The Second Saladin (35 page)

Trewitt shifted uncomfortably beside him. As he moved he bumped into his own armament, which had been propped against a log in front of him. He’d had some practice too; with the scope, it was like shooting at the star of a drive-in movie.

“No,” he said, “he’s had plenty of time. They left yesterday—in the postman’s Jeep they could have been back by one. It’s almost five now.”

“Forget it. What does a little snotnose know? He don’t know nothing.”

“He knows enough to get back in time. Dumb kid.” The kid was important because he was a kid and Trewitt liked him, but also because he carried another telegram for Chardy, care of the Resurrection. If this try didn’t
work, Trewitt had resolved to go out in the open, the hell with the risk. He was done with waiting.

“Don’t wet your pants. He’ll be back. Little snotnose.”

Trewitt picked up the rifle, slid it back against his shoulder. They were two hundred yards upslope from the stone shack. The move had been Trewitt’s idea, arguing that if they were at any moment apt to be jumped they couldn’t just be caught in the shack; they had to have a
plan
.

Ramirez looked upon this strategic innovation with great curiosity, and then went back to his smart-alecky maid and her comeuppance.

But Trewitt insisted, and ultimately prevailed. Still, some plan. The
plan
was to blow the brains out of anybody who poked around.

And what if Chardy showed up? Well, Chardy wouldn’t show up. There’d been some kind of screw-up.

But Trewitt was determined. He’d get this Ramirez back somehow, whether he wanted to or not, back to Chardy. There, Chardy, what do you think of that? You decide, Chardy. Trewitt had no other chart to work by. His head was still packed with confusion. All espionage tends to end in farce, Malcolm Muggeridge had said, and boy, he sure had this one figured out. Trewitt was not certain whether he’d decided on this course of action or whether it had been decided for him. Things just happened, and here he was, halfway up a dusty mountain in a hot sun on a clear day with a sniper’s rifle in his hands.

Above, a hawk pirouetted, slid on a thermal, high, remote, coldly beautiful. Trewitt watched the bird with idle envy: the grace, the power, the freedom, the dignity commandeered his imagination. The lovely thing skidded back and forth brainlessly on the currents, wheeling into the valley, then soaring upward again.

Trewitt wiped a drop of sweat off the end of his nose and studied its dampness on the end of his finger, and did not see the car.

But when he looked up, there it was, a Mercedes 450 SL, gunmetal gray, sitting before the shack.

Roberto was squirming into cover next to him.

“Jesus Mary, now we going to see some stuff.”

Oscar Meza got out from the passenger’s side, held his hands wide to show that he was unarmed.

“Reynoldo,” he called to the mountain, “can you hear me? These people here want to talk to you. That’s all, a little talk. They sent me ahead. Come, have a little talk, and we will let the little one go. Don’t be no fool, Reynoldo, it’s just a little talk.”

There was silence.

“Reynoldo, think it over. Take your time. You got fifteen—”

The shot rang out crisp and clear. Oscar Meza sat back on his expensive fender, holding his middle. He breathed deeply. His sunglasses fell off. His knees cracked and he pitched forward on them. Then he fell the rest of the way.

“Goddammit,” bellowed Trewitt, “he shouldn’t have—”

“Right in the guts! Reynoldo sure can shoot a gun.”

Trewitt stared stupidly at the dead man by the car. For a long moment nothing happened. Then the car began to gently back up, leaving its fallen passenger. It moved as though it were pulling out of any suburban garage into any sane, pleasant street, turning as its driver swung its nose to bear in the right direction. Then, slowly, it began to descend the dirt road.

“Shoot! Shoot the whoreson. I cannot see him,” commanded Ramirez from his cover.

“What?” Trewitt said.

“Shoot him! Mother of God, shoot!”

Without thinking, Trewitt brought the rifle to his shoulder, throwing the bolt. He felt the press of the stock against his shoulder, the weight of the rifle in his hands. His eye went naturally to the scope and after a moment of blurred dazzle in which nothing made sense, he caught a glimpse of the gray car as it plummeted toward safety. Against the cross hairs, through the rear window, there now appeared, almost magically—a head. A man’s head, held low as he hunched in terror behind the wheel, holding the car in a straight line for the turnoff, gathering speed.

Trewitt readied himself.

“Shoot! Shoot!” Roberto commanded.

Only seconds remained until the car reached the turnoff and would be gone. Trewitt took a whole breath, released half. The head lay in the foreshortened reality of the scope, just beyond the muzzle. He felt he could touch it.

Shoot, Trewitt told himself. The 7-millimeter would burn into the skull, exiting, hugely, through the face, taking features and bones and eyes and brains with it, spraying them indiscriminately against the windshield. Trewitt felt a split-second’s nausea at what he was about to do. He took the slack out of the trigger—

“Shoot!” Roberto hooted.

The car swirled around the turnoff in a great rooster-tail of dust, and was gone.

“What is wrong with you? Are you sick, man?” asked Roberto.

“I—I didn’t have a very good shot,” Trewitt said. “I couldn’t see wasting a bullet.”

“You should have shot anyway.”

“Well, I didn’t want to throw a bullet away.”

The youth looked at him suspiciously.

Trewitt sat back.

“I don’t know why he shot that guy,” he said to nobody. “I don’t see what that accomplishes.” Oscar Meza lay a hundred or so yards down the slope on his stomach. Trewitt could now see that he was wearing an expensive suit and fine boots. He was a curiously formal figure in the litter of the yard.

“That son of a bitch kick me out of my job,” said Roberto.

But Trewitt now had to think about the boy. What about the boy?

“They’ll kill him now,” he said.

“Kill who?” Roberto asked.

Trewitt’s desolation was total. It became rage. He wished he’d shot the man in the car, blown his fucking head to pieces. “The little boy. Miguel.”

“He should have stayed with his mama,” said Roberto.

Trewitt sat back against the tree, the rifle next to him. Around him the bleak mountains lay in dusty splendor. He looked for the hawk but it had vanished. He looked about: he seemed to be on the face of the moon.

“Hey,
patrón,”
Roberto called to Ramirez, who ambled toward them, “the
norteamericano
wants to go down the hill for the little snotnose kid.”

“You just get killed, mister. Hey, how come you didn’t shoot? You should have shot him.”

“I couldn’t see him very well,” mumbled Trewitt.

“That’s a fine telescope on that gun. You should have been able to see him real good. Maybe you weren’t working it right.”

“He’s just a kid!”
Trewitt screamed, leaping to his feet. “Come on, we can’t stay here. Let’s get going. Maybe it’s not too late.” He began to stride manfully down the slope. He turned when they did not move and fixed them in a steely glare.

“Let’s get going,” he commanded icily.

“You must be a real crazyhead,” said Ramirez. “Go down there? They just kill you. They’re going to kill you anyway, but why rush it?” He laughed. “I’m hungry. Let’s get some food. They’ll be back pretty soon.”

“We’ve got to save that kid!” boomed Trewitt again.

“He
is
a crazyhead,
patrón,”
said Roberto. Wonder filled his eyes.

The two Mexicans, laughing between themselves, walked past him to the shack.

Trewitt stood alone, the rifle tucked against his hip. He watched the fat man and the youth. They stepped over the body of Oscar Meza and ducked inside.

Then Trewitt started down the hill to the shack for some tortillas too.

C
hardy was made uneasy by the approach of night. He had a history of unpleasant evenings, for during them, late, when he was alone, the things that he could not control by sheer will crawled out to harry him. And when he had found Johanna in her car, across from the blinking police lights, the rushing officers and medics, the gathering crowd, he was aware that in some strange way a trap had been sprung in his mind. He had stared at her, knowing exactly what had happened, and why, and how: he saw it now. A pain came and took his breath away and almost knocked him to the sidewalk.

He had thought he heard somebody tell him to be reasonable.

The memory would not die; it had increased the next several days, all through his time as athlete, among the postman and his friends.

Be reasonable, somebody was telling him.

The voice was sane and calm; it was almost compassionate.

“Paul. Be reasonable.”

Chardy was alone in his little Silver Spring apartment, on the night after he returned from Danzig’s. A baseball game was over on the tube, it was that late. He’d had a
few beers. He’d laid out his new suit, a clean shirt, and his shoes for tomorrow. He felt like another beer, but realized he was now out and wondered if it made sense to dress again and drive around until he found an all-night liquor store or a bar with package goods.

Be reasonable, he told himself.

But the voice was not his. It was affable, pleasant, colloquial, American. It was the voice of a pudgy man, about fifty, with merry, alert eyes and thinning blond hair, almost white. He wore a Soviet major’s uniform, army, with artillery boards and insignia, but he was KGB all the way. The uniform made this point explicitly: no Soviet military careerist would be seen in a Third World country in such a disgraceful uniform, rumpled, spotted, humorously impressed. An orthodox man could not wear such a uniform under pain of instant censure and discipline; thus the wearer was not an orthodox man. He enjoyed special privileges. He was permitted his eccentricities.

“Paul,” he had said, “come on. Let’s be reasonable, shall we?”

Chardy’s Arabian Nights, which were not 1001 in number but only six, were beginning to reassemble in his mind this night in his little apartment.

“It’s so difficult, this business,” said Speshnev. “I’d much prefer to be your friend. I really would. Will you please talk to me? Please, Paul.”

But Chardy would not talk. He remembered instructing himself: don’t give them anything. If you start, you will not stop. Don’t give them anything. The first surrender is the only surrender; it is total, it is complete. Time. Play for time.

He studied the cell. Down here, the walls sweated. The air was moist, almost dense. This room had probably been cut from living stone a thousand years ago, by slaves.
Who knew what pains it had witnessed? Had it always been a torture chamber?

“Paul, let me explain how it works. I’m going to have them burn a hole in your back. The pain will be—well, it will be indescribable. But I think you can get through it. You are a very brave man. I think you can get through it. Then tomorrow, Paul, tomorrow, I’m going to have them burn another hole in your back. You’ll have all this evening to think about the hole they’re going to burn. You’ll know exactly what it’s going to feel like. There will be no surprises. Paul, the day after that, I will burn another hole. You’ll have a night to think about that one too. And on and on, Paul. On and on and on. If we run out of back, then we’ll move to the chest. Do you understand? That is the future, Paul. That’s all the future there is.”

You can do it, he told himself. You can stand it, he told himself.

Oh, it’s going to hurt so. Oh, Christ, it’s going to hurt.

You can do it, you’re Chardy, you’re so tough. You’ve been begging for this one your whole life. To see how tough you are.

They burned the first hole in his back.

“Paul, it’s so absurd,” Speshnev told him on the second day. “What do you gain by resisting? We win in the end, of course. But think further:
What
do we win? Frankly, not much. We win a momentary advantage, a half a point’s shift in momentum. Perhaps I win a promotion, or at least advance a few inches closer to promotion. And what of it? Is the world really changed? Is one system that much better off than the other? Of course not Let’s face facts: our two nations face each other on a thousand different battlefields, a thousand different contests each second. Some we win, some you win. But nothing really changes. The process of change is implacably slow and no
human endeavor may be seen to affect it. So what sense does it make to resist us? None at all. It’s thoroughly ridiculous, an exercise in playground heroics. Now, in this cellar, you are being a hero, an authentic American hero, fighting the pain, the psychological pressure, fighting alone without help, without hope, standing against everything we can do to you. It’s incredible; it’s quite moving. You have my respect. I couldn’t have done nearly so well. I’d have cracked in the first session. I’d certainly have cracked by now. You are a champion. Paul, must I have them bum another hole in you? Must I? Will you force me?”

Chardy’s wrists were tied before him; he could see old stone and smell his own sour perspiration. He’d spent the night thinking about his back.

“Paul, please. Help me on this. We can work together.”

They burned the second hole in his back.

“How was your evening, Paul? The guards say you screamed all night. They say you woke several times with nightmares. I would imagine the psychological pressure is immense. I know this business weighs heavily on me as well. I hope we can finish it today and that you’re able to cooperate. What do you say, Paul? Do you think you’ll be able to help me?”

Chardy was silent; in his peripheral vision he could see Speshnev standing behind and beside him in his rumpled uniform.

“Paul, now let’s think about this. At this very moment an American from the IBM Corporation is selling a Russian from the Committee on Scientific Research highly sophisticated computer software whose intricacies are a thousand times more complex than you or I could ever understand. A traitor? No, it’s done in the open! Businessmen!
With the support and endorsement of both governments. It’s simply trade. Also being sold are licenses for the bottling of Pepsi-Cola and the manufacture of Ford Pintos. In exchange we fork over tons of our desperately needed minerals, crude ore, and so on. So against this panorama of exchange, this Technicolor extravaganza of commercial greed, of ideological co-option, what can you expect to accomplish? Paul, be reasonable. You prevent one man, me, from becoming a full colonel. It’s really quite humorous, Paul. I wish you’d work with me on this.”