Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  13

  Ah, Air Force One. It was a traveling media circus where Isaac had to play juggler, wise man, and magician-clown. The press had its own compartment at the back of the plane, but reporters wandered about like petty cannibals prepared to devour the skin and bones of presidential advisors who had tagged along on the flight. Their favorite was Colin Fremont, who sat in his red scarf and black silk shirt and served as the president’s portmanteau. Colin had his own spies at State, and he was aware of what these reporters knew. He was like a dentist in the middle of a probe, revealing what he wanted to reveal.

  “Of course it’s political. Every time POTUS gets on a plane it’s a political act. We’re bailing out the Czech president. His tenure at the Castle is a bit shaky. But he’s smiling now, as well he should. Karel’s the beneficiary of POTUS’s first trip abroad. And we’re not brandishing missiles or challenging the Soviets.”

  “Why not?” asked a political correspondent from Time who’d been invited aboard by the Secretary of State.

  “Because we’re the USA, and POTUS is making a spiritual mission. That’s our policy. It’s a cultural package. The president’s going to revisit the cobblestones of Prague’s greatest writer.”

  “Sir,” said one of the bureau chiefs at the Washington Post, “Prague isn’t even on our agenda.”

  “That’s a bit of a wrinkle,” said Colin Fremont. “But it will be resolved before we touch down.”

  “Isn’t it true, sir,” asked the same bureau chief, “that there’s a price on the president’s head, and we have to hide out at some half-pint castle miles from Prague?”

  “That half-pint castle is President Ludvik’s country estate,” Colin declared, but Isaac had to wander into this hornets’ nest.

  “There’ve been threats, and we have to take precautions, but I will cross the Charles Bridge and retrace Franz Kafka’s steps.”

  “Why is Kafka so important to you?” asked a correspondent from Atlanta. “He’s not an American author. He didn’t invent Gatsby’s green light. He writes about cockroaches and castles that cannot be penetrated.”

  A fury began to build in Isaac. He could have been back at Columbia College, during his one season of classics, sitting somewhere at the back of Hamilton Hall, in a freshman humanities seminar.

  “Well, isn’t Air Force One some kind of a castle? And Kafka didn’t write about cockroaches. Haven’t we all woken up from a bad dream and felt a sudden metamorphosis?”

  “Mr. President,” answered the most sympathetic member of the press pool, “what do you mean?”

  “Metamorphosis,” Isaac repeated, wearing his Camp David windbreaker on Air Force One. “That your whole life had changed, that you weren’t even human—that you could have become a pathetic creature with spindly legs.”

  “Oh,” said the same reporter, “we’ve all had the blues like that.”

  And Isaac trundled off to POTUS’s suite with Captain Sarah and Colonel Oliver, who should have flown ahead to Prague on a military transport to reassemble the presidential package of Night Hawks. But Isaac wanted Stef with him on Air Force One.

  “I can feel it,” he said, once they were all alone in his private compartment. “Somehow, somewhere, I’m going to get fucked. What’s the word on Karel Ludvik?”

  He knew that Sarah was sharing her secrets with the admirals at Quantico, but she was still the intelligence maven he trusted the most.

  “He might be the genuine article, sir,” she said. “He climbed the usual commie ladder, but Moscow is imploding. And you may have a much better lifeline to him than the Kremlin and the KGB.”

  “He’s still a thug—he’s had people tortured and killed.”

  Sarah perused the Prince of the Western World. “Give him a little credit. He managed to survive a police state. No one has toppled him—not yet.”

  “Does he have a family?”

  “He did. A wife and two daughters. But they were killed in front of his eyes—in a car bombing.”

  Isaac brooded for a moment. “And it’s impossible to identify the perps, I suppose.”

  “Oh, there are the usual suspects,” Sarah said. “Rogue bankers, or a rival in the StB. Karel owes millions to his handlers, whoever they are.”

  “And was there a lottery out on his life?”

  “I have no idea, Mr. President, but I wouldn’t walk around without your vest. We can’t tell what company we might meet at the hunting lodge. I’m not as sanguine about it as the Secret Service. They might have sharpshooters on the battlements, but it’s in the middle of nowhere. I’d have taken my chances in Prague, sir.”

  “So would I, but Karel was against it. And we’re his guests. Stef, I hope you brought a sidearm or two with your Night Hawks?”

  “Roger that, sir. I managed to smuggle a Beretta on board the lift package.”

  And Isaac laughed for the first time in his flying fortress.

  There was too much politics involved in every one of his sorties. He preferred a landscape of Berettas and Glocks.

  It was an airstrip, a secret military base, used by the Russkies, Isaac imagined, whenever they wanted to drop in on Prague. He saw the meanest looking soldiers.

  But the Night Hawks were there, in enormous barns. Isaac had to endure a military salute, since the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic couldn’t allow the Prince of the Western World to enter its domain unnoticed. He returned the salute as he descended the air stairs. There was even a military band, a ragtag troupe that swayed like drunken men. They missed half the notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the national anthem sounded like an aria out of Looney Tunes.

  He’d only traveled to Eastern Europe once, when he was mayor of New York. He’d gone through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin with a little gang of other mayors and some mid-career viceroy at the State Department. He had to exchange his Yankee dollars for eastern marks, which looked like Monopoly money to Isaac; the paper was pathetically thin. They crossed the border into some no-man’s-land of gigantic murals, revealing the wonders of the worker state; behind the murals were mounds of rubble. The State Department viceroy was very smug. “It’s all one big façade,” he said. But Isaac felt a crippling sadness. He mourned something he didn’t quite understand. Perhaps this violent pull into East Berlin was the finale of his socialist dream. He saw goose-stepping soldiers in front of monuments celebrating some Russian victory in the late world war. He was ushered into an enormous restaurant replete with chandeliers and marble walls. The headwaiter wore spotless white gloves. There must have been a hundred tables. But only two were in service, where the mayors sat with the viceroy. The rest of this food palace was an enormous, silent cavern with its own odd celestial music. Isaac tried to strike up a conversation with one of the waitresses, a plump woman with blue eyelashes, a natural flirt. The other waitresses stared at the ceiling, never looked once into Isaac’s eyes.

  “Guten Morgen,” Isaac said in a guttural growl he’d picked up from German Jews at the Garden Cafeteria. The viceroy frowned at him. And the plump woman disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Sidel,” said the viceroy, “no intimacy is allowed.”

  “Jesus, how will I learn anything if I can’t talk?”

  “You’ll meet scientists and poets, Mr. Mayor. You’ll be more in your own arena.”

  But the scientists and poets must have been plucked right out of those murals on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie. They all babbled about their freedom to create.

  “We feel so sorry, Herr Sidel, for the problems you have in the West. Will you ever get rid of Rikers Island?”

  Sidel tumbled back into silence. The poets had all been rehearsed. But one scientist in a ragged collar did manage to tease Isaac out of his surly mood. “How is the Pink Commish? You’re famous in these circles, Herr Sidel, as the proletarian Bürgermeister, the one mayor in America who has helped the poor.”

  Isaac didn’t argue. He couldn’t win. He met with a bunch of police chiefs who tried to convince hi
m that all crime had been erased from the German Democratic Republic. Isaac nodded his head. But he must have gotten into trouble with the viceroy. After he arrived back at the Kempinski in West Berlin, he discovered that his room had been ransacked . . .

  The airstrip outside Prague reminded him of the gigantic murals hiding mounds of rubble; half the hangars were made of cardboard, and many of the Czech planes were wooden replicas of the latest Soviet aircraft. Isaac was glad when the soldiers and musicians vanished from the parade grounds, and he was left with these strange wooden toys.

  He climbed aboard Marine One with his White House staff and the Secretary of State, while the Secret Service and Colin’s staff rode in the second Night Hawk, and the third was a decoy. The three White Tops must have looked like ships from another planet to farmers in the Czech countryside. They swerved north across hilly terrain, past gardenless gardens and orchards where nothing seemed to grow, and hovered near Karel Ludvik’s dacha, a hunting lodge that resembled a miniature castle. The castle overlooked the fortified town of Terezín, which had been a transit station for Jews during the war, a kind of model camp. Terezín was the most diabolic of all the death camps. It had its own children’s chorus, an opera house, its own philharmonic orchestra, a theater troupe, and an artists’ colony. Many of its inmates had come from Prague—musicians, actors, poets. They performed for the Red Cross at Terezín, for German generals on leave, for Czech industrialists. The Germans made propaganda films about this Jewish utopia. But the children’s chorus went right from one of these idyllic performances and propaganda films to Auschwitz. Ottla Kafka, Franz’s youngest sister, who had been an inmate at Terezín, looked after these children, and accompanied them to Auschwitz as their companion and “nurse.”

  And when Isaac looked into the heart of Terezín, which was now a sleepy garrison with many of the same barracks, he felt a rage he could barely control.

  The Czechs had built a helipad on the battlements for Marine One. And Colonel Oliver landed his White Top on two red markers with all the precision of a gigantic metal glove. Isaac could see Matt Malloy and his coterie of sharpshooters on the ramparts like medieval warriors with sniper scopes. Matt had been the first of Isaac’s crew to arrive and had made a sweep of the hunting lodge and Ludvik’s grounds with his metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs; the dogs had come in their own kennel.

  The Czech president stood alone on the ramparts to greet this Jewish prince of the West. He wore a blue blazer with silver buttons, a white shirt with a soft collar, and a brilliant red tie. The president had tiny feet. He was slightly stooped and had unruly brows and the crisp gray eyes of a hunter. Isaac felt an immediate kinship with him.

  He’s a werewolf.

  “Mr. President,” Karel Ludvik said, “I’m most grateful that you have honored us with your visit.”

  “The honor is mine. Call me Isaac.”

  “And you shall call me Karel.”

  From the battlements Isaac could see inside the walls of Terezín, with its orange rooftops, and it irritated him that Karel Ludvik would select a dacha near one of the Nazis’ model camps. But he kept his own counsel and descended the winding, windy stairs to Ludvik’s living quarters. He’d left his Secretary of State to deal with Ludvik’s own diplomats, and he sat alone in the president’s study. He found a rocking horse in the corner.

  The two presidents drank some wine and shared a poppy seed cake.

  “I’m sorry about your loss,” Isaac said, as he looked at the rocking horse.

  Karel scratched his cheek. “Mr. President, I would rather mourn alone.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .”

  “Forgive me,” Ludvik said. “I was told that the Americans might have been involved.”

  “I don’t understand,” Isaac said.

  “The trigger mechanism, it was of an American design. We are not fools, Mr. President. I would not allow my wife and little girls to wander about. We have our own tracking devices. And this bomb was beyond our abilities.”

  “And you think people around me . . .”

  “No. But perhaps the people around the people around you. I tried to reform the banking regulations in my country. I did not want farmers squeezed out of their own small farms. The bankers allied themselves with the StB. There were battles in parliament, fistfights. I was stabbed twice in the halls of Prague Castle. I put down a rebellion of StB colonels—had them shot. That’s why I could not invite you for an official visit to the Castle. There would have been chaos. And in the confusion . . .”

  “But I wanted to see the house where Kafka was born.”

  Karel laughed bitterly to himself.

  “The bankers can’t wait for this regime to fall. They will build their own Disneyland devoted to Kafka—with cafés, gift shops, and a museum. They count up all the Western tourists and salivate like mad dogs whenever his name is mentioned. Don’t talk to me of Franz Kafka.”

  “Have you read a single line of his?” Isaac asked with a growl, aware that Karel was a novelist and a poet.

  “I could recite A Hunger Artist by heart. But I do not want Prague to become a theme park—a toy town.”

  “And yet you have your country estate on the hills above another theme park.”

  Karel’s cunning gray eyes narrowed with a hunter’s alarm. “What theme park?”

  “Terezín,” Isaac hissed. “The devil’s own Disneyland, a Jewish menagerie with deportation as the very next stop. Did you know that Ottla Kafka was a volunteer nurse at—”

  “Kafka,” Karel muttered, “always Kafka.” And he strode toward Isaac as if he meant to harm him. “Terezín was a transit camp with lace curtains, a lavish second act. I felt all the fury, the hot air—violinists and dramaturges fighting for the last crumbs of bread. Isaac, I was an eyewitness.”

  Seems Karel Ludvik had spent his childhood in Terezín. His father was one of the “essentials,” shopkeepers who were permitted to remain when the town was converted into a camp. He was a shoemaker with a little shop next to the main square and served the SS and other officers and journalists who were always in transit, preparing reports about this strange Jewish utopia. Karel was seven or eight when the camp opened, in 1942. He had his pick of tutors among the doctors and professors of law who were “pensioners” at Terezín. And he had a special task. He met once or twice a week with the camp commandant, who was half blind and hid his worsening eyesight from fellow officers in the SS. The commandant was a bibliophile, and he would rave to Karel about a Yid from Bohemia who could scribble Deutsch like a Teutonic demon. Karel’s task was to read A Hunger Artist and other tales to the commandant. They were like conspirators, the SS commandant and the shoemaker’s boy.

  “Isaac, I was no innocent,” Karel said. “I made a profit from the camp. But I wasn’t cruel. I found bread and cheese—at a price. I repaired shoes with my own hands. I fell in love with a little Jewess. I kept her and her family from starving. I removed their names from the deportation list. I had that power. I told you—the commandant was nearly blind. He was in my power. I served as his little secretary . . . and yes, yes, I know you’re dying to ask. I was well aware of Ottla. The commandant wanted to meet the little sister of his favorite Jewish demon.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “I can’t recall,” Karel said. “I think she had curly hair, cut very short.”

  Isaac was like a guilty boy confronting a parable that couldn’t be penetrated without some magic fist. “Do you remember what Ottla said about Franz?”

  Karel whistled to himself. “Isaac, it was almost fifty years ago.”

  “Lie. Make something up. I don’t care.”

  There was a craftiness in Karel’s smile—he had found a flaw in this Jewish prince. And that flaw was Franz Kafka.

  “She said he sang out his sentences sometimes.”

  Isaac savored the words. “Sang out his sentences? Like an aria?”

  There was a knock on the door. A bodyguard entered with the majord
omo of the dacha.

  “Excellency, dinner is being served.”

  Karel removed one of his dainty leather shoes and tossed it at the majordomo’s skull. “Why do you interrupt us with mundanities? Can’t you see that I’m in conference with the president of the United States?”

  “I beg your pardon, Excellency,” the majordomo said, bowing twice. The bodyguard was wearing a Beretta in his waistband. Both of them vanished.

  “Karel, why couldn’t your precious commandant save Ottla?”

  “He tried, he tried. She wouldn’t leave the children. She went right on board the train with them to Auschwitz.”

  “But he could have removed the children from the deportation list—or you could have done it for him.”

  “Impossible,” Karel said. “The order came from Himmler himself: Children who sing like angels should be treated like angels—at Auschwitz.”

  “But why have your kept up this little castle near Terezín? You could have easily found another refuge.”

  Karel shut his eyes. “The commandant lived here, on this hill. And this is where I had my happiest moments as a child. Not because he fed me sweets, not because his Czech mistress pampered the shoemaker’s boy and showed me her tits. It was the moments we shared, reading the words of that Bohemian in the bowler hat.”

  His eyes twitched, like a man coming out of a coma. “Forgive me, Mr. President. I’m selfish. I’ve kidnapped you all to myself.” He shouted into an intercom on his desk. “Ivo, come back. Accompany the president to his quarters.”

  Isaac picked up that dainty little shoe and returned it to his Czech counterpart, who must have crafted it himself. Karel would always be a shoemaker.

  14

  Something bothered the Big Guy. There were bodyguards galore, with pistols in their waistbands, but they pretended to be drowsy, and that wasn’t a good sign. They were either fed up, or waiting for some signal. They wore blue wristbands, as if they belonged to the same fraternity of brutes. Isaac didn’t trust them for a minute. Matt Malloy was there with his own detail. But his special agents seemed like Boy Scouts compared to these brutes.