And so he was. He answered the phone himself. And recognized my voice.
“Ah, Horace. The weather is filthy in Paris. How is it in Uzbekistan?”
“Overcast.”
“So I’ve heard. What a fellow you are, Horace.”
“I’m standing here with our mutual friend Kevin and your cousin.”
“Is anyone pointing a gun at you?”
“Not yet. But I am pointing a gun at Ibn Awad.”
“Then you’re in an ambiguous position and so am I. May I speak to Kevin?”
“No.”
“I see. Then why are you calling? What do you want?”
“Reassurance. What exactly are your plans for your relative?”
“I told you. An island in the sun where he can pray in peace. Somehow I’ve gotten the idea from past events that that’s not a solution that would appeal to you.”
“I don’t have the resources to keep him happy and healthy in that kind of assisted living facility.”
“Of course you don’t. On the other hand I have a family obligation, you know. Don’t want to flunk the orals on Judgment Day.”
I had one more question, the only one that mattered. I expected a truthful answer. Kalash was unlikely to lie to someone as lowly as me. It was beneath him. Not only was I his profound inferior in every way that mattered—even my scrap-metal soul, if I had one, was worth far less than his golden one—but he also must have expected that I would be dead in a matter of seconds. I was almost as certain of this outcome as he was, but I was dying of curiosity. Years of my life had been crossed out by my connection to Ibn Awad. What was left of it was hardly worth worrying about.
I said, “Once you have your cousin, you have control of his wealth, correct?”
“I suppose I would have some sort of fiduciary responsibility, yes.”
He was talking about billions of dollars. Ibn Awad still controlled the wealth of his entire country with its huge oil reserves. Although I was a good one to talk, the idea of placing such wealth in the hands of a man who seemed to be a complete cynic made the blood run cold. Not because Kalash actually cared about nothing but because in some hidden part of himself he must care about something very much indeed to keep it such a secret. And in the age of terror, in an age when two versions of the same god were wrestling with each other in the minds of the zealots of two civilizations, what else could he care about but the same mission that obsessed Ibn Awad? This wasn’t a simple case of swapping one bad risk for another. Kalash was more dangerous than Ibn Awad because he was five times as intelligent and absolutely sane. He would get the job done, and quickly, efficiently, remorselessly.
I could never let him get his hands on the money.
I said, “Hold on a moment, will you? I want to ask Kevin a question.” To Kevin I said, “Will you give me the Christophers, all four of them, if I let Ibn Awad live?”
Kevin shrugged. “That’s fine by me.”
“No. You have to guarantee it. I’ll walk Ibn Awad to the plane. Paul and Zarah and Lori and Tarik must be on the tarmac, waiting for us. You must get us away from the Turkmen and get us across the frontier into Kazakhstan.”
Kevin nodded. “That’s a lot of ‘musts,’” he said. “But okay.”
I spoke into the telephone. “Did you hear all that?”
“Every word,” Kalash said. “Of course you can have the Christophers. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to old Paul. But I must have the Amphora Scroll.”
“That’s the price?”
“That and my poor cousin, safe and sound, yes.”
“I must have your promise.”
“You trust me to keep it? I’m touched.”
I said, “Do we have a deal or not?”
“Done,” Kalash said. “Go in peace.”
13
It was a short walk to the airstrip, but Kevin had been muttering into his headset and by the time we got there the Christophers awaited. They looked the same, except for Tarik, who had one arm in a sling. To my surprise Zarah held the hooded Saker falcon on her arm. When Ibn Awad saw her uncovered face and unbound hair he turned his head away and spat, eyes glittering with righteous anger and disgust. Kevin, too, noticed Zarah, but reacted in a more Christian manner. I thought that his eyes might drop out of his head, and it must be said that she made a striking composition with the wind blowing her hair across her face and the huge alabaster bird gripping her slim forearm with its talons and the whirling demons and noise and smoke of chaos all about.
Captain Khaldun was already in the cockpit. The door of the plane was open, the ramp in place. Ibn Awad’s outraged reaction to Zarah’s harlotry had lasted only a moment. He shrank back into the passive old duffer he had been all morning. It was strange how utterly harmless he looked in his muslin robes and black turban and bare feet. His head was slightly cocked, as if he could hear things that the rest of us could not. He wore a slight smile. If it was voices he heard they must have been soothing ones.
Kevin said, “Shall we get him aboard?”
“Are you going with him?”
“Nope. I’m leaving with the fellow that brung me. Wasn’t that the deal?”
“What about Ibn Awad?”
“Minders have been provided. A doctor and a male nurse. Ibn Awad seems to know them.”
“The doctor’s name?”
“Mubarak.”
I laughed. Kevin gave me a sharp look. What else did I know now that I wasn’t supposed to know? It was time to load Ibn Awad onto the plane. At this last minute I was loath to do so. Thirty bearded Turkmen fingered their weapons and watched my every move, looking theatrically grim. There was no way to be sure of what might happen to the Christophers and me after I let Ibn Awad go, especially after my grenades did their work on the left engine of the jet. Whatever they might do, it was unlikely to be friendly and pleasant. Kevin’s men, who were making a point of standing well apart from me and my friends, were our best if not our only hope of getting out of this alive and with all our body parts still attached. Yet I still didn’t even know what the native language of Kevin’s men might be—or Kevin’s either, if it came right down to it.
“Time to load him aboard,” Kevin said. “But first, you and I have some unfinished business.”
His tone was heavy with meaning. Paul gave me a look. So did Zarah. I saw no sign of the Amphora Scroll, but then Lori had never carried it in plain sight.
I beckoned to Paul and handed him my Kalashnikov. While he covered Ibn Awad, I walked over to Lori, who was standing somewhat apart from the others. Tarik moved closer as if to protect her even from me. I did not blame him. The air quivered with tension, Turkmen stood in a ring around us, Kevin’s intentions could not be guessed, confusion reigned. Lori seemed almost as oblivious to it all as Ibn Awad.
Talking to Lori was an echoless experience at the best of times. She simply absorbed whatever you said into the deep silence that seemed to be at the center of her being. I explained about the Amphora Scroll, that Kalash wanted it and that we had to put it on the plane or probably die, in which case it would be taken from her dead body.
She said, “What will he do with it?”
“That’s not going to be a concern.”
“What are you saying to me?”
“That the scroll will be out of your life. Out of Zarah’s life. It will cease to exist right in front of your eyes. Do you understand?”
“You’re certain of that?”
“On my honor.”
Lori looked at Zarah, a long look, which must have been like gazing at herself in another time and place, and perhaps she remembered Heydrich and who knows what else. And then this woman who had guarded the Amphora Scroll, who had carried it next to her skin for more than sixty years and given up everything for it, reached under her voluminous Kyrgyz skirts, brought it out and handed it to me. Tarik gasped. She laid a motherly hand on his cheek, and for a brief moment when she smiled at her son, the one that she loved, she looked as she must have loo
ked when she still looked like Zarah.
I handed the scroll over to Kevin. Solemnly we marched Ibn Awad to the plane. A hostile young man in a white coat whom I knew must be Mubarak and a male nurse met us at the bottom of the ramp. They helped him up the stairs. Kevin and I followed, Kevin carrying the portable oxygen tank as well as the Amphora Scroll. On board the aircraft, he handed the oxygen tank to the nurse and the Amphora Scroll to the doctor, who snatched it from his hand and tossed it into an overhead compartment.
Ibn Awad was being strapped into a large seat like a dentist’s chair, more suitable for an execution than a journey. The male nurse strapped his oxygen tank into the seat next to him. I tried to catch Ibn Awad’s eye; this would be the last time I would ever see him and to my surprise I found myself wishing to exchange some sort of good-bye. The old man breathed easily through his nose tube, eyes seeing afar, a little smile on his face, his head cocked. He seemed to be listening to something pleasant. There would be no good-byes. God had sent messengers for him. He had forgotten me already.
Mubarak said, “Get out.”
He looked as if he might plunge a syringe full of cyanide or plague into my arm if I did not depart immediately and take my revolting kaffir germs with me. I disembarked.
On the tarmac, while Captain Khaldun taxied the plane toward its takeoff point, I gave the impatient Turkmen the Saker falcon and what gold we had left in payment for their dead. They were not happy with the price. Kevin helped with the negotiations, speaking to the Turkmen in their own language, shouting above the whine of the jet engines as the plane taxied, pivoted, then hurtled down the runway for its takeoff.
It rose from the runway and climbed steeply, almost vertically, to avoid the hills in front of it, then banked sharply to avoid the pillar of flame dead ahead. And then, just as I was beginning to fear that the things had been discovered and removed, the grenades I had tossed into the left-hand engine detonated. The engine disappeared in a gout of flame and smoke. The plane shuddered and kept flying. I looked at Kevin, who had taken such an interest in Ibn Awad’s oxygen tank. He was looking at his watch, as if timing something. A second later there was a second explosion, this one inside the cabin. Flames shot from the portholes. A wing fell off. Like a flaming checkmark, the plane cartwheeled, spewed parts, then disintegrated.
Kevin smiled a brilliant smile. “Oxygen,” he said. “You really can depend on it.”
The Turkmen were all looking upward and pointing to the shower of debris.
Kevin said, “Get ready.”
One of his men pulled up beside us in a brand-new SUV.
Kevin said, “Go. Fast.”
I jumped into the driver’s seat and took the wheel. Tarik swept his mother into his arms and leaped in after me. Zarah and Paul took the back seat. Courtesy of Kevin, there was a loaded Kalashnikov for every passenger. We drove away. Kevin and his men made no attempt to interfere with the Turkmen who started to pursue us. It was the Old Boys on the hilltop who got us away. They dropped half a dozen mortar shells on the Turkmen, overturning a couple of their vehicles. The survivors turned around and fled.
It was only my imagination, of course, but I thought I heard schoolboy cheering from the hilltop.
EPILOGUE
Paul Christopher decided to remain dead to everyone except his mother and Tarik and Zarah. The four of them went off together, where I do not know and will not follow. It is my hope that I will see Paul and Zarah again, but if this doesn’t work out we will always have Uzbekistan, not to mention Xinjiang and the several other places where it would be unwise of their little family to settle down.
After we returned to the United States, we Old Boys saw little of each other. We had not really been friends before our search for the grail, just a bunch of fellows who had lived the same life and had more or less the same scores to settle. We did not so much drift apart, as soldiers do after a war, as doze back into ennui. On the whole, I think, we were happier than we might have been if we had not committed this one last folly. Everyday life is a cover identity for operational types. Inside the golfer, the backyard chef, the fond grandfather, the cutthroat remembers what is hidden and listens for the phone to ring at midnight and the muffled voice he knew so well to say, “You’re needed in Berlin.” Most of us had never really expected the phone to ring again, so Jack and Charley and Harley and David and Ben, and I most of all, had reason to be grateful to Paul Christopher for one last trip on the expense account.
With the proceeds of the sale of my house in Georgetown, I lived a comfortable life. Washington did not seem the place to do this. I moved to the Harbor, the family homestead in the Berkshires and rattled around in the company of ghosts whose measured tread across the squeaky attic floor I had known since childhood. Living alone, I limited myself to two vodkas per day, sometimes dared to eat a peach, and cast my mind entirely in the future, which was a tuneful Ruritania in relation to the scorched continents of my several pasts.
It was Harley, naturally, who decided that a reunion was in order. He handled all the arrangements and one November day, the anniversary of the memorial service for the vermilion urn that supposedly contained Paul’s ashes, the Old Boys arrived. They seemed older, smaller, quieter, less opinionated. Conversation lagged. There was no reason to tell one another what we already knew, which was that whatever we had done did not really matter. Our work did not exist, had never existed, not in the annals of history or in the memory of those who had asked us to do it. All of it, going back to our dewy youth, was a laugh, a prank, a game, and like any other game, the one we had just played, our last, had not really changed a thing. There was no remember the day Horace and Kevin blew up the same airplane, no mention of the album of odd new friends we’d made on our travels, then lost forever. Or so we hoped, although we knew there would always be another bomb, another believer, another game of blindman’s buff, and one day a different outcome.
During dinner, Christopherian in its undercooked simplicity— smoked fish, cold soup, rare meat, and the inevitable asparagus—we drank several bottles of Montrachet and Romanée Contis from the well-stocked cellar that Paul had bequeathed to me. We talked about his taste for the pinot grape and his luck with women. At sunset we walked up the hill to the family burial ground, a bottle of Perrier-Jouët in an ice bucket, to drink a toast on Christopher’s grave.
What, Horace? You actually went so far as to mark a fake grave with his name?
Not me—Stephanie, for whom one burial at Arlington had not been enough. She had saved a cupful of what she insisted were his ashes and planted them here and raised a handsome polished stone with Paul’s name and dates carved upon it. I found the thing when I came back from Kazakhstan, and I guess you could say that in a way, for Stephanie at least, Paul had been fastened to the earth at last. In two places, with a third yet to be designated—and if I knew Paul, unmarked.
I poured the bubbly. Memories moved in the circle of dimming eyes that gazed down on Paul’s monument, a last disguise written in stone.
“Old times, old friends, old everything,” said Harley.
We drank. Plastic glasses bounced off the mock headstone. The champagne, as it should, left its half-sweet lingering aftertaste on the tongue.
TO THE READER
Old Boys is a work of fiction in which no reference is intended to anyone who ever lived or anything that ever happened. This disclaimer applies in particular to Ibn Awad, who appeared in two of my earlier novels, The Better Angels (1979) and Shelley’s Heart (1997). In the earlier works, he sponsored a wave of suicide bombings, a flight of the imagination so bizarre thirty-five years ago that it was regarded by many an obstacle to the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. Conversely, some of the events described in the Amphora Scroll are based closely on the Gospel According to John. Where mere information is concerned I have, as usual, attempted to stick to the facts. For details of life, landscape and archeology in Xinjiang province, I drew on the recollections of Robert M. Poole and the writings of
Tom Allen. Some details of life on a country estate in Hungary were suggested by András Nagy’s review in the autumn 1999 issue of the Hungarian Quarterly of The Memoirs of a “Proud Hungarian” by Tibor Scitovsky. The material on falconry is drawn largely from the eleventh edition of Encyclopedia Britannica but also from memories of a long-ago friendship with a falconer who presented my children with a fully trained golden eagle from the Atlas mountains. (Their mother declined the gift.) For data on satellite tracking of the migration of the houbara bustard, I am indebted to an article in Arabian Wildlife by Thery Bailey and Dr. Fred Launay. The material on Soviet Naukograds was mined from the Web site globalsecurity.org. Details of “peaceful” underground nuclear tests in the USSR were drawn from nuclearweaponarchive.org. Everything else came from thin air.
C. McC.
The Old Boys Page 39