The Second Saladin (30 page)

“Paul, not the gun itself, gun as object. Guns don’t scare me. Paul,
that
gun. It’s for shooting him.”

“Johanna, it’s a sidearm issued for an Agency security operation. They want me to wear it; they expect me to wear it. It’s that simple. Nothing has changed.”

“Paul. You were going to help. You said your first allegiance—”

“I’m on a security detail. They expect me to carry a gun. They expect me to protect him from Ulu Beg. If they feel I’m not willing to do that, then they have no more use for me. They’d get rid of me and I couldn’t do anything.”

“I hate it. Take it off—hide it. I don’t want to look at it.”

“Okay, sure.” He peeled off the complicated holster, a harness of elastics and leathers and snaps, a mesh of engineering surrounding and supporting the automatic, and tucked the whole ungainly thing under his coat.

“Better?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s not. I can see.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’m sorry. What’s wrong?”

“It’s really hopeless, isn’t it? We’re just pretending? It’s gone too far; there’s nothing we—”

“No.” He went to her and took her shoulders in his hands. “No, we can bring it off. We just need that first break. I have to be able to
get
to him. If I can talk to him, reason with him, explain things, then I can go to them. I can get them to help me set up a deal. I’ll go to goddamned Sam Melman; I’ll crawl to him, if that’s what it takes.”

“We haven’t brought anything off. We’re just
sitting
here.”

“They think he’s in the Midwest. Somebody stole his money, they think. I’ve been trying for a week to get them to send me out there.”

“So they’re closing in, and here we sit. Talking.”

“I’ll make something happen, I swear it. I’ll go to Sam on Monday, soon as we get back. I’ll tell him the whole story. I—I just can’t offer more than that, Johanna. I don’t have anything more than that.”

“Somehow it’s just not working out. They’re closing in, you’re spending your time with Joseph Danzig a thousand miles away, I sit around working on a book that I can’t finish, that I can’t make good, and—and we’re just not in control. It just isn’t working.”

“Johanna, please don’t say that. It’s working perfectly. I’m getting them to like me; I’m getting some influence. You just watch. And they’re not going to catch Ulu Beg in Dayton. He’s too smart. For Christ’s sake, I trained him. He’ll be all right. Johanna, I think he’ll be out here within the month. I know he’ll get in contact with you. Or with somebody who knows you. He’ll have thought it all out; he’ll be very careful. Johanna, we’ll bring it off, I swear we will.”

“I’m sorry, Paul. I went for a walk down by the river
today. A helicopter, one of those traffic things, came screaming over the trees. It spooked me—it really did. I told you I was a little nuts. Oh, God, Paul, I get so scared sometimes.”

“Okay, okay, I understand. I understand.”

But she had started to cry.

“You’ve never seen me like this, Paul. But I can just crash for days, sometimes.”

“Johanna, please. Please.” He tried to comfort her.

“We’re just not doing anything,” she said. “We’re just sitting here. The whole thing is falling apart. It’s just no good.”

“Please don’t say that. It
is
good. We
will
get it done.”

“Oh, Paul. Since I got back, I’ve just become a basket case. I have a terrible darkness inside me.”

“Johanna, please.”

It terrified him that he could not reach her, that she was sealed off.

“Look,” he said, “would this help? I think I could get by, late tomorrow. Danzig’s got some kind of party not five blocks from here, on Hawthorne. It’s with old colleagues, faculty people. It’s not on any itinerary. I know I can skip out, about eleven o’clock. Would that help? And then Monday I’ll go to Sam. Shit, I’ll go all the way to the DCI. I’ll get the whole thing changed around, all right? I’ll get all the guns put away. We’ll work a deal of some kind, I swear it.”

“Oh, Paul.” She was still crying.

“Is that some kind of help?”

She nodded.

“Here,” he said. “Just let me hold you for a while. All right? Just let me hold you. We’ll get through this. I swear we will.”

He felt her warmth and thought he loved her so much he’d die of it.

She was not sure when he left finally; she drifted off and he had not awakened her. When she finally did awake it was around five; and he had covered her.

The television was still on, and she recognized the movie,
White Christmas
, with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. The scene involved a reunion among some ex-GIs at some hotel in Vermont that a general owned. It seemed a ridiculous movie to run in Boston in the spring.

But she did not have the energy to turn it off. She felt almost ill, feverish at the very least. She did not feel like doing a single thing and wondered again about her strength, her sanity. She tried to lock her mind up in
White Christmas:
idiotic Danny Kaye raced around; Bing just stood there and sang. Who were the women? Rosemary Clooney—whatever happened to Rosemary Clooney? Vera-Ellen. Did Vera-Ellen have a last name? Was it Ellen? Ms. Ellen? Johanna had seen the movie years ago on a giant screen; she remembered it now. The theater had been air-conditioned. The movie was Technicolor. She saw it with her big sister, Miriam, who was killed in a car crash, and her brother, Tim, who was now a lawyer in St. Louis. All this had been years ago, epochs ago, in the Jurassic of the ’50s. She remembered it with brutal clarity and had no urge to fabricate it, to make myths out of it. Miriam had been very pretty and bright, but she’d left them, Johanna and Tim, all alone, because she’d snuck off with her boyfriend, whom Mommy and Daddy didn’t want her to see anymore. Miriam was bad. She was fast. There was no controlling her. She had the hots. She had lots of boyfriends and worried Mommy sick. She was always in trouble. She was beautiful and bright and wicked and when she’d died her freshman year at Vassar in a car crash with a Yale football player (who survived) nobody was surprised. Johanna remembered
that somebody whispered that Miriam got what she deserved. She was a bad girl. She deserved it.

Johanna started to cry again. She cried for Miriam, of whom she’d not consciously thought in years. Poor Mir. She was so bright and pretty and not until Johanna was in her twenties did she know what she should have said to anybody who said Miriam deserved it. She should have said, Fuck you. Miriam deserved the world. She was bright and pretty and good. Miriam was good. She was so good.

I am bad, thought Johanna. I’m the bad one.

She shifted her position slightly, with great weariness. Paul had sat there. And he was the man she loved. She would give herself to him. She would do anything for him, anything he wanted. She loved that chalky, locker-room body, that Catholic’s body, with its slight coating of fat under which there was great strength. It was a big, loose-limbed, hairy body (Paul had hair everywhere; he left a trail of hair), a scarred and hurt body. But she loved it. He was not brilliant and she loved that too. She’d known brilliant men her whole life and now she hated them. Clever, wicked, tricky, cunning bastards. Intellectuals, geniuses, artists. Great scholars, predatory lawyers, egomaniacal doctors. She was tired of brilliant, interesting men without guts. All the trouble in the world came from brilliant, interesting men without guts who loved to hear themselves talk. They were all babies. They were the real killers of this world.

She reached and touched the rumpled fabric where he had sat. It was not at all warm. He must have been gone for a long time. Her fingers lingered against the material; she sat up, shook her head, and reached across the coffee table to where a rumpled issue of the
Globe
lay. Chardy’s feet had even touched it. She picked it up again—as she
had a thousand times before—and opened to the metro page.

FIRE GUTS MIDEASTERN RESTAURANT

A three-column headline over a ten-inch story explained in the mundane voice of daily journalism how arson was suspected in a blaze on Shawmut Avenue in which a restaurant called The Baghdad had burned down.

Noon of the second day after the fire, you will pick him up across from the restaurant, they had told her. The technical term for this kind of arrangement was a blind link, and it was the most secure, the most sure method: no phone contact, no dead-letter boxes, nothing by mail, nothing at all. It’s for operating in an enemy country.

Tomorrow, noon tomorrow. She would pick up Ulu Beg. Here, in Boston, ten thousand miles from the mountains. And Joseph Danzig would be that same night only five blocks away, unguarded.

She’d gotten Chardy out of there now. She’d done half the incredible. If she could get Ulu Beg in, she’d have done the other half.

She was not as he remembered; she’d been a hard, youthful figure then, boyish and strong and active; a part of Jardi and very much not a part.

Now, in the automobile, she was nervous and plump and dry-lipped and pale.

“Your trip. Hazardous?” she asked.

“Somebody stole my money.”

“Yet you got here so much faster.”

“A fine lady drove me. A fine black woman.”

“There was trouble at the border.”

“What? Oh, yes.”

“They know you’re here. They’ve guessed what you’re here for.”

They drove in bright sunlight through sparkly Boston streets. Everything here was made of wood. There was so much wood, wood in abundance. Wood and automobiles: America.

“How?” he said finally.

“The bullets from your gun. They traced them to nineteen seventy-five.”

He nodded. Of course.

“You should have brought a different gun.”

Yes, he should have. But they had insisted, hadn’t they? It had to be this gun. They had given him this gun. This would be his gun.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’re convinced you’re in Ohio still. That’s where they’re looking for you. We have an incredible chance. The best chance we’ll ever have. You would say it’s all written above.”

She told him about Danzig and the party that night, that very night. She told him how relaxed they’d be, since the party was a private thing, among old friends. She told him she had gotten the university faculty guide and found the address of the one member of Danzig’s old department that lived on Hawthorne. She could take him there late tonight and point him. She told him that the only man who could recognize him would not be there.

“Who?”

“Chardy.”

His face did not change. In many ways it was a remarkable face; the nose was oversize, like a prow, and the cheekbones high and sharp. The eyes were gaudy blue, small and intense. In the mountains he’d worn a moustache, huge and droopy, but now he was clean-shaven. He looked almost American. He did look American. She was astonished at how
American
he’d become, in blue jeans,
with a pack, a tall, strong man who could have been a graduate student of athletic bent, an adventurer, an outdoorsman, any vigorous thirty-five-year-old American, and the streets were full of them, fit, lean joggers, backpackers, professional vacationers.

“You are his woman again?”

“It seems so.”

“He is with us, then?”

“No. He doesn’t know. He came back into my life because of all this. I realized at once that I had to become close to him again. I could learn things from him, and through him I could convince important people that I was harmless.”

“But you are his?”

“It’s not important.”

“But you are?”

“Yes. He’s a different man too. They were very hard on him. His own people. And the Russians tortured him horribly. They burned his back with a torch. He’s a very bitter man, a hurt man. He’s not the same Chardy at all.”

“He works for them again?”

“He does.”

“I will never understand Americans.”

“Neither will I.”

“You will betray him?”

“Yes. I have thought about it. I will betray him. The political is more important than the personal. But I ask a condition. It’s very important to me.”

“Say it.”

“There will be other people there. People from the university. They are innocent. You must swear not to hurt them. To kill Danzig is justice. To kill these others would be murder. I can’t commit murder. I saw too much of it committed myself.”

“You Americans,” Ulu Beg said. “You make war, but
you don’t want there to be any bodies. Or if there are bodies, you don’t want to see them or know about them.”

“Please. Swear it. Swear it as a great Kurdish fighter would swear it.”

“I can only swear what I can. But what is written, is written.”

“Still. Swear it. Or I can’t help. You’ll be on your own. And we’ve both figured out long ago that on your own you have almost no chance.”

He looked at her. Was she insane? He saw it now: she was crazy; she had terrible things in her head. Who could keep promises with bullets flying?

“Swear it. Please.”

“On my eyes,” he said.

“All right.”

They pulled into a parking lot a few minutes later.

“Here.” She handed him a key. “It’s a motel. I’ve rented you a room at the far end. Go there; stay inside. Clean up. There’re some clothes in the room, American clothes. I hope they fit. I’ll pick you up at ten. He said he’d come to my place at eleven. We’ll wait outside until we see him leave. Then I’ll help. I’ll help you get inside. I’ll help with the other business too.”