The Second Saladin (23 page)

Chardy looked around at the lush suite, the huge bed, the silks, the David Hicks wallpaper and carpet.

“Not this Chicago,” he said.

Danzig gave his seminar on international relations to the American Management Association on Wednesday morning in a banquet room, and then was driven to the University of Chicago, where he addressed a hundred graduate students after a luncheon; and then back to the Ritz-Carlton for a cocktail party with the steering committee of the Association, where he was charming and gossipy and wicked and where Chardy stood around like a jerk, awkward but always close; and then on to the banquet for his formal address, a hell-raiser on Soviet domination; and then another hotel party, a more intimate one with the Management Association’s board of directors; and then to his room to dictate into a recorder for an hour. An exhausting day, much photographed, talked at, pressed upon by the occasional autograph seeker, yet he remained by and large pleasant through it all, because of the adulation he’d received, which he loved, and because of the $30,000 he’d just earned.

“A busy Wednesday, Mr. Chardy.”

“Extremely.”

“We leave for the airport at ten.”

“I know.”

“No Kurds.”

“Not this time.”

“You’ve got that pistol?”

“I do.”

“Good, Mr. Chardy.”

Everywhere Danzig went it was the same. That’s what TV did, Chardy guessed.

Everybody was drawn to Danzig. They tracked him, came to him, were mesmerized by him. And Danzig fed on it, he grew in it.

And these weren’t teenagers either, but grown men from the world of business, who made decisions, hired
other men, fired them. They inhabited a Chicago Chardy had never seen, and their confidence, their sense of rightful, silver-haired place, irritated him. Most had lovely younger wives too, girls who were beautiful and distant and did not see him except by accident.

“Who’s he?”

“Some kind of bodyguard, I guess.”

They poured in on Danzig, to touch him.

“It’s like this everywhere,” the other bodyguard, Uckley, said.

“Incredible,” Chardy said. They stood next to the curtains at the banquet, in a huge room filled with blue smoke. Danzig—the top of his head, actually—was barely visible among a gang of executives and executive wives. In the far distance other lonely men held uncomfortable vigil: cops, Agency goons, private dicks, and somewhere Yost Ver Steeg must have clucked and fretted, and somewhere surely Lanahan would be lurking.

“How much longer will this last?” Chardy asked Uckley.

“Hours, sir,” Uckley replied, eyes Marine-front, neck a steel lock, lips barely moving.

“You were in ’Nam, right, Sarge?”

“Yessir. First Marines. Two tours. Good people, good times. Better ’n this. Man’s work.”

No, this was not man’s work. It was not any kind of work.

A discreet figure suddenly swam into the periphery of his vision, and he turned to meet it.

It was Miles.

“Yost wants to see you. He’s in the hall,” Miles said.

“Good, I want to see him.”

Chardy unfroze, and walked through the hall, avoiding executives and tables. He found Ver Steeg outside, arms crossed, two new assistants close by.

“Hello, Paul. How’s it going?”

“It stinks, Yost. I want out. You can find something better for me to do than stand around.”

“Sorry, Paul. You stay.”

“I can’t play sentry. And I can’t stand Danzig. And the most important thing is Ulu Beg.”

“Sorry, Paul. I have to put my people where it counts. What good are you roaming around? You forget, you’re the only man in America who’s seen the Kurd.”

“Ah,” said Chardy.

“It won’t be much longer. Something’s broken.”

He handed Chardy a twenty-dollar bill.

“A couple of nights ago, in Dayton, Ohio, the police picked up a drug dealer with a large wad of these. The Dayton people routinely ran the serial numbers through the Treasury. Thank God for those computers. It’s part of the bundle Bill Speight had with him in ’seventy-three when you guys were setting up Saladin Two. Back in the days when a dollar still bought something in Iran.”

Chardy nodded.

Ver Steeg continued. “It’s not hard to design a scenario by which it would come into the hands of Ulu Beg, is it?”

“Where’d the dealer get it?”

“He said a pickpocket was distributing generous amounts of it in certain low spots about town.”

“It looks like Ulu Beg got his money lifted in Dayton.”

“Yes, it does. And without the money, he’ll have a tough time getting anywhere.”

“We ought to get right out there.”

“People have left. I’m leaving myself tonight. Paul, I think this is it.”

“I’ll be packed in—”

“No, Paul. Not you. Sorry.”

Chardy looked at him.

“Somebody’s got to guard Danzig, Paul. Somebody.”

T
rewitt was down to $11.56 and some traveler’s checks he didn’t dare cash. And ten bucks bought exactly one night in his current quarters in scenic Nogales. The accommodations consisted of a straw bed in a hovel clinging precariously to the side of one of the hills. His roommates were chickens. At least the water ran—through the roof, into his face, and down into the straw, producing, in mixture with assorted animal droppings and liquid eliminations, an odor unlike anything he could describe. The view was breathtaking: across a chasm of reeking poverty to another dusty hill, on which sat—more hovels. But he was not without a beacon in this hopeless situation. At night, if he dared, he could creep halfway around the hill—being careful, for the drop was sheer on that side, one hundred feet down—and make out in a notch between the infested other slopes a wonderful symbol of the motherland: on a pedestal, high above the cruel barbed wire and metal mesh of the border, the golden arches of McDonald’s.

Trewitt would have killed for a Big Mac—
el Grande
, they called them down here.

He would have killed for a shower too, a shave, a new shirt, clean fingernails. Had there been a mirror available he wouldn’t have had the nerve to look into it, guessing
what a week in a chicken coop will do to any man, turning him into a pitiful mock Orwell, down and out in Nogales, in a dirty costume of his own skin and rumpled summer suit. He’d lost his tie—when? Probably in the long running climb up Calle Buenos Aires. He had seemed to climb forever, up, up, still farther up, through chicken yards and goat pens (tripping once on the wire fence and sprawling into the dust). He was also sure he’d knocked down several people, but his memory wasn’t terribly distinct He remembered dodging in and out of big-finned cars, racing by small shops in which Mexicans lounged, drinking beer. Up one hill, down another. He ran aimlessly in the dark, in great heat, under a smear of moon in a foggy sky.

Near dawn he sought shelter in a structure whose purpose he could not quite divine. Its main recommendation was that it was deserted. He tried to get some sort of grip on himself. He was shivering miserably, almost sniveling (it was so
unfair
, it always had to happen to
him)
when a boy found him.

“Who are you?” the boy asked. He wore dirty jeans and black gym shoes and a dirty white T-shirt whose neck was all stretched out.

“A crazy gringo,” Trewitt answered in Spanish. “Go away or I’ll give you a smack.”

The boy’s scrawny chest showed in the exaggerated loop of the shirt’s neck.

“This is my mama’s.”

“Where’s your daddy?”

“Gone to America to be rich.”

“You want to be rich?”

“Sure. In U.S. bucks.”

“I need a place to stay. No trouble. Something quiet.”

“Sure, mister. You kill some guy in a fight?”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“You can stay here.”

Trewitt looked around without much enthusiasm. Bales of hay stood against one wall and shafts of sunlight fell through chinks in the roof. The place was built of corrugated metal. It smelt dusty and shitty all at once. Chickens wandered about, pecking at the ground.

“You got a bath in the house? A shower?”

“No, mister. This is Mexico, not Los Estados Unidos.”

“I noticed. Look, it’s a big secret, okay? Don’t tell anybody. Big secret, you understand?”

The boy vanished quickly and returned with his mother, a huge, ugly woman with eyes of brass and a baby in her arms.

“I can pay,” Trewitt said.

“Ten bucks, U.S.”

“Ten’s fine. Ten a week.”

“Ten a night. Starting last night,” she said, her brass eyes locking on to his. The baby began to squeal and she gave it a swat on the rump.

“Ah, Jesus,” said Trewitt.

“And no cursing,” she said.

Mamacita came with the meal—cold tripe in chili sauce. He fought the gag reflex; he could see the brown sauce crusting on the loops of gut. But it was better than yesterday’s fish-head soup.

“Money,” she said.

Trewitt forked over his last ten.

“How’s my credit?” he asked.

“No credit,” she said, handing him the plate. “Tomorrow you get some more money or you go.”

He attacked the food ravenously, because he had not eaten since yesterday.

What now? Trewitt contemplated alternatives. Could
he find a way to make contact? Take a chance, ring up the people at headquarters? Maybe then somebody could bring him in—somebody good, somebody who’d been around, a Chardy? But he knew the waiting would kill him. It had already been two weeks since Bill got killed. So should he try the other alternative: take the risk, try and bust the border himself? It was a fairly simple proposition, a tollbooth plaza, like the George Washington Bridge. Just an easy stroll; head for the gate. It was wide open, no Berlin-style Checkpoint Charlies, no Cold War wall to cross like some existential husk of an agent out of Le Carré. For Christ’s sake, you just walked up, following the sign.
Entrada en Los Estados Unidos
. What could be easier?

But then he remembered Bill Speight in the sewer. He remembered he was being hunted.

He rolled over and faced the scabby tin wall, waiting for inspiration. He had to do
something
. His mind was full of bubbles—a good deal of commotion and light and very little substance. He had a sudden blast of insane, giddy optimism. But it collapsed almost as quickly as it peaked and the downward trip was a crusher.

He heard a noise and turned.

“Oh,” he said glumly, “it’s only you.”

The boy eyed him from the doorway, unimpressed. Trewitt had the terrible sensation of failing another test. Yet the boy liked him and in the two weeks Trewitt had spent in the barn, on most days the boy had visited him.

“You sure never kill no one in no fight,” the boy said.

“No, I never did. I never said I did. Go away. Get out of here.”

“Hey, I got some news for you.”

“Just get out of here.” It occurred to him to take a swat at his tormentor, but he didn’t have the energy.

“No, listen, man. I tell the truth.”

“Sure you do.”

The truth, Trewitt knew, was bleak. He had failed utterly in his dream of unearthing information on Ulu Beg’s journey through Mexico, in finding out whether the Kurd came alone—or with others. What he had succeeded in doing was inserting himself in the center of a Mexican mafia war.

Unless the one was part of the other.

Trewitt’s mind stirred for just a second.

But he had to face reality. Reality was that he now had to turn himself in to the
Departamento de Policía
. The whole story would come out. C
IA
A
GENT
N
ABBED IN
M
EX
, the headlines would say. Phone calls, official protests and denials, embarrassments, awkwardnesses of all kinds.

“I found him,” said the boy.

Trewitt could see Yost Ver Steeg. He could imagine himself trying to explain.

See, we thought we found the guy who brought the Kurd across. We thought we could learn from him if—

Ver Steeg had no capacity for expressing emotion. The rage would be inward. Trewitt would sense it in constricted gestures, tightly held lips, a cool handshake.

You went
into
Mexico?

Uh, yes.

He could blame it on Old Bill.

See, Old Bill said that—

But Ver Steeg would have a hundred ways of letting him know he’d screwed up.

What were you doing there?

Well, uh—

Didn’t you cover Speight?

No, I sort of lost track of him.

And Chardy would look and see a hopelessly incompetent kid. And Miles, that seedy little dwarf, would glow. Another rival x-ed off the list, another potential competitor
screwed, shot down in flames. Miles would smile, showing those brackish teeth, and clap his tiny hands.

“You found who?” Trewitt said.

“The guy.”

“What guy?”

“You know.”

“I don’t know a goddamn thing. Who, you little—” He lunged comically at the boy, missing. The boy laughed as he danced free.

“Him, man.
Him
. The bartender, Roberto.”

“Roberto?”

“Roberto, the bartender. Who would not shut up. Remember?”