I felt a certain awkwardness, but that had nothing to do with her looks. Zarah had not attended her father’s funeral. Needless to say this had done nothing to intensify Stephanie’s love for her stepdaughter, and I had been hauled off into a corner to make sure I was fully aware of just how outrageous Zarah’s conduct was. I tended to agree, but what did I know about Zarah or her reasons?
I said, “You were missed yesterday.”
“So Stephanie has told me.”
She was impassive, controlled. It was remarkable how many glimpses of Paul one saw in Zarah, considering that she had known her father personally for only five or six years. Although I don’t know the details, arithmetic suggests that she was conceived sometime around the last day of her parents’ marriage. Her late mother, who was as neurotic as she was gorgeous—had she been born a rung or two further down the Kentucky social ladder, she might well have become Miss America—took revenge on Paul by concealing their child’s existence from him. He knew nothing about Zarah until, as Stephanie put it, Helen of Troy knocked on the door one day and identified herself as his child. DNA tests confirmed this, but looking at her and remembering her father were enough of a paternity test.
“That’s why I’ve come to see you,” Zarah said. “I didn’t go to the funeral because I think it was a sham. If my father is dead— and there is no evidence that he is—those were not his ashes that were buried at Arlington.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“No. But if he were dead, I would know it and believe it.”
“But you don’t.”
She shook her head.
I said, “Neither do I. I’m no soothsayer, but I don’t believe that Paul’s death has been proved.”
“Why?”
“Because the man I know is too adroit to let himself be killed before he had the answer he was looking for.”
I paused for a moment to give her a chance to reply or ask a question, but she seemed to sense that I had more to say and she waited for me to say it.
“However,” I said, since the floor seemed to be mine, “I think you should be careful. Your father has spent his life in pursuit of a mother whom the rest of the world has believed to be dead for almost sixty years.”
“But who may be alive after all.”
“So your father believed, and for all we know he was right. But there’s no more evidence that Lori Christopher is living at ninetyfour or whatever than that Paul is dead.”
Zarah changed the subject. “May I ask you something?”
“Certainly.”
“If Ibn Awad is alive and is threatening the same kind of action for which you were ordered to kill him before, how does that make you feel?”
“Incompetent.”
“You want to correct the mistake.”
“I suppose so.”
“Why?”
“I made this mess. I should clean it up.”
“Alone? Without help?”
“Your father has helped me. He gave me information and something I can sell to finance the operation.”
“Yes, the Hicks. He told me.”
“He told you?”
“He left a letter for me.”
She handed me a sheet of paper, one page from a longer letter. There it was, in Paul’s handwriting.
What to say to all this? What did she want?
She said, “I’d like to help you. I speak Arabic. I know you do, too, but not the way I do. I grew up with Arabs. I don’t always understand them, but I know them, and I have a lot of friends among them. And I know things that you might not know about my father.”
I doubted this. This must have shown on my face, because after an icy moment she decided to explain herself. “My father made a project of telling me everything he remembers about his life.”
This amazed me. Paul opening his emotional files, even to his own daughter? “Paul never seemed the oral history type to me,” I said.
“He’s not,” Zarah replied. “But for whatever reason, he wanted to make this transfer of knowledge to me, and he did. In theory, at least, I know everything and everyone my father ever knew.”
“Everything?”
“Wouldn’t it be out of character for him to leave anything out after he said he wasn’t going to do that?”
“Yes.”
They must have spent days locked up together. No wonder Stephanie hated this young woman.
I said, “You took notes?”
“That wasn’t necessary. The material is impossible to forget.” “And you’d share all this with me?”
“All of it? No. The parts you need to know, yes. For example, I know the name of a man who worked in the Vatican in the thirties and forties. He was a friend of my father’s. This man’s assignment was to deal with Nazi officials during World War II.”
“And?”
“He’s still alive,” Zarah said. “At least he was three days ago, when I checked. Very old, but lucid. He’s in Salvator Mundi hospital in Rome.”
“Okay. But how does he fit in?”
“He saw my grandmother in Prague in 1942,” Zarah said.
9
The Old Boys arrived at my house precisely at five in the afternoon. This may sound like an insecure meeting place, but the fact is we were pretty much alone on my block. This was a street on which the near-mighty lived, and at five in the afternoon our privacy was protected by the triage of Washington existence. As twilight fell, my neighbors were all in meetings or having a drink with somebody or stuck in traffic, and my guests would melt into the darkness before they got home. Jack Philindros, dressed like the secretary of state, resembled the time-warp Hellene that he was—olive skin, dense hair slicked back, thick eyebrows that grew together. Charley Hornblower, hearty and long-boned and in need of a shave, was a Falstaff who for many years had been working on his red nose and his connections to people who knew things. Ben Childress and Harley Waters might have been cousins—Yankee faces, Yankee economy; both wore frayed blazers, faded polo shirts and rumpled khakis and drugstore watches. David Wong was his usual self, oldest of the Marx Brothers—bodhisattva smile, quick tongue, quicker brain. He was the only one among us who showed no sign of being the worse for wear. Philindros, a teetotaler, refused the Laphroaig I was offering, but the others did it justice. It was a treat to hear the voices of men and to smell whisky in the house where I had been all by myself for such a long time.
That afternoon I had bought five satellite phones at $498 each, including one year’s access for each to communications satellites in 130 different countries. I distributed the phones. Everybody got an index card listing the others’ satellite phone numbers. No code names necessary; we would recognize one another’s voices.
Philindros, always the security nut, said, “Do you think these phones are secure?”
“No, but they’re the best way to keep in touch.”
“You don’t mind having half the world on the party line with us?”
“What difference does it make?” I asked. “This operation will either succeed within the month or fail miserably in less time than that. If it succeeds we go off the air forever. If it fails and Ibn Awad’s bombs go off, our little group will be the least of the world’s worries.”
“If we’re found out by the wrong people, they’ll roll us up.”
“Not in this time frame they won’t,” I said. “Our advantage is that we can move fast because nobody can say no to us.”
Jack said, “We’ll see about that. You have no actual objection to our following the rules of tradecraft?”
“No.”
“That’s good,” Harley said, “because we jes’ can’t help it.”
I told them the plan. Because of my physique I didn’t think it wise to stop off in Rome and call on Zarah’s ex-monk. Looking up from his deathbed at a six-foot-five American who speaks Italian like a Visigoth wouldn’t put a man in the mood to share confidences. On the other hand, Jack had a soothing personality and he spoke fluent Italian
. I told him what we knew about Paul’s old friend and how we knew it, and handed him Zarah’s slip of paper with the man’s name on it.
“If he has anything to tell us,” Jack said, “what do I do then?”
“Tell everybody everything you know over the satellite phone,” I said. “Then follow up.”
“By doing what?”
“Go wherever you think you should go, see whoever you need to see,” I replied. “but feed every scrap of information to every single one of us by satellite phone as soon as it happens. Don’t wait. Call the minute you know something.”
They all knew the reason for this: if every one of us knew everything, only one of us had to survive to carry out the last stage of the op.
Ben Childress, our Arabist, knew Ibn Awad’s German live-in doctor. This particular alumnus of the Schutzstaffel (SS) called himself Claus Bücher. If Bücher was still alive and still doctoring Ibn Awad, his whereabouts obviously would be unknown. We needed to know if he had dropped out of sight at the same time as his employer and, more important, if he had been sighted since. If he came into town every now and then, or flew somewhere for R & R, we might be able to get our hands on him, and if we did, miracles do happen. Who knows? If the incentive was right, he might take us to his patient.
Harley Waters had a wide circle of friends among the used-tobe’s of the former Soviet bloc. He would find out whatever he could in Moscow, then go to Prague and Budapest and sniff around for recent traces of Paul and old folklore about Lori Christopher. Harley’s prime target was the nobility of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. These people still existed, and in Lori’s day they had been a nationality of their own, living in a world of their own, and so much intermarried over the centuries that they were nearly all cousins.
The old aristocracy had despised the Nazis, who came out of the gutters. By 1942, these people were an undergroundin-waiting, and Lori was one of them. Had she gone to anyone for help in Prague, she would have gone to them. Unless they had come to her first and asked her help in liquidating Reinhard Heydrich.
Charley Hornblower, our scholar, would remain in Washington and work the files. He had an attic full of them and a Rolodex full of fellow pack rats.
I would go to Paris and sell the Hicks to finance the operation.
10
In my penury I continued to possess some of the accoutrements of the man of means: wardrobe, credentials, connections, manners, even a valid credit card. But I had almost no pocket money. I booked the cheapest available ticket to Paris and took a bus into town from the airport. At 8-bis, avenue Wagram, I presented one of my last calling cards to the burly servant who answered the door of Kalash al Khatar’s apartment. He took it from my hand and shut the door in my face. A long time passed. Had I not been dealing with a descendant of the Prophet I might have feared that I had been refused entry. However, I had in the past been kept waiting by this haughty breed on many occasions in many parts of Islam, so I loitered patiently in the corridor. The windows looked down on a cobbled courtyard where a fountain played. I heard the muted gargle of midday traffic in the place de l’Étoile. This reminded me of how Paris had smelled at rush hour in my youth, when the proportion of leaded exhaust fumes to fresh air was only slightly lower than the level needed to commit suicide.
Forty-five minutes passed. An hour. More. When Kalash’s man—a different one this time—opened the door, he was not smiling, he did not speak. He gestured me inside with a jerk of his bullet head.
He led me to an audience room. One very imperial overstuffed chair faced several smaller, unpadded ones. Also visible were a collection of knives with rhino-horn hafts on one wall, a bronze tray inlaid with silver and copper on the opposite wall, phrases from the Koran in beautiful calligraphy on the back wall. The room was imposing but not overwhelming. However, the surrounding apartment was vast. One felt this spaciousness without actually seeing the rest of the place. It must have cost a fortune. I wondered if Kalash’s impoverished subjects made him an annual present of his weight in precious stones or metals, as did the followers of the Aga Khan.
After another hour Kalash appeared, wearing Arabian robes and carrying a carved and inlaid ebony staff. He was, indeed, remarkably tall—nearly a head taller than myself. He did not offer to shake hands, nor did he speak. Or sit down. I, of course, had risen to my feet when he entered.
“I apologize for arriving without notice,” I said.
Kalash said, “What do you want?”
“I have a letter for you.”
I handed over Paul’s letter of introduction. He banged his staff on the marble floor twice. Yet another flunky appeared. Kalash handed him the letter. The flunky bowed himself out and a moment later bowed himself back in, with the opened letter on a silver tray.
Kalash read the letter. “Is that the painting?” he asked, staring at the rolled-up canvas on the chair beside me.
“Yes.” I did not offer to unroll it. Kalash was a very annoying fellow.
He said, “How much do you want for it?”
“The price that you offered my cousin, plus ten percent. In cash.”
“Let me see the thing,” said Kalash.
I unrolled the painting and flattened it on the table. Kalash examined it inch by inch, like the expert he apparently was.
“This picture is not as it was when I saw it the last time,” he said. “It has been damaged by all this rough handling. Take it away.”
“As you wish.” I began to roll up the painting.
“Stop that,” said Kalash. “You’ll make it worse.”
“If the painting doesn’t please you, what difference can that make? You’ll never see it again.”
“I don’t wish to be an accomplice to this barbarous destruction,” Kalash said. “So stop what you are doing.”
“I can hardly carry it through the streets like a flag,” I said. Kalash’s face was expressionless, as it had been throughout our encounter. I waited for him to speak again. At last he said, “Why did Paul send you on this errand, instead of coming himself or simply mailing the letter?”
There was no point in dissembling. I said, “We have a report that Paul died in China.”
“Where in China?”
“Xinjiang province. It is very remote.…”
“I know where Xinjiang is,” Kalash said. “What proof exists that this is true?”
“The Chinese have sent us his ashes.”
“Are they genuine?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you mean to find out.”
“If that’s possible, yes.”
We had been standing throughout this conversation. Now Kalash said, “Sit down.” He himself sat down, not in the larger chair, but in one of the smaller ones. Evidently we were going to be equals for a few minutes.
He banged on the floor again with his staff, just once. In seconds the household slave appeared with two glasses of very hot, very sweet mint tea on a tray.
Kalash said, not unpleasantly, “So you are the man who killed my cousin Ibn Awad.”
“So it was believed at the time.”
“And now?”
“Paul left me a letter. I know what you told him.”
“He wrote down everything?”
“The main points. An outline.”
“So now you plan to kill my cousin again and you need money to do this and you think that I will give it to you? You are an extraordinary fellow.”
I said, “I have no plans to kill Ibn Awad. Obviously I’m not very good at that. And I am no longer in the business of saving the world.”
“Then what will you do with a million dollars?”
“A million one hundred. I’ll carry on with Paul’s search.”
“For what?”
“For his mother, my aunt. For the Amphora Scroll.”
“Do you plan to sell that, too?”
“Would you be interested in the right of first refusal?”
Kalash played deaf to this uppity remark. He sa
id, “And if you happen to stumble on Ibn Awad?”
“We can talk about old times.”
“You should have let him set off one of his bombs and then murdered him. In those days Tel Aviv would have been his preference, so America would have come to no harm. You would have been the toast of the West instead of being driven into the wilderness.”
“Is that still your recommendation?”
“No. Times have changed. If I were the Crusader in charge of this manhunt, I would think it best to keep him from coming back from the dead.”
“And how would you accomplish that?”
“Not by killing him again. That would inflame the pious, because they would never believe that he was not immortal. If he lived through one murder, why should he not live through another? Murder him again and you create a Hydra.”
“What, then?”
“Capture him. I realize you’re an American, but for once, renounce braggadocio. Say nothing to the world. Let him stay dead.”
“And then?”
“Send him off to some Saint Helena in the Indian Ocean— he couldn’t be happy in a cold climate—and let him live out his days in prayer and fasting. It would be a kindness to tell him that all twelve of his bombs had gone off as planned in American cities. Show him videos of the devastation. Lots of corpses clutching crucifixes.”
I said, “Very creative. But I thought we were doing all this to prevent devastation.”
“Obviously. But surely your organization can make very convincing fake footage for a fraction of what it would cost to rebuild New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and so forth. It’s said that you faked the moon landings, so this should be child’s play.”
“You believe that?”
“About the moon landings? No. But I am not my cousin nor one of his half-mad followers.”
What, then, was he? His callousness was so matter-of-fact that it was comical.
“Excellent advice,” I said. “But do you really think such an operation can be kept quiet forever?”
The Old Boys Page 4