The Second Saladin (12 page)

“Did the Russian tell you about that?” Johanna asked him as he laid down the last page.

“No,” Chardy said. “Not the details.”

“Was the ambush the part of the other thing? Was it part of some larger betrayal? Were you under orders? All those months when I loved you, when you fought with the Kurds—did you know? Did you know how it would end?”

“Of course not.”

“But that
was
you on the radio?”

Chardy remembered it, but not very well. It was a Soviet LP-56 model, with double amplification and some kind of frequency scanner thing, standard issue in Soviet armored units. He remembered the microphone in his hand, a heavy, blocky thing. They were way behind in radios, he remembered thinking. He had felt so numb.

“What?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

He remembered the KGB colonel, Speshnev, had been pleased with his performance.

“Why, Paul?” she said quietly.

“I—it was very important to them to kill or capture Ulu Beg,” he said.

“But why did you help them?”

“I didn’t have any choice.”

“Did they torture you?”

“They had some fun. But it wasn’t that.”

“Tell me, Paul. Why?”

“Johanna, I can’t tell you. And I can’t change a thing now. I guess I’m really here to try and make it up.”

“Nobody made anything up for the Kurds.”

“Johanna, he’s here to kill. Suppose some more children get stuck in the crossfire? Suppose it’s another massacre? Suppose somebody innocent—”

“
We
armed Ulu Beg.
We
supported him.
We
urged him on. Paul, nobody’s innocent.”

“Johanna—”

“Paul, get out of here. I can’t help you, I won’t help you. What’s going to happen will happen.
Insha ’allah:
God’s will. The Kurds say, ‘Do not hesitate to let the vengeance fall on the head of your enemy.’”

He looked at her.

She said, “Get out, Paul, I’m so tired.”

He stood.

“Don’t ever try to see me again. I swear I’ll call the police.”

Chardy stood outside her house in the cold. He wondered if they’d followed him and after a few minutes the van pulled up. He walked across the street and got into it.

“How did it go?” asked Lanahan.

“Terrible,” he said, sitting across from the boy in
back. The van started and he looked out the window as lights and dark houses fled by.

“Who the fuck does she think she is? What the fuck does she think this is all about? Okay, she won’t help us, we’ve got some tricks we can throw her way. We’ll—”

Chardy had the boy by the thick lapels of his raincoat and rammed him against the side of the van, feeling the head slap hard against the glass of the window.

“Hey,
hey.”
The wizard in front turned, horrified. “Take it easy, you guys.”

But Chardy planted a forearm against the boy’s throat, pinning his neck against the seat, and told him to watch his fucking mouth. Then he released him and sat back.

The boy shook his head woozily and touched his throat. Fear showed in his wide eyes and trembling fingers, but the fear turned to rage.

“You
are
an animal,” he said.

Chardy looked out the window, into the dark.

They returned to the hotel sullenly. It was nearly midnight. Chardy went to the bar and had a few more beers. He looked around the room—it was pretty packed—for the biggest man he could see, found him, and went to pick a fight. But the man turned out to be timid, and left quickly, and people stayed so far from Chardy after that that he finally decided to go to bed.

He slept poorly, thinking of helicopters.

The phone roused him early the next morning. He blinked awake in the gray light in a messy room. He had a headache and a sour taste in his mouth. He answered.

“Paul?”

“Yes?”

Her voice held promise of a question, but did not ask it. He gripped the phone so tight he thought he’d shatter the plastic.

She said, “I have to see you.”

“Why?”

“Paul, you son of a bitch. Why didn’t you stay in Chicago?”

He looked at his Rolex to discover it was 7:30.

“I haven’t slept,” she said. “I seem to be a little nuts. I did some speed a little while ago.”

“Take a nap, for Christ’s sakes. Then meet me someplace in the open. Outside.”

“By the river. By the boathouse. Off Boylston. Anyone can tell you where it is. At noon.”

“I’ll see you then.”

“Paul. Please come alone. Don’t bring any little men in overcoats.”

U
lu Beg sat next to a black man. He’d learned that the black men were best. Between El Paso and Fort Worth, an endless flat monotony, he had sat with a white man who talked and talked. The tales were filled with unknowable references—the Spurs, mortgage rates, gas prices, the Oilers, Johnny Carson, the PTA, waterfront lots, barking dogs—that troubled his brain. He kept a smile on his face and nodded eagerly for the hours of the journey, and when at last he was freed found himself waxen, shaky, slimy with perspiration.

So Ulu Beg looked for black men. You could sit next to a black man for hours and he would say nothing. He would not see you. He would sit encased in his own furious silence, absorbed and bitter. Ulu Beg was somehow drawn to them. Were they America’s Kurds? For, like the Kurds, they were a manly and handsome people, intent upon preserving their own ways. They had a dignity, an Islamic stillness he could understand. And they were skeptical of the America around them, he could sense that too. Yet they had never retreated to the mountains to fight. He wondered why. He thought it might have to do with the music they always listened to, the huge radios they carried with them everywhere.

Beyond the glass of the bus window the state of Arkansas rolled past, flat and green.

The black man stirred. He was a large and silent man with small angry eyes in his huge face. He rattled the newspaper he was reading. Ulu Beg could see in black letters:

MAN TAKEN BY UFO FOURTH TIME
SALLY, BURT: SECOND TIME AROUND?
CHERYL LADD: DAVID ABUSED ME

Ulu Beg tried to get comfortable. He was not used to sitting for long periods of time. He’d sat still very seldom in his life. He shifted his pack, which he carried in his arms rather than storing on the overhead rack, squirming awkwardly. His elbow poked into the black man’s outstretched newspaper.

“Sorry,” he said, drawing into his seat even farther.

The black man made an elaborate ceremony of turning the page, claiming for himself even larger amounts of space.

Ulu Beg looked past him, out the window again.

Arkansas. After Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee. Then Ohio. Then …

They were strange names and stranger places. He almost didn’t dare say them, even though the drilling had improved his English greatly; and he had memorized them, that curious, shambling route up through the middle of America, through dirty towns of no distinction that all looked the same. He’d been on the journey now for many days and would continue for many more.

“There is no hurry,” they had told him. “Caution is better than risk. Three certain steps back are better than one risky step forward.”

Little Rock upcoming. Memphis, then Bowling Green.
By bus, by train, but never by airplane. Americans were crazy with fear about airplane hijackers, terrorists, killers, and so there was no more dangerous place for a man with a gun in America than an airport.

Lexington, Huntington. Always the same. Roll into a city bus station late at night, or, if arriving in the day, wait till nightfall. Then, with certainty, there will be a small hotel that caters to travelers without much money, without pasts and futures—
transients
, the sign will say. Take a cheap room. Leave it only to eat. Eat only in small restaurants, where you do not have to order elaborate meals. Stay for several days. If you stay more than three, change hotels. Then move on.

Ulu Beg was becoming something of an expert on such a life, and the places required by it. The hotels were full of old men with bleak eyes who spat and smelled of liquor, who would talk to anyone or no one. This was no America of wealth and might; it was a mean place, like the slums in any country, especially for lonesome men with problems: no money, no homes, no job. Much hate. These men without women lived on and fed off their hate. They hated the blacks—who hated them in turn—and they hated the “others”—that mysterious remainder of the world which they did not fathom but which somehow seemed to have the skill to live nicely. They hated children, who had futures; and they hated women, for not seeing them; they hated each other; they hated themselves.

Yet they did not seem to notice Ulu Beg, or if they did, because he fit into no category, they could not hate him. They ignored him.

SURGEON SUED WHEN BREAST SLIPS
I KILLED MY BABY, CRIB-DEATH MOM SOBS
NEW CANCER CURE FOUND BY MEX DOCS

They were right They could not prepare him for America. Nothing could prepare him for America. They had prepared him for much but they had not prepared him for the hate. It was as if he had never left the dangerous streets, the gun-haunted hills, the ugly free-fire zone of the Middle East. There was a war here too. The old men in the hotels that stank of disinfectant and had bugs that bit you in the night—as at home. The black men, in angry knots on the street corners: the young ones looked like tough young Hanafis in a Sunni area. Solitary old Negroes, who moved so slow you’d think they’d seen their own death waiting at the end of the block. The women, both inviting and hostile. Could they all be whores? Painted like Baghdad harlots for sure, thrusting their hips and breasts and fat mouths at you. Yet they were brittle with a kind of fear too. But worst of all he saw were the white men.

Masters of this world? Rulers, emperors? Conquerors of the moon?

He’d never seen masters so sullen and wan. It is worse to suffer dishonor in this world than death, the Kurds say. Kurdistan or death, the Kurds say. Life passes, honor remains, the Kurds say.

No white American could say such things. They were like the corrupt old Ottomans—America a tottering Ottoman empire, as Byzantine, as greedy, as muscleless. American men sweated because they were so fat. They did not seem to own their own streets but merely to lease them at exorbitant rates. God willed nothing for them, because God could not see them.

Or maybe it was the weather, or maybe it was the city. Whatever, the air seemed blue in the cities he passed through—blue with rising smoke, with rising steam, blue with the nighttime hues of huge lamps, blue with hate. At any moment it would break apart and the groups would
begin to hunt each other in the streets. Beirut, Baghdad, Tehran, Tabriz: it had happened a hundred times in his part of the world, all the hate swirling madly until one red day it burst, spilling across the pavement. And it would happen here. Surely that was the message in all this. He saw no Jardis.

America had lost her Jardis. Sent them away, pushed them, driven them, murdered them, blasphemed them, for whatever mad reason.

In his travel he saw no Jardi—not the posture which had seemed to him in the mountains the very essence of America, which had been perhaps only the very essence of Jardi. Jardi always pushed them on.

But Jardi had betrayed him.

Jardi, Jardi: Why?

His head ached. Jardi’s crime mocked him.

Jardi, you were my brother. Jardi, I loved you. You had honor, Jardi, you could not do such a thing.

Jardi, why? Who reached you, Jardi, who took you from us, who turned you against us? You would have died, Jardi, rather than betray us.

You once gave life, Jardi. You gave life to my son, Apo. Why would you then take it, my brother?

“Little Rock, folks. Municipal Station, ’bout ten minutes. Check the luggage rack overhead now.”

The passengers stirred.

Ulu Beg looked out the window: in a mean blue city again.

“’Bout motha-fuckin’
time,”
said the black man, turning another page in his newspaper.

MAGIC ENERGY PILLS RESTORE VITALITY
REDFORD TO DIRECT STREISAND
U.S. MUST SHOW SPINE, SAYS JOE DANZIG

T
rewitt felt as if he were at an audience with Lyndon Johnson. This huge old man who carried a nickel Peacemaker in his holster, who never sweated through his mummified skin, who had hands like hams and eyes like razor slits and spouted laconic Texas justice, hellfire and brimstone: these
characters
, these essays in human charisma, they always meant trouble for Trewitt. They enchanted him and he stopped paying attention, which he knew to be both stupid and dangerous.

Vernon Tell was a supervisor in the U.S. Border Patrol, Agent in Charge of the Nogales, Arizona, station, and he was trying to explain to Trewitt and Bill Speight, who were sitting in his office under the weak fiction of being investigators for the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms interested in an automatic-weapons violation, just how little there was to go on in the case of the death of his two officers, 11 March last. He wore gigantic yellow-tinted Bausch & Lomb shooting glasses and had the shortest crewcut Trewitt had ever seen. Trewitt blinked in the heat, trying to sort it all out. Evidently a climax in the conversation had been reached, for now the bulky old cop and Bill Speight rose. Trewitt felt the situation squirming out of control and wanted urgently
to have it in his fingers again—if it had ever been so in the first place—but he felt himself rising too, drawn by Vernon Tell’s creaky magnetism, and by the desire to demonstrate to a creep like Speight that he wasn’t confused.

The old officer turned to him suddenly and said, “You in Vietnam, son?”

Trewitt, startled, felt he was being tested.

“No, sir,” he said.

“Well,” said Tell, whose forest-green uniform was crinkleless even though the air conditioning in his office was on the fritz and both Trewitt and Speight had wilted in their clothes, “reason I ask is most nights it’s like Vietnam out there.” He gestured to his window, through which, in blazing, cloudless radiance, could be seen a representative vista of the Southwest, miles and miles of scrub and desert and mountains and, incidentally, as Trewitt could see, a Dog ’n’ Suds. “They come with dope and guns and they come just plain illegal. They come in planes and in Jeeps and on foot. It can get pretty wild and woolly.”