The Second Saladin (21 page)

“It’s just a place,” Marion said.

A cool wind whipped the leaves, chilling Chardy. He’d
left his overcoat in his car, from which he was now, in his wanderings with Marion, a mile distant.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I interrupted you. I’m not much company today, I’m afraid.”

“Funerals depress everyone. Please don’t worry about it, Paul.”

“Thanks.”

“I was telling you that Frenchy was thinking of you at the end.”

“That’s right.”

“He had a message for you. He told me especially to tell you. But then he died and it was a difficult time and then I didn’t see you and I started another life. The years went by. But now I remember. Seeing you, standing by yourself up on that hill with your new beard, I remembered.”

“A message?” said Chardy, curious.

“ ‘Marion,’ he said, ‘Marion, when Paul gets back, tell him to fetch the shoe that fits. Got that? Fetch the shoe that fits? He’ll know what I’m talking about.’”

Chardy couldn’t keep a sudden cruel grin off his face.

“What does it mean, Paul?”

“Oh, Marion, it goes back so far, to another time. A terrible time. I hate to tell you.”

“You can tell me, Paul. I’m a big girl.”

“When we were running our missions into the North up around the DMZ with the Nung people, there was a Chinese opium merchant in the area named Hsu. H-S-U. Pronounced ‘shoe.’ Anyway, one of our patrols got bounced bad, and we just got out of there with our hides. It was a bad, bad time. And then somebody told us this Hsu was working for the North Vietnamese. He was their agent; he’d infiltrated our area to get a look at our operations. He was a very bad guy, it turned out. Well, we had our contacts too. We set him up. We let it be known that
he’d done some work for
us
. His bosses didn’t see the humor in it. The guy was found floating in the river in oil drums. Several of them. And Frenchy said—we were drunk at the time; you have to understand that—Frenchy said, ‘Well, Paul, we proved the Hsu fits.’ It seemed very funny at the time.” She didn’t say a word.

“Marion, you’re horrified. Look, we were in the middle of an ugly kind of business. People were getting greased left and right. It had come out that up north they’d put out a fifty-thousand-piaster bounty on our heads. You never knew which way was up and you went out on these long patrols with the Nungs and you never knew if you were coming back. It was a hard time, a difficult time, and nobody knows or cares about it anymore. And a lot of things seemed funny then that don’t now.” He was irritated that she seemed so offended. What did she think Frenchy’s job was all those years?

“I had no idea it would be so
cruel.”

“I’m sorry, Marion. I didn’t mean to wreck your illusions.”

“I can be an awful prig, can’t I? It’s not your fault. As you say, it was a different kind of time. But what about the ‘fetch’?”

What about it?

“I just don’t know what he was thinking about with that. I think he meant ‘remember’ or something. He was saying, ‘Remember the times we had.’”

“Oh, it’s such a strange world you and Frenchy had, Paul. I’m so glad to be out of it. Look, here’s my car.” They had reached a low brick wall that separated the cemetery from Fort Myer. Just beyond, in the Army parking lot, was a dirty yellow Toyota.

She smiled, her features briefly lighting. She’d really been a beautiful woman once, where Frenchy had always
been especially ugly, and Chardy had always been impressed with his ability to earn the loyalty of such a lovely woman.

“It was so good to see you again, Paul. I’m so glad I came to this. It was nice to step into the past again. I really do miss him, Paul. I really do.”

He thought she might cry, and said quickly, “Yes, I do too, Marion.”

“Call me sometime, if you’d like. My husband’s name is Brian Doelp.” She spelled it. “We live out in the suburbs, a place called Columbia. Halfway between Baltimore and Washington. It’s very nice.”

“I will, Marion. It was nice seeing you too. It really was.” He bent and kissed her on the cheek.

“Can I drop you somewhere?”

“No, my car’s just over there,” and he pointed vaguely in the direction of Maryland and the North Pole.

“Bye-bye then.”

“Goodbye, Marion.”

She climbed into the car, started it quickly, and disappeared into the traffic of Fort Myer.

Chardy walked back through the boneyard, a tall man, bearded, hunched against the wind, his hands in his pockets. He put on his sunglasses. The cemetery was empty now, except for a few tourists, and he walked among the American dead, thinking of his own losses.

C
hardy sat in the back seat with Lanahan, while some Agency gofer—a kid, no introductions had been made—chauffeured them down Wisconsin Avenue through increasingly snarled traffic.

Lanahan droned: “And at four fifty-five the car takes you to National. You’ll be covered the whole way, Paul, backup units, checkpoints, escort, the works.”

“Just like I was in Boston, Miles?”

Miles plunged on. “By six you’ll be on a Lear to Chicago. You land at Meigs, on the lake, not at O’Hare. From there it’s just a hop to the Ritz-Carlton in Water Tower Place, where the conference is; there’s a room for you there too.”

“Miles, I don’t think I’m going to make a very good bodyguard.”

“Look, Paul, I thought Yost was clear on this. The last thing anybody needs is for this guy to wax Danzig. We’re going to nail him. We’re going to lay out such a net, there’s no way he can get through. But if he does, Paul, if he should get through—you’re there, you’ll recognize him. Remember, nobody else knows what he looks like. You lived with him for over a year in the mountains. Have you got the piece?”

Chardy nodded. A Smith & Wesson Model 39 9-mm automatic hung upside down like a bat in a shoulder holster under his left arm.

“You’ve fired a nine-millimeter?”

“I’ve fired everything, Miles.”

“Okay. Now let me brief you on Danzig.” Lanahan at his most officious. His splotchy acne was particularly bad today, fiery red. The back of his neck hadn’t seen a barber since the last ice age. Flecks of dandruff lay across the dark shoulders of his rumpled blue suit. His short warty fingers jabbed the air as he discussed Danzig, but his eyes were bright with their own special kind of intelligence. They were small, sharp Irish eyes, city eyes. Miles wouldn’t miss much. He pushed ahead, lecturing Chardy.

“They say Danzig can be very charming. He likes to talk, he’s got this way of grabbing hold of people, talking them into oblivion. So you have to watch yourself. He’ll really rivet you if you don’t.”

Chardy thought of Joseph Danzig in all the hundred thousand pictures, on the TV shows, in the books: everywhere, like wallpaper. Of course, all that was a few years back, during his term in office and just afterward; still, the whiff of celebrity would cling to him. Yet Chardy knew he’d dislike him on principle, the way infantrymen dislike generals. For there’d been a time when if Danzig said go, a whole operation went: money, plans, papers, case officers, logistics people, on-site specialists. And somebody usually got burned and usually it was a Special Operations type—Chardy’s type. Nicky Welch, greased in Laos. Tony Chin had caught it in Laos also, or maybe it was Cambodia, a sucking chest wound, slow death. Chardy couldn’t remember. And hadn’t Stan Morris taken some junk in Angola, the African op, and been turned into a basket case? Yes. And in every one of those scams, the outcome was the same. At the crucial moment, Danzig had pulled
back. He’d seen the cost escalating and he’d pulled back, and Nicky and Tony and Stan and the others had bought nothing with their skins. As had Chardy bought nothing with Saladin II, a classic example. Once, down at the Special Warfare school in Panama, he and a bunch of other instructors, all old Special Operations vets, had tried to figure out how many had died on account of Danzig’s way of doing things. The list had been long.

“Look, Paul, best thing around him is to play the robot. He’ll try and provoke you; he loves to provoke people. Or he’ll gossip with you; he loves to gossip. Or he’ll try and get you to pimp for him. Lately they say he’s really been chasing women. Any woman. At any rate, he’ll want to dominate you, to own you. That’s how he is. If he likes you, is drawn to you, he’ll destroy you. Yost says the best thing is to just smile mildly at anything he says, no matter how outrageous. Don’t try to top him, or get into it with him. He’ll chew you up, okay?”

They had turned off the busy avenue and were crawling through a Georgetown back street under densely matted trees that blocked out the sun. It felt subterranean, the coolness, the shadow in the air. The brick houses, set primly back from the street, were red and narrow and shuttered and four stories tall and had small gardens alongside.

“Nice neighborhood,” Chardy said.

“The guy’s got dough. The guy’s got more dough than you’d believe. He makes about a million a year lecturing and writing. He can knock off twenty G’s a day giving these speeches.” Lanahan spoke like the poor city boy he was, his resentment as tender and red as his acne. His face formed a snarl as he scanned the swanky Georgian facades. Chardy had seen the look a thousand times growing up; you saw it on playgrounds when a fancy car wheeled through the neighborhood, the hate, the envy.

But it was gone in an instant, and Miles turned back. “Look, Paul. Yost is parking you with a very touchy, egotistical guy who can do us a lot of harm, even now. It has to be you. Everybody wishes it could be somebody else, somebody not so controversial. Just don’t blow it for us, okay? This is very fucking important.”

Yost, nervous, handled the introductions. It was awkward: the Great Man, plumper and older, puffier, with human flaws normally invisible on television, such as a clump of hair in the crown of one nostril, a missed patch of whisker, a light spray of freckles—but still, totally and exactly and unavoidably Joseph Danzig, offering, as would any mortal, a hand. It turned out to be a weak one, smallish, with tapering fingers, and Chardy felt the delicacy of the thing and tried to avoid squashing it, though it seemed to collapse into bone fragments at his softest touch.

They sat in a downstairs study, a room that belonged in a department store window or an ad for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Chardy felt like a tourist among the shelved books, several of which must be by Danzig himself. He looked around at leather furniture, at polished wood, at muted damask curtains.

“It’s a wonderful house,” he said stupidly.

“The wages of sin, Mr. Chardy,” said Joseph Danzig.

Nervous Yost kept making patter, small phony jokes at which neither principal in this peculiar blind date would laugh. Finally he said it was time to go and excused himself. In the confusion of his leaving, Chardy stole a glimpse at his watch and saw that he had forty minutes until the caravan left for the airport. He wondered how he’d kill them. He looked out a massive paned door—hate to have to clean the son of a bitch, all those tiny panes, hundreds of them—across a veranda to a backyard garden.
Gardens in G-town were not large, but Danzig had more land than most, and his garden was consequently more than ample, reaching back to the brick wall that enclosed his yard. It had not quite sprung to blossom, though Chardy could make out its outlines, its plan: it was a place of severe order, of symmetry. It balanced, neat and crisp. The plots were cut squarely into the earth and low precise hedges ran geometrically through them. Four—not five, not three—four white wooden arbors stood to the rear, bulked with vines, two on each side of a simple fountain. When filled out, the garden would be a composition of immense order.

Chardy suddenly sensed a presence. Danzig, who’d last been heard from announcing he had to run upstairs to his office, was standing next to him, holding a sherry—Chardy had been offered one earlier and had refused.

“What do you think of that garden, Mr. Chardy?”

“It’s very nice, sir,” he said lamely. Nobody had ever asked him about gardens before. Then he added, “Do you garden?”

“Of course not,” Danzig said tartly. “That is, I do not go out there with a hoe and a little set of clippers. But I designed it. The people who lived here before had a terrible Italian grotto fantasy. It looked like the sort of place where homosexuals go to meet each other. I made certain improvements. That fountain was a gift from the President of France. The trees along the left came from Israel. The trees along the right were imported from Saudi Arabia. Many of the plants and bushes come from other countries. It will never be beautiful, of course, but then, that is not its purpose. I do not care much for beauty, and having looked at your record I would say that you do not either. Perhaps on that basis we’ll get along. But back to the garden: it expresses an idea, an idea I hold in extreme
importance. It stands for perfect harmony, all components kept in check by other components. Do you understand?”

Chardy understood exactly, and the point was driven home by Danzig’s sudden, wicked, facetious smile.

Just smile mildly, they’d told him; he’ll eat you up otherwise.

But Danzig had been so vastly superior, so condescending, so celestially regal that Chardy’s Hungarian blood began to steam and in his fury he came up with a rejoinder which surprised even him.

“I worked in a garden like that for a while,” he said. “From the big house, far away, it looks great. But up close it’s terrible work—sweaty, dangerous, grubby, disgusting. You might want to talk with your gardeners some hot July Saturday, Dr. Danzig. They might surprise you.”

Behind their lenses, Danzig’s eyes held him for a long moment, not quite in astonishment but at least in surprise. He considered a moment, then smiled again, wickedly.

“But, Mr. Chardy,” he said, “to do it right—to make the right decisions, the long-term decisions—demands perspective, a cool intellect. You have to see the whole plan, the final limits. Gardening, after all, is not missionary work.”

Danzig could not keep his eyes off him; the reflex surprised him and he found that charming, for there had been no surprises in his life lately.