The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  “I be back, baby,” Anita said.

  She dipped out the curtain and returned in a moment, holding a wash basin brimming with soapy water and a rough cloth.

  “Rub-a-dub-dub,” Trewitt joked bleakly.

  She began to scrub him. She rubbed and wiped and grated without mercy to cleanse his tender equipment and though he had not been exactly fierce with desire in the preceding few moments, under this humbling assault he felt himself shrinking ever further.

  “Be careful,” he complained. Was she trying to erase it?

  “It’s nice, baby,” she said. “It’s not real big or nothing, but it’s real good shaped, and clean. And gringos been trimmed.”

  Trewitt smiled tightly at this wonderful compliment.

  She dried him roughly and then pulled back in triumph, flipping the towel into the hall, where it swirled to the floor.

  She stood above him, an absurdly plump woman of nearly thirty-five, in a cheesy dress, all cleavage and density, an infinity of circles, globs, undulating horizons. She smiled hideously. Backing off, she reached down for her own hem, grabbed it and peeled upward, the dress constricting her flesh as it was yanked until she popped it off with a final tug and stood in cotton drawers, great gushy, floppy breasts with those enormous dark nipples wobbling across her front.

  Now she’d step from those drawers next—panties was too modest a word for a garment of such magnitude—and a part of him was disgusted and debased, while at the same time another part, recovering, became entranced. She knelt to divest herself of the drawers, pivoting to deposit the huge filmy things on the table under the Day-Glo Virgin, and turned to face him, her bush a blot of darkness that seemed to separate her bulging belly from her thunderous thighs, without which the whole mass would collapse upon itself.

  Yet the very peculiarity of the image—a huge Mexican prostitute standing above his pale gringo body, ribsy and stark—commandeered his imagination. The contrasts were vast and enticing: her hugeness, his frailty; his reluctance, her greed; her expertise, his clumsiness; his repression, her earthiness. His penis picked itself up in salute to the intensity of the moment.

  “The mouth,” he commanded hoarsely.

  She knelt, obedient to his wishes.

  Speight waited out back, beyond the sewer, in the yard of the shop called Argentina. He could smell the sewer, the suffocatingly dense odor of human waste, and hear water trickling through it. It was quiet here in the junky, walled yard but beyond, on the street, he could see whores prowling in the pools of light from the intermittent overhead lamps. The old fieldman in him looked for escape routes, just in case; but there were no escape routes, no real ones. Sure, he could hit the wall if things turned ugly, but at his age there was no way he’d scale ten feet of brick if somebody was shooting at him. So it was a simple, no-option proposition: he was lucky or he was not lucky.

  He knew he should have briefed the boy—what was his name? It escaped him for just a moment: Trewitt, Trewitt. But Speight never knew what to say to such youngsters—there were so many of them these days, and he knew they thought him an old fart, long out of it, a relic, an antique. And what could the boy have done anyway? Covered him? With what? No, he would have complained and groused and second-guessed. Trewitt filled Speight with depression. If he was the future, the future was bleak. Speight didn’t think Trewitt would work out.

  He glanced at his watch. Oscar Meza had said fifteen minutes and twenty had passed. Speight coughed nervously, picked some scum off his lips, and wished they’d get there.

  Five hundred dollars.

  That’s what it would cost for a chat with Reynoldo Ramirez, a chat with a dead man.

  Oscar Meza, proprietor of Oscar’s, formerly El Palacio, had wanted a thousand. Speight had thought more in terms of $300. Five hundred was all right, though he knew he’d have a tough time sailing it by Yost Ver Steeg if he didn’t come up with something nice and solid. In the old days there was always enough money. You wanted it, you got it. No questions asked. In those days the outfit went full-out, first-class. Now, nickels and dimes and young smart kids who thought you belonged in a museum or a paperback novel. He knew he thought too frequently about the old days. Now—

  The car swung into the yard. Speight crouched, watching. It was an old Chevy, a ’58 or ’59, rusted out badly. There must have been thousands of them in Nogales, rotting Mex cars, with broken windows and lead-painted fenders and doors from other vehicles.

  Come on. Let’s go, thought Speight.

  The driver killed the engine. It died with a gasp and the car ticked hotly for several seconds. Speight could see the two men scanning the yard. They couldn’t see him behind these crates. He could just sit there. It wasn’t too late to forget it.

  But he knew he couldn’t forget the $500.

  The $500 was now running the show.

  Oh, hell, Speight thought.

  He stood, stepped out.

  “Over here, amigos,” he called.

  Now he was finished. He’d done it, or rather, had it done. He remembered similar moments from books—Rabbit Angstrom rising from the whore Ruth, Stingo from his Sophie—but they were no help at all. His experience was of a different denomination, with fat Anita on a dirty bed on a sticky floor in a room that smelled of Lysol, under the eye of a glowing Virgin. Yet he felt rather good. In fact he was astounded by his bliss. The actual moment, the actual ultimate instant, with the hulking woman down beneath him, working hard, his own hands gripping something, his muscles tense, his mind pinwheeling: yes, indeed. He smiled.

  “Round the world, baby? Only feefty more dollar?”

  “No. Oh, uh, no, I don’t think so,” Trewitt said dreamily.

  “Come on, baby. We can have some more fun.”

  “Ah. I don’t think so. I appreciate it, I really do. I just don’t think so.”

  “Sure, baby. It’s your money.”

  She retrieved her underpants and pulled the dress over her head and there she was, presto chango, the old Anita. It was as if nothing had happened, and he realized that for her nothing had.

  He pulled up his pants, tucked in his shirt, and fastened his belt.

  “Ten dollars, baby.”

  “Ten dollars! I already paid. Hey, I paid you a fair amount!”

  “Rent, baby. You gotta rent the room. Is not free, nothing free. For the towel, the clean sheets”—yeah, fresh out of the dryer sometime in 1968—“It’s for the big boss. He beat me up if I don’t get it.”

  What was the difference? But this was costing a fortune. He was counting it out in ones when he heard the siren.

  He raced down the steps two at a time, almost spilling out of control at the end as he lurched into the now-empty bar. The boy Roberto quietly polished glasses and nearby Oscar Meza sat at a table talking with a bulky policeman in a crisp tan uniform with a yellow tie—yes, yellow, canary yellow, screeching yellow—whose beefy shoulder was looped with a final ludicrous touch, a gold braid.

  Trewitt tried to gain command of himself, but the cop looked over to fix him with a set of dead eyes.

  Trewitt smiled casually, and tried to shuffle out.

  He heard the word gringo, and the two men broke into laughter.

  Trewitt reached the door and stepped into the night. He could see nothing except the railroad tracks beyond the street and beyond that, Oscar’s competition, the Casa de Jason, another nightclub. Trewitt descended the steeply pitched parking lot to street level and turned. Five hundred yards ahead, beyond an arcade of canopied shops adjacent to the railroad tracks, lay the border; he could see it in lurid light, and the beggars and cabdrivers collecting there, a cruel, high fence, a traffic jam, booths, and a fortresslike bridge of offices overhead. He could see no flag; but, beyond the fence, he saw something perhaps more emblematic: the golden arches of McDonald’s.

  Then he saw the crowd. It had gathered just up the street at what seemed to be a bridge at the corner of Calle Buenos Aires and the Ruis Cortina. Indians, a few Americans, M
exican teenaged girls in tightly cut American jeans and blouses, but mostly policemen. Three or four gray pickups had been parked nearby and by their uniformity Trewitt realized they were official vehicles.

  Warily, he walked into the crowd; he could hear, among other things, the trickle of water.

  It smelled here. Something? What? The odor was overwhelmingly familiar. His nose picked it apart but could not identify it—too many other odors were woven into it. But it was disgusting.

  The crowd had gathered at the bottom of the street. It was a cobbled, climbing street that traveled up the side of a hill, lit intermittently by overhead lamps. He could see signs of the shops that ran partway up the hill, before the road disappeared into darkness: a dental clinic, a TV and stereo shop, a small food shop on the other side of the street, and a few others. But Trewitt pushed his way through the crowd and came soon enough to the wall, where he stood by three policemen who were talking rapidly among themselves. Lights—there were lights back here. He could feel the warmth, the human warmth, of people all around. He was aware that the blank brick wall that stared back at him twenty feet away was the wall of Oscar’s, of the whorehouse; the gurgle of water was very strong indeed, but he could not quite get to the edge, to look into the—the whatever it was that lay before him and had drawn all these people.

  He gave a last, mighty shove, and broke through two men and came to the edge.

  The scene, in fact, was a phenomenon of light. The Mexican faces, fat and slack, Indianesque in their unreadability, almost Asian, and the pencil moustaches; and the indifferently blazing headlamps from the police trucks, throwing beams that cut this way and that through the crowd, and a jumble of shadows on the wall beyond. And the Spanish, against it all, the Spanish in a thousand babbling tongues and incomprehensible dialects, jabbering, spiraling through the air. And the odor: he now recognized it for human waste, the stink of cesspool, of outhouse, of backed-up pipes, the smell of the toilet, the urinal, the smell of defecation. Miasmatic, it covered him like a fog, drilling through his sinuses; he winced at its power, feeling his eyes well with tears.

  Bill Speight lay on his back in the sewer. Trewitt, at the edge, could just now make him out. Three or four different light beams pinned the old man against a cascade of stones and beer bottles and rusty pipes and assorted junk. The police were talking about las botas, Trewitt overheard as he stared at old Bill in the sewer.

  Boots.

  That was it: there was a delay until some high rubber waders could be found; no man would descend into the muck without them.

  A flashbulb popped and in its brightness Trewitt could see that the old man had taken some kind of heavy-caliber or big-bore shell in the left side of the face. Shotgun, perhaps. The features had been peeled back off that side of his head; yet on the other, astonishingly, the old Bill prevailed. The vision so diverged from Trewitt’s assumptions of human anatomy that he could make no sense of it.

  Speight was soaked by the rushing water from a pipe. A shoe had come off and floated downstream, where it wedged against a rock. It was an old Wallaby.

  They’d blown the side of his head in and thrown him into a sewer behind a whorehouse, Trewitt thought dumbly. He accepted and did not accept it. Only yesterday, as he sat throwing down rum-and-Cokes, old Speight had numbed him with an endless tale of the Korean War, an account that could have been in a foreign language, so full was it of obscure references, improbable characters, unlikely events. Halfway through, Trewitt realized he must have missed something important, for he had no idea what the man had been talking about. Now he was dead. In a sewer. Shot in the face.

  Trewitt gripped the bricks before him for steadiness. Oh, Jesus, poor old bastard. He realized he was trembling, that he was cold. He looked again at Bill. Bill had been so alive just a few minutes ago. Trewitt thought he might be sick. He didn’t know what to do. He could hear the police asking questions.

  “Anybody know this old bird?”

  “He was with another gringo in Oscar’s. A young one.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Still with his girl friend.” There was some laughter.

  “They get those boots yet?”

  “Yes, they just arrived. Who’s going down there?”

  “Call Washington. Have them send a vice-president.” More laughter.

  Then something occurred to Trewitt.

  They—whoever they were—killed Speight for trying to find out about Ramirez.

  He, Trewitt, had been with Speight.

  He, Trewitt, had asked about Ramirez.

  And then, and only then, did he panic.

  16

  On a Saturday night in Boston, in her high-ceilinged old room, Chardy lay beside her in the dark. Sleep had never come easily for him and it evaded him tonight. But that was fine; he would just listen to the breathing.

  The night’s lacework of shadows lay across the far end of the room, webs and links and flecks of brightness; moonlight threaded through the dark, gleaming cold. Chardy anchored himself against the coming of a bad minute or two by putting a hand against her arm. In Chicago there’d never been anything to touch.

  Sometimes, then, over those years—frequently, if he was honest about it—he’d awaken weeping. A secret shame: big guys don’t cry. Sometimes it was his back, which to this day became occasionally infected and could be quite painful. Or sometimes a sensation, a vision, would set it off: a twinge of pain, a picture of a hot blue flame. Or sometimes something even stupider: some police officer or fireman or boy scout’s sudden heroism, as vicariously experienced through the newspaper; or an old pro basketball player, on the line looking at a one and one with a whole season’s weight perched on his shoulder; or a young kid, a freshman, taking a jump shot in the last second of an NCAA game. It was the contrast that wrecked him each time: they’d passed their tests, he’d failed his.

  Or he wept in confusion. There were so many things about it he didn’t understand even now. Some aspects of it just didn’t add up. He’d break it down and put it together again in a hundred different ways and it still never made sense. It was like one of those awful modern novels that everybody hated except three critics, full of fragments of plot, surrealistic moments of great vividness, odd discordant voices, textures achingly familiar but at the same time unknowable. He was not even certain what he did remember and what he did not; perhaps they’d used drugs on him. Whatever, it was all scrambled up; he could not get inside it.

  Or he’d weep in rage. Punching walls was nothing new and once he’d broken his wrist. He dreamed of smashing heads: Speshnev’s, Sam Melman’s, his own. Them all: the Russians, for destroying him; his own side, for the cold, detached fury they’d directed at him; buddies like Frenchy Short for never coming by, whatever the rules—though of course Frenchy could not have come by, for even then he was dead; Johanna, for confirming his vision of himself. And, of course, last and most: himself. Sometimes he looked for fights. A cold need for pain would haunt him; he’d head for Rush Street and throw himself on somebody’s girl, not caring for her at all; and the guy would have to challenge him and the guy would always have friends and Chardy would always wear a black eye for days, or lurch about with cracked ribs; he’d had three teeth knocked out—he wore an old man’s bridge now—and a bad laceration on his chin, which the beard hid.

  Nuts. Chardy, you are nuts.

  Yet now, lying in the bed in the black New England night, it suddenly occurred to him with swift joy that he had a kind of chance. For with Johanna, all things were possible, a whole universe of things.

  He felt he could save Ulu Beg from Ver Steeg and Lanahan. He could even save Joseph Danzig. He could save Sam Melman. All of them linked together by events of the past, chained and doomed, but he could break the chain; he felt the power. Ulu Beg, last reported at the border, moving probably toward them. He’d save him, and bind her to him forever. He’d make Beg in a crowd coming in on Danzig, and he’d nail him with a tackle and calm him down; then he’d talk to th
em; he’d get it all straightened out, somehow.

  It’s only been a week; there’s plenty of time left.

  Ulu Beg, I’ll save you. He owed him, for not only had Ulu Beg brought him together with Johanna in the first place, seven years ago as now, he’d also, by allowing however accidentally his target to be known, virtually removed Johanna from the realm of interest of Miles Lanahan and Yost Ver Steeg and whatever other dark lords the two of them served. Chardy, whose importance seemed also to have diminished in the past several days, was for now free to travel on weekends and be with her, as he was now.

  She moaned in her sleep, and shifted. He could not really see her, for the moonlight did not touch this corner of the room, yet he felt her: warmth, weight, sweetness of odor, a presence. Her arm warm and dry against his hand.

  The telephone rang.

  Chardy jumped at the noise, pulled himself up in the bed, and looked at his Rolex, which announced the hour of four.

  Johanna stirred in the dark and seemed to swim for the telephone. He heard her speak briefly; then she turned.

  “For you.”

  He took the phone.

  Miles said, “Chardy? What the hell are you doing there?”

  “It’s the weekend, Miles. I can go anywhere.”

  “Not anymore you can’t.”

  Chardy waited, and finally the young man said in a breathless, unpunctuated sentence, “Trewitt and Speight in Mexico and we lost Speight somebody blew his face off with a shotgun behind some whorehouse in Mexico where he wasn’t supposed to be.”

  Chardy closed his eyes at the image. Behind a whorehouse. Old Bill, who was always around.

  “Paul,” Johanna said, “Paul, what is it?”