“Still,” Viktor said, “I trusted you with my life. And you, Brother Olinov, you were one of my cheloveks. You carry the tattoo of a werewolf. I painted your chest.”
“I am a werewolf,” said Pesh, “and proud to be one. I was born in the prison camps. But you have betrayed us with this sentimental attachment to Sidel—a policeman who probably pisses in his pants. You must share your art with us—you must.”
“Don’t appeal to him,” Rosa said. “We will have his paper.”
Viktor noticed her knitting needle, as it glistened like an elongated ice pick. She lunged at him with all the art of an MI6 assassin, perhaps to graze his cheek as a warning, or to stop him in his tracks with a hole in the head. Did his erstwhile partners have their own magic, their own Talmudic engraver? Why should Viktor care? He stepped outside the arc of her lunge like a matador, or a chelovek in the middle of a knife fight in Kolyma, and watched her crash into a wall. She sat there in a perfect daze.
A laundress appeared with a silencer and a lunatic smile on her face. That smile cost her, that moment of arrogance. She was rejoicing in her act of betrayal. Viktor seized an ashtray from the table and hurled it at her. It bounced off her forehead and sent her flying. But he couldn’t defeat the entire staff. Waiters arrived with their own silencers.
“Slow,” Rainer said. “We want to taste his agony. He might relent and allow us a little pinch of his paper. If not, we’ll bury him in the cellar, and who will mourn a werewolf?”
“Not me,” Michael Davit said. “Not me.”
“We’ll inherit his besprizornye,” said the dwarf who wasn’t a dwarf.
Michael Davit was amused. “Those tits? We’re better off without them.”
Viktor watched the merriment in the waiters’ eyes, that sense of their own sadistic pleasure, as if they were about to take target practice on a scarecrow. And that’s when he heard the sirens. He’d phoned the Sûreté just before the meeting began. He knew a certain chief inspector, had done him some favors. Told him to arrive at noon with a little fleet.
“Bravo,” Rainer said. “You’ve walked your way out of this, Viktor, but how will you survive on your own, even with your band of aging orphans?”
“You’re the ones who should worry,” Viktor said. “Rosa, you won’t have your shops very long. I will ask your landlords to have another look at all your leases. And the rue du Cherche-Midi will become a labyrinth. Deliveries will be impossible, customers will be scarce. Your little clothing empire will be without a clientele.”
Rosa sat calmly on the floor, awakening from her little nap, but the princes started to panic. “It’s silly to declare war,” said Rainer. “We will find a solution, but it must be without Sidel. His heartbeat is not negotiable.”
Viktor shoved past Pesh and Michael Davit, slapped a laundress and two waiters as he left the dining room, and marched out onto the tiny, hidden boulevard near the riverbank. There was a blaze of white from the high-rises that nearly cut into Viktor’s eyes. He saluted the police cars in front of the hotel. The chief inspector stepped out of his own sedan to greet him. They spoke French, a language Viktor had explored as a little boy on the Place des Vosges. With his father and the other pakhans he was perfectly fluent in English and Russian. But he couldn’t find much melody in his voice with the chief inspector. He was stuttering, in fact. He could have had the entire troupe at the Hotel des Artisans taken into custody, yet what would he have accomplished? There were no corpses inside the hotel, no signs of conflict. Yes, the waiters and laundresses had their silencers and might have sat six months inside La Santé. But Rainer and the rest would have snaked out of reach of the Sûreté. Rainer’s million-dollar lawyers could have outwitted any magistrate.
The problem’s been solved, he said, and slipped a packet of money into the chief inspector’s sleeve.
“Impeccable, Monsieur Viktor.”
The cars drove off, leaving Viktor with that slash of sunlight off the high-rises. He’d had a very bitter revelation at the hotel. He could trust no one—not his apprentices, not his associates, not even Sidel.
11
The baron was sitting with his two bodyguards in a mini compartment on board the bullet train to Basel. He’d already cut off Renata Swallow’s monthly allowance. He’d closed Viktor’s accounts, and he was warehousing whatever paper “Rembrandt” had left with him—immaculate fifties that could have been hung on the walls of museums as works of art. He had to side with Rainer and his other partners. Viktor had become as temperamental—and reckless—as a prima donna. He was a pakhan who had lost his touch. He spent half his time marking the skin of random people—soldiers or convicts and high-class whores like Renata Swallow—with little memorials. What did it all mean? He carried around his wooden box of ink and tools rather than his engraver’s kit. The baron couldn’t afford that luxury, not in the winter of ’89 when the Soviet Union was caving in and the economies of Eastern Europe were up for grabs—it was like stealing into a barnyard with a bunch of sacks and shovels. The loot was everywhere.
His mobile rang, but there was very poor reception on the bullet train. He fiddled with the antenna, and a voice came through like the echo of some familiar ghost. It was Rainer Wolff from West Berlin, as if he were speaking from the netherworld.
“Rainer, I cannot hear you.”
“Your bodyguards,” the ghost said.
“They’re tip-top. The best in the business. They come from Michael Davit’s crew.”
They had to be careful, since they weren’t on a landline, and the baron couldn’t tell who was listening. “Yes, yes, I am disposing of Rembrandt’s assets—he must be submerged somewhere, like a submarine. Davit’s lads will find him. It is a great pity. But we never asked him to self-destruct . . . indeed, it is time to cash in on our lottery. And we’ll start another—for Rembrandt. Goodbye, Rainer.”
The first bodyguard was gone. “Where is he?” the baron asked his second bodyguard, who sat across from him.
“Ian?” the bodyguard said. “He’s in the loo, love. He’ll be back. Ian’s a good lad.”
But Ian didn’t return after ten minutes. And the baron snapped at the second bodyguard. “Find him. I don’t want to be here alone.”
“Right you are.”
And the second bodyguard left. Viktor sat down in his place, and the baron could feel his bowels twist.
“I’ll scream,” he said. “This is an exclusive train. And there are many more conductors in first class.”
“Scream your head off,” Viktor said. “I bought out every ticket in this car—it’s empty.”
“But I have two bodyguards. The best in the business. Michael Davit’s lads.”
“They won’t be back.”
“But they’re incorruptible,” the baron said. “Ian and his partner can’t be bought.”
“They won’t be back.”
The baron started to cry. “They threatened me, Viktor. Michael Davit put a gun to my head, and Rainer was behind that gun.”
“Pierrot, please. I let you in close, and you saw how indecisive I was about Sidel. You read that as weakness. It wasn’t. We can’t always kill. Sometimes it’s a question of civility.”
He slit the baron’s throat with a razor. The baron didn’t scream—it was a gentle stroke, without effort, it seemed. Bubbles appeared in the baron’s mouth. He started to say something and stopped. Viktor laid his head back, as he would have done with a sleeping child. He sat there. Not a single conductor came. He got off at the next stop with his besprizornye, millionaires in their fifties, with scars on their faces, like Viktor.
Pierrot had been right. Michael Davit’s men couldn’t be bought. Viktor and his besprizornye had to strangle them in the corridor, with a wire. They had to wear leather gloves, or the wire would have cut deep into their own hands. They’d hurled both bodyguards out a broken window of the bullet train. Michael Davit’s men should have been more attentive, should have noticed the empty seats, some of them filled by the besp
rizornye. They had covered Pierrot with the latest copy of Paris Match and wiped off the surplus blood.
The conductors wouldn’t discover him until the bullet train arrived in Switzerland. They would talk about the banker from Basel for days. A corpse in a first-class car. It would remind them of an unsolved murder they had read about in Paris Match. Italian gangsters from the Riviera, no doubt. Or a feud among Corsican cutthroats.
PART FOUR
12
It was all confusing to Stefan Oliver. The Marine commandant at Quantico avoided him; the admirals at Navy Intel whispered in his presence; the FBI instructors and recruits stared at him as if he were some idol touched with leprosy or the plague. His fellow pilots and crew were careful around him; that pure sense of play was gone. He couldn’t even set up a ping-pong match with any of his rivals. He had to race around the gym all alone in his silkies. Stef had become the pariah of his own squadron; as the president’s pilot, he was caught in the middle of a feud between the admirals and his boss. He had problems with every lift package on account of his mechanics, who were loyal to the admirals at the base. Stef was living permanently at the White House with Max and their Serbian maid, Karina, while the FBI harassed her with background checks that never seemed to end. He was a Marine at odds with his own service. The duty officer at Quantico was very blunt with him.
“Wildfire to Rio, how’s life in the attic? Are they fattening you up with peanut butter pie?”
“Rio to Wildfire, it’s none of your fucking business.”
“Well, homeboy, you’re getting back your roommate.”
Stef wasn’t even listening. “Roger that,” and he tuned out the frequency.
But Wildfire wasn’t wrong. Sarah Rogers returned to the attic, in Isaac’s bathrobe and all. Her eyes couldn’t focus. All her flintiness was gone, that rough edge he admired. Her skin was very sallow. She looked like a wraith in curly black hair. The bastards must have kept her in deep cover at Quantico. She began to weep like a child. He’d never seen Sarah cry. It tore at him, and for a moment he wasn’t a widower and could grasp beyond his own grief.
“What’s wrong? I’ll never hurt you. I promise.”
“Stef, I’m their spy. I have to report back to them—Navy Intel. All our intimate acts. Every time you eat me out I have to describe it in detail. They’re gunning after you and the president.”
“Does the boss know?”
“He says he still wants me around, even if I have to wear a wire—I missed you, Stef. All the while they kept me in the freezer at Quantico, I missed you more and more. I could feel my hand slide down the fur on your chest.”
They kissed in one of the attic’s utility closets. She never bothered to take off Isaac’s robe. He was tender and fierce with her, as fierce as any satyr. It excited Stef that she was tattling on him about their sexual exploits to her bosses at Quantico. He felt like a porn star.
The daily briefings grew more and more urgent. Secretary of State Colin Fremont had just returned from a whirlwind tour of Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin. Fremont was elegant, brash, and brittle as sandpaper. He never wore a necktie, not even at an embassy dinner. He replaced it with a red scarf and a black silk shirt with a soft collar. That was Colin’s uniform. He spent more time in the air than he did at his bachelor pad near Dupont Circle or his ancestral home in Boise. Isaac didn’t give a damn that there had been rumors of a love affair with a male professor while Colin was a student at Swarthmore.
“Isaac,” said the chief counsel of his selection committee, “this gay business could come back and bite you on the ass.”
“I still want Colin Fremont,” Isaac said. And here he was, arrogant as always, and the shrewdest member of Isaac’s court.
“They did a dance at the Kremlin, Mr. President. We fed on wild boar and drowned in Veuve Clicquot. The Russkies are all curious about you. The Pink Commish—Stalin with a Glock. But I could see the terror in their eyes. The Veuve Clicquot tasted like piss. They’re running out of dollars. And they print their rubles on toilet paper.”
“What are you driving at, Mr. Secretary?” Tim Vail asked in that superior tone of his.
“They’re desperate. We don’t dare make a hostile move. But the Bolshoi goes on with five-hour performances and their ice-cream factories hum with new flavors. I learned more in Prague from a junior finance minister than I did in Moscow. The Russkies can’t buy dollars, so they’re trying to kidnap some master engraver and print their own product, but they can’t afford high-quality silk. Whatever they touch is atrocious.”
Isaac muscled his way in. “Tell us about Prague.”
“The president’s castle is filled with mousetraps. The maids can’t afford panties and bras. They have to settle for military underwear. Half of them are whores and all of them are members of the StB—the secret police. The whole country trades in counterfeit dollars. I think we ought to help. A high-quality product of their own would make them less dependent on the Soviets. We’d be the first ones in Prague Castle, Mr. President, ready to pounce when the shit begins to fly, and it will.”
“Are you suggesting that we give those Czech gangsters a fortune of fake fifties?” Ramona asked with a growl.
“Yes.”
Isaac was falling in love with his Secretary of State. “Bull, do we have any of Viktor’s paper on hand to show Mr. Fremont?”
Bull Latham removed a fifty-dollar bill from a plastic case in his pocket and handed the bill and a jeweler’s loupe to Colin Fremont.
Fremont peered at Ulysses Grant through the loupe. “This stuff is priceless—pure gold. We’ll put the Kremlin out of the business. Who’s the engraver?”
“He uses many names, Mr. Secretary. We call him Rembrandt. He’s one of my prize informants. I have enough of his product on hand to supply the Czechs—if POTUS approves.”
“What will it do to our economy with queer fifties floating around?” asked Tim Vail, who liked to serve as the Cromwell of Isaac’s court.
“It won’t leave a dent,” said Felix Mandel. “As Mr. Fremont says, the product is pure gold. And if we control the supply, where’s the harm?”
The Secretary of State rubbed his hands together as a sign of his appetite for the deal. “That will make Karel Ludvik a happy man.” Karel was current occupant of the Castle. The Soviets had put him into power after the Prague Spring of ’68, with its quiet revolution that was crushed by Soviet tanks and artillery. He was a minor poet, novelist, and diplomat with sterling communist credentials. He’d also been a colonel in the StB. But Colin Fremont found him “a man of culture” who rebelled against the atrocities of the secret police. “Karel’s eyes have turned toward Washington rather than Moscow, Mr. President. He’s one of your biggest fans—in camera, of course. But he would welcome a visit.”
“So would London, Paris, and Bonn,” said Bull Latham. “But POTUS can’t travel. There’s a price on his head.”
“Indeed,” said Colin Fremont. “We’ve heard rumbles about some mysterious raffle that predicts the president’s demise. What does it mean?”
“A lot,” said Tim Vail. “There are rogue agents everywhere—in the Kremlin, in the StB. They’d all like to collect.”
“That’s what Karel told me,” said Colin Fremont. “Can’t even trust his own men. ‘It’s open season on Isaac Sidel,’ he said.”
“Kafka,” Isaac muttered to himself. His mavens pricked their ears and listened to the president. “I want to walk the streets where Kafka walked, sit in the cafés and coffeehouses where he sat.”
Tim was exasperated with Sidel. “That Prague is long gone. You can’t go on a sentimental journey, sir. You’re the prince of West—”
“I’m no prince,” Isaac snapped at his Oliver Cromwell. “I’m a cop who landed in the White House.”
“Still a prince in the eyes of the world,” said Tim, “and this is hard-nosed politics. We have to catch Karel at his own game, bend him to our will with a bargaining chip—Rembrandt’s paper.”
“No, no, no,” said the Secretary of State with his own flair for drama. “POTUS is right. We take politics out of the picture, at least as an appetizer. The president isn’t visiting Prague to cause problems for the Russkies. He’s recapturing his own literary past. That will play, but there’s a slight dampener—President Ludvik says Prague isn’t safe. We can’t mount every spire with sharpshooters. And the Castle itself is compromised; it’s filled with so many palaces and gardens, you could wander around for days and never find yourself; it’s like a souk for secret agents, a clearinghouse, and everyone has murder on his mind.”
“Then what’s our strategy for the president?” Ramona asked.
“We accept Karel’s invitation,” Colin said. “We make it strictly a cultural tour—POTUS is making a pilgrimage to Franz Kafka’s birthplace. But he can’t go to Prague, not in public, at least. Karel has his own dacha about fifty clicks northwest of Prague Castle. It’s an old hunting lodge, a haven once upon a time for Czech noblemen and their mistresses. It’s isolated and impenetrable. Very few people know its whereabouts.”
Ramona grinned. “That was the word on Cactus—impenetrable. And look what happened.”
“I don’t give a crap,” Isaac said. “Get back to Karel. We’re going to Prague.”
He had to see Kafka’s birthplace, suck up the atmosphere and vanish for a moment within the famous Czech fog, even if the fog itself was an American fairy tale. He didn’t care what the communist regime thought of Kafka, a Prague Yid who left around unfinished manuscripts in crystalline German prose, a tubercular werewolf who told about miraculous transformations and hunger artists. Isaac was mystified when he discovered that Kafka had been six feet tall. He’d always imagined him as a tiny man in a bowler hat who could have walked into a cafeteria on East Broadway and asked for a bowl of barley soup.
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