The Second Saladin (27 page)

And Trewitt had one more treasure of considerable significance to him: he had a new recruit, No. 2 in his network. The bartender Roberto had signed on. He had been sacked by Oscar Meza for stealing and like many another Latin male, unjustly dismissed only for playing by what he understood the rules to be—they had been Reynoldo Ramirez’s rules, after all—was insane with a desire for vengeance,
la venganza
, and dreams of glory. He too had an image problem: he wanted to be a tough guy, a knife fighter, the kind of man whom all the women wanted.

Roberto’s story: One of his less pleasing jobs in the brothel involved the sorting of laundry, going through the towels. “The whores use a lot of towels,” he explained, and Trewitt kept his face blank, remembering the job done on his privates by Anita with just such a towel.

“And guess what I find, three weeks running, every Tuesday?”

Trewitt could not, or would not.

“Bandages with pus. Yards of adhesive tape with hair in the sticky part. Bloody linen.”

“Maybe somebody got rough with the girls.”

“Not that rough,” said Roberto.

“So where’s it from?”

“I try to keep my eyes open. Where, I wonder, where does the Madonna go on Tuesday afternoon?”

“Who’s this Madonna?”

“The upstairs lady. The pecker-checker. Fat and ugly. Eeeeeiiii. She been a nurse or worked in the hospital or something, I don’t know. She takes care of the girls.”

Trewitt nodded, thinking about it. Where
did
the Madonna go?

Now it was Tuesday, and behind cheap sunglasses, in his yellow outfit, Trewitt lounged on a bench in the hot shade of a mimosa tree. He was among Indians, country peasants, shoeshine boys, hungry scabby dogs, an occasional cop, a more than occasional gaggle of Exclusivo cabdriver pimps, in a small park at the corner of Pesquirica and Ochoa streets. Beyond him were railway tracks glittery with broken glass; beyond them another hundred yards, the Casa de Jason; beyond it, the Ruis Cortina and on the other side of the Ruis Cortina, tucked into the rising bulk of a sandstone bluff otherwise bristling with shacks, Oscar’s. Weeds fluttered in the gritty breeze; skinny dogs and kids fled this way and that; banged-up Mexican cars roamed up and down the streets, jammed full. The sky was blue; the sun was hot.

But Trewitt just sat, one leg tossed over the other, and kept his eyes pinned on a small figure beyond the tracks, just down the block from the nightclub. The boy Miguel. Somewhere closer yet lurked the other boy, Roberto. The three had been so arranged for some time—since ten, and it was nearly one. The heat and the boredom were beginning to get to Trewitt. Not long ago he’d bought a chicken tortilla and a Carta Blanca from a street vendor, downing them both quickly, and was now just a little logy. He had not yet adjusted to Mexican time, in which nothing happens quickly, and was stifling a yawn when the boy leaped.

The boy leaped, then Trewitt. He was up in a shot, panic huge and bounding through his brain.

The car, goddammit, the car!

He sprinted up the street where, among the ’53 De Sotos and the ’59 Edsels and the ’63 Falcons, there was wedged an ’80 Mexican Chevette, rented that very morning from Hertz at the hotel under his real name, a big chance. Trewitt reached it, unlocked it, jumped in.

It was maybe 300 degrees inside—the car had been baking for about three hours in the sun. Still, Trewitt got the key into the slot, started it, cranked the wheel and pumped the pedal. The car accelerated rapidly to almost ten miles an hour and seemed to have some trouble getting into second gear, and just then the younger boy, having threaded his bold way across the tracks and through the traffic, reached him and climbed aboard.

“Go, mister, go.”

“Where? Where?”

“Down there, down there!” the boy screamed.

Trewitt rammed the car across two lanes, took a hard left just beyond the Casa de Jason, and skyrocketed over the tracks on a dirt crossing. Where the hell was the other kid? But Trewitt saw him running hard, his hair flying, his face dark and angry. He had seemed to appear from nowhere—a trick these Mexican kids had—and slid into the back.

“Okay, man, turn right fast,” he commanded.

Trewitt turned and sped into downtown Nogales, for just a few seconds under the bluffs of shacks and then into a flatter part of the city.

“She’s in a green Chevy. Just ahead. Hurry, man.”

But Trewitt could not hurry; he was suddenly in traffic up to his eyeballs.

“A Mexican freeway,” shouted Miguel, laughing.

“Goddammit,” shouted Trewitt.

“Hurry. Hurry.”

“How the hell can I
hurry?”
Trewitt complained. All
of Mexico out for a drive that afternoon. The traffic lights all fouled up, strange directional signals giving him orders he couldn’t understand. Somebody honked and cursed. The sidewalks were dense with people who roamed in and out of the small stores and spilled aimlessly into the streets. An ice-cream wagon was parked in the middle of an intersection. Kids fled in and out.

“Wow. You almost hit that cocksucker,” said Miguel.

They moved at a stately pace. Trewitt searched ahead through the jumble of automobiles and people. He couldn’t see a goddamned—

“There! There, I see her,” yelled Roberto, who’d been craning crazily out the window.

“Watch it, kid,” Trewitt warned, but joy flooded him.

In Le Carré, this would have been handled differently, Trewitt told himself as he bombed and bobbed and lurched sweatily in and out of the traffic, guiding the sluggish yellow Chevette among the dented ’50s hulks that dominated the streets. Goddamn this woman—she had the only
fast
car in the country.

In Le Carré, it would have been bleak, icy professionals, drab men with sinus problems and wretched home-lives, following one another through an Eastern European drizzle. Every brick, every nuance of thought or action accounted for, every alleyway diagrammed, every bitter irony underscored; here, instead, dusty crowded streets, ice-cream wagons, fruit wagons, kids in plastic shoes, hills set with powder-blue shacks, a hot sun, a dry, dusty wind, streets whose names he’d never learn, two Mexican boys shouting into his ear.

“She turned.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Which is it?”

“She turned.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“I can’t see her.”

In Le Carré tail jobs were handled by teams working in units of four, with silhouette changes, a control van with something childish scrawled in the dust high up where no child could reach. In Czecho or one of the old territories, or on Hampstead Heath, but with Moscow Rules. Le Carré knew the nuts and bolts, the trade craft, knew it cold.

“She turned.”

“No she didn’t.”

“Aw, shit,” he bellowed in exasperation, braking the car to one side of the road in a shower of dust. A scrawny chicken hoppity-flipped in front of it from a hole in somebody’s coop and wandered off the shoulder onto the roadway, where it was immediately smashed by a huge Mercedes Pepsi-Cola truck, knocked up into the air as if in a cartoon to spiral down leaking feathers and drumsticks, and land with a thud in the dust.

“Jesus Mary, did you see that?” Miguel asked.

Trewitt had seen it and began to wonder if anywhere in the works of John Le Carré, chickens got creamed by Pepsi trucks and if so, what that decent, weary, brilliant old professional, that traveler in the shadowy labyrinths of espionage, George Smiley, would have made of such a thing; but at that moment, blocks ahead, he saw the green Chevy.

From the avenue they climbed another hill, then down, then up again. Perched all about in no order save that of first claim were tarpaper shacks, corrugated tin roofs, wire fences, pink or blue one-roomers; Trewitt was beginning to believe there was but one street in Mexico and that he’d been down it a thousand times.

He could read the dust floating in the air, however, which told him the Madonna’s car had screeched through
moments before, and now and then he could see the vehicle, disappearing on a crest above or careening wildly beneath him as he hurtled down the same hill.

“Where are we?” he asked his guides.

“People from the desert or the mountains end up here,” said Roberto. “The poorest of the poor. Reynoldo, he comes from this place.”

“It’s a very bad place,” said the younger boy.

The car ahead vanished. Trewitt slewed to a panic stop, skidding. But beyond him there was no dust.

“Oh, goddamn,” he said.

“She must have turned off.”

“Dammit.”

He looked back, forward. It was the same, the muddy little streets twisting up and down, the sheds, the wire coops, the TV aerials.

“Back up. Slow.”

He began to back. He could have used one of Le Carré’s four-man teams about now.

“There. There, I see it.” It was Miguel.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Trewitt, for he saw it too, pulled off at a funny angle halfway up a nearby hill.

He pulled ahead slowly, turning a corner, and parked near a small store, the Abarrotes Gardenia.

“Okay,” he said, breathing hard, “Miguel, you go on back to that house. You’re least likely to attract attention. Play it cool, huh? Nothing stupid. Just see what you can see, okay? Roberto, you drop on back to that little store. See what the guy behind the counter says. Don’t force it, just see—”

“Okay, is okay,” said Roberto, sliding out.

Trewitt waited. He slouched behind the wheel of the car, his cheap sunglasses slipping down his nose. He felt preposterous, a costumed clown playing games. It was hard to accept any of this. But he could accept Bill
Speight, in the sewer: that was real. He wondered if any of the others ever had this sort of problem, ever felt themselves playing absurd parts among unlikely characters. He doubted it; they were trained men, and would think always in terms of their training, look for expediencies, for angles, for escape routes. They’d be so occupied, so
busy
, they’d have no time for the longer view. Trewitt had only the longer view. He’d never been trained in the clandestine arts; he was an analyst, a historian. Nobody had ever thought about dumping him into an op. Yet here he was.

The boy Miguel returned first.

Trewitt jumped as the boy slipped in. Damn, he’d been silent.

“I couldn’t get too close. There wasn’t much cover. I didn’t want to wreck the whole thing.”

“That was probably smart.”

“But I got into the garbage. Here.” His trophy: a crusty strip of gauze, pink-brown and stiff.

“That’s blood, all right,” Trewitt said, stomach queasy all of a sudden at the elemental essence of the artifact. “And lots of it.”

“Sí,” said the boy.

“Now if only Roberto would get here.”

But Roberto did not get there. A long time seemed to pass. They sat in the car in the alley. Maybe the youth had decided to forget
la venganza
for the time being and had skipped out. Or maybe—

But Trewitt knew smart field operators didn’t sit around chasing maybes in their brains. No percentage, nothing but grief in it. Still, he couldn’t stop his mind running off. Maybe he’d run into a gang. Maybe he’d—

But the youth arrived suddenly.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“In the Abarrotes Gardenia.”

“You were in there an
hour.”

“I had some trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” Trewitt had to know.

“Suspicious old men in there. They watch me close. Who am I, what do I want? So I tell them I was from down south, I was going to go to
el otro lado
tonight. The wire.”

“They buy it?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. But I did not think I ought to run out. So I had a Pepsi-Cola.”

“So you were drinking a—”

“But then two others showed up.”

“Americans?”

“No. Latins. Tough ones too, gangsters.”

Trewitt nodded grimly. He didn’t like the sound of this.

“They hurt him pretty bad, the owner. Hit him with a gun, a pistol.”

Trewitt turned, the boy leaned into the light, and Trewitt saw an ugly red swelling above his eye.

“Jesus, Roberto—”

“Hit me too, the cocksuckers. Tough boys, real evil ones.”

“What did they want?”

“They wanted to know about a wounded man. They’d heard there was a wounded man in the neighborhood.”

“Did he tell them? This old man?”

“It was that or die. He told them.”

“Dammit,” Trewitt said. He reached with a pale hand and touched the automatic in his belt.

“They must be there by now,” said Roberto.

“Fireworks,” said Miguel gleefully. “Fireworks.”

“G
oodbye, Leah,” he said. “God will be kind to you.”

“Baby,” she said, “you be careful. Don’t you do nothing
stupid
. Don’t let no cop bust your head. Stay away from cops, you hear?”

“I do,” he said.

The city was huge. It was no Baghdad, nor even any of the other American cities he’d seen, but something, more America than he’d seen in one place, America piled high, America all over the place, America crazy, bewildering, America spinning itself out. There was no rhythm to this place. It was all one speed, which was fast, and one tone, which was loud.

“Don’t let no big-city boys take you to town,” she said. Behind, a cab honked. The traffic fled by. The air was gray and cold and dirty and smelled of exhaustion. He looked down a canyon of buildings and the details were too multitudinous to be absorbed. His head sang in pain; sullen men on the sidewalk looked at him.

“Jim,” she said, “honey, ain’t nothing here for you. Come on back. Come on back to Dayton.”

“I can’t.”

“You got that same look as the time you went up them
tracks. You got Bobby’s look. You come back to me. You hear? You come back to Leah. You promise me that.”

“I will, Leah. By my eyes, I will.”

“Don’t know nothing ’bout no eyes, Jim. I just want you back.”

“I’ll come,” he said, and stepped to the curb and she drove away.

He was near the bus station and he found another small, dirty hotel. She had given him $100 and he paid the clerk $15 for the night. He stayed in the room for a long time, two days. The next part of the trip would be the most difficult.