The Second Saladin (15 page)

Across Chardy’s back were six clusters of scar tissue. Each identical to its five brothers: a central scar, a knot of curled piebald about the size of a half-dollar, a small, fiery sun, and around it a system of tinier agonies recorded in the flesh, smaller scars, streaks and comets and whorls of dead skin.

“Oh, Paul,” she said.

She was staring at him.

“I sold you out, Johanna. I gave him you and Ulu Beg and the Kurds, I gave him the whole operation. I guess at the end I would have given him anything. But he didn’t get it off me easily. It took him six days. Six sessions. I figured later he knew just how much my body could take. So he spaced it out. He took me as far as he could each day and then he quit and went to the officers’ club. And I had to think about it that night.”

“Oh, Jesus, Paul.”

“He did it with a blowtorch. His name was Speshnev; he was the senior KGB officer in Iraq.”

He looked at her.

“The fucker made me crazy. He scrambled my brain.”

“Paul. They never told me. Nobody ever told me.”

“Nobody ever knew. Nobody ever asked. You’re the only person that knows. You and Speshnev.”

“Paul—” She grabbed him, as though to hold him down, hold him in, control and comfort him, but he spun out of her grasp.

“Look at this, Johanna. You might as well see it all. Look carefully—they’ve healed up pretty good now.” He showed her the scars on his wrists. “I cut ’em open on a flight to Moscow. But the Russians kept me alive.”

“Please, Paul. Please, it’ll be all right, it’ll be fine,” she said.

“No,” he said. “No, it’ll never be all right,” he screamed. Then, with an effort, he controlled himself. “Look,” he said, “I was raised by a crazy old Hungarian. He died in the nut house. He raised me to hate them. That old bastard—he used to whip it into me: ‘Paulie, you must always fight them, you must never rest, you must always be a fighter.’ Russians, Communists. But it was the way we lived, it was the way you lived in a city then. Fights every day, fights all the time, everywhere. Fights against everybody. You had to be tough or you were nothing. That’s the first lesson, the one you never forgot. You’re always showing them how tough you are. You had to do sports, do basketball, show them how tough you were out there. Listen, I was
king
in that world, that’s how hard I pushed myself. Listen to me, Johanna, are you listening?”

He could not stop. He could not close himself down.

“Listen, Johanna, I never bugged out. I never did. I never let anybody down and I was in some tough scrapes. I was in Vietnam for seven years, Johanna. I was a company commander in the Marine Corps when I was twenty-three years old, I had two hundred teenagers depending on me. This was ’sixty-four, first year of the big battles in places nobody can even remember today. The gooks came out of nowhere in motorized regiments like panzer troops,
with Chinese advisers calling the moves and coordinating artillery support. And all we had were dumb teenagers and a few tough old noncoms from Korea and pretend tough-guy lieutenants like me, and goddammit, Johanna, goddammit, if there was ever a right time to run, that was it”—he punched the wall behind her bed with a sudden, terrifying fury—“and we didn’t move one fucking inch. That was some fight too, three days and nights without stop, and if you were going to run that was the time. Out of two hundred guys in that company, I had less than fifty left when the gooks finally quit.”

“Paul, you’re hurting yourself. Your hand is bleeding—please, don’t do tha—”

“No,
no!
You have to understand what he took from me. You have to see what this guy took from me. The motherfucker. The
motherfucker!”

In his craziness he hit the wall again, crashing through the plaster. The blood ran down his arm.

“Paul, please,
please.”
She held him back, burying him in her warmth. “Jesus, you’ll hurt yourself—you’ll kill yourself,” but he squirmed free.

“I had a hundred chances to split, to jerk off, to lie down. Johanna, the Agency put me in some jams, Frenchy and I
lived
for jams, we
loved
jams. We
specialized
in jams, we looked for them, we took some crazy, some stupid crazy reckless chances looking for jams, Johanna, I’m a lot of terrible, terrible things, but I was never a coward, never a
coward!”
He smashed at the wall.

“Paul, oh, God, you’re hysterical, it’s all right.”

But he could not stop sobbing.

“I fought him. I never fought anybody like I fought this guy but he wanted inside my head so bad,
so bad!
Why? Why was it so important to him to crack me? Did his life depend on it or something? Did he hate Ulu Beg that much? He wanted to split my head open and get in
there forever. Oh, Jesus, why? Why, for Christ’s sakes,
why?”

Johanna suddenly realized what Chardy believed, and said as calmly as she could to the weeping, bleeding man in her bed, “Paul. He’s not in there now. He’s not.”

“Yes, he is,” Chardy said, furiously righteous in his conviction.

“You can drive him out. You can get rid of him.”

“No. Never. He’s in there.”

“Please listen to me. Please, please—” She tried to push the tears from his face but was crying herself at the same time. “Paul, we’ll get better. Jesus, what a pair. What a catch for the bin, you and I, Paul. God, we are so screwed up, God, what a freak show—the freak capital of America, this apartment.” She was even laughing a little by now. “We’ll get better, I swear to you—we’ll beat them. We’ll learn how to forgive ourselves, I swear we will.”

“We’ll help Ulu Beg. That will make us better.”

“It will mend us. It will heal us.”

She reached for his scars and touched them Her finger traced the cruelest of contours, traced it around whorls, in an expanding universe, a spiral radiation outward and outward.

“Oh, Paul.”

He heard her voice through the noise of his rage, his devouring self-loathing, and at last he let her reach him and calm him and they began to touch each other. Their mouths found each other and their bodies grew tense with physical hunger and he wanted her in the most piercing of ways but even as he held her, the first woman he had had in seven years, he thought he heard the Russian.

Dark had fallen. A buzzer rang in the apartment. Chardy could not identify the sound. She went to the wall and spoke into an intercom, asking who was there.

Chardy heard the name Lanahan.

“Paul,” she called. “They want you.”

“I heard,” he said groggily. “Tell them I’m coming.”

The wizard drove the van through the Cambridge traffic to a bridge over the Charles. The van reached a highway and turned toward the city and minutes later climbed the ramp to U.S. 93 toward Callahan tunnel, and finally Chardy said, “Where are we going?”

Lanahan sat up front, with the seat between himself and Chardy, and would not look back.

“You spend the day with her?”

“Where are we going?” Chardy repeated.

“I’m supposed to be able to tell them where you were all day. Were you with her?”

“I was doing my job, Miles. That’s all you have to know. I don’t report to you. All right?”

Lanahan considered.

Finally he said, “We’re going to the airport.”

“I thought Johanna was the point of this drill.”

“You sure did your bit,” Lanahan said.

“Don’t poke me, Miles. I’ll poke you right back.”

“You guys are worse than a married couple,” said the wizard.

“Just drive,” said Lanahan. “We’ve got a plane to catch.” He looked at his watch.

“You want to tell me what’s going on, Miles?”

Lanahan held the silence dramatically, making some stupid point Chardy did not care much about, and finally said, “We think we know where Ulu Beg is going. And it isn’t Boston.”

Chardy almost smiled. He had just learned something
—something that Miles maybe didn’t want him to know. Now he saw it. Why was Miles so grumpy? He’d just gotten a big break. But Chardy knew why.

You bastards
, he thought.

“You better tell me then, Miles,” he said.

“Look”—Lanahan turned—“at what level was your political dialogue with him back during the operation? They’re going to want to know back at Langley.”

“It was pretty simple.”

“Did you ever discuss the
origin
of the operation, its political context?”

“This was a few years ago. I don’t remember.”

“Well, you’d better try.”

“Well, again I’d say, nothing fancy. He was curious. He had a great deal of admiration for America. He was passably acquainted with various American personalities—he listened to the BBC, just like everybody in the Mideast.”

“And Johanna?”

“She talked with him. Of course. She speaks Kurdish, remember?”

“About?”

“Who knows? All kinds of things. She was there seven months.”

Lanahan nodded.

“We just got a terrific break. One of our computer analysts—a real smart guy, they say—happened across a line of poetry Ulu Beg had written way back in ’fifty-eight. Did you know he was a poet?”

“They’re all poets. Just like they’re all revenge-crazy. It doesn’t surprise me.”

“And then he came across an anonymous political broadside, written years later, just after Saladin Two. It’s from a radical Kurdish group calling itself HEZ. Do you know what that means?”

“Yes. ‘Brigade.’ The Pesh Merga was divided into ten
hez
, each composed of three to five battalions. Back in the mid-sixties Ulu Beg fought in big battles against the Iraqis around Rawāndūz and was a battalion commander in the Fourth
Hez.”

“Well, HEZ is the name of a bitter group of veterans, violently anti-Western. Anyway, our analyst—he found an exact repetition of a phrase from Beg’s poems in the broadside.
Exact
. It couldn’t be coincidence. And the poem was too obscure for it to be quotation or allusion.”

“He wrote the broadside then?” Chardy said.

“Yes. Do you know what it was about?”

“No.”

“It was about a great and famous American villain, the mastermind behind the betrayal of the Kurds. It concluded with a sentence of death.”

“The President?”

“No. Joseph Danzig.”

Chardy smiled. “Old Joe,” he said.

“Paul.” Lanahan was furious. “Do you have any idea of the consequences if an Agency-trained and sponsored Kurdish guerrilla with an Agency-provided automatic weapon were to put nine bullets into the head of one of the most famous men in America? You might somewhere, someplace find an obscure government document with a record of there once having been a Central Intelligence Agency, but you’d have to work awfully hard to find it.”

But Chardy could see the logic to it. He could see the Kurd’s fierce sense of justice. Joseph Danzig had pushed the CIA, which pushed Paul Chardy, who pushed Ulu Beg—into an abyss. Now the years have passed and here is Ulu Beg to push back: all the way to the top man. The same linkages, the same progression.

“Paul, you’d better stop smiling. They’re very upset about this. They’re
very
upset. Now they have to go to
Danzig, of course, and they don’t like that. They’ve sent people to Nogales, to try and backtrack. They’ve—”

“I’ll bet they’re upset, Miles. Come on, Miles, tell me how upset they are?”

Lanahan said nothing.

The van had arrived by this time at Logan, but Chardy was not finished.

“You must have really thought I was stupid, Miles. You and Yost and—who? Sam? Is Sam in on it?”

“Chardy, I—”

“Shut up. Miles. Because didn’t you think I’d notice we never spent much time on Ulu Beg’s target possibilities in the first briefings? Did you think I’d miss that? Did you think I’d miss how important it was to keep me in sight—to follow me? Did you think I’d miss how upset you were when you couldn’t find me this morning?”

Miles faced dead forward.

“You thought you knew who the target was. Your analysts told you so. The same boys who said he’d head for Johanna. You thought the target was
me.”

The van swooped into the cab lane and pulled to a halt at the Eastern terminal.

“You guys better hurry,” said the wizard. “You can just make the six-thirty shuttle.”

“Just a minute,” Chardy said. “That was the real plan, wasn’t it? Not to control Johanna at all, but to put me in the center ring and draw him to me.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Chardy,” Miles said furiously. Then he said, “We had to use our assets the best way we could. You were covered the whole way.”

“By you, Miles? I’d like to see you try to stop Ulu Beg from getting what he wanted.”

“We did what was best. For everybody. Somebody has to make the hard decisions, Chardy. That’s what—”

“There’s a joke in this, Miles, though I doubt you’ll find it funny. The joke is no man is safer from Ulu Beg in America than Paul Chardy.”

Chardy choked on the bitter irony of it, and if he smiled now before these men, it was because he had trained himself not to show his pain. “In what the maps call Iraq but you and I know to be Kurdistan, Miles, in a battle in a foreign war, I saved the life of his oldest son, and Ulu Beg made me his brother.”