The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  They had turned off the busy avenue and were crawling through a Georgetown back street under densely matted trees that blocked out the sun. It felt subterranean, the coolness, the shadow in the air. The brick houses, set primly back from the street, were red and narrow and shuttered and four stories tall and had small gardens alongside.

  “Nice neighborhood,” Chardy said.

  “The guy’s got dough. The guy’s got more dough than you’d believe. He makes about a million a year lecturing and writing. He can knock off twenty G’s a day giving these speeches.” Lanahan spoke like the poor city boy he was, his resentment as tender and red as his acne. His face formed a snarl as he scanned the swanky Georgian facades. Chardy had seen the look a thousand times growing up; you saw it on playgrounds when a fancy car wheeled through the neighborhood, the hate, the envy.

  But it was gone in an instant, and Miles turned back. “Look, Paul. Yost is parking you with a very touchy, egotistical guy who can do us a lot of harm, even now. It has to be you. Everybody wishes it could be somebody else, somebody not so controversial. Just don’t blow it for us, okay? This is very fucking important.”

  Yost, nervous, handled the introductions. It was awkward: the Great Man, plumper and older, puffier, with human flaws normally invisible on television, such as a clump of hair in the crown of one nostril, a missed patch of whisker, a light spray of freckles—but still, totally and exactly and unavoidably Joseph Danzig, offering, as would any mortal, a hand. It turned out to be a weak one, smallish, with tapering fingers, and Chardy felt the delicacy of the thing and tried to avoid squashing it, though it seemed to collapse into bone fragments at his softest touch.

  They sat in a downstairs study, a room that belonged in a department store window or an ad for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Chardy felt like a tourist among the shelved books, several of which must be by Danzig himself. He looked around at leather furniture, at polished wood, at muted damask curtains.

  “It’s a wonderful house,” he said stupidly.

  “The wages of sin, Mr. Chardy,” said Joseph Danzig.

  Nervous Yost kept making patter, small phony jokes at which neither principal in this peculiar blind date would laugh. Finally he said it was time to go and excused himself. In the confusion of his leaving, Chardy stole a glimpse at his watch and saw that he had forty minutes until the caravan left for the airport. He wondered how he’d kill them. He looked out a massive paned door—hate to have to clean the son of a bitch, all those tiny panes, hundreds of them—across a veranda to a backyard garden. Gardens in G-town were not large, but Danzig had more land than most, and his garden was consequently more than ample, reaching back to the brick wall that enclosed his yard. It had not quite sprung to blossom, though Chardy could make out its outlines, its plan: it was a place of severe order, of symmetry. It balanced, neat and crisp. The plots were cut squarely into the earth and low precise hedges ran geometrically through them. Four—not five, not three—four white wooden arbors stood to the rear, bulked with vines, two on each side of a simple fountain. When filled out, the garden would be a composition of immense order.

  Chardy suddenly sensed a presence. Danzig, who’d last been heard from announcing he had to run upstairs to his office, was standing next to him, holding a sherry—Chardy had been offered one earlier and had refused.

  “What do you think of that garden, Mr. Chardy?”

  “It’s very nice, sir,” he said lamely. Nobody had ever asked him about gardens before. Then he added, “Do you garden?”

  “Of course not,” Danzig said tartly. “That is, I do not go out there with a hoe and a little set of clippers. But I designed it. The people who lived here before had a terrible Italian grotto fantasy. It looked like the sort of place where homosexuals go to meet each other. I made certain improvements. That fountain was a gift from the President of France. The trees along the left came from Israel. The trees along the right were imported from Saudi Arabia. Many of the plants and bushes come from other countries. It will never be beautiful, of course, but then, that is not its purpose. I do not care much for beauty, and having looked at your record I would say that you do not either. Perhaps on that basis we’ll get along. But back to the garden: it expresses an idea, an idea I hold in extreme importance. It stands for perfect harmony, all components kept in check by other components. Do you understand?”

  Chardy understood exactly, and the point was driven home by Danzig’s sudden, wicked, facetious smile.

  Just smile mildly, they’d told him; he’ll eat you up otherwise.

  But Danzig had been so vastly superior, so condescending, so celestially regal that Chardy’s Hungarian blood began to steam and in his fury he came up with a rejoinder which surprised even him.

  “I worked in a garden like that for a while,” he said. “From the big house, far away, it looks great. But up close it’s terrible work—sweaty, dangerous, grubby, disgusting. You might want to talk with your gardeners some hot July Saturday, Dr. Danzig. They might surprise you.”

  Behind their lenses, Danzig’s eyes held him for a long moment, not quite in astonishment but at least in surprise. He considered a moment, then smiled again, wickedly.

  “But, Mr. Chardy,” he said, “to do it right—to make the right decisions, the long-term decisions—demands perspective, a cool intellect. You have to see the whole plan, the final limits. Gardening, after all, is not missionary work.”

  Danzig could not keep his eyes off him; the reflex surprised him and he found that charming, for there had been no surprises in his life lately.

  The man kept to himself: big, somewhat sour, perhaps even shy. He was presumably under orders to keep his distance, and the beard helped, masking the features. But the eyes were lively, watchful.

  You always wonder about them; all statesmen do. At the bottom of every policy, every necessary decision, there are people: infantrymen, bomber pilots, very junior consular personnel, intelligence operatives. And here was one of the last, the cutting edge of all the chatter in Washington offices, all the committee meetings, the working groups, the papers. Here was the man who had to make it happen.

  Chardy had been good at it, the reports said, until his misfortune. Danzig had seen and studied the dossier, being not at all surprised at certain things—the military background, the athletics, the temper, the impatience—and stunned at others—the high IQ, for example. And of course he’d seen Sam Melman’s final judgment: unreliable under stress.

  Well, perhaps. Yet this Chardy seemed on first glance anything but unreliable. He seemed stolid, effective, prosaic even. The mind would be dull, although focused. He’d be the technical type, wholly uninterested in things beyond his arcane craft. It was hard to see him as one of the Agency glamour boys—a cowboy, they called them—most alive among far-off little people with grudges, in mountains or jungles, amid guns and equipment.

  “I’m told, Mr. Chardy, that the most famous Kurd of all time was Salāh-al-Dˉ Yūsuf ibn-Ayyūb, Saladin of the Crusades, who fought against Richard Coeur de Lion and forced the Crusaders to abandon practically all of Palestine except for a few coastal forts. Perhaps giving crusades a bad name that we should have taken cognizance of in our own times, eh? Did you know that, Mr. Chardy?”

  “You can’t be around the Kurds without hearing of Saladin,” said Chardy. “Like he was, they are superb soldiers.” He paused. “When they’ve got the right gear.”

  “Are they a colorful people? I always expected Arabs to be colorful and they turned out to be simple boors. But what about the Kurds? Were you disappointed in them?”

  Another leading question. What capacity would Chardy have to determine what was “colorful,” what was not?

  “They’re obsessive. And obsessives are always colorful. Unless it’s you they’re obsessed with.”

  Danzig smiled. Chardy insisted on surprising him. He admired the capacity to astonish, which was rare, as opposed to the capacity to be astonished, which was commonplace.

  “You respe
ct them, I take it?”

  Chardy went blank and would not answer, as if he were holding something back. Danzig could guess what: his outrage, his contempt, his fury, his disappointment over his—Danzig’s—“betrayal” of the Kurds. But Danzig could figure it out. The man had been among them, had known this Ulu Beg, had probably come to identify with them. The process was common. And when the operation had, of every urgent necessity, to be aborted, Chardy, and many others, would have taken great offense.

  But Chardy did not express these sentiments directly. He said only, “Yeah, you have to,” turning quickly moody. It was not difficult to calculate why either: Chardy would share with his hard-charging brethren the conviction that the Kurdish thing had been a No-Win situation from the start. Then why get involved, why spend the money, the lives, if you’re not prepared to stick the course? the beef would run. Danzig had no doubt he could draw him out at great length: we needed more weapons, more ammo, SAMs, better commo and logistics, more sophisticated supply techniques, satellite assistance, naval support, germ warfare, psywar, defoliants, another front, tactical nukes. It would go on and on, no end in sight, a funnel down which could endlessly be poured gear and people and hopes and dreams.

  “You do not approve of how it ended, I take it?”

  The athlete in Chardy spoke. “I hate to lose,” he said.

  “Perhaps if you recall, at that precise moment in history certain events were taking place across the world.”

  Chardy nodded glumly. No, he wouldn’t recall from living memory, since he’d been in his cell in Baghdad that week. But he would know by now: the Republic of South Vietnam was falling.

  “A very complex and difficult time,” Danzig pointed out.

  “Yeah.” was all Chardy could manage. His was not a particularly interesting mind. Still: Danzig was attracted. Not to the mind, but to the mind and the man, to the organic whole. Like an athlete who has nothing to say but is fascinating when he runs or shoots or dodges or whatever, that aspect—man-in-action, man-of-will, man-of-force—had a Nietzschean grandeur to it, a fascination, because it was in part how Danzig saw himself, although in a different realm: the man who makes things happen.

  Not to declare Chardy a total original, of course. These crypto-military types had their limits, just as surely as they had their uses. Curiously, they almost always had a sports background; at the very heart of their vision of the world was an image of the Playing Field, on which there are certain teams and certain rules, and if A happens, then by all that’s logical B must follow, mustn’t it? and thus to the swift, the strong, the brave, go the spoils. A heavy, masculine, sentimental fascism ran through it all, a painful juvenile strain. It was best summed up by Kipling, the Imperial apologist and poet laureate of nineteenth-century British Steel, when he coined a brilliant term for it which caught at once the athletic component and the masculine component and the sentimental component: the Great Game. It was of course by now a useless, a worthless concept. Especially as the world progressed exponentially in its complexity, became more densely and dangerously packed with oddball nationalist groups, with sects and cults of personality, with zealots, with madly proliferating technology, up to and including nuclear weaponry.

  Danzig took instead as his model a more recent metaphor, the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law, which mandated that in closed systems, randomness, disorder, chaos tended to prevail over the long term. Centers would not hold; all systems disintegrated. A nation was a system; disintegration was its fate. But given this ultimate tendency, this spiral toward collapse (which even the most immense system, the universe itself, would some distant day undergo) small salvations were available within the process itself. It was possible for a clever man to make the law of entropy work for himself—or his nation.

  As Clausius demonstrated in 1865, entropy grows out of all proportion to the energy expended in producing it. His famous example is the cue ball: dispatched into a formation of billiards, it transfers the energy of the cue into the formation of the balls; and while the energy of the system is thus transformed and momentarily increased, the entropy is increased much more, as demonstrated by the balls careening madly across the surface of the table. And that was only in two dimensions! Imagine this concept as applied in three: the complications are incredible, immeasurable!

  The Soviets understood this principle instinctively, and built their own mischievous foreign policy around it. But Americans had some difficulty with it; they were not used to exalting disorder; it went against their mindset. But to Danzig it meant that his energy—the stroke of a cue—could drive a ball or a series of balls into various target billiards, and the results in entropy would be remarkable. This was the heart of what the news magazines termed “The Danzig Doctrine,” in whose service the Chardys of this world labored. A series of small engagements could be fought in the Third World; at no one place would the full weight of the nation’s will be committed, as had been done so foolishly in Vietnam; rather in an Angola, a Laos, a Bulgaria, a Yemen, a Kurdistan, a few special men, highly trained, superbly motivated, brave, resourceful—and expendable—would go in and raise a ruckus. The Soviets, like billiard balls driven into fury, would attempt to respond; they could eventually restore the local order, but the effort required resources of personnel, rubles, and effort drawn from other parts of their empire. And when they finally did prevail, a new battleground, in some other sector of the globe, would be found. The cost of these many small Third World battles was far less than any cataclysmic confrontation between the systems themselves, via strategic weaponry.

  This was reality, geopolitical reality. Danzig orchestrated it; it was his legacy to the nation. He had the strength, the fierceness of will to do so. If it meant that he himself had to become ruthless and cynical, feeling the huge weight of having to betray so many times, then that was a part of the price too. In the long term he knew himself to be a moral man, perhaps the highest moralist, because he acted on behalf of the greatest number of people over the greatest length of time.

  And if men like Chardy, like Ulu Beg, like the Agency’s generation of cowboys had to be used up in the same process, then that too was a part of the price; they were not innocent victims and should not be mourned—suffering was their duty, their contribution. Their ignorance of the mechanisms that destroyed them in no way qualified them for pity or martyrdom. They took their wages and they died.

  But damn them! Of course they didn’t understand, or wouldn’t; of course they’d take it all personally and insist on mad notions of honor and vengeance, and travel half the globe to strike back. And so here was Danzig’s newest geopolitical reality—and his smallest: a big man with a beard and a cheap corduroy suit who moved like an athlete and had a boy’s unformed rhythms of speech. And his counterpart, equally fascinating, a Kurd, born in the wrong century, now hunting him. It was a paradigm of the entropic absolute—fragmentation, randomness, strangeness, disorder, dissipation of energy, in a world too desperate to entertain such extravagances. The three of them locked crazily, linked by coincidences, odd twists, unreal developments, veering toward their strange fates. It was Kafkaesque, Nabokovian, Pynchonian, a ludicrous Master Plot from the crazed imagination of some Modern Novelist high on drugs and paranoia.

  Yet Danzig, in all this, could not deny that it filled him with a certain excitement. There was that same rush, that dizzy, swooping, immensely satisfying sensation of being at center again.

  “Would you shoot him to save my life?” Danzig asked. “I do have a right to ask.”

  “It’ll never come to that,” Chardy said laconically. “There’ll always be people around: backup teams, men with rifles and scopes, with infrared gear, with dogs. The works. You have your own bodyguards too. Finally, after all that, there’s me.”

  “Mr. Chardy, I have probably told more lies in good causes than any man on this planet. And so I recognize a lie in a good cause. And I have just encountered one.” Danzig smiled, pushed ahead merrily. “It’s not at al
l difficult to concoct a scenario in which he is raising his weapon and I am defenseless and you have—a pistol, I presume?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you any good with it?”

  “Pistols are very hard to shoot with any accuracy.”

  “Very reassuring, Mr. Chardy. In any event, there you are. He’s a man you’ve fought with, hunted with, trained, whose sons you knew. And I am a fat old Jewish professor with a bit of the heavy Polish about me and I show up on television a lot, was once upon a time an important man and to this day remain controversial. I am not remotely humble and can be numbingly unpleasant to be around for long periods of time. I once had a date with a movie starlet, I expect doors to be opened and other people to stop talking when I open my mouth. Those are your choices, Mr. Chardy. You have less than a second to decide.”

  He watched Chardy turn the question over in his mind.

  “I’d fire,” said Chardy eventually.

  “You have not convinced me. I believe I have a right to be convinced.”

  “I’d shoot, that’s all.”

  “Even though to you he is the victim and I am the villain?”

  “I never said that.”

  “It’s true, though; I can sense it. I have very good instincts in these matters.”

  Chardy seemed to grow irritable.

  “I said I’d shoot. It’ll never come to that. I just know it won’t.”

  “Now that is reassuring,” Danzig said. “That is reassuring indeed.”

  Yet, whatever Chardy’s doubts, his interesting mesh of alliances and confusions, Danzig had to admit that in the capacity of bodyguard he functioned well. Chardy was at his side the whole time, a step ahead in crowds, though things had been set up in such a way as to minimize passage through public areas. The hotel, for example, was selected because it did not begin until the twelfth floor, being mounted atop a marble shopping center across from the Water Tower on Michigan Avenue. Where but America—and certain Arab countries—could such a gawky extravagance be conceived, much less executed? The wealth of the Midwest—the sheer, staggering accumulation of capital—always stunned Danzig, new to wealth himself, though he trained himself not to show his shock.