“He makes me a laughing stock!”
“Don’t be stupid. What they say about Rex and that woman—”
“Women!”
“It’s all fake news.”
She wondered if Ingrid actually believed that. “Mamina, seriously?”
“Men have needs, Natalia. Especially powerful, rich men. You must work harder to keep them interested. Even your father—”
“Papa wasn’t rich until Rex bought him ten Slovak Audi dealerships!”
“May Papa rest in peace!” Ingrid made the sign of the cross. “Be grateful those Audi dealerships gave your baby brother a job. You want Franc back in jail?”
“Rex owns Franc and you and me!”
“Rex doesn’t own us. He is a loving man, a generous man. A great man! He is POTUS, the greatest leader on the planet!”
“Rex is a bad leader! He is zlý, bad, period! Weekends at Beau Rivage, I sit through long, boring dinners with him in the dining room. Businessmen, friends, come over to our table, groveling and seeking favors. Rex is eating Funck steak dripping with ketchup. He’s talking to them with his mouth full, specks of meat spewing out with his spit. What are they talking about? Feeding starving migrant children at the Mexican border? I don’t think so!”
Ingrid snorted. “Name me one government official in Slovakia who doesn’t stuff his own pocket! Name me one in Russia, in China!”
“Rex calls immigrants ‘animals’ and takes their babies away,” she said, ignoring her. “His company makes business deals with foreign governments. He refuses to admit the world is being devastated by global warming!”
“Rex is POTUS. You must trust he’s doing the right thing.”
“I must? In citizenship class, they taught me America is a democracy. A free country where the President is honest and thinks of the people first, not himself.” It sounded strange to her as she said the words, as if it were all a scam.
“Democracy is a bájka,” said Ingrid. “A folktale, like the folktales Babika told you when you were a little halusky.” She pinched Natalia’s cheek.
Natalia pulled away, remembering how when she was a little girl, her grandmother would tell her stories by the fireplace in her farmhouse, a pile of potatoes on the floor. Her babika never washed her hands after digging up potatoes. She always smelled like dirt.
“Natalia, darling, when you met Rex, you said you felt loved, safe, worshipped.” Ingrid’s suddenly sweet tone warned her that she was launching into a sell mode. “You felt you found your Zlatorog!”
“Zlatorog?” Natalia shook her head. “The Slovak mountain-goat god who owns all the treasures in the world? The story says the god is a monster until he marries a beautiful woman. Then he becomes good. ‘Good?’ That’s the bájka about Rex!”
“I remember Babika told me that story when I was little girl.” Ingrid smiled wistfully, ignoring Natalia’s point. “She said Zlatorog was guarded by a dragon.”
“A dragon with a hundred heads. Now when I think of Rex, he’s not Zlatorog, the god. He’s the dragon!”
“Natalia, you are the luckiest woman on the planet,” said Ingrid, her voice hardening.
“I am a prisoner.”
“Stop this craziness!” She grabbed her by the shoulders. “Listen to me. Don’t I know what’s best for you?” When Natalia averted her eyes, Ingrid shook her. “Didn’t I stop you from making the biggest mistake in your life?” She shook her again, harder. “Didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
Suddenly Natalia was fifteen years old, admitting that her mother’s suspicions were correct. She was pregnant. That day her mother convinced her to have the baby in secret and give it away to an orphanage. “You must do this. You are young and beautiful, and you will be an internationally famous fashion model.” She remembered how Ingrid repeated it over and over, hammering away as if it were dream for herself. “You must not give that up!”
“Maybe you knew what was best for me when I was fifteen,” she said, squirming out of her mother’s grasp. “But not now. Not this time.” She stood up from the bed.
“Natalia, you gave birth to a baby in sin,” hissed Ingrid. She clutched the gold crucifix around her neck. “This is your chance to make up for it in the eyes of God.”
Natalia flinched, stung in her most vulnerable spot.
Natalia had been burdened with guilt since the baby’s birth. She prayed nightly to the Virgin Mary to forgive her. The memory flashed in her mind: screaming in pain as she lay in bed by the fireplace in her grandmother’s farmhouse, her babika squeezing her hand as Natalia pushed a child out into the world. In the flickering firelight, she saw it was a boy. She wished she could tell the baby’s father, her one true love, but she had been forbidden to ever see him again.
Before the midwife could wipe off the bloody afterbirth, her mother snatched the baby and wrapped it in a blanket. Natalia hadn’t expected to feel maternal instincts, but they suddenly overwhelmed her. “Mamina,” she cried, reaching for the baby. Ingrid ignored her, carrying the child out the door. Natalia glimpsed a withered Catholic nun hovering on the threshold. Her mother put the baby in the nun’s arms and shoved cash into the pocket of her frayed habit. The nun vanished into the snowy night.
Natalia remembered wailing in grief. Ingrid had no patience for her tears. “Put today out of your mind,” she had said, as if it were a command. “Forget all about it. Focus on the future!” She cringed, remembering the old Slovak saying that her mother then repeated and had been repeating ever since: “What eyes don’t see, heart doesn’t hurt.”
Natalia had to admit that as her modeling career took off, she did forget about the baby. But the guilt never disappeared. Years later, she came up with a way to assuage it. She had been dating Rex and had moved to New York when he confessed that he was in love with her. “As soon as I get you a ring, I might just propose,” he joked. She called her mother in Slovakia.
“Say yes!” Ingrid screamed into the phone.
“But I don’t know if love him,” Natalia admitted.
“You love him!”
“How can I be sure?”
“How can you not love a billionaire with palaces, limos, yachts, jet planes, and hotels?”
Natalia hung up on Ingrid—she wanted to make her own decision—but her mother’s words had echoed in her mind. After a few days, despite her doubts, she came up with a persuasive reason—okay, it was a rationalization, she admitted—to marry Rex. It hit her one afternoon when she was in Serendipity Café pigging out on a hot-fudge sundae because she was so depressed that she didn’t even have the desire to go shopping. She called this reason for marrying Rex the “cherry on top,” like the maraschino cherry on top of her hot-fudge sundae. It was small, but so sweet and such a happy color, that she saved it for last.
Natalia remembered how she spun a fantasy of finding her long-lost son; she even hired a detective to scour Slovakia looking for him. After she and Rex got married, she imagined bringing the young man—he would be grown by now—to live with them in America. She convinced herself that if Rex loved her enough to marry her, he would accept her child. She pictured Rex taking him into his family and his business. It seemed the perfect happy ending: She would not only right the wrong she had done in the eyes of God, but her son would become a millionaire.
She recalled the night that Rex had proposed to her on his yacht, the shimmering lights of the New York skyline behind them. She was touched to see tears in his eyes when he said, “I feel I’ve been waiting for you my entire life,” and presented her with the 15-karat diamond engagement ring that he had already flashed to reporters. “I promise to do everything in my power to make you happy.” She felt so loved, so confident that Rex would do anything to please her, that after they returned to his penthouse in Funck Tower and were slipping into bed, she confessed that she had given up a baby when she was young. “If I find him, I hope you will accept him as part of our family.”
Instead of agreeing to her request, he had lashed out at her. “Are you
out of your fucking mind? You think I want another bastard child to support? No fucking way! This one’s not even mine!” He kicked her out of bed. “Come back when you’re ready to play by my rules!”
She remembered wandering, dazed, through the penthouse condo, realizing that she had nowhere else to go. In the palatial living room, she flicked on the lights and gazed at the gold-framed eighteenth-century French landscapes and gilded furniture. “Talk about antiques!” Rex had bragged the first time he brought her here. “These priceless beauties once belonged to King Louis XIV of France. The fucking Sun King! They were in the fucking Palace of Versailles!”
Natalia knew that King Louis XIV’s furniture was still in Versailles. She had seen it there when she trooped through the palace with hundreds of other tourists after moving to Paris from Slovakia. This was just one more of Rex’s… She didn’t think of them as lies in those days, just innocent exaggerations. But so what if his “antiques” were replicas? They glowed in the radiance of massive chandeliers dripping with crystal. When she toured Versailles, she had dreamed of one day living in a palace. Now she had the chance. Would she ever have another one? Could she turn all this down because of a son she might never find? She crept over to the phone and called her mother in Slovakia for advice.
“You told Rex about the dieťa, the baby? You are bláznivý!” Ingrid screamed.
“I’m not crazy, Mamina! I thought he loved me enough to—”
“Do not think, Natalia! Thinking is what got you in deep hovno!” Her mother’s voice was faint—the phone connection with Slovakia was weak—but her panic was loud and clear. “Do whatever you must to make him forget you ever said it! Rex will not just be your husband. He will be your boss, your master, and your savior! Without Rex, you will end up a dirty-legs prostitútka in Bratislava!”
Natalia angrily hung up the phone, but she was terrified that her mother was right. She crept back into Rex’s bedroom. He was lying in bed watching FOX News, a Diet Coke in his hand. He didn’t look up from the screen when she apologized and begged for his forgiveness. Instead, he snatched a thick document from the nightstand and tossed it at her: the prenuptial agreement. She didn’t bother to read it. She signed it, climbed into bed, and slid down the straps of the black-silk La Perla nightgown that he had given her to wear tonight.
“That black-ass Muslim motherfucker!” yelled Rex. Natalia glimpsed the TV screen. He was referring to Barak Obama, who at the time was being mentioned as a potential future candidate for President. She licked her lips and ducked under the covers. She knew that it was crucial right now to give Rex the blowjob to blow away all blowjobs, or she would be history.
“Natalia!” Her mother’s voice startled her back to the glorified hospital room. “Look at your ring!”
“What?”
“It’s like the headlight on a locomotive.” Ingrid grabbed Natalia’s left hand and wrenched it close to her face. “How many women in the world have a ring like this?”
“I don’t care.”
“You are royalty!”
“I would rather be a roľník, a peasant!” A wave of guilt, as sour as bile, surged in Natalia’s gut. She remembered back to the day before her wedding to Rex, when the Slovak detective she had hired to find her son reported that the boy died of rheumatic fever at the age of five. She considered the news a bad omen for her marriage, but her mother convinced her that it was too late to back out. She wished now that she had. What her mother said was wrong: Having Rex’s child wouldn’t make up for the guilt she still felt for having a baby in sin. It would make her feel guiltier.
“I will not have Rex’s baby, Mamina. Rex is the diabol!” She grabbed her coat, scarf, and purse from the bed.
“Natalia, do not do something stupid!”
Sensing Ingrid’s panic, her dog jumped off the bed and peed on the floor. “Ach! Vladimir! Zlý pes! Bad dog!” She rummaged in the bed covers for the buzzer to summon a nurse.
In that instant, when her back was turned, Natalia snatched her mother’s iPhone from the nightstand and pocketed it. “Love you, Mamina!” She donned her black wig and sunglasses, blew her an air kiss, and headed toward the door.
Still rummaging for the buzzer, Ingrid called after her, “Promise you will not do something bláznivý, crazy!”
Natalia waved to her mother and walked out the door. In the hall, she pulled the iPhone from her pocket and stowed it in her purse.
Sorry, Mamina, she thought. Right now, I need this phone more than you do.
Chapter 4
New York City
December 1, 4:00 p.m.
Bristling from the visit with her mother, Natalia sank into the back seat of the Escalade. Ken eased the door shut and hopped in front. The driver pulled into Park Avenue traffic. Sliding into a corner that Ken and the driver couldn’t see in the rear-view mirror, she took her mother’s iPhone out of her purse and pressed the start button. Nothing.
“Hovno!” She should have known that her mother would forget to charge it.
She slid open a panel on the back of the driver’s seat, revealing a mini fridge and a tray holding crystal glasses etched with the Presidential seal. Beside it, iPhone cords dangled from two data ports. She grabbed one and plugged in the iPhone. While waiting for it to charge, she surveyed the contents of the fridge. In addition to Rex’s regulation cans of Diet Coke, it was stocked with bottles of Evian, Perrier, and San Pellegrino, her three mineral waters of choice. She usually drank Evian because it was flat water, calming when she needed to stay calm. Right now, she craved bubbles.
She opened a bottle of Perrier and poured the fizzing water into a crystal glass. She took a sip and closed her eyes. Savoring the tickle on her tongue, she pretended it was champagne. She had something to celebrate: She had convinced Rex to allow her to visit her mother in New York today so that she could secretly snatch her iPhone. Now she possessed a phone that was not monitored by the White House, as her FLOTUS phone was. Rex and Gretchen would never know whom she called—or what she searched for online—with it. Natalia reverently placed her fingers on the phone, as if it were a religious relic. May you charge quickly, she thought, and yield Google information that will change my life.
They were pulling onto the East River Highway. She knew that she had to access the iPhone before the SUV arrived at the East River Heliport. Once she climbed aboard the helicopter that was waiting there to whisk her back to the White House, she would have no privacy. Her fingers itched to tap on Slovak Google, Slovak Facebook, and the dozens of Slovak apps that she knew her mother had on her phone. They were crucial to locating the man that she was desperate to find.
She remembered that a few years ago her mother had said she used the same password for all her online accounts: “At my age, it’s hard enough to remember one password!” She asked Natalia to remember it, just in case she forgot: “Haluski 1724.” “Haluskis are my favorite Slovak potato dumplings,” she said to Natalia. “When you were a little girl, I used to feed you haluskis by hand! I even nicknamed you ‘haluski’!”
Natalia remembered the morning of her fourteenth birthday. She was naked, rummaging in a drawer for something to wear in the bedroom she shared with her brother in the family’s Communist-era, high-rise apartment. Her mother had barged in. “Happy Birthday, my little haluski!” She looked Natalia up and down and crossed herself. “Mami Maria! You are the tallest, slimmest, and most beautiful girl in Žilina Catholic School! With the smallest waist and the biggest haluskis!”
“Mamina, you’re embarrassing me!”
“For such beauty, you have God, and me, to thank!” Ingrid lifted her enormous, but now-sagging, breasts, and gave them a shake. Laughing, she hugged Natalia.
After her fourteenth birthday, her mother continued to call her “haluski,” but she no longer hand-fed her dumplings, or allowed her to eat them. “Soon you will be a famous model! You cannot be fat!”
“No more haluskis!” was her mother’s mantra.
In the back of
the Escalade, Natalia checked the charging iPhone. Not enough power yet. She focused back on the password. Her mother had told her that she chose the number “1724” to go with “haluskis” because 1724 was the address of the little four-room house on Čierny Mor Street in Žilina that Natalia bought her parents after she became a successful model in Paris, when she was nineteen. “Papa and I are so proud of you,” Ingrid had said. “Our little haluski is now rich and famous!”
Natalia thought back to that time. The truth? Her modeling career wasn’t all that successful, and she was a long way from being “rich and famous.” She recalled her first months working in Paris. It was winter and bitterly cold, and she and her roommate Yvonne, a stunning young Belgian model, could barely pay for heating. Her mother encouraged her to do what Natalia admitted some of their model friends did: get paid to go on dates with wealthy men. “A rich man wants a gold watch on his wrist and a beautiful woman on his arm,” Ingrid nagged on her daily call from Slovakia. “Makes the man look powerful and makes other powerful men envy him. You will wear beautiful clothes and meet handsome men. You must be very nice to the richest.” She recommended that Natalia encourage Yvonne to become an escort too, to keep her company. “You will have a girlfriend to gossip about men with. It will be fun!”
Ingrid sent her money so that she could buy sexy, secondhand clothes for her new side hustle. Soon Natalia made more money from the escort service than from modeling; so did Yvonne. The two roommates gossiped about their dates, but it wasn’t “fun.” Most of the men they “escorted” were rich, but they were also either old or ugly—or both. Natalia had sex with the few that she liked, but it wasn’t a turn-on to sleep with men who regarded her as a sex object, not a someone, but a something that they could conquer, whether or not they paid for the privilege. She could fake an orgasm as well as the next model/escort, but real orgasms with them were nonexistent. Her worse pet peeve: They felt entitled to forego foreplay, the soft, sweet kisses on the lips and neck, and the gentle caresses, that make a woman feel desired. The oafs cut right to the chase: First they stuck their tongues down her throat; then they stuck in something else. When she met Rex, he forced his tongue down her throat too, but somehow she hadn’t found it as offensive. Maybe because his tongue is not all that long, she thought, like another part of his anatomy.
The First Lady Escapes Page 3