Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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