It was serendipity, something like that. Rainer Wolff, the Berlin publishing baron, had been invited by the Library of Congress to a symposium on the future of the printed word, and Isaac seized upon the symposium for his own concerns. Yes, he still had his collection of Modern Library classics from Columbia College. Yes, he would have killed to maintain the hegemony of the printed word. But he hated all the clatter of symposiums. Books would live or die without the constant screed of librarians, authors, and publishing barons. And, of course, POTUS was one of the invited guests.
He was asked to speak at the gala in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building. Isaac was a commodity again, a precious piece of merchandise. The honeymoon he’d never had suddenly began. He’d given Rikers back to the warden and his Ninja Turtles, had gone into the bowels of a supermax facility—the Bing—and disarmed a band of desperados. He was pictured on the cover of the Daily News, below a banner headline:
POTUS TOP COP
The Democratic Caucus reversed itself and chased after Sidel. Republicans couldn’t stop courting him. Even Ramona Dazzle was nice. All Isaac wanted to do was look into Rainer Wolff’s eyes, so he could measure the man.
He always had a bad case of vertigo whenever he entered the Great Hall; he couldn’t adjust himself to the dizzying heights, as if he was floating around in an Arabian bazaar, with a ceiling of blue glass and gold tidbits that seemed to swim in front of his eyes. There was a mosaic of blinding colors, a white marble floor inlaid with bands of brown, and twin statues of some goddess who represented both war and peace. Isaac was lost in this palace of infinite space. He didn’t belong here, a college dropout like him. But he had a rabbinical streak.
“For one semester I lived inside a cradle of words. I read until my eyesight weakened. Sentences had their own perfume, sometimes the stink of death. I was like a hunter on an endless battlefield, strewn with marvelous debris. I had no existence beyond my reading self. Then I had to quit college, and I went into freefall. I became a cop, and I had to endure the metallic grip of handcuffs, but I can’t imagine a world without books.”
The guests at the gala stood around in their tinseled clothes and clapped for this curious president, who would have come to the Library of Congress in his windbreaker had his butler not shamed him into wearing a velvet bowtie, a crisp shirt, polished shoes, and an ancient Tuxedo from his tenure as the Pink Commish. Ramona Dazzle couldn’t keep her hands off the Big Guy; she kept stroking the worn patches of his tux. She introduced him to a man in his eighties with exquisite white hair and the startling profile of a handsome hawk. The man wore a plum-colored velvet jacket.
“Saul, I’d like you to meet President Sidel.”
Saul’s Bellow.
The Big Guy was shaken. He knew Bellow might be at the gala. But the encounter itself was beyond his ability to dream.
“Augie,” Isaac muttered. “I’ve been living all these years with Augie March. I can’t forget Caligula, the cowardly eagle.”
“There’s a little bit of Caligula in all of us,” the master said. “But I admire what you did at Rikers, Mr. President. You went into the heart of darkness and came out a winner.”
“I’m not so sure,” Isaac said.
“But it was almost novelistic. Perhaps you are what Augie might have become.”
“I doubt it,” Isaac said. “I’m more like the eagle.”
Both of them laughed. Isaac had much less vertigo in this palace. Perhaps he had conquered his fear of heights. Guests grabbed at him, and he was pulled away from Saul Bellow. His chief of staff couldn’t stop showing him off. He hadn’t been a hero inside the Bing. He’d averted a slaughter, had saved the lives of inmates who’d been beaten and mauled by certain screws, and perhaps he’d also saved the screws. But now he was as cunning as Caligula. He kept shaking hands, whispering, shouting, kissing women’s cheeks among all the tumult until he happened upon a man with an executioner’s crystal-blue eyes.
Rainer Wolff.
And like Caligula again, he removed himself from all the tumult.
“I liked your little speech,” the publishing baron said. “I, too, believe in the primacy of the written word, Mr. President.”
And much, much more, Isaac mused. Bull Latham had told him about Rainer Wolff, an Übermensch of a different sort. Rainer had come from a distinguished merchant family with a hint of Jewish blood and might have fallen into the hands of the Gestapo and the SS. But Rainer was rescued from oblivion by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, master of German military intelligence, who declared that he couldn’t get along without his “Jüdische” protégé. Uncle Willie was a real enigma. He had little taste for Hitler’s atrocities and delusions, yet his commandos at the Abwehr could cross borders like invisible men and sabotage whatever resistance there was to the Reich. Canaris had a monk’s purity and a spy’s contradictions. He was one of the earliest plotters against the Führer, but he couldn’t participate in the failed July ’44 plot. Hitler had removed his puzzling spymaster. Uncle Willie was held under house arrest, and was later delivered to one of the Abwehr’s own dungeons at Flossenbürg castle, where he was hanged to death from a meat hook.
Rainer had also joined the plotters, but his role was never uncovered, and somehow he managed to remain loyal to military intelligence and its deposed master, Uncle Willie. The admiral had a mad daughter, Eva, who was locked away in a public Krankenhaus after his fall and might have died of neglect if Rainer hadn’t moved her to a private clinic. He visited Eva as often as he could, wooing and threatening her keepers.
Rainer had another mission. He was in charge of the Abwehr’s counterfeit currency. When his own forgers failed to produce, he was sent to the Eastern Front and suffered from a severe case of frostbite. Herr Kapitän Wolff came out of the war with two permanently crippled toes. He was both a hero and a villain, depending upon the angle and the mirage of history’s own mirror. He took over his father’s moribund publishing empire and made millions.
Rainer still had the look of a spymaster, Admiral Canaris’ greatest disciple. Nearing seventy, he had a panther-like gait, even with his crippled toes. Isaac could tell from a glance that he’d never frighten Rainer into any kind of retreat. But he had to test the publishing baron, claw at him a little, reveal that he was aware of Rainer’s murderous tricks.
“Herr Wolff,” he said, “I have greetings from an old friend.”
The blue eyes were no less alert. “But you must call me Rainer. We are almost comrades, Mr. President. Both of us were born in a brew of words. We are book lovers. What could possibly keep us apart?”
“Rembrandt,” Isaac said.
The Berliner smiled. “You mean that gangster who walks around with a wooden box and paints pictures on people?”
“I believe Rembrandt was a partner of yours.”
“Yes,” Rainer said. “I had dealings with him and his little army of aging orphans. But I’m a businessman, Mr. President, and we cannot foresee the directions that our business affairs will take.” He patted his mouth with a silk handkerchief that he kept in his sleeve. “Do you have a literary agent, Mr. President? You are also a painter, I suspect, but you paint with words, and not silly little bottles of ink. I would be very interested in publishing your memoirs.”
Isaac wasn’t going to let Rainer off the hook. “My memoirs might not be very flattering—to you.”
Rainer smiled, his tobacco teeth glistening under the lamps of the Great Hall.
“Ah, but it would tantalize your readers, Mr. President. We would both make a killing. And if you gave me world rights, I could put together quite a package. Imagine, your memoirs could come out in Germany, England, America, France, and ten other markets within the same week. But I can’t think of a title, and titles are important. What shall we call your book?”
“The Death Lottery Rider.”
Rainer sucked at Isaac’s words. “That sounds like a crime novel, Mr. President, not a memoir.”
“True,” Isaac said. “But your own memoir, Herr Wolff, would amount to the same thing—a crime novel.”
“I’m not ashamed of my past,” Rainer said. “I served under Admiral Canaris. I led a team of saboteurs. We undermined Czech patriots, we slit their throats. But we did not butcher women and children.”
“And you were kind to the admiral’s crazy daughter.”
Isaac must have found a secret niche. The crystalline eyes withdrew inside his skull, and his face rippled with anger.
“That was a private matter, Mr. President.”
Isaac meant to claw a little deeper, rile the publishing baron, even if he had to rattle the dead. But he imagined Eva Canaris at the sanitarium, and it stuck in his craw. He didn’t want to feel sympathy for a spymaster who had shielded a delicate girl from Gestapo bloodhounds.
“Herr Wolff, your past doesn’t concern me. I’m worried about your future.”
The Berliner’s face stopped rippling. That arrogant, superior smirk had come back, and his eyes were crystal-pure again. “But the future is sealed,” he said. “I will publish your memoirs.”
Rainer bowed like a Prussian aristocrat—he was a gutter gangster, an assassin who had sipped from a silver spoon—and he quickly mingled with other guests at the gala with his panther-like gait.
I’ll never nail that prick.
Sidel was filled with fury. He was ready for a massacre. He’d learned the art of war from Joe Barbarossa. When in doubt, go to your guns. But he couldn’t shoot his way to Berlin, even with Joey at his side. So he finagled. He moved his financial wizard, Felix Mandel, from Treasury to the West Wing. He appointed Felix director of the Office of Management and Budget. It was a fancy title for the president’s bagman. Felix had to oversee federal spending and sculpt the president’s budget out of some invisible clay.
The Big Guy had invited Bull Latham to his first skull session with Felix in the Oval Office. Isaac didn’t give a crap about his archives. Not a word was recorded, not a whisper was saved for posterity. It wasn’t a matter of learning from Nixon’s mistakes, of muffling another Watergate. Isaac had all the slyness of the Pink Commish.
There would be no Sidel presidential papers.
Felix sat on a plush white sofa next to Sidel, while the Bull sat on that sofa’s twin on the far side of a teak coffee table. Felix could hear a rustling behind the president’s purple drapes. It confused him; he couldn’t believe that a large rat inhabited the Oval Office; then a creature with whiskers whirled through the air and plopped on Isaac’s lap. Felix felt like a fool. He was face to face with the president’s feral cat, Desirée, rescued from Rikers Island. She’d become almost as famous and coveted as Fala, FDR’s black Scottish terrier. But Fala never tore the president’s drapes, Fala never snarled, never frightened the White House staff. This mountainous white cat was meowing as she stared at Felix with some kind of fascination in her olive eyes.
“She’s crazy about you,” Sidel said. “Would ya like to hold my little girl?”
“No thanks, Mr. President.”
The butler knocked, entered the Oval Office, and served them coffee and almond macaroons on the teak table. They drank their coffee out of porcelain demitasse cups embossed with the White House seal. Isaac fed Desirée a macaroon; she devoured it like a lioness and licked at the coffee in Isaac’s cup.
“Felix,” Isaac said in front of Bull Latham, “do we have a reptile fund?”
Felix’s brows knit with consternation. He was jittery around the Bull and this monstrous cat on the president’s lap.
Isaac had to repeat himself. “You know. Reptile fund. Le Carré.”
The Bull winked and tried to educate Felix Mandel. “Actually, it wasn’t British at all. It existed long before MI6. Bismarck had his own Reptilienfonds to bribe journalists and do other damage. I’m not including our intelligence services, and their black operational budgets. That’s strictly academic. The question is, Felix, can we shove cash into someone’s pocket without the scrutiny of Congress?”
Felix nodded once, while the cat devoured a second macaroon.
“Well,” the Bull said, “that cash would be considered a reptile fund.”
Felix didn’t nod again. “Mr. President, I can thread the needle as well as any man, but I won’t lie and steal.”
“Not even to save the presidency?” the Bull asked.
Suddenly, without a warning sign, or even a meow, Desirée leapt onto Felix’s lap. He let out a little scream, then calmed himself. But Felix was more confounded than ever. “I’m a numbers cruncher. I can create as many reptile funds as you want, but I have to have a good reason.”
Now Isaac intervened. “Suppose some guy in Berlin—”
“You mean Rainer Wolff,” Felix said, as if the White House had made him omniscient with a magical cat on his lap. “I saw you with Herr Wolff at the gala. I met him last year in Davos. He has quite a reputation. He was Hitler’s chief counterfeiter, who nearly froze his ass off on the Eastern Front. I believe he was one of the first publishers to encourage Günter Grass. That’s no small accomplishment.”
“He’s still a counterfeiter,” Isaac insisted. “He manipulates currencies all the time. And Herr Wolff would increase his profit margin by having me dead. Didn’t you once tell me I had zero chance of survival, that the biggest hedge fund managers were betting I wouldn’t complete my maiden year? Your very words.”
Felix found himself stroking Desirée’s wild white mane, soft as velvet, despite the scabs. He had a triumphant grin. “I know, I know. Statistically you’re a dead man. But I was a mite too clever for my own good. You can’t kill a president just like that. It’s not cost effective. It would rattle the markets and create a worldwide recession—the dollar would slide and slide. He’d never be invited to Davos again.”
Isaac hunched his shoulders. “Felix, what if Herr Wolff did the markets a favor? I’ve gone after Big Tobacco. I’ll take on pharmaceuticals next. I’m on the Wall Street Journal’s most wanted list.”
“There’s no such list,” Felix said. “Yes, some of the papers have called you a pinko, but FDR was called a lot worse, and he survived in a wheelchair.”
“But FDR was a patrician,” Isaac said. “And I rose out of a pickle barrel on Essex Street. Bull, tell him the bitter truth.”
The Bull rolled his eyes, as if he were talking to a child and not the savviest economist at the table, a demon who could destroy a nation’s wealth with his phantom currencies and now had conquered the Boss’s feral cat. Desirée was purring with both eyes shut.
“Felix, did you forget that there’s a lottery with Isaac’s number on it, started by the bankers themselves? The payoff increases exponentially the longer Isaac lives. It’s become an assassin’s bullet, and Herr Wolff is behind the bounty.”
“I don’t believe it. The honchos at Davos would have known about this dark side of Rainer. Industrialists certainly have their own secrets. I’m not part of that privileged club. But you can’t hide something like this.”
“It’s not such a secret,” Isaac said. “I have a ghoul on my back wherever I go. There are sockers waiting for me, even at the White House. My helicopter pilot is living here in the attic. He has a little boy, and the socker was posing as the boy’s maid. She whacked me with a white-hot iron. Ask the Bull.”
Felix turned pale. He should have realized that the presidency itself was a statistical nightmare. He’d created ghost currencies, knew what a flood of fake fifty-dollar bills could do in a volatile market, but figured POTUS could ride out the worst storm, at least at the White House. He scratched his lip for a moment. It was a nervous habit he’d picked up at Davos. Desirée licked his hand, and he almost licked her back. Soon he’d be as mountainous as the cat. Concentrate, he told himself.
“And I suppose Herr Wolff selected this socker, as you call her?”
“No,” the Bull said. “But he paid for her upkeep.”
And now Felix was in his element. “We don’t really need a reptile fund, Mr. President. I can ruin Herr Wolff, bring him down on my own. It’s not strictly legal. But I can juggle behind his back. I’ll tap into his holdings. A publishing empire isn’t that different from a nation. Instead of a phantom currency we’ll introduce phantom paper. He’ll become a pauper after six months.”
“Felix,” Isaac said, “that won’t do the trick. He’ll build another empire, and he’ll continue coming after me.”
“Then he’s a barracuda,” Felix said. “And we’ll need a reptile fund. But what is it for?”
“To hire sockers of our own,” Isaac said.
And Felix started to tremble. He was caught in POTUS’s whirlwind, and he couldn’t get out. He’d lose face if he returned to Treasury. He was Isaac’s secret chancellor of the exchequer, not a hatchet man exactly, but the financier of hatchet men. And he’d have to get used to that label.
“There no point dancing around,” Isaac said. “We have to get rid of Herr Wolff.”
Felix was as cautious as a chancellor of the exchequer could be. “Mr. President, I’ll get you your reptile fund, but I’d rather not know who these reptiles are.”
“Then you’d be a straw man, a clerk among clerks. You wouldn’t like it very much, being on my B-list, a wizard kept on a string. Is that what you want?”
“No,” he muttered, with Desirée still on his lap, creasing his trousers with her claws.
Isaac tossed his head back, like FDR. “That’s grand. We’ll have to hire the hitter behind the hitters, General Tollhouse.”
Now it was the Bull who groaned. “Isaac, I thought you hated Wildwater.”
“I do. But we have limited options. I can’t run to Berlin wearing a mask. I’m only a guy with a Glock. I have to travel with a whole fucking fleet. It has to be a Wildwater op.”
“But Rainer Wolff is probably Wildwater’s biggest client.”
“That’s why we need the reptile fund,” Isaac said. “And a little pressure from you.”
“And what if he picks up his tent and moves to Switzerland?”
“Then we’ll come down hard on the Swiss.”
“So,” said the Bull, “we remove Herr Wolff’s options and shove him toward the kill zone.”
“Please,” Felix said. “I’d prefer not to hear that word—kill.”
Isaac tugged at Felix’s necktie. “My budget director can’t be a big baby. Bull, how can we scare the shit out of those Swiss bankers and put an end to their lottery?”
“Isaac,” the Bull said, “Herr Wolff has his own Secret Service.”
“So do I. And that didn’t stop Wildwater or one of its affiliates from planting a bomb right under my ass at Karel Ludvik’s dacha.”
“But you walked out of that explosion in one piece,” the Bull had to insist.
Felix’s head was swimming. In one day he’d gone from a master of phantom currencies to a phantom himself, employed by Isaac Sidel.
“Felix,” Isaac said, “you can go now. The Vice President and I have certain details to discuss.”
Felix panicked. He felt evicted, left out. But he couldn’t contradict POTUS, and he couldn’t get up.
“Mr. President, I have Desirée on my lap.”
“So tell the little girl to jump in the lake. Ah, I’m joking Felix.”
Isaac cooed at Desirée, and the cat leapt onto his shoulder.
Felix climbed off the sofa with cat hair on his wobbly, leaden knees. He was about to return to his own office in the West Wing when he banged into Ramona Dazzle, who seemed in the dumps.
“What’s going on?” she growled at him.
“Nothing much,” Felix said. “POTUS and the Bull are plotting the end of the world. And they can’t do it without me and my numbers.”
Felix hopped away from Ramona Dazzle without another word.
Ach, the Americans and their Marshall Plan, Rainer muttered to himself.
Only such creatures could have built their Great Hall in homage to Thomas Jefferson, a slave master with slave mistresses. Rainer loved books and the miracle of warfare, the constant rustle of spies. War was like Mozart, not a science, not an art, but pure music, the melody of melodies, with blood and bones as the excrement, the waste matter that couldn’t corrupt the music. He was happiest at that nondescript gray building on the north bank of the Landwehr Canal, the Abwehr’s hidden headquarters, so secret that the Führer himself didn’t have a clue where Uncle Willie spent his days and most nights. Rainer was a bachelor then. He preferred to visit brothels. He was second in command of the Brandenburg Brigade, the admiral’s specialized unit of soldier-saboteurs. Their barracks was right in Berlin. Uncle Willie could have arrested Herr Hitler and his whole hierarchy—cleaned the slate in one swoop. Rainer had planned the op half a million times—the streets, the routes, the hours, the calling in of firemen to stop traffic, while the Abwehr’s black buses sped across Berlin with the culprits in hand. He would have hung them all in the rear yard of the barracks. But Uncle Willie had that touch of reticence, along with the tremor in his right arm.
Herr Admiral, you are not one of them, and when they find that out, they will rip you apart. We have our boys. We must use them before it is too late.
But it was always too late for Uncle Willie. The SS stripped him of the Brandenburgers, and without his boys he was a sly old fox who’d lost his teeth. The admiral’s boys became ciphers rather than saboteurs until the SS integrated them into their own units. Rainer was left behind, even after Uncle Willie was arrested, and the Abwehr itself was a symphony of ghosts.
He’d been in love with Eva, the admiral’s older daughter, and his love was a little like the melody of war. He’d kissed her once, only once, when Uncle Willie wasn’t looking, and had to clutch Eva’s fist behind the admiral’s back; this strange, furtive romance of pecking and patter was also the language of a spy. She was a gentle creature who had nightmares of the world’s end, and Uncle Willie didn’t want her involved with one of his own saboteurs. “My brutal boys,” he would say, “my brutal boys.” But the admiral was plucked from his gray building by the SS, beaten and abused, and his best saboteur had to shield Eva from the Gestapo, who would have shipped her off to one of their euthanasia hotels, filled with mental defectives and dwarfs. He kept her at a clinic, had to bribe the nurses with Reichsmarks he printed at his own press. And then Rainer himself was sent to the Eastern Front, not as a Brandenburger, but as a lowly officer with a bundle of raw recruits. He survived with his own tricks of the trade, a captain who lost every single one of his boys.
And then he vanished into a normal, anonymous life. He married an heiress, took over his father’s firm. Yet what could business affairs mean to him, a saboteur at heart? He had his own secret headquarters, like Uncle Willie. He found a replica of that old gray building on the north bank of the Canal. It remained empty for years, a warehouse of memories, until the memories began to congeal. Rainer hired his own clerks, involved them in shady deals. He siphoned off assets from his publishing empire.
He’d stumbled upon Viktor Danzig—Rembrandt—at a high-class brothel in Hamburg a dozen years ago. They were both wild, warring creatures, both without a pinch of fear; they could read their own ambitions in one another’s eyes, their secret delight in uncovering avenues of disorder and smashing other men’s idols. They signed a pact on the spot, created a partnership in crime, while Rainer revived his old counterfeit currency section from the Abwehr. But none of his counterfeiters had Rembrandt’s masterful touch, none could provide paper without a flaw. Soon he and Viktor had their own Swiss bank, their own properties in Basel and Berne. Meanwhile, his family prospered. He had two lovely little girls, Gretel and Wilhelmina. They grew up, married, had children of their own, while Großvater Rainer bribed politicians, sat on economic councils, dealt with the Stasi on both sides of the Berlin Wall. But Viktor proved unpredictable. He went around with a wooden box and didn’t take care of essential details. That’s why Rainer had to strike—like a commando from the Landwehr Canal.
He had Rembrandt on the run. But things went sour a day after that gala in the Great Hall. Rosa Malamud’s boutiques on Paris’ Left Bank were all firebombed. And Rosa was ruined overnight. Her accounts disappeared, her credit cards were frozen, as if she had been visited by a whirlwind.
Michael Davit fared even worse. He lost his holdings in Manchester, and the school for assassins he had nurtured for years—his flagship enterprise—suddenly fell apart. The premises had been vandalized; all the assassins were gone. And Michael Davit was found with a broken neck in an abandoned barn near his country manor.
Rainer had inherited Uncle Willie’s cool head and cool heart. He wouldn’t check out of his hotel near the White House. He was still at the Washington, a floor above Pesh Olinov’s suite. He marched down one flight and rang the Russian’s bell. It was Olinov himself who came to the door—his bald thug of a bodyguard must have fled. There were bruises under Olinov’s eye. His mouth was bloody. His velvet bathrobe had been turned inside out.
“Was it the soldier?” Rainer asked.
“Yes,” the Russian whispered.
They entered Olinov’s suite like two conspirators. The Russian couldn’t stop shivering. There was a great rent in the carpet that ran like a lopsided river across the sitting room. A plush chair had been overturned.
Olinov was crying now. “We cannot continue,” he said.
“When have I ever failed you?”
“We cannot continue,” Olinov whispered again.
And Rainer realized that the soldier was also in the room.
“Come out, General,” he said with the same imperturbable smile. And Tollhouse appeared from behind the lavender drapes in his Baltimore Orioles cap and one of Isaac Sidel’s signature windbreakers. Rainer marveled at Tollhouse’s fire-marked face; the soldier looked almost like an albino. The cap must have covered the wig that Tollhouse had to wear.
“Rainer, tell me, why does Gorbachev tolerate this little pest who lies and steals and has a monopoly on toilet paper?”
“It’s simple,” Rainer said. “Without Pesh, he could never navigate the many mousetraps of the KGB. It’s Pesh who keeps him in power.”
“Then Gorbachev must be a very lonely man.”
Tollhouse dismissed Olinov without bothering to wave his hand. “You can go now. Get the fuck out of here. I’ve already paid your bill. You’ve given up your residence at the Washington. Gorbachev will need his court jester in Moscow if he intends to survive.”
“General, I haven’t packed,” Olinov said with a whimper.
“Out.”
And Olinov vanished into the hall in his velvet robe turned inside out.
“You shouldn’t be so harsh,” Rainer said. “Pesh has his good points. He was once very loyal.”
“But this isn’t the Boy Scouts. I never admired merit badges.”
Rainer sat on one of Pesh’s sofas. “And what manner of fate have you prepared for me?”
Tollhouse stroked the torn bill of his cap; he could have been a baseball manager who’d seen better times. His mind had begun to drift.
“General, I paid you a fortune—to rid the world of Sidel. You never lost a penny on my account. You had every chance, and still you failed.”
“I didn’t fail,” Tollhouse said. “I always worked for Sidel. He just didn’t realize it.”
Rainer considered strangling the general with the velvet sash that clung to the drapes. “Yet you took my millions without a qualm.”
“You got your money’s worth,” Tollhouse said. “Sidel was stranded on Pennsylvania Avenue for months. You maneuvered around him, sold off whatever paper you had, manipulated the markets around the possibility of POTUS becoming a corpse. You didn’t need much more than the myth of his destruction. I made a rich man even richer. So stop crying those crocodile tears. He couldn’t even travel to Prague, his dream town. But he should have gone to your island metropolis. West Berlin was the place for him, with its Turks, its whores, its spies, its squatters, hunched inside a wall. He’d love Berlin. It would remind him of another ghetto—the Lower East Side. But it’s too late. You won’t be there to greet him.”
Rainer could see the madness in Tollhouse’s eyes, plots spiraling out of control. But if Tollhouse really wanted Rainer dead, he would have gone for the jugular and not toyed with Michael Davit. Rainer had some kind of protective cloak that wasn’t clear. Ah, it had something to do with that little gray house on the Canal. Tollhouse worshiped Uncle Willie and the Abwehr—that band of aristocratic saboteurs, who would suddenly appear behind the enemy’s lines, speaking Polish better than the Poles. They were consummate actors in the theatre of Kriegspiel. So Rainer used the general’s own skills against him.
“Mensch, if I don’t leave the capital alive, the Library of Congress will never forgive you. I was an honored guest at the gala. Thomas Jefferson will rise out of his grave.”
“Let him rise. I told you. I work for Sidel.”
Rainer squeezed as hard as he could. It was Kriegspiel. But the targets were much less distinct. “Big Balls has turned the tables. You’ve been hired to get rid of me.”
Tollhouse laughed for the first time, but his burnt skin had little elasticity. And he wore a grimace like a death mask.
“Yes, your body count is in the package. But it’s difficult to ice a Brandenberger. It’s against my principles. You know, I’m sentimental about certain things. Rainer, you were my Roman Legion. Will you promise to stay clear of the president?”
“No,” Rainer said.
Tollhouse must have been hit with fatigue. Even the grimace was gone.
“I’ll kill your wife, your children, and your children’s children. I’ll decimate entire blood lines. The whole population of West Berlin will suffer on account of you.”
And now Rainer went on the attack. He’d trapped the general. He had much better terrain.
“Dear general, my answer won’t be any different no matter how many you kill.”
“Good,” Tollhouse said. “The Library of Congress can go fly a kite. You’re now officially Wildwater’s guest. You can have safe passage to West Berlin. But if you go near your corporate headquarters in Hamburg, I promise, you’ll never get back.”
He’d run to Hamburg, visit the Red Castle, his favorite bordello—it had had several facelifts over the past forty years, had started in a grungy cellar, then climbed several flights of stairs to the attic, with its glorious harbor view. He no longer went to the bordellos in Berlin. They were filled with black marketeers, spies and gangsters from Istanbul, MI6 outcasts, and American generals and millionaires; and the girls wouldn’t shave their legs or sponge themselves between clients. He wouldn’t mind dying in a tub, like Marat—at the Red Castle. Tollhouse could hire one of the little darlings to slit his throat, as long as she shaved her legs.
He’d have his last glimpse of the harbor, a lyrical wasteland with its endless rotting warehouses and wharves, its derricks, its cranes that seemed to scratch the sky, and the ships themselves, like hulking pharaohs that could barely keep afloat—that was Rainer’s little paradise. But Tollhouse was much too curious about the wonder of Rainer Wolff to have him killed. His hooded eyes suddenly brightened like those of a little child.
“Tell me about the admiral?”
Rainer had him hooked, this Moby Dick with scarred white flesh. “Mensch, what is there to tell? He was a little man in lumpy clothes.”
“But he had the precision of a celestial clock. Your brigade was always there first, at every fucking battle.”
And now Rainer scolded this mad general. “We were saboteurs—we had to be first. It was Kriegspiel. We had a whole warehouse of uniforms next to the Canal. We liked to parade around Berlin as British troops—it scared the pants off people. The admiral loved practical jokes. We could have fooled Churchill himself. My cockney accent was impeccable.”
Tollhouse grew wistful. “Get the hell out of here. Go back to Berlin.”
Rainer wasn’t sure if it was a death sentence, a battle cry, or both. Tollhouse had his own sense of Kriegspiel. Wildwater was now part of the West Wing.
Tollhouse left him there without a word of goodbye. Rainer hiked upstairs to his own suite. And he went down to the lobby with his luggage and an old leather briefcase that had been repaired a dozen times by an old Jewish tailor near the checkpoint at Chausseestraße. The tailor was ninety years old. He’d worked exclusively for the Abwehr until the admiral smuggled him out of Berlin, and into one of his safe houses in the hinterland. The tailor lived in England for a while after the war. But Rainer begged him to return, and he bought the tailor his own shop. Rainer never had to buy a single article of clothes after that; everything he wore had been sewn by hand. He often had lunch with the tailor, who never discussed the war and the death camps with his benefactor, but still looked at Rainer like a live bullet burning into his head . . .
Tollhouse had paid the publishing baron’s hotel bill, and had a black limousine waiting for him outside the Washington. Rainer entered the limo like a willful, walking target. Would the chauffeur drive him to Dulles International or a Wildwater warehouse on the banks of the Anacostia? Rainer didn’t seem to care. It was Kriegspiel all over again. He didn’t think of his wife, or his children, or the mistress he had in Milan above a Louis Vuitton shop. He thought of Eva Canaris, of her squirrelly hand, like some secret weapon of desire. All his life he had to find sustenance in the memory of a single kiss. Rainer shut his eyes and fell into a profound sleep.
We’ll do it at David.”
Sidel hadn’t forgotten the art of the Lower East Side. He loved to play shadkhen—marriage broker and wizard—with his helicopter pilot.
It gave him a measure of delight that Colonel Oliver had given up his widower’s weeds, moved out of the White House attic, and rented a flat in Georgetown with Captain Sarah.
“We’ll do it at David.”
“Boss,” the colonel muttered. “I can’t follow you.”
“Your engagement party,” Isaac said. “We’ll do it at David.”
Stef shivered in silent protest. “Wait a minute. I never said we were engaged. It’s an experiment between Sarah and me—a trial run.”
“Terrific,” Isaac said. “And when the trial run is over, we’ll do it at Camp David.”
It was wiser not to argue with POTUS when he was in one of his moods. “Yeah, I get ya, boss. We’ll do it at David.”
The White House rocked with madcap energy. Sidel’s ratings hit the roof. Seventy-nine percent of the voting population agreed that POTUS was the best damn cop and commander in chief to have around in a period of uncertainty, when the Eastern Bloc was unraveling and Gorbachev made overture after overture to the West. Glasnost, what the hell could it mean? Did Moscow want to move into the wild lands of Alaska and become our fifty-first state?
There were Kremlinologists at every little corner, including the White House, where Isaac met with all his mavens in the Situation Room. East Berlin had become the capital of the hardliners, according to the Kremlinologists. Erich Honecker, first secretary of the East German Central Committee, didn’t want glasnost. He hewed to a strict socialist line. And when there were riots in the streets, Gorbachev wouldn’t come to the rescue. He was more interested in the humming capitalist music of West Berlin.
“It’s a ploy,” Tim Vail said, “a trick. Honecker’s his man. Gorby will have to prop him up.”
“No,” said Felix Mandel, Isaac’s budget director. “He’d rather let East Berlin sink.”
The Kremlinologists in the room trained their daggers on him. But that couldn’t stop Felix. “East Berlin is a phantom city, an apparition, a poisoned fairy tale, a porous myth.”
“And West Berlin?” rasped Ramona Dazzle, who sided with the Kremlinologists. “Gorby will strangle it out of existence.”
“No,” said Felix. “No, no, no. It’s sucked all the energy out of the East.”
And now Ramona gave him one of her demonic smiles. “What about the Wall?”
“Another apparition,” said Felix.
“The Wall Jumpers wouldn’t think so,” said Tim Vail, who pressed a button on his new silver wand; four screens hummed with competing images of a raffish man in a ripple of bullets—an unemployed clown perhaps—as he fell from the Wall like a wayward pin of flesh caught in a flicker of light; some graffiti artist had decorated this particular piece of the Wall with sunflowers and dragonflies in garish, defiant colors.
Suddenly Isaac began to mourn the ghost of Stalin inside him.
“But I ruled New York as a socialist town.”
“Sure, boss,” Felix said. “The tycoons let you have your little toy palace. But where did the gelt come from for your pet projects? You could bob and weave around all the contradictions.”
“And you’re saying East Berlin will perish?” Isaac asked with a waver in his voice.
“That Wall will be around for another fifty years,” said Ramona, who leapt into the fray.
The Kremlinologists nodded their heads. “Another fifty, at least.”
“And what should we do in the meantime?” Isaac had to ask his mavens. He felt bewildered, like little Alice surrounded by the Queen of Hearts and her royal retinue.
“Nothing,” said Tim Vail. “Gorby will fall flat on his ass. The KGB will put in one of their cronies, and Honecker will prevail.”
“Then it’s business as usual,” Isaac said.
The Bull had been sitting there in silence, his eyes beetling across the Situation Room. He was usually rhapsodic with all the mavens around. Isaac had to drag him into the conversation.
“It’s a different ballgame,” the Bull said in that cryptic manner of his, as if he had some overwhelming truth he was about to reveal.
“How so?” asked one of the Kremlinologists.
“We have POTUS. And he’s the best weapon in our stockpile.”
“But I thought it was too dangerous for him to travel,” Ramona said.
“The danger days are over.”
And the meeting was adjourned. But the Bull signaled to Isaac, and they sat alone in the Situation Room. The Bull chuckled to himself like an intelligence chief after some great coup.
“Rainer Wolff is toast.”
“Bull, I haven’t read about his demise in any obit.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the Bull said. “It was a classic Wildwater op. Tollhouse met with the Nazi, and set him straight. That old boy can’t hurt us—dead or alive. But we have one small wrinkle, sir.”
Isaac could feel a shower of shit swirling over his head. “And what’s that?”
“Tollhouse thinks he deserves the Medal of Freedom. And he would like the ceremony performed in the Blue Room in front of all the cameras.”
“He’s a murderer,” Isaac muttered. “I won’t do it.”
“But you commissioned that murderer to save your life. We paid him a handsome fee. Felix had to juggle all our books to find the cash.”
“I won’t do it,” Isaac said. “Mr. Wildwater stays in the shadows, where he belongs—and that’s final.”
But everything was more complicated than it appeared to be. Isaac couldn’t have a rogue general wandering about with a grudge against the commander in chief. So he pinned the medal on Tollhouse at a secret ceremony. And Mr. Wildwater promised never to wear it in public. Such were the compromises a president had to make.
He had no guests at the White House other than Desirée, and needed none. The monstrous white cat invaded all of Isaac’s meetings with his cabinet. She frightened the wits out of Ramona Dazzle, hissing and arching her back every time Isaac’s chief of staff left her corner suite. And Desirée was still in love with Felix. She would serenade the budget director, sitting near his office, and meowing like a moonstruck frog. Still, she revealed her matted, warlike belly to no one but Isaac, leaping onto his desk in the Oval Office, scattering papers and penholders until the boss stroked her religiously. Desirée demanded the Big Guy’s complete attention, and didn’t always get it.
There was a logistical problem: what part would she play in a presidential lift package? She could fly with him to David, sit on his lap in Dragon, when he had to ride around the capital to meet up with some diplomat, but what about all the other packages? Queen Elizabeth had invited him to Windsor Castle, and would Desirée fit in with the queen’s corgis? Would she rip these royal dogs to shreds? Should a mongrel like her—a cat as chaotic as Rikers itself—be permitted on Windsor’s grounds?
A European junket was being planned for POTUS, a kind of jubilee. He would sit with Elizabeth at Windsor, chat up the British prime at Chequers, meet with the French president at the Élysée, visit the house where Beethoven was born in Bonn, with the German chancellor at his side, take a White Top to West Berlin, ride down the “Ku damm” in Dragon, and deliver a speech in front of the Wall.
The itinerary still had to be polished to perfection. The Secret Service didn’t want him near the Berlin Wall.
“Boss, there will be a whole bunch of squatters, Lefties, and anarchists,” said Matt Malloy. “We won’t be able to protect you.”
“Stop it,” Isaac said. “I had the same squatters, Lefties, and anarchists in Manhattan, and I managed.”
They solved the riddle of Desirée. The delinquent cat wouldn’t be allowed near Windsor, out of respect to Elizabeth and her dogs, but she would have a special basket and litter box on board Air Force One. Still, Isaac’s interns had to anticipate the difficulty of having a cat with the appeal of a movie star.
“Sir, the foreign press will want photo ops with you and Desirée.”
“They can have all the photo ops they want, at their own risk. Desirée might not take kindly to their cameras.”
The Big Guy was on a roll. He was more coveted in the Deep South than Republican Party bosses, and was called the Pistolero President in the heartland of Illinois. He wouldn’t stay on script—there was no script that could handcuff Sidel. He would walk into a fundraiser, attack Wall Street donors, and speak about financing schools in the nation’s worst barrios. “We have to lure our best teachers into the poorest districts, so that billionaires will beg to have their children enrolled in these schools. Make them better and better—that’s how you solve de facto segregation.”
But reporters had to remind him that New York City had been one of the worst offenders, that it had its own invisible wall.
“Not so invisible,” Isaac said. “I failed. I had Merlin, but Merlin didn’t make much of a dent.”
“Then how will you find a solution, sir?”
“With blood, sweat, and volunteers. I’ll teach in one of the problem schools myself.”
The reporters smiled and winked at one another. “And it will cost the taxpayer millions just to solve the logistics of getting you in and out of there.”
That realization also cost Sidel. He was still trapped within the confines of the presidency, no matter how much freedom he had to travel. Windsor Castle would have the same hot wind as the West Wing. He could have bullied his way into Prague, followed Kafka’s steps, stone by stone, and he’d have been just as blue. He was as much a prisoner of circumstance as the Queen of Hearts. And while he wandered about the residence with his own crazy cat, who was ruining the White House carpets with her claws, he looked up and found Colonel Oliver in his flight jacket.
“Stef, why the hell are you here? Am I part of some secret lift package?”
“We’ll do it at David.”
Isaac was still caught up in a woeful dream of self-entrapment.
“Kid, have I missed something? Am I out of commission?”
“We’ll do it at David,” his pilot repeated. “Sarah and I have agreed—to an engagement party.”
Isaac was the last to learn about the lift package. That’s how low he’d been, how far down in the dumps. The Bull himself had arranged the lift. The engagement party was meant as a surprise to Sidel. He put on his cap and his windbreaker, had to coax Desirée into her travel cage, while the White House butler bundled up her litter box and portions of wet and dry food, and within ten minutes they were on the South Lawn, with Marine One revving up. Isaac was the sole passenger—with his cat and a pair of Secret Service agents, who clung to the shadows.
The White Top danced and swerved above the lawn, and Sidel felt a strange lightness about him, a lifting of the soul. It lasted deep into Maryland as they rode the mountain range. And when he glimpsed the rudiments of his presidential retreat—Cactus, as his own protectors called it—that lightness of soul was still there. The cabins, lodges, barracks, and roads were laid out like some abandoned village caught under a spell. And perhaps Isaac was the enchanter—with his cat.
They were all waiting at Aspen Lodge. Captain Sarah, young Max, the Bull, Felix Mandel, Ramona Dazzle, who rarely accompanied the Big Guy to David, Matt Malloy, a few interns and aides, and Isaac’s own private Seabee, Charles, who had once lived near Willie Mays in Harlem Heights.
Isaac’s mind was playing tricks. For a moment he could has sworn that General Tollhouse was at Aspen, wearing the Medal of Freedom Isaac had forbidden him to wear. But it was one more apparition that flew away. Captain Sarah kissed him on the cheek.
Ramona was subdued around such company. She couldn’t seem to find a proper role.
Bull Latham edged her aside, since he was both maestro and master of ceremonies, and part-time president when the boss’s head was in the clouds.
“Ladies and gents, we’ve assembled here at Aspen Lodge to honor the engagement of Colonel Stefan Oliver and Captain Sarah Rogers, in the presence of their rabbi, Isaac Sidel, who brought them together in his own inimitable way. A toast to the president—and to the colonel and his fiancée.”
“Their fiancée,” said Felix Mandel, who was a bit tipsy in the miasma off the mountain.
“To the president!” shouted Isaac’s guests, clutching glasses of ginger ale. “And to the honorees—Stef and Sarah.”
The Secret Service joined in the merriment. Isaac swayed about the room with Max on his shoulders. He even danced with Ramona, whose body stiffened. He had little sense of modern music. His temperament remained in the ’40s and hovered around Franklin Roosevelt’s war. Bandstand stuff—Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Benny Goodman, Dinah Shore, and the Golden Toothpick, Frank Sinatra. He’d followed the Toothpick’s career, had seen him perform at the Paramount, amid a battalion of bobby-soxers, screaming, clutching their scalps, as the Toothpick swayed on the bandstand, hitting notes that Caruso might have envied—there’d never been another balladeer like the Toothpick. Isaac’s own history was wrapped around FDR, Eleanor, too, William Bendix in Back to Bataan, or was it Guadalcanal Diary? Isaac was a little thief during the war years. He and his baby brother Leo had their own black market. Leo Sidel was the dirty little secret of the Sidel administration. Leo lived in a trailer park. He was an alcoholic and a writer of bad checks. Bull Latham’s pals in the FBI looked after Leo, who’d been bribed and pampered, and forbidden to go near the White House.
“Leo Sidel’s a poison pill,” Brenda, Isaac’s first chief of staff, had warned. “He’ll drag you down into the abyss.” And Isaac had to take all of it into his final reckoning. But he missed Little Leo at the party in Aspen Lodge. The Big Guy had abandoned his own baby brother.
He whispered in the vice president’s ear. “Bull, are you sure Little Leo’s alright?”
“He’s thriving, boss.”
“In a trailer park?”
“That’s the style he likes,” the Bull said. “We clear all his bad checks. We’d diaper him if we had to.”
“But suppose a reporter finds out who the fuck he is?”
“Such a person would never get close enough to Leo. And if some wise guy ever did, we’d haul his ass off to Quantico and put him in a reeducation program.”
“But couldn’t I visit Leo once?” Isaac whined.
“Boss, I beg you, don’t go near that fire. We’ll all get burned. That brother of yours is a publicity hound. Once he gets a whiff, we’ll never put the genie back in the bottle.”
The Bull shoved away from him, but Isaac wasn’t finished yet.
“What sort of alias does my brother use?” Isaac shouted within earshot of all his guests.
“Leo Little,” the Bull said.
Leo Little.
How poetic, and appropriately cruel. Leo had stayed little all his life, while Isaac burgeoned around him like some man-eating plant. Desirée wasn’t the monster in these parts—it was Isaac Sidel. He’d let his cat out of the cage the moment he arrived at Aspen. She sniffed all the food. She didn’t want her cat fare. Isaac had to feed her hummus and hot dogs from his own plate. She licked ginger ale out of the Big Guy’s glass and leapt onto Felix’s lap, sat there like a princess with wounds in her white coat, while Isaac watched Stef and Sarah dance to the elegiac sounds of the Golden Toothpick.
The lovebirds danced and danced, and then Sarah herself coaxed Isaac out onto the floor.
“You were the matchmaker, boss. I first made love to Stef in your flannel robe. And don’t you play the innocent party.”
“So I’m the culprit now.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And you be nice to Max, hear?”
“He’ll never adore me as much as he adores you. You’re his Uncle Isaac.”
And Sidel returned her to Stef. He didn’t climb into bed until well past midnight. It was his Seabee who cleaned up all the mess.
Isaac had a wet dream. He was making love to a woman with beautiful flanks. It was full of heartbreak, as the woman vanished from his bed. He woke like a silver bullet at the crack of dawn. The light burst through his picture window. The Seabees must have attended to the salt lick. Isaac watched a lone male fawn dance tentatively toward the lick on its long legs. The little whitetail tumbled once, and got up, like a soft bridge repairing itself. Where was the rest of its herd? Isaac prayed that there wasn’t a gray wolf or any other predator lurking around.
But the real predator was inside Aspen. Desirée stood on her hind legs and followed the movement of that fawn with hungry eyes.
“You harm that little fellah and it’s curtains for you, understand?”
The cat bumped Isaac with her bullet head and disappeared from the picture window. That’s when Isaac saw a man in a worn winter coat limp toward the lick with a wooden box in his hand. Another apparition, damn it. But this apparition wouldn’t go away. How did Rembrandt get inside the compound’s electric walls?
Isaac had a more urgent problem. Desirée must have broken through a porch screen; she leapt toward the wobbly little whitetail like the Rikers cat that she was. And then the fawn’s mama appeared from behind the shrubs. And while Desirée sailed in midair, the doe batted at her with one hoof—the cat shot across the yard like a blurry football.
Isaac was prepared to mourn until he heard Desirée howl. She rose on her paws, her back curled in defeat, and withdrew to her own hidden lair, while Rembrandt climbed the steps to Isaac’s patio. The Big Guy didn’t have to ask any questions—it was Bull Latham who had let Rembrandt through the gate. Either Rembrandt was in the Bull’s pocket, or they had reached some kind of an accord. Isaac wasn’t an absolute imbecile. While he reigned as president, the Bull ruled. Isaac had the ceremonial robes, but he was like a blind horse who raged—the Bull called him “boss” and kept control. It wasn’t anything like a bloodless coup. The Bull was loyal to Sidel in his own fashion. Isaac was as much of an infant as Little Leo. He’d burst through City Hall with his Glock, but what mark had he really left? Rikers was still there . . .
“Viktor, did you give the Bull a long lease on your paper?”
“Not at all,” Rembrandt said. “I promised to give up Ulysses Grant.”
“And what if you come up short one day?”
Rembrandt shuddered in his worn coat. “Big Balls, I didn’t come to Camp David to discuss my affairs.”
“Then why did you come?” Isaac had to ask.
“I think you earned your tat, Mr. President. Soon you’ll be one of my registered werewolves.”
A registered werewolf.
“I like it. Where’s Renata?”
“Best not to ask,” Rembrandt whispered, pointing to the microphones he imagined in Aspen’s walls.
“Would you prefer to live in Prague? I can put the squeeze on Karel Ludvik.”
Rembrandt perused Isaac with his own piercing eyes. “Mr. President, I had to sell off my assets to survive.”
Desirée appeared, with a bruise on her bullet head. She climbed on Isaac’s lap the moment he sat down. She was purring like a ghost in a graveyard.
“That’s quite a beast.”
Rembrandt set his box down on Isaac’s coffee table, opened it, fiddled with his needle, his brushes, and pots of indelible ink.
“Take off your shirt, please.”
Isaac removed his pajama top, and Rembrandt frowned at the hair on Isaac’s chest.
“I can’t work in that forest. It will soak up all the ink.”
He shaved Isaac’s chest with a pearl-handled razor that had once belonged to a barber in the gulag; his father had won it in a bidding war with another pakhan. Rembrandt’s wooden box was a portable tattoo shop. He didn’t have mirrors with retractable necks and an electromagnetic “gun.” He had to use a primitive electric pen with his pots of ink. He hunched in the light that glanced off the picture window. He wore a surgeon’s gloves and kept wiping the wounds in Isaac’s skin with swabs of alcohol. Isaac winced as the pen’s knifelike needle cut into him with Rembrandt’s design. There were no lunch breaks. Even Isaac’s Seabee wasn’t allowed to interrupt. And Isaac had to imprison that wild cat in the crate Charles had prepared for her, stuffed with old towels, or she might have jarred the path of Rembrandt’s pen with a sudden leap.
Rembrandt toiled for sixteen hours, letting the ink dry before he went back to his electric pen. It was a maddening process. Isaac had to gulp half a gallon of water, while Rembrandt didn’t wet his lips once. He couldn’t even look at the tat after all the artistry was done. He wore a bandage over his heart like a soldier plucked from battle.
Rembrandt had to leave before the “unveiling” of his tattoo.
“What if I don’t like it?”
“It’s not an ornament, Big Balls. You’re a chelovek. You have to like it.”
“When can I take a peek?”
“Not for two days. The cuts have to heal.”
Rembrandt packed up his wooden box, squinted at the cat, and went out the door.
Isaac panicked. “What if I want to get in touch?”
“You can’t. Didn’t the Bull tell you? I don’t exist.”
He climbed down the patio stairs and got into a bulletproof car with black windows. Isaac realized he wouldn’t hear from Rembrandt again. The tattoo artist had fallen into one of Bull Latham’s black holes. Big Balls was feverish with that engraving on his chest, wrapped in gauze. What did he really know about Latham? He’d never visited the Bull’s own Little White House at the Naval Observatory. Suppose there was a second Situation Room? And Isaac was the country’s court jester, the seasonal clown? He summoned his vice president to Aspen Lodge.
The Bull arrived with his nuclear football and his military aide, like an uncommon commander in chief. Isaac had the Bull’s aide sit outside on the patio with the football. “What the fuck is going on, Bull? Am I under house arrest?”
The Bull stared at the little blots of blood in the bandage. “Boss, are you delirious? I can resign if you prefer another vice president . . .”
“You’re running Rembrandt, aren’t you?”
“I’ve slowed him down, that’s all. He tried to have you killed, for Christ’s sake.”
“He also saved my life.”
The Bull hunched his linebacker’s shoulders. He seemed exasperated. “Rembrandt would have made a nifty profit from your death. He set that murder machine into motion.”
“What changed his mind?” Isaac asked.
“He’s an artist. How should I know? But I won’t lie. Rembrandt’s licensed to me. He’s my counterfeiter.”
“That’s grand,” Isaac said. “And I’m kept in the dark.”
“Boss, it’s best if he doesn’t exist.”
“That’s what Rembrandt said. ‘I don’t exist.’ What the fuck does it mean?”
“It means I put him in deep cover, where he can’t harm us and no one can harm him.”
The Bull marched out of Aspen, and Isaac was left with Rembrandt’s hieroglyphics under the gauze. His fever mounted and waned. He followed Rembrandt’s instructions, undid the bandage after two days. He didn’t know what to make of the riddle on his chest. It wasn’t at all like Pesh Olinov’s griffin with its magnificent sweep of talons and claws. Rembrandt had painted a very peculiar cat on Isaac Sidel. This cat had Desirée’s features, but with donkey ears; its whiskers were in gold; its tail was knotted like a torture instrument; its eyes sat like silver pecans in its skull; one of its paws had been mutilated, and the other was soaked in blood. Rembrandt had etched some kind of sibyl with a cat’s face on Sidel.
He was now a registered werewolf, whatever that meant—a chelovek, with a sibyl near his heart. His skin burned like the devil where Rembrandt had cut into him, and blood kept leaking from the wound. It was like some crazy circumcision. What would the doctors at Walter Reed and Bethesda make of Isaac’s tattoo?
He didn’t give a damn. His Seabee had prepared some soup. Isaac walked the trails near Aspen with Desirée. She was used to the roaches and rats and sickening sweat at Rikers. Isaac’s cat wasn’t countrified. Her instinct as a lioness had been to run down a frightened fawn, but she was puzzled by the tangled growth of the forest; the tiniest squirrel eluded her. The dark, clotted earth made her sneeze. She clung to Isaac’s heels.
“You sissy,” he said. His chest seemed to rip with every word.
He climbed back up the stairs of his citadel, with Desirée still at his heels. He stared out his picture window. The telephone rang. A call had been patched through from the White House. Ariel Moss was on the line.
“Itzik, it’s good to hear your voice. Mazel—you’re lucky to be alive.”
Isaac wondered how many machines were recording his conversation with the Hermit of Haifa? Was Bull Latham listening in at his own lodge?
“Bull,” Isaac said, feeling frisky, “say hello to Ariel Moss.”
There was dead silence, and then Bull Latham hopped aboard.
“How are you, Ariel?”
And the three of them kibitzed like old comrades for half an hour. The Bull had no shame. He took part with gusto in the very call he was monitoring. Isaac laughed his ass off, and every peal of laughter pinched like hell.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m lucky to be alive.”