“You shouldn’t be so harsh,” Rainer said. “Pesh has his good points. He was once very loyal.”
“But this isn’t the Boy Scouts. I never admired merit badges.”
Rainer sat on one of Pesh’s sofas. “And what manner of fate have you prepared for me?”
Tollhouse stroked the torn bill of his cap; he could have been a baseball manager who’d seen better times. His mind had begun to drift.
“General, I paid you a fortune—to rid the world of Sidel. You never lost a penny on my account. You had every chance, and still you failed.”
“I didn’t fail,” Tollhouse said. “I always worked for Sidel. He just didn’t realize it.”
Rainer considered strangling the general with the velvet sash that clung to the drapes. “Yet you took my millions without a qualm.”
“You got your money’s worth,” Tollhouse said. “Sidel was stranded on Pennsylvania Avenue for months. You maneuvered around him, sold off whatever paper you had, manipulated the markets around the possibility of POTUS becoming a corpse. You didn’t need much more than the myth of his destruction. I made a rich man even richer. So stop crying those crocodile tears. He couldn’t even travel to Prague, his dream town. But he should have gone to your island metropolis. West Berlin was the place for him, with its Turks, its whores, its spies, its squatters, hunched inside a wall. He’d love Berlin. It would remind him of another ghetto—the Lower East Side. But it’s too late. You won’t be there to greet him.”
Rainer could see the madness in Tollhouse’s eyes, plots spiraling out of control. But if Tollhouse really wanted Rainer dead, he would have gone for the jugular and not toyed with Michael Davit. Rainer had some kind of protective cloak that wasn’t clear. Ah, it had something to do with that little gray house on the Canal. Tollhouse worshiped Uncle Willie and the Abwehr—that band of aristocratic saboteurs, who would suddenly appear behind the enemy’s lines, speaking Polish better than the Poles. They were consummate actors in the theatre of Kriegspiel. So Rainer used the general’s own skills against him.
“Mensch, if I don’t leave the capital alive, the Library of Congress will never forgive you. I was an honored guest at the gala. Thomas Jefferson will rise out of his grave.”
“Let him rise. I told you. I work for Sidel.”
Rainer squeezed as hard as he could. It was Kriegspiel. But the targets were much less distinct. “Big Balls has turned the tables. You’ve been hired to get rid of me.”
Tollhouse laughed for the first time, but his burnt skin had little elasticity. And he wore a grimace like a death mask.
“Yes, your body count is in the package. But it’s difficult to ice a Brandenberger. It’s against my principles. You know, I’m sentimental about certain things. Rainer, you were my Roman Legion. Will you promise to stay clear of the president?”
“No,” Rainer said.
Tollhouse must have been hit with fatigue. Even the grimace was gone.
“I’ll kill your wife, your children, and your children’s children. I’ll decimate entire blood lines. The whole population of West Berlin will suffer on account of you.”
And now Rainer went on the attack. He’d trapped the general. He had much better terrain.
“Dear general, my answer won’t be any different no matter how many you kill.”
“Good,” Tollhouse said. “The Library of Congress can go fly a kite. You’re now officially Wildwater’s guest. You can have safe passage to West Berlin. But if you go near your corporate headquarters in Hamburg, I promise, you’ll never get back.”
He’d run to Hamburg, visit the Red Castle, his favorite bordello—it had had several facelifts over the past forty years, had started in a grungy cellar, then climbed several flights of stairs to the attic, with its glorious harbor view. He no longer went to the bordellos in Berlin. They were filled with black marketeers, spies and gangsters from Istanbul, MI6 outcasts, and American generals and millionaires; and the girls wouldn’t shave their legs or sponge themselves between clients. He wouldn’t mind dying in a tub, like Marat—at the Red Castle. Tollhouse could hire one of the little darlings to slit his throat, as long as she shaved her legs.
He’d have his last glimpse of the harbor, a lyrical wasteland with its endless rotting warehouses and wharves, its derricks, its cranes that seemed to scratch the sky, and the ships themselves, like hulking pharaohs that could barely keep afloat—that was Rainer’s little paradise. But Tollhouse was much too curious about the wonder of Rainer Wolff to have him killed. His hooded eyes suddenly brightened like those of a little child.
“Tell me about the admiral?”
Rainer had him hooked, this Moby Dick with scarred white flesh. “Mensch, what is there to tell? He was a little man in lumpy clothes.”
“But he had the precision of a celestial clock. Your brigade was always there first, at every fucking battle.”
And now Rainer scolded this mad general. “We were saboteurs—we had to be first. It was Kriegspiel. We had a whole warehouse of uniforms next to the Canal. We liked to parade around Berlin as British troops—it scared the pants off people. The admiral loved practical jokes. We could have fooled Churchill himself. My cockney accent was impeccable.”
Tollhouse grew wistful. “Get the hell out of here. Go back to Berlin.”
Rainer wasn’t sure if it was a death sentence, a battle cry, or both. Tollhouse had his own sense of Kriegspiel. Wildwater was now part of the West Wing.
Tollhouse left him there without a word of goodbye. Rainer hiked upstairs to his own suite. And he went down to the lobby with his luggage and an old leather briefcase that had been repaired a dozen times by an old Jewish tailor near the checkpoint at Chausseestraße. The tailor was ninety years old. He’d worked exclusively for the Abwehr until the admiral smuggled him out of Berlin, and into one of his safe houses in the hinterland. The tailor lived in England for a while after the war. But Rainer begged him to return, and he bought the tailor his own shop. Rainer never had to buy a single article of clothes after that; everything he wore had been sewn by hand. He often had lunch with the tailor, who never discussed the war and the death camps with his benefactor, but still looked at Rainer like a live bullet burning into his head . . .
Tollhouse had paid the publishing baron’s hotel bill, and had a black limousine waiting for him outside the Washington. Rainer entered the limo like a willful, walking target. Would the chauffeur drive him to Dulles International or a Wildwater warehouse on the banks of the Anacostia? Rainer didn’t seem to care. It was Kriegspiel all over again. He didn’t think of his wife, or his children, or the mistress he had in Milan above a Louis Vuitton shop. He thought of Eva Canaris, of her squirrelly hand, like some secret weapon of desire. All his life he had to find sustenance in the memory of a single kiss. Rainer shut his eyes and fell into a profound sleep.
25
We’ll do it at David.”
Sidel hadn’t forgotten the art of the Lower East Side. He loved to play shadkhen—marriage broker and wizard—with his helicopter pilot.
It gave him a measure of delight that Colonel Oliver had given up his widower’s weeds, moved out of the White House attic, and rented a flat in Georgetown with Captain Sarah.
“We’ll do it at David.”
“Boss,” the colonel muttered. “I can’t follow you.”
“Your engagement party,” Isaac said. “We’ll do it at David.”
Stef shivered in silent protest. “Wait a minute. I never said we were engaged. It’s an experiment between Sarah and me—a trial run.”
“Terrific,” Isaac said. “And when the trial run is over, we’ll do it at Camp David.”
It was wiser not to argue with POTUS when he was in one of his moods. “Yeah, I get ya, boss. We’ll do it at David.”
The White House rocked with madcap energy. Sidel’s ratings hit the roof. Seventy-nine percent of the voting population agreed that POTUS was the best damn cop and commander in chief to have around in a period of uncertainty
, when the Eastern Bloc was unraveling and Gorbachev made overture after overture to the West. Glasnost, what the hell could it mean? Did Moscow want to move into the wild lands of Alaska and become our fifty-first state?
There were Kremlinologists at every little corner, including the White House, where Isaac met with all his mavens in the Situation Room. East Berlin had become the capital of the hardliners, according to the Kremlinologists. Erich Honecker, first secretary of the East German Central Committee, didn’t want glasnost. He hewed to a strict socialist line. And when there were riots in the streets, Gorbachev wouldn’t come to the rescue. He was more interested in the humming capitalist music of West Berlin.
“It’s a ploy,” Tim Vail said, “a trick. Honecker’s his man. Gorby will have to prop him up.”
“No,” said Felix Mandel, Isaac’s budget director. “He’d rather let East Berlin sink.”
The Kremlinologists in the room trained their daggers on him. But that couldn’t stop Felix. “East Berlin is a phantom city, an apparition, a poisoned fairy tale, a porous myth.”
“And West Berlin?” rasped Ramona Dazzle, who sided with the Kremlinologists. “Gorby will strangle it out of existence.”
“No,” said Felix. “No, no, no. It’s sucked all the energy out of the East.”
And now Ramona gave him one of her demonic smiles. “What about the Wall?”
“Another apparition,” said Felix.
“The Wall Jumpers wouldn’t think so,” said Tim Vail, who pressed a button on his new silver wand; four screens hummed with competing images of a raffish man in a ripple of bullets—an unemployed clown perhaps—as he fell from the Wall like a wayward pin of flesh caught in a flicker of light; some graffiti artist had decorated this particular piece of the Wall with sunflowers and dragonflies in garish, defiant colors.
Suddenly Isaac began to mourn the ghost of Stalin inside him.
“But I ruled New York as a socialist town.”
“Sure, boss,” Felix said. “The tycoons let you have your little toy palace. But where did the gelt come from for your pet projects? You could bob and weave around all the contradictions.”
“And you’re saying East Berlin will perish?” Isaac asked with a waver in his voice.
“That Wall will be around for another fifty years,” said Ramona, who leapt into the fray.
The Kremlinologists nodded their heads. “Another fifty, at least.”
“And what should we do in the meantime?” Isaac had to ask his mavens. He felt bewildered, like little Alice surrounded by the Queen of Hearts and her royal retinue.
“Nothing,” said Tim Vail. “Gorby will fall flat on his ass. The KGB will put in one of their cronies, and Honecker will prevail.”
“Then it’s business as usual,” Isaac said.
The Bull had been sitting there in silence, his eyes beetling across the Situation Room. He was usually rhapsodic with all the mavens around. Isaac had to drag him into the conversation.
“It’s a different ballgame,” the Bull said in that cryptic manner of his, as if he had some overwhelming truth he was about to reveal.
“How so?” asked one of the Kremlinologists.
“We have POTUS. And he’s the best weapon in our stockpile.”
“But I thought it was too dangerous for him to travel,” Ramona said.
“The danger days are over.”
And the meeting was adjourned. But the Bull signaled to Isaac, and they sat alone in the Situation Room. The Bull chuckled to himself like an intelligence chief after some great coup.
“Rainer Wolff is toast.”
“Bull, I haven’t read about his demise in any obit.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the Bull said. “It was a classic Wildwater op. Tollhouse met with the Nazi, and set him straight. That old boy can’t hurt us—dead or alive. But we have one small wrinkle, sir.”
Isaac could feel a shower of shit swirling over his head. “And what’s that?”
“Tollhouse thinks he deserves the Medal of Freedom. And he would like the ceremony performed in the Blue Room in front of all the cameras.”
“He’s a murderer,” Isaac muttered. “I won’t do it.”
“But you commissioned that murderer to save your life. We paid him a handsome fee. Felix had to juggle all our books to find the cash.”
“I won’t do it,” Isaac said. “Mr. Wildwater stays in the shadows, where he belongs—and that’s final.”
But everything was more complicated than it appeared to be. Isaac couldn’t have a rogue general wandering about with a grudge against the commander in chief. So he pinned the medal on Tollhouse at a secret ceremony. And Mr. Wildwater promised never to wear it in public. Such were the compromises a president had to make.
He had no guests at the White House other than Desirée, and needed none. The monstrous white cat invaded all of Isaac’s meetings with his cabinet. She frightened the wits out of Ramona Dazzle, hissing and arching her back every time Isaac’s chief of staff left her corner suite. And Desirée was still in love with Felix. She would serenade the budget director, sitting near his office, and meowing like a moonstruck frog. Still, she revealed her matted, warlike belly to no one but Isaac, leaping onto his desk in the Oval Office, scattering papers and penholders until the boss stroked her religiously. Desirée demanded the Big Guy’s complete attention, and didn’t always get it.
There was a logistical problem: what part would she play in a presidential lift package? She could fly with him to David, sit on his lap in Dragon, when he had to ride around the capital to meet up with some diplomat, but what about all the other packages? Queen Elizabeth had invited him to Windsor Castle, and would Desirée fit in with the queen’s corgis? Would she rip these royal dogs to shreds? Should a mongrel like her—a cat as chaotic as Rikers itself—be permitted on Windsor’s grounds?
A European junket was being planned for POTUS, a kind of jubilee. He would sit with Elizabeth at Windsor, chat up the British prime at Chequers, meet with the French president at the Élysée, visit the house where Beethoven was born in Bonn, with the German chancellor at his side, take a White Top to West Berlin, ride down the “Ku damm” in Dragon, and deliver a speech in front of the Wall.
The itinerary still had to be polished to perfection. The Secret Service didn’t want him near the Berlin Wall.
“Boss, there will be a whole bunch of squatters, Lefties, and anarchists,” said Matt Malloy. “We won’t be able to protect you.”
“Stop it,” Isaac said. “I had the same squatters, Lefties, and anarchists in Manhattan, and I managed.”
They solved the riddle of Desirée. The delinquent cat wouldn’t be allowed near Windsor, out of respect to Elizabeth and her dogs, but she would have a special basket and litter box on board Air Force One. Still, Isaac’s interns had to anticipate the difficulty of having a cat with the appeal of a movie star.
“Sir, the foreign press will want photo ops with you and Desirée.”
“They can have all the photo ops they want, at their own risk. Desirée might not take kindly to their cameras.”
The Big Guy was on a roll. He was more coveted in the Deep South than Republican Party bosses, and was called the Pistolero President in the heartland of Illinois. He wouldn’t stay on script—there was no script that could handcuff Sidel. He would walk into a fundraiser, attack Wall Street donors, and speak about financing schools in the nation’s worst barrios. “We have to lure our best teachers into the poorest districts, so that billionaires will beg to have their children enrolled in these schools. Make them better and better—that’s how you solve de facto segregation.”
But reporters had to remind him that New York City had been one of the worst offenders, that it had its own invisible wall.
“Not so invisible,” Isaac said. “I failed. I had Merlin, but Merlin didn’t make much of a dent.”
“Then how will you find a solution, sir?”
“With blood, sweat, and volunteers. I’ll teach in one of
the problem schools myself.”
The reporters smiled and winked at one another. “And it will cost the taxpayer millions just to solve the logistics of getting you in and out of there.”
That realization also cost Sidel. He was still trapped within the confines of the presidency, no matter how much freedom he had to travel. Windsor Castle would have the same hot wind as the West Wing. He could have bullied his way into Prague, followed Kafka’s steps, stone by stone, and he’d have been just as blue. He was as much a prisoner of circumstance as the Queen of Hearts. And while he wandered about the residence with his own crazy cat, who was ruining the White House carpets with her claws, he looked up and found Colonel Oliver in his flight jacket.
“Stef, why the hell are you here? Am I part of some secret lift package?”
“We’ll do it at David.”
Isaac was still caught up in a woeful dream of self-entrapment.
“Kid, have I missed something? Am I out of commission?”
“We’ll do it at David,” his pilot repeated. “Sarah and I have agreed—to an engagement party.”
Isaac was the last to learn about the lift package. That’s how low he’d been, how far down in the dumps. The Bull himself had arranged the lift. The engagement party was meant as a surprise to Sidel. He put on his cap and his windbreaker, had to coax Desirée into her travel cage, while the White House butler bundled up her litter box and portions of wet and dry food, and within ten minutes they were on the South Lawn, with Marine One revving up. Isaac was the sole passenger—with his cat and a pair of Secret Service agents, who clung to the shadows.
The White Top danced and swerved above the lawn, and Sidel felt a strange lightness about him, a lifting of the soul. It lasted deep into Maryland as they rode the mountain range. And when he glimpsed the rudiments of his presidential retreat—Cactus, as his own protectors called it—that lightness of soul was still there. The cabins, lodges, barracks, and roads were laid out like some abandoned village caught under a spell. And perhaps Isaac was the enchanter—with his cat.
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