Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  Ariel laughed in his blue hospital shirt. His teeth were all black. He looked like a vampire who relished black blood in his mouth.

  “Well, then we’re both a couple of desperados. It’s no secret. I was once a bank robber.”

  “But there are no banks along this stretch of Southern Boulevard. Very little happens here. Why did you come to such an unholy place?”

  “I was on a pilgrimage,” said Ariel Moss.

  Isaac was even more perplexed. He wondered if that mugger had rattled Ariel’s mind.

  “You must have heard of Sholem Aleichem, the Yiddish Mark Twain. When I was in the gulag, it was his stories that kept me going. He spent his last years in the Bronx, on Kelly Street. He couldn’t write. He was a legend who’d lost his substance. He had diabetes and tuberculosis, among other ailments. If a few of his devoted readers hadn’t left food outside his door, he and his family would have starved. Yet he had a hundred thousand people at his funeral. And I never got to Kelly Street.”

  That was the last encounter Isaac had with Ariel Moss, in his blue hospital shirt. And then a week ago, out of nowhere, the Soviet acting deputy foreign minister, Pesh Olinov, whispered in Isaac’s ear at a reception in the East Room that the Hermit of Haifa had fled his chicken coop and wanted to see the Big Guy. Those were Olinov’s exact words—fled the chicken coop. Why should a Soviet diplomat, whose sudden success was tied to the KGB and the crime bosses of Moscow and Kiev, have become the messenger of a derailed ex–Israeli prime minister? It made no sense. Egypt was Soviet Russia’s client, not the mad Jews of Tel Aviv. But then Isaac recognized the tattoo on Olinov’s knuckles—a dagger piercing the eye hole of a skull. Isaac had seen that tattoo before, among the cheloveks of Brighton Beach. It was the mark of a werewolf. And Isaac realized the connection. Ariel and Pesh Olinov must have served in the same gulag, many years ago, must have belonged to the same crime boss, and must have escaped together. But the cheloveks wouldn’t have gathered among themselves a Jewish intellectual from the law school at Lodz—unless that law student was as much of a werewolf as they were. Intellectuals and zhids always died first. That was the rude sign of Siberia. Ariel Moss couldn’t have survived the brutish life of a labor camp without the protection of a pakhan, or crime lord. And Olinov must have been that lord’s lieutenant. Born in Siberia, the son of a whore and a chelovek at the camp, he was raised as a werewolf who sat at his pakhan’s knee. He had scars on his face from knife fights with rivals of his pakhan and other cheloveks. He looked like a gourd with ruts down the middle; his eyes, a luminous green, were half hidden among all the marks. Isaac felt an immediate kinship with Pesh Olinov; they were like bounty hunters in a sea of diplomats and politicians. Yet this former KGB colonel and intimate of crime bosses was Mikhail Gorbachev’s deputy foreign minister; Olinov had helped shape glasnost and perestroika, was instrumental in making overtures to the West and bringing about social and political reform in the Kremlin’s bewildering bureaucracy.

  The Pink Commish wasn’t blind. Moscow ranted against alcohol consumption, destroyed distilleries, while it lost billions of rubles to Olinov’s pals in the black market. Pesh grew richer with every one of his decrees. He spent months in our capital, like any lobbyist from K Street. He lived across from the White House, at the Hotel Washington, where he dined with six bodyguards surrounding his rooftop table. He still had to step out of explosions, his body covered in bits of glass. Who knows how many Moscow gangsters and graduates of the gulag were gunning for Pesh? Having become one of the masterminds of perestroika had made him an easy target among conservative politicians and members of the Politburo. So a day after this mysterious encounter in the East Room, Isaac met with his intelligence chiefs in a dungeon under the Oval Office to discuss Olinov’s overtures. Bull Latham had been there with Ramona Dazzle. Isaac felt like a schoolboy having to repeat word for word his conversation with Pesh.

  “The deputy kept saying that Ariel wouldn’t come to the White House—the walls had too many ears. He would only come to my dacha. I didn’t know I had a dacha.”

  Isaac remembered the chiefs chortling among themselves. His national security advisor, Tim Vail, spoke first. Vail was a boy genius, a graduate of Harvard and Georgetown, who had published the definitive paper on Soviet geopolitics. “Olinov meant Camp David, Mr. President. That’s where Ariel signed the peace accords with Sadat. That’s where he must have felt most comfortable. But why would Pesh volunteer to be his angel? There’s nothing in the chatter we’ve picked up so far that links them. And we’ve been diligent, sir. That’s why we don’t trust this gambit. It’s some kind of a stunt to suck you into Ariel’s orbit, whatever it is.”

  But Isaac trusted Ariel’s roundabout summons more than he did the advice of his intelligence chiefs. And Ramona must have sensed this. Her boss was a hopeless romantic and a loose cannon. And now she tried to ruffle Isaac, catch him off guard, while he stood in her office with his Glock.

  “Ex–prime ministers don’t come out of hibernation like that and suddenly decide to visit POTUS at his dacha in Maryland. He must have a motive. And I don’t like it, particularly when the SOS is from that thug at the Kremlin. Ariel hasn’t revealed himself yet. And when he does . . .”

  “You’ll have our thugs leave him to wander as much as he likes.”

  Her lower lip trembled. She couldn’t find her magic potion with Sidel. “We’re not like the Russians,” she said. “We don’t employ thugs. Some of our best agents have PhDs.”

  Yes, Isaac muttered to himself, they can whack you on the ears while they recite one of Hamlet’s soliloquies.

  “He shouldn’t have been allowed to get on a plane. He has forged documents. We’ll find him.”

  “That’s what the Brits said after he bombed the King David. He’s landed, Ramona, and he’s much too clever to be found. He’s been a hunted animal half his life.”

  An ancient, ravaged prime minister on the lam must have caused havoc among the ranks of Shin Bet. Perhaps Ariel Moss once had his own nuclear football, with all the doomsday codes, and Shin Bet didn’t want this Hermit of Haifa to fall into the wrong hands with whatever codes he still had. Isaac could tell that Ramona had been in touch with Israeli counterintelligence, and she’d kept it a secret from him. Shin Bet didn’t trust the Pink Commish, even if he was a zhid from the Lower East Side. His horizons were too far to the left. His own intelligence chiefs were suspicious of him, fueled by all the neoconservative think tanks. The neocons were convinced that President Sidel was a sleeper who took his instructions from Moscow. The Secret Service had dubbed him the Citizen, and that name stuck. Fanatics on talk radio took to calling him Citizen Sidel of the Soviet Union. He couldn’t light out for the territory, like Huck Finn, his favorite character in American lit. There was no territory now, in Isaac’s mind, except perhaps Antarctica and Tierra del Fuego, and he had little desire to go there. He was stuck in this “great white jail” with a chief of staff who was plotting to dismantle him. She sat with her pantyhose in the air, as if he was some sidebar she had to tolerate for a little while longer.

  He hated her smugness, her certainty that he was a transient who would fall into ruin. He had to resist tugging at her pantyhose and spinning her around until she couldn’t recapture her comfort zone. But Isaac would have ended up in handcuffs, charged with assault.

  So he smiled that errant smile of his—like a Chinese mask that couldn’t be pierced.

  “Ramona, I bailed you out,” he said. “You would have shoved me into the tar pits if your own candidate had survived his inauguration. But he couldn’t, and now you’re stuck with me. Either we have a marriage, or it’s civil war, and it will ripple right through the DNC. You’ll lose all your donors.”

  Those thin nostrils of hers flared. “Are you threatening me, Mr. President?”

  “Yes,” he whispered. They were all alone in her labyrinth of rooms. Ramona’s brats must have fled to a bar in Georgetown, where they could mock Isaac’s torn cuffs and bald pate ove
r whiskey sours and a pot of British ale.

  Ramona tugged at her pantyhose, stood up, strode around her antique desk, and walloped Sidel. His jaw tingled. His mouth bled, and he had a roaring in his ears that was like the crash of the Atlantic against Ramona’s private seawall. The Big Guy didn’t bother to wipe the blood from his teeth. The ground had shifted. He’d riled Ramona Dazzle.

  “We’ll have that Russian dwarf Olinov recalled to Moscow. He won’t play Mercury for a miserable old man from Haifa.”

  “Pesh isn’t a dwarf,” Isaac said, with a sudden lilt to his voice. “And you can’t have him recalled—it’s the age of glasnost, the era of cooperation between East and West. We’re downsizing our nuclear arsenals, in spite of their generals and ours. If you let your hatchet men go near Olinov, I’ll have their peckers cut off and hung on display in the Rose Garden. You can watch their wrinkled remains from your patio.”

  “You’re disgusting,” Ramona screamed into the void. “You’re uncouth.”

  She walloped him again. The Big Guy tottered for a moment and grabbed her wrists. It was his first moment of pleasure since he’d arrived in the White House.

  “Let go of me,” she screamed at Isaac, who had to sidestep her flicking heels like a matador and also protect his groin. A Secret Service man arrived, his .357 Magnum unholstered, like an obscene toy. With him was Isaac’s naval aide, carrying the nuclear football. And behind them both was the vice president, Bull Latham, barreling in and shoving everyone out of his way, until Isaac’s naval aide and the nuclear football landed in the dark well under Ramona’s desk.

  “Can this lovers’ quarrel, Mr. President. There’s been some disturbing chatter.”

  He sat Isaac and Ramona down at her conference table. “It’s not a joke. Oh, we’ve heard rumors about Colonel Gaddafi sending hit men after your hide—that’s been going on for months. But he wouldn’t want his ass bombed out of Tripoli. He’d have to retire to the desert in a woman’s scarf and join my list of favorite cross-dressers.” The Bull was basking in his new glory. He’d set his own rules as Isaac’s vice president. He reigned over the FBI and went into the deepest pockets of Isaac’s other agencies. His Herculean shoulders held him in good sway wherever he happened to poke around. “The Colombian drug lords hate you because we’ve been busting up their cartels. But they consider themselves crusaders. And you’re popular in the barrios. They call you the israelita with a Glock, so the clamor comes from another direction. We don’t bother with anti-Semitic dreck—fruitcakes who rant against that ‘Heimie in the White House.’ ”

  The Bull paused to lick his lips and capitalize on his own sense of drama.

  “Something came in from the Aryan Brotherhood, those jailhouse freaks. It’s a fucking tattoo. They’re tattoo artists, I know. But this one is a little scary. It’s a caricature of you, Mr. President, with an ice pick in one eye, and your neck sewn onto your head, like some Frankenstein, with the stitches as fat as a finger.”

  “Then we ought to round up those tattoo artists and teach them a lesson,” Ramona rasped.

  “Whoa,” said Bull Latham. “They’re only the clerks. That’s why we have to shake their little tree.”

  Isaac was wary of Bull Latham. The Secret Service should have notified him of any danger, not his vice president. And Matthew Malloy, chief of the White House detail, hadn’t said a word.

  “What sort of tree?” Isaac asked, with that false naïveté of an ex-cop.

  “A poison tree, Mr. President, but the tree’s not important. We should concentrate on the gardeners who’ve been watering it. They’re the ones who would profit from your demise. They lured the Brotherhood with a secret load of cash.”

  “And who are these ghostly gardeners?”

  “There’s the rub,” said Bull Latham. “I haven’t a clue. I’d squeeze the neo-Nazi bastards, but most of them are lifers who are loyal to one another, and they’d only lie. Could be anybody under the sun with a grievance against you, yet tough enough to tangle with the Brotherhood and relieve them of their art. That’s no small accomplishment. The Brotherhood doesn’t like to part with their tattoos.”

  Now Ramona saw her chance. “I’ll bet Ariel Moss is involved. He could be one of the gardeners.”

  The Bull chuckled to himself and chided her. “That hermit? He has to wear diapers—that’s in my logs, swear to God. He was always incontinent, even during the Camp David Accords. Shin Bet had to run up and down the paths with a fresh pair of nappies for their prime minister. He had some sort of dysentery when he was in the gulag, and it was never cured—a horrible case of the worms. He’s not one of the gardeners. I can guarantee that.”

  “But he’s out there doing mischief,” Ramona chanted, like a little helpless girl, while the Bull winked.

  “We’ll catch him. All we have to do is sniff the wind.”

  Isaac grew weary of his vice president. He left Ramona’s labyrinth without a nod to the Bull, walked under the colonnade that Thomas Jefferson had built, rode upstairs to his private quarters in the president’s elevator, two Secret Service men at his tail. He had his own labyrinth of rooms. He couldn’t seem to settle in. He inhabited the entire second floor of the White House, with its rosewood tables, astral lamps, satinwood commodes, its cut-glass chandeliers that left irregular shadows on the walls, and a little treasure of Cézannes with clumps of earthlike color that crinkled against the fanlight windowpanes. The residence also had a kitchen, sitting rooms, a balcony, and a beauty salon, with a salmon-colored lounge chair, multiple hair driers, a manicurist’s stool, and a porcelain shampoo bowl, meant to accommodate the First Lady. Somehow, Isaac preferred this room, with its coral-colored rug. He wasn’t wifeless. But the wife he had, known as the Countess Kathleen, a voluptuous redhead whom he had married when he was nineteen and had never bothered to divorce, preferred an empire of Florida real estate to the White House. She was five years older than the Big Guy and a rabid Republican. He could never have become mayor or police commissioner without Kathleen, who had stroked the Irish mafia of the NYPD for Isaac. She might have slept with a few of the chiefs before her own marriage, bewitched them with her wild Irish ways.

  The Countess was an embarrassment to Ramona and the DNC, having donated millions to Republican coffers during Isaac’s campaign and not a dime to the Democrats. But Isaac never abused her, never sang an unkind song, even when Ramona’s detectives came up with every sort of dirt about Kathleen’s land deals in the Florida swamps.

  “Sweetheart, leave my wife alone,” Isaac had to warn. “Whatever you uncover will only come back to haunt us.” Isaac was clever enough to see the Countess’s own cleverness. Who would be dumb enough to prosecute a president’s wife for some arcane land deal in the Okefenokee? And it gave him pleasure to sit in the White House’s Cosmetology Room and dream of the Countess rinsing her red hair.

  The Pink Commish was about to shut his eyes when he noticed a slip of paper beneath one of the hair driers, like a primitive greeting card. On the front was written in a very ragged script:

  Welcome to the Brotherhood,

  Big Balls

  That’s what his enemies would call him when he was police commissioner and had locked up badasses in every borough. They meant to mock him, but Big Balls soon became a mark of respect. He followed child molesters and bank robbers and sadistic gang leaders across the landscape until he cuffed them. He went into a burning warehouse once to capture a homicidal maniac and had to be hospitalized for six weeks. But that couldn’t sideline Sidel. He simply moved his office into his hospital room, and was surrounded by detectives and assistant DAs.

  His nom de guerre didn’t follow him to Gracie Mansion. He wasn’t Big Balls on the mayor’s circuit. So why should that name suddenly haunt him at the White House? He unfolded the greeting card and saw an imprint of the tattoo that the Bull had described, a sample of the Aryan Brotherhood’s art in bold red ink—Isaac with his bald patch, an ice pick stuck in his left eye and his head sewn onto his body wi
th a thick cord.

  The artist had captured Isaac’s stern look, as if the Pink Commish had sat for his own portrait somewhere in hell.

  Below the drawing were the habitual swastikas and runes of the Aryan Brotherhood. Isaac brooded over this greeting card. How did it get here? Who had sneaked it into his sanctuary? Someone had to be aware of Isaac’s habits and haunts. He didn’t shout for the Secret Service, didn’t alert Bull Latham. He plucked a telephone out of its cradle near the manicurist’s stool and had the White House operator dial the Hotel Washington and ask for Pesh Olinov’s suite. Some Soviet gorilla answered the phone.

  “Who is talking? Please to answer, yes?”

  “Big Balls,” Isaac shouted. “Tell that to Pesh.”

  2

  He couldn’t cross the street without his caravan. He would have stopped traffic cold on Pennsylvania Avenue for an hour, as District detectives and the Secret Service scrambled about and lined the gates of Lafayette Park. Every one of his moves had to be mapped out and diagrammed, his destination logged in. It would have taken him five minutes to travel on foot from the White House to the Hotel Washington, but he’d never have gotten out the North Portico on his own. He was embalmed in his own trappings as president. The White House operator must have snitched to Ramona and Matthew Malloy. Isaac’s chief of staff flew at him like one of the Furies.

  “Imbecile,” she said. “Do you want to create an international crisis? The dwarf’s thugs could shoot you in the shoulder—just for fun. You can’t amble into the Washington. You have to follow protocol. Tell him, Matt.”

  The head of the White House detail rocked on his heels. Ramona had managed to henpeck him after she first strutted into the West Wing. He was almost fifty, and intended to retire. He must have looked like a blue-eyed Apollo once, but Calder Cottonwood had involved him in some shady deals, and that blond handsomeness was gone; his face had turned soft, as if he’d begun to rot like an exotic flower.