They were all waiting at Aspen Lodge. Captain Sarah, young Max, the Bull, Felix Mandel, Ramona Dazzle, who rarely accompanied the Big Guy to David, Matt Malloy, a few interns and aides, and Isaac’s own private Seabee, Charles, who had once lived near Willie Mays in Harlem Heights.
Isaac’s mind was playing tricks. For a moment he could has sworn that General Tollhouse was at Aspen, wearing the Medal of Freedom Isaac had forbidden him to wear. But it was one more apparition that flew away. Captain Sarah kissed him on the cheek.
Ramona was subdued around such company. She couldn’t seem to find a proper role.
Bull Latham edged her aside, since he was both maestro and master of ceremonies, and part-time president when the boss’s head was in the clouds.
“Ladies and gents, we’ve assembled here at Aspen Lodge to honor the engagement of Colonel Stefan Oliver and Captain Sarah Rogers, in the presence of their rabbi, Isaac Sidel, who brought them together in his own inimitable way. A toast to the president—and to the colonel and his fiancée.”
“Their fiancée,” said Felix Mandel, who was a bit tipsy in the miasma off the mountain.
“To the president!” shouted Isaac’s guests, clutching glasses of ginger ale. “And to the honorees—Stef and Sarah.”
The Secret Service joined in the merriment. Isaac swayed about the room with Max on his shoulders. He even danced with Ramona, whose body stiffened. He had little sense of modern music. His temperament remained in the ’40s and hovered around Franklin Roosevelt’s war. Bandstand stuff—Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Benny Goodman, Dinah Shore, and the Golden Toothpick, Frank Sinatra. He’d followed the Toothpick’s career, had seen him perform at the Paramount, amid a battalion of bobby-soxers, screaming, clutching their scalps, as the Toothpick swayed on the bandstand, hitting notes that Caruso might have envied—there’d never been another balladeer like the Toothpick. Isaac’s own history was wrapped around FDR, Eleanor, too, William Bendix in Back to Bataan, or was it Guadalcanal Diary? Isaac was a little thief during the war years. He and his baby brother Leo had their own black market. Leo Sidel was the dirty little secret of the Sidel administration. Leo lived in a trailer park. He was an alcoholic and a writer of bad checks. Bull Latham’s pals in the FBI looked after Leo, who’d been bribed and pampered, and forbidden to go near the White House.
“Leo Sidel’s a poison pill,” Brenda, Isaac’s first chief of staff, had warned. “He’ll drag you down into the abyss.” And Isaac had to take all of it into his final reckoning. But he missed Little Leo at the party in Aspen Lodge. The Big Guy had abandoned his own baby brother.
He whispered in the vice president’s ear. “Bull, are you sure Little Leo’s alright?”
“He’s thriving, boss.”
“In a trailer park?”
“That’s the style he likes,” the Bull said. “We clear all his bad checks. We’d diaper him if we had to.”
“But suppose a reporter finds out who the fuck he is?”
“Such a person would never get close enough to Leo. And if some wise guy ever did, we’d haul his ass off to Quantico and put him in a reeducation program.”
“But couldn’t I visit Leo once?” Isaac whined.
“Boss, I beg you, don’t go near that fire. We’ll all get burned. That brother of yours is a publicity hound. Once he gets a whiff, we’ll never put the genie back in the bottle.”
The Bull shoved away from him, but Isaac wasn’t finished yet.
“What sort of alias does my brother use?” Isaac shouted within earshot of all his guests.
“Leo Little,” the Bull said.
Leo Little.
How poetic, and appropriately cruel. Leo had stayed little all his life, while Isaac burgeoned around him like some man-eating plant. Desirée wasn’t the monster in these parts—it was Isaac Sidel. He’d let his cat out of the cage the moment he arrived at Aspen. She sniffed all the food. She didn’t want her cat fare. Isaac had to feed her hummus and hot dogs from his own plate. She licked ginger ale out of the Big Guy’s glass and leapt onto Felix’s lap, sat there like a princess with wounds in her white coat, while Isaac watched Stef and Sarah dance to the elegiac sounds of the Golden Toothpick.
The lovebirds danced and danced, and then Sarah herself coaxed Isaac out onto the floor.
“You were the matchmaker, boss. I first made love to Stef in your flannel robe. And don’t you play the innocent party.”
“So I’m the culprit now.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And you be nice to Max, hear?”
“He’ll never adore me as much as he adores you. You’re his Uncle Isaac.”
And Sidel returned her to Stef. He didn’t climb into bed until well past midnight. It was his Seabee who cleaned up all the mess.
Isaac had a wet dream. He was making love to a woman with beautiful flanks. It was full of heartbreak, as the woman vanished from his bed. He woke like a silver bullet at the crack of dawn. The light burst through his picture window. The Seabees must have attended to the salt lick. Isaac watched a lone male fawn dance tentatively toward the lick on its long legs. The little whitetail tumbled once, and got up, like a soft bridge repairing itself. Where was the rest of its herd? Isaac prayed that there wasn’t a gray wolf or any other predator lurking around.
But the real predator was inside Aspen. Desirée stood on her hind legs and followed the movement of that fawn with hungry eyes.
“You harm that little fellah and it’s curtains for you, understand?”
The cat bumped Isaac with her bullet head and disappeared from the picture window. That’s when Isaac saw a man in a worn winter coat limp toward the lick with a wooden box in his hand. Another apparition, damn it. But this apparition wouldn’t go away. How did Rembrandt get inside the compound’s electric walls?
Isaac had a more urgent problem. Desirée must have broken through a porch screen; she leapt toward the wobbly little whitetail like the Rikers cat that she was. And then the fawn’s mama appeared from behind the shrubs. And while Desirée sailed in midair, the doe batted at her with one hoof—the cat shot across the yard like a blurry football.
Isaac was prepared to mourn until he heard Desirée howl. She rose on her paws, her back curled in defeat, and withdrew to her own hidden lair, while Rembrandt climbed the steps to Isaac’s patio. The Big Guy didn’t have to ask any questions—it was Bull Latham who had let Rembrandt through the gate. Either Rembrandt was in the Bull’s pocket, or they had reached some kind of an accord. Isaac wasn’t an absolute imbecile. While he reigned as president, the Bull ruled. Isaac had the ceremonial robes, but he was like a blind horse who raged—the Bull called him “boss” and kept control. It wasn’t anything like a bloodless coup. The Bull was loyal to Sidel in his own fashion. Isaac was as much of an infant as Little Leo. He’d burst through City Hall with his Glock, but what mark had he really left? Rikers was still there . . .
“Viktor, did you give the Bull a long lease on your paper?”
“Not at all,” Rembrandt said. “I promised to give up Ulysses Grant.”
“And what if you come up short one day?”
Rembrandt shuddered in his worn coat. “Big Balls, I didn’t come to Camp David to discuss my affairs.”
“Then why did you come?” Isaac had to ask.
“I think you earned your tat, Mr. President. Soon you’ll be one of my registered werewolves.”
A registered werewolf.
“I like it. Where’s Renata?”
“Best not to ask,” Rembrandt whispered, pointing to the microphones he imagined in Aspen’s walls.
“Would you prefer to live in Prague? I can put the squeeze on Karel Ludvik.”
Rembrandt perused Isaac with his own piercing eyes. “Mr. President, I had to sell off my assets to survive.”
Desirée appeared, with a bruise on her bullet head. She climbed on Isaac’s lap the moment he sat down. She was purring like a ghost in a graveyard.
“That’s quite a beast.”
Rembrandt set his box down on Isaac’s coffee table, opened it, fiddled with his needle, his brushes, and pots of indelible ink.
“Take off your shirt, please.”
Isaac removed his pajama top, and Rembrandt frowned at the hair on Isaac’s chest.
“I can’t work in that forest. It will soak up all the ink.”
He shaved Isaac’s chest with a pearl-handled razor that had once belonged to a barber in the gulag; his father had won it in a bidding war with another pakhan. Rembrandt’s wooden box was a portable tattoo shop. He didn’t have mirrors with retractable necks and an electromagnetic “gun.” He had to use a primitive electric pen with his pots of ink. He hunched in the light that glanced off the picture window. He wore a surgeon’s gloves and kept wiping the wounds in Isaac’s skin with swabs of alcohol. Isaac winced as the pen’s knifelike needle cut into him with Rembrandt’s design. There were no lunch breaks. Even Isaac’s Seabee wasn’t allowed to interrupt. And Isaac had to imprison that wild cat in the crate Charles had prepared for her, stuffed with old towels, or she might have jarred the path of Rembrandt’s pen with a sudden leap.
Rembrandt toiled for sixteen hours, letting the ink dry before he went back to his electric pen. It was a maddening process. Isaac had to gulp half a gallon of water, while Rembrandt didn’t wet his lips once. He couldn’t even look at the tat after all the artistry was done. He wore a bandage over his heart like a soldier plucked from battle.
Rembrandt had to leave before the “unveiling” of his tattoo.
“What if I don’t like it?”
“It’s not an ornament, Big Balls. You’re a chelovek. You have to like it.”
“When can I take a peek?”
“Not for two days. The cuts have to heal.”
Rembrandt packed up his wooden box, squinted at the cat, and went out the door.
Isaac panicked. “What if I want to get in touch?”
“You can’t. Didn’t the Bull tell you? I don’t exist.”
He climbed down the patio stairs and got into a bulletproof car with black windows. Isaac realized he wouldn’t hear from Rembrandt again. The tattoo artist had fallen into one of Bull Latham’s black holes. Big Balls was feverish with that engraving on his chest, wrapped in gauze. What did he really know about Latham? He’d never visited the Bull’s own Little White House at the Naval Observatory. Suppose there was a second Situation Room? And Isaac was the country’s court jester, the seasonal clown? He summoned his vice president to Aspen Lodge.
The Bull arrived with his nuclear football and his military aide, like an uncommon commander in chief. Isaac had the Bull’s aide sit outside on the patio with the football. “What the fuck is going on, Bull? Am I under house arrest?”
The Bull stared at the little blots of blood in the bandage. “Boss, are you delirious? I can resign if you prefer another vice president . . .”
“You’re running Rembrandt, aren’t you?”
“I’ve slowed him down, that’s all. He tried to have you killed, for Christ’s sake.”
“He also saved my life.”
The Bull hunched his linebacker’s shoulders. He seemed exasperated. “Rembrandt would have made a nifty profit from your death. He set that murder machine into motion.”
“What changed his mind?” Isaac asked.
“He’s an artist. How should I know? But I won’t lie. Rembrandt’s licensed to me. He’s my counterfeiter.”
“That’s grand,” Isaac said. “And I’m kept in the dark.”
“Boss, it’s best if he doesn’t exist.”
“That’s what Rembrandt said. ‘I don’t exist.’ What the fuck does it mean?”
“It means I put him in deep cover, where he can’t harm us and no one can harm him.”
The Bull marched out of Aspen, and Isaac was left with Rembrandt’s hieroglyphics under the gauze. His fever mounted and waned. He followed Rembrandt’s instructions, undid the bandage after two days. He didn’t know what to make of the riddle on his chest. It wasn’t at all like Pesh Olinov’s griffin with its magnificent sweep of talons and claws. Rembrandt had painted a very peculiar cat on Isaac Sidel. This cat had Desirée’s features, but with donkey ears; its whiskers were in gold; its tail was knotted like a torture instrument; its eyes sat like silver pecans in its skull; one of its paws had been mutilated, and the other was soaked in blood. Rembrandt had etched some kind of sibyl with a cat’s face on Sidel.
He was now a registered werewolf, whatever that meant—a chelovek, with a sibyl near his heart. His skin burned like the devil where Rembrandt had cut into him, and blood kept leaking from the wound. It was like some crazy circumcision. What would the doctors at Walter Reed and Bethesda make of Isaac’s tattoo?
He didn’t give a damn. His Seabee had prepared some soup. Isaac walked the trails near Aspen with Desirée. She was used to the roaches and rats and sickening sweat at Rikers. Isaac’s cat wasn’t countrified. Her instinct as a lioness had been to run down a frightened fawn, but she was puzzled by the tangled growth of the forest; the tiniest squirrel eluded her. The dark, clotted earth made her sneeze. She clung to Isaac’s heels.
“You sissy,” he said. His chest seemed to rip with every word.
He climbed back up the stairs of his citadel, with Desirée still at his heels. He stared out his picture window. The telephone rang. A call had been patched through from the White House. Ariel Moss was on the line.
“Itzik, it’s good to hear your voice. Mazel—you’re lucky to be alive.”
Isaac wondered how many machines were recording his conversation with the Hermit of Haifa? Was Bull Latham listening in at his own lodge?
“Bull,” Isaac said, feeling frisky, “say hello to Ariel Moss.”
There was dead silence, and then Bull Latham hopped aboard.
“How are you, Ariel?”
And the three of them kibitzed like old comrades for half an hour. The Bull had no shame. He took part with gusto in the very call he was monitoring. Isaac laughed his ass off, and every peal of laughter pinched like hell.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m lucky to be alive.”
WINTER WARNING
Pegasus Books Ltd.
148 W. 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2017 Jerome Charyn
First Pegasus Books edition October 2017
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written
permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection
with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this
book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the
publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-68177-348-3
ISBN: 978-1-68177-584-5 (e-book)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
Winter Warning Page 25
