The Second Saladin (10 page)

“These modern girls, you can’t teach them a thing. They already know everything,” he said. “There’s a young one with a magnificent mouth. A mouth of uncompromising sweetness. She’ll play you like a trumpet for only a little extra.”

“Is that Rita? I had Rita. Rita, a most refined and gifted young lady.”

“Rita is truly a rare bloom,” Ramirez called, and kissed his fingertips in homage to her skills. Under the kiss his fingers seemed to blossom, grow light and float away. Rita was fifty and needed dental work.

“We ought to be going,” said the man in the blue leisure suit. “It’s getting late.”

“You’ll come back, I hope?”

“Sadly, no. Our business in Nogales is almost finished.”

“A great pity. But I hope you’ll remember our little establishment fondly.”

“I have a great affection for it,” the man in the cream suit said, rising enthusiastically. He had an automatic pistol in his hand and he brought it to bear on Ramirez’s center, aiming carefully, and Ramirez shot through the
table, hitting him in the chest, spinning him around. The report in the closed space was sharp and ugly, but it did not bother the man in blue, for he shot at Ramirez, hitting him under the heart and knocking him back off his chair.

Ramirez felt as though he’d been punched. He fought to get his breath back and to find feeling in his fingertips and when he looked he could see the man in blue tugging at his wounded partner, trying to bring him to his feet, but the man’s limbs were floppy and indifferent and the body kept collapsing forward. Ramirez pushed himself to his knees and rushed a shot at the man in blue, missing, and fired again quickly, hitting him in the jaw. The man sat down stupidly next to his friend. He held his head in his hands and began to moan. He started to weep.

“Oh, it hurts,” he said brokenly, with blood spilling from his mouth.

Ramirez climbed to his feet and walked over and shot him in the back of the neck, pitching him forward.

“Jesus Mary,” said Roberto. “Who are they?”

“Evil men,” said Ramirez. But who were they?

“Run,” he said to Roberto, “go get the Madonna. Quickly, boy, before I bleed my life away.”

The boy dashed off to get one of the prostitutes who claimed to have been a nurse.

Ramirez sat down on a chair. He still had the pistol in his hand. He dropped it.

The room began to flutter before his eyes. He wanted a priest, he hurt so bad. He looked at the two women on the couch, who stared at him in horror and shock.

“Get out of here, whores!” he bellowed. “Whores may not watch a man die.” They scurried off.

He wished he’d lit a candle that morning. He wished he’d been to mass. He wished there was a priest.

Where was the Madonna?

T
he van had reached a suburb of Boston called Medford, up north of Boston, and pulled into a crowded parking lot—acres and acres of cars—surrounding a bar or something called Timmothy’s, a single low building of unsurpassing modesty. The name, in red neon, was written in about fifty places: on the roof, above the doors, on a huge sign at the entrance to the lot: This Is it! The Original! T
IMMOTHY’S
!

“We are here,” said Lanahan, “because it’s Saturday night. And every Saturday night, this studious intellectual lady, this gifted, brave, strong woman”—Chardy’s words, thrown back at him—“comes here, or one of several other similar institutions, and finds a man and leaves with him.”

“Last weekend she didn’t get home till Sunday afternoon,” said the driver, a wizard from Technical Services.

Chardy wondered if that was a smirk on Lanahan’s lumpy little face in the red glow of the neon. He felt like smacking him, but then the impulse vanished. Lanahan was nothing to him, not worth hitting.

“Nobody from Harvard would come way out here,” said the man up front. “They stick to Cambridge and snottier places like The Casablanca or Thirty-three Dunster
Street. This place is too tacky, too crass, your suburban crowd, polyester.”

“She’s in there now,” Lanahan said. “That’s her car.” He pointed to a green VW parked nearby.

The wizard said, “She always goes for the same type. I’ve seen three of them now. Dark Irish. Big, six two, two hundred pounds.”

“She’s looking for some others off your assembly line,” Lanahan said. “She’s looking
for you.”

“That’s shit,” Chardy said.

“We shall see. You all set? You ready? You still think you can handle it?”

“Uh-huh,” Chardy said.

“You don’t sound so convincing. Look, there are other ways of handling this.”

Chardy thought, you little bastard.

“Chardy. I have to answer to Ver Steeg on this one. Don’t fuck it up, all right? Just play it cool, don’t come on too strong. Don’t spook this girl. You do it wrong, she goes to the newspapers, makes a big—”

“I can handle it.”

Chardy slid the van door open, stepping into the chilly, damp evening.

Spring had not yet reached Massachusetts and he walked through the ranks of cars in a fog of his own breath. At Timmothy’s a short line formed and he ducked into it. They were all so pretty: the boys in their twenties had expensive haircuts, parted in the middle, that fell in glorious layered cascades; they wore rich, dark clothing, European almost. The girls all seemed small and dark and jocular and somehow Catholic; they would wear crucifixes on their delicate throats and not really believe what they were here for. He felt like some kind of grown-up among them, stiff and stupid, for he was easily a decade beyond the next oldest person in the line. He waited patiently in
his drab suit for almost ten minutes, until at last he reached a set of doors that were opened to admit him. He took a last look at the van, far off, under a tall light, its windows impenetrable, and knew that Lanahan was watching, and by extension Yost Ver Steeg and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Entered, the bar was really a collection of bars, each to its own motif, each equally fraudulent. It took him a while to move through all these variations—each big room was jammed—but just as he was beginning to grow panicky, he found her.

She sat at a table with some guy. The room was tonier than the others, fashioned after the Victorian age, if the Victorians had discovered plastic. Chardy felt he’d stumbled on to a movie set. But there was Johanna, her flesh, her face, with some man: as the wizard had said, a big man, Chardy’s size or larger, in a three-piece suit.

Chardy squeezed in at the bar a discreet distance from them and ordered a beer. He could see her in the mirror, but just barely, for smoke hung in the dark space near the ceiling like a rain squall. She was so intimate with this man. She touched his arm. She laughed at his jokes and listened with rapturous attention to his anecdotes. Sheer jealousy almost crippled Chardy. He watched as they ordered another round—bourbon for the man, white wine for Johanna.

Chardy watched, mesmerized. When was the last time he’d seen her? He could call it back with surprising accuracy, even now, even here. It had been the day of the ambush, the day of his capture. She’d dressed after the Kurdish fashion, a gushing print peasant’s skirt, a black vest, several blouses and scarves, and her hair wrapped in a scarf. But not now. Now she wore dark slacks, a turtleneck under a tweed jacket. Her biggest glasses, to soften
the slight angularity of her face. Her tawny hair pulled backward, though a sprig of it fell to her forehead. And when she smiled he could see her white teeth.

Chardy thought: Oh, Jesus, you look good. He could not take his eyes off her. If he had a plan in his head it abruptly vanished. He had some trouble breathing; she robbed him of air. Her hands were white and her fingers long and she reached and touched the man on the hand. He laughed, whispered something. They finished their drinks. They stood.

Chardy stood.

They walked through the crowd into the hall. The man had his arm around her. They got their coats from the checkroom and stepped out the door. Chardy followed and caught them in the parking lot under a fluorescent light as the man fumbled with the keys to his Porsche.

“Excuse me,” Chardy said.

She turned, recognizing the voice instantly but perhaps not quite believing it.

“Johanna?” He
stepped
into the light so that the man could see him. “I’d like to talk to you. It’s important.”

“Oh, Paul,” she finally said. “Oh, Paul.”

“Do you know this guy?” the man asked, stepping forward.

“This doesn’t concern you,” Chardy said.

“Oh, it doesn’t?” he said, taking another step forward. He turned to her. “Do you want to talk to this guy or not?”

She could not answer but only looked furiously at Chardy.

“Look,” the man said, “I don’t think this girl wants to talk to you. Why don’t you just go on and get out of here?”

“Johanna, it’s really important. It really is.”

“Just go away, Paul,” she said.

“Paul, you better get on out of here,” the man said.

Chardy felt electric with sensation. So much current was whirling through him he thought he might blow. She was so close. He wanted to touch her. He felt physically weak, but he could not draw back. Terror also gripped him. He knew he’d done this all wrong, coming on like this.

He stepped forward another step. “Please, Johanna.”

The man hit him in the ear, a sucker punch. He twisted his leg as he fell back on the asphalt. He felt for an instant as though a steeple bell had gonged through his skull, and found himself sitting oafishly in a puddle. He looked up, and murder boiled through his brain; but the man who’d thrown the blow looked absolutely stunned that he’d done such a thing.

“I didn’t mean to,” the man said. “But I told you to stay away. I warned you. You asked for it. You really did. You asked for it and I gave it to you.”

Chardy climbed to his feet. “That was a stupid thing to do. You don’t know who I am. Suppose I had a gun? Suppose I knew karate or something? Suppose I was just tough?”

“I-I told you to leave.”

“Well, I’m not going to. You better not try that again.”

“Wally,” Johanna said. “It
was
stupid. He’s a kind of soldier. He probably knows all kinds of dirty tricks. Anyway, I hate it when men fight. It’s so pointless.”

“Just don’t hit me again, Wally,” Chardy said, “and you’ll come out of this okay.”

“This is ridiculous,” Wally said. “Are you leaving with me or not?”

“Oh, Wally.”

“You certainly changed your tune in a hurry. Well, fuck you, and fuck your crazy boyfriend too. You two
have fun; you really deserve each other.” He climbed into his car, pulled out, and roared away in a scream of rubber.

“Johanna,” Chardy said.

“Paul, stay away. Stay the fuck away. I don’t need your kind of trouble.”

He watched her walk away, through the pools of light in the parking lot.

“Johanna. Please.”

“Paul.” She turned. “Go
away. Stay away
. I’ll call the police—I swear I will.”

“Johanna. Ulu Beg is coming.”

They sat in her Volkswagen near a park. He could see the deserted playground equipment, a basketball court empty and dark, through some trees. He drank from a can of beer—he’d told her to stop at a grocery store and she’d silently obeyed—his third in twenty-five minutes. The car ticked occasionally and it occurred to him that this American thing, sitting in a car with a woman on a quiet night near a park, was as exotic to him as a Philippine courtship ritual. Moisture beaded the windshield, fogging it; the air was damp and the trees clicked together in a breeze. She had not yet spoken and then finally she said, “You’re working for them, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Temporarily.”

“I thought they fired you.”

“They did. They needed me back.”

“You said in that letter you’d never work for them again. You said you were all done with it. Were you lying then too?”

“No. I came back because I didn’t feel I had a choice.”

“Because of the Kurd?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t it a little late to be paying off your debts?”

“Maybe it is. I don’t know. We’ll see, won’t we?”

“How can you do it? Work for them? How can you stomach it?”

“If I didn’t there’d be another man here. He wouldn’t care about you. He wouldn’t care about Ulu Beg. These are cold people, from the Security Office. They want him dead.”

“What do you want from me?”

“They think he’ll come to you, because he has no other place to go. Or so they say. I’m not sure what they really think. But that’s the official line. So I’m here to get your help.”

“There was a time when I would have killed you. I thought about it. I thought about flying to Chicago, going to your door, knocking, and when you answered, shooting you. Right in the face.”

“I’m sorry you hate me so much.”

“You were part of it.”

“I never—”

“Paul, you’re lying. It’s part of the fiber, the structure of your life. I’ve done some research on your employers: they train you to lie without thinking about it. You can do it calmly and naturally, as if you were discussing the weather.”

“Agency people are just people. Anyway, I never did lie to you. The lying goes on at higher levels. They have specialists in it.”

He emptied the beer can and reached into the sack for another one. He wished he’d gotten another six-pack. He popped the new top, took a long swallow.

He finally said, “There probably hasn’t been a night in seven years that I haven’t thought of you and hated what came between us. That’s not a lie. But if you love
him—
and I think you do, and I think you should—then you’ve got to help me. Or he’s dead.”

“Don’t overdo the nobility, Paul.”

“Don’t overdo the betrayed woman, Johanna. While you’re busy feeling sorry for yourself, they’re going to put a bullet in his head.”

“Paul,” she finally said, “I lied too. I said I loved you. I never loved you.”

“All right. You never loved me.”

“I loved the
idea
of you. Because you were fighting for the Kurds, and the Kurds needed fighters.”

“Yes.”

“I was so impressed with force. I thought it was a great secret.”