The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  So now he stood wrapped in his robe at the broad window, peering down at the mazelike garden beneath him.

  “It’s quite attractive, don’t you think? This new one works awfully hard, although I don’t think he understands me. I certainly don’t understand him.”

  “Huh?” Susan said, getting her haunches (she was not quite as slim as the first Susan) into her pantyhose with a final pump of the pelvis.

  “The garden. I was talking about my garden and the new gardener.”

  “Yeah,” she said, self-absorbedly.

  “It has such order. It is a very pleasing design.”

  “Joe,” she said, “I’m going now.”

  “Huh?”

  She laughed. “I can see how much this all meant to you.”

  “I’m sorry. Do I seem preoccupied? I do apologize. Forgive me, won’t you?”

  “I just said I was going.”

  “I’ll see you out, of course.”

  “No. That’s fine.” She worked quickly on her makeup. Seeing her sitting before the mirror, one fine leg stockinged and crossed over the other (Danzig loved their legs), in her sensible plum wool suit, mundanely studying her own face and making improvements in it, he stirred.

  With a moan of lust singing between his ears, he walked to her almost uncontrollably and reached to touch her breast, inserting his hand quickly between her buttons and the elastic of the bra, feeling the weight, the heaviness of it.

  “Joe! God, you frightened me!”

  “Don’t go.”

  “Oh, Joe!”

  He had his whole hand inside her cup now and the nipple was between his third and fourth fingers and he was squeezing it with what he took to be finesse.

  “Please, I do have to go.”

  “Don’t. Please.” He was startled at the urgency of his need.

  “Joe, really—”

  “It’s still early. Please. Please.”

  He could feel the nipple tighten.

  “Oh, God,” she muttered.

  He bent and began to lick her earlobe, another trick he thought especially stylish; they all loved it. He reached and touched the inside of her leg and ran his finger up it and rubbed her, feeling the contours, the definitions, the fleshy rolling mounds of her cunt through her pantyhose. He kissed her on the mouth, their tongues groping.

  For a second time they were finished and Susan rose to dress.

  “Please,” she laughed. “I’ll get fired if I don’t get back. You’re a maniac.”

  He smiled, seeing it as a compliment. He had not had sex twice the same day before in his life, much less in the same hour. He was astounded at his power. What was reaching him?

  He looked and she was at the mirror working on her face again, dispassionately. He watched her sadly. Women were leaving him all the time; it had never bothered him before.

  “I’m going,” she said, “this time.” She laughed; she was a friendly girl, good-hearted.

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “No, I will.”

  “It’s all right, Dr. Danzig.”

  “Call me Joe.”

  “It’s all right, Joe, I do have to go. ’Bye.”

  “Goodbye, Susan.”

  And she really did leave. He could hear her steps receding in the hall until she reached the stairwell and descended. A minute later he heard a quiet thud as the door closed. He wondered if the agents down below were polite to her. He hoped so. Damn, they’d better have been; if they weren’t, he’d have them reassigned faster than the coming of night. He told himself to check on it later.

  Now he stood again at the window. He felt vulnerable, unprotected. Could this odd state of affairs be traced to the presence of this phantom Kurd assassin, who everybody is so confident will be shortly apprehended wandering desperately in the greater Columbus-Dayton-Cincinnati triangle? Perhaps. But he felt, rather, another presence, a brooding thing that pressed at him from beyond the wall.

  For beyond the wall was another room, almost the twin of this one. It was high-ceilinged and immensely bright. Potted plants stood green and smart against cream-white walls, and muslin curtains softened the blaze of the sun. It afforded a view almost the duplicate of the one he now enjoyed, the downward vantage to the mazelike perfection of the garden. That room, like this, was neat and orderly; that room, like this, had a red-hued Persian on the floor; that room, like this, had a desk, a mahogany worktable, a sofa bed. But unlike this room, that room had: one Xerox 2300 tabletop-size copier, four cans each of Xerox 6R189 toner and Xerox 8R79 fuser oil, three IBM Selectric typewriters, one DCX Level III Dictaphone, six Tensor steel-jointed lights, several dozen pounds of Xerox 4024 dual-purpose paper, to say nothing of carbons, erasers, Bic fine-line pens, Eagle No. 3 pencils, a Panasonic Point-O-Matic electric pencil sharpener, a blotter. And against one wall, tightly locked and as yet unopened, his files, his logs, his documents, his reports, his minutes, his clippings, his borrowings—his past.

  That was the room of the book, and it terrified him.

  In that room, in one thirteen-month period of intense effort, he, three research assistants, two exceedingly patient secretaries, and two editors down from an august publishing firm on Madison Avenue, had written a book. It was a book largely of triumph.

  But soon another book was due from that room and there was, as Danzig saw it, no sadder thing in this world than a room in which a book must be written if you do not want to write the book.

  Danzig did not want to write the book.

  He preferred to ad-lib speeches and doodle in television and avoid his wife and pursue the limelight and make love to an endless procession of curiously pliant young or youngish women. But not the book: the book would take him back to the season of catastrophes, the year 1975, when Vietnam came tumbling down, take him back to sad, groping days with a new and short-lived President. It would be a book of defeat.

  He secretly feared he’d lost his edge, his ambition. Poof! Here one day, gone the next. His reputation was that of a fiercely ambitious man, a ruthlessly ambitious man; and perhaps once it had been true. But another Danzig, a softer, a lonelier man, a man more anxious to explore the realms not of power but of the senses was beginning to emerge from under the shell of the old Danzig. He hoped it was a process of transformation or transfiguration. But he was terrified that he’d reached the age of entropy.

  He thought he’d call another girl, because he did not think he could be alone in this room, next to that room, another second.

  24

  It occurred to Chardy that he would not tell them—not Lanahan here, not Yost, expecially not the man whose presence he thought he felt in it all, Sam Melman—about Trewitt, about Mexico.

  “Paul, I guess you’ll just have to get back to Danzig,” Lanahan said. “Ver Steeg”—Lanahan said it bitterly, for he was turning out to be no fan of Yost’s—“says he’ll have it wrapped up in a day or so.”

  They sat in the Rosslyn office, a ghost office, full of echoes and silence and stale air, on the Monday morning following the news from Trewitt.

  Miles was bitter—he was not on the Dayton team. He had been shelved, it seemed, in favor of men Yost either trusted more or feared less.

  “Relax, Miles. You’ll get a shot at Ulu Beg. Yost won’t get him in Dayton.”

  “They’ve got Dayton sealed. They’ve got it nailed. It’s only a matter of time,” said Lanahan bleakly. He was sweating. Drops of pure ambition ran from his hairline.

  It occurred to Chardy that Lanahan flatly, coldly did not want Yost to take the Kurd. Not without having a hand in it himself.

  “No, Miles. Yost doesn’t really know this guy. He thinks he’s some gun-happy Third World terrorist. Just a brainless hooter, a man with a gun and a screwball cause. He doesn’t realize: Ulu Beg’s got it.”

  It? What?

  But Lanahan didn’t ask, merely stared angrily at Chardy. “Little rats like Yost don’t catch hero-types like Ulu Beg,” he finally said.


  “Something like that.”

  “Chardy, it’s all nonsense. That’s a silly notion, a schoolboy notion. It’s full of romance, myth. It’s full of bullshit. Ulu Beg is being hunted by men armed with computers, sophisticated electronics and optics. And manpower. Carte blanche. All they want. Bodies and more bodies. A whole agency full of bodies. You make him sound like Geronimo. He can only be caught by the righteous. It’s out of the last century, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, ended some time ago.”

  “Okay, Miles. Don’t say I didn’t tell you. I almost like you, Miles. You want into the big time so bad.”

  “Just leave it alone, Paul.”

  “You want in. You want buddy-buddy with the Harvard boys.”

  “Just forget it, Paul. I have to tell Yost where you are. You better get where you’re supposed to be.”

  No, Chardy would not tell Miles about Trewitt. Because Trewitt had no brief for Mexico, because there would be all sorts of problems if Trewitt was suddenly operating in Mexico, which Yost had specifically forbidden.

  And it also meant one other thing, which may have pleased Chardy the most and explained his decision the best: for the first time he knew something they—all of them—didn’t.

  Let Trewitt have some time, some space. Maybe he could come up with something. But what, or who?

  Chardy smiled.

  I just put some money on Trewitt, he thought. Dreamy Trewitt, preppy kid, all eagerness and sloppy puppy love, full of insane, ludicrous notions of adventure. Weighted with legends, inflated with heroes—a fan really, as far from shrewd, grim, pushy little Miles as you could get.

  Chardy thought of the good men he’d backed and who’d backed him in his time, heroes from Frenchy Short on down; and here he was with his chips on Trewitt.

  “What’s so funny, Paul?”

  “I don’t know. It all is, Miles. You, me, all of it.”

  But Miles wasn’t smiling.

  “You better get going, Paul. The great man is waiting. And you better get ready to move this weekend. There’s a job coming off.”

  Chardy turned, stung.

  “I thought he was staying put—” He’d had plans for the weekend.

  “It just came up. But maybe Yost will get lucky before then.”

  “He won’t.”

  “Don’t worry, though. You’re going to Boston.”

  25

  Her name was Leah; she never asked him his. After the first day she began to call him Jim. He never questioned it.

  She was a tall, strong woman with furious wide eyes and a flat nose and long fingers that were miraculously pink inside. Her hair was cut short as a boy’s and she had three wonderful wigs—red, yellow and jet black—which she wore depending on her mood. Her skin was brown, almost yellow, and she was a proud woman with a grave and solemn air until she had a few glasses of wine, which she did every night, when she laughed and giggled like a loose-limbed girl. She worked in the basement of a place called Rike’s and he never understood what Rike’s was, except that it had to do with clothes because she brought him some: a suit like an American businessman’s, a raincoat, a dapper hat.

  “They for you, baby,” she said.

  He looked at the clothes. He could not have clothes, a wardrobe, because he had to move quickly. He could have no luggage, no luxuries. Wealth was of no interest to him. He turned to look at the black woman, whose face was eager.

  “They are beautiful, Leah. But I cannot wear them.”

  “But why, baby? I want you to look good. You a fine-looking man, tall and strong.” She’d had several glasses of wine.

  “Leah,” he said. “I cannot stay much longer. I have to go on.”

  “Why you in such a hurry, Jim?”

  “Ah.” He was evasive. He almost thought he could trust her but he knew he’d never be able to explain. It would take so long and go back so far. “I have a special place to go. Someone special to see.”

  “You up to something,” she said, and laughed explosively. “You up to something sly. I seen that look before. I been seeing that look for years and years and years. Somebody ’bout to take something from some other body. Just you don’t git caught, hear?”

  That was Leah: she would not judge. He fit into her life as smoothly as if she’d practiced all this, as though she’d taken bleeding men home time and time before. She asked nothing except his company, and if he never went out, if he had no past and would not speak of the future except in the most guarded and general terms, then she would accept that.

  “Why, Leah? Why you help me? I can give you nothing.”

  “Baby, you remind me of somebody. ‘Dey take my wallet’”—she imitated his voice—“and up that hill you go, like to get yourself killed dead. And one minute later you comes down. Never seen nothing like it since my brother whipped Sheriff Gutherie’s boy Charlie back in nineteen fifty-eight in West Virginia. Everybody says, ‘Bobby, he’s going smack you, boy.’ Bobby, he just say, ‘He took my money,’ and Bobby go on up to the house and he kick that boy bad and he get every last cent back. Nobody seen nothing like that ’round there in years and years.” She laughed again at the distant memory.

  Bobby sounded like another Jardi.

  “A brave man. A soldier, this brother Bobby?”

  “Oh, Bobby, he was somethin’. He won the West Virginia High School four-forty-yard dash in ’fifty-seven. My baby brother, oh, he was somethin’. White people say he robbed them. He got sent to prison, up in Morgantown. Somebody stick a knife in him. He wasn’t in that place no more than three weeks when they killed him.”

  “A terrible thing,” said Ulu Beg. He had been in a prison in Baghdad for a long time, and knew what things happened in prison. “God have mercy on him.”

  “Mamma died after that and I came to Dayton and here I been ever since. I been at Rike’s twenty years now. It ain’t the life I wanted, but it sure is the life I got.”

  “You must be strong. You must make them pay.”

  “Make who pay, Jim? Can’t make nobody pay nothin’.” She took some more wine.

  The apartment was small and dark, in an old building with garbage and the smell of urine in the halls. The lights had all been punched out and people had written all over the bricks. Ulu Beg had recognized the English word for freedom scrawled in huge white letters. Everybody who lived there was black; when he looked out the window he could only see black people, except occasionally in the police cars that prowled cautiously down the street.

  “Don’t worry none about them, baby,” she had said. “They ain’t comin’ in here.”

  “Say, Jim,” she said now, “just who are you? You white? You look white, you walk white, you talk funny white. But you ain’t white. I can tell.”

  “Sure, white.” He laughed now himself. “Born white, die white.”

  “But you ain’t no American.”

  “Many peoples come to America. For a new life. That’s me—I look for the new life.”

  “Not with no gun, Jim. I looked in your bag.”

  He paused a second. “Leah, you shouldn’t have.”

  “You on the run? Running to or running from, Jim? It don’t matter none to me. Have some wine. You going to waste somebody’s ass? It don’t matter none to me. Just don’t get caught, you hear, because they put you away in a bad place forever and ever, Jim. You the strangest white man I ever did see.”

  He stayed a long week. He made love to her every night. He felt full of power and freedom with the black woman in her small apartment in a ramshackle city in the fabulous country of America. He rode her for hours. He lost himself in the frenzy of it, sleeping all day while she worked, then taking her when she returned. He had her once in her kitchen.

  “You a crazy man. I’m pushing the damn broom ‘round Old Man Rike’s store all day thinkin’ ’bout crazy Jim.”

  “You’re a fine lady, Leah. American ladies are fine. They are the best thing about America.”

  “You know another?”

>   “A long time ago,” he said. “A real fighter, like you, Leah.”

  “A white girl?”

  “White, yes.”

  “No white girl know nothin’ ’bout no fighting.”

  “Oh, this one did. Johanna was very special. You and Johanna would be friends, I think.” An odd vision came to him—he and Leah and Jardi and Johanna and Memed and Apo. They’d be at a meadow, high in the mountains. Thistles were everywhere, and the hills were blue-green. Amir Tawfiq was there too; they were all there. His whole family was there; everybody was there. His father, also Ulu Beg, hanged in Mahābād on a lamppost in 1947, he was there too. There were partridges in the trees, and deer too. The hunting was wonderful. The men hunted in the day and at night the women made wonderful feasts. Then everybody sat around in the biggest, richest tent he had ever seen and told wonderful stories. Jardi talked about his own crazy father, the Hungarian doctor. Johanna told of her sister Miriam. Leah told of her brother Bobby, and even as these people were mentioned they came into the tent also and had some food and told some stories and raised a great cheer. Kurdistan ya naman, they cheered, Kurdistan ya naman.

  “Jim? Jim?”

  “Ah?”

  “Where you been? It sure wasn’t Dayton.”

  “It’s nothing. Tomorrow I will go. I have to go. I stay too long; I must move on.”

  She looked at him, her eyes furious and dark.

  “You go off someplace with that gun, they kill you. No lie, they kill you, like my brother Bobby.”

  “Not Jim,” he said.

  “Baby, don’t go. Stay with Leah. It’s nice here. It’s so nice.”

  “I have to go on. To meet a man.”

  “To the bus station? Cops catch you sure.”

  “No cops catch Jim.”

  “Sure they do. Where you going?”

  “Big city.”

  “Big-city cops catch you in a bus station sure. I know they will.”