Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  “And were you ever planning to tell me, Bull?”

  “No,” the Bull said. “It was for your own protection, your own good. He’s been betting heavy dollars that you won’t last. That’s why we put you in a cocoon. Matt Malloy shits a brick every time you leave the White House. That rumpus at your dacha was some kind of foreplay, a first act. The little bastard hired General Tollhouse to mock us. He might have finished you off tonight if we hadn’t wised up to your masquerade. You look wonderful in your epaulettes. We let him listen into our frequencies.”

  “And you still couldn’t grab him,” Isaac said, walking away from the Bull. He was caught in some merciless web. The people paid to protect him were always a few paces behind someone else’s curve. And the culprits, the killers in waiting, sat on angelic wings and rescued him at the last minute. It wasn’t fair. Isaac should have had more involvement in his own fate.

  It was a fool’s paradise. He held on to Brenda Brown as his virtual chief of staff since she wasn’t on any government payroll and couldn’t be fired. He held on to Colonel Oliver as his helicopter pilot because it would have been complicated to remove the commander of Marine Squadron One without the president’s approval. Stef was too damn visible, but Sarah Rogers had never really been assigned to the Big Guy. The chiefs of Naval Intel were fierce about guarding their own entitlements, yet they still pulled Sarah from the White House and hid her deep within Quantico. These admirals dared Sidel to do something about it. He went to Quantico in a presidential caravan, with sharpshooters and a medical team, and was stopped at the gate. The facility was in lockdown, the admirals had declared—no personnel, authorized or not, could enter or leave until the lockdown was lifted. Marine Base Quantico was a sprawling, secretive site that also housed the FBI Academy and half a dozen covert combat schools.

  Isaac returned to Pennsylvania Avenue with his tail tucked between his legs. He couldn’t get near Captain Rogers. She was incommunicado as far as the president was concerned. Brenda Brown advised him to look for another intelligence harpy who wasn’t stuck so far up some admiral’s ass. But Isaac wanted Sarah. He summoned Felix Mandel, chief assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury. They sat on a couch in the Oval Office, Felix in a rumpled tie. He could have sunk the Soviet Union by substituting the ruble with one of his phantom currencies. He was the Darth Vader of the currency markets. Economic ministers from all over the planet paid homage to Felix. His Nobel Prize was like an open wound for these ministers, who waited in line to sit with Felix and beg him not to tinker with their currencies. Felix Mandel was a native son of Manhattan, and Isaac had inherited him as assistant manager of the budget in the first year of his mayoralty. Felix worked out of a cavernous closet in the Municipal Building, like some modern Bartleby who was a numbers cruncher rather than a scribe. It was before his Nobel and Felix was utterly unrecognized. But Isaac cherished him. Felix never lied about the budget.

  “Mr. Mayor, I can’t tell you how many teachers we have in the public school system. Firemen, yes. But teachers come and go. None of us can keep track. The city payroll is a behemoth that feeds on its own flesh. And our revenue is beyond anyone’s crystal ball. One week we’re bankrupt and the next we’re a fatted calf.”

  “Then how can I plan, Felix, how can I take the homeless out of city shelters and put them into public housing?”

  “You can’t. The housing might disappear tomorrow.”

  “Then were all my campaign promises a lie?”

  “Mayor Sidel, that’s the black hole of politics—promises, promises.”

  Felix was soon whisked away to Washington, and Isaac was left with a swollen cadre of jesters and clowns. He never solved the housing crisis. The homeless multiplied. He blustered and finagled, walked in and out of Rikers with his Glock. He was visible and beloved. One morning a deranged man at a city shelter tried to carve him up with a kitchen knife. That’s the closest he ever got to a mayor’s immortality. He soothed the man, and they ended up playing pinochle together. But now he’d crept down the rabbit hole and stumbled into the fourth dimension. There was nothing random about the assault on his life.

  He drank coffee with Felix Mandel and shared a piece of carrot cake from a local farmers’ market. “Felix, can’t you put some heat on the budget director and cancel the paychecks of certain admirals who are in revolt?”

  “You can pension them off for dereliction of duty. But the provost marshal will eat you alive. And God forbid if there’s ever a court-martial. You’ll have to testify, Mr. President.”

  “All I want to do is stop their paychecks.”

  “Then you’ll have to run up to the Hill and argue in front of Appropriations. Do you want Congress to declare that you’re having a secret vendetta against the admirals of Navy Intel? Get off that track. Your numbers are down. You’ll go into free fall.”

  Isaac brooded a bit and summoned up his conversation with Viktor outside Gallaudet. “Why is that tattoo artist such a no-no? His name doesn’t appear on any list.”

  Isaac’s maven was silent for a moment. The mention of the tattoo artist had made him ill at ease. He could barely look at Isaac. “You have no idea of that man’s genius, and his power to destroy whatever he has in mind. It’s not just the artistry of his plates. He has half a dozen apprentices, men—and women—who can perform miracles with soft steel. They’re master engravers, every one; and they seem to replicate like rabbits.”

  “So how do you deal with Viktor Danzig?”

  “We bargain—and we beg. We pay him not to circulate that soft metal of his.”

  “Then he holds us at ransom.”

  “Worse,” said Felix. “He commits atrocious deeds, sometimes in our behalf, sometimes not. He and his aging orphans are an army within an army.”

  “And who’s responsible for keeping him in line? It can’t be the Bull. He tried to capture Viktor.”

  “Ah, it’s a game of cat and mouse. But Viktor’s the cat, and we are all his many mice.”

  “Viktor said I should ask you about my own slim chance for survival.”

  Felix’s face was twitching. “We shouldn’t get onto that subject.”

  “What are my chances?”

  “Almost none.”

  “But the Dow has risen a hundred points since I was sworn in.”

  Felix smiled like Bartleby in his old municipal cavern. “There are much better indicators than the Dow. The managers of the biggest hedge funds are all betting you won’t survive your maiden year.”

  Isaac suddenly felt as if he’d lost his own language. Perhaps that’s why the tattoo artist had called Gallaudet a dummy school. He hadn’t meant to be cruel. Isaac had become a man without his own proper signals. “Ariel Moss said I should resign.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Felix said.

  “Then what should I do? This mansion is no safer than my dacha. And I’m not a guy who likes to sit at home. I imagine the Bull can’t wait to inherit my chair, with Ramona right next to him, as the solitary Witch of the West Wing.”

  “You’re wrong,” Felix said. “The Bull is as much a policeman as you are. He couldn’t bear to preside over the death of a sitting president.”

  Isaac started to laugh. “Then I suppose I’ll have to sit shiva for myself while I’m still alive.”

  PART THREE

  10

  They could have met in Geneva’s Old Town, with its fairyland flavor, or in Amsterdam, where he would have had a perfect escape route along the canals, but he picked Paris to meet with all these money launderers, maniacs, crypto-bankers, and ministers of crime. They had billions at their disposal in hard cash. Viktor had found a nondescript hotel in the thirteenth arrondissement, near Chinatown, with its vast plain of high-rises. He’d booked every room in the hotel. He was wary of his own partners, but the waiters and laundresses at the Hotel des Artisans worked for him. They all carried silencers under their blouses and bibs. He might have to turn the hotel into a killing ground, so he sent the manager on a month�
�s vacation. He was aware that his partners had their own accomplices and also plotted among themselves, but he couldn’t operate without such risks. There was too much wealth at stake. His partners were angry at him because he refused to initiate measures that would have favored them. They could have made a killing in Mother Russia, but Viktor hesitated, Viktor stalled. So they sank their talons into America’s soft underbelly, but Viktor wouldn’t share his paper with these princes, wouldn’t give them access to his prize plates. Their own paper was crude, and couldn’t have weakened the American economy. Half their associates were already in prison, and they didn’t want T-men on their tail.

  “But you, Viktor, you are our Rembrandt,” said Rainer Wolff of West Berlin. Rainer owned newspapers, publishing houses, and nightclubs. But he couldn’t expand his holdings without Viktor and his apprentices, with their little sacks of engravers’ tools. “You must give us these children—or share them with us.”

  The others seemed to agree, or perhaps they wanted to give the impression that they were within Rainer’s reach. There was Pesh Olinov, who’d just come from Moscow, and who worked for and against Gorbachev at the same time, crippling him while he held him aloft; there was Michael Davit from Manchester, who’d made his fortune with a string of tobacco shops and had his own snug little school for assassins who were almost as invisible as the besprizornye, and Viktor was convinced that Davit had brought some of these thugs from Manchester and had put them at Rainer’s disposal; there was Pavel Lind from Poland, a publisher of pornography who owned a fleet of truckers in a collapsing communist empire; Pavel also controlled the Eastern Bloc’s black market in dollars and had the most to gain from Viktor’s magical paper.

  Pavel was desperate for dollars, and half crazed. He watched Viktor like an embattled hawk.

  Then there was Pierrot, the Baron de Robespierre, who was one of Viktor’s messengers and confidants, but the baron had his own allegiances, and Viktor’s other partners kept their money in the baron’s invisible vaults inside a bomb shelter in Basel. Thus it was hard to tell where the baron’s real allegiances lay, and at what price he would sell out. And then there was Rosa Malamud, who had her own line of fashion shops on the Left Bank; she’d done a bit of freelancing for Shin Bet and MI6; her weapon of choice was a sharpened knitting needle that she would dig between a man’s eyes. Viktor wasn’t frightened of her violence or her volatility. She was quicker on her feet than Viktor’s partner-princes. She was fifty years old and had all the cash she would ever need, yet she sat in the darkened dining room at the Hotel des Artisans. It wasn’t greed that had brought her here, or adventure. She was curious about this pakhan with the wooden box. Perhaps she’d slept with Viktor’s father once upon a time and her maternal instincts had turned deadly. Viktor watched for any signs of the knitting needle.

  They must have elected Rainer Wolff as their spokesman. Viktor had avoided West Berlin, because Rainer had enough punch to bribe every single border guard, and Viktor might have ended up in some Stasi cell in East Berlin without his passport. He was more comfortable in Paris, even if it was Rosa’s roost, and he had a lot to fear, but his father had settled in Paris, as much as a pakhan could settle in any one place, and he felt nimble in its streets. He loved the odors of each Metro station, loved the little parks with their ping-pong tables topped with marble and mosaics. Paris was his bled, his personal canteen, his wanderer’s home, and he wouldn’t allow a clever maniac like Rosa to ruin it for him. So he listened to his partners’ grievances.

  “Mensch,” Rainer said, “you cannot have a monopoly on those dollars of yours. You must share.”

  “I have shared,” Viktor said. “Rainer, you have a very short memory. When you were in a hole and needed my paper to settle your debts with some gangster from MI6, I did not hesitate for a second. I prepared a special plate.”

  Rainer whistled through his teeth. “A masterpiece! And I am forever grateful. But gratitude can only go so far. We have to stop the Yankee invasion. Their spooks are everywhere. We cannot conduct our business.”

  “And you think my paper will end your problems.”

  “Yes,” Rainer said. “They’ll pull their bloodhounds from our territories if their own market is flooded.”

  Viktor stared into the heat of those hostile faces. “They’ll come at you more and more. They’ll close your shops. Pavel, they’ll arrest all your traders. You won’t be able to move the paper you have. And they’ll whack you in the head out of pure spite. We’ve seen it happen before.”

  “Ah,” Michael Davit said, “but we never had paper of your quality—we have our own atom bomb and you tell us we can’t use it.”

  “Stop that,” Viktor said, “I’ve given you enough to make you all rich.”

  “What about Sidel?” Rosa asked, looking like a delirious spider in a designer dress. “We paid Tollhouse a fortune to get rid of him. You contributed to the pot. And I thought we had the whole Republican Party in our pocket. Didn’t we bribe those bastards?”

  “Ah, the good old Republican Party,” Viktor said. “It’s like bribing a sea of sand.”

  “So what? Sidel’s a dreamer. He’ll turn Yankee Land into one big welfare state. All our holdings will be flushed into the toilet. We can’t afford him, Viktor. People will riot. I’ll lose all my shops. Tollhouse has killed for us. Why did you stop him now?”

  “Because,” Viktor said. “I did not fancy killing Sidel.”

  “Is that how we conduct business?” asked Pesh Olinov, the dwarf. Pesh was the only one at this table who had been with the besprizornye, who’d risen up from the ranks, and he was the only one with the mark of a werewolf on his chest. The others weren’t werewolves. They were ruthless entrepreneurs, but they hadn’t been reborn in a prison camp.

  “Brother,” Pesh said, “it is out of your hands. Assassins have been sent.”

  And Viktor knew in his bones that this meeting would end badly. But he had to make one last attempt to avoid a bloodbath in a hotel that didn’t have a decent view—the high-rises that flashed in the sun could have been a land of graves above the ground. He would have liked one final stroll along the Place des Vosges.

  “Assassins can be recalled,” Viktor said.

  Rainer chortled to himself; he’d been a young captain in the Abwehr during World War II, a master spy involved in the Abwehr’s gigantic counterfeit racket. It was their last desperate fling; they hoped to flood the world market with American dollars and bring down the currency. But their engravings were rushed, and the thieves they hired were no better than amateurish louts. The paper these men produced would have been rejected at every bank and couldn’t have fooled the simplest of shopkeepers. The entire operation was botched. Rainer was demoted and sent to the Eastern Front. But he never lost that desire to bring down America and its currency.

  “I will recall no one,” Rainer said. “You cannot stop us this time, Viktor. Even if none of us leaves this hotel alive, it will not change a thing. Come, we’ll all do our little dance of death. I don’t mind. But you have your proof, Viktor. Isaac the Pure will never change. Didn’t we woo him while he was mayor? We buttered up his lieutenants, but we couldn’t get near him. He was too busy visiting shelters for the homeless. We wanted to rebuild the Lower East Side and all its crumbling dreck, turn it into a shopping center and an amusement park for foreign tourists. We spent millions in lawyers’ fees, and what did Sidel say? He’d rather have his pickle barrels than our amusement park.”

  “It wasn’t out of malice,” Viktor said. “He’s like a child with this enormous toy at his disposal—the presidency.”

  “A preposterous child, a child we can’t afford.”

  Rainer stared at Michael Davit with a kind of crushing omniscience. Viktor had to prepare himself for the worst; his partners had met without him and planned this escapade. “And now you want revenge, Rainer, because he wouldn’t let you invade Manhattan.”

  It was the spider lady who answered him. “Don’t belittle us, Viktor.
We’re not in the revenge business. Sidel should have stayed in Manhattan where he belongs. He threatens all our enterprises. He’s a disaster as a president. You know this. His secret services run rampant around him. We could deal with Bull Latham. He understands the truth of your paper, but Sidel tilts at windmills while our profits go down and down. He must be replaced. You agreed with us. What changed your mind?”

  Viktor had no reasonable answer. Perhaps it had something to do with his waiflike mother and Isaac’s battles to preserve rent control. He saw Sidel as some kind of zek, entombed in his own spiritual prison camp—the first werewolf to inhabit the White House. Viktor didn’t have the will to launch him into eternity. That was not his gift. He knew now that his partners had bribed the waiters and laundresses who were meant to ensure his own safety. The Hotel des Artisans had turned into a trap. He shouldn’t have been that naïve. Paris was as much a graveyard as Geneva or West Berlin.

  “Tell me, Little Brothers and Sister Rosa, how do you mean to flourish without my paper?”

  “We have reckoned with that possibility,” Rainer said. “One of your own apprentices now works for us.”

  “Mensch, even if you had them all, you would still have nothing. They are wonderful engravers—I taught them all my strokes—but they still lack the final touch. A crooked line in Grant’s bowtie, a missing curlicue in his beard. I have to improve upon their artistry. Bull Latham would spot these errors even without his loupe.”

  “Ah,” said Rainer, “then we will keep you here as our guest until you are in a more negotiable mood.”

  One thing in this conspiracy enraged Viktor. “And you, Pierrot, my littlest brother, who was my father’s pet, why did you join these plotters? You have all the wealth in the world, and I have made you even wealthier.”

  The baron didn’t apologize. “My dear Viktor, your besprizornye are now middle-aged, some are old men. They’ve lost their teeth. And many of them grumble about you. They worry about their pakhan.”