The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  “I don’t want money, goddammit,” screamed Trewitt in English.

  “Cut him,” yelled the other kid, Miguel, watching from above with great, cruel joy.

  “Shut up, you. Silencio!”

  “Let me go, sir. I have only money for my sister and my mama and my two brothers and our dogs. Do not hurt me.”

  “Why was the old gringo killed? Come on, talk, goddammit!”

  He gave the wrist a quarter twist to the right.

  “Ow! Oh! It hurts so. Ouch. No more. He went for the wrong woman.”

  Trewitt tightened up on the wrist.

  “The real reason, dammit.”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Of course I’m hurting you. Come on, goddammit, talk.” He squeezed.

  “Ahhhhhhhh!”

  A cock crowed and Trewitt looked nervously about and saw no movement, though a goat in a pen down the way seemed to stir. He knew he’d better get on with it. In a few minutes this place’d be crawling with people.

  “Why, why?” he bellowed in righteous fury.

  “Ahhhh. Let me go, please. Don’t hurt me no more.”

  Trewitt relaxed his grip a bit. “Next time I break it. Why’d they kill the old man? Why?”

  “He ask after Ramirez.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “The story they tell is that Oscar Meza set Ramirez up to take over his place. And here’s this old gringo asking questions. And Oscar no like the gringos and he no like the questions.”

  “Oscar?” said Trewitt.

  “Yes. Let me go. Oh, please, mister, it hurts so bad.”

  Trewitt almost did. He was exhausted and he was running low on energy and purpose. But his fury boiled up again darkly.

  “No, goddammit, there’s more.” There had to be. He gave the Mexican another jolt.

  “Ohhhh. No, I swear. On Jesus, on the Virgin. He kill me if he finds out.”

  If there wasn’t any more, then Trewitt was in big trouble. Next step? He had no next step. This wasn’t an intelligence operation, it was a gang war. He’d stumbled into the middle of it, and now the whole Mexican underworld was after him. Or was the youth lying?

  He tried to think of what one of the old cowboys would do in his place. Chardy, a hero, a pro, an operator’s operator. What would they do? Maybe the kid was lying; maybe he wasn’t. There’d really only be one way to make certain, and that would be to take him all the way. Put him on the black edge of death and see what he said.

  Trewitt knew in an instant that Chardy would be capable of a higher brutality here, for wasn’t the other side of bravery just the numb capacity to hurt and feel no guilt? Suppose now, suppose a Chardy broke the kid’s fingers, both hands, then his kneecaps, then his nose, all his teeth, then his wrists, and finally the kid broke. And this Chardy-type then used the dope he got from the kid and turned it into a real coup. Became a hero. A legend would grow, a reputation; maybe a career would blossom. But nobody, least of all Chardy, would remember the hurt youth, humiliated, debased, raped almost, in a gully in a scabby Mexican slum; the boy used, tossed away.

  Weariness suffused Trewitt. His will vanished. “Ah, Christ,” he muttered, knowing he could hurt his victim no more. He felt the youth slip away.

  “Go on. Beat it. Scram,” he said.

  The young bartender fell back, rubbed his mouth and then his aching wrist and crossed himself quickly for deliverance.

  “You should not do this,” said Miguel, perched on the lip of the gully. “You should make him talk.”

  “Shut up. I cut your throat, little shit,” said Roberto, making a listless lunge that sent the younger boy scurrying.

  “Go on, get out of here. Both of you.” For now Trewitt could not stand the sight of either of them.

  Trewitt sat back in disgust and exhaustion. Next step? Departamento de Policía. And damned quick, before somebody from the mafia blew him away over the ownership of Oscar’s. Still, he dreaded it; it meant the coming to an end of a phase of his life. For surely he was done at the Agency; that much was clear—after a mess-up like this, there’d be no future.

  It was also clear to him that he deserved to be done at the Agency. He simply was no good at this sort of thing—he hadn’t the hardness, the cunning, the fury. They never should have sent him; they should have sent somebody who knew what he was doing. He hadn’t even taken the Clandestine Techniques course out at The Farm in Virginia, a basic intro to the dark side of the Agency.

  He wondered where the nearest Federal Police station was. Enough adventure for one day, and it was not even 6:00 A.M. He treated himself to a last smile for his own dumb folly—it was kind of funny, except for poor Bill—and set off in search of saner possibilities.

  “Hey, mister,” somebody called—Roberto—“I tell you a lie.”

  Trewitt turned. The youth stood with a taut look of defiance on his face. What, did he now want to mock Trewitt, or even, out of some Mexican macho thing, to fight him?

  The younger boy lurked close at hand, eyeing the two curious antagonists, still hoping for a little action.

  “Hey, mister,” said Roberto, “you got some money for Roberto?”

  “Kid, I ought to—”

  “’Cause, mister, Roberto thinks Reynoldo Ramirez is still alive. And he thinks he knows where he is.”

  22

  She wanted to walk.

  “I just want to walk. Could we walk all weekend? I need the space—I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “Sure,” Chardy said.

  “I just have to walk. Do you understand? I want to be with you but I want to walk too. All right?”

  “No, it’s fine. Show me this place. I want to see this place.”

  She took him down Mass Ave to MIT and back again. They went up Garden Street, and she showed him Radcliffe. They got lost in the little places along Brattle. Then they went onto the campus, and walked among the red brick Georgian buildings, under the vaults of the trees.

  “How was your week, Paul? Your trip?”

  “Terrible. I don’t do anything. They won’t let me do anything. I just hang around Danzig, except when they’ve got him locked up—like now. How was your week?”

  “I didn’t get much done. I didn’t make any progress. It was depressing. I’m glad it’s the weekend. I’m glad you’re here.”

  The place was lousy with undergrads. They all dressed like hoboes in baggy, sexy rags, junk-shop clothes, insouciantly graceful. They seemed to Chardy like barbarians. Frisbees sailed all over the place, skimming the ground, bouncing. Some rock group sang an amplified tune called “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” from a speaker in a window.

  “Look,” he said, “let’s sit down. Do you mind? You’ve really worn me out, all this trooping around.”

  They found a bench and sat quietly for a long time.

  “This is quite a place,” said Chardy lamely. “I always wondered what one of these places looked like. I went to college in a little town in Indiana. You could hear the grass grow. On Saturday night we used to hang out at—”

  He stopped, because he could tell that she wasn’t listening.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said.

  “Look, something is wrong, I can tell.”

  “I think what I like about this place,” she said, “is the safety. Paul, there are people here who never come out. They are troglodytes. They live totally interior lives. They spend forty years studying a certain molecule in an amino acid or a certain sixteenth-century Italian poet. It’s very safe. Nothing intrudes.”

  Safe? Chardy looked out on the crowd scene before them.

  “Johanna—”

  “Paul,” she went on, “I get so scared sometimes. I lie there and I think of all the things that could happen. I think of him, of Ulu Beg. I think of the Kurds, a lost people. And I think of us, and how we’re so responsible for it all, how we tie it all together, and how we haven’t really done anything. Sometimes my mind gets goi
ng so fast I can’t get it settled down. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. Paul, I can get very crazy. You have no idea how crazy. I can act very strange.”

  He turned to touch her but saw she was not agitated. In fact, he’d never seen her so calm.

  “Paul,” she said suddenly, “teach me something. Will you? Help me.”

  “Anything.”

  “Teach me bravery. Your kind of bravery, a man’s kind of bravery. War bravery, battle bravery. There must be a trick. You were so brave. Whatever else, for so long you were so brave. That attracted me from the first. I fell so in love with it. Teach it to me. I’m sick of being scared.”

  “I don’t know much about it anymore. It used to be so important to me. A guy I thought was the bravest man in the world—the guy that taught me everything—ended up floating in the Danube. He left me a message, and it had an eerie ring to it. He told me to fetch the shoe that fits. The shoe fits? It was a joke, I thought. But now I don’t know. Frenchy was trying to tell me something. About all this. He was scared too, because he was going in solo and Frenchy hated to work solo.”

  “He was a hero?”

  “In our line of work, he was the best. Yes, I suppose he was a hero. Yet even the Frenchman came unglued at the end. His wife—his widow—told me about it. He grew up, he burned out, he got tired.”

  “Still, he died for something. Scared and tired and old, he died for it. That’s really it. That’s the lesson I want to learn. This Frenchman—he went ahead. He pressed on.”

  “Yes. You’d have to give him that.”

  “He died for something he believed in?”

  “The joke is, when you think you’re dying, the last thing you think about is what you believe. You think about crazy things. I thought about basketball.” I thought about you, he thought.

  “Still, it’s the act that counts, not the motive. That’s a shoe that fits.”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “Paul, I want to go back to the apartment now. Can we go back and make love?”

  He looked at her in the hard light. It was noon, the sun harsh, the breeze stirring old limbs in this leafy place. Slivers of light cutting through the overhead canopy lay about them on the ground, on the walk. She was without color, a severe profile, almost stylized in her beauty.

  “Of course we can. Sure. Let’s go. Let’s run back.”

  She laughed.

  “Johanna, I hardly recognize you.”

  “No, I’m fine. It’s you, Paul. I really do draw from you.”

  “Johanna, I—”

  “Please, Paul. I want to go back. Let’s go. The shoe fits.”

  He had always thought beautiful women a breed apart, and maybe they were, some mutant species, made crazy by all the hits on them, or made cynical, contemptuous of the twerps kissing their asses so desperately, or, the worst, made devious, unable to respond until they had figured out just what they stood to gain or lose. But not Johanna: she seemed to him none of these things except achingly, innocently beautiful as she sat before the mirror working on her hair, an abundant woman, flawless in the late afternoon light, after their lovemaking. “Jesus, are you fun to watch,” he called from the bed.

  She smiled, but did not look over.

  The telephone rang. Chardy rolled over to look at the ceiling.

  Johanna said, “It’s for you. A woman.”

  He took the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Paul?”

  The tone, queerly familiar, seemed to arrive from another universe.

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “Paul, it’s Sister Sharon.”

  “Sister Sharon! How are you? How in the world did you find me?”

  The nun taught at Resurrection, back in his other life. She had the third-graders, and was a funny, quiet, plain girl, so young, who’d always liked him.

  “Paul, it wasn’t easy. You left an address with the diocese to forward your last check; one of the secretaries gave it to me. It was a government office in Rosslyn, Virginia. I went to the library and got out the Northern Virginia phone book and looked up the government offices. I finally found one with the same address. It took an hour. I called the number. I got a young man named Lanahan. I told him who I was and he was very helpful.”

  Lanahan. Sure, he’d break his Catholic neck to help a nun.

  “Finally he gave me this number. Am I disturbing anything?”

  “No, uh-uh. What’s up?”

  “There’s a telegram for you. It came to the school. They were just going to send it along but I thought it might be important.”

  Who would send him a telegram?

  “I had to open it to see if it was an emergency.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “It’s from your nephew. He wants money.”

  Chardy, an only child, had no nephew.

  “Read it to me.”

  “‘Uncle Paul,’ it says, ‘onto something, need dough. I beg you. Nephew Jim.’”

  Trewitt.

  “Paul?” Sister Sharon said.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said, but he was calculating. Trewitt had found a soft route back in, trusting no one except his hero, and reaching him through his whole other life. Trewitt, you surprise me. Where’d you get the smarts—from some book?

  “Is there any kind of address?”

  “Just Western Union, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Is it all right?”

  “It’s fine. A college kid, a little wild. Always in trouble, always after me to bail him out.”

  “I’m glad it’s not serious. Paul, we all miss you. The boys especially. Even Sister Miriam.”

  “Give ’em my love. Even Sister Miriam. And, Sister Sharon, don’t tell anybody about this. It won’t do the kid any good. He’s probably in some jam with a girl and he doesn’t want his folks to know about it.”

  “Of course, Paul. Goodbye.”

  She hung up.

  “Johanna, I have to go out. Is there a Western Union office around here? Come with me.”

  “Paul. You look ecstatic.”

  And Chardy realized he was.

  23

  For the moment, the Kurd could wait, Chardy could wait, it could all wait. Other things occupied Joseph Danzig.

  He was astonished. What little rabbits they were. He had lived most of his life in a kind of sexual sleep; then, at forty-seven, catapulted into an absurd celebrity, made preposterously powerful, imprinted upon the collective imagination, he was also granted, almost as a fringe benefit, an astonishing freedom with women. Not that they were attracted to his body—it was a wreck, a blimpish shamble of wrinkles, almost toneless muscles, a wilderness of wattles and fissures, a great, white dead thing—nor even his power (for they could not partake of that) nor his mind (they never talked about anything). They sought him not for cocktail party conversation or to get jobs with the State Department or for exclusive interviews to advance their careers in journalism or to punish their husbands or lovers.

  Why then?

  He asked one once, a lissome Georgetowner, thirty-four, ash-blonde, Radcliffe, old Washington/Virginia connections. They were at the time both naked and had just consummated the act with passion though not a great deal of skill—in this field, Danzig was well aware that he was merely an adequate technician. With prim efficiency Susan, for such was her name, was preparing to dress, arranging her Pappagallos, her Ralph Lauren double-pleated slacks, her cashmere turtleneck (from Bloomingdale’s, he guessed; it’s where they all dressed these days), her subtly checked tweed sport coat that re-created almost hue for hue the Scottish heather.

  “Susan,” he said suddenly, “why? I mean, really: Why? Be honest.”

  “Well, Joe,” she said, matter-of-factly—and paused. He knew she was the mother of two girls, three and five, and that her husband was a Harvard law grad in the midst of a flourishing career with the FCC. “Well, Joe”—naked she was small and fine, with tiny shapely breasts and delicate wrists. She was slender enough to show ribs and had
creamy, mellow skin. She had tawny hair, expensively taken care of, and had been a champion golfer and an excellent doubles tennis player. “I guess you could say I was curious.”

  Curious!

  He had shaken his head then. He shook it now; he was with a twenty-six-year-old congressional aide, a bright Smith girl he had met casually at an embassy cocktail party. They had just accomplished an exchange of favors intense and satisfying and wholly meaningless. They were on the top floor of the Georgetown house in what had been a previous owner’s music room—a wide space that drew in light from the brightness outdoors and splashed it abundantly around. Meanwhile, birds sang and bees buzzed and the flowers and bushes in his garden grew under the skillful nurture of a Philippine gardener.

  The girl—by coincidence her name was Susan too, which was perhaps why the first Susan had so recently been in his mind—was dressing quickly and without, it seemed to him, regret. The room stank of sex, a peculiar odor, of which he could never get enough when aroused but which disgusted him afterward. He was, in fact, a little nauseated with himself. He had come, of late, to enjoy certain deviations from the standard male-female menu, certain varieties of dish or sauce. It was always the same: what had seemed exotic, astonishingly inviting, fascinating, erotically creative almost, seemed now merely unwholesome, to say nothing of unhygienic. He wanted badly to brush his teeth and use mouthwash, but was unsure of the etiquette: would such a gesture seem impolite? She had not brushed her teeth and she had used her mouth quite as industriously as he had used his (and simultaneously). He felt gross, an ogre. Yet it was not his fault. These girls these days! A nod, a nudge, a gentle suggestion as oblique and encoded as a secret cipher, and off they went like Bangkok tarts after treasures their mothers could not have conceived of, would not have even had the vocabulary to describe. And they expected—demanded—he reciprocate.

  Such odd creatures. Their minds, really, were different from men’s. For one, they were more grown-up, less romantic (as a rule, no matter that it defied the popular stereotype), more organized. Their brains were full of little compartments. This Susan, the other Susan, too, all the Susans, could fellate him like tigresses, smile, get dressed and return uncontaminated to their other lives. They’d go back to husband or lover, having entirely separated their adventure of the afternoon from their reality of the evening. Meanwhile, he or any man would brood and fret and remember, feel tainted and unworthy, clinched with guilt. Astonishing!