The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  Finding next a sudden rush of strength, he began to shout: “You did what? you what? you what? that was really stupid, you told him?”

  Trewitt looked down the road. At any second it could yield a carload of Mexican hoods. And they had a Beretta. With four rounds left.

  “Hey, mister, come look at this,” Ramirez called.

  The Mexican led him to a corner, pulled aside a dusty rag to reveal the lid of some kind of cabinet or chest buried in the earth. Kneeling, he unlocked and opened it. He pulled out a rifle with a telescopic sight.

  “We do some hunting up here,” he said. The grin did not diminish, yet to Trewitt it had turned savage.

  There was a sudden sound, and Trewitt thought he’d die.

  But it was the yellow car returning.

  33

  When he reached the door he had no idea what to say, no plan.

  He knocked on the door, wondering what God willed for the next few minutes.

  The door opened and he found himself face to face with a woman of advanced years who wore a look of great, eager American friendliness and who said only, “Helio.”

  “Yes, hello, how are you?” he replied.

  Something he did—he’d never know what—must have perplexed her.

  “Yes? Are you here for the party?”

  He had no idea what to say. Beyond the door lay a dim corridor and at its end a brightly lit room choked with smoke and people. He could sense them crowded in there; the noise was intense and laughter bellowed heavily in the air.

  “Yes?” she repeated. She wanted to help him. He could tell.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, “you must be Dr. Abdul.”

  “Yes. Dr. Abdul.”

  “It was so nice of you to come. Joe admires your work intensely, even if he doesn’t quite agree on Egyptian hegemony.”

  “I look forward to talk.”

  “Come in, of course. Let’s not stand here. Oh, you’re so tall, I had no idea.”

  “Yes. It is a gift from God.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. How long will you be with the department? Do you return to Cairo at the end of the term or in the winter?”

  “Term.”

  “Oh, I hate those short appointments. Jack and I were in Munich, but the grant only lasted eight months. You can’t get a real sense of a culture in less than two years. How do you like America?”

  “Ah. I love it.”

  “Good. Go on in. Jack is over by the wall at the bar. He’ll get you a drink. And if you can fight your way to Joe, say hello to him for me. I haven’t said two words to him since he arrived.”

  “Ah. Thanks.”

  He stepped by her and walked down the hall to the noise. A few couples talked privately, lovers perhaps, in the darkness. He edged by them and stood in the room, at the edge of the crowd.

  Danzig knew she was his. She was beautiful too, and very young, exotic. She may have been mulatto even, or a Eurasian, or some odd mix of Filipino and Russian. She had not yet spoken to him but she was staring at him. He knew it was a preposterous idea and that the technical problems—how to get her back to the hotel, how to get her back from the hotel—were immense. Yet he wanted her!

  She’d come with a man probably. But who? That tall dramatic one staring furiously from the doorway? Perhaps, but Danzig, who was by this time quite exhausted with conversation, and not a little drunk, decided to risk it anyway.

  “Ah, miss?”

  “Yes?” Faint accent.

  “Ah, I couldn’t help wondering. Are you a student at the university?”

  “No, Dr. Danzig. My husband is an associate professor in the physics department.”

  “Oh, how pleasant. I’m sure I couldn’t begin to understand the first thing about his work. He must be very brilliant. Is he here?”

  “No. I came with my lover.” She said it quite matter-of-factly, but clearly to shock him, to see something register on the famous face. “You spoke with him earlier. He’s that brash younger man in political science. Jeremy Goldman.”

  Danzig vaguely remembered somebody who might fit that description, but the details were hazy.

  “Yes, yes, he made a number of interesting points. A very interesting man, as I recall. I don’t think he cares for me.”

  “Oh, he loathes you. He loathes everybody. But he’s fascinated.”

  “May I ask … pardon me if I seem forward, I really mean no harm and am an extremely harmless man”—the famous Danzig self-deprecation, charming and cruelly vain—“but do I fascinate you?”

  “Well,” she said, pausing. Her face was beautiful, witty: very thin, with high, fiercely chiseled model’s cheekbones, the eyes vaguely Oriental, the lips full as plums. “I would say—a little. Yes. A little.”

  “Well, what an excellent compliment. How nice you are to an old and rather vain man. May I ask further—again, I don’t mean to be forward and please stop me if in any way I am intimidating you—”

  “Oh, I’m not intimidated.”

  “Well, may I ask then, is he around? And do you plan to leave with him? I’m sure you do; I don’t mean to press you.”

  She made a cool pretense of looking around the room.

  Chardy! Danzig realized suddenly that Chardy could drive them back to the hotel and then take her on to her place. But would he mind?

  Of course not. He’d better not mind. He looked too, but for Chardy.

  Ulu Beg could see him now. He looked thicker than in pictures, the hair flecked with gray, the eyes beady behind the thick glasses, the stomach plump and straining in the vest. He leaned over a bit, his ungainly body slightly atilt, talking earnestly to a woman. Twice, in fact, he’d looked at Ulu Beg directly, freezing him. But the eyes quickly returned to the woman; he spoke in a low insistent voice.

  Ulu Beg edged through the crowd. He bumped somebody.

  “Excuse me,” somebody said.

  “Well, I—”

  “Who’s the—”

  “Well, sorry, I seem to—”

  “Oh, are you trying to get—”

  At last he was sixteen feet away. He reached back under his coat and felt the Skorpion. He cautioned himself to draw it slowly and steadily and to fire with both hands. His fingers touched its hardness, its metal.

  Yet he hesitated.

  A fat man talking to a pretty girl in the middle of his civilization.

  He’d killed a hundred men, but all were soldiers and would have killed him. He tried to think of his sons, one dead, one so hideously wounded that he himself had done the final act out of mercy and love. The memory flooded over Ulu Beg and the stench of burning fuel seemed to come alive in his nostrils and he could feel the dust heavy in the air from the rotor blades and the bullet strikes.

  Someone jostled him.

  “Sorry, old man,” said a man in a sweater and a pipe.

  Ulu Beg turned. The woman was laughing at something Danzig had just said, and the man himself was smiling, chatting confidently.

  “Drink?” somebody asked Ulu Beg. He turned to look at him in astonishment. He had no sensation of removing the weapon.

  “He’s got a gun,” somebody was screaming. “Oh, God, he’s got a gun!”

  Ulu Beg pivoted, raising the weapon with both hands until the fat man on the sofa filled the sights.

  The noise rose, a light fell, shadows reeled in the room.

  Danzig stood in stupefied terror and raised his hands.

  Ulu Beg fired.

  Glass everywhere. Chips of wood, pieces of table, ruined books. Danzig lay on the floor. He could see the carpet. Somebody was still shooting.

  Make it go away.

  Oh, God: Make it go away.

  The girl was crying, “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, Jerry, oh, Jerry, Jesus,” and bled badly, all down her front. She was on the sofa. He could not—would not—move to help.

  Danzig lay still. Uckley had fired at least twice before the tall man had killed him.

  “Where is he?
Where is he?” The boy Lanahan, the Agency man, a pistol in his hand, danced in fury and terror.

  “Oh, Christ,” someone shouted, “oh, Jesus Christ, he had a gun, a gun.”

  Sirens.

  Sirens: somebody had called the police.

  Danzig would not look up. The tall man. Had he left? God save him from the tall man.

  He lay on his stomach curled up behind the couch. Three times he’d been hit, maybe a fourth, knocking him backward. Where was the doctor? Please let there be a doctor. He thought his heart would explode. He needed a pill.

  Danzig began to cry. He wept uncontrollably. His chest hurt awfully. He had wet himself in fear and didn’t even care. A great, furious self-pity welled through him. He had figured out that he would not die. The vest—the material was called Kevlar, very expensive, spun steel and high-density nylon, developed for his trips to the Middle East—would stop the bullets. But what if it hadn’t? Why did his chest hurt so? He could not stop crying or shaking.

  “My God,” somebody was still shrieking, “he had a fucking gun.”

  Chardy heard the sirens. He started to run down the hall. By the time he got outside at least three squad cars had sped by. Chardy ran after them. Across from the house he found her, in the car. The muzzle blast had blackened the side of her face and her eyes were closed. The pistol was still in her hand. Across the street, police cars and ambulances with their flashers all squirting red and blue light into the night had gathered, but Chardy didn’t even look. He opened the door, laid her gently on the other seat, and got in, turned the key, and drove away.

  34

  “Nada,” the boy said. “Nothing.”

  “You’re sure?” Trewitt demanded.

  “Sí. I said, nada. Nothing.”

  Trewitt, stung, exploded. “Goddamn,” he said bitterly. “Goddamn. What’s wrong with him?” The fury cut through him. “Goddammit. You’re sure?”

  “He said, didn’t he? Mother of Jesus,” said El Stupido, as Trewitt had begun to think of Ramirez, a great fat greasy farting boorish creep.

  “All right,” said Trewitt.

  But it was not all right. It was another day. How many now, five, six, a week? Trewitt could discover in himself no talent for waiting. He would have made a lousy sub skipper, bomber pilot, sniper. This sitting around, playing one of Peter Pan’s lost boys in the Never-Never-Land of this mountainside, yet with real guns and a pig like this El Stupido for companionship—he glanced over and saw his antagonist reading the same goddamn book! “A Smart-Alecky Young Lady Gets Her Comeuppance”! Ramirez could read it over and over and over, his lips forming the words in the balloons over the photographs of the actors, and still chuckle in deep and profoundly satisfying amusement when the little maid got swacked on the butt with a two-by-four at the end.

  “Aiiieee!” He looked up happily. “Hey, come look at this one, Señor Gringo. They really give it to her. Right on the back bumper!”

  “And no others? No visitors, no questions?” asked Roberto, fourth member of this hilltop Utopia.

  “Nada. Not in El Plomo,” said the boy. “What’s for supper?”

  “I can’t figure out why he hasn’t gotten back to me. What the hell is going on back there?” Trewitt said self-righteously. But he had deep suspicions. The El Plomo postman—he was also the mayor, the sanitary commissioner, the general store owner, the traffic cop—had been recruited, for a substantial fee, of course, to drive fifteen miles to the nearest town of consequence and dispatch another telegram via Our Lady of Resurrection to Trewitt’s own particular saint, Saint Paul.

  “UNC,” the telegram had read, “FOUND BIG TACO BUT MUCHO OTHERS WANT RECIPE SPICY GOING SEND HELP EL PLOMO SIERRA DEL CARRIZAI

  NEPHEW JIM”

  But what if the public official had taken the money and said screw the gringo and his telegram and headed for the nearest whorehouse?

  Trewitt shook his head. His rage, which was mostly self-pity, was inflating exponentially. Who the fuck knew what was going on back there anyway? Maybe Chardy had gotten the can. Maybe he should have sent his first message to somebody sensible like Yost Ver Steeg. Forget the cowboy; go for the corporate executive.

  Trewitt began to pine, to mourn, for lost opportunities. Maybe it wasn’t too late, sure, even now, send an open wire to Yost, care of Langley, Va., dear Yost, it may surprise you to know that …

  But—

  But it was true Bill Speight had been murdered. It was true there were men trying to murder Reynoldo Ramirez. It was true all this began almost immediately after the Kurd, Ulu Beg, had come across the American border in a blaze of gunfire, assisted by Reynoldo Ramirez. And it was true that at any second an odd squad of gunmen might arrive. The linkages were not definite but they were certainly suggestive. Somehow it all fit together, though try as he might he could not exactly imagine how or why. Who was pursuing them?

  There’s your key, Trewitt. Mexican gunmen, trying to rub out El Stupido for his nightclub, or for a past betrayal, or for …? Or some other force?

  Trewitt shivered.

  Behind the scabby line of mountains the sun collapsed into a great hemorrhage of purple swirls. Beneath, the valley was quiet and dark. Down there on those gentle slopes grew maybe fifty million bucks’ worth of marijuana. It was a wild country, bandit country, gun country. Around here everybody carried guns. It was a violent place.

  Trewitt advised himself to deal with the reality of the situation, and forget the overview for the time being. Forget also his desperate prayers for Resurrection. He was going to have to get out of this one by himself.

  He took the rifle off his shoulder, a Remington Model 700 in 7-mm magnum, with a 6X scope. Ramirez had two, for desert sheep, which once or twice a year the old Ramirez—prosperous vice lord and whoremonger—came up to stalk.

  “Hey, some food is here,” called Roberto.

  Trewitt reslung the rifle. Food meant more beans and rice, which meant farting all night, and he knew he had the two-to-six shift when the farting would be at its worst.

  Jesus Christ, that was something Le Carré never wrote about.

  35

  This was his third day; by now he had established his talents and been nominally accepted, though no one had ever asked his name or inquired where he came from. They knew more important things about him: that he could hit from twenty-five feet out if given the shot, that he would dive for a free ball, that he set picks that would knock your teeth loose, that he was a furious rebounder, and finally, that he was honest.

  “You do the pros, old man?” the tallest, the star, said to be a postman in real life, put to him sullenly.

  “I had a week in the old Chicago Packers camp. But I couldn’t stick it.”

  “Say, Jack: you think I could make it in the pros?”

  Chardy paused a fraction of a second. He was, after all, a vulnerable figure, the only white man on the playground, even if the dome of the United States Capitol could be seen in the distance, across the river, an immaculate joke for the thousands of black teenagers who threw balls through hoops here.

  “No,” he finally said. “No way. Sorry. You’re just not good enough.”

  Chardy thought the postman might hit him. He was maybe twenty-two, six five, and had some great moves. He’d probably had a year or two of college ball before flunking out, or quitting.

  But the postman thought it over and seemed to back off. Perhaps he was too elegant for a punch-out, or too smart; or perhaps he secretly knew the truth of Chardy’s judgment; or perhaps he sensed that Chardy didn’t give a shit about much of anything and would have fought him to the last bloody blow.

  “Then let’s play, old man,” said the postman.

  “Let’s do it,” Chardy replied, and they began again.

  Chardy had by this time worked his way up to the best court, where the most talented players went five-on-five full distance. At first the blacks had let their rage show: they’d crowded and roughed him, and he’d been knocked to the asphalt m
ore than a few times. But he fought back with elbow and hip, and his shots were falling. He was still the jump-shooter. You never forgot. It never left, that gift. He went for net, not rim or backboard, although these skirts were woven of chain, which clanked medievally when the ball fell through them. It was as though a kind of enchantment had fallen over Chardy. He played to lose himself forever, to hide, to vanish in the game, the glorious game. He knew only that he had to play or die. His limbs had ached for the sport.

  He’d left Boston and driven straight from National into D.C., stopping only at a sporting-goods shop in a suburban mall to buy a luxurious pair of shoes—Nike high-tops, leather, the pro model—and a good Seamco outdoor ball, and headed deep into the city until he saw a playground, a good one, a big one, across a bridge in a meadow between a highway and a slow river. The place was called, after the river, Anacostia. He knew the best ballplayers would go there.

  He felt he could play forever. At thirty-eight, he felt sixteen. If there was a heaven on this earth, he had at last found it: a playground, two hoops, and a shot that was falling.

  Jesus, was it falling.

  “Fill it.”

  “Drop it.”

  “Put it down, man.”

  “Jam it.”

  “Damn, you hot.”

  He hit four in a row, then five, then six before missing. He fired rainbows that fell like messages from God, dead center, without mercy. He tried tap-ins and finger rolls and fallaway jumpers and drives off either hand. He fought to the baseline to receive a pass and curled backward through two defenders for a reverse lay-up. The ball felt like a rose, it was so light and smelled so sweet. In a trance he shot a wish from forty feet, only to watch it drop without a rattle. Even the postman gave him a tap on the butt after that one.

  But eventually, in the hazy hour of twilight of the third day, when the moths had begun to gather in the cones of the fluorescent lights that would illuminate the hoops until midnight, into this athlete’s Eden there came a snake. Chardy pretended not to notice; but how could he miss the only other white face among so many black ones, even if it was far away, behind the windshield of a nondescript car.