The Second Saladin (39 page)

“Oh, yeah,” Chardy said.

“And of course we knew where you’d been.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Chardy, leering as if he remembered the tart. And then he did, a Eurasian girl. She lived in a crappy little apartment in the city with three children. She’d given him a dose, too. And Frenchy had her, but that was on another trip, when Marion wasn’t around.

“Marion, I just can’t get it out of my head. We really had some times in those old days.”

“I used to think about it too, Paul.”

“But you quit? God, how? I’m still stuck back in the sixties.”

“You were very young then. That was your youth. You always remember your youth. And for me I suppose it had to do with starting a new life. A new family. New friends. You just have a different circle.”

“But you must miss him. The Frenchman. I miss him terribly.”

“I do, Paul. Of course. Frenchy was one in a million. I miss him all the time.”

“Old Frenchy. He taught me so much. Oh, he taught me a lot.”

“But Paul, it can be dangerous back there. I never told you this—or anybody this. But after Frenchy died, I had a very rough time. I had to go into a place for a while. And they made me see how he was killing me. And I had to let him go. I had to let it all go, and move ahead.”

“I wish I could.”

“You can. Frenchy always said you were the strongest.”

“Ah, Frenchy. The old bastard. Marion, where did they put him? I’d love to go see him. Just once, for old times’ sake.”

“He’s in
Cleveland
, Paul. A very nice place. He was cremated, and he’s in a vault in a nice cemetery outside Cleveland.”

“Maybe I’ll go there sometime,” Chardy said.

“Paul, have you been drinking?”

“Not enough,” he said, laughing loudly.

She nodded, disturbed. She was still a pretty woman; or rather he could still see her prettiness underneath her age, her thickness. She’d seemed to turn to leather. She was so tan she glowed. Her legs were still slim and beautiful. She’d been a stewardess, he seemed to remember. Yes, Frenchy always had a gift for stewardesses; they responded to him somehow.

“I’m just so mad he was dead all that time and I didn’t even know. The bastards could have told me that, at least.”

“I never liked the secrecy. I hated all that.”

“Ah, they don’t know what they’re doing.” He dismissed them with a contemptuous and exaggerated wave of his hand. He laughed loudly, threw down some more coffee. “Christ, the bastards,” he said.

Marion watched him. “You
have
been drinking.”

“A bad habit. Nothing serious. I drink, I shoot my mouth off. I make enemies, I take afternoons off. I get sentimental, look up old friends.” He laughed again. “Look at me now. Chasing ghosts.”

“Paul, you need help.”

“No, no, Paul’s fine. Old Paul, the strong one. He’s the strong one. Frenchy really said that?”

“He did.”

“I loved him. Marion, I have to know. What did they do to him?”

She seemed to take a large breath. She stood at the window. She looked out upon other Normandy-style mock farmhouses.

“It’s such a pretty neighborhood, Paul. It’s so leafy and bright. It’s a wonderful place to raise children. They have pools all over the place and playgrounds they call ‘tot lots.’ They have little shopping malls they call ‘village centers.’ It’s a wonderful place. I’m so happy here.”

“Marion. Please tell me. I have to know.”

“Paul, I don’t want to go back there. I had so much trouble. You don’t know how much trouble I had. I think it would be better if you left. This just isn’t working. I can’t go back there. Do you know how hard I had to work to get to this place, Paul? To have this life? This is the life I wanted, Paul, I always wanted.”

“Help me, Marion. Please help me. I need your help.”

“You’re not here for the old times, Paul. You’re not here out of love or loyalty. You’re still in it. I can smell it on you, Paul.”

She stood by the window.

“It’s so important, Marion.”

“It really was awful, wasn’t it, Paul? All the things you and Frenchy did. You thought you were such heroes, such big men, flying all over the world. Your duty, you called it. You were fighting for freedom. You were fighting for America. But you were just thugs. Gangsters. Killers. Weren’t you? Maybe that’s the shoe that fits.”

“I don’t know, Marion. I don’t know what we were.”

“Frenchy told me, years later he told me, that in Vietnam accidents happened all the time. The wrong people always died. And in South America the soldiers you worked with were brutal men, who hated everybody. There was just too much violence sometimes, it couldn’t be controlled. It just slopped all over the place.”

“Terrible things happened. That’s what it was about.”

“‘Hairy.’ Isn’t that the word? That was Frenchy’s favorite word. ‘Very hairy, babe,’ he’d say when he came back, just before he drank himself insensible What it means, though, is that a lot of people had just gotten killed in some terrible and arbitrary way, for no reason. Isn’t that what it means?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you know, Paul, that Frenchy didn’t make love to me for the last five years of his life? Tried, tried hard. He just couldn’t do it. The war was eating him up. It was destroying the great Frenchy Short. He was trying to get out before it killed him and he knew he wouldn’t make it. He knew. That last trip, he
knew.”

“He knew?”

“Here they come, Paul. Look.”

Beyond the yard, beyond the fence, two boys and a girl in bathing suits and sneakers were running down the street, the smaller boy way ahead, running crazily, chugging
like a cylinder, the second boy too cool to notice, the girl taking up the rear, laughing.

“They’re good kids, Paul. So good. I only have them a month and five or six weekends a year, and they didn’t come out of my body but, Jesus, I love them, Paul. Oh, Jesus, I love them.”

She turned; he could see she was crying.

“Paul, you’d better go. I really don’t have the energy to make introductions. All right? Just go; just get out of here.”

“Marion. Please help me. How did Frenchy die? Go back, just one time. It’s so important. You have no idea how important it is.”

She started to sob. He went quickly to her, but when he touched her she recoiled.

“I’m all right,” she said fiercely. “I’m fine.” Her face had swollen; her eyes were red and wet.

“Did he drown?”

“That’s what the Austrian death certificate said. But—”

“Yes?”

“Paul, when they were getting him ready for cremation, I got a call at the hotel. This was in Cleveland. It was the mortician. He asked me to come by. I drove over in the rain in a rented car. He was an old man, the only one there. He said he was sorry to bother me, he didn’t want to make any trouble. The instructions said closed casket. But somehow something had happened in the mortuary. The box had been opened by mistake. He wanted to know if I wanted to make any kind of inquiry. Something was wrong; I should know about it. He was just trying to protect himself, he said. So I said, what is it, what is wrong?

“Paul, he took me back and he showed me. I had to look at it, Paul.”

She paused.

“How did Frenchy die, Marion?”

“They killed him with a blowtorch, Paul. My beautiful, beautiful Frenchy. They burned him to death, slowly. They burned his face off.”

A
t last there was peace.

Ulu Beg slept a great while, arising to cleanse himself and to pray. He slept, he ate. He lay in the bed, staring at the ceiling. Hours passed, days perhaps.

“We will simply have to go again,” Speshnev said in his crisp English, their common language.

“Okay,” said Ulu Beg.

“A vest,” said Speshnev. “A vest that can stop a Skorpion from close range. What a fine American invention.”

“The head. Next time the head.”

“Of course.”

“But when?”

“Soon, my friend. But for now, relax. Enjoy this place.”

“Where are we?”

“In the State of Maryland, on a peninsula. This old estate was built by a man who made millions of dollars manufacturing—cars? airplanes? washing machines? No. Mustard! For sausages. Ten thousand acres, gardens, pools, tennis courts, a nineteen-bedroom house, two guest houses, a collection of exquisite paintings, Chippendale furniture, rare old books. From mustard! And now the
taxes are so high, only the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics can afford them!”

The fat Russian smiled with great appreciation of his own humor; he had spoken with such precision that Ulu Beg was certain it was a treasured speech, delivered a thousand times before. He saw from the Russian’s expectant eyes that he was presumed to see the wit in it too, and he smiled politely, although he didn’t know what this “mustard” was.

Rewarded, the Russian sat back. They were in an opulent bedroom of a guest cottage down a path from the main house. Outside, a pond in which swans glided gave way to a marsh. And from the front one could look and see three distinct zones: a meadow, a marsh, and a sparkling body of water, flat and calm. This world was green and blue—
kesk o sheen
in the Kurdish—and quiet. A gentle breeze frequently moved across it; it was a vision he took great sustenance from.

“I am still overcome with what you managed to accomplish,” the Russian said. “You traveled across a foreign country to strike your blow. Then, having done so, you fled through an extensive manhunt. And when we finally made contact, you were planning your new attack. You are an extraordinary fellow.”

The Russian’s technique was to flatter excessively. Ulu Beg had grown used to it; still, he wondered how much steel was beneath all this flab. The Russian had gray eyes—kind eyes, really—and blondish hair that in some lights was almost white. He wore rumpled suits and moved comically, yet this excess weight seemed also to conceal great strength. The Palestinians who had helped train Ulu Beg at the Raz Hilal Camp near Tokra, in Libya, called him, for reasons Ulu Beg never understood, Allahab, meaning, literally, The Flame. Ulu Beg took this to refer to the purity of his passion, his strength.

“Do you need anything? A woman? A boy? We can arrange anything.”

“I am content,” said the Kurd. He was somewhat offended; he was no buggering Arab. “Some rest. Freedom from pretending. Then another chance. This time I will not fail.”

“Of course. The secret of my success—which is considerable, I might add—is simple. They ask me in Moscow, ‘Speshnev, how do you do it?’ ‘It’s easy,’ I tell them. ‘Quality people.’ I use them here. I use them in Mexico. I—”

Ulu Beg blinked.

“The
best
people,” Speshnev amplified.

“Oh.” A compliment. The man would go to any length. “You are most kind.”

“It’s only true,” Speshnev said.

Ulu Beg nodded modestly. When would this fellow leave? The Russian’s warmth and nearness were overpowering. Ulu Beg felt suffocated in love. The Russian reached and touched his shoulder.

“You are an inspirational man. Your story, your deeds, your heroism will last for centuries. Your people will make a great hero of you. They will sing songs.”

But even as this ornate thought was expressed, it seemed to evaporate. The Russian rose gloomily, went to the window. He stared out of it painfully, not seeing the marsh and the sky and the bay. Russians were said to be a moody people. How quickly they changed.

“It is the contrast,” he said. “I cannot stand it. It hurts me. It physically hurts me. The contrast between you and the other.”

He brooded on the placid landscape. In the radiant light, his hair became almost pink, the color of his jowly face.

“The other?” said Ulu Beg.

“Yes,” said Speshnev. “The man who troubles my dreams.”

“A man troubles mine too,” said Ulu Beg.

“But not the same man. You think of the larger betrayal, the historical betrayal, the political betrayal. Of your people, as an act of state by the Americans to advance their own cause. You think of Danzig and the justice denied you, the justice deferred. You think of cold-blooded calculations made thousands of miles away by men in suits looking at maps. I think of something hotter, more immediately personal.”

Ulu Beg followed nothing of these Russian ravings, moody wanderings through a gloomy landscape. The intensity was surprising, for in his normal life the man was the jovial type.

“I think of a man with a talent, a great genius. The talent is for evil. He is an artist, inspired, a poet.”

Ulu Beg looked at him uncomprehendingly. Yet the Russian seemed not to notice and plunged madly on.

“You know, in this business it is not uncommon to get to know your opponent. Most often he is a chap such as yourself—decent, hardworking, a man you can respect, a man whom you could befriend were it not for the obvious politics. Yet once in a career one encounters what can only be called this talent for evil. It is not cold; it is hot. It is a kind of lust or need or obsession. A fervor. An absolutism that has nothing whatsoever to do with cause. It has no motive other than selfhood. It is the highest human vanity. I speak of a man who would sell his brother or torture someone helpless, not for politics or adventure but purely for the sensation of ego triumphant.”

The short man gestured violently. Ulu Beg watched him, befuddled and unsure. Where was all this taking them? What significance had it? He had a terrible feeling
of increasing complexity—what had been so simple must now take on another dimension.

“I speak,” said the Russian, “of the man you call Jardi.”

“But, Colonel—”

“Stop. If you thought you knew this man, you do not. You know only a part of him, a part he allowed you to see. You know the soldier. But let me tell you another story.”

Ulu Beg nodded.

“After we captured him, I girded myself for the struggle, knowing full well how tough he’d be. He was, after all, an operative, a professional, for the American intelligence service. But such was not the case; in fact, exactly the opposite happened. He saw immediately how tight a bind he was in, where his best interests lay. And thus he did more than cooperate or collaborate. He gave us your group, for his own skin, but also, I tell you truly, for his own pleasure, his own pride. I confess I was shaken by this, perhaps even intimidated. I knew I should kill him, take him off the surface of the earth. Yet I hesitated; who could kill a helpless man? That indecision cost me dearly. He quickly insinuated his way into the favor of the Iraqis. I couldn’t touch him. In fact, the last twist, the helicopter deceit: that was his idea. I argued against it—we had won, after all, by then. But no, he insisted on a gesture. Think of the future, he told the Iraqis; here is a chance to make a gesture of such contempt, no Kurd would face the light for a thousand years. After all, he maintained, Ulu Beg is famous; let his end become famous as well.