Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  “Do you trust me?” Ariel asked, and it felt like a religious question, as if Lincoln and the Lord’s own better angels were involved.

  “With my life,” Isaac answered without an instant of hesitation.

  “And your soul,” Ariel said. “I want that, too. I must have it, or we will never solve this riddle. Do you remember when I was beaten up in the Bronx—mugged, in your American argot. And you visited me at the hospital. The doctors and the nurses were all startled—and impressed. The police commissioner of Manhattan had come to visit some poor, bruised schlemiel, a nobody. I had stature now. The best doctors in that broken-down hospital listened to my heart. And the day before these doctors had left me there to rot. I was a perfect candidate for the icebox in the basement. Isaac, I am in your debt. Do you trust me?”

  “Yes, dammit!” Isaac said. “I trust you, heart and soul. You and your emeritus general.”

  “Then you must listen when we talk of a smash point, of vectors that meet with an explosive force. It was not the bankers’ lottery that mattered. There are endless games of chance. It was the mischief and the ferocity of their bet. They weren’t gambling, Isaac, they were proselytizing, converting people to their cause. It was well beyond prediction. They were willing your death with their lottery, that’s how certain it was to this one banker in Basel, who laundered money for the Colombian cartel.”

  “But you have Mordecai—Motke,” Isaac said. “You could have gone right to Shin Bet.”

  The two old warriors looked at Isaac as if he had lost his mind. “They’re part of the problem,” Ariel said. “All the clandestine services are. They’re pulled along into the maelstrom.”

  “Then I suppose I should be frightened of Matt Malloy and my own Secret Service.”

  Isaac realized that the giant’s great paws were as substantial as a pair of catcher’s mitts.

  “Frightened, no? But they can’t protect you with all their gadgets, not the way this lottery is growing.”

  Isaac had walked into hell houses alone, had sniffed the devil’s ass, and walked out alive.

  “What’s your advice?” he asked with a bitterness in his voice that the two warriors must have noticed.

  “Resign,” Ariel said. “You don’t have any other escape routes. Even I have to admit that you’re a catastrophe as a president. That’s why we admire you so much. Look, Pepito, the drug lord, is your biggest fan. He can’t wait to build schools in the worst barrios of Medellin—just like the israelita, he says—but he would kill you in a minute. You’re a threat to his narco dollars. The whole banking system could sink with you in the White House, and his numbered account would be washed away with it. The president can’t afford to be Robin Hood.”

  “Why not?” Isaac asked, wounded by this old warrior and his accomplice. “Why not?”

  “Because,” said Mordecai, “Sherwood Forest wasn’t Robin Hood’s sanctuary. It was his prison.”

  Isaac was mortified. The White House had dismantled him, whittled him down to a mess of skin and bone. He’d been a defiant mayor. He could fight the governor and state senators from his perch in City Hall, since he had the realtors under his thumb. He was the ultimate landlord. He owned the lots where all the pharaohs wanted to build their apartment palaces, even owned the little rivers that flowed beneath the lots. He could find revenue for all his pet projects. The Republicans couldn’t field a candidate against Sidel. They capitulated, let him play Robin Hood within the five boroughs. But there were fifty Sheriffs of Nottingham he now had to battle, more than fifty. His generals could barely look him in the eye. His cabinet grumbled behind his back. His chief of staff pretended he didn’t exist.

  “Mr. President,” Ariel said, “we can’t be the only prophets of doom. Forget the bankers and their morbid bet. You must have had some other sign?”

  Isaac showed Ariel and Mordecai the mysterious greeting card on a folded slip of paper he had found under one of the hair driers in the White House’s Cosmetology Room. They weren’t surprised. They studied the ragged greeting to “Big Balls” from “the Brotherhood” and the imprint of the tattoo, revealing Isaac as a raffish clown with an ice pick in his left eye and his head sewn onto his body.

  The slip of paper excited Ariel, woke him from his habitual gloom.

  “Motke, didn’t I warn you that the White House was compromised? Isaac has enemies under his own roof, or at least the servant of some other master. That’s why we had to come here, to this dacha in the wilderness.”

  Isaac watched the path of that lazy eye. “And to your own tight memories, I assume. This was your Garden of Eden during the Camp David Accords.”

  Ariel cackled in his winter underwear. “Eden, eh? With Sadat in the next cottage, it was a nest of thorns. We nearly came to blows half a dozen times. But at least I had Motke at my side—and Shin Bet. Sadat was scared of his own security team—and his generals. He was convinced they meant to poison him before he could sign the accords. It was our Motke who watched over Sadat, who had to prepare his food in President Carter’s kitchen.”

  “Balanda?” Isaac asked.

  “No, no,” Ariel said with a frown. “Sadat wasn’t a zek. That soup would have been worse than poison for a man who’d never been near the gulag. We fed him clear chicken broth, rice, and boiled potatoes. He ate kosher for the first time in his life. It’s possible that his own chef may have been peppering his food with arsenic. The fanatics in his country and mine didn’t want any pact—no one did. He walked around Shangri-La like a ghost—he was a ghost, and I wasn’t far behind. Motke, how many wounds do you have on your body, wounds that were meant for me? Please strip for the president.”

  Mordecai sulked. “Ari, I’m not a showoff.”

  “Strip, I said.”

  Mordecai removed his sweater and his ruffled woolen undershirt. Isaac saw a gallery of punctures along the giant’s enormous chest—some looked like indented arrowheads, others like fingers and the imprint of a webbed foot. Mordecai’s wounds had all the panorama of cave art.

  “See,” Ariel said, “now you know how lucky I am to be alive. I returned from Shangri-La to a storm of anger. My own party wanted to scalp me. I would drown in spit every time I walked into the Knesset. And there was Motke at my side.”

  “But this mountain must have meant something to you,” Isaac said. “It must have worked its magic, or you wouldn’t have traveled this far. You could have sent me a kite.”

  “Perhaps I did enjoy myself a little in Roosevelt’s retreat. Even with all the nasty bargaining, the shuttling between cottages, the meetings with that evangelist, President Carter, I felt outside politics. I wasn’t Ari Moss, the reformed terrorist. I was someone else at Shangri-La, a stranger to all the madness. Isaac, you must grow invisible if you want to survive. You can offer the illusion of change, nothing more. That’s why you’re such a threat. You believe in your own beliefs, or you never would have gotten this kite, as you call it,” Ariel said, clutching the slip of paper. “And where did it come from? You spoke to your wizards at the White House . . .”

  “I have only one wizard, Bull Latham, and he never saw the card. But he said that a caricature of me with the ice pick in my eye had been floating around, and that it seemed to come from the Aryan Brotherhood.”

  The ex–prime minister scoffed at the idea. “Amateurs! They could not have conceived such a masterful design in a million years.”

  “That’s what the dwarf said—Olinov.”

  Ariel’s hands were trembling now. “And who were the creators of this art?”

  “The besprizornye,” Isaac said.

  “Then it should become clear to you.”

  “As clear as the broth that Motke made for Sadat. The Sons of Rossiya sent me that kite—a band of orphans who are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, who can strangle stock markets, murder diplomats, and mint money whenever they want. I’m not sure I believe in the mystical powers of the besprizornye.”

  “And did the dwarf tell you about t
he CEO of the Sons?”

  Isaac was getting pissed off. Were the Sons as grandiose as Big Tobacco? The Fortune Five Hundred champions of crime?

  “His name is Viktor.”

  Ariel wouldn’t have survived Siberia without the friendship of Viktor’s papa, Karl, the patriarch of all the besprizornye. Karl grew up in one of the camp orphanages. He had a rare gift. He knew how to draw with a child’s crayons, to seize the world around him and his own interior landscape. And the pakhans got wind of the boy. They apprenticed him to one of their own drawing masters, a zek who had strangled men and women with his powerful hands. He taught this boy the language and ritual of tattoos, a language more sophisticated than a medieval monk’s illuminated manuscripts. Each stroke, each color, each animal, each star had meaning in this hierarchy of urkas and their pakhans. The tattoos marked the history of a chelovek’s rebirth in Kolyma, and his ascent within his own pack of werewolves, cat men without whiskers who preyed upon the weak, and those intellectuals who landed in Kolyma for some fabricated political sin.

  But this boy, Karl, soon surpassed his own master. No one could instruct him now. He was a prince with his own self-propelled royal line. Karl had learned another art from his drawing master. He strangled whoever stood in his way and welcomed all the besprizornye from the orphanages in Kolyma, Moscow, and Kiev.

  “But you weren’t an orphan,” Isaac said. “You were a political prisoner. Why would Karl welcome you into his clan?”

  Ariel often wondered himself, but Karl must have looked into Ariel’s eyes and seen a werewolf as well as a lover of books. The young pakhan had mastered the tattooist’s art but was utterly blind to the Russian alphabet. So Ariel read to him all the classics he could find at the camp. Sophocles. Shakespeare. Pushkin. And he would recite in a multitude of voices until the pakhan was struck dumb with the modulations and music of words. He cried into a silk handkerchief that had come from the commandant’s own laundress. Ariel dined with pakhan Karl, had Turkish coffee, and oriental sweets.

  Where did such a paradise of treasures come from? It was wartime. The Germans had made their push into Soviet territory. But Karl was also a counterfeiter and the camp’s one millionaire—military trucks arrived in the dead of night with stolen goods from as far as Turkey and Iran. And Ariel enjoyed other sweets—Karl’s own concubines.

  “And still you escaped from Kolyma.”

  “With Karl’s blessings,” Ariel said. “He despised the Germans as much as I did, even if he had to do business with them. And he gave me one of his orphans to guide us out of the tundra.”

  “Pesh Olinov,” Isaac whispered.

  Karl could have flown off on a magic carpet of money. But he stayed in Kolyma, a werewolf among werewolves. And when the camp closed, he kept his millions and had his own little army of besprizornye. They worked all the “gold mines” of the West, went from capital to capital, sucked up what wealth they could, as counterfeiters, contract killers, bankers, real estate barons, black marketeers, and then moved on, leaving behind a ravaged landscape. Karl had a son, born in West Berlin or Basel—nobody knows. The boy’s mother is as much of a mystery. Was she one of Karl’s concubines from Kolyma? He did not have a Siberian Salome in his baggage train. Was she a baroness or a banker’s daughter he had met in the middle of a land deal? Little Viktor couldn’t have been attached to his mama. There are no recollections of her at all. But he had an excellent drawing master—his own papa. He went to private schools in Switzerland, learned the art of handling and manufacturing money.

  Meanwhile, Karl dodged his rival pakhans, eliminated every one. He had many scars from his battles with the pakhans, who envied his rise from a tattoo artist to criminal overlord, but their knives couldn’t kill Karl. He had too much paté at La Tour d’Argent with his bodyguards. And when Karl died suddenly of a heart attack, Viktor inherited the besprizornye.

  He didn’t repeat his father’s mistakes. He dined with his wolf pack on balanda and lived out of a suitcase. He could have bought and sold La Tour d’Argent, but it would have been futile to take revenge on a restaurant. Viktor moved about, kept modest apartments in many places, seldom traveling with a bodyguard. Yet his aura was great. He might appear at a Russian nightclub in Tel Aviv, or at Little Odessa in Brighton Beach, while some half-starved minstrel thrummed the balalaika—it must have reminded Viktor of a past he didn’t have. His spiritual home was the gulag, even if he’d never been near the tundra. His art had been born in the camps. His tattoos were sought by princes and moguls and movie stars. But he wasn’t interested in their money. Bankers courted this young billionaire. He had no desire for their business. He was a counterfeiter whose “originals” were impossible to find. Even Treasury agents marveled at the details of Grant’s beard on one of Viktor’s immaculate fifty-dollar bills. His paper was of the purest silk. He could have brought down the U.S. currency—created a blizzard of false fifty-dollar bills—but he had no real argument against the United States. He wouldn’t flood the market. Besides, tattoos intrigued him much more than cutting into a soft-steel plate. And he never put a price on his tattoos, never charged a penny for his designs.

  People who understood the power and the workmanship of his tattoos began to wonder if he chose his subjects at random. But it wasn’t random at all. Most of his subjects were besprizornye, the werewolves of his own pack.

  “I saw one of his tattoos,” Isaac said. “I’m positive—on Olinov. It was a fabulous bird, a griffin that poked right across his chest, with a bunch of claws, and a face that was almost human. I got dizzy looking at such a bird. But why would Viktor pick Pesh?”

  The two old warriors winked at one another.

  “What kind of policeman are you, Mr. President?” Ariel asked in a rough tone. “Pesh was a chelovek. Viktor owed him that tattoo. Pesh had once belonged to his father’s clan, probably saved his life. He certainly saved mine. I would never have come back from the taiga without him. He had eyes in both cheeks of his ass. We’d have been devoured by Siberian wolves if he hadn’t tossed sticks of fire at them. You cannot imagine a timber wolf with white fur and pale blue eyes that blend right into the dark. Pesh had a way with wolves. He could growl at them, flap his arms like an engine. These wolves would crawl under the wires and rip the throats of guards on the perimeter and attack cheloveks. That’s why the dwarf was so valuable, and Karl could trust him and only him to get us through the taiga. The griffin you discovered on the dwarf was Viktor’s version of a god-man who could scare away the Siberian wolf. And it was a warning to other cheloveks that the dwarf was not to be trifled with.”

  “A winter warning,” Isaac said. “It was Viktor who sent the greeting card.”

  Ariel nodded.

  “And he had Pepito write you that letter about the lottery.”

  Ariel nodded again.

  “He might even have invented the lottery to flush those bankers out.”

  “Yes,” Mordecai said, “to bring them closer to the smash point.”

  The giant began to sniff around him with his enormous nostrils. “Ari, we have to leave. I can smell the snow. We do not want to be trapped on this mountain—it will be worse for us than timber wolves in the taiga.”

  The two of them put on their trench coats and crazy garrison caps. Isaac had gotten used to these warriors, would miss them now.

  “You could stay,” he said. “Whatever’s out there, Aspen is like a fortress.”

  But they wouldn’t listen, or wait until Charles could prepare a sack of bread and cheese. They were already halfway out the door, and Isaac had to clutch at Ariel.

  “You’ve come this far,” he said. “Tell me why Viktor should care whether I live or die.”

  “Mr. President, he’s a businessman as well as an artist. He doesn’t want all his assets to go into the toilet. Besides, he has a weakness for Robin Hood.”

  Isaac didn’t catch one fleck of snow as Ariel and Mordecai began to negotiate the stairs. Mordecai was the navigator. Ariel clutched his s
houlders as they descended one stair at a time. It was excruciating to watch. Isaac went back inside Aspen, as sad as he had ever been.

  He opened the curtains. The light had begun to break, and he could see down into the valley through a narrow cut in the woods. A whitetail arrived, its legs like great jumping sticks, with the picture window serving as a natural screen. A block of salt sat on a stake driven into the ground, but that whitetail never got near the salt lick. It bounded back into the forest in one arcing leap that was both lyrical and violent—the whitetail trembled in midair and was gone. And that’s when Isaac saw the gray wolf, with its spindly legs and winter fur. The wolf must have come out of a taiga all its own. Its eyes appeared a brilliant green in the breaking light. It was staring at Isaac with its own timid defiance. Disdaining the salt lick, it loped back into the woods with a lazy motion. Isaac stood against the window, an easy target, and still couldn’t find that first snowflake of Mordecai’s.

  PART TWO

  5

  There was talk of a winter storm, of air currents rippling off the mountain, but Isaac still hadn’t seen a snowflake. And while he gazed out the window, looking for that lost whitetail, Ramona called. “How dare you, Mr. President? Sneaking out like a common criminal. I should be the first to know if you’ve gone off the track. I could be at Aspen within the hour.”

  “Then who would watch over the West Wing?”

  He hung up on Ramona, and was tempted to call the camp duty officer about the gray wolf. He wanted the wolf driven off his grounds, and then he realized that this renegade had as much right to be here as he did. But finally, after an hour or two, a mob of whitetails appeared on Isaac’s lawn, tempted by the salt lick. The leader of the mob, a stag with antlers that pierced the sky like a crooked crown, took short, furtive steps. Isaac had seldom seen whitetails near Aspen this late after early light. The stag stood guard, while its herd hopped around the salt lick with their white throats held high. Isaac longed to go outside and dance with the whitetails, but he knew that a lumbering soul like himself would scare them away.