The Second Saladin (26 page)

Miles was bitter—he was not on the Dayton team. He had been shelved, it seemed, in favor of men Yost either trusted more or feared less.

“Relax, Miles. You’ll get a shot at Ulu Beg. Yost won’t get him in Dayton.”

“They’ve got Dayton
sealed
. They’ve got it
nailed
. It’s only a matter of time,” said Lanahan bleakly. He was sweating. Drops of pure ambition ran from his hairline.

It occurred to Chardy that Lanahan flatly, coldly did not want Yost to take the Kurd. Not without having a hand in it himself.

“No, Miles. Yost doesn’t really
know
this guy. He
thinks he’s some gun-happy Third World terrorist. Just a brainless hooter, a man with a gun and a screwball cause. He doesn’t realize: Ulu Beg’s got
it.”

It? What?

But Lanahan didn’t ask, merely stared angrily at Chardy. “Little rats like Yost don’t catch hero-types like Ulu Beg,” he finally said.

“Something like that.”

“Chardy, it’s all nonsense. That’s a silly notion, a schoolboy notion. It’s full of romance, myth. It’s full of bullshit. Ulu Beg is being hunted by men armed with computers, sophisticated electronics and optics. And
manpower
. Carte blanche. All they want. Bodies and more bodies. A whole agency full of bodies. You make him sound like Geronimo. He can only be caught by the righteous. It’s out of the last century, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, ended some time ago.”

“Okay, Miles. Don’t say I didn’t tell you. I almost like you, Miles. You want into the big time so bad.”

“Just leave it alone, Paul.”

“You want in. You want buddy-buddy with the Harvard boys.”

“Just forget it, Paul. I have to tell Yost where you are. You better get where you’re supposed to be.”

No, Chardy would not tell Miles about Trewitt. Because Trewitt had no brief for Mexico, because there would be all sorts of problems if Trewitt was suddenly operating in Mexico, which Yost had specifically forbidden.

And it also meant one other thing, which may have pleased Chardy the most and explained his decision the best: for the first time he knew something
they—
all of them—didn’t.

Let Trewitt have some time, some space. Maybe he could come up with something. But what, or who?

Chardy smiled.

I just put some money on Trewitt, he thought. Dreamy Trewitt, preppy kid, all eagerness and sloppy puppy love, full of insane, ludicrous notions of adventure. Weighted with legends, inflated with heroes—a fan really, as far from shrewd, grim, pushy little Miles as you could get.

Chardy thought of the good men he’d backed and who’d backed him in his time, heroes from Frenchy Short on down; and here he was with his chips on Trewitt.

“What’s so funny, Paul?”

“I don’t know. It all is, Miles. You, me, all of it.”

But Miles wasn’t smiling.

“You better get going, Paul. The great man is waiting. And you better get ready to move this weekend. There’s a job coming off.”

Chardy turned, stung.

“I thought he was staying put—” He’d had plans for the weekend.

“It just came up. But maybe Yost will get lucky before then.”

“He won’t.”

“Don’t worry, though. You’re going to Boston.”

H
er name was Leah; she never asked him his. After the first day she began to call him
Jim
. He never questioned it.

She was a tall, strong woman with furious wide eyes and a flat nose and long fingers that were miraculously pink inside. Her hair was cut short as a boy’s and she had three wonderful wigs—red, yellow and jet black—which she wore depending on her mood. Her skin was brown, almost yellow, and she was a proud woman with a grave and solemn air until she had a few glasses of wine, which she did every night, when she laughed and giggled like a loose-limbed girl. She worked in the basement of a place called Rike’s and he never understood what Rike’s was, except that it had to do with clothes because she brought him some: a suit like an American businessman’s, a raincoat, a dapper hat.

“They for you, baby,” she said.

He looked at the clothes. He could not have clothes, a wardrobe, because he had to move quickly. He could have no luggage, no luxuries. Wealth was of no interest to him. He turned to look at the black woman, whose face was eager.

“They are beautiful, Leah. But I cannot wear them.”

“But why, baby? I want you to look
good
. You a
fine-
looking
man, tall and strong.” She’d had several glasses of wine.

“Leah,” he said. “I cannot stay much longer. I have to go on.”

“Why you in such a
hurry
, Jim?”

“Ah.” He was evasive. He almost thought he could trust her but he knew he’d never be able to explain. It would take so long and go back so far. “I have a special place to go. Someone special to see.”

“You up to something,” she said, and laughed explosively. “You up to something
sly. I
seen that look before. I been seeing that look for years and years and years. Somebody ’bout to
take
something from some other body. Just you don’t git caught, hear?”

That was Leah: she would not judge. He fit into her life as smoothly as if she’d practiced all this, as though she’d taken bleeding men home time and time before. She asked nothing except his company, and if he never went out, if he had no past and would not speak of the future except in the most guarded and general terms, then she would accept that.

“Why, Leah? Why you help me? I can give you nothing.”

“Baby, you remind me of somebody. ‘Dey take my wallet’”—she imitated his voice—“and up that hill you go, like to get yourself killed dead. And one minute later you comes down. Never seen nothing like it since my brother whipped Sheriff Gutherie’s boy Charlie back in nineteen fifty-eight in West Virginia. Everybody says, ‘Bobby, he’s going
smack
you, boy.’ Bobby, he just say, ‘He took my
money,’
and Bobby go on up to the house and he kick that boy bad and he get every last cent back. Nobody seen nothing like that ’round there in years and years.” She laughed again at the distant memory.

Bobby sounded like another Jardi.

“A brave man. A soldier, this brother Bobby?”

“Oh, Bobby, he was somethin’. He won the West Virginia High School four-forty-yard dash in ’fifty-seven. My baby brother, oh, he was somethin’. White people say he robbed them. He got sent to prison, up in Morgantown. Somebody stick a knife in him. He wasn’t in that place no more than three weeks when they killed him.”

“A terrible thing,” said Ulu Beg. He had been in a prison in Baghdad for a long time, and knew what things happened in prison. “God have mercy on him.”

“Mamma died after that and I came to Dayton and here I been ever since. I been at Rike’s twenty years now. It ain’t the life I wanted, but it sure is the life I got.”

“You must be strong. You must make them pay.”

“Make
who
pay, Jim? Can’t make
nobody
pay nothin’.” She took some more wine.

The apartment was small and dark, in an old building with garbage and the smell of urine in the halls. The lights had all been punched out and people had written all over the bricks. Ulu Beg had recognized the English word for freedom scrawled in huge white letters. Everybody who lived there was black; when he looked out the window he could only see black people, except occasionally in the police cars that prowled cautiously down the street.

“Don’t worry none about them, baby,” she had said. “They ain’t comin’ in
here.”

“Say, Jim,” she said now, “just who are you? You white? You
look
white, you
walk
white, you
talk
funny white. But you ain’t white. I can tell.”

“Sure, white.” He laughed now himself. “Born white, die white.”

“But you ain’t no American.”

“Many peoples come to America. For a new life. That’s me—I look for the new life.”

“Not with no
gun
, Jim. I looked in your bag.”

He paused a second. “Leah, you shouldn’t have.”

“You on the run? Running
to
or running
from
, Jim? It don’t matter none to me. Have some wine. You going to waste somebody’s ass? It don’t matter none to me. Just don’t get caught, you hear, because they put you away in a bad place forever and ever, Jim. You the strangest white man I ever did see.”

He stayed a long week. He made love to her every night. He felt full of power and freedom with the black woman in her small apartment in a ramshackle city in the fabulous country of America. He rode her for hours. He lost himself in the frenzy of it, sleeping all day while she worked, then taking her when she returned. He had her once in her kitchen.

“You a crazy man. I’m pushing the damn broom ‘round Old Man Rike’s store all day thinkin’ ’bout crazy Jim.”

“You’re a fine lady, Leah. American ladies are fine. They are the best thing about America.”

“You know another?”

“A long time ago,” he said. “A real fighter, like you, Leah.”

“A white girl?”

“White, yes.”

“No white girl know nothin’ ’bout no fighting.”

“Oh, this one did. Johanna was very special. You and Johanna would be friends, I think.” An odd vision came to him—he and Leah and Jardi and Johanna and Memed and Apo. They’d be at a meadow, high in the mountains. Thistles were everywhere, and the hills were blue-green. Amir Tawfiq was there too; they were all there. His whole family was there; everybody was there. His father, also Ulu Beg, hanged in Mahābād on a lamppost in 1947, he was there too. There were partridges in the trees, and deer
too. The hunting was wonderful. The men hunted in the day and at night the women made wonderful feasts. Then everybody sat around in the biggest, richest tent he had ever seen and told wonderful stories. Jardi talked about his own crazy father, the Hungarian doctor. Johanna told of her sister Miriam. Leah told of her brother Bobby, and even as these people were mentioned they came into the tent also and had some food and told some stories and raised a great cheer.
Kurdistan ya naman
, they cheered,
Kurdistan ya naman
.

“Jim? Jim?”

“Ah?”

“Where you been? It sure wasn’t Dayton.”

“It’s nothing. Tomorrow I will go. I have to go. I stay too long; I must move on.”

She looked at him, her eyes furious and dark.

“You go off someplace with that gun, they kill you. No lie, they kill you, like my brother Bobby.”

“Not Jim,” he said.

“Baby, don’t go. Stay with Leah. It’s nice here. It’s so nice.”

“I have to go on. To meet a man.”

“To the bus station? Cops catch you sure.”

“No cops catch Jim.”

“Sure they do. Where you going?”

“Big city.”

“Big-city cops catch you in a bus station sure. I know they will.”

“I have to go.”

“
Jim
,” she said suddenly, “take my car. Go on, take it. It just sit there.”

An awkward moment for him.

“I cannot drive an automobile,” he said.

She threw back her head in laughter, sudden and light and musical.

“You some dude, baby, you some old dude.” She laughed again. “Hon,” she said, “you the strangest white man I ever heard of. You so strange you almost ain’t white.”

And so she said she’d drive him.

T
o Trewitt the world seemed considerably more attractive with a full meal in his belly, a shower, a night in a decent place—the Hotel Fray Marcos de Ninza, not exactly Howard Johnson’s, but it had TV and running water, hot if you waited long enough. And locks on the door. So a little confidence had returned to Señor Trewitt with the arrival of Chardy’s money; not that a sudden shadow, the report of a car backfire, a hard set of Mexican eyes flashing his way didn’t still wreck him, but he was at least done with cowering in a barn.

Look at me. Look at me! So pleased he thought he might burst, in love with this new image, for he was a clandestine operator now; he was an agent. He felt he’d finally joined a fraternity that had been blackballing him these many years.

Look at me. Look at me! And he did, too. He could not keep his eyes off himself in shopwindows, in the mirror of his room—lean young man, quiet, willful. The eyes deep and quick. The hand never far from his weapon.

For Trewitt was now an armed man.

He’d sent the boy out with $50 of Chardy’s money and specific instructions.

“An automatic. Not some ancient Colt or Remington
or Pancho Villa special. An automatic, short-barreled if possible, but I’d settle for one of those Spanish nine-millimeter Stars or even a Llama from Spain if it’s big enough, nine mil at the least. Can you do it?”

“Sure I can.”

“Don’t screw me now.”

“I’m no screw you.”

“Just don’t.”

The boy returned with a worn yellow box, its faded label displaying a pale square of print. In, of all unlikely things, Italian.

“Italian?” wondered Trewitt, much concerned, and ripped the box open greedily. “Jesus, a Beretta.” he said in wonder. “Must be fifty years old.”

The small blue pistol glinted up at him, antiquated and stubby. It had an odd prong flaring off the butt-stock to give it an Art Deco look. Ten oily rounds stood upright in a tray along the box’s edge.

“That’s all you could get for fifty American?”

“Inflation,” the boy explained.

But Trewitt was secretly delighted with the small automatic. He fired one of the precious 7.65-millimeter rounds that night into a gully wall. The pistol was accurate to maybe seven feet, something out of an old Hemingway novel, fresh from the retreat from Caporetto, but it was his, his alone. Its weight in his waistband pleased him, and he carried it with a round in the chamber, but at half cock, pushed around on his hip. He tried his draw too, in private moments, groping quickly for the weapon. He needed to improve, and vowed to spend half an hour a day in practice.

Look at me! For the pistol was only the beginning. The shop-windows and the mirror also threw back the vision of a dashing young gangster in a yellow leisure suit, a double-knit polyester thing only recently arrived from
Taiwan, and a white-on-white imitation-silk shirt (also Taiwanese) with a huge flappy collar and no buttons above the sternum. He looked like a pimp, an assassin, a failed movie star in the getup, a zoot suit, a blast of sheer arrogant yellow that would have burned the retinas of his friends. The bad taste of it was awe-inspiring and of his old self only his Bass Weejuns, tassel loafers in a muted oxblood, remained, because the Mexican shoes all ran to three-inch heels and seemed to be made of plastic.