The Second Saladin (3 page)

“Done,” he said. “Another five hundred meters. Then you pay—right,
amigos?
Then they’ll take you to Arivaca by back roads. And you’ll be in the American Nogales by sunup.”

“Thank you, Virgin,” somebody said.

“Hurry, damn you all. They won’t wait. You too, gringo.”

They filed past him, the
norteamericano
last, his pack across one shoulder.

Good-bye, strange man. I hope never to see you again.

They picked their way across the flat in the moonlight. In a little while Ramirez lost them, even with the moon. They’d made it, made it easily, and then the searchlight came on and a harsh voice was yelling over the loudspeaker,
“Manos arriba! Manos arriba!
Hands up, hands up, motherfuckers!”

They froze in the light. Ramirez watched.

Curse my mother, that whore, he thought.

The voice from above: “Don’t move,
amigos
. Get those hands up. Get ’em up!
Manos arriba.”

They stood stiffly, hands high in the glare of the single beam.

Ramirez thought, I ought to get out of here. Jesus Mary.

For Christ Jesus’ sake, run, he told himself. But he watched in sick fascination.

An American officer—in the deep green of the Border Patrol and a baseball cap and carrying a shotgun—came into the light.

“Face down.
Down
, goddammit.
Descendente pronto!”

The men in the light looked at each other in panic. One young boy turned back to Ramirez. The gringo stood erect.

“Down,
down,”
screamed the policeman.

They went to their knees. The officer walked behind them and with his boot nudged one forward into the sand. The others followed.

“Jimmy, get that chopper on the horn again.”

“It’s coming,” came a voice from back near the light.

Luck. Maniac luck, the true law of God. Ramirez cursed his mother for bearing him and himself for his selfishness to the Virgin. He made a vow to change all that, crossed himself quickly and spat into the dust.

Clearly this was no raid; he had not been betrayed. There would have been hundreds of them, with bullhorns, machine guns. And on his side
federales
. He’d seen it before, down below, and once had to run half the night
with an American .38 in his side. But this was just two stupid gringos with a four-wheel-drive truck. They had been lucky; Ramirez had been unlucky; the stranger with a million dollars in his knapsack had been unlucky. Fate, a whore like his mother with clap and no teeth and ribbons in her filthy hair, laughed at him, spat his way.

The border patroman had walked around in front of them again and stood nervously with the shotgun, shifting his weight from leg to leg.

“Buzz him again, Jimmy.”

“I just did. He’s on his way.”

They would wait for the helicopter, for more men, before searching and cuffing their captives.

Ramirez thought: If the tall man is going to do anything he’d better do it now.

If he’d had the Python, he could have fired for the light, or even the patrolman. But that was bad business, shooting
norteamericanos
. They were a crazy people; they’d get you for sure. Besides the range was over two hundred yards, a long shot for a pistol, even a big one.

Ramirez looked again. The long figure lay on the stony soil. His pack was inches beyond his fingers.

Gringo, do something, do it now. They’ll put you away for a century if they catch you.

Ramirez rubbed his mouth nervously.

A sound of engines, low and pulsing, rose in the distance and began to build.

“There he is,” yelled the one at the truck.

“Okay,” yelled the one with the shotgun, easing back a step, half twisting. He turned his head toward the sound—

It happened with the speed of a snake’s strike. The patrolman turned, the tall man seemed to elongate upon the earth, and in the same half-second he had in his hands
a small gun with a blunt barrel, and a spurt of flash broke from the muzzle and the patrolman fell.

A machine gun! A small machine gun! thought Ramirez, astonished at the treasure.

The others began to flee the light. A hasty shot rang out to kick at the dust near the tall man. He stood, holding his weapon with two hands, the left cupped under the grip for support, and fired carefully into the vehicle on the ridge. Ramirez heard the glass shattering, the metal shuddering as the bullets tore through. The searchlight vanished. The tall man dropped to one knee and swiftly changed magazines in his weapon. He rose and fired again, and the truck detonated in an oily orange flash that filled the night with heat and color.

Ramirez blinked as the dust and gas from the blast pushed across him. He saw purple spinning circles before his eyes from the bright flash. He squinted them away and turned back to the
spectacle
before him. Rolling flames from the ridge illuminated the valley.

The tall man had moved to the fallen Border Patrol officer. Ramirez watched in astonishment as the tall man bent to the man he’d just slain, and seemed to close his eyes and a hanging jaw. Then with one hand he pushed the flattened body to its side and turned it toward Nogales. Then he grabbed his pack and ran into the darkness.

The roaring of the helicopter became huge. Dust began to whirl and rise and Ramirez could see the dark shape of it, lights blinking, start to settle out of the sky. A searchlight beam sprang from the port to play across the stones.

Ramirez drew back. He knew that inside an hour the
federales
would arrive, summoned by the Americans. He knew that more Americans would come, and more and more. He knew he’d better get the hell out of there. He prayed that the Americans wouldn’t find his gringo
compadres
, who’d obviously been spooked by the passing patrol.
If they found them and they talked and they told of Ramirez …

Ramirez crossed himself. Holy Virgin, I’ve lied and cheated and stolen and killed, but spare your sinning child. He prayed intently as he scurried through the moonlight up the hill. He saw his van ahead and knew he’d make it. He even paused by the cactus to fetch his pistol.

“What happened?” asked Oscar. “Mother of Jesus, it sounded like a war.”

“Mother of Jesus, it
was
a war,” Ramirez said, thinking of the tall one, for he suddenly realized he’d seen a kind of soldier.

B
ill Speight pulled the Chevette to the side of the road, puzzled by what he saw. He must have lost track of the numbers a while back—some of these little houses out in the western Chicago suburbs were set so far back from the street you couldn’t read the figures. He reached for and opened his briefcase and sifted through the papers.

Come on, come on, old fool, he told himself, and at last located the address. Yes, it
was
1104 Old Elm Road. Could he have gotten off the expressway at the wrong town? But no, he’d seen the exit—he’d been careful, very careful so far. He was in the right place.

A Roman Catholic church? He searched his memory, yet he could unearth no remembrance of Paul Chardy that touched on any issue of religion. Had Chardy gone strange—the brave ones had more than a little craziness in them anyway—and joined the priesthood? Another priesthood. As if Special Operations wasn’t religious order enough. Yet he could not imagine that famous temper hidden beneath a priest’s habit, nor could he see a large-boned, impatient, athletic man like Chardy, a man of Chardy’s peculiar gifts, listening in a dark booth to pimply teenagers telling tales on themselves.

But he looked at the church and saw it was one of those
modern things, more roof and glass than building. A spindly cross way up top stood out against the bright blue spring sky; otherwise the place could have been some new convention center. Speight’s watery blue eyes tracked back to the sign and confronted it squarely: O
UR
L
ADY OF THE
R
ESURRECTION
R
OMAN
C
ATHOLIC
C
HURCH AND
S
CHOOL
, the letters white and blocky, slotted onto a black background, and beneath them the legend: L
EARN TO
F
ORGIVE
Y
OURSELF
. Speight winced at the advice. Could he? Could Paul?

But the school part made some sense. He could imagine Chardy among children, not among nuns and priests. For Chardy had still a little of the athlete’s boyishness, the gift for exhilaration which would captivate children. That was his best half, his mother’s half; but what about the other side, his father’s side, the Hungarian side, which was moody and sullen and turbulent?

At that moment a class of kids came spilling out from behind the church onto an adjacent blacktopped playground. So much energy; they made Speight feel his age. The panorama was raucous and vast and not a little violent, and the one bearded old geezer in a raincoat, who was supposedly in command, stood so meekly off to one side that Speight feared for him.

It was nearly noon. What lay ahead filled him with melancholy and unease; he wasn’t sure he could bring it off. Sighing heavily, he pulled the car into the church’s parking lot and found a place to park, marked
VISITOR
—he searched for it at some length, not wanting to break any rules—and began a long trudge to the buildings, his briefcase heavy in his hand.

His walk would take him through the playground, where balls sailed and bounced and kids hung like monkeys off the apparatus. All the boys wore scrawny ties, he saw—now that’s not a bad idea; his own kids dressed like
tramps—and the girls kilts. But the imposed formality didn’t cut any ice with the little brutes. They still fought and shoved and screamed at each other, and at one point the supervisor had to bound over to break up a bad scuffle. Kids. Speight shook his head, but he wasn’t really paying much attention.

He was worried about Chardy. You don’t just go crashing back into somebody’s life after seven years—or was it now eight?—and take up where you left off. And it was true that at the end, at the hearings, Bill hadn’t done Paul much good. He’d just told the truth, and the truth hadn’t helped Chardy at all, and maybe even now Chardy would hold it against him. Chardy had a famous temper; Chardy had once slugged a Head of Station.

Bill stopped in the middle of the playground. He felt a little queasy. He wished he had a Gelusil. The church building loomed above him; he was surrounded by children. He had to go to the bathroom suddenly. Maybe he could find a john and get settled down, get himself composed.

But then, maybe the best thing would be to get it over with. Get it over with fast. He’d come this far, quite a way.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a Binaca canister, and squirted a blast of the mouthwash into his mouth. Its cool sweetness pepped him up considerably, burying that sour taste that had collected in his throat.

I’ll just do it.

He turned as a basketball glanced off his knee and a horde of little jerks roared by in pursuit.

“Hey, excuse me.” He hailed the old duffer, who was bent in conference with two sniffling children. “Is there an office around here? Where would I find an office?”

“Are you sure you’re looking for the office, Bill?” asked Paul Chardy, rising.

It was the coat, cloaking the man’s size. And it was the beard, surprisingly shot with gray, masking the dark half-Irish face, blurring that pugnacious chin. And the hair, longish, almost over the ears, where Paul’s had always been short, after the military fashion, like Bill’s own. And it was also the playground full of kids, the bright sun, the bouncing, sailing balls, the noise, the church: it was all so different. The last time Bill had seen Paul had been at an arms dump on the border. Chardy wore baggy khaki pants then, and an embroidered coat and a black-and-white turban and sunglasses and had magazine bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest like some kind of bandit and had been almost mahogany from the sun. He’d carried a Soviet assault rifle, the AK-47, and had a couple of rocket-propelled grenades in their launchers slung over his back, and a belt full of Russian F-l grenades.

“I-I didn’t recognize you, Paul. The beard—you look so different.”

“Old Bill, Jesus. I saw you getting out of the car. They still make you rent cheap little Chevys, huh? How are you?” He took Bill’s hand and shook it. “You’re looking good, Bill.”

“You’re lying, Paul. I’m looking
old
, which is what I am. You’re getting some gray yourself.”

“It’s these kids. I look a hundred. These damned kids, they took my youth.” He laughed, and clapped Bill on the back.

“Paul, we had some trouble finding you.”

“You were supposed to. That was the point.”

“Well, anyway. It’s some old business. Have you got a minute?”

Chardy looked at his watch, a big Rolex. He still had it. All the Special Operations people wore them.

“This is my most open period. They work you pretty hard in these joints. I’m off around five. Can it wait?”

“Ah.” It couldn’t. Get to it, they’d told Speight. Don’t give him time to think about it, to nurse his furies. Plunge in.