Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  “Herr Wolff, your past doesn’t concern me. I’m worried about your future.”

  The Berliner’s face stopped rippling. That arrogant, superior smirk had come back, and his eyes were crystal-pure again. “But the future is sealed,” he said. “I will publish your memoirs.”

  Rainer bowed like a Prussian aristocrat—he was a gutter gangster, an assassin who had sipped from a silver spoon—and he quickly mingled with other guests at the gala with his panther-like gait.

  I’ll never nail that prick.

  Sidel was filled with fury. He was ready for a massacre. He’d learned the art of war from Joe Barbarossa. When in doubt, go to your guns. But he couldn’t shoot his way to Berlin, even with Joey at his side. So he finagled. He moved his financial wizard, Felix Mandel, from Treasury to the West Wing. He appointed Felix director of the Office of Management and Budget. It was a fancy title for the president’s bagman. Felix had to oversee federal spending and sculpt the president’s budget out of some invisible clay.

  The Big Guy had invited Bull Latham to his first skull session with Felix in the Oval Office. Isaac didn’t give a crap about his archives. Not a word was recorded, not a whisper was saved for posterity. It wasn’t a matter of learning from Nixon’s mistakes, of muffling another Watergate. Isaac had all the slyness of the Pink Commish.

  There would be no Sidel presidential papers.

  Felix sat on a plush white sofa next to Sidel, while the Bull sat on that sofa’s twin on the far side of a teak coffee table. Felix could hear a rustling behind the president’s purple drapes. It confused him; he couldn’t believe that a large rat inhabited the Oval Office; then a creature with whiskers whirled through the air and plopped on Isaac’s lap. Felix felt like a fool. He was face to face with the president’s feral cat, Desirée, rescued from Rikers Island. She’d become almost as famous and coveted as Fala, FDR’s black Scottish terrier. But Fala never tore the president’s drapes, Fala never snarled, never frightened the White House staff. This mountainous white cat was meowing as she stared at Felix with some kind of fascination in her olive eyes.

  “She’s crazy about you,” Sidel said. “Would ya like to hold my little girl?”

  “No thanks, Mr. President.”

  The butler knocked, entered the Oval Office, and served them coffee and almond macaroons on the teak table. They drank their coffee out of porcelain demitasse cups embossed with the White House seal. Isaac fed Desirée a macaroon; she devoured it like a lioness and licked at the coffee in Isaac’s cup.

  “Felix,” Isaac said in front of Bull Latham, “do we have a reptile fund?”

  Felix’s brows knit with consternation. He was jittery around the Bull and this monstrous cat on the president’s lap.

  Isaac had to repeat himself. “You know. Reptile fund. Le Carré.”

  The Bull winked and tried to educate Felix Mandel. “Actually, it wasn’t British at all. It existed long before MI6. Bismarck had his own Reptilienfonds to bribe journalists and do other damage. I’m not including our intelligence services, and their black operational budgets. That’s strictly academic. The question is, Felix, can we shove cash into someone’s pocket without the scrutiny of Congress?”

  Felix nodded once, while the cat devoured a second macaroon.

  “Well,” the Bull said, “that cash would be considered a reptile fund.”

  Felix didn’t nod again. “Mr. President, I can thread the needle as well as any man, but I won’t lie and steal.”

  “Not even to save the presidency?” the Bull asked.

  Suddenly, without a warning sign, or even a meow, Desirée leapt onto Felix’s lap. He let out a little scream, then calmed himself. But Felix was more confounded than ever. “I’m a numbers cruncher. I can create as many reptile funds as you want, but I have to have a good reason.”

  Now Isaac intervened. “Suppose some guy in Berlin—”

  “You mean Rainer Wolff,” Felix said, as if the White House had made him omniscient with a magical cat on his lap. “I saw you with Herr Wolff at the gala. I met him last year in Davos. He has quite a reputation. He was Hitler’s chief counterfeiter, who nearly froze his ass off on the Eastern Front. I believe he was one of the first publishers to encourage Günter Grass. That’s no small accomplishment.”

  “He’s still a counterfeiter,” Isaac insisted. “He manipulates currencies all the time. And Herr Wolff would increase his profit margin by having me dead. Didn’t you once tell me I had zero chance of survival, that the biggest hedge fund managers were betting I wouldn’t complete my maiden year? Your very words.”

  Felix found himself stroking Desirée’s wild white mane, soft as velvet, despite the scabs. He had a triumphant grin. “I know, I know. Statistically you’re a dead man. But I was a mite too clever for my own good. You can’t kill a president just like that. It’s not cost effective. It would rattle the markets and create a worldwide recession—the dollar would slide and slide. He’d never be invited to Davos again.”

  Isaac hunched his shoulders. “Felix, what if Herr Wolff did the markets a favor? I’ve gone after Big Tobacco. I’ll take on pharmaceuticals next. I’m on the Wall Street Journal’s most wanted list.”

  “There’s no such list,” Felix said. “Yes, some of the papers have called you a pinko, but FDR was called a lot worse, and he survived in a wheelchair.”

  “But FDR was a patrician,” Isaac said. “And I rose out of a pickle barrel on Essex Street. Bull, tell him the bitter truth.”

  The Bull rolled his eyes, as if he were talking to a child and not the savviest economist at the table, a demon who could destroy a nation’s wealth with his phantom currencies and now had conquered the Boss’s feral cat. Desirée was purring with both eyes shut.

  “Felix, did you forget that there’s a lottery with Isaac’s number on it, started by the bankers themselves? The payoff increases exponentially the longer Isaac lives. It’s become an assassin’s bullet, and Herr Wolff is behind the bounty.”

  “I don’t believe it. The honchos at Davos would have known about this dark side of Rainer. Industrialists certainly have their own secrets. I’m not part of that privileged club. But you can’t hide something like this.”

  “It’s not such a secret,” Isaac said. “I have a ghoul on my back wherever I go. There are sockers waiting for me, even at the White House. My helicopter pilot is living here in the attic. He has a little boy, and the socker was posing as the boy’s maid. She whacked me with a white-hot iron. Ask the Bull.”

  Felix turned pale. He should have realized that the presidency itself was a statistical nightmare. He’d created ghost currencies, knew what a flood of fake fifty-dollar bills could do in a volatile market, but figured POTUS could ride out the worst storm, at least at the White House. He scratched his lip for a moment. It was a nervous habit he’d picked up at Davos. Desirée licked his hand, and he almost licked her back. Soon he’d be as mountainous as the cat. Concentrate, he told himself.

  “And I suppose Herr Wolff selected this socker, as you call her?”

  “No,” the Bull said. “But he paid for her upkeep.”

  And now Felix was in his element. “We don’t really need a reptile fund, Mr. President. I can ruin Herr Wolff, bring him down on my own. It’s not strictly legal. But I can juggle behind his back. I’ll tap into his holdings. A publishing empire isn’t that different from a nation. Instead of a phantom currency we’ll introduce phantom paper. He’ll become a pauper after six months.”

  “Felix,” Isaac said, “that won’t do the trick. He’ll build another empire, and he’ll continue coming after me.”

  “Then he’s a barracuda,” Felix said. “And we’ll need a reptile fund. But what is it for?”

  “To hire sockers of our own,” Isaac said.

  And Felix started to tremble. He was caught in POTUS’s whirlwind, and he couldn’t get out. He’d lose face if he returned to Treasury. He was Isaac’s secret chancellor of the exchequer, not a hatchet man exactly, but the financier o
f hatchet men. And he’d have to get used to that label.

  “There no point dancing around,” Isaac said. “We have to get rid of Herr Wolff.”

  Felix was as cautious as a chancellor of the exchequer could be. “Mr. President, I’ll get you your reptile fund, but I’d rather not know who these reptiles are.”

  “Then you’d be a straw man, a clerk among clerks. You wouldn’t like it very much, being on my B-list, a wizard kept on a string. Is that what you want?”

  “No,” he muttered, with Desirée still on his lap, creasing his trousers with her claws.

  Isaac tossed his head back, like FDR. “That’s grand. We’ll have to hire the hitter behind the hitters, General Tollhouse.”

  Now it was the Bull who groaned. “Isaac, I thought you hated Wildwater.”

  “I do. But we have limited options. I can’t run to Berlin wearing a mask. I’m only a guy with a Glock. I have to travel with a whole fucking fleet. It has to be a Wildwater op.”

  “But Rainer Wolff is probably Wildwater’s biggest client.”

  “That’s why we need the reptile fund,” Isaac said. “And a little pressure from you.”

  “And what if he picks up his tent and moves to Switzerland?”

  “Then we’ll come down hard on the Swiss.”

  “So,” said the Bull, “we remove Herr Wolff’s options and shove him toward the kill zone.”

  “Please,” Felix said. “I’d prefer not to hear that word—kill.”

  Isaac tugged at Felix’s necktie. “My budget director can’t be a big baby. Bull, how can we scare the shit out of those Swiss bankers and put an end to their lottery?”

  “Isaac,” the Bull said, “Herr Wolff has his own Secret Service.”

  “So do I. And that didn’t stop Wildwater or one of its affiliates from planting a bomb right under my ass at Karel Ludvik’s dacha.”

  “But you walked out of that explosion in one piece,” the Bull had to insist.

  Felix’s head was swimming. In one day he’d gone from a master of phantom currencies to a phantom himself, employed by Isaac Sidel.

  “Felix,” Isaac said, “you can go now. The Vice President and I have certain details to discuss.”

  Felix panicked. He felt evicted, left out. But he couldn’t contradict POTUS, and he couldn’t get up.

  “Mr. President, I have Desirée on my lap.”

  “So tell the little girl to jump in the lake. Ah, I’m joking Felix.”

  Isaac cooed at Desirée, and the cat leapt onto his shoulder.

  Felix climbed off the sofa with cat hair on his wobbly, leaden knees. He was about to return to his own office in the West Wing when he banged into Ramona Dazzle, who seemed in the dumps.

  “What’s going on?” she growled at him.

  “Nothing much,” Felix said. “POTUS and the Bull are plotting the end of the world. And they can’t do it without me and my numbers.”

  Felix hopped away from Ramona Dazzle without another word.

  24

  Ach, the Americans and their Marshall Plan, Rainer muttered to himself.

  Only such creatures could have built their Great Hall in homage to Thomas Jefferson, a slave master with slave mistresses. Rainer loved books and the miracle of warfare, the constant rustle of spies. War was like Mozart, not a science, not an art, but pure music, the melody of melodies, with blood and bones as the excrement, the waste matter that couldn’t corrupt the music. He was happiest at that nondescript gray building on the north bank of the Landwehr Canal, the Abwehr’s hidden headquarters, so secret that the Führer himself didn’t have a clue where Uncle Willie spent his days and most nights. Rainer was a bachelor then. He preferred to visit brothels. He was second in command of the Brandenburg Brigade, the admiral’s specialized unit of soldier-saboteurs. Their barracks was right in Berlin. Uncle Willie could have arrested Herr Hitler and his whole hierarchy—cleaned the slate in one swoop. Rainer had planned the op half a million times—the streets, the routes, the hours, the calling in of firemen to stop traffic, while the Abwehr’s black buses sped across Berlin with the culprits in hand. He would have hung them all in the rear yard of the barracks. But Uncle Willie had that touch of reticence, along with the tremor in his right arm.

  Herr Admiral, you are not one of them, and when they find that out, they will rip you apart. We have our boys. We must use them before it is too late.

  But it was always too late for Uncle Willie. The SS stripped him of the Brandenburgers, and without his boys he was a sly old fox who’d lost his teeth. The admiral’s boys became ciphers rather than saboteurs until the SS integrated them into their own units. Rainer was left behind, even after Uncle Willie was arrested, and the Abwehr itself was a symphony of ghosts.

  He’d been in love with Eva, the admiral’s older daughter, and his love was a little like the melody of war. He’d kissed her once, only once, when Uncle Willie wasn’t looking, and had to clutch Eva’s fist behind the admiral’s back; this strange, furtive romance of pecking and patter was also the language of a spy. She was a gentle creature who had nightmares of the world’s end, and Uncle Willie didn’t want her involved with one of his own saboteurs. “My brutal boys,” he would say, “my brutal boys.” But the admiral was plucked from his gray building by the SS, beaten and abused, and his best saboteur had to shield Eva from the Gestapo, who would have shipped her off to one of their euthanasia hotels, filled with mental defectives and dwarfs. He kept her at a clinic, had to bribe the nurses with Reichsmarks he printed at his own press. And then Rainer himself was sent to the Eastern Front, not as a Brandenburger, but as a lowly officer with a bundle of raw recruits. He survived with his own tricks of the trade, a captain who lost every single one of his boys.

  And then he vanished into a normal, anonymous life. He married an heiress, took over his father’s firm. Yet what could business affairs mean to him, a saboteur at heart? He had his own secret headquarters, like Uncle Willie. He found a replica of that old gray building on the north bank of the Canal. It remained empty for years, a warehouse of memories, until the memories began to congeal. Rainer hired his own clerks, involved them in shady deals. He siphoned off assets from his publishing empire.

  He’d stumbled upon Viktor Danzig—Rembrandt—at a high-class brothel in Hamburg a dozen years ago. They were both wild, warring creatures, both without a pinch of fear; they could read their own ambitions in one another’s eyes, their secret delight in uncovering avenues of disorder and smashing other men’s idols. They signed a pact on the spot, created a partnership in crime, while Rainer revived his old counterfeit currency section from the Abwehr. But none of his counterfeiters had Rembrandt’s masterful touch, none could provide paper without a flaw. Soon he and Viktor had their own Swiss bank, their own properties in Basel and Berne. Meanwhile, his family prospered. He had two lovely little girls, Gretel and Wilhelmina. They grew up, married, had children of their own, while Großvater Rainer bribed politicians, sat on economic councils, dealt with the Stasi on both sides of the Berlin Wall. But Viktor proved unpredictable. He went around with a wooden box and didn’t take care of essential details. That’s why Rainer had to strike—like a commando from the Landwehr Canal.

  He had Rembrandt on the run. But things went sour a day after that gala in the Great Hall. Rosa Malamud’s boutiques on Paris’ Left Bank were all firebombed. And Rosa was ruined overnight. Her accounts disappeared, her credit cards were frozen, as if she had been visited by a whirlwind.

  Michael Davit fared even worse. He lost his holdings in Manchester, and the school for assassins he had nurtured for years—his flagship enterprise—suddenly fell apart. The premises had been vandalized; all the assassins were gone. And Michael Davit was found with a broken neck in an abandoned barn near his country manor.

  Rainer had inherited Uncle Willie’s cool head and cool heart. He wouldn’t check out of his hotel near the White House. He was still at the Washington, a floor above Pesh Olinov’s suite. He marched down one flight and rang the
Russian’s bell. It was Olinov himself who came to the door—his bald thug of a bodyguard must have fled. There were bruises under Olinov’s eye. His mouth was bloody. His velvet bathrobe had been turned inside out.

  “Was it the soldier?” Rainer asked.

  “Yes,” the Russian whispered.

  They entered Olinov’s suite like two conspirators. The Russian couldn’t stop shivering. There was a great rent in the carpet that ran like a lopsided river across the sitting room. A plush chair had been overturned.

  Olinov was crying now. “We cannot continue,” he said.

  “When have I ever failed you?”

  “We cannot continue,” Olinov whispered again.

  And Rainer realized that the soldier was also in the room.

  “Come out, General,” he said with the same imperturbable smile. And Tollhouse appeared from behind the lavender drapes in his Baltimore Orioles cap and one of Isaac Sidel’s signature windbreakers. Rainer marveled at Tollhouse’s fire-marked face; the soldier looked almost like an albino. The cap must have covered the wig that Tollhouse had to wear.

  “Rainer, tell me, why does Gorbachev tolerate this little pest who lies and steals and has a monopoly on toilet paper?”

  “It’s simple,” Rainer said. “Without Pesh, he could never navigate the many mousetraps of the KGB. It’s Pesh who keeps him in power.”

  “Then Gorbachev must be a very lonely man.”

  Tollhouse dismissed Olinov without bothering to wave his hand. “You can go now. Get the fuck out of here. I’ve already paid your bill. You’ve given up your residence at the Washington. Gorbachev will need his court jester in Moscow if he intends to survive.”

  “General, I haven’t packed,” Olinov said with a whimper.

  “Out.”

  And Olinov vanished into the hall in his velvet robe turned inside out.