General Sol Ben-Zion, current chief of Shin Bet, had come all the way from Tel Aviv. He had an ominous presence, because his face was scarred from a dozen skirmishes and wars, battles with his own officers, and bombings in Beirut. He looked a bit like Boris Karloff in full bloom—hangman, soldier, and Frankenstein monster. He’d been whisked into the West Wing from a little private gate, a “ghost” who didn’t appear in any logs. There was no hard evidence that Sol had even been let into the United States. He sat in the regal office of Ramona Dazzle. It was Ramona who had summoned him. Sidel, it seems, had fallen off the face of the moon after a disastrous trip to Czechoslovakia and was hidden somewhere within the walls of Walter Reed.
Sol wasn’t alone. With him were the vice president and a female officer from Naval Intelligence, Sarah Rogers, a thoroughbred beauty with hazel eyes and curls in her hair. Sol was already lusting after her. She had a delicious bruise on her cheek that Sol would have loved to touch with one of his knotted hands. He was a widower with several rich widows in the wings.
Ramona served as her own self-styled grand inquisitor at this clandestine briefing. She invited the female captain to talk first. Sarah was uncomfortable. The admirals at Quantico had ordered her to the inquisition. She wasn’t Ramona’s little spy. She felt a sudden fury and wanted to lash out at Ramona.
“It was after dinner and—”
Ramona interrupted her. “What dinner and where?”
“At the Czech president’s dacha—his version of Cactus.”
Ramona interrupted her again. “The captain means Camp David, General.”
“Yes,” Sol Ben-Zion said. “I’m familiar with Cactus Land. I was there, you know, at the Camp David Accords. I think I saved Sadat’s life more than once. But this is not the right time to boast of such exploits. Continue, Captain, please.”
Ben-Zion wanted to brush against her hair, fondle her right in front of the vice president and Sidel’s chief of staff. Ramona was clever enough to sniff his sudden desire, and she didn’t like it at all. She would have preferred to bury Captain Rogers in the caverns of Quantico, but the admirals had sent her back to Sidel.
“And what was a captain from Naval Intelligence doing at a state dinner in Czechoslovakia?”
“I wasn’t privy to POTUS’s private talks with President Ludvik,” Sarah said.
Ramona couldn’t stop scratching. “Didn’t it have something to do with Franz Kafka? Wasn’t POTUS on a pilgrimage at the taxpayers’ expense?”
Sarah pursed her lips. “That was the subterfuge, I suppose. The Czechs are in deep shit. Their currency is worthless. And President Ludvik needed POTUS’s presence to bail him out.”
“How? With a magic wand? ” Ramona asked with a slight tremor in her voice.
“As I said, ma’am, I wasn’t privy to their private talks.”
“And were these talks worth the death of Colin Fremont and the maiming of two Secret Service men?”
“Stop that,” Bull Latham said. “We all agreed to the talks, Ramona. Don’t crucify the captain.”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Vice President. Captain, aren’t you currently residing in the White House attic?”
“Yes, ma’am, on orders of the president. I’m part of his staff.” Ramona licked her tongue.
“That’s curious. I never assigned you a berth in the attic.”
“You’d have to discuss that with POTUS, ma’am.”
“And who else resides in the attic at the moment?”
“Captain Oliver. His son Maximilian has a learning disability. And POTUS thought—”
“I’m aware of the boy’s condition,” Ramona said. “And who are the other occupants?”
“President Karel Ludvik. He’s sort of in limbo, ma’am. I’m not sure the Czechs want him, and he doesn’t seem to want the Czechs.”
Ramona went right on scratching. “And who else?”
“A pair of Izzies, ma’am.”
Ramona whipped her head around. “And what about you, General Ben-Zion? Ain’t we pals anymore? I thought you guys shared information that was vital to our security. Why’s Ariel Moss still here with the fucking founder of Shin Bet? How long has that lunatic been dancing under your radar?”
Ben-Zion would have loved to slap her face. He was answerable only to his prime minister, but he didn’t want to rile the relationship between Israel and Uncle Sam. His own purse strings suddenly depended on Ramona Dazzle, who seemed to have all the covert agencies under her spell. Sidel had been adrift from the moment he entered the White House.
“Ari was always under surveillance,” he said.
“Even when he robbed banks in Tel Aviv?”
“Ah,” Ben-Zion said. “The banks were a myth. He took a few shekels, mostly counterfeit coin.”
“And was Mordecai Katz also a myth?”
“Enough,” Bull Latham said. “We’re among friends here.”
Ben-Zion was much more comfortable talking to this Dallas Cowboy, though he didn’t have much faith in the FBI and their starched white shirts. They were more like preachers than gatherers of intelligence.
“We read all of Ari’s mail. There were vague threats. We checked them out. It was a lot of gibberish.”
“But that gibberish brought him here,” Ramona said. “Right before an attack on the mountain—and suddenly he resurfaces after the bombing of Ludvik’s dacha.” She whipped her head around again and turned to Sarah. “Isn’t that a strange coincidence, Captain?”
“Damn you, Ramona,” Bull Latham said. “You’re not at that killer law firm of yours. Captain Rogers isn’t a hostile witness. We’re lucky to have her.”
“And what if the football was stolen by some foreign agents?” Ramona asked with an inquisitor’s crooked smile.
“Who cares? They couldn’t do anything without the biscuit.”
While the president was incapacitated, it was only Bull who could authenticate the codes. But Ramona didn’t give a damn about Bull’s biscuit.
“Get real! Does someone have a fucking clue about the mental state of Isaac Sidel?” Ramona kept scratching at the same raw wound. “I think you ought to go on the tube, Mr. Vice President—talk to the country, tell the people what’s happening.”
Ben-Zion didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to catch the battle lines. Ramona had reached too far. She turned her own office in the West Wing into a travesty of a command center, sat with a “ghost” from Tel Aviv and a lovely intelligence officer with limited powers, and tried to invent a new crisis—the unraveling of Isaac Sidel—with Bull Latham as her partner, but the Bull wasn’t buying it.
“I’m not gonna create a worldwide panic, Ramona, just to satisfy your own whims.”
Bull watched the Witch of the West Wing blow her cool. Her hands were shaking. “My whims? We have to walk around on tiptoe and protect a president who’s an utter incompetent, who doesn’t have the least conception of his own responsibility, who’s put all of us in harm’s way?”
“Not here,” Bull whispered, “not now.”
The Bull winked at Sol Ben-Zion and walked out of Ramona’s office with him. He hijacked Ramona’s chief deputy and locked her out of her own office.
“Sol, Ramona doesn’t have the weight to pull you into her orbit. And yet here you are. What’s going down? You’re not a meddler, Sol. Or a tinkerer. And yet you’re tinkering.”
“I am not,” said the chief of Shin Bet. “I didn’t make up Ramona. She’s as powerful—and mischievous—as Haldeman ever was.”
“Solly,” Bull said, “you don’t know shit about American politics. Nixon was a wounded man after Watergate. He ceased to exist as president, and Haldeman crept into the vacuum.”
“What’s different now?” Ben-Zion asked, taunting the Bull. “Sidel is a clumsy magician in the midst of his own disappearing act.”
“He’s visible enough,” the Bull said. “You aren’t fond of him, are you?”
“We worry,” Ben-Zion said. “A Jew in the White House, the first of his kind, and we don’t know a thing about the Big Guy. He could dance with Arafat, and leave us out in the cold. Has he ever shown an interest in Tel Aviv?”
“But you can’t measure him that way,” the Bull said.
“Why? Is he unmeasurable? He talks of visiting Beirut.”
“Yes. He says it’s like the South Bronx.”
“Wonderful! The Jewish St. Francis. The South Bronx is paradise compared to Beirut. Sidel would be flayed alive by all the different factions. Yes, Ari may have stumbled onto something, but it’s no simple plot. Sidel is a very soft target, racing around like a knight in armor. He should be undone.”
“That’s treasonable stuff,” said the Bull.
Sol Ben-Zion laughed. “Half of what we do is treasonable. I came here because I’m curious. Two of the men I most admire, Ari Moss and Motke Katz, have been swindled, caught up in some deceit about Sidel—tell me, that young captain in Ramona’s office, how can I find her again?”
“You can’t, Sol. Go home.”
“I’d like to recruit her.”
“Go home.”
And the Bull returned to Ramona, who must have banished the young captain to Isaac’s attic. Ramona hissed at him, her mouth full of venom.
“Don’t you ever humiliate me like that again, mister. Not in front of Shin Bet and Miss Steel Toes. I could have relegated you to the back kitchen, like other vice presidents, and I still can. We agreed to get rid of Sidel.”
“Sure, we’ll rip him right out of his hospital bed. The nation would love that. And you should never have invited Ben-Zion here. You wanted to deliver a coup d’etat in front of that fox catcher. Now he knows all our weaknesses.”
“Come on,” Ramona said. “He was so busy eyeballing Miss Steel Toes, he didn’t have time for anything else. And I wanted to know if Ariel was acting on his orders—if he was on some covert mission.”
Bull Latham stared at the wintry garden outside Ramona’s window, then his eyes turned inward, and he grabbed her by the throat. There wasn’t a fleck of pity in his pale blue eyes. He could have strangled her right in the West Wing. Her throat was rattling.
“Be quiet,” the Bull said. “You told the Izzies more about us than they could have dreamt up on their own. Ben-Zion spotted all the cracks in our command—that the president has a team of piranhas ready to devour him at any moment. You should never have invited Shin Bet into our playground.”
The Bull released a little pressure on her throat. She was sobbing now.
“But Sol’s our friend,” she muttered between sobs.
“Little Sister, we have no friends.”
“You son of a bitch,” she said in a scratchy voice, “I could have you arrested for assault.”
“But you won’t.”
And he walked out of the West Wing, whistling to himself.
The White House butler brought Sidel his slippers and one of the winter robes that the Big Guy had plucked from the barrels of Orchard Street. Isaac had the beginnings of a beard; he wouldn’t allow the butler to shave him, although he might have looked a bit less like a tramp with a brand-new pink face. The president seemed incongruous among all the sick soldiers, walking around in some ancient subaltern’s robe, yet it was the kind of robe that Lincoln had once worn in the White House. And with his sad eyes and the scruff on his chin, Isaac was almost Lincolnesque.
He went from ward to ward; the soldiers and their families were startled to see him. This wasn’t the president’s hospital—it was Walter Reed, where mice scuttled about, where soldiers lay for months on some extended leave that felt like half an eternity. And here he was in his bathrobe, clutching a soldier’s hand, and Isaac tried to imagine what it must have been like when Lincoln visited hospital tents with Mary and Tad during the Civil War, surrounded by amputated limbs and drunken, delirious officers who were battle crazed.
He sat with a blind soldier from Oregon in a room of blind soldiers. They were all curious about Isaac’s Glock, which had been lost in the debris at Karel’s dacha and suddenly reappeared in a plastic envelope sent to Walter Reed. They didn’t ask about Air Force One and all the other presidential perks. They liked the idea of Isaac as the sheriff of Manhattan, a Golem with a Glock. And so he amused them with stories of his mishaps as mayor, and his adventures, too, of gunfights outside Madison Square Garden and wrestling matches at City Hall, of how he’d gone into Rikers and rescued young men and women who had been incarcerated by some lame judge’s orders and utterly forgotten, of how he’d rushed into an abandoned fire station in the South Bronx that had been taken over by sex traffickers and managed to walk out with all the traffickers and their string of slaves—girls who hadn’t seen sunlight in six months.
“Mr. President, didn’t you feel like executing those sons of bitches on the spot?” one of the blind soldiers asked. “Didn’t you have the urge?”
“Yes, I did. I wanted to glock them inside the fire station. But I had to resist the urge.”
“Why?” another soldier asked. “Did it have anything to do with the law?”
“No,” Isaac said. “I’ve broken every law in the books. But there’s something much worse than execution—the court system. It’s like navigating through hell.”
Isaac could feel a hand on his shoulder. He had a guest, his helicopter pilot, with blue marks under both eyes.
“Boss, I just got back from Germany. Captain Sarah sent me. She has all those damn admirals at Quantico squatting on her ass. But she says you have no business being here. She calls you the Prisoner of Zenda.”
“The docs haven’t released me,” Isaac said.
“You’re commander in chief. You can write your own release.”
The Prisoner of Zenda. Perhaps his chief of staff had done him a favor. He might have been better off at Walter Reed. He had to deal with all the sudden fury around him—the recriminations, the death threats, the talk of impeachment, congressional reprimands, editorials against his imperial presidency, cartoons of Isaac in a bowler hat, with Kafka’s long nose and burning, rabbinical eyes. He couldn’t escape the constant barrage.
His one solace was the attic. He now had a family—Karel Ludvik, pursued by every sort of secret police; Ariel Moss and Mordecai Katz, without legal status in America; Captain Sarah, his own spy who also spied on him; Colonel Oliver, his son Max, and Karina, Max’s live-in maid; and the Golem himself, who sprang to life whenever he stood on the attic stairs.
Karel Ludvik cried in Isaac’s arms. He’d lost fifteen pounds since the bombing ten days ago. He wore a rumpled shirt and a mothballed sweater that must have come from one of Tim Vail’s supply closets. His shoes weren’t shined. The president of Czechoslovakia didn’t have much of a portfolio outside his native land.
“Isaac, your vice president was going to send me back to Prague, trade me in for a handful of captured American spies.”
“The Bull can’t move you, Karel. Moscow and Prague can cry bloody murder. You’re safe—with me.”
But there was intrigue, always intrigue. Isaac found a note in the pocket of his windbreaker.
Mr. President, we have important matters to discuss. If you could schedule an exam at Walter Reed tomorrow at noon, I would be most grateful. You needn’t look for me. I will find you.
Sincerely, General Solomon Ben-Zion
Shin Bet
He showed the letter to his mavens in the attic.
“It’s a fake,” Ariel insisted.
“That’s not Sol,” Mordecai said. “He was once my second in command. He would never write such a letter. It didn’t come from Shin Bet.”
“I’m afraid it did,” Sarah said. “He handed it to me.”
“Ben-Zion is in America . . . on a state visit? That’s not his style. I know him. That man never strays from Tel Aviv.”
“He’s still in Tel Aviv,” Sarah said. “Boss, your chief of staff invited him—as a ghost.”
“But he could have had you whisper in my ear,” Isaac said. “Why use my windbreaker as a dead letter box?”
“He’s old-school,” Sarah said. “He’s read too much le Carré.”
Isaac looked into her hazel eyes. “I love le Carré.”
“So do I, boss. But I get a little sick of all the tradecraft—that esoteric language of spies.”
“Still,” Ariel said, “you’ll have to meet with him, Isaac. But don’t trust a word he says.”
Karel stood in the corner, stroking his chin. “It sounds fishy. Why a soldiers’ hospital?”
“Because all the American generals are in love with Israeli intelligence,” Ariel said. “And Sol must have found a friend.”
So the Prisoner of Zenda returned to his roost at Walter Reed. He scheduled an appointment with the cardiologist who had looked after him and the calcium in his heart, advised Matt Malloy, and the next morning he boarded Dragon; the entire caravan crossed the District, snarling traffic wherever it went, and arrived at the old army hospital, which looked like a red brick outpost in the middle of a reservation at the edge of Rock Creek Park.
The Big Guy had to admit that his calcified heart was beating like a little boy’s. Isaac admired Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade, but he worshipped George Smiley, who was always coming out of retirement to fix something broken at the Circus—MI6—and practice his tradecraft. Isaac had almost none. He would have made a feeble spymaster. He met with his cardiologist, his blood pressure rising like a wayward pump, and as he left the office, an intern took Isaac aside, touched his arm, and led him to another office.
“Wait here,” Isaac said to Matt Malloy and went through the door. A huge man with a monstrous face that could have been stamped out of metal stood near the window in a doctor’s white coat.
“Sidel, how many minutes do we have before that kindergartener comes crashing through the door?”
“Three, I’d guess.”
“Good,” said this Frankenstein with a metal face. “I never liked you. You’re no friend of ours. You’ve probably done us harm with all your nonsense about Beirut. But you were once a good policeman.”
“And what am I now?”
“A fool. A clever one, but a fool nonetheless. It’s not entirely your fault. Your intelligence teams gather little intelligence, or no intelligence at all, and you’re left to fiddle in the dark.” There seemed to be a crack in the metallic mask. “You must not visit Beirut.”
“Ah,” Isaac said, “I would have felt at home. I thought it might remind me of the Bronx.”
“You would not last five minutes. Prague should have taught you a lesson.”
Sidel couldn’t decipher much beyond the crack in Ben-Zion’s mask. “I wasn’t allowed to enter Prague. I couldn’t have protective cover, I was told.”
“And still you went—to Terezín, where Hitler had his show camp, his favorite Follies. And you barely survived. You must not travel. There’s only one city in the world where you would be safe—Tel Aviv. We have our share of rogue agents, but none of them would ever harm you, or allow you to be harmed. We have our pride. Our people are obsessed with the image of a Jewish police chief, mayor, and president. You even have a nickname at my headquarters. King Saul, the unlucky one, who was deaf to God’s voice.”
“I’m not a king, lucky or unlucky.”
“You most certainly are,” Ben-Zion said. “Otherwise you would not be in such danger. I cannot hope to count your enemies. But I’m like a weasel when it comes to gathering information. Shall we start with an industrial tycoon and publisher who works out of Hamburg and West Berlin? Herr Rainer Wolff. You’ve become a threat to all his enterprises. Rainer’s a worrier. He trades in currencies. And you’re too unpredictable as—”
“Prince of the Western World.”
“Yes, the man with the sleek blue-and-white thunderbird, Air Force One, the perfect symbol of American might. Rainer would rather have the thunderbird remain on the ground. And he will have you killed—unless you kill him first.”
There was a knock on the door. “Sir, are you okay?” Matt Malloy called through the frosted glass.
“Matt, I’m fine.”
“May I come in?”
Ben-Zion talked in pantomime, nodding no with that Frankenstein face.
“I’ll be out in a few minutes,” Isaac said. He felt manipulated by General Ben-Zion.
“Why don’t you have the publisher killed?”
Isaac heard a metallic roar. “Rainer? He’s one of Israel’s biggest friends.”
“Then why are you sharing his secret?”
“I told you. You’re our King Saul.”
It didn’t feel right, this sudden revelation, a gift from the chief of Shin Bet, a wandering ghost who never left Tel Aviv. It felt more and more like a setup, a fancy deal. Ben-Zion could have met Isaac in the Oval Office, no matter how secret his presence was. There was a little too much tradecraft in Ben-Zion’s insistence on Walter Reed.
“General, I should warn you, I’m wearing a wire.”
The mask fell away, and Isaac saw an actual smile, no matter how metallic it was. There was a marked amusement in Ben-Zion’s silver-gray eyes. The general was having a hell of a time. “I would expect nothing less from the Pink Commish.”
“Were you going to tell your comrades at Shin Bet how you recruited the president of the United States in an obscure office at Walter Reed? Not a chance. I’ll never be one of your assets. And if I holler once to Matt Malloy, he’ll handcuff you in front of every nurse and doc, and send you back to Tell Aviv on an El Al express. Why are we here? What is it you want?”
“An oath,” Ben-Zion said, “that you will not visit Beirut. Hezbollah will see it as a triumph, and suck us back into the war. You’re a hero who’s risen right out of the ruins.”
Isaac was perplexed. “Hezbollah will celebrate a Yid from the Lower East Side? That’s a laugh.”
“But children have your picture on their walls with your Glock—a gun like your own is outside any definition of an infidel.”
Ah, Isaac remembered now. There’d been a siege at the first mosque in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive. It was during Isaac’s time as police commissioner, at a low point in his career. He was battling with the mayor, who had her own blind addiction against drug dealers. It was at the height of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, when a college sophomore hard up for cash could spend her most fertile years in prison for trying to traffic a few ounces of grass.
The mosque had been seized by several religious fanatics. Her Honor wanted Isaac to storm the mosque. But he knew the fanatics would slaughter the worshipers and the clerics inside and then set fire to themselves, in their last lunatic act of faith. So Isaac defied Her Honor, wore a white handkerchief, and went inside the mosque, with his Glock tucked inside his shirt. He didn’t bargain, didn’t cajole. He listened to the leader of the fanatics, a boy with angelic blond curls and a rabbit’s flaming red eyes, who saw the mosque as the Islamic devil’s first outpost in Manhattan.
“There’s more to come,” this curious angel said. He and his crew were armed with automatics, but it wasn’t their firepower that disturbed Isaac, who grasped the charismatic force of the boy with blond curls. He held his entire little menagerie together with the glue of his rhetoric. The boy was a born preacher.
“Satan is under every stair, in the prayer rugs, in the women’s veils.”
Isaac did make one final try. “Son, you’ll be murdering children and old men. Grant them some kind of innocence.”
“No,” the boy said—he must have been nineteen or twenty. “They are Satan’s assistants.”
Isaac had no choice. He glocked this boy preacher through the heart. The boy’s entire crew collapsed and dropped their automatics. And Isaac marched out of the mosque with clerics and worshipers and defeated fanatics.
This is what Hezbollah must have seized upon. The strange Jewish prince who was almost a child of Islam. And General Ben-Zion couldn’t afford to have Isaac near Beirut’s Green Line, among Hezbollah, Christian militias, civilians, refugee camps, Israeli commandos, and American spies—he would reignite the civil war in Lebanon.
“General,” Isaac said, “I swear to you, Beirut isn’t on my list. I have no list. Consider me a man without a travelogue—once I did walk Dublin’s streets, visited Leopold Bloom’s address, lit a candle for James Joyce, but that was before I went into politics. Presidents shouldn’t have literary predilections. It could ruin them, as my love of Kafka ruined me.”
“You’ll recover,” Ben-Zion said. “America worships a true original. But a favor for a favor. You have an assassin in the White House.”
Isaac wanted to glock the Israeli Frankenstein, who’d nearly been burnt alive in Beirut.
“Now you volunteer this information?”
“I needed to extract that promise from you,” Ben-Zion said.
“And if I’d refused you that promise?”
Suddenly Isaac could read the pain that knit all the scars and ridges together on the spymaster’s riven face.
“Then, dear King Saul, I would not be in your debt.”
“And who is this hypothetical assassin?”
“I assure you. It’s far from hypothetical. If you aren’t careful, you won’t survive the month.”
“Then should I close down the mansion, General Ben-Zion, and arrest everyone, including myself? I’m also an assassin.”
“It wouldn’t help. The assassin will follow in your footsteps. You’re the cop. Think like a cop. You can turn off your tapes. It’s time to go.”
“I’m not wearing a wire,” Isaac said. “It was a bluff.”
“I know,” said Ben-Zion.
And Isaac walked out of the office, abandoning the chief of Shin Bet in his doctor’s spotless white coat.
Assassin.
The Big Guy’s sudden exhilaration—he was back in Sidel country—terrified him. He worried about the collateral damage. What if Max was caught in the crossfire?
“I’ll have to warn Stef,” he muttered, before he disappeared into the cushions of Dragon, and the caravan left Walter Reed, with Isaac’s double in one sedan, and his doctor in another. That was the madness of a president’s logistical maneuvers.
Isaac didn’t have time to reconnoiter and rub his gold shield. How could he search for a hired gun when the DNC kept stabbing him in the back? His own party wanted to run him out of the District on a rail. It was politics, always politics. Genevieve Robinson, alias Brenda Brown, his former chief of staff, advised the Big Guy to sit down with the Senate Republican Caucus.
“Don’t say a word, Isaac. Just nod your head and listen.”
The Republicans wanted to rob from Social Security and get rid of every fucking entitlement program. Isaac had a bad case of vertigo. He still kept nodding his head.
Ramona came marching in once the Republicans left the Oval Office. “You can’t invite them here again. It’s an insult to our own Caucus.”
“I’m meeting with the House Republicans tomorrow.”
“Cancel,” she said.
“If you don’t put an end to your palace coup, I’ll caucus with the Republicans and cut my ties with the DNC.”
“That’s political suicide,” Ramona said.
“No, it’s Russian roulette.”
An officer arrived from Fort Meade, a rabbi who was also a second lieutenant, a big burly fellow who declared himself the unofficial White House chaplain. His name was Elijah Silvers.
“Who sent you, Silvers?”
“Genevieve Robinson, sir. She said I could be your equalizer. Since you’re not a member of any congregation—”
“And have never been.”
“I could serve as your spiritual guide.” And this army chaplain from Fort Meade whispered in Isaac’s ear. “The voters will love it, Mr. President, particularly the religious right.”
Isaac was suspicious. “Why didn’t Brenda clue me in herself?”
“She said you wouldn’t go for it. So I took the initiative.”
The chaplain had to be vetted, of course, and he was. He followed Isaac around like a hunting dog.
“Are you sorry that you killed people, Mr. President?”
“Silvers, you’re not a priest. You can’t absolve me of my sins.”
“I’m curious,” the chaplain said. “And I could lighten your load a little.”
“I don’t have one,” Isaac said. “I glocked whenever I had to glock.”
Isaac got used to the chaplain’s lumbering gait. But there were other issues, outside regret and remorse. The clock was ticking, and Isaac had an assassin in the house, unless it was all a big lie, and Shin Bet was trying to frighten him for his sins. Still, he couldn’t stop worrying about Max. The Pink Commish had to plead with his helicopter pilot. “It’s only temporary. Until we find the fuck.”
But Colonel Oliver kept postponing his move back to Arlington with Max and Karina. “Boss, we’ll do it tomorrow, I swear. You know how Max loves the attic. And Karina has her washing machine and ironing board. She’s in heaven.”
Isaac put pressure on the Bull, and forced the FBI to stop harassing Stef’s Serbian maid. Karina had arrived in America with the help of a rich uncle in Arlington. She was a tall, zaftig blonde who reminded Isaac of a forgotten TV actress, Dagmar, who’d had a moment of fame in the fifties. Karina was gentle with Max, and her malapropisms made the boy feel a little less anguished about his own duel with the English language.
Karina had a pungent perfume. Her body moved with its own kind of lazy lightning under her housedress. Isaac couldn’t deny that he was attracted to this Serbian Dagmar. Karina seemed to grow fleshier under Isaac’s gaze, with all the frightful tremors of a sudden metamorphosis. She wore nail polish and a hint of mascara—a blond femme fatale in a housedress. But she never flirted with the Big Guy, never played the seductress. She was always proper near the boy, protected him without trying to replace his lost mother. Karina had aspirations. She hoped to work with the blind at Gallaudet University. She was teaching herself to “sign” at night, and she would practice with the boy. She had the very best sponsor. She lived in the White House.
Isaac would have to send her and the boy away until he found the hired gun. He wondered how much of an oracle Sol Ben-Zion really was. Yet that Frankenstein from Shin Bet had been adamant, and Isaac began to meditate. Ben-Zion must have lived through unbearable carnage in Beirut—massacre after massacre along the Green Line. It was the Israeli incursion into Lebanon and the Camp David Accords that had driven Ariel out of office. He resigned in ’83 and became the Hermit of Haifa. And all the carnage had bound up Ariel, Mordecai, and Sol Ben-Zion in one great broth of blood.
Isaac began thinking of that blond boy inside the Manhattan mosque. His name was also Elijah, like the army chaplain. The boy preacher had an infernal poetry. He could sermonize like Satan. Isaac had to look into his raw red eyes.
He would often sit in the Cosmetology Room with Rabbi Silvers. Isaac loved the reclining chairs. It was a beautician’s paradise. The Big Guy had a wife somewhere in Miami, the Countess Kathleen, but the salon lacked a genuine First Lady.
“Do you suffer remorse?” the chaplain asked.
“About the boy preacher? I dream of him sometimes. His rabbit’s red eyes.”
“You might have convinced him to leave with the others.”
“There was no time for talk therapy,” Isaac said. Young Elijah had begun to twitch. He wanted to destroy everyone in the mosque. All he could see was Satan.
“I had to glock him,” Isaac told this Elijah.
“I like that word—glock,” the chaplain said. “It has a wonderful flavor, but you executed that boy.”
“I did. And I would do it again. But righteousness doesn’t rub away the bad dreams.”
“Do you glock the boy in your dreams?” the chaplain asked.
Isaac rose up in his reclining chair like a sea lion. “Silvers, since when are you a shrink?”
“I’m your rabbi,” the chaplain said. “I have a right to ask.”
“I never glock him in the dream. We dance.”
“Dance,” the chaplain said, rolling that word around on his tongue. “Isn’t it peculiar?”
“He’s wearing lipstick. I mean, he’s not a girl. He’s Elijah, the cracked prophet. But he’s wearing lipstick. And we dance. He has tears of blood in his eyes.”
“Like a suffering Christ,” the chaplain said.
“Yeah, a Christ with murder on his mind.”
Perhaps Isaac did want absolution. He wasn’t sure. He noticed a tall, busty blonde come toward him with a sway of her hips—he could have sworn it was Dagmar, broken loose from the fifties. Then the vision vanished. He saw the Serbian maid with Max. She crept down onto the carpets like a four-legged beast, while Maximilian rode on her back. But there was something remiss in her pose, something malaprop and perverse, as if it was designed for Isaac’s benefit, not the boy’s. Yet Max was delighted.
“Karina, are we g-g-going to China—or Bethlehem?”
“Is China on next floor?”
Isaac was startled by her prowess, and the rich purpose of each move as she crept along the carpets. It excited him. He’d been as solitary as a monk at the White House.
“Karina, I command you—f-f-fly to Bethlehem.”
“Maxy,” she said with a hoarse laugh. “I have not dragon’s wings, or motor in my heart. I will never train to fly. We must borrow your papa’s wagon.”
Isaac could see the amazing curve of Karina’s spine. She drove past Isaac with the boy, into some unknown interior of the attic, while Isaac sat with the military chaplain and imagined himself gripping Dagmar’s broad back. He had such unholy thoughts, he had to look away from Rabbi Silvers.
He must have dozed off in the Cosmetology Room. Had the chaplain gone back to Fort Meade? Isaac was wearing his subaltern’s robe, like Abe Lincoln. He must have gone down to the residential floor and come back upstairs, a sleepwalker in disguise. The salon was dark, but Isaac could see a crack of light in the attic. He glanced at the green glow of the numerals on his watch. It was well before midnight. He could hear a hissing sound. He stood up and marched into the narrow mezzanine.
Dagmar. . .
Karina hovered over the attic ironing board in her panties and bra. She didn’t seem brazen. She was humming some Serbian tune. Isaac crept up behind her, could sniff that powerful perfume.
“Karina,” he said, “didn’t you leave for Arlington with the colonel and Max?”
She twisted her head around with all the aplomb of a television queen. Karina didn’t hide her succulent flesh. Isaac was a bit ashamed. He had a king-sized tent sticking out the front of his subaltern’s robe.
“Mr. President,” she said without a waver in her voice, “I had to finish ironing. Maxy left me behind.”
He wasn’t even certain what happened next. He found himself licking the armpits of Max’s live-in maid. He loved the salty aroma. He was ridden with guilt, even as he hovered over her, like some Dracula. Had he used the power of his office to brand this Serbian Dagmar with the mark of his own spittle? She had the Big Guy’s number. She was still at the ironing board all the while he caressed her. She was pounding away at a pair of Max’s pants. Isaac heard the iron’s white-hot whistle.
“Mr. President, we play country girl and big bad wolf?”
Yes, he wanted to say, yes, yes, yes.
But he wasn’t a big bad wolf. He was bemoaning his fate as a prisoner of the White House when he noticed a nasty curl on Karina’s lip. There was little seduction in her eyes. He managed to swerve under her elbow as she brandished the iron in her fist. She batted at him with her free hand. She must have had military training somewhere. She shoved him right across the mezzanine. The ironing board collapsed. Isaac could have shouted for help, but she must have known he wasn’t a shouter. She was toying with Sidel. She meant to push his face in with the iron.
And he thought to himself. This fucking madness has to stop.
All the malapropisms were gone. She was suddenly as fluent as that boy prophet, Elijah.
“The attic is empty,” she said. “It’s Karel’s birthday. I made a reservation at the Old Ebbitt Grill. They’ll get drunk on chicken wings. Sidel, you should have known better than to come at me with your prick like a battle lance. You’ll pay for that.”
“You aren’t from Serbia, are you?”
“I couldn’t tell Serbia from a cat’s ass,” she said with a murderous chuckle, though her laughter shaved off a bit of her heat. And now Isaac took a leap of faith. Fuck the presidency! He’d been a mayor with his fists, and had never been more or less than a street cop with the crippling shrewdness of the streets.
“You trained with General Tollhouse.”
He’d startled her. But her toughness returned.
“Does it show, Mr. President?”
“You must have been with Wildwater at Warm Springs. But Tollhouse didn’t send you. That’s not his style. Tollhouse wouldn’t have been so oblique.”
She was still stalking him with the iron. But Isaac had derailed her a bit with his own gift of gab.
“What’s your real name, Karina?”
“Karina,” she said.
“And who sent you here to give me a goodbye kiss?”
“Rembrandt,” she said.
“I should have seen it,” Isaac said. “All the talk about Gallaudet. You got that from the master himself. Gallaudet is one of his escape routes in the District.”
Karina nodded her head. “And I’m gonna give you one of my own tats,” she said, rattling the iron. “I’ll burn it right into your fat brain. A wolf’s eyes and ears.”
“And you’re the gal who left those greeting cards in the beauty salon, under a hair drier.”
“Yeah,” she said, “that was my personal touch. Viktor relied on my ingenuity a lot.”
“He helped you create that Serbian myth, with the uncle in Arlington.”
“I was bulletproof,” she said. “I picked out a pathetic maid who lived in a closet. I strangled her. We dumped her body in the Chesapeake, and I became Karina.”
“You vampirized her.”
“Yeah,” Karina said. “That’s a fancy way to look at it. You’re a poet, Mr. President. Would you like one last tumble? Close your eyes, and I’ll do you with my panties on.”
Keep her talking.
The Big Guy was recovering his ground, even while she lunged at him with the iron. She could afford the luxury of keeping him alive a little longer. She was as agile as an acrobat, but now it was Isaac who tugged at her invisible tail.
“Tell me, sweetheart, did you ever really like Max?”
“That stupid little stutter boy. I wanted to stuff a rag in his mouth. I was going nuts. But Rembrandt wouldn’t make his move. You would have been a corpse months ago if he hadn’t attached himself to your heartbeat. And I can’t have the FBI combing through all my shit. Those idiots could stumble onto something, even if I am bulletproof.”
She shouldn’t have been so dismissive of Max. Dagmar didn’t deserve that little boy. And while she pondered, his wind had come back. He was as wily as Odysseus.
“So you found another sponsor.”
“Yeah,” she said, with an insane glimmer in her eye. “And he wasn’t so finicky—not about you.”
“Rainer Wolff,” Isaac whispered.
“Rembrandt’s on the run. Half his partners have dumped him. That guy has a lot of balls. But he went too far. He clipped his own banker, and he can’t move money around. Can you imagine? A billionaire who’s short of cash.”
Her eyes were fluttering now. She’d forgotten Sidel for a moment, caught in the monsoon of her tale. He’d talked her to a turning point. The iron had stopped whistling. He leapt at Dagmar, slapped the iron out of her fist. She laughed at him, mocked his maneuver. That crazy curl appeared on her lip.
“Papa wants to play,” she said. He wondered where she grew up, if she was a street urchin like him, and if he was staring at his own distorted face in a funhouse mirror. She shouldn’t have come to this attic—it was Isaac’s lair. Her flesh shivered as she laughed, and Isaac felt no pity. He didn’t need one of Rembrandt’s tats. He’d always been a werewolf—alone, alone.
Dagmar couldn’t have reckoned on the ferocity of his attack. He ripped at her, seized her ears, knocked her head against the wall, struck her with her own iron, as her lip uncurled and the first sign of fear registered on her face, with blood welling in her eyes, blinding Dagmar.
“Here’s something for Max!”
All the humiliation he’d endured—being babied half the time, with a panoply of protectors who couldn’t protect him—roused Isaac, and his rage fell upon Dagmar with blow after blow. He was willing to suffer the consequences.
He looked at himself in a real mirror on the mezzanine wall. He was speckled with blood, like someone maddened by the moon. Dagmar lay on the carpet, one arm stretched out, as if she’d just performed in a ballet. Sidel was the choreographer here. He didn’t bother to feel the pulse in her neck. He had the White House operator call Bull Latham and ask him to bring his cuffs. He’d rather not be arrested by a stranger.
He wouldn’t clean the blood off his subaltern’s robe, wouldn’t cover Dagmar in a sheet.
The Bull arrived, saw the carnage, squinted at Isaac’s robe. “Jesus, I was worried for a minute.”
“Aren’t you gonna arrest me?” Isaac had to ask.
“Come on, boss. She was bent. But you wouldn’t give us a chance to prove it. Forgive me, I have to bring in my border patrol.”
The Bull began whispering into his mobile. Isaac had never heard of border patrols in the District. Half a dozen men appeared in the attic, wearing identical blue suits, crisp white shirts, and striped ties. They could have been their own fraternal order. They carried two of the biggest satchels Isaac had ever seen. They didn’t put on work clothes, like house painters. They padded about in rubber soles. One of these sextuplets reached into a satchel, pulled out a portable vacuum cleaner, and sucked up some of the debris Dagmar had left behind—a broken bracelet, a brassiere strap, bits of hair.
Another sextuplet wiped the blood off Isaac with a cotton ball bathed in alcohol. “Mr. President, you’ll have to give these lads your robe,” the Bull said. “They’ll have it cleaned for you. They’ll return it with the same wrinkles—come, sit with me.” The Bull led Isaac back into the Cosmetology Room, and they sat in reclining chairs, the vice president and the president in his winter underpants.
“Where will your lads put the young lady?”
“What young lady?” the Bull said with a smile. “You’ve been by yourself all evening.”
“But the ironing board . . . she must have been logged in.”
“And we’ll log her out,” the Bull said. “Leave it to my border patrol. But that bitch shouldn’t have been allowed to share your quarters, sir.”
“Bull, I’ve been bombed, shot at, and nearly brained with Karina’s iron. And I can’t counterattack with a whole caravan of cars.”
“That comes with the terrain. The president’s like a diva . . .”
“Yeah, I know all about it—the Prince of the Western World.
“Isaac, what do you want?”
“Lightning. And I can’t have it without a much slimmer machine.”
“Done,” the Bull said. “You’ll still need a babysitter. And you’ll have to call the White House switchboard on the hour. We can’t afford to have you vanish into the twilight zone. The country would go wild.”
Isaac’s eyes lit with pure delight. “Bull, that’s the only way I can win—from the twilight zone.”
“You’ll still need a babysitter.”
The sextuplets stood near the doorway with their satchels. They shook Isaac’s hand and left with the Bull. Isaac was bewildered. There wasn’t a trace of Dagmar in the mezzanine, not a splotch of blood. Not a single ridge in the carpet. That was the beauty of Bull Latham’s border patrol. The sextuplets had erased the very fact of Dagmar’s existence. It wasn’t a matter of dried blood and powdered bones. Dagmar was a figment of Isaac’s imagination, a maid and a murderess who had never been.
Viktor should have fled to the white hills of Lisbon, where he knew every winding path that dove down to the river, and where he could have survived on pink wine and Crackerjacks while he waited out his enemies. Or he could have gone to Bilbao, a medieval city where his father had made a fortune opening a passel of ice cream parlors with exotic flavors, and where foreigners rarely went. But he couldn’t seem to get Paris out of his blood. It had nothing to do with high fashion, monuments, and museums.
He sat in the Zeyer, a brasserie in the fourteenth that Henry Miller had frequented fifty years ago and held court with other artists and writers who had to scrounge for every meal. The Zeyer’s habitués had tales to tell about the bald American with his Brooklyn accent, who limped along in French, and wanted to fuck every female in the brasserie from sixteen to sixty. It amused Viktor, made him laugh. Miller fucked the wives of friends and lived off Anaïs Nin and her husband while he wrote Tropic of Cancer.
Viktor could have gone to the Coupole, in Montparnasse, where his father, Pakhan Karl, would often meet his lieutenants at the bar. Sometimes, Viktor came along. His father had adopted a drunken poet with a long, grizzled face, who would wander into the Coupole, swaying from side to side. His father called him Sam. This Sam never had a sou in his pockets. He dressed like a clodo. Spittle flew from his mouth. The pakhan had to wipe Sam’s face with a silk handkerchief. Years after his father’s death, Viktor finally realized that Sam without a sou was the Nobel laureate who had written Waiting for Godot. But even that bit of news couldn’t bring him back to the Coupole. Besides, he might have been spotted by Rainer’s henchmen in the middle of Montparnasse.
Viktor clung to the Zeyer, a poorer cousin in the heart of a modest neighborhood at the Carrefour Alésia, near the Porte d’Orléans—it was an artisan’s paradise. He closeted himself at a corner table, drinking a blond Belgian beer, and could see across the terrace and into the street, as plumbers in hip boots went past, glaziers with shivering sheets of glass on their backs. He was still at war with Rainer Wolff, but his own allies were dwindling. His orphans—the besprizornye—had begun to abandon him. He was more involved in tattoos than in counterfeit currency.
He kept his needles and dyes in a wooden box at his feet, like some religious monk. He had a new fiancée, a young widow who wasn’t at all like Viktor. She had a fixed abode in Georgetown. She loved ballet and Washington’s winter galas and balls. She belonged to the Republican National Committee. Viktor had stuffed the committee with cash like a golden goose when he was trying to sabotage Sidel. But he was drawn to the widow and her muscular American blondness that seemed so bland on the surface, yet was scratched by its own peculiar passion. The pakhan had fallen in love for the first time perhaps . . .
He was reckless. He shouldn’t have been daydreaming at the Zeyer. Still, he smiled when Rainer sat down at the next table, superior as ever in a coat with a mink collar.
“Rembrandt, we could have had the best sea bass in Paris at the Dôme, picked it right out of the tank, and I have to find you here. How are you adjusting to our reduced circumstances?”
“Don’t cry, Rainer. You have a million commodities.”
“But I had to sell short,” Rainer said. “Should I tell you how much I lost in a single day? Did you have to garrote our own banker?”
“I didn’t garrote Pierre,” Viktor said. “I slit his throat.”
“Mensch, it comes to the same thing. Either we have a truce, or you don’t walk out of here alive.”
Viktor smiled into the teeth of Viktor’s remark.
“And how will you orchestrate my disappearance in a brasserie full of clients drinking orange pressé and Belgian beer—ah, I forgot. You were once with the Abwehr. Choreographing disappearances was your specialty.”
“It still is. I’ll create a diversion, a fire in the toilets. Why the devil did you come back to Paris? It’s teeming with Michael Davit’s men. Davit has a grudge against you. You strangled two of his very best employees, sworn to protect Pierrot. You made a fool of Davit. He couldn’t deliver. And he wants to deliver now. Your partners are very cross. Rosa Malamud has put a bounty on your head.”
“How is dear Rosa? Are her fashion shops flourishing? Has she stabbed anyone in the heart with her knitting needle?”
“Rembrandt,” Rainer said, “she’s sharpening it especially for you.”
Viktor should have been more alert. Rainer had manufactured a little homecoming party for Viktor, who recognized Michael Davit’s men in their plaid jackets with leather elbow patches, like country squires. They were thugs with split eyebrows, despite their aristocratic attire. And then he saw Rosa herself at the bar, too involved with Rembrandt’s destruction to count her millions.
“It’s hopeless,” Rainer said, “can’t you see? Give us your plates—your precious plates—and you’ll walk out of here in one piece.”
Viktor laughed. “But they’re my intellectual property. You’re a publisher, Rainer. Would you ask any of your authors to surrender their rights?”
“Rembrandt, you’re wasting my time. Either we deal or we don’t.”
Viktor knew the Zeyer’s exits and entrances by heart. He couldn’t duck out on Davit’s men. He had to move right into the squall. “Rainer, your spotters didn’t find me. You couldn’t have taken some magic wheelbarrow from West Berlin. You figured I’d come here.”
Rainer pretended to yawn. He should have been a Schauspieler. He had to act out different parts when he was with the Abwehr—he was once a butler in the house of a British spy for two weeks, and had to play a transvestite to trap a clerk in the Foreign Office who was selling secrets to Stalin. “Rembrandt, you’re so predictable. You can’t resist a proletariat café. Paris is where your father made his mark. Only an idiot or a clever man would hide right under our noses. And I learned how to be patient. I told myself, He’ll come to the Zeyer, sooner or later. And here you are.”
Viktor leapt up, tossed his blond beer into Rainer’s eyes, skipped between two of Davit’s thugs with their fancy elbow patches, clopped another one on the head with his wooden box, but he couldn’t maneuver fast enough. Rosa Luxemburg ripped into his coat with the savage point of her knitting needle. He still knocked the needle out of her hand, and clutching his side for a moment, he danced into the stairwell that went down to the toilets. He nearly tripped, but he clung to the banister rail. The Zeyer was his terrain, even if he’d brought his enemies here. He went through an unmarked door that led to a tunnel where most of the Zeyer’s deliveries must have been made. He climbed a flight of stairs and found himself at the side of a little church on the Avenue du Maine. He opened the gate and hopped across the avenue, with a trickle of blood on his hand.
He arrived at the Mistral, a dump of a hotel next to the rue Daguerre. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had both stayed here when they were penniless philosophers. But that’s not why Viktor had chosen the Mistral. He liked its random sense of decay. He climbed up to a room on the second floor, where the young widow was waiting. Renata would have preferred the Ritz. But the Ritz was outside Viktor’s realm of reliability, though he had stayed there once, had sat with his besprizornye at Hemingway’s bar. He would have been noticed at the Ritz with his odd flamboyance, that cavalier disregard of decorum by a billionaire who walked around with a child’s paint box . . .
“I was worried,” Renata said.
Viktor couldn’t even calm her. He would have smeared blood on Renata with his own hands. She’d walked out of one disaster on an errand for him, and he didn’t want her to walk into another. She was a casualty of sorts. She still had a twitch under one eye, from that explosion in the castle. She whimpered in her sleep. He’d rock her in his arms half the night.
Viktor made a call from the phone in his room, whispered a few words. Within five minutes there was a knock on the door. He welcomed the ancient toubib, Muhammad, who had once been part of his father’s clan. The toubib dug a needle into Viktor’s arm that was almost as large as Rosa’s knitting needle. Muhammad spoke Russian, English, and a little Arabic with Viktor. He cut away Viktor’s clothes with a surgeon’s scissors, cleaned and cauterized the wound, then wrapped him in a bandage of tape and gauze.
“I’ll have to travel,” Viktor said. “I can’t stay here. It’s too risky.”
“Sir,” Muhammad said, “the kind lady, she should hold your hand. It will be like a transfusion.”
This toubib without a doctor’s diploma wouldn’t accept cash from Viktor.
“You have rewarded me many, many times. Allow me this one bit of service.”
And he was gone. Renata didn’t ask any questions. She followed the toubib’s advice, clutched Viktor’s hand. The toubib had been right; a kind of electric current passed through Viktor, energized him. He shouldn’t have brought her into this mess, made her his private ambassador to Karel Ludvik. But she hadn’t been better off on her own; her dead husband’s bankers and lawyers had preyed upon Renata, had robbed her blind. Viktor had to threaten this band of thieves with dire consequences; he’d kidnapped the nanny and daughter of one banker, but he didn’t have the heart to hurt a child. Luckily the warning worked. Yet the bankers weren’t done with Renata; they hovered over whatever bits of property she had left, preparing to pounce when the time was ripe.
So she’d become a vagabond like him, by default. But he couldn’t travel with her. He’d have to slip across borders, worrying about betrayal after betrayal. One of the besprizornye whom he could still trust would pick her up in an hour, drive her to Brussels, where she would board a commercial flight under an identity he had picked out for her: Desdemona Roth, an heiress without an heir. But he hadn’t told her all this—he didn’t want to spoil this last little hour at the Mistral.
“Whatever happens, you’ll have enough cash,” he said. It was a rotten habit he’d inherited from his pakhan father. Money was always on his mind.
“Stop it,” she said. “I’m staying with you.”
The blueblood and the besprizornye.
He didn’t argue. She held his hand. He’d profited from that transfusion the toubib had talked about—the beat of her heart, the warmth of her blood.
She must have deciphered her own fate in his dark eyes, realized that the werewolf was sending her away. “Darling,” she said, “let me go with you. I’ll become a washerwoman, I swear. We can hide in Ibiza.”
A rumble of laughter rose up from Viktor’s belly. He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on that island of castaways, counterfeiters, informants, and retired British agents.
He kissed her as hard as any man could with a cauterized wound. He was crazy about Renata, more than crazy—it was a genuine affliction.
“Ibiza,” he said. “We’ll see.”
“Or Prague,” she said, with a sudden fire in her eyes. “Yes, Prague. We’ll have our own palace. Didn’t they promise us a palace, dear?”
A palace, he muttered to himself, like a dreamer with a stitch in his side from Rosa’s knitting needle.
Isaac’s little family began to fall away. Ariel and Mordecai returned to Haifa with the blessings of Sol Ben-Zion and Shin Bet. “Itzik,” Ariel said before he got on an El Al flight, “how can we save you if you won’t save yourself? This is not your home. It’s a haven for diplomats.” Isaac would miss his pair of crusaders in trench coats. They, too, had lived outside the law.
And then Karel Ludvik, the self-deposed president, decided to disappear from the attic. This former colonel of state security must have arrived at some agreement with the Soviets and the Czechs. “Mr. President, I have what they want—Rembrandt’s paper. I hid as much as I could before I left.”
“And once you turn it over?” Isaac asked. “They’re torturers, for Christ’s sake.”
But that didn’t seem to trouble Karel Ludvik. Perhaps he would create his own pact among torturers, since he’d been one himself. He’d never tattled on Renata Swallow, never talked about what she’d been doing at his dinner table the night of the bombing, but suddenly he volunteered. It was his parting gift to Sidel. She hadn’t come to barter with Karel in Rembrandt’s behalf, or to sell him a bundle of Ulysses S. Grants. Besides, Rembrandt had already sold him half a ton of paper. It was a much more vital matter than counterfeit currency. Rembrandt wanted to relocate to Prague, with Renata Swallow. He was buying his way into Czechoslovakia, with the doyenne of Washington’s Cave Dwellers at his side.
“She’s in love with that crime czar,” Karel said. “And love always distorts the picture.”
“So you’re a philosopher now,” Isaac said.
“No, a pragmatist. Rembrandt is banking on Prague’s future in a free Czech state. But it doesn’t really matter. He’s an outlaw where other outlaws will prosper. It will be frontier capitalism in another few years. And I told you once. He already owns half of Prague. He’ll be a little king.”
Isaac peered at him. “And what will you be, Karel?”
“The king’s accomplice.”
And he was whisked away on Aeroflot. Isaac’s own intelligence teams hadn’t gotten their money’s worth from Karel. The folks at Langley must have sweated him for a while, but the CIA was in disrepair. Its agents had been running drugs in Nicaragua to help finance more and more rogue ops. Langley was under Bull Latham’s thumb. “Don’t bother fixing the unfixable,” the Bull loved to say. And Isaac had to wonder how many rogue agents were out there, floating around in the fourth dimension—1989 wasn’t a good year for spies. A randomness had settled in. Members of MI6 had turned on their own masters. There was an international crisis. Agents could be bought and sold by the bushel. And private contractors like General Tollhouse prospered among all the confusion; he could raid Isaac’s mountain retreat at will, and put one of his assets—a female soldier of fortune—in Isaac’s attic. Wildwater was its own CIA.
Isaac would have been all alone if Captain Sarah hadn’t returned to the attic with the president’s pilot and the pilot’s son. Max was very blue. He’d grown fond of Dagmar’s musk; it had become ambrosia to a stuttering boy. And Sidel had a difficult time skirting around the maid’s magical disappearing act.
“She had to leave, Max. Her Auntie was sick.”
“Uncle Isaac, will she ever be back?”
“Soon,” he said without missing a beat. Isaac was like any rogue agent. Worse, even. But he couldn’t fool Captain Sarah and Stef.
“You got rid of her,” Sarah rasped, the moment Max had fled to another part of the attic. “She wouldn’t have disappeared on the spin of a dime. She was much too loyal to Max.”
“She was loyal to no one but Mr. Wildwater.”
Stef was furious after Isaac told him the entire tale. “She might have hurt my little boy. Tollhouse shouldn’t have taken advantage of me like that—planting one of his own operatives as my live-in maid.”
But they couldn’t wreak vengeance on Wildwater right away. Isaac had a much more urgent matter. There’d been a riot and open rebellion at Rikers, the nation’s largest penal colony, which held fifteen thousand souls on its island fortress. It was a turnstile jail, with inmates moving in and out. More than half of them didn’t even wear prison garb; they sat for months and months if they couldn’t make bail. There was a unit for pregnant women, another for psychopaths and suicide cases, and yet another for adolescents. Guards openly had sex with inmates, and beat others half to death. Rikers was considered an extension of the Bronx, on the East River. The jail was run by two gangs, the Bloods and the Latin Kings. Rikers had become their honey pot and their private crib. They had their very own day room, where they initiated new members into their ranks, and hired themselves out as contract killers. They could disappear for an afternoon and return to their cell blocks without ever being noticed. They’d learned the art of tattooing from some forgotten master and loved to display their tats. But the Kings and the Bloods hadn’t caused the riot. They had little to rebel about.
The riot had been started by a lay preacher, Martin Teasdale, who called himself a rabbi and minister of the dispossessed. None of the correctional officers seemed to know why he was at Rikers. The COs couldn’t find a record of Martin Teasdale. He wasn’t an inmate. Somehow he had slipped into the penal colony and remained, moving from dorm to dorm, from block to block. Perhaps the COs had adopted him, perhaps not. He taught impromptu classes in religion and philosophy, organized inmates who weren’t involved in the war between the Bloods and the Kings, and managed to outmaneuver them. And one winter night, he took over every single facility at Rikers, with his captains beside him—pale boys, pregnant women, and mean hombres. They’d reversed the order of things—locked the COs inside their bunkers, contained the Bloods and the Kings, trapped the warden and his deputies inside their offices, and communicated with the press via the warden’s mobile. They had firearms and smoke grenades, but they hadn’t harmed a living soul in the penal colony.
Teasdale had made one request: he would surrender to Sidel, and Sidel alone. Ramona Dazzle went ballistic when she heard that on the six P.M. report. “Mr. President, there’s already too much Manhattan in your blood.”
“But Rikers is a piece of the Bronx.”
“It’s still like going back to grade school,” she said. “You graduated from the mayor’s chair. This might play if that demented preacher were calling out to you from some jail in Iowa. Then Colonel Oliver could ride you right onto the roof. It would be gangbusters! But not a lousy dump on the East River. You’ve already been called the Ghetto President. You shouldn’t return to your roost.”
It was a political landmine for the mayor and the governor. Neither one wanted another Attica, with the blood of inmates and COs on their hands. And why did this lone white man who called himself a preacher appeal to a population of Latinos and blacks? Martin Teasdale didn’t seem to have a prison record. He was reared in Vermont, attended a rural school and later a teachers’ college, returned to the same rural schoolhouse, where he taught second grade until he was hospitalized. Teasdale suffered from a crippling chronic depression. What whiff of steam or air had brought him to Rikers Island? And when had he begun to preach? He wasn’t registered as a Republican or a Democrat. The man seemed apolitical. And here he was creating a firestorm in a penal colony and seeking out Sidel.
Stef had to prepare the lift package. He had little lead time. An entire penal colony sat in some sandbox, waiting for the president. Stef rode in advance with his crew to JFK, where the lift package—two White Tops—had been assembled. They could have dropped the package off at LaGuardia, which was less than a hundred yards away from Rikers. But the arrival of Air Force One would have disrupted the entire airport. The runways weren’t really long enough, and Air Force One might have landed in the East River, or crumpled onto Rikers. Also, LaGuardia didn’t have the space to house White Tops in its hangars.
The colonel was already in the cockpit when his radio started to crackle.
“Red Rider to Rio, Red Rider to Rio, the Citizen is on the way. Thirty minutes to touch down.”
“Roger that, Red Rider. Over and out.”
Stef was grateful that they could skirt Manhattan on this part of the lift, and wouldn’t have to bring that same old nightmare of gridlock every time the president was on the ground.
The Citizen had arrived with Captain Sarah and half his White House detail. He was wearing his windbreaker, as usual. His cuffs were slightly frayed. He wouldn’t permit the White House butler to arrange his wardrobe. The Big Guy dressed and shaved himself. He climbed the air stair without a nod to the cockpit.
And Stef rode the currents, rocked and cradled Marine One above the plains of Queens with its high-rise villages that looked like battlements in some bittersweet dystopia. He had to skirt LaGuardia’s airspace. The White House liaison officer had mapped Marine One’s route with air traffic control.
He snaked along the edge of the East River and peered down at the penal colony that inhabited its own windswept island like a rubber pancake with white and red bunkers. Stef could see the rolls of razor wire that surrounded the penal colony like a lethal bracelet. He landed his bird on a patch of lawn without grass. It was cluttered with reporters come to see the mishaps of a president whose numbers dropped precipitously in poll after poll. Stef felt like he was part of a circus sideshow. The mayor and the governor had to be there—it was a prime-time crisis—but they weren’t looking for a photo op with the commander in chief. Isaac had become his own isolation ward, a president who never had his proper honeymoon.
Teasdale’s command center was “the Bing,” the nastiest jail on the island. It housed the incorrigibles. The Central Punitive Segregation Unit—CPSU—was a supermax facility, in permanent disciplinary lockdown. Yet Teasdale had penetrated the bitter heart of this bunker, the most ancient and run-down unit in the penal colony. The warden had declared a red alert—a total lockdown of the island—once Teasdale went on the warpath, but this lowly teacher from Vermont was able to override the warden’s red alert and seize control of every facility, trapping the master and many of his screws in their own bullpens. Of course, the dreaded Ninja Turtles of ERU—Rikers’ Emergency Response Unit—had rushed the Bing with their batons. The Turtles were unmistakable in their fatigues, padded coats, helmets, and steel-tipped boots. The Turtles had solved every crisis on the island. ERU had never failed. But Teasdale disgorged the Turtles, sent the warden’s paramilitary unit howling from the Bing, their faces covered in feces and blood.
Isaac walked into a swirl of elite units from the NYPD; the police commissioner had arrived with his sharpshooters and SWAT teams clad in black. But the new Commish, who was little more than the mayor’s attack dog, had been given no instructions at all. The mayor couldn’t afford a massacre. And the governor stood on the sidelines, yapping with reporters, while the Bronx borough president, who was swept into office with Isaac Sidel, seemed to care about the island’s population of undesirables. He was shrewd enough to talk to Sidel in front of the cameras.
“There are kids in the Bing, Mr. President, and old men with diabetes and heart conditions. What can you do?”
“Go inside and talk to Mr. Teasdale.”
“And if he won’t reason with you?”
“Well, we’ll have to reason with the unreasonable.”
Isaac was no stranger to this island. He’d taught classes at one of Rikers’ high schools, had met with boys in their “junior” jail—sixteen-year-olds were treated as adults and sent to the penal colony. He’d tried to secure scholarships for the brightest ones, and gave reading lessons to boys who had never learned to spell. He’d wanted to get rid of Rikers, but he had neither the power nor the will—it was a gulag on the East River, with a tundra all its own; more than half of the young men who did time at Rikers returned within a year. Even as president, he’d petitioned the Federal Bureau of Prisons, but nothing came of that petition; it was mired in politics. Jails and penitentiaries brought in big bucks. And there were always stats about the little “dips” in violence, while the prison population boomed. Democrats and Republicans alike clamored for additional wardens and screws.
Teasdale still remained a mystery. COs weren’t allowed to wear guns inside the cellblocks. They could arm themselves outside the jails, since they might encounter former inmates with a grudge against them. Teasdale’s band must have broken into the COs’ lockers and swiped their pieces. That’s what Isaac had heard on the news. But perhaps there was another explanation. Some of the inmates went out on furlough; they would leave Rikers aboard the Department of Correction’s orange and blue buses, volunteer at homeless shelters and hospices for men and women with full-blown AIDS, and then return on the same orange and blue buses in the middle of the night. And Isaac wondered if Teasdale had smuggled warriors and weapons into Rikers on these buses. If so, this wasn’t a spontaneous eruption and riot. It sounded more and more like a Wildwater op. And Martin Teasdale wasn’t some preacher out of the wilderness. He was a mercenary, a soldier of fortune. But how could Isaac be sure?
Neither the Ninja Turtles nor a single screw would welcome the most popular mayor the city had ever known. The governor conferred with his aides, and finally approached Sidel. That prick, Isaac muttered to himself.
The Gov had abandoned Isaac a month after the elections and sided with the Democratic Caucus. “You’ll have to solve this thing, Sidel,” he said on camera.
“You numbskull,” Isaac said, “you nitwit, why don’t you wave your handkerchief and come inside with me?”
The Gov fled from the TV crews without a word, as Isaac shoved around the cameras. No one volunteered to accompany him.
A janitor had to steer Isaac toward the hellhole where Martin Teasdale had barricaded himself, a corral for the most violent inmates—CPSU. The janitor wouldn’t follow Isaac on his journey.
“The crazies are in there, Mr. President. Good luck.”
But Isaac wasn’t alone. A tribe of stray cats had swarmed around him, caressing his heels with their scarred heads. They didn’t bother with mice or insects. They hunted rats on this little razor-wired plantation. And the leader of the tribe, known as Desirée, an enormous white she-cat with many scabs, had fallen for the Big Guy at first sight. She had a strange, high-pitched voice in Isaac’s presence, though she snarled at other cats who inched too close. Desirée had adopted Isaac, and led him into the Bing, her curled tail like a crusader’s flag.
Isaac stepped on crumbs of shattered glass. Cockroaches climbed the walls as Isaac went through a gate that opened for him and Desirée, and shut behind them with an electrical scrape. The aroma here was much worse than the stench of shit and sweat and unwashed linen at the city’s homeless shelters—it was the perfume of perpetual rot, and it made Isaac giddy for a moment.
The metal detectors were unmanned, but one of Teasdale’s rebels sat in the control booth with his own button mike and ushered Isaac into the facility. The Big Guy passed a cell block cluttered with screws in their winter underwear. They looked frightened and forlorn.
Who the fuck is Martin Teasdale?
A voice shot out at him with its own grit.
“Are you bearing arms, sir?”
“Yes,” Isaac shot back into the stinking wind that blew across the Bing. “I’ve come with my Glock.”
“Dangle it from your left thumb.”
So Isaac dangled his Glock and stepped deeper into a stench that debilitated him.
“Is this your bodyguard?”
“No,” Isaac said, pointing to the mountainous white cat. “My welcoming committee.”
He went through another rumbling gate and arrived in a tiny room that must have been a holding pen, where he spotted Martin Teasdale and his motley band of rebels. Some must have been high on coke or meth; others looked deranged. They had a variety of weapons: stun guns, grenades, hand cannons, firemen’s hatchets, and swords from another century. The men—Latino, white, and black—wore head scarves, stocking caps, and doo-rags made of silk. None of them were in jailhouse green. Several sported CO uniforms, with the shirts unbuttoned and cuffs rolled up. They couldn’t have been professional soldiers. They had the swollen cheeks and split lips of inmates who’d been manhandled. Isaac sensed a piercing beauty and defiance in the sad, bitter faces of these men—outlaws sentenced to solitary confinement. The women looked as fierce as the men. Some were pregnant; others wore the uniforms of female COs. The preacher stood out among them. He was very tall, like a skeleton in a sheath of yellowish skin.
“Reverend Teasdale,” Isaac said, “I feel silly with my gun resting on a finger.”
“You can put it back in your pants, Big Balls.”
Who is this guy?
Isaac was touched by Teasdale’s army. Pregnant women, psychopaths, desperados, and pale boys with filth on their faces. How had they managed to overcome a penal colony with the population of a small town? Perhaps Isaac miscounted their numbers and misconstrued their mission. Was the reverend a genius of disorder?
“Are you hungry?” Isaac asked. “I can give a shout and have some food brought in.”
“We have command of the kitchen,” Teasdale said. “We’re not hurting for grub.”
“Then why did you summon me? Why am I here?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” the talking cadaver said. “Sit.”
They sat down at a table that was infested with rat droppings. Teasdale offered Isaac a Mars bar that had come from one of the facility’s vending machines. Isaac unwrapped the bar, took a bite, and soon the caramel clung to his teeth.
“Big Balls, why haven’t you shut down Rikers? It’s the worst penal colony in creation. It reeks with shit.”
“Reverend, I sent in reformers while I was mayor. I got the children out of there. I did what I could.”
“Don’t talk mayor to me,” Teasdale said. “You’re president. You could have the Justice Department shut down Rikers.”
“It’s not a federal facility,” Isaac said, with a sudden lameness in his voice.
Teasdale cackled at him. Tribe members in doo-rags glared at Isaac.
“Big Balls, that’s no excuse. Federal marshals could swoop down on this island and create their own red alert. The warden would shit his pants. I voted for you, voted for the first time in my life. And you play your war games with the Pentagon.”
“What war games?” Isaac asked. “You won’t find generals crowding the Situation Room.”
“Situation Room,” Teasdale said with spittle on his tongue. “That’s a laugh. The real war is right here. Rikers is crowded with crazies—men and boys who have no business being inside a jail. And this isn’t even a jail. It’s a holding pen for undesirables.”
Teasdale was right on the mark. But Isaac couldn’t admit that in front of this band, or he would have had to surrender himself to Teasdale.
A boy with a teardrop painted on his cheek—the mark of a murderer—pointed a Colt .45 at Isaac’s heart. He couldn’t have been much older than eighteen. Isaac recognized him instantly: Oswaldo Corona, who’d been one of Isaac’s best students on the island. He’d been elected to arista, the honor society. Isaac had talked to Columbia and Yale about him. And here he was in the Bing, with that ominous teardrop.
“Mr. T.,” Oswaldo said, in that sweet, childish voice of his—he even wore his arista pin. “Should I whack him in the right eye or the left?”
“Homey,” Isaac said, “did you forget me so fast?”
“I’m not your homeboy,” Oswaldo said. “You’re the master, and I’m the slave.”
“’Waldo,” Teasdale asked, “what will we accomplish by shooting out his eye? Go easy on Big Balls. He’s better than most.”
Isaac couldn’t stop squinting at that teardrop. How had a boy who had written about vegetable gardens in the barrio, who adored his moms, and wanted to be a novelist or an astronaut, have ended up killing someone and having a teardrop painted on his cheek as a sign of respect?
Oswaldo wouldn’t talk about his past or his present. It was this rabbi of the dispossessed who had to explain what had happened to the boy scholar. A CO at the jail for “juniors” had tried to punk Oswaldo out to another CO, and Oswaldo had punctured his throat with a ballpoint pen. The boy had gone back into the maze of the court system, and would soon be transferred to a facility upstate, where he’d probably spend the rest of his life. Meanwhile, he wore a teardrop and carried a cannon, like Isaac’s own Secret Service.
Isaac swore to himself that he would look into the case. No, he would have to do better than that, or he himself would be trapped in the maze.
“Mr. T.,” Isaac said, “Rikers should be shut down, but it will only rise out of the mist on another island, the ghost of a ghost. I can’t reform the courts. No president can. I can shuffle around my federal prosecutors, but the numbers will still come up short. How the hell did you trap the warden and all his disciples in their own cages? You got around their red alert, locked them inside their lockdown. And you took the Ninja Turtles and tossed them out of the Bing. You’re no rabbi. You trained will all the other mercs at Warm Springs.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Teasdale said. “No questions. If I surrender, Big Balls, there has to be a press conference.”
“I can’t protect you,” Isaac said, “once we’re outside the Bing. I can’t call the shots.”
“Yes, you can,” Teasdale said.
“Rabbi, don’t be so damn naïve. The might of the whole system will rain on your head like a shitstorm.”
“But not while you’re standing beside me. Shut the Bing for thirty days. Talk to the press. The warden will have to dance on a bed of nails—for a little while.”
Isaac agreed to the rabbi’s terms. He left the COs in the cellblock and marched out of the Bing with the Reverend Teasdale and his rebels. Isaac had secured their weapons, including the cutlass, and carried them in a metal container, with Desirée at his heels. He held off the Ninja Turtles and the SWAT teams. He was still commander in chief.
“Rabbi,” Isaac said, “I think you’d better free the warden, or this will never go down.”
Teasdale whispered into his button mike: a siren blasted, and soon every gate on this island gulag opened with a maddening screech. Teasdale had handed back Rikers to the little despots of the Department of Corrections.
Suddenly Isaac was some kind of a hero. Reporters from all over the planet wrapped a necklace of microphones around the Big Guy.
“Mr. President, how did you get the fiend to surrender?”
And for a moment Isaac’s glamour had returned. He wasn’t the recluse of Pennsylvania Avenue, marauded wherever he went. He had freed an entire facility from its captors, had walked unscathed out of the lions’ den.
“Mr. Teasdale is not a fiend. I can’t concur with his methods. He broke the law, and he’s willing to pay for his transgressions. But you’ll have to consider this an extreme form of protest. I’m going to ask Justice to shut down the Bing for thirty days. We’ll have another look at this island.”
The Big Guy didn’t blink or squint into the lights. Half the world was watching the metamorphosis of Isaac Sidel—resurrection, really. This was the man who had helped elect the unelectable Michael Storm, and now stood in his place. The cameras seemed to settle on his windbreaker. He was a president who was willing to enter the maelstrom.
“And what about that feral cat?” asked a journalist from El País.
“Desirée? I’m taking her with me to the White House.”
Dragon hadn’t been part of the lift package. Isaac didn’t want to ride through his own town in an armored cradle. Marine One delivered him to the Wall Street helipad, where he climbed into an anonymous sedan with Desirée, Captain Sarah, Stef, Matt Malloy, and another member of the White House detail. The sedan delivered him to an Italian grocery on Ninth Avenue that also had three dinner tables with waxen cloths; it was a Mafiosi joint, and he’d been coming here ever since he was a deputy chief inspector with the NYPD. His daughter Marilyn and Joe Barbarossa, his son-in-law, were sitting at one of the tables.
The Big Guy had a special dispensation. He could bring his feral cat inside the store. The grocer’s other cats scattered behind the counter at Desirée’s first hiss. Sidel was pleased. His cat was territorial. She curled up at Isaac’s feet, her meow like an asthmatic trumpet. Marilyn barely had room under the table for her legs.
“Isaac, did you have to adopt such a monster?”
“The cat adopted me,” Isaac muttered.
“That’s even worse,” Marilyn said. “All the strays collect around you. Isaac, you’re a bag of bones. Joe, tell my father that he looks terrible.”
But Barbarossa couldn’t do that. He’d gone out on kills with Isaac Sidel. Isaac was the only boss he’d ever had who understood his erratic nature, his mood swings, his gift for violence. Every other cop on the force had feared him, not because his father-in-law had once been the Pink Commish and was now president, but because Barbarossa was volatile and dangerous to have around. He wore a glove on one hand; it covered the burns he’d received in Nam fighting other drug dealers. And Barbarossa’s glove could rip at you out of nowhere.
He decided to play the diplomat and not contradict his wife, who could be as warlike as her father.
“Ah, Dad,” he said, “I’ll bet you haven’t had a decent meal since you left the Apple.”
They drank Chianti together from a bottle wrapped in straw, had roasted red peppers soaked in olive oil, a chopped salad, grilled sardines, spaghetti pomodoro with the thinnest noodles Isaac had ever seen, and a hazelnut cake that the grocer’s wife had prepared for the president. Isaac had to sign his autograph for the grocer’s tribe of nephews. He’d sent one of them to Sing Sing. But the grocer and his wife didn’t bear a grudge.
Marilyn scrutinized her father across the table without the semblance of a smile. “I still say he’s thin.”
Isaac would never recover from Marilyn the Wild. She ruled him and rifled his dreams. She was like a burglar inside the Big Guy’s gut.
“When are you coming to DC?” Isaac asked.
“Never,” she said. “I told you not to run. You can’t breathe outside the boroughs.”
Matt suddenly appeared at the table with his mobile. “Didn’t mean to interrupt, Mr. President. But I think it’s urgent. Renata Swallow just called the White House, and the switchboard patched the call through.”
“Renata’s on the line? But she wouldn’t take any of my calls . . .”
He grabbed the mobile from Matt with its two rabbit ears. He always felt like a Martian with that machine. He had to juggle with the rabbit ears before he heard Renata’s voice; it sounded as if she were stranded in an echo chamber.
“Renata, I hope this has nothing to do with Balanchine. I’m not in the mood to talk about the master.”
She was crying, and Isaac regretted that he was so nonchalant with her; like a ping-pong player fending off a vicious serve with one eye shut. “What’s wrong?”
“Viktor wants to see you.”
“Fine,” Isaac asked. “We can meet in one of the tunnels at Gallaudet—tomorrow.”
“He’s not at Gallaudet,” Renata said. “He’s in Manhattan—on the Lower East Side.”
Ah, Isaac reasoned with himself. Viktor Danzig must have inherited his mother’s flat—the seamstress Pauline wouldn’t take a nickel from her billionaire son. Rembrandt had buried her in Woodlawn.
Isaac got the pakhan’s address from Renata. “But why is he in Manhattan?”
“Because, darling, he has no other place to hide.”
“Is he hurt? Is he in trouble?”
Renata told him about Michael Davit, the Manchester entrepreneur who had his own school for assassins. Viktor had remained one hop ahead of Davit’s hitters. But where were Rembrandt’s Ninja Turtles, the besprizornye? They’d abandoned him and vanished with their own hard cash, their holdings, and counterfeit plates. Rembrandt had become too unpredictable, falling in love with a Washington blueblood, neglecting his Ulysses S. Grants while he maneuvered against the Swiss bankers’ lottery in order to spare Sidel’s life. The besprizornye had come to terms with that publishing baron, Rainer Wolff, and may even have been hunting Viktor on their own. The Sons of Rossiya were disbanding without their pakhan.
“But is he hurt?” Isaac had to ask again.
“Yes,” Ramona said, “and the cops are after him.”
“What cops?”
“Your own boys in blue,” Ramona said; her voice turned to static, and a long silence rippled right through Sidel, as he began to saddle up.
He whispered in Barbarossa’s ear, and Barbarossa whispered right back.
“Dad, I’ll have to call from a pay phone, just to be safe.”
Barbarossa left the little restaurant in his black leather coat and returned in five minutes.
“Joey, were there any problems?”
“Dad, don’t ask.”
But Isaac understood the score. Rainer Wolff, or one of his agents, must have hired several homicide detectives to track Rembrandt to the Lower East Side. There had always been freelancers like that, and Vietnam Joe was part of the same club.
“Dad, I stopped the hemorrhaging, but there’s still one lone wolf out there, and we’ll have to take our chances.”
Marilyn could never seem to decode all this cop talk.
“Isaac,” she said, “fatten yourself. Finish the cake before you disappear altogether. And Joey, don’t you let him walk into an ambush.”
Barbarossa stroked his glove as a warning sign to Isaac’s enemies, wherever they were, while the Big Guy began to brood. He wasn’t even sure if he was allowed to kiss his own daughter. “Marilyn, the Secret Service will drive you home.”
But she hugged Isaac and Joe. “My two idiots,” she said, with the taste of hazelnut in her mouth.
Isaac groaned when he saw Dragon outside the grocery.
“Boss,” Matt said, “I took the initiative and had that baby brought here on my own.”
They all climbed into the president’s cradle. Desirée had already captured a mouse. She delivered her trophy to Isaac and leapt onto his lap, while Marilyn stood inside the curtained window and waved to her husband and Isaac, as Dragon disappeared into the night.
It was an old-line tenement on Attorney Street, a firetrap that should have been torn down. Perhaps it was Isaac himself who had spared the building when he was the grand seigneur of Manhattan real estate. He wouldn’t allow a single tenant to fall into oblivion inside New York’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. Promises were always made, and often produced nothing but a subway token and a berth at a public shelter.
Dragon was much too conspicuous. The Big Guy didn’t want to advertise his own razzia. So he left Dragon a block away, and while Barbarossa and Captain Sarah approached Rembrandt’s building from the roofs, breaking into an abandoned building a few doors away, Isaac, Stef, and Matt Malloy marched into the firetrap on Attorney Street, with Desirée weaving around them and bumping into their heels with her bullet head.
Isaac knew it was some kind of a trap. The lampposts were all unlit. Some motherfucker must have knocked out the lights with a long stick. The firetrap itself was dark as Moses. Matt had to use his pocket flashlight, or they would have stumbled about on the stairs like straw dolls.
Up they went, one stair at a time, mired in dust and filth. The banisters creaked; it was Isaac’s old bailiwick. He loved every moment. He was back on his native ground, removed from a world of monuments and antiques, and the must of history. He didn’t have to be reminded of Lincoln’s footsteps, as much as he admired the Great Emancipator. He had a rawness here, not Marines in harness, butlers on parade. He was on a president’s holiday. And then he heard the cat hiss—it was like a deafening whistle. Desirée hunched her back and leapt into the air, her enormous body twirling, as she attacked with her claws.
Someone groaned on the second floor landing. “Stop, stop, I beg you. Get this creature off me.”
Isaac called once. “Desirée.”
And the cat returned to his heels. A man stepped out of the shadows, with deep runnels of blood on his face.
Isaac recognized one of the lazy lieutenants from his own time at headquarters, a worthless bagman who fetched coffee and delivered the Department’s pocket money from a local bank.
“Hirschhorn, is that you?”
The bagman blinked at the president.
“Jesus, Isaac, nobody said you were part of this package.”
“You’re a lucky guy. Barbarossa will be here in a minute. If he catches you, he’ll knock your brains out.”
And the bagman rumbled down the stairs.
“Is that wise, Mr. President?” Matt asked. “Letting a crooked cop back out on the streets?”
“Matt, if we grab him now, we’ll overplay our hand. Don’t worry, he’ll turn in his badge by tomorrow and run from Joey as fast as he can.”
They didn’t have to grope very long in the dark; Desirée led Isaac’s search party to a crack of light under a door. Isaac didn’t bother about a bell. He wrapped once with his knuckles on the rotting wood.
“Who’s there?” a disembodied voice broke through the other side of the door.
“A friend.”
There was a long silence. And Isaac began to feel bewitched, trying to explain himself to some guy he couldn’t see.
“I’m looking for Tollhouse’s tin man—a tattoo artist. This is your late mother’s apartment. I’m Sidel.”
The door opened. And Viktor did seem disembodied in the dim light. His face was bloodless. He stood in his undershirt, with a bandage around his middle.
Isaac entered with his search party. The apartment was nearly barren. It had a bureau and a bare-bones bed. There was a battered sofa in the sitting room and several chairs. It saddened Sidel, this ruthless stamp of love. Had Viktor’s mother waited year after year in this railroad flat for a pakhan who would never come, Siberian Karl, a mystic, a murderer, a forger and a thief?
“Is this how your mother lived?” Isaac asked. “In a monk’s cell? What happened to you?”
“I got careless,” Rembrandt said.
“Why aren’t you in Czechoslovakia? Karel told me that you were about to become the little king of Prague.”
Rembrandt laughed with a certain bitterness, and it must have pained him to laugh. His face screwed up into a tantalizing half-mad look.
“A sovereign without his scepter. Karel promised that Prague was for sale.”
“But you’ve been eating up all the real estate,” Isaac said.
“That doesn’t amount to much in Prague—it’s Kafka country, or did you forget? I have all the documents from the banks, but Karel still holds the key to the kingdom. He’s gone into business with Rainer Wolff, and both of them want me dead.”
Now Isaac realized why Karel had been so eager to bolt. It had nothing to do with the Kremlin or his own conniving minions at Prague Castle. He’d used Isaac to climb out of the Bull’s black hole and position himself as his own little king. Isaac wasn’t the real fall guy. Rembrandt had ruined himself with his lottery.
Isaac turned to Matt. “Have the White House find the Bull, will ya?”
“Boss,” Matt said, “I have him on the line.”
Isaac swiped the mobile away from Matt with one of his paws.
“Bull, we have a problem. I need your pals at the Bureau to babysit for Rembrandt until we can relocate him.”
“Isaac,” Bull Latham said, “I wouldn’t use the Bureau. You’ll leave some residue, like a snail. We’re better off with Wildwater.”
“Wildwater,” Isaac said, “always Wildwater.” And he pressed down hard on the rabbit ears.
Within twenty minutes, three men and a woman arrived in Ray-Bans. Isaac felt uncomfortable around such civilian soldiers until Barbarossa came down from the roof with Captain Sarah.
“Joey, I’ll feel much better if you put together a little unit to watch over these mothers. I’ll pay your boys out of my own pocket.”
“It won’t be necessary, Dad. I’ll call in a couple of favors.”
“And if you catch hell from the Commish, you tell him I’ll cut off all his federal funding . . .”
“Dad,” Barbarossa said, “I’m untouchable.”
“And take care of Marilyn, will ya? Ah, I almost forgot. Bring a doc along, some guy we can trust. We have to patch up this package. He’s as pale as my cat’s belly.”
Isaac glanced at Rembrandt for the last time. “Hey, you owe me a tat.”
And he left with his search party. Desirée had already discovered a mouse in this dump. She left it on the cracked sill of Rembrandt’s door and scampered down the stairs like the absolute queen of the Lower East Side.