The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  Could he leave immediately? We were ready to go. We were already dressed in woolens and down parkas—it was cold in November even at Ulugqat’s relatively modest altitude. Zikkar did not answer immediately. His eyes were on our two minders, who were sprinting toward us through the crowd like a couple of halfbacks, spinning and dodging pedestrians. They were sleepy-eyed, frantic, panting. The senior minder let loose a torrent of Mandarin, too fast and slangy for me to understand, while the other gave David and me a burning stare designed to make us think of handcuffs and dungeons.

  In Mandarin, David said, “We have hired this man to drive us to the buz kashi. We may never have another chance to see such a thing. You and your friend are welcome to come along.”

  As if a horn had sounded ending the game, the senior man stopped raving in mid-sentence. He considered the offer for a long moment, then stepped back into the crowd, turning his back in case one of us was a lip reader, and made a call on his cell phone. While he talked, the silent minder placed himself in front of the 4Runner. In moments the senior man reappeared. Without another word, he and his sidekick got into the car as if they had paid for it. The talker got into the front seat. Very politely, I asked him to move to the back with his friend and David. There was no room for my legs back there. And besides, I had paid for the vehicle. Frozen-faced, he complied.

  The buz kashi match would take place in a meadow at a high altitude. There was a road of sorts—actually a narrow track beaten down by hooves over centuries. The 4Runner, which had 200,000 kilometers on the odometer, made slow and bumpy but steady progress on a grade that got closer to the vertical with every turn of the wheels.

  It took the better part of the morning to reach the point where, according to Captain Zhang, Paul Christopher had met his end. Zikkar halted by the fateful ravine as if this were a programmed stop on the tour. The gash in the earth was prodigious, with a cold torrent tumbling through mist at its bottom. The stony smell of the rushing water was apprehended as much on the tongue as in the nostrils. A brisk wind was blowing. The air was quite cold now, close to the freezing point and probably well below it on the wind-chill scale. Our minders wasted no time emptying their bladders and jumping back into the heated car. David took pictures. The vociferous minder rolled down a window and shouted at him to stop. This was sensitive country, a border region. We walked up the track a half mile or so, Zikkar trailing along behind us. In Tajik, David asked him if this was a dangerous place to ride a horse.

  Zikkar grinned. “Only for a pregnant woman,” he replied. “Or a Han.”

  “What about a white man?”

  “They ride in cars.”

  “Has a white man every fallen off his horse and gone into the ravine?

  “A white man?” Zikkar said. He gave us a long look before answering the question. “I don’t think so. But you can ask at the buz kashi.”

  Zikkar faced the sun and looked at his shadow. It was about ten o’clock by this human sundial. With a follow-me jerk of his head, he strode down the mountainside toward the 4Runner. The Han policemen, dressed in cotton trousers and shirts and thin padded jackets, shivered miserably in the backseat.

  An hour or so later we came to a notch in the terrain that framed a vista of whitened peaks marching into Afghanistan. According to the map, the altitude here was nine thousand feet. Below us lay an impossibly picturesque valley fenced by the sheer rock walls of snowcapped mountains. The Tajik village on the valley floor consisted of a couple of dozen stone huts straggling alongside a fast-running river. On the other side of the valley stood a half-dozen yurts— round, collapsible shelters made of thick felt.

  Zikkar pointed to them: “Kyrgyz.”

  The visiting team. The blue smoke of dung fires drifted in the crystal-clear air. Yaks, sheep, and goats wandered about, with a few two-humped Bactrian camels intermingled. The horses, shaggy hammer-headed animals, stood apart in two groups. Zikkar maneuvered the 4Runner through the herd. The animals paid no attention to the stinking machine, which might well have emerged through a seam in time into this ancient world.

  David and I were introduced to the village headman, a dignified fellow named Jafargul, who gave David and me cups of warm milk fresh from the ewe. He then invited us inside for more food and drink. Our Han minders were ignored, left to their own devices in the backseat of the car. I would have let them shiver, but Zikkar, a businessman thinking of the future, brought them tea and flatbread, along with a couple of sheepskins for warmth.

  The buz kashi match, played mostly inside a cloud of dust, lacked the dramatic close-ups and sound effects of movie versions I had seen, but it was exciting enough. The smell of blood, sweat, dirt and fresh dung added a dimension that movies lack. Through my binoculars I caught glimpses of riders wrestling at a full gallop for the carcass of a young goat. Early in the game, two riders playing tug-of-war with the dead animal pulled off its head. Blood spurted. The man with the severed head pursued the other fellow, beating him on the back with it. As the match progressed, the goat’s legs and tail were pulled off one by one, so it became more and more difficult to get a grip on the slippery dismembered carcass. Blood-smeared men were knocked off their horses, dragged, trampled, had their teeth knocked out—you could see them spitting incisors into the air. Injured horses writhed on the rocky ground. I have no idea which side won. Mayhem seemed to be the only rule. As far as I could tell, nobody crossed the goal—if there were goals—with what was left of the goat, so maybe the object was not victory but how murderously you played the game.

  Injured men had been dragged off the field, but Zikkar assured us that no one had been killed today. “Many broken bones,” he said with a delighted smile. “That’s why they play now, so that they’ll have the whole winter to heal.”

  7

  The weather was changing. A great dark-blue bruise appeared above the craggy peaks to the west. The smell of snow was in the air. A few fat flakes were already drifting in on a soft west wind. There was no question of driving back down the mountain in darkness during a snowstorm. Zikkar led us back to the headman’s house, where we would spend the night.

  Jafargul awaited us outside his door. Beside him stood two men holding a wriggling sheep. They lifted it into the air, head down, and Jafargul slit its throat. He caught the blood in a bowl, then skinned the sheep with a few economical slashes of his knife, which evidently had been honed to a surgical edge. He then cut it up for the pot and with a dazzling smile of welcome, invited us inside. A dung fire burned cheerfully on the hearth, fumes rising through a smoke hole. The dirt floor, pounded to a sheen by many feet over many years, was covered with bright red-and-black tribal carpets. More carpets hung on the walls. There were no windows. The scene was lit by firelight and the flames of oil lamps. It occurred to me that I was seeing human faces and the mellow vegetable-dye colors in the rugs in a way that few Westerners had seen them since Edison brought the mischief of electric light into the world.

  The Tajik believe that they are descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great, and some of them do have Macedonian looks. Jafargul, for example, had green eyes and thick auburn hair and eyebrows. Women wearing pillbox hats with white veils attached were at work in the kitchen. The veils did not cover their faces. These particular Tajiks are Ismaili Shi’as, followers of the Aga Khan, and they have their own customs. In this house at least, abstinence was not one of them. Jafargul and his guests had a taste for whiskey, and we soon worked our way through the liter of Jack Daniels that David had brought along as emergency rations.

  One of the guests, seated across the fire from me, was the Episcopalian. He sounded as if he were in the middle of another philosophical discussion. The Episcopalian paid absolutely no attention to us. Time passed. The feast and the whiskey took effect. Conversation dwindled to a murmur. Quite soon most of the men had stretched out on the rugs and fallen asleep. I, too, lay down and closed my eyes. What dreams would a man have in this place?

  I was on the edge of sleep when a hand
squeezed my arm. Zikkar. He beckoned, pointing to my parka. David was already on his feet, zipping up his own jacket. Zikkar put a finger to his lips, then led us outside. The wind had died. An inch or two of snow lay on the ground. More was falling through milky moonlight, forming a scrim between village and mountains. Boots creaking in the snow, we followed Zikkar to a small stone building at the far end of the village. It was surrounded by snow-covered animals. None of these ghostly beasts paid any attention to us except for a camel that swung its ponderous head toward our disagreeable scent and spat.

  It was pitch-dark inside the hut. David entered first, and as I bent double to go through the empty door frame I heard him utter an explosive oof! A knife? A club? I dropped to my hands and knees and went inside like a defensive tackle—a slow one, but I still had bulk—and encountered two pairs of legs. One pair, wearing corduroys, belonged to David, the other pair, clad in rough wool, belonged to another man, who seemed to be holding my friend in a death grip. I was about to strangle the attacker when David, sounding as though the breath had been knocked out of him, gasped, “Horace, wait! It’s okay.”

  A flashlight—Zikkar’s—winked on and I beheld David in the embrace of a brawny tribesman. It was obvious that murder was the last thing this gentleman had in mind. He was delighted to see David. The man was dressed like the Kyrgyz I had seen at the buz kashi, and the language he spoke sounded different from Tajik.

  “Good grief,” David said in English. “It’s Askar.”

  “Who?”

  “Askar. He was Filibuster stroke one. We worked together on the frontier in the ’80s.”

  Filibuster was the code name for David’s infamous operation to encourage a Muslim uprising on the Sino-Soviet frontier. Askar’s designation, Filibuster stroke one, meant that he had been the principal agent—commander of the Islamist network the Chinese supposedly had rolled up fifteen years ago. How could he still be alive and walking around, a free man?

  Zikkar’s flashlight went out. A lamp was lit. By its milder light Askar turned out to be a grayhead with bristling white eyebrows and a wiry pepper-and-salt Islamic beard. In the past David had given Askar hundreds of thousands of American dollars—I knew, because as chief of station I had signed off on every penny—but the affection the man was displaying toward his old handler could not possibly have been bought with money.

  David introduced me to Askar in true name. There was no reason to do otherwise. Askar shook hands firmly, like a Westerner. “I know who you are,” he said in slow Mandarin. “We were told to expect you.”

  I said, “Told by whom?”

  “By the other American,” Askar replied. “The one you’re looking for. He said you would come and try to find him.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “Not long ago.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Zikkar shrugged. Exasperation washed over me. David put a hand on my arm.

  “You’ll get nowhere with direct questions,” he said. “Step back. Let them talk. That’s why they brought us here, to tell us something. Just listen.”

  Zikkar crooked a finger. David and I followed him to the back of the hut, where a large squared-up stack of thick felt—a folded yurt?—stood against the wall. He moved some of the material and I saw that the stack was hollow. Zikkar moved another bale or two and beckoned us closer. He shone his flashlight into the hollow space, revealing a bright-orange Suzuki dirt bike.

  “This belonged to the other American,” Zikkar said in Mandarin.

  They had swapped Paul some food and two horses for the bike, Zikkar told us. He said no more than that. Zikkar hid the motorcycle again, then spread a carpet on the dirt floor. We sat down in a circle. David fished a pint of whiskey and three packs of American cigarettes out of the pockets of his parka.

  As the tribesmen smoked and drank, Zikkar and the Episcopalian talked at length in their own languages. When they were through, David asked a question or two, then turned to me.

  “Do you want to hear this now, or wait?” he asked.

  “Now,” I said. “The short version.”

  “Okay,” David said. “One day Paul turned up on his motorcycle. Not here—higher up in the pastureland, because it was still summer and they were out grazing their herds. He spent a few days with them, long enough for them to get to like him. Apparently he had already picked up some of the language and was soon speaking it pretty well. Was he that quick?”

  “Yes. A sponge.”

  “He said he was looking for his mother. He told them the story of her disappearance. This touched their hearts. As I said, there was something about him they liked, but they wanted to be sure he was for real. So he told them about his life, that he had spent all those years in a Han prison. Some of these people have served time, too, and he knew all the details of prison life under Mao. They’d heard about the ditch he dug.”

  “So?”

  “So they almost trusted him, but at the same time he was a stranger in the wrong place. They were afraid that the Han would show up at any moment and they’d all be in trouble. They wanted to help him. They also wanted to get rid of him. Some of the old people knew a story about a European woman, not a Russian, who came to live with the Kyrgyz. She came when she was young. She lived among the Kyrgyz until she was very old. The last they heard, she was still living. They told him this.”

  “Was this story the truth?”

  “They don’t know. But it was enough for Paul. He asked directions and took off at once with the two horses he’d swapped the motorcycle for. He left one of the horses by the ravine with his belongings—the stuff Zhang showed you—in the saddlebag. Then he disappeared, riding west. The Han came up from Ulugqat and took the horse and saddlebag.”

  “What about the body they were supposed to have carried down to Ulugqat?”

  “These people don’t know anything about that.”

  David and Askar exchanged a few sentences in Kyrgyz.

  Then David turned to me and said, “He says this European woman married his uncle. She had blue eyes and fair hair. She carried some sort of strange glass container with her wherever she went. He says she’s still alive, living with her son.”

  “Paul found her?”

  “Not that son,” David said. “Askar’s cousin, the child she had with his uncle. His name is Tarik.”

  “Does Tarik’s mother have a name?”

  “Yes,” David said. “In Kyrgyz she’s called Kerzira.”

  Askar told us the rest of the story, or as much of it as he knew. Fifty years before, Lori had appeared out of nowhere into another nowhere, arriving in a Kyrgyz encampment on a stallion, leading two mares. She gave the headman an admission fee in gold when she arrived. She lived with the headman’s family. Despite her wealth—gold aside, the stallion and mares eventually grew into a large herd—she worked as hard as any other woman. The headman’s wives liked her and taught her Kyrgyz household skills. Even in the beginning she spoke enough Kyrgyz to make herself understood. Before long she was fluent, and in tribal dress looked like a light-skinned, gray-eyed Kyrgyz. When Russian or Chinese police or soldiers came around, depending on which side of the border the herds happened to be, she veiled her face and withdrew along with the rest of the women. After a while she married the headman’s youngest brother, putting up five colts and gold as a dowry. Soon afterward she had a child, and after that no one bothered to remember that she was not born a Kyrgyz unless reminded by one of her peculiarities, such as her refusal to be separated from her heavy glass tube and a habit of going for long, unwomanly gallops all by herself. No one knew where she had come from, though she had been wearing Persian dress and riding a Persian horse when she arrived. No one questioned her desire to live the wild bygone life of their mountain tribe. Who in the world would not wish to do so?

  8

  Snow continued to fall in big wet flakes. The jagged rocks that had made the landscape so beautiful yesterday were now softly rounded white globes. The snow was shin deep
. Zikkar decided that it would be unwise to remain where we were.

  “He says we won’t be able to get up the hill and out of the valley even with chains if it snows much more,” David translated. He was hoarse, poor fellow, from the long night of turning three difficult languages into English.

  After tea and more naan and cold mutton, we were on our way. Our Han minders reappeared, wrapped in sheepskins. We hadn’t seen them since arrival. They had been too thinly dressed to go looking for us in a snowstorm, and the one who did the talking launched into a tirade as soon as he saw us. David decided to pretend that he did not understand, and I really couldn’t follow what the man was shouting. He was standing in eight inches of snow in cloth shoes. Midway through the outburst Zikkar took back the sheepskins, so it was a short tantrum. Both Han immediately leaped into the 4Runner, shuddering with cold. It was impossible not to take pity. Before getting into the car I stripped off the thick tight-knit Guernsey sweater I was wearing and handed it over. It was big enough for both of them, and by golly both of them got into it. Quite soon, thanks to the mingled heat of two scrawny bodies wrapped up in good English wool, they were warmer and quieter.

  But no happier. The talker started trying out his cell phone as soon as we reached the crest of the hill above the valley. He had to operate it one-handedly because the other hand was trapped beneath my Guernsey sweater. There was no transmission tower for miles, so naturally the phone didn’t work, but he kept on trying as Zikkar, barely in control of the creeping 4Runner, battled skids and spins and narrowly escaped going airborne over the brink of one precipice after another.