ottla. The commandant wanted to meet the little sister of his favorite Jewish demon.”
“What did she look like?”
“I can’t recall,” Karel said. “I think she had curly hair, cut very short.”
Isaac was like a guilty boy confronting a parable that couldn’t be penetrated without some magic fist. “Do you remember what Ottla said about Franz?”
Karel whistled to himself. “Isaac, it was almost fifty years ago.”
“Lie. Make something up. I don’t care.”
There was a craftiness in Karel’s smile—he had found a flaw in this Jewish prince. And that flaw was Franz Kafka.
“She said he sang out his sentences sometimes.”
Isaac savored the words. “Sang out his sentences? Like an aria?”
There was a knock on the door. A bodyguard entered with the majordomo of the dacha.
“Excellency, dinner is being served.”
Karel removed one of his dainty leather shoes and tossed it at the majordomo’s skull. “Why do you interrupt us with mundanities? Can’t you see that I’m in conference with the president of the United States?”
“I beg your pardon, Excellency,” the majordomo said, bowing twice. The bodyguard was wearing a Beretta in his waistband. Both of them vanished.
“Karel, why couldn’t your precious commandant save Ottla?”
“He tried, he tried. She wouldn’t leave the children. She went right on board the train with them to Auschwitz.”
“But he could have removed the children from the deportation list—or you could have done it for him.”
“Impossible,” Karel said. “The order came from Himmler himself: Children who sing like angels should be treated like angels—at Auschwitz.”
“But why have your kept up this little castle near Terezín? You could have easily found another refuge.”
Karel shut his eyes. “The commandant lived here, on this hill. And this is where I had my happiest moments as a child. Not because he fed me sweets, not because his Czech mistress pampered the shoemaker’s boy and showed me her tits. It was the moments we shared, reading the words of that Bohemian in the bowler hat.”
His eyes twitched, like a man coming out of a coma. “Forgive me, Mr. President. I’m selfish. I’ve kidnapped you all to myself.” He shouted into an intercom on his desk. “Ivo, come back. Accompany the president to his quarters.”
Isaac picked up that dainty little shoe and returned it to his Czech counterpart, who must have crafted it himself. Karel would always be a shoemaker.
Something bothered the Big Guy. There were bodyguards galore, with pistols in their waistbands, but they pretended to be drowsy, and that wasn’t a good sign. They were either fed up, or waiting for some signal. They wore blue wristbands, as if they belonged to the same fraternity of brutes. Isaac didn’t trust them for a minute. Matt Malloy was there with his own detail. But his special agents seemed like Boy Scouts compared to these brutes.
Isaac wouldn’t dress for dinner. He arrived at the table in his windbreaker, with his Glock. They were in the dacha’s main dining hall. Isaac was startled to see pictures of Terezín on the walls—the children’s chorus, an acting troupe, a soccer match among starving Jewish athletes and the SS, as if it comforted Karel to revisit his own childhood, or perhaps these images had been put up as souvenirs for Sidel. He’d never unravel all the riddles. He was surrounded by Czech diplomats, members of his own court, including Bull Latham and Colin Fremont, colonels from the secret police who hovered over Karel like hawks, communist party officials, and a blond woman in a blue dinner dress.
The doyenne of Georgetown had arrived at this dacha before Isaac ever had a chance. Renata wasn’t here to see the sights. She was Viktor Danzig’s courier. And Isaac realized that all the counterfeit currency Bull Latham had grabbed from Rembrandt didn’t matter now. Karel had made his own deal with Viktor. And suddenly the Big Guy was enjoying himself. His mavens in the Situation Room didn’t know shit about Karel. This president of Czechoslovakia, who was still under Soviet scrutiny, had made idiots of them all. Isaac’s visit was hardly more than a smokescreen, a chance to puff up Karel’s stature in the West, and hide his money deals.
Isaac could imagine Czechoslovakia as one big Monopoly board. And Karel was in league with the bankers who may have tried to murder him. Yes, he wanted to help the local farmers, but he also wanted Prague revitalized and revamped, turned into a tourist’s paradise, with cafés and museums that would re-create the ambience, the aromas, and the vitality of Franz Kafka’s Bohemian village. If the Jews were gone from the old Jewish Quarter, he would replace them with young artists and rebels, once the Soviets withdrew inside the walls of the Kremlin. Karel must have been banking on that, and even if he lost his seat at the Castle and had to give up the president’s dacha, he would still be the virtual ruler of Prague. The besprizornye must have been behind this deal. If Isaac couldn’t congratulate Viktor, he still had Viktor’s courier with the clipped blond hair.
She sat next to Karel, across from Sidel. Bull Latham was in full bloom, in a bowtie and shirt with ruffles as befit a vice president. He was drinking pivo, amber Czech beer, and toasting everyone at the table. Renata Swallow meant little to him. She was a Republican Queen Bee, and the Bull had crossed party lines and joined Isaac’s Democratic ticket. It no longer mattered who ran the CIA or the FBI and the Secret Service; Bull had a stranglehold on all the agencies. But he hadn’t grasped that Rembrandt was running rings around him and Isaac Sidel.
The waitresses wore peasant blouses with full bodices, and they weren’t like the zombies of East Berlin. They stared into Isaac’s eyes with a lasciviousness that almost made him blush. Had they come from an StB bordello in Prague? Their mascara was as thick as a mask. They slid from table to table with bowls of potato soup and baskets of dark rye bread with caraway seeds. They could have been StB agents themselves, prowling the tables like lusty she-wolves. They had little cords behind their ears, and they whispered into button mikes as they served the soup.
Everyone drank mineral water—minerálka—and dark or light beer. The president of Czechoslovakia stood up, tapped his pilsner glass with a spoon, and toasted Isaac Sidel.
“To the president of the United States, a child of Manhattan, who has come here as a pilgrim, paying homage to one of Bohemia’s favorite sons. And I would like to honor Sidel with a tale of my own, composed for him on the occasion of his visit.”
Isaac’s sleuths and spymasters should have studied modern lit rather than the political contours of a communist state. Then they might have understood Karel’s real predicament. His persona had shattered—the werewolf poet was devouring the politician. Karel held up a blinding mirror to Terezín. He didn’t spare himself or the commandant. He told of the commandant’s lust for Jewish girls, how he would take a starving young woman from the barracks, picked by the boy himself, declare her as his housekeeper, and fondle her in front of Karel’s eyes.
I told her not to weep. The commandant is blind and he will give you bread.
A communist party official cleared his throat and tried to interrupt Karel.
“Mr. President, I beg you to stop. Is this the picture you want to give of us to our American guests? Select another story, please, in a lighter vein. We were victims, not vultures.”
But the Czech president ignored this official, sang above his complaints.
There was one woman who would never have been sent to Terezín if she hadn’t divorced her husband—a Gentile—in 1942. After the divorce, she put on her rucksack, kissed her two daughters goodbye, walked the streets of Prague for the last time, stopped at the central police station, declared herself a Jew, and got on the bus to Terezín. Her face revealed nothing at all. She could have been going on a picnic in the woods . . .
It was Kafka’s sister, of course. She was no great beauty, yet the commandant and the little boy were entranced. She would not touch the bread and cheese the commandant had served her. She was a hunger artist who saved the tiny parcel of food for the children in her care.
The little boy watched her board the train to Auschwitz. Her hair shone in the sunlight. Her shoulders had a marvelous sweep. Another picnic, the boy thought. A picnic in the East.
“We will not tolerate such an indignity,” said the same party official. All the party members rose, hurled their napkins onto the table, and left the dining hall. Karel sat down again. He tore into the dumplings and breaded mushrooms on his plate like a wild animal. “Eat, Mr. President,” he shouted with a fanatical joy, “this may be our last supper together.”
One of the waitresses whispered in his ear. Karel ripped the cord of her button mike and sent her into the kitchen. The other waitresses mumbled while the president had his compote. Bull Latham got up from his chair and stood behind Isaac, cupped his hand, and muttered, “I don’t like it, Mr. President. There are too many tricksters at the table. I think it’s time to leave Dodge.”
“Finish your compote, Bull. Wouldn’t want to abandon Karel.”
“It’s imperative, sir.”
“Finish your compote.”
The Bull returned to his chair, while Isaac reached across the table and clasped Renata’s hands.
“Are you gonna be the next queen of the winter festival in Prague, Renata dear? Is that why you’ve come to Czech Land?”
“You’ll never see Prague,” Renata said. Isaac wanted to stroke her clipped blond hair. If he couldn’t have Kafka’s streets, he still wanted to step inside the Staranová Synagogue with its medieval pitched roof. He loved the tale of the Golem that he’d heard as a boy on the Lower East Side. Near the end of the sixteenth century, it seems, there were rumors that the King of Bohemia wanted to raid the Prague ghetto and burn it to the ground. And to protect the Jews of Prague, the illustrious Rabbi Judah Loew fashioned a creature of clay from the banks of the Vltava River. He worked in secret for six moonless nights. He blessed a stone with the word of God and dug this sem under the Golem’s tongue; the monster’s eyes blinked, and the Golem came to life. The Golem guarded the ghetto from the king and his troops. But the rabbi always removed the sem from the Golem’s mouth on Friday nights to preserve the ritual of the Sabbath—even a Golem had to have a day of rest.
The rabbi forgot to retrieve the sem one Friday night, and the monster went on a razzia, attacking Jews and Gentiles alike. Rabbi Loew was able to lure the Golem into the attic of the Staranová Synagogue. The rabbi reached into the monster’s mouth and removed the sem, whereby the Golem reverted to a dumb creature of clay. And the rabbi locked this lifeless clay man inside the attic and kept him there. Isaac would have loved to reconnoiter in that old, medieval synagogue and look for the iron ladder that led to the attic . . .
He found himself standing next to Karel. “Isaac, this castle isn’t safe. You must leave as soon as you can.”
“Why? You have a whole garrison of troops at the bottom of the hill, inside Terezín.”
“These soldiers have been sent out on war games. They can’t help us—we’re isolated, alone. I can’t even recognize my own bodyguards. And the women who served us are pirates from an StB unit in Prague.”
Isaac was amused. “I never saw pirates with such deep chests.”
“They’re runaways, rogues,” the Bull said, clutching a mobile phone with the biggest antenna Isaac had ever seen. “Mr. President, there’s a NATO base within five hundred clicks of here. I suggest we saddle up in twenty minutes and evacuate. I checked with Colonel Oliver. He can assemble the lift package. What choice do we have, sir? We’re a walking nuclear arsenal, with a pair of fucking footballs and biscuits in our possession.”
“We’re not moving,” Isaac said.
“Matt,” Bull Latham shouted, “talk to the Big Guy, will ya?”
“Sir,” said Matt Malloy,” I’m not certain we can protect you here.”
“Then where can you protect me, Matt? You went through this castle with all your devices. Do we have a secure perimeter?”
“Not if Ludvik’s own team is compromised. The White Top on the ramparts is secure at the moment, with all our sharpshooters guarding the perimeter. But the situation could deteriorate in a matter of seconds. This isn’t our terrain. Mr. Latham is correct, sir. We should evacuate.”
“We’re not moving until I have a couple of minutes with Karel—alone.”
“Impossible, sir,” Matt said. “You have to have at least one babysitter at your side.”
“Then let me have Captain Sarah.”
“Negative, sir. She’s not part of our detail.”
The Bull nodded once with that monstrous phone in his fist, like a torch with an antenna, and Matt Malloy backed away. Isaac stood in a tiny alcove of the dining hall with Karel and Captain Sarah.
“Now you tell me what the fuck Ramona Swallow is doing here on the same exact day of my trip? A lovely coincidence.”
“Roger that, sir,” Captain Sarah said.
All of Karel’s bravura was gone. He was neither the poet nor the politician, but a hapless shoemaker’s boy. Isaac had missed the mark. Karel had never been a werewolf, not even inside Terezín.
“We’re bankrupt. There’s no point printing any more currency. The Czech crown is almost as worthless as the ruble. An entire tank corps is on strike. Several garrisons have gone home. The mayor of Prague hasn’t collected his salary in months. Our policemen are out of ammunition. That’s why I couldn’t have you come to Prague—it’s utter madness.”
“And yet you angled to have me visit Czechoslovakia.”
“It was a great coup for us. The prince—”
“Enough,” Isaac said. “I was your currency. I was your bait. That’s how you lured Ramona, the Queen Bee. My appearance makes Viktor Danzig’s paper more valuable. Rembrandt is helping you stay afloat. I’ll bet he and his besprizornye are among the biggest investors in Prague.”
“They’re buying up whatever real estate they can,” Karel said.
“Then where’s the glitch? You’re the new King of Bohemia with all those fifty-dollar bills. You can bribe the young Turks in the StB and fill up your garrisons again. Where’s the glitch?”
“Viktor isn’t immortal. He has his enemies. And you’ve become a hazard, an endangered species.”
And that’s when Isaac noticed her out of the corner of his eye. One of the “pirates” was prancing toward him with a snarl on her face and the snout of a machine pistol rising from the folds of her skirt, like a metallic infant in its own soft cradle. Sarah shoved Isaac and Karel aside, charged into the lady pirate, knocked the machine pistol out of her hand, and walloped her so hard, her teeth rattled as she flopped into a chair.
“Five unfriendlies—no, six, at five o’clock,” Sarah said, with her right hand turned into an arrow.
Karel’s bodyguards appeared with their Berettas; they didn’t seem so sinister, as Isaac’s detail stared them down with .357 Magnums.
Matt Malloy disposed of the renegade bodyguards without firing a shot. He had them drop their Berettas inside a sack. Isaac had never seen Matt with so much zeal. He had them sit with their noses touching the floor, while his agents mummified each bodyguard in a roll of plastic tape.
Was this a palace coup? Isaac was disappointed in the assassins that the anonymous Swiss bankers had sent. Or were these bums just disenchanted members of the StB?
“Sir,” Matt said, “it’s time to roll.”
“What about Karel?” Isaac asked. “We can’t leave him in this mess.”
“Mr. President, we’ll create an international incident,” the Bull said, holstering his hand cannon. “You can’t grab the leader of a Warsaw Pact nation. He could have staged this little drama to get our sympathy.”
“I don’t care,” Isaac said. “I’m not leaving without him. And that’s final.”
Isaac didn’t have a chance to continue his chat. His own body betrayed him, as his feet collapsed first in a roar that rang in his ears, and he flew right over a table. He heard groans all around him as the dining hall went dark. Isaac’s head was spinning. He danced around in the debris.
It was beyond Isaac’s control. A medivac team had come from the U.S. military hospital in Wiesbaden, two hundred clicks away. A doc in fatigues nearly poked a pencil-thin flashlight into Isaac’s eye.
“It’s protocol, Mr. President. Please state your name and place of birth.”
“Sidel,” Isaac said. “I was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Jesus, Doc, how many of us are hurt?”
“I’m not prepared to answer that, sir. We haven’t assessed the situation. You’re my immediate concern. I haven’t felt any broken bones. Could be some internal bleeding, and we have to get you off this site. I noticed a lot of nasty gas in the air—poison, sir, could be part of the device.”
A team of medics carried Isaac through the blinding dust in a gurney, and up to the battlements. Isaac didn’t remember much after that. He flew over the bombed castle in a gondola that did its own curious ballet, as if it had an angel’s whirring wings.
He woke in a palatial room that overlooked a long garden, with the reek of overripe flowers in his nostrils. Isaac hadn’t come out of some miasma. He was as alert as a lion on the lam. There were no tubes attached to him, no monitors, no machines. He stood up in his hospital gown. He was still wearing his socks. He wandered into the hall, which was cluttered with gurneys.
“Where are we?” Isaac asked a medic.
“Wiesbaden, sir, but you’re not supposed to get out of bed.”
“Do you have a casualty list?”
“Negative, sir.”
“But where are the wounded?” he had to ask.
The medic gave him a sly look. “All over the facility.”
A general arrived, saluted Isaac, and made him return to his own little palace overlooking the gardens—it didn’t even have a TV monitor on the wall. The Big Guy was kept in some kind of quarantine. There were no casualty reports.
“I want some fucking news,” he shouted. But he might as well have been talking to the wind. He got rid of his gown and was given a military uniform to wear without any insignias. An MP arrived and drove him to some airport that wasn’t on the map, with his football and a military aide he had never met. He flew to Washington on Air Force One. He didn’t recognize any of the stewards. He was the only real passenger on board, except for his aide—it felt like a ghost ship. There was still no news from Wiesbaden. Then he got an oceanic call from Ramona Dazzle, and Isaac realized that she was the one who had choreographed this return trip, had kept him in her own isolation ward. She gave the Big Guy his new itinerary. He’d land at Andrews in the middle of the night. The Secret Service would be waiting to whisk him to Walter Reed, where he’d have to endure a battery of tests. He should have gone to Bethesda, the hospital of presidents, but Ramona wanted to dodge any reporters who might be on Isaac’s trail. So she put him into cold storage, told his family and his aides where he was, but she wouldn’t issue a press release. And Ramona was an amnesiac when it came to Karel Ludvik’s castle.
“Welcome home, Mr. President.”
He was closeted at Walter Reed. Doctors in surgical caps loomed over him and then disappeared. Matt Malloy and the Bull stood in their wake, wearing bandages on their skulls. The Bull had a patch over one eye.
“Thank God you’re here,” Isaac said. “I’ve been living among doctors and lunatics.”
“Colin didn’t make it,” the Bull said. “An artery burst and the medics couldn’t stop the bleeding. He died on the way to Wiesbaden.”
“It’s my fault,” Isaac muttered. “I shouldn’t have gone hunting for Kafka’s footsteps. Does Colin have much of a family? Brothers, sisters?”
“No one,” Matt said.
“Mr. President,” the Bull whispered, “we can’t get involved in that. It would sully Colin’s reputation if word ever got out, and consider the collateral damage to State.”
“Fuck collateral damage. I want Colin’s live-in notified. Pronto. And what about the others, damn it? Colonel Oliver, Captain Sarah, and the whole White House detail?”
“I’m not sure about Sarah. She’s with Naval Intel right now, and Stef’s still in Wiesbaden, but I hear he’ll be fine. The detail took a lot of hits.”
Isaac couldn’t hold back his rage. “You had your bomb-sniffing dogs, Matt. How come the castle was compromised?”
“It’s not that simple. The device came from inside Terezín.”
“But it’s a military garrison,” Isaac insisted.
“It was once, sir—the soldiers are gone. There’s a tunnel that leads from Terezín to Karel Ludvik’s castle. That’s how the bomber got in. I’m told the device was standard fare—plastic explosives with a time switch. Forgive me, sir, but luck was on your side, or you wouldn’t be here. The bomber might have been in a hurry, and he didn’t have a chance to mold his gel. But you were the main target. The blast pattern proves that. He was tracking your movements with a very sophisticated stethoscope—the kind that burglars use.”
“Burglars and assassins. It’s their magic tit. What happened to Karel?”
“Karel’s contained,” the Bull said with a diabolic grin. “We brought him with us. He’s in protective custody. He blubbers about political asylum, but he has to be debriefed before we send him back.”
“You’re not sending him anywhere. You’ll grant him whatever asylum he wants and you’ll move him into my attic. I don’t care if he has a Marine stationed outside his door, but Karel stays with me.”
The Bull had a murderous look in his eye. He left with Matt Malloy, and Isaac had to endure a lecture from the physicians at Walter Reed about the calcium deposits in his heart. He wore a hospital gown like some sick crusader and was wheeled from lab to lab with the Secret Service at his tail. It was midnight before he returned to his room. The telephone console near his bed lit up. His daughter was on the line.
“Isaac, we were worried sick. The papers mentioned a massive detonation. No one could tell me if you were alive or dead. We’re coming to DC tomorrow.”
“That’s out of the question, sweetheart. The docs say I can’t have any guests.”
Isaac didn’t enjoy lying to his own daughter. But he’d been reluctant to have her here even before his coronation. He was ashamed of the presidency and all its pomp. He felt like a fraud who had put others at great risk. Marilyn was married to one of Isaac’s own troopers, Vietnam Joe Barbarossa, the most decorated cop in the history of the NYPD, but the contradictions were always there. Barbarossa had dealt drugs in Nam, had murdered other dealers, and continued the drug war while he was a cop. Vietnam Joe still had his citations. He survived firefights with the worst Mafiosi in Manhattan. He jumped off a burning roof with two children in his arms and landed in a cavalcade of clotheslines. Isaac wished he had Barbarossa at his side. He wouldn’t have needed a White House detail. But he would have involved Marilyn in his own mishegas.
“Sweetheart, I’ll visit soon as I can. Put Joey on the line.”
“Dad, Dad,” Barbarossa said, “the city’s a wasteland without ya. The correction officers can’t control Rikers. And the streets have become a shooting gallery.”
“Yeah, and I can’t get a decent half sour pickle. Keep in touch, Joey. I may call upon your services—soon.”
“You bet, Dad. I’ll be there in a zip.”
Isaac began to cry the second he got off the phone. He missed Manhattan, but it was more than loneliness. He felt betrayed by his own impulses. He could have rounded up his Modern Library collection of Kafka. He didn’t have to drag his court to Czech Land on a sentimental journey to relive a classic at Columbia College—his humanities instructor, a young man with a frayed collar and dandruff in his scalp, had refined the rabbinical art of excavating The Metamorphosis. “It’s not really Gregor’s tale. It’s Greta’s.” Gregor Samsa was the guy who woke one day as an insect. He was a traveling salesman who could no longer travel. His father was an unsuccessful businessman who had lost his business. Gregor had become the mainstay of his family. His little sister, Greta, was seventeen, and loved to play the violin—she was the artist, not Gregor, who had hoped to send her to the conservatory. Greta cleaned his room and fed her insect brother scraps of spoiled food. But she soon turned away from Gregor, repelled by him. Greta didn’t feel remorse after the insect died—she bloomed. She had her own metamorphosis—a sexual awakening—and she walked with the vitality of a panther.
It was Greta who had remained in Isaac’s mind all these years, not the insect trapped in his bedroom. And that’s why he was drawn to Ottla. Perhaps, she, too, played the violin, and had walked with a panther’s step. And that’s what the half-blind commandant at Terezín must have noticed as darkness descended upon him—a Jewish panther in the shadows, a panther prepared to pounce.
Isaac’s console lit up again. This time it was the head of security at Walter Reed.
“Mr. President, we have two vagabonds outside the gate. They’re pretty insistent, sir, about knowing you.”
“Are they wearing trench coats and forage caps? If so, send ’em up.”
Soon Isaac had his old winter warriors, Ariel Moss and Mordecai Katz.
“How did you guys get here? This isn’t even the president’s hospital. My own chief of staff is hiding me. Can you beat that?”
“We’re not idiots,” Ariel said. “We have our spies.”
“Jesus, where have you both been hibernating?”
“At a cheap motel near the White House,” said Mordecai.
“Are you my godfathers now?”
“How could we leave you all alone? You’re like a baby who’s lost his diapers, Itzik,” Ariel said, purring Isaac’s Yiddish name. No one called him Itzik except a few renegade rabbis and religious gangsters at the Garden Cafeteria. Isaac didn’t realize how much he mourned that lit dungeon on East Broadway—the Garden had vanished with most of the pickle barrels.
“What possessed you to run to Prague? Are you an imbecile? Prague is a haven for every gangster in Europe. It’s as bad as Palermo.”
“But I never got to Prague,” Isaac said.
“Sure you did,” said Ariel.
“Come on, I didn’t even get to see the Staranová Synagogue. I wanted to look for the Golem in the attic.”
Ariel laughed. “You are the Golem, Isaac, with an attic of your own. That’s why people are so frightened of you. A Golem made for Manhattan—it’s a perfect fit. You could ride above the streets with your giant steps. You could rule with or without God’s stone under your tongue. But a Golem in the White House is another matter. You can’t sleep in the capital with a stone in your mouth. You’ll choke on God’s words. Such a character! A bomb explodes under your feet and yet you manage to survive. Isaac, a Golem like you brings the smell of death.”
“I’m not a Golem,” Isaac had to whisper. “No magic rabbi created me.”
“That’s because you created yourself,” Mordecai said.
But Isaac was adamant. “Tell me, comrades, will the Manhattan Golem survive the Swiss bankers and their lottery?”
Ariel began to ponder with a knuckle in his mouth. “Itzik, that’s a good question—that utterly erases the smash point. But Golems can be killed, certainly.”
“No, Arik, not at all,” Mordecai said. “You can deactivate a Golem, put him in a coma by removing the sem from under his tongue. But kill him—never!”
They argued well into the morning like three Talmudists, while doctors came and went, checking the Golem’s blood pressure, putting a thermometer into his mouth. And Ariel concluded that a Golem couldn’t be destroyed but could be retired.
“You can’t stay at some fleabag motel,” Isaac said. “That’s final. Your new address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. You’ll be living in my attic.”
“And how many Golems will we discover, dear Itzik?”
“As many as you can manage,” Isaac said. And suddenly his sadness slipped away. He’d follow in Roosevelt’s footsteps, surround himself with friends. FDR had turned the White House into a Washington resort hotel. His speechwriter and confidant, Robert Sherwood, had his own bedroom. And Crown Princess Martha of Norway lived at the White House with her royal retinue during the war. FDR loved to go riding with Martha in the Maryland countryside. FDR’s aides considered the sultry crown princess his “girlfriend,” even if she had a husband of her own, Crown Prince Olav. This was the kind of intrigue that Isaac enjoyed. He’d never have FDR’s flair or his political savvy. But he would bring a little of Manhattan to the White House, with as many guests as could fit into the attic.