The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  Kalash did not see the houbara yet, but he knew by the noise I had just made that I did. He rose to his feet and took the falcon from its bearer, who removed its hood in the same motion as the one with which he passed the bird to Kalash. The lookouts also stood up and ran toward the houbara. It fled—not into the air but across the ground, moving at almost unbelievable speed for a two-legged animal. Outside of Road Runner cartoons, I had never seen a bird move so fast afoot. One of the lookouts fired a gun at it. He missed, then missed again. I realized that he was trying to make it fly rather than hit it. A third round kicked up dirt about two feet to the bird’s left. At last the houbara took flight.

  It flew like a woodcock, fast and close to the ground, zig-zagging around obstacles as if equipped with sonar. Another shot. The houbara climbed. The sun had been up for less than ten minutes but already the sky was an inverted bowl of indigo, utterly cloudless, fingernail moon still visible on the western horizon, pinprick Venus to the east. Even when climbing the houbara flew very fast. When it was between the horns of the moon from our perspective, Kalash gave a two-note whistle and released the falcon. It rose into the sky quicker than the houbara and in seconds was above it.

  The falcon then dived, overcoming the resistance of the wind with its big wings. Kalash had been quite right. What was happening was beyond photography’s power to capture or even suggest. The falcon fell, the houbara took desperate evasive action. The falcon drove its prey back toward Kalash, who had taken off his sunglasses and was gazing upward, his ebony face shining in rapture. The falcon, talons extended, hit the houbara bustard at speed that I would call blinding except that the opposite was true. At the moment of impact the many elements of the image fragmented. Talons gripped, the houbara twisted in agony, feathers exploded, blood spurted then separated into a spume of vermilion droplets. The falcon’s beak struck, the houbara went limp. The falcon, gripping its prey in its talons, braked its fall with outspread wings.

  The falcon dropped its prey several hundred meters to our front. All four of the servants ran toward the spot, human retrievers gone to collect the kill. Kalash waited calmly, arm outstretched, face lifted toward the circling falcon. He whistled. After what seemed a long time but was probably less than a minute, the falcon settled onto Kalash’s arm. Its curved beak was bloody; so were the feathers on its breast. Kalash gave the bird a piece of meat and spoke to it in a kind of wordless baby talk. The bird’s eye was exactly as Zarah had described it, without memory or mercy. If it remembered anything, I thought, it remembered its dinosaur ancestor doing to the houbara’s ancestor what the two of them had just reenacted in a new world where everything was smaller but outcomes were the same.

  Kalash said, “Did you see everything?”

  “I doubt it. But enough.”

  “Enough?” He paused. “I’m glad to hear that because it’s time for you to go. Captain Khaldun will fly you to Cairo.”

  “All right, thank you for letting me see this.”

  “Remember it and you will understand other things. You understand the map?”

  “I think so. It shows the flight path of the houbara bustard’s winter migration.”

  “You understood. Ibn Awad is an enthusiastic falconer—or did you perhaps already know that? He follows the houbara. It is his only pleasure.”

  Kalash looked at me for a long moment. “I can’t help you more than this and still meet my cousin in paradise,” he said.

  If he was being sardonic I saw no sign of it. I held my tongue. Questions would have been useless even if I had any. As for expressions of gratitude, I supposed that thanking one descendant of the Prophet for betraying another is bad form. Bad Kismet, too, probably.

  Kalash said, “Don’t procrastinate. Ibn Awad is enjoying himself now, but when the houbara are home again, a short time from now, he will act.”

  The lookouts and the bodyguards approached, one of them holding the dead houbara at arm’s length by the feet, the others grinning in celebration.

  Kalash said, “Remember, he’s an old man to whom you owe something for the inconvenience you have already caused him. No assassins this time. Fate will not permit an assassin to succeed. No bullets, no sword, no humiliation. A new Saint Helena’s, but warmer, and with more intelligent guards.”

  He put on his sunglasses and handed off the falcon to its bearer. The lookouts were already far ahead of us, scouting for more houbara bustards.

  3

  “Assuming you were averaging three hundred fifty to four hundred miles an hour, that means that Kalash’s camp was somewhere in the empty quadrant,” Ben Childress said.

  We were in Rome. The time had come for a meeting of all the Old Boys. Ben and I had arrived first and let ourselves into the apartment in the Campo dei Fiori that Charley Hornblower had rented through the Internet. The apartment was on the top floor. We had it for a week. Ben and I were drinking bottled Campari and soda on the tiny terrace. A troupe of acrobatic cats made its way across the face of our building, leaping from balcony to balcony. By craning the neck one could see the wonderful stretched dome of Michelangelo’s St. Pancrazio. Traffic moaned all around us, making discreet conversation difficult.

  Ben was extrapolating the location of Kalash’s camp on the basis of the rough information I had compiled on the flight back to Cairo, when I placed my trusty compass in front of me on the tabletop. This told me that the Learjet was flying northeast. The flight took three hours and thirty-seven minutes from takeoff to touchdown. This was enough data to permit Ben to put his finger on his mental map of the Arab world.

  I had no notion what or where the empty quadrant was, and when Ben surprised me by not explaining his reference in detail, I said, “The empty what?”

  “Quadrant,” Ben replied. “The region where Sudan, Chad and Libya meet. You say there was vegetation?”

  “Low bushes. And rocks.”

  “Hilly?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Northern Chad, most likely,” Ben said. “Somewhere near the Aouzou Strip. Jef Jef el Kébir, maybe. That neighborhood, anyway. Nothing there, not even an oasis, for hundreds of miles. You were lucky that the natives were friendly. Mostly they’re not.”

  He named a tribe of brigands, told anecdotes of robbery, rape and murder of wayfarers. Ben was pulling this esoterica out of his head as if flipping the pages of a guide book. There was no reason to think he didn’t know what he was talking about. Ben had probably used Jef Jef el Kébir as a dead drop at some point in his career or recruited an agent who called it home. And of course he had always been a fellow who knew where every well in the Sahara was.

  I said, “There was a well where we were camped, I believe.”

  “Really?”

  It was plain to see that Ben doubted that, but he wasn’t going to argue with a man who did not know what he was talking about. The truth was, Ben was miffed that Kalash had dropped Ibn Awad’s itinerary into my lap. Ben himself had arrived with great news. With our money, though the young doctor did not know this, Mubarak had bought himself a GPS monitor. When I asked, Ben explained that GPS means Global Positioning System. On his most recent visit to Ibn Awad’s encampment, the one during which he sent Claus Bücher on his way to Vienna, Mubarak’s device had triangulated on U.S. space satellites and calculated his position on the surface of earth to within a few meters.

  “And guess what?” Ben said. “He wasn’t so very far from where you met Kalash.”

  “How far?”

  “I’d have to have an exact fix on Kalash’s camp, but Mubarak thinks he was in southern Libya. The distance between him and Kalash couldn’t have been very much.”

  Kalash’s map was spread out between us. I put my finger on the airstrip I thought was the one used by his Learjet. There was no other airstrip within hundreds of miles.

  “Same airstrip, maybe,” Ben said. “Mubarak was choppered north for half an hour or so after landing. You were near the airstrip?”

  “Within fifteen minutes by Jeep.�
��

  “Maybe you were both guests of Ibn Awad,” Ben said. “Wouldn’t that be rich, if his falcon was catching a houbara bustard just over the next ridge at the very moment that Kalash’s was doing its thing?”

  “Priceless,” I replied.

  However, there was a catch. If Ibn Awad really had been nearby while I was visiting Kalash—and I had to admit the possibility that he was—why was I still alive?

  Ben answered my question even though I had not spoken it aloud. “Maybe what Kalash’s hospitality and the miraculous map really mean is that Kalash is a cat’s-paw of Ibn Awad’s and has been from the start. If so, chances are he’s sending you in one direction while his illustrious cousin goes in another.”

  “Anything is possible,” I said.

  But I didn’t believe it. It was almost impossible to imagine Kalash, the very model of egomania, playing cat’s-paw to anyone. It’s a great thing to have a devil’s advocate on your team. That’s why Ben was on ours. His stock in trade was the dark side of human nature. He was more interested in shadow than sunlight, he never trusted virtue, he had observed that people were never so happy as when they were betraying a trust. He had suborned too many men to betray other men in return for money and the illusion of friendship that he offered. Too many wives had taken off their clothes for him, then washed off his smell and fixed their hair and faces and stepped back into the boring matrimonial movie from which they had escaped for an afternoon while their costar, John Q. Cuckold, was playing his big scene at the office. On the other hand, Ben had his limits. A man who is good at taking advantage of situations—and this was Ben’s forte—usually lacks the imagination to create situations that can be exploited. He must wait for opportunity to come to him.

  I said, “Ben, I hear what you’re saying to me. But we can’t start over. We have to go in the direction in which we’re headed. Everything we know, or think we know, pushes us that way. If I’m wrong I’m wrong.”

  Charley Hornblower was the first to join Childress and me in Rome. This raised the prospect of being locked up with two compulsive pedagogues, but I was glad to see Charley just the same. He brought good news about Harley, who was back on his feet and, according to Charley, entirely himself again. Perhaps even more so if such a thing were possible. He had more energy, less shortness of breath, better concentration since the implantation of his pacemaker. Needless to say Charley had lots to tell us besides this, but before he could begin his briefing, the bells of St. Pancrazio began to toll. The noise was so huge, coming in waves, that you felt that you might be able to reach out and take a handful of it. A yellow cat, frozen now with back arched, tail stiffened and teeth bared, shook its head and yowled back at the bells. It was several moments before any of us could hear again.

  The houbara bustard’s migration, Charley told us, had been tracked from space. Lightweight transmitters—miniaturized versions of Mubarak’s GPS device—had been attached to individual birds. These broadcast to the three GPS satellites in stationary orbit six hundred miles above the Earth’s surface. One bird, released in Abu Dhabi in February, flew 6,600 miles. It stopped in Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan before arriving in Xinjiang in April after fifty-four days en route. It traveled at an average speed of 18.64 miles an hour and covered an average of 787.92 miles between stops. Other birds had also been fitted with transmitters and released. This research established that there were two migratory flocks, one of which bred in western Kazakhstan, the other farther to the east.

  We spread Kalash’s map on the floor, got down on our hands and knees, and measured the distance between airstrips. The desert runways lay about eight hundred miles apart, corresponding roughly to the distance between stops by the migrating houbara bustards. “And look!” said Charley, drawing a path with his index finger. The landing strips staggered toward the east, along the flyway of the houbaras who were headed for Xinjiang and Mongolia.

  “Bingo,” he cried, rubbing his hands. “A perfect match.”

  Too perfect, Ben suggested in body language, though for once he held his tongue.

  That afternoon, Jack Philindros and Harley Waters arrived. David Wong turned up an hour or so later, haggard after the long flight from Hong Kong. Without speaking a word, a wonder never before observed in the voluble David, he took a shower and fell into bed. While waiting for him to wake up I played gin rummy with Philindros. This was a dispiriting experience. Jack took cards as seriously as he took everything else. He showed no mercy, picking up good cards and sticking me with bad ones and whispering “Gin” like an automaton with a one-word vocabulary. This had nothing to do with luck. He simply skunked me. I ended up owing him more than two hundred dollars. The experience reminded me why I had never liked games.

  By the time David woke up, it was after nine o’clock in the evening. This is no very late dinner hour on the Mediterranean. Rome was experiencing a false spring and this had its effect on all of us. In the overheated dusk, young people kissed and fondled by the fountains. Grown-up Romans were even nicer and more talkative than usual. The restaurants had put tables on the side-walk. We set out for an evening on the town—walking separately, to be sure, but all headed for the same restaurant, a kind of ritzy catacomb. The walls were made of fragments of old columns. Noseless marble faces peeked sideways or upside down out of the rubble. All were fakes, made of plaster. Had they been genuine, Charley said, he would have dated them to the first century B.C.

  David loved Italian food. He ordered antipasto and a full plate of pasta, followed by a large steak and topped off by stewed pears and ricotta. This would have been a lot of food even for a man my size, but David had no trouble putting it all away. The restaurant had the high noise level that good restaurants often have, dishes clattering and everyone talking at once. David responded happily to this. Conviviality was important to him. Not a word about business was spoken during dinner.

  Afterward we left separately. Finding the way back to the apartment was a challenge for me. In old neighborhoods, Roman streets are narrow and dark with imperceptible changes in direction that can lead you far out of your way. Everyone who understood the hidden logic behind their twists and turns is long since dead. Before very long I was lost. I didn’t really mind. I liked the smell, the colors, the sound of this city. No matter how many times you had walked down a particular street, there was always some new detail to see—a window, a statue, a fountain. To get lost in Rome was to be civilized by its past. At last I emerged into a small piazza, cobbled and colonnaded and lit by floodlights that illuminated its prettiest features—a small church, a niche in which water flowed from the mouth of a stone fish into a scallop-shell basin. Outside a small restaurant a few late diners sat at sidewalk tables. A very old tenor, accompanied by a very young female guitarist, sang a quavering “Come le rose.” I knew the tune and the name of the song because I had heard it many years before while dining outdoors in Rome with Paul and his first wife, Zarah’s mother. Same tenor, maybe.

  Behind me David’s voice said, “Americano, Lei? ”

  I wish I could say that I knew all along that David was following me. But I didn’t. True, I had been absorbed in the night and the city, but the fact is, I probably wouldn’t have detected him even if I had been fully alert. Even when not in a crowd of other Chinese he had the knack of rendering himself invisible. He had been practicing all his life, but still, he was an alley cat.

  David said, “I smell coffee. Let’s find it.”

  We followed his nose. To my surprise the Pantheon was just around the corner—obviously I had been wandering about longer than I thought—and just down the street was a coffee bar. At this time of night, it was empty. David paid the sleepy cashier and amazed her by ordering a double espresso for me and a cappuccino for himself in pretty fair Romano. Evidently not many Ashkenazi-Chinese came in here speaking the local dialect.

  David drank his cappuccino in one long swallow and then belched, as he had every reason to do, considering what he had had for
supper. He leaned back in his chair as if to relax and let the clock tick. However, I knew that he was merely casing the joint and watching the street. David had something to tell me. It was written all over his face. I did not read what I saw there as a sign of good news to come.

  “There’s been a development,” David said at last. “I wanted to tell you about it before reporting to the rest of the group.”

  He looked solemn. This was very far out of the ordinary. I said, “David, you’re making me nervous.”

  He made no effort to reassure me. “I don’t know if you remember mentioning a certain Ze Keli to Captain Zhang when we were in Urümqui.”

  Ze Keli was the name used by the party functionary who had been Christopher’s interrogator when he was in prison in Xinjiang, the man who had questioned Paul every day for ten years. I had made a mighty effort to recruit or bribe him, using David Wong as the enticer. The effort has failed. Ze was incorruptible, a sort of Maoist Jesuit who thought that Paul was a soul worth saving for the revolution if only he could be persuaded to confess his sins.

  I said, “I remember, but you weren’t present when I asked about Ze.”

  “I heard about it later,” David said, “when the boys from Guoanbu came to see me in Beijing.”

  Guoanbu is jargon for Guojia Anquan Bu, the Chinese Ministry of State Security.

  David said, “They were very curious. This bothered me a little, considering my history with Ze.”

  I said, “What did they want to know?”

  “Why you had brought up this name after so many years. They asked how you even knew the name. Good question. I pleaded ignorance.”

  “And?”

  “They went away. Needless to say my curiosity was aroused. Why were they so fixated on this one small detail? Especially if Christopher was dead, like they said. So I put out some lines.”

  “After all these years?”

  “Ze’s family lived in Shanghai when I was trying to cultivate him. I had other business there. I paid the family a call. They were still there.”