The Second Saladin (13 page)

“I’m sure it’s a tough job,” said Trewitt ineffectually.

“This-a-way,” said Tell.

He took them down a glossy hall under the gaze of various official portraits and through a double set of green doors. Beyond lay a gate, which the old cop swiftly unlocked. This led into another hall and into an atmosphere that rose in thickness and discomfort in direct proportion to their penetration of it. Cells, empty, flanked them, but there was still another destination: at the end of the hall two uniformed men sat in a prim little office.

“How’s our boy today?” Tell asked.

“’Bout the same, sir.”

“These gents come all the way from the East to see him.”

Another door opened, a room, half cell and half not, a private little chamber. In the cell a single Mexican boy lounged on the cot, slim and sullen.

“This is what we drug up,” said Tell. “His name is Hector Murillo. He’s sixteen, from a village called Haitzo about a hundred miles south of Mexico City. Any of you speak Spanish?”

Trewitt and Speight shook their heads.

“We think Hector came over that night. The others are dead in the desert, or back on their side of the border, or got clean away. But from the tracks on the site, we know at least seven men went across. One of them, the man who did the shooting, in boots. We’re still trying to track the make on the boots.”

“What’s his sorry story?” asked Bill Speight gruffly, mopping his face with a sodden handkerchief. Speight looked gray in the heat and his hair clung in lank strips to his forehead. Upstairs he’d been spry and folksy but the heat had finally gotten to him.

“Funny thing, he hasn’t got one. We just found him wandering half-dead from thirst and craziness in the mountains a week after the shootings. Says he can’t remember anything. Hector.
Cómo está la memoria?”

“Está nada.”

“Nada
. Nothing.”

The sullen boy looked at them without interest, then turned and elegantly hawked a gob into a coffee tin and rolled to face the wall.

“These Mex kids, some of ’em are made out of steel,” said Tell. “But unless we get some kind of break on the case, he’s looking at Accessory to Murder One in the State Code and Violating the Civil Rights of my two men in the Federal.”

“Jesus,” blurted Trewitt, “he’s only a boy,” and saw
from the furious glare off Speight that he had made a mistake.

“They grow up fast on that side of the fence,” Tell said.

“Any help coming from the Mexican authorities?” Speight wanted to know.

“The usual. Flowers to the widows and excuses. They’ll kick down the doors of a few Nogales whorehouses.”

“Any idea of who ran them across?”

“Mr. Speight, there’s maybe two dozen coyote outfits in Mexican Nogales that move things—illegals or dope—into Los Estados. And there’s hundreds of free-lancers, one-timers, amateurs, part-timers. Ask Hector.”

But Hector would not look at them.

“In the old days, we’d have him talking. But that’s all changed now,” said Tell.

But Trewitt, studying the boy, who wore gym shoes, blue jeans, and a dirty T-shirt, did not think so. You could bang on that kid for a month and come up empty; a tough one; steel, the old cop had said. Trewitt shuddered at the hardness he sensed. He tried to imagine what made him so remote, tried to invent an image of childhood in some Mexican slum. But his imagination could not handle it beyond a few simpering visions of fat Mexican mamas and tortillas and everybody in white Mexican peasant suits. Yet he was moved by the boy.

“Well,” said Speight, “thanks for your trouble, Mr. Tell.” He probably wanted to head back to the motel bar for a rum-and-Coke. Trewitt had never seen a man drink so many rum-and-Cokes.

“Sooner or later Hector will decide to chat with us,” the supervisor promised. “I’ll give you a ring.”

“Do you think you could let me run through your file on the border runners, the coyotes?” Speight asked.

“Don’t see why not,” said Tell.

They turned and left, and Trewitt made as if to follow. But his sense of poignancy for the rough, brave boy alone in an American jail, facing bad times, stormed over him. He paused, turned back.

The boy had perked up and sat on his bunk, eyeing Trewitt. His dark brown eyes were clear of emotion. In the office Trewitt heard the two old men enmeshed in some folksy conversation about the old days, the way things used to be. But Trewitt, in the cell, felt overwhelmed by the present, by the nowness of it all. He yearned to help the boy, soothe him somehow.

You should have been a social worker, he thought with disgust. This tough little prick would cut your throat for your wristwatch if he had the chance.

But an image came to him: Hector and the others in some kind of truck or van, prowling through the night on the way to something they must have only vaguely perceived as better. They would have been locked in with the Kurd for hours, with a strange tall man. What would they have made of him?

The boy looked at him coldly, and must have seen another gringo policeman. Trewitt felt he’d blundered again. He knew he should leave; he didn’t belong in here. He felt vaguely unwholesome. He turned to leave—and then a terrific idea, from nowhere, detonated in his head.

“Hector,” he said.

The boy’s eyes stayed cold but came to focus on him. Speight’s words boomed loudly behind him someplace and the supervisor and the guard laughed. Had they noticed his absence? His heart pounded.

He could see before him a picture: it floated, tantalizing him. It was a picture of a high-cheekboned, tall, bright-eyed man with a strong nose and blondish hair. It
was on a wall. It was the picture an artist had projected from the old photo of Ulu Beg.

Blond. And tall. And strange.

Trewitt said, in the Spanish he had so recently denied knowing, “I’m a friend of the tall
norteamericano
with the yellow hair. The one with the gun. He is a big gangster. He thanks you for your silence.”

The boy looked at him cautiously.

Trewitt could hear them laughing, old Speight and old Tell, two old men full of good humor. Would they miss him yet?

“You were betrayed,” Trewitt invented. “Sold for money by the man who took you to the border. The tall man seeks vengeance.” He hoped he had the right word for vengeance,
la venganza
.

“Tell him to cut the pig. Kill him. Make him bleed,” the boy said coldly.

“The tall
norteamericano
gangster will see it happen,” he said.

“Tell him to kill the pig Ramirez who let my brother die in the desert.”

“It’s done,” said Trewitt, spinning to race out.

Ramirez!

He was so charged with ideas he was shaking. He couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“Okay,” he said, “I think we ought to bump something back to Ver Steeg. The hell with cables. I think we can call it in. Then we can open a link to Mexican Intelligence—I’m sure we have some guys in Mexico City who are in tight with them—and get a license to do some nosing around over there.
Then—”

But Speight was not listening. He sat gazing thoughtfully into his rum-and-Coke. It wasn’t even noon yet!

“Bill, I was saying—”

“I know, I know,” said Speight, nodding. He took a long swallow. Trewitt knew he had once upon a time been a real comer, a man with a great future, though it was hard to believe it now. He looked so seedy and didn’t want to be rushed into some mistake.

“You’re probably right,” he said. “That’s a great idea, a fine idea. But maybe we ought to hold off on this one. Just for a while.”

“But why?” Trewitt wanted to know. They sat in a dim bar, at last safe from the bright desert sun that seemed to bleach the color from the day almost instantly. They were not far from the border itself. Trewitt had glimpsed it just a few minutes ago; it looked like the Berlin wall, wire and gates and booths, and behind it he had seen shacks crusted on suddenly looming hills, a few packed, dirty streets—he had seen Mexico.

“Well …” Bill paused.

Trewitt waited.

“First, it never pays to make a big thing out of your own dope. Second, it never pays to rush in. Third, I am an old man and it’s a hot day. Let’s just sit on it, turn it around, see how it looks after the sun goes down.”

“Well, the procedure is—”

“I know all the procedures, Jim.”

“I just thought—”

“What I’d like to do—you can come along too, if you want; you might find it interesting—what I’d like to do is a little quiet nosing around. Let’s just see what we can develop in a calm way.”

“Mexico?
You want to go to
Mexico?
We don’t have any brief to—”

“Thousands of tourists go over there every day. You just walk across and walk back, it’s that simple. It’s done all the time.”

“I don’t know,” said Trewitt. Mexico? It frightened him a little bit.

“We’ll go as tourists.
Turistas
. We’ll buy little curios and go to a few clubs and just have a fine time.”

Trewitt finally nodded.

“Turistas
,” Old Bill said again.

H
e waited by the huge old boathouse, a Victorian hulk; it was a clear, chill day, almost a fall day, and before him he could see the wind pushing rills across the water. Some Harvard clown was out in a scull working up a sweat and Chardy watched him propel himself down the river toward the next bridge, bending and exploding, bending, exploding. The rower developed surprising velocity and soon disappeared under the arches, but by that time Chardy’s vision had locked on an approaching figure.

It seemed to take a great deal of time for her to cross the shelf of worn grass that separated the Georgian mansions of several Harvard houses from the cold Charles. She wore jeans over boots and her tweed jacket over a turtleneck. Her hair was hidden in a knit cap. She had on sunglasses and wore no makeup. She looked more severe, perhaps more bohemian, certainly more academic than last night.

Chardy walked to meet her.

“You get some sleep?”

“I’m fine,” she said, without smiling.

“Let’s go down to that bridge.”

His head ached and he was a little nervous. A jogger, ears muffed against the cold, loped by and then, traveling
the other direction, a cyclist on one of those jazzy, low-slung bikes. They reached the bridge at last, and walked to its center, passing between trees only a little open to the coming of spring.

Chardy leaned his elbows against the stone railing, feeling the cold wind bite; his ears stung. He had no gloves, he’d left them somewhere. Chardy could feel Johanna next to him. She had her arms closed around her body and looked cold.

He scanned the left bank, Memorial Drive, which ran through the trees. Cars sped along it. He looked off to the right, where the road was called Storrow Drive and studied the traffic on it, too.

“This should be all right,” he said.

“What are you worried about?”

“They have parabolic mikes that can pick you up at two hundred feet. But you need a lot of gear to make it work, which means you need a van or a truck. I was looking for a van or a truck parked inconspicuously somewhere.”

Chardy looked down at the water.

“I think,” he said, “they’ve only let me see a little of the operation. I think it’s much bigger than they’ve let me know. I haven’t worked it out just yet—just what they’re up to, just how much more they know than they say they know. They’ve got me working with some jerk without a human twitch in his body and an Ivy League drone and a dreamy kid. It’s got to be bigger. I just know it is. And somebody’s watching.”

Sam
, he thought.
Sam, I bet you’re there
.

“It’s safe to talk here?” she said.

“If they really want to nail you, they can do it, no matter what. But they don’t have much respect for me now. So it’s safe.”

“You gave me such an awful night, Paul.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What choice do I really have?”

“None. If you care for him.”

“I hate the fact we don’t have a choice.”

“I hate it too. But that’s the game.”

The wind was quite strong; he turned against it, looked the other way down the curving river. He could see the rower, fighting his way back to the boathouse.

“You hurt us so bad, Paul. Oh, you hurt us, Paul.”

“Things happen,” Chardy said. “You do your best and sometimes it’s not nearly enough. I just got into something I couldn’t handle. I’d give anything, my life, to have it to do over again. But I can’t do anything about it.”

The wind had really become strong now, and he could see it pushing up small waves in the river.

“Don’t they believe in spring in Boston?” he said.

“Not till June.”

“Has he gotten to you? Has anybody reached you?”

“No.”

“Can you think of what he might do? Is there a Kurdish community, an exile community, where he might go? Are there people who might help him? Where can we look for him? What can we expect?”

“There’s no Kurdish community, Paul. A few Kurds, I suppose. Paul, there’s something I have to tell you. Something else. It was something I wanted to put into the book, but I couldn’t. It’s something I just wanted to forget, to bury away. But it comes back on me, Paul. It comes back at odd moments. I think it’s made me a little crazy.”

Chardy turned to look at her.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”

“We went into the clearing after the helicopters left. We thought we could help people.” She giggled in an odd way. “And we did. Most of them were … blown apart. You’ve been in wars; you’d know.”

“It’s—”

“It was like a meat shop. The bullet holes were burning, had burned through people. There was a smell of cooked meat. Paul, one of his boys was still alive. He had a bullet in his stomach that was burning. He was crying terribly. He was crying for his father. Ulu Beg knelt and told him that he loved him and kissed him on the lips and shot him through the temple with that gun you gave him. Then he walked around, shooting other people in pain. His own son, then maybe fifteen, maybe twenty others. They were all screaming.”

Chardy was shaking his head slowly, breathing with difficulty.