Winter Warning

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Winter Warning Page 19

by Jerome Charyn


  Isaac got used to the chaplain’s lumbering gait. But there were other issues, outside regret and remorse. The clock was ticking, and Isaac had an assassin in the house, unless it was all a big lie, and Shin Bet was trying to frighten him for his sins. Still, he couldn’t stop worrying about Max. The Pink Commish had to plead with his helicopter pilot. “It’s only temporary. Until we find the fuck.”

  But Colonel Oliver kept postponing his move back to Arlington with Max and Karina. “Boss, we’ll do it tomorrow, I swear. You know how Max loves the attic. And Karina has her washing machine and ironing board. She’s in heaven.”

  Isaac put pressure on the Bull, and forced the FBI to stop harassing Stef’s Serbian maid. Karina had arrived in America with the help of a rich uncle in Arlington. She was a tall, zaftig blonde who reminded Isaac of a forgotten TV actress, Dagmar, who’d had a moment of fame in the fifties. Karina was gentle with Max, and her malapropisms made the boy feel a little less anguished about his own duel with the English language.

  Karina had a pungent perfume. Her body moved with its own kind of lazy lightning under her housedress. Isaac couldn’t deny that he was attracted to this Serbian Dagmar. Karina seemed to grow fleshier under Isaac’s gaze, with all the frightful tremors of a sudden metamorphosis. She wore nail polish and a hint of mascara—a blond femme fatale in a housedress. But she never flirted with the Big Guy, never played the seductress. She was always proper near the boy, protected him without trying to replace his lost mother. Karina had aspirations. She hoped to work with the blind at Gallaudet University. She was teaching herself to “sign” at night, and she would practice with the boy. She had the very best sponsor. She lived in the White House.

  Isaac would have to send her and the boy away until he found the hired gun. He wondered how much of an oracle Sol Ben-Zion really was. Yet that Frankenstein from Shin Bet had been adamant, and Isaac began to meditate. Ben-Zion must have lived through unbearable carnage in Beirut—massacre after massacre along the Green Line. It was the Israeli incursion into Lebanon and the Camp David Accords that had driven Ariel out of office. He resigned in ’83 and became the Hermit of Haifa. And all the carnage had bound up Ariel, Mordecai, and Sol Ben-Zion in one great broth of blood.

  Isaac began thinking of that blond boy inside the Manhattan mosque. His name was also Elijah, like the army chaplain. The boy preacher had an infernal poetry. He could sermonize like Satan. Isaac had to look into his raw red eyes.

  He would often sit in the Cosmetology Room with Rabbi Silvers. Isaac loved the reclining chairs. It was a beautician’s paradise. The Big Guy had a wife somewhere in Miami, the Countess Kathleen, but the salon lacked a genuine First Lady.

  “Do you suffer remorse?” the chaplain asked.

  “About the boy preacher? I dream of him sometimes. His rabbit’s red eyes.”

  “You might have convinced him to leave with the others.”

  “There was no time for talk therapy,” Isaac said. Young Elijah had begun to twitch. He wanted to destroy everyone in the mosque. All he could see was Satan.

  “I had to glock him,” Isaac told this Elijah.

  “I like that word—glock,” the chaplain said. “It has a wonderful flavor, but you executed that boy.”

  “I did. And I would do it again. But righteousness doesn’t rub away the bad dreams.”

  “Do you glock the boy in your dreams?” the chaplain asked.

  Isaac rose up in his reclining chair like a sea lion. “Silvers, since when are you a shrink?”

  “I’m your rabbi,” the chaplain said. “I have a right to ask.”

  “I never glock him in the dream. We dance.”

  “Dance,” the chaplain said, rolling that word around on his tongue. “Isn’t it peculiar?”

  “He’s wearing lipstick. I mean, he’s not a girl. He’s Elijah, the cracked prophet. But he’s wearing lipstick. And we dance. He has tears of blood in his eyes.”

  “Like a suffering Christ,” the chaplain said.

  “Yeah, a Christ with murder on his mind.”

  Perhaps Isaac did want absolution. He wasn’t sure. He noticed a tall, busty blonde come toward him with a sway of her hips—he could have sworn it was Dagmar, broken loose from the fifties. Then the vision vanished. He saw the Serbian maid with Max. She crept down onto the carpets like a four-legged beast, while Maximilian rode on her back. But there was something remiss in her pose, something malaprop and perverse, as if it was designed for Isaac’s benefit, not the boy’s. Yet Max was delighted.

  “Karina, are we g-g-going to China—or Bethlehem?”

  “Is China on next floor?”

  Isaac was startled by her prowess, and the rich purpose of each move as she crept along the carpets. It excited him. He’d been as solitary as a monk at the White House.

  “Karina, I command you—f-f-fly to Bethlehem.”

  “Maxy,” she said with a hoarse laugh. “I have not dragon’s wings, or motor in my heart. I will never train to fly. We must borrow your papa’s wagon.”

  Isaac could see the amazing curve of Karina’s spine. She drove past Isaac with the boy, into some unknown interior of the attic, while Isaac sat with the military chaplain and imagined himself gripping Dagmar’s broad back. He had such unholy thoughts, he had to look away from Rabbi Silvers.

  19

  He must have dozed off in the Cosmetology Room. Had the chaplain gone back to Fort Meade? Isaac was wearing his subaltern’s robe, like Abe Lincoln. He must have gone down to the residential floor and come back upstairs, a sleepwalker in disguise. The salon was dark, but Isaac could see a crack of light in the attic. He glanced at the green glow of the numerals on his watch. It was well before midnight. He could hear a hissing sound. He stood up and marched into the narrow mezzanine.

  Dagmar. . .

  Karina hovered over the attic ironing board in her panties and bra. She didn’t seem brazen. She was humming some Serbian tune. Isaac crept up behind her, could sniff that powerful perfume.

  “Karina,” he said, “didn’t you leave for Arlington with the colonel and Max?”

  She twisted her head around with all the aplomb of a television queen. Karina didn’t hide her succulent flesh. Isaac was a bit ashamed. He had a king-sized tent sticking out the front of his subaltern’s robe.

  “Mr. President,” she said without a waver in her voice, “I had to finish ironing. Maxy left me behind.”

  He wasn’t even certain what happened next. He found himself licking the armpits of Max’s live-in maid. He loved the salty aroma. He was ridden with guilt, even as he hovered over her, like some Dracula. Had he used the power of his office to brand this Serbian Dagmar with the mark of his own spittle? She had the Big Guy’s number. She was still at the ironing board all the while he caressed her. She was pounding away at a pair of Max’s pants. Isaac heard the iron’s white-hot whistle.

  “Mr. President, we play country girl and big bad wolf?”

  Yes, he wanted to say, yes, yes, yes.

  But he wasn’t a big bad wolf. He was bemoaning his fate as a prisoner of the White House when he noticed a nasty curl on Karina’s lip. There was little seduction in her eyes. He managed to swerve under her elbow as she brandished the iron in her fist. She batted at him with her free hand. She must have had military training somewhere. She shoved him right across the mezzanine. The ironing board collapsed. Isaac could have shouted for help, but she must have known he wasn’t a shouter. She was toying with Sidel. She meant to push his face in with the iron.

  And he thought to himself. This fucking madness has to stop.

  All the malapropisms were gone. She was suddenly as fluent as that boy prophet, Elijah.

  “The attic is empty,” she said. “It’s Karel’s birthday. I made a reservation at the Old Ebbitt Grill. They’ll get drunk on chicken wings. Sidel, you should have known better than to come at me with your prick like a battle lance. You’ll pay for that.”

  “You aren’t from Serbia, are you?”

 
“I couldn’t tell Serbia from a cat’s ass,” she said with a murderous chuckle, though her laughter shaved off a bit of her heat. And now Isaac took a leap of faith. Fuck the presidency! He’d been a mayor with his fists, and had never been more or less than a street cop with the crippling shrewdness of the streets.

  “You trained with General Tollhouse.”

  He’d startled her. But her toughness returned.

  “Does it show, Mr. President?”

  “You must have been with Wildwater at Warm Springs. But Tollhouse didn’t send you. That’s not his style. Tollhouse wouldn’t have been so oblique.”

  She was still stalking him with the iron. But Isaac had derailed her a bit with his own gift of gab.

  “What’s your real name, Karina?”

  “Karina,” she said.

  “And who sent you here to give me a goodbye kiss?”

  “Rembrandt,” she said.

  “I should have seen it,” Isaac said. “All the talk about Gallaudet. You got that from the master himself. Gallaudet is one of his escape routes in the District.”

  Karina nodded her head. “And I’m gonna give you one of my own tats,” she said, rattling the iron. “I’ll burn it right into your fat brain. A wolf’s eyes and ears.”

  “And you’re the gal who left those greeting cards in the beauty salon, under a hair drier.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “that was my personal touch. Viktor relied on my ingenuity a lot.”

  “He helped you create that Serbian myth, with the uncle in Arlington.”

  “I was bulletproof,” she said. “I picked out a pathetic maid who lived in a closet. I strangled her. We dumped her body in the Chesapeake, and I became Karina.”

  “You vampirized her.”

  “Yeah,” Karina said. “That’s a fancy way to look at it. You’re a poet, Mr. President. Would you like one last tumble? Close your eyes, and I’ll do you with my panties on.”

  Keep her talking.

  The Big Guy was recovering his ground, even while she lunged at him with the iron. She could afford the luxury of keeping him alive a little longer. She was as agile as an acrobat, but now it was Isaac who tugged at her invisible tail.

  “Tell me, sweetheart, did you ever really like Max?”

  “That stupid little stutter boy. I wanted to stuff a rag in his mouth. I was going nuts. But Rembrandt wouldn’t make his move. You would have been a corpse months ago if he hadn’t attached himself to your heartbeat. And I can’t have the FBI combing through all my shit. Those idiots could stumble onto something, even if I am bulletproof.”

  She shouldn’t have been so dismissive of Max. Dagmar didn’t deserve that little boy. And while she pondered, his wind had come back. He was as wily as Odysseus.

  “So you found another sponsor.”

  “Yeah,” she said, with an insane glimmer in her eye. “And he wasn’t so finicky—not about you.”

  “Rainer Wolff,” Isaac whispered.

  “Rembrandt’s on the run. Half his partners have dumped him. That guy has a lot of balls. But he went too far. He clipped his own banker, and he can’t move money around. Can you imagine? A billionaire who’s short of cash.”

  Her eyes were fluttering now. She’d forgotten Sidel for a moment, caught in the monsoon of her tale. He’d talked her to a turning point. The iron had stopped whistling. He leapt at Dagmar, slapped the iron out of her fist. She laughed at him, mocked his maneuver. That crazy curl appeared on her lip.

  “Papa wants to play,” she said. He wondered where she grew up, if she was a street urchin like him, and if he was staring at his own distorted face in a funhouse mirror. She shouldn’t have come to this attic—it was Isaac’s lair. Her flesh shivered as she laughed, and Isaac felt no pity. He didn’t need one of Rembrandt’s tats. He’d always been a werewolf—alone, alone.

  Dagmar couldn’t have reckoned on the ferocity of his attack. He ripped at her, seized her ears, knocked her head against the wall, struck her with her own iron, as her lip uncurled and the first sign of fear registered on her face, with blood welling in her eyes, blinding Dagmar.

  “Here’s something for Max!”

  All the humiliation he’d endured—being babied half the time, with a panoply of protectors who couldn’t protect him—roused Isaac, and his rage fell upon Dagmar with blow after blow. He was willing to suffer the consequences.

  He looked at himself in a real mirror on the mezzanine wall. He was speckled with blood, like someone maddened by the moon. Dagmar lay on the carpet, one arm stretched out, as if she’d just performed in a ballet. Sidel was the choreographer here. He didn’t bother to feel the pulse in her neck. He had the White House operator call Bull Latham and ask him to bring his cuffs. He’d rather not be arrested by a stranger.

  He wouldn’t clean the blood off his subaltern’s robe, wouldn’t cover Dagmar in a sheet.

  The Bull arrived, saw the carnage, squinted at Isaac’s robe. “Jesus, I was worried for a minute.”

  “Aren’t you gonna arrest me?” Isaac had to ask.

  “Come on, boss. She was bent. But you wouldn’t give us a chance to prove it. Forgive me, I have to bring in my border patrol.”

  The Bull began whispering into his mobile. Isaac had never heard of border patrols in the District. Half a dozen men appeared in the attic, wearing identical blue suits, crisp white shirts, and striped ties. They could have been their own fraternal order. They carried two of the biggest satchels Isaac had ever seen. They didn’t put on work clothes, like house painters. They padded about in rubber soles. One of these sextuplets reached into a satchel, pulled out a portable vacuum cleaner, and sucked up some of the debris Dagmar had left behind—a broken bracelet, a brassiere strap, bits of hair.

  Another sextuplet wiped the blood off Isaac with a cotton ball bathed in alcohol. “Mr. President, you’ll have to give these lads your robe,” the Bull said. “They’ll have it cleaned for you. They’ll return it with the same wrinkles—come, sit with me.” The Bull led Isaac back into the Cosmetology Room, and they sat in reclining chairs, the vice president and the president in his winter underpants.

  “Where will your lads put the young lady?”

  “What young lady?” the Bull said with a smile. “You’ve been by yourself all evening.”

  “But the ironing board . . . she must have been logged in.”

  “And we’ll log her out,” the Bull said. “Leave it to my border patrol. But that bitch shouldn’t have been allowed to share your quarters, sir.”

  “Bull, I’ve been bombed, shot at, and nearly brained with Karina’s iron. And I can’t counterattack with a whole caravan of cars.”

  “That comes with the terrain. The president’s like a diva . . .”

  “Yeah, I know all about it—the Prince of the Western World.

  “Isaac, what do you want?”

  “Lightning. And I can’t have it without a much slimmer machine.”

  “Done,” the Bull said. “You’ll still need a babysitter. And you’ll have to call the White House switchboard on the hour. We can’t afford to have you vanish into the twilight zone. The country would go wild.”

  Isaac’s eyes lit with pure delight. “Bull, that’s the only way I can win—from the twilight zone.”

  “You’ll still need a babysitter.”

  The sextuplets stood near the doorway with their satchels. They shook Isaac’s hand and left with the Bull. Isaac was bewildered. There wasn’t a trace of Dagmar in the mezzanine, not a splotch of blood. Not a single ridge in the carpet. That was the beauty of Bull Latham’s border patrol. The sextuplets had erased the very fact of Dagmar’s existence. It wasn’t a matter of dried blood and powdered bones. Dagmar was a figment of Isaac’s imagination, a maid and a murderess who had never been.

  20

  Viktor should have fled to the white hills of Lisbon, where he knew every winding path that dove down to the river, and where he could have survived on pink wine and Crackerjacks while he waited out his enemies. Or h
e could have gone to Bilbao, a medieval city where his father had made a fortune opening a passel of ice cream parlors with exotic flavors, and where foreigners rarely went. But he couldn’t seem to get Paris out of his blood. It had nothing to do with high fashion, monuments, and museums.

  He sat in the Zeyer, a brasserie in the fourteenth that Henry Miller had frequented fifty years ago and held court with other artists and writers who had to scrounge for every meal. The Zeyer’s habitués had tales to tell about the bald American with his Brooklyn accent, who limped along in French, and wanted to fuck every female in the brasserie from sixteen to sixty. It amused Viktor, made him laugh. Miller fucked the wives of friends and lived off Anaïs Nin and her husband while he wrote Tropic of Cancer.

  Viktor could have gone to the Coupole, in Montparnasse, where his father, Pakhan Karl, would often meet his lieutenants at the bar. Sometimes, Viktor came along. His father had adopted a drunken poet with a long, grizzled face, who would wander into the Coupole, swaying from side to side. His father called him Sam. This Sam never had a sou in his pockets. He dressed like a clodo. Spittle flew from his mouth. The pakhan had to wipe Sam’s face with a silk handkerchief. Years after his father’s death, Viktor finally realized that Sam without a sou was the Nobel laureate who had written Waiting for Godot. But even that bit of news couldn’t bring him back to the Coupole. Besides, he might have been spotted by Rainer’s henchmen in the middle of Montparnasse.

  Viktor clung to the Zeyer, a poorer cousin in the heart of a modest neighborhood at the Carrefour Alésia, near the Porte d’Orléans—it was an artisan’s paradise. He closeted himself at a corner table, drinking a blond Belgian beer, and could see across the terrace and into the street, as plumbers in hip boots went past, glaziers with shivering sheets of glass on their backs. He was still at war with Rainer Wolff, but his own allies were dwindling. His orphans—the besprizornye—had begun to abandon him. He was more involved in tattoos than in counterfeit currency.

  He kept his needles and dyes in a wooden box at his feet, like some religious monk. He had a new fiancée, a young widow who wasn’t at all like Viktor. She had a fixed abode in Georgetown. She loved ballet and Washington’s winter galas and balls. She belonged to the Republican National Committee. Viktor had stuffed the committee with cash like a golden goose when he was trying to sabotage Sidel. But he was drawn to the widow and her muscular American blondness that seemed so bland on the surface, yet was scratched by its own peculiar passion. The pakhan had fallen in love for the first time perhaps . . .

 

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