Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  The Bull released a little pressure on her throat. She was sobbing now.

  “But Sol’s our friend,” she muttered between sobs.

  “Little Sister, we have no friends.”

  “You son of a bitch,” she said in a scratchy voice, “I could have you arrested for assault.”

  “But you won’t.”

  And he walked out of the West Wing, whistling to himself.

  17

  The White House butler brought Sidel his slippers and one of the winter robes that the Big Guy had plucked from the barrels of Orchard Street. Isaac had the beginnings of a beard; he wouldn’t allow the butler to shave him, although he might have looked a bit less like a tramp with a brand-new pink face. The president seemed incongruous among all the sick soldiers, walking around in some ancient subaltern’s robe, yet it was the kind of robe that Lincoln had once worn in the White House. And with his sad eyes and the scruff on his chin, Isaac was almost Lincolnesque.

  He went from ward to ward; the soldiers and their families were startled to see him. This wasn’t the president’s hospital—it was Walter Reed, where mice scuttled about, where soldiers lay for months on some extended leave that felt like half an eternity. And here he was in his bathrobe, clutching a soldier’s hand, and Isaac tried to imagine what it must have been like when Lincoln visited hospital tents with Mary and Tad during the Civil War, surrounded by amputated limbs and drunken, delirious officers who were battle crazed.

  He sat with a blind soldier from Oregon in a room of blind soldiers. They were all curious about Isaac’s Glock, which had been lost in the debris at Karel’s dacha and suddenly reappeared in a plastic envelope sent to Walter Reed. They didn’t ask about Air Force One and all the other presidential perks. They liked the idea of Isaac as the sheriff of Manhattan, a Golem with a Glock. And so he amused them with stories of his mishaps as mayor, and his adventures, too, of gunfights outside Madison Square Garden and wrestling matches at City Hall, of how he’d gone into Rikers and rescued young men and women who had been incarcerated by some lame judge’s orders and utterly forgotten, of how he’d rushed into an abandoned fire station in the South Bronx that had been taken over by sex traffickers and managed to walk out with all the traffickers and their string of slaves—girls who hadn’t seen sunlight in six months.

  “Mr. President, didn’t you feel like executing those sons of bitches on the spot?” one of the blind soldiers asked. “Didn’t you have the urge?”

  “Yes, I did. I wanted to glock them inside the fire station. But I had to resist the urge.”

  “Why?” another soldier asked. “Did it have anything to do with the law?”

  “No,” Isaac said. “I’ve broken every law in the books. But there’s something much worse than execution—the court system. It’s like navigating through hell.”

  Isaac could feel a hand on his shoulder. He had a guest, his helicopter pilot, with blue marks under both eyes.

  “Boss, I just got back from Germany. Captain Sarah sent me. She has all those damn admirals at Quantico squatting on her ass. But she says you have no business being here. She calls you the Prisoner of Zenda.”

  “The docs haven’t released me,” Isaac said.

  “You’re commander in chief. You can write your own release.”

  The Prisoner of Zenda. Perhaps his chief of staff had done him a favor. He might have been better off at Walter Reed. He had to deal with all the sudden fury around him—the recriminations, the death threats, the talk of impeachment, congressional reprimands, editorials against his imperial presidency, cartoons of Isaac in a bowler hat, with Kafka’s long nose and burning, rabbinical eyes. He couldn’t escape the constant barrage.

  His one solace was the attic. He now had a family—Karel Ludvik, pursued by every sort of secret police; Ariel Moss and Mordecai Katz, without legal status in America; Captain Sarah, his own spy who also spied on him; Colonel Oliver, his son Max, and Karina, Max’s live-in maid; and the Golem himself, who sprang to life whenever he stood on the attic stairs.

  Karel Ludvik cried in Isaac’s arms. He’d lost fifteen pounds since the bombing ten days ago. He wore a rumpled shirt and a mothballed sweater that must have come from one of Tim Vail’s supply closets. His shoes weren’t shined. The president of Czechoslovakia didn’t have much of a portfolio outside his native land.

  “Isaac, your vice president was going to send me back to Prague, trade me in for a handful of captured American spies.”

  “The Bull can’t move you, Karel. Moscow and Prague can cry bloody murder. You’re safe—with me.”

  But there was intrigue, always intrigue. Isaac found a note in the pocket of his windbreaker.

  Mr. President, we have important matters to discuss. If you could schedule an exam at Walter Reed tomorrow at noon, I would be most grateful. You needn’t look for me. I will find you.

  Sincerely, General Solomon Ben-Zion

  Shin Bet

  He showed the letter to his mavens in the attic.

  “It’s a fake,” Ariel insisted.

  “That’s not Sol,” Mordecai said. “He was once my second in command. He would never write such a letter. It didn’t come from Shin Bet.”

  “I’m afraid it did,” Sarah said. “He handed it to me.”

  “Ben-Zion is in America . . . on a state visit? That’s not his style. I know him. That man never strays from Tel Aviv.”

  “He’s still in Tel Aviv,” Sarah said. “Boss, your chief of staff invited him—as a ghost.”

  “But he could have had you whisper in my ear,” Isaac said. “Why use my windbreaker as a dead letter box?”

  “He’s old-school,” Sarah said. “He’s read too much le Carré.”

  Isaac looked into her hazel eyes. “I love le Carré.”

  “So do I, boss. But I get a little sick of all the tradecraft—that esoteric language of spies.”

  “Still,” Ariel said, “you’ll have to meet with him, Isaac. But don’t trust a word he says.”

  Karel stood in the corner, stroking his chin. “It sounds fishy. Why a soldiers’ hospital?”

  “Because all the American generals are in love with Israeli intelligence,” Ariel said. “And Sol must have found a friend.”

  So the Prisoner of Zenda returned to his roost at Walter Reed. He scheduled an appointment with the cardiologist who had looked after him and the calcium in his heart, advised Matt Malloy, and the next morning he boarded Dragon; the entire caravan crossed the District, snarling traffic wherever it went, and arrived at the old army hospital, which looked like a red brick outpost in the middle of a reservation at the edge of Rock Creek Park.

  The Big Guy had to admit that his calcified heart was beating like a little boy’s. Isaac admired Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade, but he worshipped George Smiley, who was always coming out of retirement to fix something broken at the Circus—MI6—and practice his tradecraft. Isaac had almost none. He would have made a feeble spymaster. He met with his cardiologist, his blood pressure rising like a wayward pump, and as he left the office, an intern took Isaac aside, touched his arm, and led him to another office.

  “Wait here,” Isaac said to Matt Malloy and went through the door. A huge man with a monstrous face that could have been stamped out of metal stood near the window in a doctor’s white coat.

  “Sidel, how many minutes do we have before that kindergartener comes crashing through the door?”

  “Three, I’d guess.”

  “Good,” said this Frankenstein with a metal face. “I never liked you. You’re no friend of ours. You’ve probably done us harm with all your nonsense about Beirut. But you were once a good policeman.”

  “And what am I now?”

  “A fool. A clever one, but a fool nonetheless. It’s not entirely your fault. Your intelligence teams gather little intelligence, or no intelligence at all, and you’re left to fiddle in the dark.” There seemed to be a crack in the metallic mask. “You must not visit Beirut.”

  “Ah,” Isa
ac said, “I would have felt at home. I thought it might remind me of the Bronx.”

  “You would not last five minutes. Prague should have taught you a lesson.”

  Sidel couldn’t decipher much beyond the crack in Ben-Zion’s mask. “I wasn’t allowed to enter Prague. I couldn’t have protective cover, I was told.”

  “And still you went—to Terezín, where Hitler had his show camp, his favorite Follies. And you barely survived. You must not travel. There’s only one city in the world where you would be safe—Tel Aviv. We have our share of rogue agents, but none of them would ever harm you, or allow you to be harmed. We have our pride. Our people are obsessed with the image of a Jewish police chief, mayor, and president. You even have a nickname at my headquarters. King Saul, the unlucky one, who was deaf to God’s voice.”

  “I’m not a king, lucky or unlucky.”

  “You most certainly are,” Ben-Zion said. “Otherwise you would not be in such danger. I cannot hope to count your enemies. But I’m like a weasel when it comes to gathering information. Shall we start with an industrial tycoon and publisher who works out of Hamburg and West Berlin? Herr Rainer Wolff. You’ve become a threat to all his enterprises. Rainer’s a worrier. He trades in currencies. And you’re too unpredictable as—”

  “Prince of the Western World.”

  “Yes, the man with the sleek blue-and-white thunderbird, Air Force One, the perfect symbol of American might. Rainer would rather have the thunderbird remain on the ground. And he will have you killed—unless you kill him first.”

  There was a knock on the door. “Sir, are you okay?” Matt Malloy called through the frosted glass.

  “Matt, I’m fine.”

  “May I come in?”

  Ben-Zion talked in pantomime, nodding no with that Frankenstein face.

  “I’ll be out in a few minutes,” Isaac said. He felt manipulated by General Ben-Zion.

  “Why don’t you have the publisher killed?”

  Isaac heard a metallic roar. “Rainer? He’s one of Israel’s biggest friends.”

  “Then why are you sharing his secret?”

  “I told you. You’re our King Saul.”

  It didn’t feel right, this sudden revelation, a gift from the chief of Shin Bet, a wandering ghost who never left Tel Aviv. It felt more and more like a setup, a fancy deal. Ben-Zion could have met Isaac in the Oval Office, no matter how secret his presence was. There was a little too much tradecraft in Ben-Zion’s insistence on Walter Reed.

  “General, I should warn you, I’m wearing a wire.”

  The mask fell away, and Isaac saw an actual smile, no matter how metallic it was. There was a marked amusement in Ben-Zion’s silver-gray eyes. The general was having a hell of a time. “I would expect nothing less from the Pink Commish.”

  “Were you going to tell your comrades at Shin Bet how you recruited the president of the United States in an obscure office at Walter Reed? Not a chance. I’ll never be one of your assets. And if I holler once to Matt Malloy, he’ll handcuff you in front of every nurse and doc, and send you back to Tell Aviv on an El Al express. Why are we here? What is it you want?”

  “An oath,” Ben-Zion said, “that you will not visit Beirut. Hezbollah will see it as a triumph, and suck us back into the war. You’re a hero who’s risen right out of the ruins.”

  Isaac was perplexed. “Hezbollah will celebrate a Yid from the Lower East Side? That’s a laugh.”

  “But children have your picture on their walls with your Glock—a gun like your own is outside any definition of an infidel.”

  Ah, Isaac remembered now. There’d been a siege at the first mosque in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive. It was during Isaac’s time as police commissioner, at a low point in his career. He was battling with the mayor, who had her own blind addiction against drug dealers. It was at the height of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, when a college sophomore hard up for cash could spend her most fertile years in prison for trying to traffic a few ounces of grass.

  The mosque had been seized by several religious fanatics. Her Honor wanted Isaac to storm the mosque. But he knew the fanatics would slaughter the worshipers and the clerics inside and then set fire to themselves, in their last lunatic act of faith. So Isaac defied Her Honor, wore a white handkerchief, and went inside the mosque, with his Glock tucked inside his shirt. He didn’t bargain, didn’t cajole. He listened to the leader of the fanatics, a boy with angelic blond curls and a rabbit’s flaming red eyes, who saw the mosque as the Islamic devil’s first outpost in Manhattan.

  “There’s more to come,” this curious angel said. He and his crew were armed with automatics, but it wasn’t their firepower that disturbed Isaac, who grasped the charismatic force of the boy with blond curls. He held his entire little menagerie together with the glue of his rhetoric. The boy was a born preacher.

  “Satan is under every stair, in the prayer rugs, in the women’s veils.”

  Isaac did make one final try. “Son, you’ll be murdering children and old men. Grant them some kind of innocence.”

  “No,” the boy said—he must have been nineteen or twenty. “They are Satan’s assistants.”

  Isaac had no choice. He glocked this boy preacher through the heart. The boy’s entire crew collapsed and dropped their automatics. And Isaac marched out of the mosque with clerics and worshipers and defeated fanatics.

  This is what Hezbollah must have seized upon. The strange Jewish prince who was almost a child of Islam. And General Ben-Zion couldn’t afford to have Isaac near Beirut’s Green Line, among Hezbollah, Christian militias, civilians, refugee camps, Israeli commandos, and American spies—he would reignite the civil war in Lebanon.

  “General,” Isaac said, “I swear to you, Beirut isn’t on my list. I have no list. Consider me a man without a travelogue—once I did walk Dublin’s streets, visited Leopold Bloom’s address, lit a candle for James Joyce, but that was before I went into politics. Presidents shouldn’t have literary predilections. It could ruin them, as my love of Kafka ruined me.”

  “You’ll recover,” Ben-Zion said. “America worships a true original. But a favor for a favor. You have an assassin in the White House.”

  Isaac wanted to glock the Israeli Frankenstein, who’d nearly been burnt alive in Beirut.

  “Now you volunteer this information?”

  “I needed to extract that promise from you,” Ben-Zion said.

  “And if I’d refused you that promise?”

  Suddenly Isaac could read the pain that knit all the scars and ridges together on the spymaster’s riven face.

  “Then, dear King Saul, I would not be in your debt.”

  “And who is this hypothetical assassin?”

  “I assure you. It’s far from hypothetical. If you aren’t careful, you won’t survive the month.”

  “Then should I close down the mansion, General Ben-Zion, and arrest everyone, including myself? I’m also an assassin.”

  “It wouldn’t help. The assassin will follow in your footsteps. You’re the cop. Think like a cop. You can turn off your tapes. It’s time to go.”

  “I’m not wearing a wire,” Isaac said. “It was a bluff.”

  “I know,” said Ben-Zion.

  And Isaac walked out of the office, abandoning the chief of Shin Bet in his doctor’s spotless white coat.

  Assassin.

  The Big Guy’s sudden exhilaration—he was back in Sidel country—terrified him. He worried about the collateral damage. What if Max was caught in the crossfire?

  “I’ll have to warn Stef,” he muttered, before he disappeared into the cushions of Dragon, and the caravan left Walter Reed, with Isaac’s double in one sedan, and his doctor in another. That was the madness of a president’s logistical maneuvers.

  18

  Isaac didn’t have time to reconnoiter and rub his gold shield. How could he search for a hired gun when the DNC kept stabbing him in the back? His own party wanted to run him out of the District on a rail. It was politics, always politi
cs. Genevieve Robinson, alias Brenda Brown, his former chief of staff, advised the Big Guy to sit down with the Senate Republican Caucus.

  “Don’t say a word, Isaac. Just nod your head and listen.”

  The Republicans wanted to rob from Social Security and get rid of every fucking entitlement program. Isaac had a bad case of vertigo. He still kept nodding his head.

  Ramona came marching in once the Republicans left the Oval Office. “You can’t invite them here again. It’s an insult to our own Caucus.”

  “I’m meeting with the House Republicans tomorrow.”

  “Cancel,” she said.

  “If you don’t put an end to your palace coup, I’ll caucus with the Republicans and cut my ties with the DNC.”

  “That’s political suicide,” Ramona said.

  “No, it’s Russian roulette.”

  An officer arrived from Fort Meade, a rabbi who was also a second lieutenant, a big burly fellow who declared himself the unofficial White House chaplain. His name was Elijah Silvers.

  “Who sent you, Silvers?”

  “Genevieve Robinson, sir. She said I could be your equalizer. Since you’re not a member of any congregation—”

  “And have never been.”

  “I could serve as your spiritual guide.” And this army chaplain from Fort Meade whispered in Isaac’s ear. “The voters will love it, Mr. President, particularly the religious right.”

  Isaac was suspicious. “Why didn’t Brenda clue me in herself?”

  “She said you wouldn’t go for it. So I took the initiative.”

  The chaplain had to be vetted, of course, and he was. He followed Isaac around like a hunting dog.

  “Are you sorry that you killed people, Mr. President?”

  “Silvers, you’re not a priest. You can’t absolve me of my sins.”

  “I’m curious,” the chaplain said. “And I could lighten your load a little.”

  “I don’t have one,” Isaac said. “I glocked whenever I had to glock.”