Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  “They’re imploding, Mr. President,” said his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We can catch Gorby with his dick in his hand.”

  “That will send a wonderful message to his generals and the KGB. If the hardliners come back, we’ll have to start counting warheads again. We help Gorby wherever we can. We stabilize the ruble, because we can’t afford a currency meltdown. Our own markets will crash.”

  “Sir,” said Isaac’s chief economic maven, “the ruble is beyond repair.”

  Isaac looked into his maven’s eyes like a gunslinger, Wild Bill Hickok of the West Wing. “Come on, Felix. We’ve manipulated currencies many a time, you and our miracle boys at the CIA. We can have our ghosts buy up rubles.”

  “But they’re worthless,” said Felix Mandel, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Economics with his treatise on phantom currencies that could destroy nations like malicious worms.

  “So what? We buy, we sell. You’ve never lost a dime, Felix, in any of our currency deals. The rubles will be our bargaining chip.”

  Who the hell was advising Sidel? He hadn’t turned to Ramona Dazzle once. She no longer held sway over his agenda. He’d managed to box her out, keep her contained in her corner office. His press secretary didn’t have to confide in her. His speechwriters went directly to Sidel. The Big Guy had found another guru. A certain Dr. Genevieve Robinson of the State Department visited him once a week. She wore dark glasses and a long mantle of brown hair that covered most of her face. The Big Guy himself had initialed her ticket. No one had bothered to check that this stout woman in dark glasses wasn’t the Genevieve Robinson who worked at State. Isaac had smuggled Brenda Brown, his former chief of staff, back into the White House, with an elaborate subterfuge.

  It was Brenda who rewrote his speeches and helped him strike down the legislation that irked him. She was smarter than his generals and she understood Felix Mandel’s notion about the peculiar warp of phantom currencies. Brenda was coming out of her breakdown. But Isaac preferred to keep Brenda where reporters couldn’t find her and harp on her love affairs with Isaac’s female ushers. He pulled money from his pension plan to pay her a little gelt. And she was the one who suggested how the Big Guy could have much greater mobility.

  “We create a fictitious persona who happens to be real—a foreign diplomat, with epaulettes and other embellishments.”

  “But where will we find such a fellah?” Isaac groaned. “I’m surrounded by spooks and every sort of policeman. They’ll see through that disguise.”

  Brenda’s younger brother played the diplomat. And Sarah Rogers, his own liaison to Navy Intel, provided him with a convenient persona right off her computer screen. Colonel Alfonso Borges, Argentina’s air attaché.

  Now all Isaac needed was the perfect occasion to disappear for a few hours, and not be tied to the Secret Service. He found the occasion—another greeting card left under a hair drier in the beauty salon, with the same stamped tattoo of Isaac’s wandering, headless head and a cryptic note.

  THE DUMMY SCHOOL.

  LOOK FOR THE WORKMAN’S SHACK ON FLORIDA AVENUE.

  TONIGHT AT NINE.

  BIG BALLS, DON’T BRING THE BULL.

  Isaac was pretty clear about the destination. Gallaudet University, Washington’s own college for the deaf. Isaac wouldn’t be the first president to visit that school.

  Lincoln had gone there in 1862, when it wasn’t a college, but a grammar school for the deaf and blind, funded with federal money. It wasn’t called Gallaudet then, but the Columbia Institute for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind. Lincoln sat with the school children, read to them, played with them in the school’s tiny yard. The blind children felt his face, plucked gently on his beard, while Lincoln could hear the rumblings of war across the Potomac.

  Isaac could visualize that scene, imagine the president arriving with Tad, who had his own speech impediment, and he could sense the grief on Lincoln’s grieving face. It embarrassed Isaac, who hadn’t bothered to visit Gallaudet on his own—but was summoned there for some monkeyshines. Lincoln had carried a divided nation on his crooked back and prevented it from utterly unraveling. And he took the time to visit a little school for the deaf. What had Isaac done except follow the irregular arc of his own demise? All he had was a bizarre portrait of himself—a winter warning—and a brief encounter with Mrs. Swallow, doyenne of the Cave Dwellers, who wore a tattoo on her ass. The elusive tattoo artist, Viktor, was a lad without a surname.

  Captain Alfonso Borges appeared at the West Gate around seven P.M. and was ushered upstairs to Isaac’s residence. Isaac already had a duplicate of the captain’s fanciful uniform. Brenda’s brother, who was an amateur makeup artist, stuffed cotton balls into Isaac’s cheeks—a bit like Brando in The Godfather—and made him wear his military cap at a steep angle, severing half his nose. And while Brenda’s brother waited in Isaac’s private sitting room on the second floor, the Big Guy marched out of the White House as Argentina’s air attaché. A limousine was waiting for him on New York Avenue, with Stefan Oliver behind the wheel and Sarah Rogers in the back seat, both of them carrying Berettas.

  “Boss,” Stefan said, “I could barely recognize you.”

  “That’s not what bothers me,” Sarah said. “The colonel and I could be court-martialed, Mr. President. This isn’t exactly legal.”

  “Come on. The president can’t commit an illegal act. Not while he’s in office.”

  “Isn’t that what Nixon said? And look what happened to him.”

  “Ah, Tricky Dick should have toughed it out.”

  “So now you’re a believer in Watergate,” Sarah said.

  “I’ll bet Lyndon did much worse. But he was never caught.”

  “Oh, my God,” Sarah said. “I must be mental. I mean, the colonel here is a babe in the woods—Stef, have you ever fired that Beretta of yours at a human target?”

  Stefan hunkered down into his seat. “I’ll be fine.”

  “And now we’re desperadoes in search of a man who doesn’t even exist. I can’t find the Sons of Rossiya in any of our data banks. And we have a tattoo artist with the shady name of Viktor, who’s the king of a criminal enterprise that’s so enormous it doesn’t have a beginning or an end. Then there’s the Baron Pierre François Marie de Robespierre—he is a baron, you know, a very minor one, without family connections. He launders money for South American drug lords and has his own private bank in Basel—without a legitimate address.”

  “That’s a start,” Isaac said.

  And the Big Guy seemed so pathetic and foolish in his epaulettes that Sarah sat back and decided she would come along for the ride and see what happened next. She knew that the admirals at Quantico were waiting to pounce. All she had to do was slip once and fall off her trapeze. Yet she was an analyst, and the raid on Cactus—without a single casualty—was like a sportive dance, or hunt, with a seraglio of veils. And she had to crawl under those veils. Besides, she liked the Big Guy and she was drawn to this quiet colonel with his slightly damaged son.

  They got to Gallaudet—a miscellany of Gothic mansions with turrets and spires and burnt brick walls on a vast campus that could have been the City of God. Even Isaac was intimidated by the dynamic proportions of this college for the deaf. Frederick Law Olmstead, the father of Manhattan’s Central Park, had designed the current campus in 1866, less than a year after the Civil War. The college that Olmstead envisioned had a greensward, a meadow, a chapel, and academic buildings, all connected by a subterranean tunnel system that would protect students, provide them with refuge and an escape route into the Washington woods in the event of another war.

  Isaac wondered if the subterranean route still existed under the campus. He would have loved to explore Gallaudet. The winding road into the campus enticed him, but the workman’s shack was outside the front gate, on Florida Avenue. Isaac didn’t see a light inside the shack.

  “Boss,” Stefan said, “you shouldn’t go in there alone. It could be a trap.”

  �
�If we wanted to announce ourselves,” Sarah said, “we could have brought the Secret Service. We’ll never be more than a step or two away—don’t pester him. He’s a big boy, even if he can’t tie his own shoelaces.”

  And Isaac stepped out of the limo with his laces untied. He was in his element now, on a deserted street, beside a campus with very few lights in the windows. The shack had a dented door with a missing hinge. The door wasn’t locked. He went inside, stood in the darkened doorway. He was wearing a button mike and could have signaled Sarah and Stef. A hurricane lamp was switched on, and there was the tattoo artist as Isaac had imagined him, sitting on a workbench in a velvet suit with a bandanna around his throat. His face had the brutal twist of a man who had been in many fights. His eyes, which had a liquid calm, were very dark, almost black in the light of the hurricane lamp. His mouth had once been ripped by a razor and still bore several scars. His chin had puncture marks. And yet, even with that brutal twist and all the wounds, he didn’t seem unkind.

  “I haven’t come alone,” Isaac said.

  “Yes, you have two babysitters across the road—your helicopter pilot and his sweetheart, an intel officer who has annoyed her superiors because of her allegiance to you. Both of them are armed, and they can probably hear every word we say. But I have nothing to hide, Big Balls.”

  “Have we ever met before, Monsieur?”

  The man laughed, and his wounds leapt about in the glare of the lamp. “Why are you so formal with me? I’m Viktor Danzig.”

  “Ah,” Isaac said. “So you do have a surname.”

  “It was my mother’s,” he said. “And I use it sometimes, in her honor, and sometimes not. No, we have never met—until now.”

  One thing rubbed at Isaac. “Why am I Big Balls if we haven’t met?”

  “Because that’s how you are known in penitentiaries around the country. And I admire convicts . . . their fortitude, their endurance under the duress of a prison system that has robbed them of all dignity.”

  “Then you’re familiar with the Aryan Nation?”

  “I despise their beliefs,” Viktor said, “but I visited them at a penitentiary in Illinois, taught them a few tricks with pen and ink, since they knew about my talents and had asked for me.”

  Isaac was suspicious. “How come such lowlife bastards knew more about you than I ever did? And I have half the government’s spooks behind me.”

  “It’s the curious propaganda of prisons,” Viktor said. “And your spooks have never seen the inside of a jail.”

  “Neither have you,” Isaac said.

  “But I still have the stink of Kolyma on me. It’s in my blood. And we do business with the Brotherhood. They peddle drugs for us. And they get rid of FBI rats—sit down, Big Balls, we have a lot to discuss.”

  Isaac sat on a workbench a few feet away from Viktor, who wore a Beretta of his own in a little leather cup attached to his belt. “Little Brother, this is not a town for you. It does not welcome mavericks from Manhattan. You had a perfect laboratory—New York. You could break into restaurants, visit abandoned children at Rikers, knock your own police commissioner senseless. Who would dare challenge you? The Republicans didn’t even bother to come up with a candidate. And then you allowed the Democrats to put you on the national ticket. They had to prop up that crook, Michael Storm, and who better than a mayor with a cop’s credentials? The DNC planned to hide you in the Naval Observatory and have you go around the country from time to time to shoot at bottles with your Glock.”

  “Like Buffalo Bill.”

  “But Michael exploded, and then there was you, only you, with your democratic vistas and ideals. But you were outside your own candy store. The Pink Commish who would have lowered the subway fare if his own City Council hadn’t threatened to lock him inside Bellevue.”

  Isaac squinted into the splashes of light and dark in that somber shack. “You started the lottery, didn’t you? Baron Robespierre is one of your clerks.”

  “The baron was my father’s banker. But I admit—the lottery was my idea. I had to find the means of capturing the imagination of all the business moguls who recognized you as an immediate threat—a Stalinist in the White House.”

  And the Big Guy would have to explain himself all over again. Stalin had murdered millions and sent millions more into the gulag. All the poets mocked his oily fingers and cockroach mustache, but he still kept the Germans out of Moscow. He never had a kopeck in his pockets, wore the same sweaty uniform summer and winter. He was as poor as Isaac Sidel.

  “A Stalinist couldn’t have been elected,” Isaac had to say in his own defense.

  “But you weren’t elected,” Viktor said. “You’re the accidental president. You can’t be manipulated or massaged. You’re not interested in money and power—you’re a very dangerous man.”

  “So were Lincoln and FDR,” Isaac said, incensed. “Who taught you so much about American politics?”

  “I spent half my summers here with my mother—in a cold-water flat.”

  Ariel had implied that Viktor’s mother was no more important to him than a spool of thread, that Karl, the pakhan prince of Kolyma, had carried the boy from capital to capital, sent him to private schools in Switzerland. But Isaac discovered otherwise. The boy hadn’t despised his mother—it was the pakhan who had cast her out of his domain. She was a seamstress from Danzig he had dallied with. She meant no more to the pakhan than a mote of dust in his eye. He might have given her a wad of dollars or Deutsche Marks for his moment of delight. But when he uncovered that this seamstress, Pauline, had given birth to a child in a charity ward—a boy with eyes as black as his—he was furious. He stole the boy from her, had his lawyers bribe officials to make the little boy’s birth certificate disappear and mark Pauline as a whore. She was tossed out of Danzig, and the pakhan himself paid for her passage to America.

  Groomed by Jewish butlers on the Place des Vosges, in the same house where Alexandre Dumas had once lived, Viktor didn’t believe his father’s story of a cruel, careless mother who had abandoned him at birth. He was a resilient, artful boy who searched for her traces. She was still a seamstress.

  “Where?” Isaac asked, touched by Viktor’s tale.

  “In your kingdom,” Viktor said. “On the Lower East Side.”

  “And she never got married?”

  “No,” Viktor said. “She was still in love with that gangster from Siberia.”

  “But how the devil did you find her? You couldn’t have had any help from your father.”

  “But I’m my father’s son,” he said. “I had some capital of my own. I sought out several retired homicide detectives. They located her in a month. And that’s when I heard of the mythical Pink Commish. They were frightened to death of you, that you might catch them in some corruption scheme.”

  “I hate corrupt cops,” Isaac said.

  “That’s not the point,” Viktor said, leaning into the hurricane lamp. “They would have been guilty no matter what they did. But my mother worshipped you. She said you were out on patrol every night, even escorted her once to a class at the Educational Alliance.”

  “You see,” Isaac said, with a sudden excitement. “We have met—through your mother.”

  Viktor was also wearing a button mike. He whispered into the mike, then turned to Isaac. “Big Balls, we have to cut this conversation. Bull Latham is two blocks from Gallaudet.”

  “Fuck Bull Latham,” Isaac said. “Where’s my tattoo?”

  “You haven’t earned it yet.”

  The Big Guy panicked. He didn’t want Viktor to leave on such short notice, just when he was warming up.

  “Why should the Bull give a damn about you and the Sons of Rossiya? You’re a bunch of ghosts. You’re name doesn’t even appear on the computer screens at Quantico.”

  “That’s because you haven’t punched in the right codes. I’m the most feared counterfeiter in the business. My fifties are without a flaw. Speak to your man at Treasury—Felix Mandel; he’s the only one wit
h half a brain. Your advisors have served themselves. They sit you down in the president’s seat, call you POTUS, and give you blinders to wear. Big Balls, you never had a chance. I’m the biggest informant Bull ever had, and also his biggest pain in the ass. He doesn’t own me. I do special favors for the CIA from time to time, me and my band.”

  “The besprizornye,” Isaac said.

  “Goodbye, Big Balls. I have to run. My mother survived because of you. You wouldn’t let the governor and his cronies ruin rent control.”

  “Jesus,” Isaac said, “you could have bought her a penthouse with all your loot.”

  “She wouldn’t take a nickel from me—called it blood money. Said she was ashamed of my credentials. I had to buy a plot for her in Woodlawn, near Herman Melville’s grave, or she might have ended up in Potter’s Field. You’re familiar with Herman, yes. He lived underground, like my besprizornye. Goodbye.”

  And Viktor bolted out of the shack with all the exuberance and grace of a whitetail buck. He didn’t disappear into some dark street. He raced right into Gallaudet. And Isaac realized that Viktor must have memorized the hidden tunnels of Frederick Law Olmstead. Perhaps he was one of Gallaudet’s donors, a patron of the school, and had seen Olmstead’s original plans—a school that would have been ready for another catastrophic war. He was twice as clever as the Bull, who wouldn’t have known about the tunnels and didn’t have the least idea of where to look.

  Isaac waited outside the shack with his arms folded as the sirens blared and the Bull arrived with his armada.

  “Mr. President, where’s that little cocksucker with the scars on his lip?”

  “The tattoo artist? I thought he doesn’t exist. Is Viktor Danzig in some kind of witness protection program meant for kings? You shouldn’t have lied to me, you son of a bitch, and played me for a sap.”

  “I had to lie,” the Bull said, whispering in front of his own men. “He’s diabolic, damn you—no one can forge Ulysses Grant like him. His paper was priceless. He could have destroyed us with his fucking fifty-dollar bills. Ask the people at Treasury. We had to pamper him.”