The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  “Yost wants you down here. There’s an early flight into National from Logan. We’ll have somebody meet you.”

  Old Bill. In Mexico? Now why kill him? What had he come across? Who did it—the opposition, some jealous boyfriend, gangsters, a hunter whose shotgun wasn’t on safe?

  But there weren’t any accidents in this sort of game.

  “Paul, that flight. You’ll be on it?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Chardy said, feeling suddenly that things had just changed and that the safety of the bedroom in which he lay hidden just seconds ago was forever gone. It frightened him a little. And then he had another thought.

  “Look, Miles, you better get some people down there to bring that kid in. I could go myself. Without an old hand like Speight, that kid could get himself in a lot of trouble.”

  “Trewitt is missing,” said Lanahan coldly.

  “I see,” said Chardy.

  “He’s dead too, you know,” said Lanahan.

  Chardy sighed. It was how these things worked.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, I suppose he is.”

  17

  Someone in the Dayton bus station had stolen his money.

  Ulu Beg sat very still and tried not to panic. But without money he was dead. Any man in America without money is dead, but he would be deader than most, with no place to turn, no one to go to, and nothing but the Skorpion. He was still hundreds of miles from shelter.

  They had given him a lot of money.

  “By their standards you are a rich man. You could buy a Chevrolet car or a motorboat.”

  “I do not desire a Chevrolet car or a motorboat.”

  “Of course not. But remember, in America money is life. All things are possible for the man with money, all doors open, all women eager, all policemen friendly.”

  He sat in a plastic chair in a bright waiting room and tried to reconstruct the last seven or eight minutes. The bus from Louisville to Dayton was late, held up in traffic in Cincinnati. There had been a rush to get off. He had been mostly among black people, emotional, and at the arrival gate much hugging and squeezing had occurred as families reunited. He pushed through into this main room, all pale plastic, shiny and new. A few policemen and many more blacks stood about, also airmen in their blue uniforms.

  And that is when he felt the lightness in his pocket.

  Now seven or eight minutes had passed. He knew it had to have happened as he pushed through the blacks. So: a black person.

  He examined them, wondering if the thief had fled instantly, and thought not. His eye searched out the blacks. An old man, invalid, in huge overcoat, talking crazily to himself. A beggar? Two tough boys with mounds of hair dancing to radios in a corner. A dapper businessman sitting three seats away, reading a magazine. Or a fat old woman in a flowered hat.

  He didn’t know what to do; he was helpless.

  In the wallet, he had over $3,000. He could not go to the police. He ached at the loss of it.

  He saw a third boy approach the two with the radios. They conferred quietly and then a ceremony began: one, then the other, slapped the outstretched hand, then clasped him by the wrist.

  They were big young men in their late teens with unreadable faces and brown, blank eyes.

  Ulu Beg stood, gathered his pack, and walked across the bus station to the three of them.

  “You have a thing of mine. So give it back.”

  “Say what, Jack?” They looked at him suspiciously.

  “You have a thing of mine. Give it back. Then, no trouble.”

  “What you talkin’ ’bout, man?”

  “A wallet. A wallet is missing.”

  “Don’t know no motherfuckin’ thing about no wallet.”

  “My wallet. I take it back now, please. Okay. No trouble.”

  “This dude lookin’ for some trouble.”

  “You have my wallet,” Ulu Beg said.

  “Jack, take your face outa here.”

  “You have my wallet.”

  “Some kind of crazy motherfucker. Man, he tryin’ for a trip to Disneyland.”

  “Let’s get outa here. Crazy motherfucker make me nervous.”

  “Let’s cut his ass up some.”

  “No, man. He motherfuckin’ crazy.”

  “You have my wallet.”

  The three boys began to back away, confirming for Ulu Beg their guilt.

  He followed them.

  “Shit, man, you nuts.”

  He followed them into the night.

  They crossed a wide street under bright lights and headed toward a railway viaduct. They turned and walked up a small road that led up an incline.

  “Hey, boy, we goin’ up here, you come along and we bust yo’ face.”

  “My wallet,” he called.

  He could make out their dark forms standing at the end of the road on a kind of crest.

  “Those boys hurt you bad, mister.”

  He had not seen the woman. She stood just a few feet away, under the bridge.

  “They cut your face up. They make you walk with a limp for a long time. They even kill you.”

  “But my wallet. They have my wallet.”

  “Honey, ’less you got a million dollars in that wallet, you stay here. Don’t be no crazy fool.”

  He could no longer see them. Had they escaped? Urgently he began a kind of run, there was nothing here except mud and cinders as the road climbed up to track level. He reached into his pack and felt the Skorpion. But then he wondered what would happen if he shot them with it. There’d be a huge commotion, an extravaganza, a mess.

  He reached the tracks. On either side the lights of this bleak Ohio city rolled away. He could see tall buildings, all lit up, a mile or so away.

  “Boy, you some kind of motherfuckin’ dumb.”

  “Gonna cut yo’ ass bad, motherfucker.”

  They were behind him. He turned. He saw a blade spring out.

  “Cut his fuckin’ ass. Go on, man, cut his fuckin’ white ass.”

  The boy with the knife came at him. He was the bravest, the meanest. He led with his blade, feinted with it.

  “Come on, motherfucker, come on,” he shouted.

  He flicked the blade toward the Kurd’s throat and Ulu Beg hit him with his open hand across the neck, crushing him to the ground. The blade clattered away. Something lashed into his head. One of the others had a strange fighting device of two stout sticks united by a short chain, and he’d just caught Ulu Beg above the right eye. He twirled it menacingly and Ulu Beg felt the swelling on his forehead.

  “Gonna git you, motherfucker,” the boy said and Ulu Beg leapt under the weapon and caught the hand that held it, then hit the boy an upward blow in the throat, knocking him back coughing and gagging. The third boy raced down the tracks.

  Ulu Beg went and took the wallet from the boy he’d hit in the throat. It was not his. The boy lay on the ground, moaning.

  “Somebody take from me, now I must take from you,” he said.

  He picked up his pack and went down the hill to the road.

  “Baby, I didn’t think you was comin’ back.”

  She startled him again.

  “I was about to call a cop.”

  “No. No. No police.”

  His sudden fierceness frightened her. She stepped back and he turned.

  “Baby,” she said, “you don’t want no police botherin’ you, you best not go walkin’ nowhere lookin’ like that.”

  He felt blood running down his face from where the boy had struck him with the stick. He reached, wiped it away with the back of his hand. His hand was bloody. More blood came to his face.

  “You banged up.”

  He looked at her. She was in her forties, a solid-looking woman. She wore a wig and smelled of perfume.

  “Help me,” he said.

  “You get your wallet back?”

  “No. Yes!” He pulled the boy’s wallet out of his pocket. He opened it.

  “There is no money here,” he said.

&nb
sp; “Where you get that?”

  “From the boy.”

  “You done took them three?”

  “I knock them down, yes.”

  “Honey, you best come home with me.”

  18

  Chardy arrived bleary-eyed, his nerves edgy, ready for a fight. He had adrenaline coursing through his veins by the quart, he could feel his eyes dilated painfully, his breath shallow and tense. In the old days, when you lost somebody you’d go in and kick some ass. It was one of the oldest, the best rules, a rule that would have helped Bill Speight—or any agent—in his last moment or two. You always got back, you always went them one better; it was all personal. There were no truces. And maybe a part of him felt some joy, though he’d never admit it. For here at last was a prospect of action.

  But when he crashed into the office, expecting men loading magazines into exotic automatics, others looking at maps, still others chatting bitterly in corners, he found only Miles, sipping coffee.

  “Where is everybody?” Chardy barked, at first furious that they’d left without him.

  “Relax, Paul. Jesus, you look half-crazy.”

  “You said it was an emergency, you said to get down here, you said—”

  It occurred then to Chardy that he’d misread it all. Something in Lanahan’s amused eyes, also the absence of stale, smoked-out air in the room, the absence of cigarette butts. Lanahan lounged at Yost’s desk, as though trying it on for size and finding it fit nicely.

  “Things have cooled. Considerably,” Miles said, the half-smirk on his face.

  “I don’t—”

  “Certain realities have set in. We got some news on Bill. We’ve doped it out. We’ve also got some orders from up above, declaring Mexico off-limits. And—”

  “Where is he?”

  “Where is who?”

  “Come on, Miles. I smell Sam Melman in here. I smell Melman all over this place. Come on, Miles, where is he?”

  “This is Yost’s operation, Paul. This is Yost’s office. You’d better get that straight.”

  “I smell Sam in this, Sam’s a great one for cooling down, for taking it easy and slow, for not making any mistakes, for—”

  “Paul, here are facts. Fact number one: the Mexicans have raised all kinds of hell. We have an informal agreement with them and part of it is that we don’t run covert operations in their country without clearing it first with them.”

  “For Christ’s sakes, this wasn’t any operation. It was some old man and a kid—”

  “We know that. But try to tell it to them. Look, it’s a delicate working arrangement: they let us have all kinds of latitude in Mexico City around the Soviet Embassy, which is the hub of a lot of KGB activity. We have to protect that freedom. They’re very kind to us; we make a lot of mileage off that kindness. All right?”

  Chardy looked at him sullenly, unsure suddenly of a reply.

  “Fact number two: oil. Oil talks in this world, loud and clear, and the Mexicans have tons of the stuff. So over and above anything on our level is that long-term issue. What they have and we need. We have to be very careful with them these days so that we can drive our Cadillacs around. Okay? We don’t call them wetbacks or spics or greasers or zooters. We treat them politely, on all levels. So we’re not going to bust in, shooting up some place when—”

  “Kid, one—maybe two—of our people got clipped. Now in the old days—”

  “It’s the new days, Paul. Fact number three: we know who killed Speight.”

  Chardy looked at him.

  “There’s no Iron Curtain involvement, no Middle Eastern involvement. It doesn’t have anything to do with Ulu Beg. There’s no connection. It was plain, ugly, stupid luck.”

  “Who?”

  “Poor Speight walked into a gang war. We have it he and Trewitt were very interested in coyote outfits—that was their brief, their only brief, to see what they could dig up on whoever smuggled Ulu Beg into this country. That, and only that. But they had to go a little further, and got themselves into the middle of a big fight in the Mexican mafia. It was something over a bar, the Palace, El Palacio, really a whorehouse. Stupid Bill walked into it. Asking questions like he was some kind of crime reporter. I don’t know what got into him. It was a terrible, stupid accident.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Chardy.

  “You don’t want to believe it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Yost believes it.”

  “And where the hell is he?”

  “Home.”

  Chardy picked up the phone.

  “Give me the number.”

  “No, Paul. There’s no point. He’s had a long night, just like we—”

  “Give me the number!”

  “You’re in no state to be talking on the phone. To anybody.”

  “Give me Melman’s number, then. Goddammit, Miles—”

  He made a move toward Miles, realizing he was dangerously near being out of control.

  But Miles held firm.

  “Just take it easy. Just settle down. Jesus, you old cowboys, you just can’t wait to stir things up.”

  “He didn’t have the guts himself to face me, did he, Miles? Yost.” He thought of Yost—an unusual occurrence; he seldom thought of the man at all, but only of Sam Melman—and could not really conjure up a face. He remembered glasses and neatness and placidity and suits and that was all. “So he left you to do the dirty work. And you’ll do it. You sort of enjoy doing it.”

  “Paul—”

  “And now we kiss Mexican asses. Mexican! Jesus, the fucking Mexicans!”

  “You better get used to the real world, Paul. You better get used to the eighties. This isn’t ‘Nam or Kurdistan or somebody’s dirty little secret war. This is America. You do things certain ways here. All right?”

  Chardy looked at him with great sadness. The world according to Lanahan was a dreadful place. In the old days, Special Ops always got its people out or at least back; and if it could only get the bodies, then it made certain someone on the other side had some burying to do too.

  “Sometimes I wonder how things got so screwed up, Lanahan,” Chardy said, wanting Johanna very much all of a sudden.

  But Miles wasn’t interested.

  “They’re bringing the body back. There’s going to be a funeral. You’ll be there, I assume.”

  Chardy nodded. He hated funerals but he’d go anyway. Old Bill. Frenchy. The business had turned so cold, and it was squeezing the old ones out so fast it wasn’t funny.

  He looked at Miles, an inheritor, and wondered how he could ever explain all this to him, but the kid glared at him and muttered something about how he’d better get himself cleaned up.

  19

  It was one of those curious events that briefly unite a dozen separate worlds, whose representatives, forced awkwardly to confront each other, stood around in stiff, silent groups. Several generations—contending generations, in fact—were there: the old warriors, ex-OSS types; and Chardy’s bunch, Cold War and Vietnam hell-raisers; and the later, ascendant Melman crowd, drones, realists, the computer brigade. Speight had known and been known to them all. And outsiders, youngsters, presumably junior members of the administration of the moment, and maybe a staffer or two from House and Senate intelligence committees; and maybe some neighbors; and family.

  Chardy, standing apart from the surprisingly large crowd ranged around the grave site and across the soft slopes of Arlington—Washington, falsely bright in the spring sun, gleamed across the river, through the dogwoods—saw with surprise that the family was young. Speight had married late then; or was it a second marriage? He didn’t know. Speight had never said. At any rate, the widow in black, veiled and weeping, stood next to Yost Ver Steeg, and nearby were three little boys, Sunday-dressed, hurt or baffled.

  Yost stood as though dead. The widow leaned on him, but Chardy guessed the strength was cold, not warm. This wouldn’t be a Yost Ver Steeg scene; he’d play it badly, although as Bill’s last field supervisor, protocol mandated tha
t play it he would. His dignity was not so much serene as merely placid; he radiated no calm into the chasm of grief. Bill’s boys did not like him, Chardy could tell, and even as the ceremony demanded their attention, they shifted and fidgeted with repressed energy. Yost stood without rocking, knees locked, hands clasped dryly together. His crisp hair was short and perfect; a glare caught on the surface of those glasses again, blanking out the eyes. He looked like the lone executive at a miner’s funeral.

  Blue soldiers from a famous Army unit handled the ceremony, which was built around the folding of the flag until it resembled a tricornered, starred hat. It was presented to Yost, who presented it to the woman; she in turn gave it to the oldest boy, who’d seemed to figure out what was going on. Three crisp volleys rang out, echoing in the trees. A bugler issued taps.

  Bill Speight, dead in a foreign sewer alongside a whorehouse. The Agency could or would say nothing about it, except in the form of an official presence at this ceremony and, Chardy hoped, an indication to the widow that Old Bill was on an op down there and not off whoring. Or would they even say that? Perhaps only silence was offered at this stage; you never knew how they figured these things on the upper floors.

  Chardy looked around as the crowd broke. Wasn’t that Miller, now a writer with two awful novels and a memoir to his credit; and that O’Brien, said to be drawing down half-a-mil on Wall Street? And he thought he recognized Schuster, the German, in this country so long now he’d almost lost his accent, recently an insurance salesman. Jesus, there were others, too: all these men, survivors of the hot ’50s and ’60s, of the Cold War in Europe and stations in sweltering deltas all across Asia. You could build a pretty good operation out of the talent just standing around here, Chardy thought. But of course nobody would.

  “Poor Bill,” he heard someone say. “Poor Old Bill.” A thousand times he’d heard someone say it, two thousand. “Poor Bill,” Bill, so much promise, such a comer once, such a bright hope; now this. “Poor Margaret, you mean,” somebody else, a woman, said, “with those three boys.”

  Funerals unhinged Chardy, this one more than most. Though the sky was blue and the sun bright and the grass blinding spring-green, and the markers white, row on row of them like an image from a bitter Great War poem, he shuddered. Hated funerals, always had. So hushed, creepy. So Catholic, the faith he’d flown. Must be the Irish half of him, his mother’s half: weepy at all the cheap theatrics, the tooting horns, the flappity-flap flags, the widows, the little boys. Chardy felt a black spell of brooding coming across him, enervating, ruining. Something bitter leaked into his blood; he’d be worthless for hours. A headache was due in shortly, and one of those awful sieges of self-loathing. All his sins and failures would come marching across his mind like these pretty blue soldier boys, Old Guardsmen, cadence perfect, bayonets gleaming in the sun. And just for a second the torrent of people before him parted and he saw a perfect tableau: the widow, head bent, weeping silently; beside her the three brave boys; and beside them all, holding her hand and seeming to encompass all their grief, Sam Melman.