Isaac got the pakhan’s address from Renata. “But why is he in Manhattan?”
“Because, darling, he has no other place to hide.”
“Is he hurt? Is he in trouble?”
Renata told him about Michael Davit, the Manchester entrepreneur who had his own school for assassins. Viktor had remained one hop ahead of Davit’s hitters. But where were Rembrandt’s Ninja Turtles, the besprizornye? They’d abandoned him and vanished with their own hard cash, their holdings, and counterfeit plates. Rembrandt had become too unpredictable, falling in love with a Washington blueblood, neglecting his Ulysses S. Grants while he maneuvered against the Swiss bankers’ lottery in order to spare Sidel’s life. The besprizornye had come to terms with that publishing baron, Rainer Wolff, and may even have been hunting Viktor on their own. The Sons of Rossiya were disbanding without their pakhan.
“But is he hurt?” Isaac had to ask again.
“Yes,” Ramona said, “and the cops are after him.”
“What cops?”
“Your own boys in blue,” Ramona said; her voice turned to static, and a long silence rippled right through Sidel, as he began to saddle up.
He whispered in Barbarossa’s ear, and Barbarossa whispered right back.
“Dad, I’ll have to call from a pay phone, just to be safe.”
Barbarossa left the little restaurant in his black leather coat and returned in five minutes.
“Joey, were there any problems?”
“Dad, don’t ask.”
But Isaac understood the score. Rainer Wolff, or one of his agents, must have hired several homicide detectives to track Rembrandt to the Lower East Side. There had always been freelancers like that, and Vietnam Joe was part of the same club.
“Dad, I stopped the hemorrhaging, but there’s still one lone wolf out there, and we’ll have to take our chances.”
Marilyn could never seem to decode all this cop talk.
“Isaac,” she said, “fatten yourself. Finish the cake before you disappear altogether. And Joey, don’t you let him walk into an ambush.”
Barbarossa stroked his glove as a warning sign to Isaac’s enemies, wherever they were, while the Big Guy began to brood. He wasn’t even sure if he was allowed to kiss his own daughter. “Marilyn, the Secret Service will drive you home.”
But she hugged Isaac and Joe. “My two idiots,” she said, with the taste of hazelnut in her mouth.
Isaac groaned when he saw Dragon outside the grocery.
“Boss,” Matt said, “I took the initiative and had that baby brought here on my own.”
They all climbed into the president’s cradle. Desirée had already captured a mouse. She delivered her trophy to Isaac and leapt onto his lap, while Marilyn stood inside the curtained window and waved to her husband and Isaac, as Dragon disappeared into the night.
It was an old-line tenement on Attorney Street, a firetrap that should have been torn down. Perhaps it was Isaac himself who had spared the building when he was the grand seigneur of Manhattan real estate. He wouldn’t allow a single tenant to fall into oblivion inside New York’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. Promises were always made, and often produced nothing but a subway token and a berth at a public shelter.
Dragon was much too conspicuous. The Big Guy didn’t want to advertise his own razzia. So he left Dragon a block away, and while Barbarossa and Captain Sarah approached Rembrandt’s building from the roofs, breaking into an abandoned building a few doors away, Isaac, Stef, and Matt Malloy marched into the firetrap on Attorney Street, with Desirée weaving around them and bumping into their heels with her bullet head.
Isaac knew it was some kind of a trap. The lampposts were all unlit. Some motherfucker must have knocked out the lights with a long stick. The firetrap itself was dark as Moses. Matt had to use his pocket flashlight, or they would have stumbled about on the stairs like straw dolls.
Up they went, one stair at a time, mired in dust and filth. The banisters creaked; it was Isaac’s old bailiwick. He loved every moment. He was back on his native ground, removed from a world of monuments and antiques, and the must of history. He didn’t have to be reminded of Lincoln’s footsteps, as much as he admired the Great Emancipator. He had a rawness here, not Marines in harness, butlers on parade. He was on a president’s holiday. And then he heard the cat hiss—it was like a deafening whistle. Desirée hunched her back and leapt into the air, her enormous body twirling, as she attacked with her claws.
Someone groaned on the second floor landing. “Stop, stop, I beg you. Get this creature off me.”
Isaac called once. “Desirée.”
And the cat returned to his heels. A man stepped out of the shadows, with deep runnels of blood on his face.
Isaac recognized one of the lazy lieutenants from his own time at headquarters, a worthless bagman who fetched coffee and delivered the Department’s pocket money from a local bank.
“Hirschhorn, is that you?”
The bagman blinked at the president.
“Jesus, Isaac, nobody said you were part of this package.”
“You’re a lucky guy. Barbarossa will be here in a minute. If he catches you, he’ll knock your brains out.”
And the bagman rumbled down the stairs.
“Is that wise, Mr. President?” Matt asked. “Letting a crooked cop back out on the streets?”
“Matt, if we grab him now, we’ll overplay our hand. Don’t worry, he’ll turn in his badge by tomorrow and run from Joey as fast as he can.”
They didn’t have to grope very long in the dark; Desirée led Isaac’s search party to a crack of light under a door. Isaac didn’t bother about a bell. He wrapped once with his knuckles on the rotting wood.
“Who’s there?” a disembodied voice broke through the other side of the door.
“A friend.”
There was a long silence. And Isaac began to feel bewitched, trying to explain himself to some guy he couldn’t see.
“I’m looking for Tollhouse’s tin man—a tattoo artist. This is your late mother’s apartment. I’m Sidel.”
The door opened. And Viktor did seem disembodied in the dim light. His face was bloodless. He stood in his undershirt, with a bandage around his middle.
Isaac entered with his search party. The apartment was nearly barren. It had a bureau and a bare-bones bed. There was a battered sofa in the sitting room and several chairs. It saddened Sidel, this ruthless stamp of love. Had Viktor’s mother waited year after year in this railroad flat for a pakhan who would never come, Siberian Karl, a mystic, a murderer, a forger and a thief?
“Is this how your mother lived?” Isaac asked. “In a monk’s cell? What happened to you?”
“I got careless,” Rembrandt said.
“Why aren’t you in Czechoslovakia? Karel told me that you were about to become the little king of Prague.”
Rembrandt laughed with a certain bitterness, and it must have pained him to laugh. His face screwed up into a tantalizing half-mad look.
“A sovereign without his scepter. Karel promised that Prague was for sale.”
“But you’ve been eating up all the real estate,” Isaac said.
“That doesn’t amount to much in Prague—it’s Kafka country, or did you forget? I have all the documents from the banks, but Karel still holds the key to the kingdom. He’s gone into business with Rainer Wolff, and both of them want me dead.”
Now Isaac realized why Karel had been so eager to bolt. It had nothing to do with the Kremlin or his own conniving minions at Prague Castle. He’d used Isaac to climb out of the Bull’s black hole and position himself as his own little king. Isaac wasn’t the real fall guy. Rembrandt had ruined himself with his lottery.
Isaac turned to Matt. “Have the White House find the Bull, will ya?”
“Boss,” Matt said, “I have him on the line.”
Isaac swiped the mobile away from Matt with one of his paws.
“Bull, we have a problem. I need your pals at the Bureau to babysit fo
r Rembrandt until we can relocate him.”
“Isaac,” Bull Latham said, “I wouldn’t use the Bureau. You’ll leave some residue, like a snail. We’re better off with Wildwater.”
“Wildwater,” Isaac said, “always Wildwater.” And he pressed down hard on the rabbit ears.
Within twenty minutes, three men and a woman arrived in Ray-Bans. Isaac felt uncomfortable around such civilian soldiers until Barbarossa came down from the roof with Captain Sarah.
“Joey, I’ll feel much better if you put together a little unit to watch over these mothers. I’ll pay your boys out of my own pocket.”
“It won’t be necessary, Dad. I’ll call in a couple of favors.”
“And if you catch hell from the Commish, you tell him I’ll cut off all his federal funding . . .”
“Dad,” Barbarossa said, “I’m untouchable.”
“And take care of Marilyn, will ya? Ah, I almost forgot. Bring a doc along, some guy we can trust. We have to patch up this package. He’s as pale as my cat’s belly.”
Isaac glanced at Rembrandt for the last time. “Hey, you owe me a tat.”
And he left with his search party. Desirée had already discovered a mouse in this dump. She left it on the cracked sill of Rembrandt’s door and scampered down the stairs like the absolute queen of the Lower East Side.
PART SIX
23
It was serendipity, something like that. Rainer Wolff, the Berlin publishing baron, had been invited by the Library of Congress to a symposium on the future of the printed word, and Isaac seized upon the symposium for his own concerns. Yes, he still had his collection of Modern Library classics from Columbia College. Yes, he would have killed to maintain the hegemony of the printed word. But he hated all the clatter of symposiums. Books would live or die without the constant screed of librarians, authors, and publishing barons. And, of course, POTUS was one of the invited guests.
He was asked to speak at the gala in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building. Isaac was a commodity again, a precious piece of merchandise. The honeymoon he’d never had suddenly began. He’d given Rikers back to the warden and his Ninja Turtles, had gone into the bowels of a supermax facility—the Bing—and disarmed a band of desperados. He was pictured on the cover of the Daily News, below a banner headline:
POTUS TOP COP
The Democratic Caucus reversed itself and chased after Sidel. Republicans couldn’t stop courting him. Even Ramona Dazzle was nice. All Isaac wanted to do was look into Rainer Wolff’s eyes, so he could measure the man.
He always had a bad case of vertigo whenever he entered the Great Hall; he couldn’t adjust himself to the dizzying heights, as if he was floating around in an Arabian bazaar, with a ceiling of blue glass and gold tidbits that seemed to swim in front of his eyes. There was a mosaic of blinding colors, a white marble floor inlaid with bands of brown, and twin statues of some goddess who represented both war and peace. Isaac was lost in this palace of infinite space. He didn’t belong here, a college dropout like him. But he had a rabbinical streak.
“For one semester I lived inside a cradle of words. I read until my eyesight weakened. Sentences had their own perfume, sometimes the stink of death. I was like a hunter on an endless battlefield, strewn with marvelous debris. I had no existence beyond my reading self. Then I had to quit college, and I went into freefall. I became a cop, and I had to endure the metallic grip of handcuffs, but I can’t imagine a world without books.”
The guests at the gala stood around in their tinseled clothes and clapped for this curious president, who would have come to the Library of Congress in his windbreaker had his butler not shamed him into wearing a velvet bowtie, a crisp shirt, polished shoes, and an ancient Tuxedo from his tenure as the Pink Commish. Ramona Dazzle couldn’t keep her hands off the Big Guy; she kept stroking the worn patches of his tux. She introduced him to a man in his eighties with exquisite white hair and the startling profile of a handsome hawk. The man wore a plum-colored velvet jacket.
“Saul, I’d like you to meet President Sidel.”
Saul’s Bellow.
The Big Guy was shaken. He knew Bellow might be at the gala. But the encounter itself was beyond his ability to dream.
“Augie,” Isaac muttered. “I’ve been living all these years with Augie March. I can’t forget Caligula, the cowardly eagle.”
“There’s a little bit of Caligula in all of us,” the master said. “But I admire what you did at Rikers, Mr. President. You went into the heart of darkness and came out a winner.”
“I’m not so sure,” Isaac said.
“But it was almost novelistic. Perhaps you are what Augie might have become.”
“I doubt it,” Isaac said. “I’m more like the eagle.”
Both of them laughed. Isaac had much less vertigo in this palace. Perhaps he had conquered his fear of heights. Guests grabbed at him, and he was pulled away from Saul Bellow. His chief of staff couldn’t stop showing him off. He hadn’t been a hero inside the Bing. He’d averted a slaughter, had saved the lives of inmates who’d been beaten and mauled by certain screws, and perhaps he’d also saved the screws. But now he was as cunning as Caligula. He kept shaking hands, whispering, shouting, kissing women’s cheeks among all the tumult until he happened upon a man with an executioner’s crystal-blue eyes.
Rainer Wolff.
And like Caligula again, he removed himself from all the tumult.
“I liked your little speech,” the publishing baron said. “I, too, believe in the primacy of the written word, Mr. President.”
And much, much more, Isaac mused. Bull Latham had told him about Rainer Wolff, an Übermensch of a different sort. Rainer had come from a distinguished merchant family with a hint of Jewish blood and might have fallen into the hands of the Gestapo and the SS. But Rainer was rescued from oblivion by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, master of German military intelligence, who declared that he couldn’t get along without his “Jüdische” protégé. Uncle Willie was a real enigma. He had little taste for Hitler’s atrocities and delusions, yet his commandos at the Abwehr could cross borders like invisible men and sabotage whatever resistance there was to the Reich. Canaris had a monk’s purity and a spy’s contradictions. He was one of the earliest plotters against the Führer, but he couldn’t participate in the failed July ’44 plot. Hitler had removed his puzzling spymaster. Uncle Willie was held under house arrest, and was later delivered to one of the Abwehr’s own dungeons at Flossenbürg castle, where he was hanged to death from a meat hook.
Rainer had also joined the plotters, but his role was never uncovered, and somehow he managed to remain loyal to military intelligence and its deposed master, Uncle Willie. The admiral had a mad daughter, Eva, who was locked away in a public Krankenhaus after his fall and might have died of neglect if Rainer hadn’t moved her to a private clinic. He visited Eva as often as he could, wooing and threatening her keepers.
Rainer had another mission. He was in charge of the Abwehr’s counterfeit currency. When his own forgers failed to produce, he was sent to the Eastern Front and suffered from a severe case of frostbite. Herr Kapitän Wolff came out of the war with two permanently crippled toes. He was both a hero and a villain, depending upon the angle and the mirage of history’s own mirror. He took over his father’s moribund publishing empire and made millions.
Rainer still had the look of a spymaster, Admiral Canaris’ greatest disciple. Nearing seventy, he had a panther-like gait, even with his crippled toes. Isaac could tell from a glance that he’d never frighten Rainer into any kind of retreat. But he had to test the publishing baron, claw at him a little, reveal that he was aware of Rainer’s murderous tricks.
“Herr Wolff,” he said, “I have greetings from an old friend.”
The blue eyes were no less alert. “But you must call me Rainer. We are almost comrades, Mr. President. Both of us were born in a brew of words. We are book lovers. What could possibly keep us apart?”
“Rembrandt,” Isaac
said.
The Berliner smiled. “You mean that gangster who walks around with a wooden box and paints pictures on people?”
“I believe Rembrandt was a partner of yours.”
“Yes,” Rainer said. “I had dealings with him and his little army of aging orphans. But I’m a businessman, Mr. President, and we cannot foresee the directions that our business affairs will take.” He patted his mouth with a silk handkerchief that he kept in his sleeve. “Do you have a literary agent, Mr. President? You are also a painter, I suspect, but you paint with words, and not silly little bottles of ink. I would be very interested in publishing your memoirs.”
Isaac wasn’t going to let Rainer off the hook. “My memoirs might not be very flattering—to you.”
Rainer smiled, his tobacco teeth glistening under the lamps of the Great Hall.
“Ah, but it would tantalize your readers, Mr. President. We would both make a killing. And if you gave me world rights, I could put together quite a package. Imagine, your memoirs could come out in Germany, England, America, France, and ten other markets within the same week. But I can’t think of a title, and titles are important. What shall we call your book?”
“The Death Lottery Rider.”
Rainer sucked at Isaac’s words. “That sounds like a crime novel, Mr. President, not a memoir.”
“True,” Isaac said. “But your own memoir, Herr Wolff, would amount to the same thing—a crime novel.”
“I’m not ashamed of my past,” Rainer said. “I served under Admiral Canaris. I led a team of saboteurs. We undermined Czech patriots, we slit their throats. But we did not butcher women and children.”
“And you were kind to the admiral’s crazy daughter.”
Isaac must have found a secret niche. The crystalline eyes withdrew inside his skull, and his face rippled with anger.
“That was a private matter, Mr. President.”
Isaac meant to claw a little deeper, rile the publishing baron, even if he had to rattle the dead. But he imagined Eva Canaris at the sanitarium, and it stuck in his craw. He didn’t want to feel sympathy for a spymaster who had shielded a delicate girl from Gestapo bloodhounds.
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