The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  But she was up, unhooking her mike, and with a last nod raced back to the show’s main set, which was surprisingly close by, just a few feet away, in fact.

  The lights flashed off, leaving Danzig in darkness as he stood and demiked himself. He’d have to get the makeup off before he left—he looked like a Hamburg tart. He had a speech before the Council of Life Underwriters today at noon, for $7,500. As he unclipped the mike, his bodyguard—a shadow, but a shadow with a .357 magnum—slipped discreetly into place a step back. Uckley today, the ex-marine—and a step behind came Sam Melman, with his bland, pleasant smile.

  “Hello, Dr. Danzig,” the intelligence executive said.

  “Hello, Sam.”

  No hand was offered. Melman stood in his quiet suit—he must be here alone, Danzig realized in amazement, for he saw no entourage of earnest young men, no staff to open doors and call cabs and get coats, which surely a comer like Melman would have by this time earned—and waited patiently. He was a deputy director now, was he not? They’d been curiously friendly adversaries years back on the 40 Committee, when Danzig had been the White House adviser and Melman the slick Agency liaison.

  “Has World War Three begun?” Danzig joked, for what else would bring a hotshot like Melman up from Langley to intercept him this early—not yet eight?

  Melman smiled quietly—he had a deceptive easy warmth about him for such an ambitious man, a charm not unlike Danzig’s own. A clever man, it was said, who if he played his cards right might one day be Director of Central Intelligence. Perhaps even now he had begun to fish for allies.

  “Hello, Dr. Danzig. No, it hasn’t, at least not the last time I checked. A certain matter has come up and I thought I might presume on our earlier relationship for a little chat.” Sam was smooth; Sam was facile. His modest smile and warm eyes beckoned to Danzig.

  “Of course.”

  “Preferably outside the precincts of a network show.”

  Danzig laughed. Yes, sensible.

  “I’m free till noon, when I’ve got a seminar and a speech a few blocks away. Time enough?”

  “More than enough, sir.”

  “Sam, let’s dispense with the ‘sir.’ But I would appreciate it if you’d kneel and kiss my ring.”

  Sam laughed at this standard Danzig line.

  A few minutes later they strode through the Rockefeller Plaza entrance of the RCA Building into the brisk, dirty New York morning. People swirled by, and Danzig coughed once, dryly, in the air.

  “My limo? All right, Sam?”

  “Would you be offended, Dr. Danzig, if I said I’d prefer one of our cars?”

  Danzig, for the first time, began to see the urgency behind Sam’s pleasant demeanor; the Agency didn’t want anything on tape it didn’t control.

  The black Chevy drove aimlessly through the hectic Manhattan traffic, guided by a grim young man, next to whom sat Danzig’s bodyguard. In back, Danzig listened while Melman talked. Danzig held—and occasionally looked down at—the Skorpion shell.

  “And so I think you’ll agree I’m somewhat understating the situation when I say we’ve both got problems,” Melman was saying. “And for once your problem and our problem are the same problems.”

  Danzig looked at the shell. One penny’s worth of metal from the farthest corners of the earth, and everything had changed. He looked up, out the window. Gray buildings lurched by as the car jerked uncertainly through the traffic. New York, always such a festival of sensation. Too much data, too many patterns, too many details, nothing coherent. Washington was a slower, saner city; here you never knew what you were going to get.

  But it all dropped away; it meant nothing. A bullet in this world, in this most violent of all the decades in the most violent of all the centuries, was the ultimate reality, and Danzig was a collector of realities.

  Of course there were always risks, especially in the Middle East, all those zealots, the whole thing so unstable, those fanatics, those bitter exiles. It had been rumored, for example, more than once that the PLO or various of its factions or units had put a mission out to eliminate him during one of his trips; but nothing had ever come of it. Or here, too, in America, there were always risks: cranks, nuts, screwballs, loonies with preposterous grudges; you could never guard against the crazy. But all that was generalized, distant, statistically improbable. That was then; this was now. Were those windows bulletproof? Perhaps. And how do you bulletproof glass, really bulletproof it? Can’t the gunman simply get a bigger gun? And in these crowds of milling, insolent New Yorkers, angry and swarthy, could there really be this special man? Damn him, Melman had said a good man, a trained man. “We trained him ourselves, Dr. Danzig—that’s the tough part. He’s exceedingly competent. I’ll show you the files.”

  No, Danzig had not wanted to see the files.

  He looked again at the cartridge case and realized that while he had authorized airplanes to fly on missions in which so many tons of bombs were dropped on so many square miles in a certain North Vietnamese city, in full awareness of what statistically must ensue, he had never in his life held in his fingers this smallest common denominator of statecraft: the bullet.

  He imagined one striking him, right now, through the glass, in the head. A blinding flash? A sense of surprise, of enveloping darkness? Or would the lights just blink off?

  “It’s not going to do us any good if he gets you; it’s certainly not going to do you—”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Well, I’d like to think we can work together on this thing.”

  Danzig didn’t say anything. He stared gravely ahead.

  “To begin with, we’ve got some suggestions.”

  Danzig remained silent.

  “First, of course, your cooperation. That is, your silence. If the whistle is blown, if the media are brought in—God only knows what sort of a circus this thing could become. And it wouldn’t make you any the safer. In fact, it might put you in more danger.”

  Danzig could see it: pools would be formed all across America, especially in the liberal areas, though also in the South and the Southwest, where he was also hated. When will the Kurd get Danzig? Money would be wagered. It would end up on the nightly news.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good. Then, most importantly, we’ve got to cut down his access to you. If you stay still, you can be protected. If you don’t, then you can’t. You’ve got to cut down on your activities.”

  “I make my living that way. I’m booked for months. For years.”

  “Dr. Danzig, it’s—”

  “Yes, I know. Of course I’ll cut down. I have to. But there are certain commitments that—damn, why did this have to happen?”

  “Then, of course, beef up your security.”

  “Yes.”

  “And lastly—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, we do have something of an advantage in this matter. We happen to have a man who knows this Kurd, who worked closely with him in fact. He even trained him. He was the Special Operations Division officer who went into Kurdistan in ’seventy-three.”

  “Yes?”

  “His name is Chardy. He—”

  “Chardy? My God, Chardy! I remember. He was captured, spent some time in a Soviet prison.”

  “Yes.”

  “Chardy,” Danzig said again, turning the name over in his mind.

  “The fact is, Chardy knows Ulu Beg, how he looks, how he thinks; that makes him immeasurably valuable. And he used to be a pretty good officer in a shooting situation.”

  “Well, I certainly hope this doesn’t come to that. Is he going to run the effort to capture this Kurd?”

  “Not exactly. He’s no policeman. No, we had something else in mind for Chardy, something to take greater advantage of his knowledge.”

  “Yes?”

  “We want to place him with you.”

  “Good God!” Danzig coughed. “With me? I just don’t believe this is happening.”

  15

 
They discovered quickly that he was dead. Reynoldo Ramirez, killed by assailants in his own establishment in the prime of life, the newspaper said. What assailants? The newspaper was silent; so was the Departamento de Policía.

  “They’ve been paid off,” Speight said ominously.

  Come on, thought Trewitt, but he didn’t say anything. He had taken an almost instant dislike to Nogales—to Mexico. Blue and pink slum shacks hanging on the stony hillsides over a cheesy turista section of souvenir stalls, bars, dentists’ offices and auto-trim shops. He hated it. A different quality to the air even, and the jabber of language that he could only partially follow did not ease his anxiety. Trewitt just wanted to get out of there.

  But Old Bill sniffed something.

  “I want to see Reynoldo Ramirez’s grave,” he said. “I want to know the man is dead.”

  Oh, God, thought Trewitt.

  But they had hailed an Exclusivo cab and journeyed to the grave site. The place nauseated Trewitt. No clean Presbyterian deaths in Mexico: the cemetery was a kind of festival of the macabre, primitive and elemental. Crosses and sickly sweet flowers and hunched, praying Virgins painted in gaudy colors. And skulls.

  Trewitt shuddered. He’d never seen the naked thing before, and here it was lying in the dust. Or rather, they: bones and heads everywhere, spilling out of vaults in the dusty hills, clattering out of niches and trenches. A wind knifed across the place, pushing before it a fine spray of sand that stung Trewitt’s eyes and whipped his coat off his body like a flapping cape. He leaned into it, tasting grit.

  “There it is,” shouted Bill.

  They stood by the elaborate marker, even now buried in dusty flowers. A weeping Virgin knelt over her fallen son amid the weeds. Trewitt was standing on a femur. He kicked it away. Looking out he could see scabby Nogales, hills encrusted with bright shacks, sheer walls over bendy little streets; and beyond that the fence of the border, like a DMZ line cutting through a combat zone; and beyond that, American Nogales, which was a neat and pretty town.

  Trewitt looked back. In stone the marker read:

  REYNOLDO RAMIREZ

  MURIÓ EN

  1982.

  “There it is,” he shouted. “Dead end.”

  Speight studied on the thing, looking it over.

  “Wonder who brought the flowers?” he said.

  Who cares, thought Trewitt. It would be dark soon; he wanted to get out of there. He looked across the boneyard to the Exclusivo cab awaiting them, its driver perched on the fender.

  “Look, it’s all over,” said Trewitt. “He’s gone. There’s no link back to the night Ulu Beg came across. Let’s get out of here.”

  But Speight stood rooted to the ground.

  “Anybody could be down there. Or nobody,” he finally said.

  Trewitt didn’t say anything.

  “Maybe we ought to check out that joint of his,” Speight finally said.

  “Mr. Speight, we’re not even supposed to be here. Now you want—”

  But Speight did not seem to hear him.

  “Yep,” he said, “I think that’s what we’ll do.” He started toward the cab, full of purpose.

  Trewitt watched him go, and then realized he was standing alone in the cemetery and went racing after.

  Several hours later he found himself undergoing a most peculiar torment: a deep self-consciousness, an acute embarrassment, a sense of being an imposter, all cut with a penetrating and secret sensation of delight.

  The girl kept rubbing his thigh, the inside of it in fact, with her palm, dry and springy, knowing, educated in a certain way, and was simultaneously whispering of intriguing possibilities into his ear in Pidgin English.

  “You got some nice money?”

  “Ha, ha,” laughed Trewitt uneasily, sipping gently at what was supposed to be a margarita but was most certainly warm fruit juice and ginger ale at eight bucks a crack, gringo rate. Other girls worked the floor of what was now called Oscar’s. They were all tarts, but this one—Anita, just like in West Side Story—was all his, or he hers, as if by treaty or diplomatic agreement. No one impinged and he was trying to draw this out as long as possible, while Speight made inquiries. It occurred to him that maybe he ought to be asking the questions; after all, it was he who had unearthed this Ramirez, had unearthed this whole Mexican thing. He looked about uneasily, however, over fat Anita’s shoulder, and saw in the darkness a sleazy room full of American students and Mexican businessmen. His loafers stuck to the floor; the odor of some kind of industrial-strength disinfectant lingered everywhere.

  “You got some money. We go upstairs, baby?”

  “Well, ahh—”

  No, let Speight handle it. Speight was the old hand, Speight had been around, knew the ropes. And where was Speight? Trewitt had seen him talking to a big boy with a moustache. Had he disappeared?

  “Come on, baby. Buy Anita a little drink. A little drink for Anita, okay, baby doll?”

  “Uh, just a sec.”

  There. There. There was Speight, still with the moustache, talking animatedly at the back of the room. Give it to old Speight: he may have been peculiar in his ways, but he got things done. A pro.

  “Come on, baby. Buy Anita some champagne.”

  Even Trewitt knew enough to nix the champagne—sure to be flat Canada Dry at $200 the jeroboam—and instead okayed something called a Mexican Hatdance: it looked like warm lemonade with a pale pink—did they use the same one over and over?—maraschino cherry in it, at only $12.50 a throw. At this rate he’d have to cash another traveler’s check before long.

  “Is okay?” asked the bartender.

  “Fine, pal.”

  “Is Roberto.” Roberto was a thin, handsome youth—he could not have been twenty yet—with a wispy moustache and soulful eyes.

  “Glad to meetcha, Roberto,” barked Trewitt, heartily el turista estúpido to the hilt, and commenced a little detective work of his own.

  “Say,” he said, “some fella was telling me you all had some excitement here coupla weeks back. A gunfight.”

  “Oh, sí,” said the bartender eagerly. “A man, he was killed right here. Our boss Reynoldo. Bang-bang! Right almost where you are standing, señor.”

  “Shot down?”

  “Just like the television. Real fast. Bang-bang.”

  “Wow.”

  “Roberto,” said the girl in Spanish, “you stupid pig, keep your mouth shut, you don’t know who this asshole is,” then turned to Trewitt with a sweet Indian smile.

  “What’d she say?” asked Trewitt.

  “That you are the handsomest American she ever see.”

  “She’s a fine-looking woman herself,” Trewitt said, squeezing her flank.

  Anita smiled at the compliment, revealing her remaining teeth. Yet Trewitt felt a strange attraction for her. She was so low. Somewhere deep inside his brain a tiny inflammation erupted; an image flashed before his eyes. He tried to banish it; it would not leave; in fact it became more exact, more perfect, more detailed. What drew him on was her offer of perfect freedom: for money you can do anything. It was simple and liberating. Anything. Against certain temptations he knew he was helpless. He could be pretty low himself. He was not a virgin and had twice been engaged; in each case he had made a goddess out of the young woman and fled in horror upon learning she was human. Yet here was a creature so human, so fleshy, so real, so authentic, she was driving him a little nuts. Here was freedom; here was escape. He thought of young nineteenth-century men who fled the hypocrisy of Victorian society and lost themselves in the privacy of the frontier, pursuing freedom and debauchery in the same impulse and, coincidentally, building an empire. American, British, Dodge City or Lucknow, it didn’t matter; it was the same process. And here he was on the same sort of frontier, and here before him was a treasure of the frontier, his for the taking.

  Trewitt shook his head. He could actually see her nipples beneath the clinging white top she wore. They were the size of fifty-cent pieces.

  �
�Who did it, Bob? Gangsters?” Trewitt tried to get back on the track.

  “Did what, señor?”

  “The bang-bang. Poor old Reynoldo.”

  “Rest in peace,” Roberto said. “Bad men. Evil men. Reynoldo has lots of enemies and even some of his friends—”

  “Shut your mouth, stupid one,” snapped Anita.

  “What did she say?”

  “She say she like you very much.”

  “Well, I like her too. A lot.”

  “Come on, baby,” said Anita, running her open hand up the inside of Trewitt’s leg, letting it linger warmly high up, “make Anita a happy girl.”

  Oh, Jesus, it felt good.

  He swallowed, licked his lips.

  “Anita make you real happy. There’s a nice hole for you—take your choice.”

  Trewitt glanced about. Speight had vanished.

  Trewitt thought, Well, if he needed me he would have gotten me, right? He just disappeared. What am I supposed to do now?

  “Baby, we can do anything. Anything,” she whispered. “I treat you real good. I make you real happy.”

  Oh, Jesus! Trewitt fought until he felt quite noble and then surrendered to his darker self meekly, without a whimper.

  “Upstairs,” he croaked.

  “Anita must wash your thing. It’s the rule,” she said.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Thing, she called it. He winced.

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice so quiet he had trouble hearing it himself. He tried to relax on the small cot but looked up to a Day-Glo Virgin on black velvet. It was only one of several religious gimcracks strewn and taped about the room: pictures, little painted statues, crucifixes. Was this some kind of shrine? His pants, meanwhile, were bunched around his knees, although he still wore his coat and tie and shirt; and a man with a coat and tie on whose balls are hanging out feels sublimely ridiculous. He gripped his wallet in his right hand.

  Oh, this is a rotten idea. This is a really rotten idea. You ought to get out of here. You just ought to get the hell out of here. But he could not figure out how, and besides he’d already paid.

  No door, of course. What did he expect, a Holiday Inn, complete with shower and Magic Fingers vibrator under the bed? Only a curtain sealed the dim little room off from the corridor and although the lights were low, the traffic in the hall was considerable. A regular rush hour. Now and then a peal of Mexican laughter would rise through the odor of disinfectant—it smelled like a hospital up here—and a man would swagger down the hall.