He was reckless. He shouldn’t have been daydreaming at the Zeyer. Still, he smiled when Rainer sat down at the next table, superior as ever in a coat with a mink collar.
“Rembrandt, we could have had the best sea bass in Paris at the Dôme, picked it right out of the tank, and I have to find you here. How are you adjusting to our reduced circumstances?”
“Don’t cry, Rainer. You have a million commodities.”
“But I had to sell short,” Rainer said. “Should I tell you how much I lost in a single day? Did you have to garrote our own banker?”
“I didn’t garrote Pierre,” Viktor said. “I slit his throat.”
“Mensch, it comes to the same thing. Either we have a truce, or you don’t walk out of here alive.”
Viktor smiled into the teeth of Viktor’s remark.
“And how will you orchestrate my disappearance in a brasserie full of clients drinking orange pressé and Belgian beer—ah, I forgot. You were once with the Abwehr. Choreographing disappearances was your specialty.”
“It still is. I’ll create a diversion, a fire in the toilets. Why the devil did you come back to Paris? It’s teeming with Michael Davit’s men. Davit has a grudge against you. You strangled two of his very best employees, sworn to protect Pierrot. You made a fool of Davit. He couldn’t deliver. And he wants to deliver now. Your partners are very cross. Rosa Malamud has put a bounty on your head.”
“How is dear Rosa? Are her fashion shops flourishing? Has she stabbed anyone in the heart with her knitting needle?”
“Rembrandt,” Rainer said, “she’s sharpening it especially for you.”
Viktor should have been more alert. Rainer had manufactured a little homecoming party for Viktor, who recognized Michael Davit’s men in their plaid jackets with leather elbow patches, like country squires. They were thugs with split eyebrows, despite their aristocratic attire. And then he saw Rosa herself at the bar, too involved with Rembrandt’s destruction to count her millions.
“It’s hopeless,” Rainer said, “can’t you see? Give us your plates—your precious plates—and you’ll walk out of here in one piece.”
Viktor laughed. “But they’re my intellectual property. You’re a publisher, Rainer. Would you ask any of your authors to surrender their rights?”
“Rembrandt, you’re wasting my time. Either we deal or we don’t.”
Viktor knew the Zeyer’s exits and entrances by heart. He couldn’t duck out on Davit’s men. He had to move right into the squall. “Rainer, your spotters didn’t find me. You couldn’t have taken some magic wheelbarrow from West Berlin. You figured I’d come here.”
Rainer pretended to yawn. He should have been a Schauspieler. He had to act out different parts when he was with the Abwehr—he was once a butler in the house of a British spy for two weeks, and had to play a transvestite to trap a clerk in the Foreign Office who was selling secrets to Stalin. “Rembrandt, you’re so predictable. You can’t resist a proletariat café. Paris is where your father made his mark. Only an idiot or a clever man would hide right under our noses. And I learned how to be patient. I told myself, He’ll come to the Zeyer, sooner or later. And here you are.”
Viktor leapt up, tossed his blond beer into Rainer’s eyes, skipped between two of Davit’s thugs with their fancy elbow patches, clopped another one on the head with his wooden box, but he couldn’t maneuver fast enough. Rosa Luxemburg ripped into his coat with the savage point of her knitting needle. He still knocked the needle out of her hand, and clutching his side for a moment, he danced into the stairwell that went down to the toilets. He nearly tripped, but he clung to the banister rail. The Zeyer was his terrain, even if he’d brought his enemies here. He went through an unmarked door that led to a tunnel where most of the Zeyer’s deliveries must have been made. He climbed a flight of stairs and found himself at the side of a little church on the Avenue du Maine. He opened the gate and hopped across the avenue, with a trickle of blood on his hand.
He arrived at the Mistral, a dump of a hotel next to the rue Daguerre. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had both stayed here when they were penniless philosophers. But that’s not why Viktor had chosen the Mistral. He liked its random sense of decay. He climbed up to a room on the second floor, where the young widow was waiting. Renata would have preferred the Ritz. But the Ritz was outside Viktor’s realm of reliability, though he had stayed there once, had sat with his besprizornye at Hemingway’s bar. He would have been noticed at the Ritz with his odd flamboyance, that cavalier disregard of decorum by a billionaire who walked around with a child’s paint box . . .
“I was worried,” Renata said.
Viktor couldn’t even calm her. He would have smeared blood on Renata with his own hands. She’d walked out of one disaster on an errand for him, and he didn’t want her to walk into another. She was a casualty of sorts. She still had a twitch under one eye, from that explosion in the castle. She whimpered in her sleep. He’d rock her in his arms half the night.
Viktor made a call from the phone in his room, whispered a few words. Within five minutes there was a knock on the door. He welcomed the ancient toubib, Muhammad, who had once been part of his father’s clan. The toubib dug a needle into Viktor’s arm that was almost as large as Rosa’s knitting needle. Muhammad spoke Russian, English, and a little Arabic with Viktor. He cut away Viktor’s clothes with a surgeon’s scissors, cleaned and cauterized the wound, then wrapped him in a bandage of tape and gauze.
“I’ll have to travel,” Viktor said. “I can’t stay here. It’s too risky.”
“Sir,” Muhammad said, “the kind lady, she should hold your hand. It will be like a transfusion.”
This toubib without a doctor’s diploma wouldn’t accept cash from Viktor.
“You have rewarded me many, many times. Allow me this one bit of service.”
And he was gone. Renata didn’t ask any questions. She followed the toubib’s advice, clutched Viktor’s hand. The toubib had been right; a kind of electric current passed through Viktor, energized him. He shouldn’t have brought her into this mess, made her his private ambassador to Karel Ludvik. But she hadn’t been better off on her own; her dead husband’s bankers and lawyers had preyed upon Renata, had robbed her blind. Viktor had to threaten this band of thieves with dire consequences; he’d kidnapped the nanny and daughter of one banker, but he didn’t have the heart to hurt a child. Luckily the warning worked. Yet the bankers weren’t done with Renata; they hovered over whatever bits of property she had left, preparing to pounce when the time was ripe.
So she’d become a vagabond like him, by default. But he couldn’t travel with her. He’d have to slip across borders, worrying about betrayal after betrayal. One of the besprizornye whom he could still trust would pick her up in an hour, drive her to Brussels, where she would board a commercial flight under an identity he had picked out for her: Desdemona Roth, an heiress without an heir. But he hadn’t told her all this—he didn’t want to spoil this last little hour at the Mistral.
“Whatever happens, you’ll have enough cash,” he said. It was a rotten habit he’d inherited from his pakhan father. Money was always on his mind.
“Stop it,” she said. “I’m staying with you.”
The blueblood and the besprizornye.
He didn’t argue. She held his hand. He’d profited from that transfusion the toubib had talked about—the beat of her heart, the warmth of her blood.
She must have deciphered her own fate in his dark eyes, realized that the werewolf was sending her away. “Darling,” she said, “let me go with you. I’ll become a washerwoman, I swear. We can hide in Ibiza.”
A rumble of laughter rose up from Viktor’s belly. He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on that island of castaways, counterfeiters, informants, and retired British agents.
He kissed her as hard as any man could with a cauterized wound. He was crazy about Renata, more than crazy—it was a genuine affliction.
“Ibiza,” he said. “We’ll see.�
�
“Or Prague,” she said, with a sudden fire in her eyes. “Yes, Prague. We’ll have our own palace. Didn’t they promise us a palace, dear?”
A palace, he muttered to himself, like a dreamer with a stitch in his side from Rosa’s knitting needle.
21
Isaac’s little family began to fall away. Ariel and Mordecai returned to Haifa with the blessings of Sol Ben-Zion and Shin Bet. “Itzik,” Ariel said before he got on an El Al flight, “how can we save you if you won’t save yourself? This is not your home. It’s a haven for diplomats.” Isaac would miss his pair of crusaders in trench coats. They, too, had lived outside the law.
And then Karel Ludvik, the self-deposed president, decided to disappear from the attic. This former colonel of state security must have arrived at some agreement with the Soviets and the Czechs. “Mr. President, I have what they want—Rembrandt’s paper. I hid as much as I could before I left.”
“And once you turn it over?” Isaac asked. “They’re torturers, for Christ’s sake.”
But that didn’t seem to trouble Karel Ludvik. Perhaps he would create his own pact among torturers, since he’d been one himself. He’d never tattled on Renata Swallow, never talked about what she’d been doing at his dinner table the night of the bombing, but suddenly he volunteered. It was his parting gift to Sidel. She hadn’t come to barter with Karel in Rembrandt’s behalf, or to sell him a bundle of Ulysses S. Grants. Besides, Rembrandt had already sold him half a ton of paper. It was a much more vital matter than counterfeit currency. Rembrandt wanted to relocate to Prague, with Renata Swallow. He was buying his way into Czechoslovakia, with the doyenne of Washington’s Cave Dwellers at his side.
“She’s in love with that crime czar,” Karel said. “And love always distorts the picture.”
“So you’re a philosopher now,” Isaac said.
“No, a pragmatist. Rembrandt is banking on Prague’s future in a free Czech state. But it doesn’t really matter. He’s an outlaw where other outlaws will prosper. It will be frontier capitalism in another few years. And I told you once. He already owns half of Prague. He’ll be a little king.”
Isaac peered at him. “And what will you be, Karel?”
“The king’s accomplice.”
And he was whisked away on Aeroflot. Isaac’s own intelligence teams hadn’t gotten their money’s worth from Karel. The folks at Langley must have sweated him for a while, but the CIA was in disrepair. Its agents had been running drugs in Nicaragua to help finance more and more rogue ops. Langley was under Bull Latham’s thumb. “Don’t bother fixing the unfixable,” the Bull loved to say. And Isaac had to wonder how many rogue agents were out there, floating around in the fourth dimension—1989 wasn’t a good year for spies. A randomness had settled in. Members of MI6 had turned on their own masters. There was an international crisis. Agents could be bought and sold by the bushel. And private contractors like General Tollhouse prospered among all the confusion; he could raid Isaac’s mountain retreat at will, and put one of his assets—a female soldier of fortune—in Isaac’s attic. Wildwater was its own CIA.
Isaac would have been all alone if Captain Sarah hadn’t returned to the attic with the president’s pilot and the pilot’s son. Max was very blue. He’d grown fond of Dagmar’s musk; it had become ambrosia to a stuttering boy. And Sidel had a difficult time skirting around the maid’s magical disappearing act.
“She had to leave, Max. Her Auntie was sick.”
“Uncle Isaac, will she ever be back?”
“Soon,” he said without missing a beat. Isaac was like any rogue agent. Worse, even. But he couldn’t fool Captain Sarah and Stef.
“You got rid of her,” Sarah rasped, the moment Max had fled to another part of the attic. “She wouldn’t have disappeared on the spin of a dime. She was much too loyal to Max.”
“She was loyal to no one but Mr. Wildwater.”
Stef was furious after Isaac told him the entire tale. “She might have hurt my little boy. Tollhouse shouldn’t have taken advantage of me like that—planting one of his own operatives as my live-in maid.”
But they couldn’t wreak vengeance on Wildwater right away. Isaac had a much more urgent matter. There’d been a riot and open rebellion at Rikers, the nation’s largest penal colony, which held fifteen thousand souls on its island fortress. It was a turnstile jail, with inmates moving in and out. More than half of them didn’t even wear prison garb; they sat for months and months if they couldn’t make bail. There was a unit for pregnant women, another for psychopaths and suicide cases, and yet another for adolescents. Guards openly had sex with inmates, and beat others half to death. Rikers was considered an extension of the Bronx, on the East River. The jail was run by two gangs, the Bloods and the Latin Kings. Rikers had become their honey pot and their private crib. They had their very own day room, where they initiated new members into their ranks, and hired themselves out as contract killers. They could disappear for an afternoon and return to their cell blocks without ever being noticed. They’d learned the art of tattooing from some forgotten master and loved to display their tats. But the Kings and the Bloods hadn’t caused the riot. They had little to rebel about.
The riot had been started by a lay preacher, Martin Teasdale, who called himself a rabbi and minister of the dispossessed. None of the correctional officers seemed to know why he was at Rikers. The COs couldn’t find a record of Martin Teasdale. He wasn’t an inmate. Somehow he had slipped into the penal colony and remained, moving from dorm to dorm, from block to block. Perhaps the COs had adopted him, perhaps not. He taught impromptu classes in religion and philosophy, organized inmates who weren’t involved in the war between the Bloods and the Kings, and managed to outmaneuver them. And one winter night, he took over every single facility at Rikers, with his captains beside him—pale boys, pregnant women, and mean hombres. They’d reversed the order of things—locked the COs inside their bunkers, contained the Bloods and the Kings, trapped the warden and his deputies inside their offices, and communicated with the press via the warden’s mobile. They had firearms and smoke grenades, but they hadn’t harmed a living soul in the penal colony.
Teasdale had made one request: he would surrender to Sidel, and Sidel alone. Ramona Dazzle went ballistic when she heard that on the six P.M. report. “Mr. President, there’s already too much Manhattan in your blood.”
“But Rikers is a piece of the Bronx.”
“It’s still like going back to grade school,” she said. “You graduated from the mayor’s chair. This might play if that demented preacher were calling out to you from some jail in Iowa. Then Colonel Oliver could ride you right onto the roof. It would be gangbusters! But not a lousy dump on the East River. You’ve already been called the Ghetto President. You shouldn’t return to your roost.”
It was a political landmine for the mayor and the governor. Neither one wanted another Attica, with the blood of inmates and COs on their hands. And why did this lone white man who called himself a preacher appeal to a population of Latinos and blacks? Martin Teasdale didn’t seem to have a prison record. He was reared in Vermont, attended a rural school and later a teachers’ college, returned to the same rural schoolhouse, where he taught second grade until he was hospitalized. Teasdale suffered from a crippling chronic depression. What whiff of steam or air had brought him to Rikers Island? And when had he begun to preach? He wasn’t registered as a Republican or a Democrat. The man seemed apolitical. And here he was creating a firestorm in a penal colony and seeking out Sidel.
Stef had to prepare the lift package. He had little lead time. An entire penal colony sat in some sandbox, waiting for the president. Stef rode in advance with his crew to JFK, where the lift package—two White Tops—had been assembled. They could have dropped the package off at LaGuardia, which was less than a hundred yards away from Rikers. But the arrival of Air Force One would have disrupted the entire airport. The runways weren’t really long enough, and Air Force One might have landed in the East
River, or crumpled onto Rikers. Also, LaGuardia didn’t have the space to house White Tops in its hangars.
The colonel was already in the cockpit when his radio started to crackle.
“Red Rider to Rio, Red Rider to Rio, the Citizen is on the way. Thirty minutes to touch down.”
“Roger that, Red Rider. Over and out.”
Stef was grateful that they could skirt Manhattan on this part of the lift, and wouldn’t have to bring that same old nightmare of gridlock every time the president was on the ground.
The Citizen had arrived with Captain Sarah and half his White House detail. He was wearing his windbreaker, as usual. His cuffs were slightly frayed. He wouldn’t permit the White House butler to arrange his wardrobe. The Big Guy dressed and shaved himself. He climbed the air stair without a nod to the cockpit.
And Stef rode the currents, rocked and cradled Marine One above the plains of Queens with its high-rise villages that looked like battlements in some bittersweet dystopia. He had to skirt LaGuardia’s airspace. The White House liaison officer had mapped Marine One’s route with air traffic control.
He snaked along the edge of the East River and peered down at the penal colony that inhabited its own windswept island like a rubber pancake with white and red bunkers. Stef could see the rolls of razor wire that surrounded the penal colony like a lethal bracelet. He landed his bird on a patch of lawn without grass. It was cluttered with reporters come to see the mishaps of a president whose numbers dropped precipitously in poll after poll. Stef felt like he was part of a circus sideshow. The mayor and the governor had to be there—it was a prime-time crisis—but they weren’t looking for a photo op with the commander in chief. Isaac had become his own isolation ward, a president who never had his proper honeymoon.
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