Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  “I’ll put a package together, sir. We’ll have everyone in place, and we’ll secure Dragon.”

  Dragon was Isaac’s armored Lincoln Town Car with bulletproof glass; he’d have had to exit the White House in a fleet of sedans and ride two blocks, with his own “double” sitting in one of the sedans.

  “That’ll take an hour, and Pesh will have time to prepare a whole scenario. I want to catch that prick with his pants down. We’re going on foot, Matt.”

  He’d still lose precious time. Matt would have to alert the hotel and secure the perimeter, which meant agents outside Pesh’s room and on the floor above and the floor below. It was like the choreography of a mad king, and Isaac had to reside within the pretense of Matthew Malloy’s “chaos control.” He refused to strap on a fiberglass vest. His Glock was good enough. But he had to wait and wait for his protective team to gather its gear—the magnetometers, the .357 Magnums, the button mikes, the Ray-Bans, the metallic cups—and rise out of its roost in the cellars of the West Wing.

  Matt and his men never wore topcoats in the winter chill. It would have slowed them down considerably if they had tried to reach for their .357 Magnums. They’d discovered a thing or two from Shin Bet. The two secret services liked to trade professional tricks. And last year Matt invited Shin Bet for a week of exercises at his own training facility near Laurel, Maryland. “They’re tough customers, those Izzies,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to fart around with them.” And now Isaac’s protective team scrambled across the leafless landscape of Lafayette Park, with its little world of windswept trees with rotting silver bark, and rushed into the lobby of the Hotel Washington like a human sledgehammer, with the Big Guy wedged in the middle. They looked sinister in their Ray-Bans—and slightly comical.

  The entire lobby was in their thrall. POTUS and his protectors had just entered a slow-motion paradise, where all movement stopped and not a sound was heard. They commandeered an elevator for themselves, while two agents fell away from the team and guarded the elevator bank. The others rode up with Isaac. They leapt out on the sixth floor and surrounded Isaac again. Two of the agents were carrying portable magnetometers. It didn’t matter who Pesh was—diplomat, crime boss, or king of Siam. They would still have to shake down his suite. There had been no preliminary search, and they couldn’t allow POTUS to enter uncharted territory.

  Isaac himself knocked on Pesh Olinov’s door; for a moment he felt like a young deputy chief inspector out on his first raid. One of Pesh’s gorillas opened the door with a growl. He had a shaved skull with a red birthmark on its crown that could have been a map of Siberia.

  “What you bother, eh? Pesh asleep.”

  “Wake him,” Isaac said, as the Secret Service barreled through the door in their Ray-Bans and button mikes. Pesh Olinov appeared from the bedroom of his suite in a magnificent velour robe. Another bodyguard stood behind him, waving a document in a leather wallet.

  “You cannot interfere. We are Soviet diplomats.”

  “It’s no use, Sasha,” said Olinov with a smile that moved like a trembling worm across his mouth. “We are with the barbarians.”

  “Sir,” said Matt, “we’ll have to sweep the room and give the Russkies a toss with the magnetometers.”

  “Not now,” Isaac said. “Forget the body searches. I have business with Pesh.”

  He turned to the acting deputy foreign minister, bowed, and whispered in his ear, “You’ll have to forgive my own protectors. They have their protocols. It can’t be helped.”

  He walked into the bedroom with Pesh and shut the door, just as Matt began to scream, “You can’t go in there, sir. It isn’t safe.”

  Isaac had expected to meet a couple of call girls under the satin covers of Olinov’s king-size bed. He’d heard about his kinky habits from Bull Latham’s informants at the FBI. But Isaac was bewildered by Olinov’s companion. She wasn’t even undressed. She sat in a rosewood chair that could have been a replica of his own prize furniture at the White House. It was Renata Swallow, the doyenne of Georgetown, and one of the principal Cave Dwellers, the elite of Washington’s elite. The Cave Dwellers had never had much truck with presidents or their wives. They and their ancestors snubbed Mary Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mamie Eisenhower with the same icy venom. They were listed in their unique social register, the Green Book, had their charity balls and concert subscriptions, and rarely meddled in politics. But Renata wasn’t like the other doyennes, or Queen Bees. A recent widow, who hadn’t relied on her late husband’s fortune, she was thirty-seven years old, defiantly blond, preferred martial arts to charity balls, and was a buoyant member of the Republican National Committee. She despised Isaac’s chief of staff and never missed a chance to hurl a poisoned dart at “Dizzy Ms. Dazzle.”

  Isaac had met Renata once before, not in the District, but at a gala honoring George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet while Isaac was in his honeymoon as mayor. He was captivated by her voice. She spoke to the maître in a lyrical Russian that was like the cry of a desolate bird. He’d never realized how sad a language could be. And it seemed out of place with her almost masculine beauty and clipped blond hair. He was delirious about this matron of the arts from the District until she grabbed him by the shoulder and roared at him in a voice with its own martial music—“What are you doing here, Mr. Mayor? Have you ever seen a ballet in your life?”

  Issac’s tongue twisted, and he couldn’t utter a word in front of Renata, who went right back to Balanchine and warbled in Russian. She had only daggers for Isaac Sidel. To spite her, and displace his own curious attraction to this Cave Dweller, he began to attend the New York City Ballet, and he marveled how the prima ballerinas danced only for Balanchine, who sat in the last row of the orchestra, his nose twitching incessantly, while he watched like a warrior hawk. Balanchine was hospitalized soon after that and never returned to his seat. Without Balanchine’s gaze to guide them, the primas fumbled through their dance, like moribund, frenzied dolls, and Isaac stopped going to the ballet. He meant to write Renata, but somehow he couldn’t seem to find the vocabulary. And here she was, in the bedroom of a Russian gangster-politician, who was Gorbachev’s conduit to the crime lords of Moscow and Kiev.

  Renata wasn’t even embarrassed. She extended her hand to Sidel. “How lovely,” she said, staring at his Glock. “I’m delighted to see that you haven’t lost your affection for firearms.”

  She’d already disarmed Isaac, and he hadn’t said a word.

  “Balanchine,” Isaac managed to whisper. “I saw my first ballet thanks to you.”

  The doyenne fondled the soft material of the Russian gangster’s robe for an instant, then turned to Isaac as if to remind herself that he was still there. “I’m so glad. And what did you learn, Mr. President?”

  “That it’s a catastrophe if you separate the creator from his creation. The ballerinas were all in a trance after Balanchine died.”

  “Yet the company still exists, and I’m one of its patrons. I’m sure you have a lot to discuss with Pesh. Goodbye.”

  And she marched out of the bedroom in her lambs’ wool coat, as if she’d spent the afternoon with her fellow bluebloods at the Salamander Club rather than with a political pimp. But Isaac wasn’t as courteous with the gangster as he had been with the lady from Georgetown. He grabbed the lapels of Pesh’s robe.

  “What was she doing here? Are you selling caviar to the Cave Dwellers?”

  “No, Madame Renata was worried about the Kirov and the Bolshoi—Russian ballet. She knows how inflation has been tearing up the roots of my country. We’ve been eating into our foreign reserves, and—”

  “Since when are you a cultural commissar?”

  “You shouldn’t belittle me,” Olinov muttered. “I’m one of the last allies you have left. Why did you settle in the White House? You won’t survive very long, my friend.”

  “Congratulations, Pesh. You’ve become a mind reader.”

  Isaac took the greeting card from the Aryan Brotherh
ood out of his pocket. “Those jailbirds smuggled this into my quarters. Are they sending me a kite?”

  Pesh savored the word “kite,” allowed it to settle between his teeth. “This didn’t come from those amateurs at the Aryan Brotherhood. The work is much too fine. Their tattoos are primitive and childish. They never had access to a master artist, and they never endured the endless winters of Kolyma. None of them was born into the craft. They’re copycats. You’ve received an epistle from the Sons of Rossiya. And you should be proud.”

  Pesh explained who the Sons were: orphans plucked from the streets of Moscow and shipped to Siberia, they had grown up in the gulag, protected by one pakhan or another, or else they would have become the sexual toys of the camp guards and the cheloveks. They all had a specific talent, either as engravers or tattoo artists, or experts with the pickaxe and the knife. Mostly, they were counterfeiters, and they made millions for their pakhans and for themselves. And when the camps began to close down during the political upheavals after Stalin’s death, they felt lost, abandoned, homeless. They were werewolves, like the other cheloveks, reborn in the camps, but still, they managed to survive. They didn’t tear at each other’s throats, didn’t wage mortal combat between Moscow and Kiev. They remained neutral and half dead. They were the Sons of Rossiya, counterfeiters and killers with an unbroken loyalty oath. Many moved to the West, settled in Milan, London, Madrid, crossing borders with all the agility of a werewolf.

  “Then why haven’t I heard of them?” Isaac asked.

  “Because these were the besprizornye—street children. You must have had your own besprizornye in Manhattan.”

  Yes, Isaac recalled; wild boys who stole from the pickle merchants and lived on the brine. They had a perilous existence in the back alleys of Hester Street. They perched on the rooftops like gargoyles with warm blood. Isaac could never tame these orphans no matter how hard he tried, never get them to attend school at Gracie Mansion and become Merlins, like children from the South Bronx he managed to rescue from the oblivion of broken streets.

  “But these boys perished,” Isaac said. “They couldn’t survive the Manhattan winter year after year.” Big Balls nearly broke down and cried at the recollection of these winter boys. “I had to bury most of them in Potter’s Field, without a name tag, and nothing to eulogize them with but a primitive pine box.”

  “Not our besprizornye,” Olinov said. “They survived Siberia. Their greatest feat, once they left the camps, was to exist without an identity, recognizable only to themselves. And as the Russian empire falls into ruin, with rubles that aren’t even worth enough to copy, they’re the ones who have had to pick up the pieces. That’s why they sent you a kite, as you say, only they would call it a winter warning—it was always winter in the taiga, you see.”

  “And that greeting card is some kind of a threat?”

  Olinov appraised the portrait of Isaac with an ice pick piercing his left eye.

  “I don’t think so. They consider you a werewolf, like themselves. And that’s a mark of respect. Perhaps they would like to meet with you—the presidency means nothing to them. It’s not your power that interests the besprizornye. In their eyes you have none. Perhaps it is a real winter warning, and they are telling you to be more careful with your steps. The Secret Service cannot protect you with their magnetometers, my friend.”

  Isaac was still baffled. The Sons of Rossiya were as remote to him as Teutonic knights. “How did they smuggle their greeting card past all the lines of security? We have bomb-sniffing dogs in the mail room. We have X-ray machines. Every damn letter is sifted and unsealed. And that card ends up under a hair drier in the White House beauty parlor.”

  Olinov laughed. “The besprizornye have all the money in the world—they bribe and kiss and kill. On top of that, they’re wizards. Their souls could probably pass right through an X-ray machine.”

  Pesh’s mystical ballyhoo didn’t appeal to Isaac. He wouldn’t have been surprised if this gangster invented the besprizornye, orphans with a magical twist. “And where does Ariel Moss fit in? He’s no wizard.”

  “But he’s become an orphan in his old age.”

  “Who escaped his keepers at Shin Bet.”

  Pesh frowned for the first time. “Don’t patronize me, Mr. President. It was Ariel who created the model for Shin Bet when he was with the Irgun—silent ghosts with a protective shield. Didn’t he float into Acre Prison and float out with half his gang? Shin Bet worshiped him when he was prime minister. The same silent ghosts kept him alive. How many suicide attacks did they thwart? At least a dozen. They were his family, my friend, his shield. Shin Bet would never harm Ariel Moss.”

  And now Isaac was the policeman again, prickly as ever. “So where did you bump into the Hermit of Haifa? At a Black Sea resort?”

  Olinov scratched under the collar of his robe, and Isaac glimpsed at the paws of some imaginary beast tattooed on his chest, like a marvelous totem. “No, my friend—not the Black Sea. The old man knocked on my door. He was starving. But he couldn’t swallow American roast beef. We had to scour the markets for Russian rye bread, blackened potatoes, and balanda.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Prison soup,” Olinov said. “Once you’ve feasted on such watery slop, it destroys your appetite for anything else.”

  Isaac didn’t believe a word. “Where did you find your precious soup ten thousand miles from Siberia?”

  “I prepared it for him on a hot plate at the hotel. We’re all zeks from the same zone. My balanda revived the old man.”

  Pesh revealed how emaciated Ariel Moss was, and how he and his own gorillas—all graduates of the same penal colony—had to feed the recluse with a wooden spoon, how they sang their favorite prison songs about cocks and cunts and Stalin’s swollen testicles. But Ariel kept insisting that he had to see the Pink Commish.

  “Your enemies, the old man said, will eat you alive. And it was only safe for him to meet at your dacha.”

  It made no sense to Isaac. Why would that hermit leave his private garden for Isaac Sidel? He could have gone to Shin Bet. He must have been on familiar terms with half its retired generals. Yet he went back to robbing banks, or something close to that, to help finance his own disappearing act. He crosses two continents like a silent ghost, knocks on the gangster’s door at the Washington, fills himself with balanda, and talks about cannibals in the White House. It made no sense.

  Isaac could hardly trust anything the dwarf said—yes, Ramona Dazzle had been right. Pesh was some kind of a dwarf. He didn’t even reach Isaac’s shoulder blades. Perhaps all that balanda had stunted Pesh’s growth. And the Cave Dwellers’ Queen Bee hadn’t come here to talk with Pesh about the Bolshoi. All the scars on his face—the souvenirs of knife wounds gathered in the gulag—hadn’t suddenly turned Pesh into a balletomane. Renata was searching for something much more enigmatic, something she couldn’t find among all the bluebloods at the Salamander Club—it was the tattoos of a Russian gangster. That’s why he stood in his velour robe, while she sat around in her winter coat. Isaac had interrupted a striptease act.

  “Chelovek,” Isaac said like an inmate at Kolyma, “get undressed.”

  Pesh stared at Isaac with that face of a mottled gourd. “Are you crazy?”

  “Strip, little man. I want to see your colors.”

  Pesh lunged at Isaac with a sailor’s paring knife cupped in his hand. The Big Guy smiled. This was a world he understood, not the invisible knife-throwing of all his military and intelligence chiefs, where it was useless to dodge; the knives always landed in some forlorn spot under his ribs, and Isaac had to survive with that perpetual nagging pain. But an ex–wild boy from the gulag was another matter. Isaac cracked Pesh’s knuckles with the blade of his hand, and the tiny hooked knife fell to the carpet. Then he grabbed Pesh’s velour collar and spun him out of his robe. And there was the bird that rippled across the gangster’s chest—a griffin of some kind, with majestic, multiple claws, a lion’s haunches, a feathery
tail, and a half human head, with whiskers, a wolf’s ears, luminous eyes, and a cavernous mouth that seemed to stifle a scream.

  It must have been a creature born in the gulag, the personification of a werewolf, with symbols that only other wild boys and their pakhans could master—stars with seven points on the griffin’s shoulder blades, swastikas on its expanding wings that ruffled in front of Isaac’s eyes. The gangster had mesmerized Renata, made her dream. That’s why she’d come to this hotel—not to flirt or do business with a Moscow minister without much of a portfolio.

  “You cannot look at me,” Pesh whispered. “It is sacred. You could be killed. Only the besprizornye are permitted to stare and count the stars. Each star tells a tale.”

  “And yet you stripped for Renata.”

  “As a special favor. She has powerful friends. And we are beggars with an abundance of nuclear warheads. The Kremlin has become a whorehouse for hire. There’s talk every week of a coup. Look,” he said, kicking a gigantic suitcase near his bed. “Open it, Mr. President, and you will understand our plight.”

  Isaac sprang the lock with a click of his thumb; the suitcase was crammed with rolls of toilet paper, like packaged snow.

  “My bodyguards went on a shopping spree in Chinatown. It was God’s country to them. You know, we have every flavor of ice cream in shops along the Arbat—peach, white chocolate, caramel—but a singular absence of toilet paper. In Moscow you learn to wipe your ass with Pravda or with the back of your hand . . .”

  They heard the thump of a warring army outside the bedroom. Pesh wrapped himself up in his robe, covering that strange, grounded bird on his chest, and the two of them leapt into the parlor, where the Secret Service was engaged in a battle royal with Pesh’s bodyguards, fighting over the magnetometers—like wild boys, Isaac muttered to himself. Besprizornye.