Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (37 page)
So, perhaps he wasn’t exactly
aching
to resume play, but he mustn’t have been averse to it, for he wasted no time in
twisting Mr. Plastic’s arm until the card blubbered like a cornered snitch,
surrendering a one-way ticket to Istanbul for Switters and a heavy silver
bracelet in a Northwest Indian raven motif for Maestra. In one of the market’s
dimmer cul-de-sacs, he enjoyed a furtive farewell straddle from a drawers-down
Dev, while yards away at her deserted stall, consumers edged across the narrow
line of civilized restraint that separated shopping from looting, cleaning out
the first of the season’s Mexican strawberries. Switters reimbursed her from
his undernourished wallet in order to keep her brothers from slapping her
around. Then, he was off to meet, for the very first time, the archangel—
“Audubon Poe.” The flannel-shirted,
Mariners-capped man who spoke the name had been standing on the
Pike Street
curb poring over a bus schedule all the while that
Switters was sliding into a taxi, folding his chair, and dragging it in beside
him. He was a youngish, nerdy yet nimble Caucasian, not unlike Hector Sumac of
Lima, Peru. As the cabbie signaled to pull into traffic, the stranger had
suddenly thrust his face in the taxi window, uttered Poe’s name, frowned one of
those obligatorily disapproving frowns that is actually a smile with its pants
on backward, and shook his head. “You know he’s an arms runner,” he said,
making it sound more like a piece of hot gossip than an accusation or a
warning. And just as quickly he was gone.
“Airport,” said Switters.
“Where you fly today, sir?” asked the
driver.
“
Turkey
.”
“Ah?
Turkey
. Long way. Vacation there?”
“Run arms there,” Switters replied
matter-of-factly, wondering where that Joe had come from and what the hell
Bobby had gotten him into.
Given a choice between a folly and
a sacrament, one should always choose the folly—because we know a sacrament
will not bring us closer to God and there’s always a chance that a folly will.
—Erasmus
The land spread out before him
like a pizza. Its topography was flat, its texture rough, its temperature hot,
its hue reddish yellow, studded with pepperoni-colored rocks; and, at the
moment, it glistened as if drizzled with olive oil. Water was absorbed slowly,
very slowly, by the arid hardpan and tended to trickle toward any depression.
Were the ground conscious, it would savor this unexpected rainwater, for it
would see not another drop of moisture for a good seven months.
Behind him, where he’d separated from
the band of Shammar Bedouins, the baked “cheese” bubbled up in low hills that
grew progressively steeper until, farther west, they became a full-fledged
mountain range with snowy peaks. Eastward, however, the “pizza” was unrelieved.
This was the great Syrian desert that stretched into Iraq and Jordan and Israel
and all the way across Arabia, and was the threshing floor upon which the human
soul had been flailed free from the chaff of its long ripening, only to be
ossified and shriveled by a degeneration into dogma of the very ideas that had
nurtured it and winnowed it loose, in the endless granary of the desert, from
its dark animal husk. Man’s physical self evolved in the sea, and to the
rhythms of the oceans our salty blood and waves of breath still moved, but it
was here on the burning sands of the
Middle East
, where
Switters now paused to rest, that the spiritual self emerged. There had been
nothing to distract it.
Switters was left almost giddy by the
realization that not only was he alone, he was also unseen. By anyone or
anything. In the Amazon forest, by way of contrast, one never made an
undetected move, for no matter how deeply one penetrated, how far removed one
was from one’s fellows and milieu, one was always of great interest to a hundred
pairs of eyes: slitty eyes, bulbous eyes, multifaceted eyes, eyes bloodshot,
chocolatey, or hollow; eyes that saw without being seen; a blinking, squinting,
spying paradise of reincarnated Joes. Here in the desert, though, nothing
watched but the gods. Small wonder that religion was born hereabouts or that,
for better or worse, hereabouts it had thrived.
The coolness that had come with the
rain was only a sweet memory now. Switters sweltered but didn’t sweat:
perspiration evaporated before it could pump out of his pores. The air that he
gasped, due to the exertion of wheeling his chair over stony, pitted,
thorn-bushed terrain, was so light and dry that it made but the weakest
impression on his respiratory system and failed to inflate his lungs, although
it tingled inside him in a faintly delicious way. For all its unsubstantiality,
the air seemed as alive as the earth seemed dead. Massaging his wrists, he
squinted through nets of rising heat at the oasis, still more than a mile away,
and could not help but think how vastly different these bare, harsh,
god-connecting surroundings were from the scene off the coast of Turkey, where
he had yachted and sipped Dom Pérignon only three weeks prior.
“Fuck the
Dallas
Cowboys.”
Switters had been expecting that
declaration, had been nervously straining to hear it through a fog of jet lag
and migraine and coffee-fueled Turk chatter all afternoon, but he hadn’t
expected to hear it issued so abruptly, openly, and emphatically by a
denim-clad black man striding toward him across lush oriental carpets and
speaking English with a Swedish accent.
“Fuck Notre Dame,” Switters responded
hopefully. Bobby hadn’t supplied him with a countersign. “Likewise the
Los Angeles
Lakers and the New—”
“Steady, man,” cautioned the contact.
“You be speaking ill of the New York Yankees, you and me gonna have a problem.
Ja, man, ya betcha.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t want that.” With
just a hint of fierceness in his grin, Switters had looked the man over. He was
trim enough for someone of his age—late forties would be a good guess—but his
shoulders were stooped, and his hands, from which long, sensitive fingers
dangled like licorice whips, seemed uncallused and spongy. “However . . .”
“Ain’t no however to it. You got
luggage upstairs? Good. Tell the bellman to bring it to the yacht basin. And
follow me.” He paused. “I’d offer to push your chair, but if you can’t get out
of this lobby on your own, you sure as hell not be getting out of where Mr. Poe
be sending you.” For the first time, he smiled. “Go Yankees,” he said softly.
“Go Knicks. And by the way, man, nice suit.”
The contact was Skeeter Washington,
chief lieutenant to the legendary Audubon Poe and, in certain circles, a minor
legend, himself. The son of a fairly well-known Harlem jazz couple (mother a
singer, father played bass), Louis Mosquito Washington, about to be drafted,
had enlisted in the army in 1969 after a recruiting sergeant assured him he’d
be assigned to a military band. Instead, he’d been put in the infantry and
shipped to
Vietnam
. He’d been wounded and upon recovery, ordered to return to battle once
he’d enjoyed a week’s R and R in
Tokyo
. At that point he deserted, threw himself upon the
mercy of a group of radical Japanese pacifists, and a month or so later turned
up in
Sweden
, where he resided for a quarter century, earning a
living and a reputation as a bebop pianist. A couple of years back, still
smoldering with resentment over the horrors wrought in Southeast Asia by
America’s savage wrong-headedness and his forced participation therein, he’d
sought out Audubon Poe and volunteered his services—although neither Skeeter
nor anyone else seemed to know exactly what Poe was up to, aside from providing
the international news media with a steady source of information damaging to
the “defense” industry and the CIA. It would have been unlikely, however, that
the services of a jazz piano player would have been refused by a man born and
reared in
New Orleans
.
“Uh, I should inform you,” Switters
had said as they waited on the dock for the hotel porter to arrive with his
bags, “that the company seems aware of this.”
“This?”
“My coming here. To meet with Poe.”
“Aw, doesn’t matter.”
“But isn’t there a price on his
head?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Ol’ Poe, he put
out the story himself years ago that he was on a CIA hit list. After that, the
government didn’t dare to smack him. Not in no obvious, violent way, nohow.
Could always try and slip him a heart attack pill or something, I guess. But
Anna, she be sneaking and tasting his food before he eat a bite of it.”
“Who is Anna?”
“His fifteen-year-old daughter.”
Switters’s Adam’s apple flopped in
his throat like an eel in a creel.
Good God!
he thought.
Why didn’t
Bobby warn me?
Antalya
’s marina, one of the most beautiful on the
Mediterranean
, was built on the site of an ancient Roman harbor next
to a restored Ottoman village. From its main dock, in the shadow of crumbling
ruins, a motor launch had carried Washington and Switters out to a gleaming
white ninety-foot yacht,
The Banality of Evil,
anchored about a
half-mile offshore. The boat, flaring in the distance like a millionaire’s
teeth, belonged to Sol Glissant, a Beirut-based French national who had made a
chunk of his fortune rebuilding
Lebanon
’s swimming pools after the war and was known as the
Pool Pasha of the
Levant
. For reasons of his own, Glissant had put
The
Banality of Evil
at the disposal of Audubon Poe, who behaved as if it were
his, which for all practical purposes it was.
Switters had been shown to a
stateroom, given time to “freshen up” (code for
perform maintenance
),
and then summoned on deck, where he was handed a champagne glass as large as a
fishbowl by none other than Poe, himself. Like Washington, Poe was dressed all
in denim, but his fine, sharp, birdlike features, his slicked-back silver hair,
his effluvium of cologne that made Switters’s Jungle Desire, in comparison,
smell as cheap as its name, and the irony in his civil, confident quiver of a
smile, produced an air of aristocracy that seemed to transform the egalitarian
blue cotton into resort wear designed by a Riviera comte.
“So, you’re Switters,” Poe said, in
an accent that managed to be both southern and refined. “The last I heard of
you, you were hanging upside down over
Baghdad
.”
Sloshing his champagne, Switters
demurred. “I believe you may have me confused with my friend Case. While I’ve
passed many a merry hour in fair
Iraq
, my peripateticism there has been limited to its
terrestrial surfaces.”
Poe regarded him curiously. “I see.
Do please forgive my social blunder. But you are, are you not, the gentleman
who knows how to refer to a lady’s treasure in seventy-five different
languages?”
“Seventy-one.”
Good God,
he
thought,
is this to be my only claim to fame? The lone thing by which men
remember me? My other achievements—academic, athletic, and political—eclipsed
by this frothy exercise in linguistic trivia? They’ll probably engrave it on my
tombstone, should I live long enough to get one.
“Myself, I dig the Swedish for it,”
put in Skeeter Washington.
“Oh, yes,” said Switters. “
Slida.
One of my favorites. For its onomatopoeia.”
When Skeeter looked puzzled, Poe had
said, “You must excuse Mr.
Washington
.
He’s been a long time away from English. Why, I had to teach him to speak
Ebonics, and as you may have noted, he’s not very fluent in it. Says things
like ‘Ja, ya betcha, motherfucker.’ “ Laughing, he turned to his associate.
“Skeet,
onomatopoeia
refers to a word that sounds like the thing it
represents.”
“Slida,”
said Switters,
nodding. “And the Japanese for the organ in question is almost as onomatopoeic:
chitsu
.”
“Yeah, man, that ain’t bad, either.”
“Preferable, certainly, to the
Japanese for the male equivalent:
chimpo
. Makes it sound like a trained
monkey in a traveling circus.”
“Don’t know about yours,” said
Skeeter, “but my dick behave like a trained monkey in a traveling circus most
of the time.”
“Let’s change the subject, shall we,
gentlemen?” said Poe. “Anna will be coming on deck momentarily with an hors
d’oeuvre or two.”
The men hadn’t gotten down to
business right away. In fact, nearly three days passed before Switters was
taken belowdecks into the boat’s storeroom and shown the contraband that Poe
and Washington were running. In the meantime, they sailed
Turkey
’s famed
Turquoise
Coast
, slicing gracefully through waters the color of Suzy’s
eyes, from whose pellucid depths fairyland rock formations and playful dolphins
rose. They sipped Sol Glissant’s champagne, dined on fresh fish poached in
grape leaves and served with capered sauces, and gazed at sunsets while Skeeter
played on the salon piano, at Switters’s tipsy request, amazing bebop
renditions of Broadway show tunes. Occasionally they talked shop, wondering
among themselves, for example, at the arrogance and uncharacteristic stupidity of
Israel
’s Mossad in its recent bungled attempt to smack a
revered Hammas leader inside
Jordan
.