The Second Saladin Page 10

  Little Rock upcoming. Memphis, then Bowling Green. By bus, by train, but never by airplane. Americans were crazy with fear about airplane hijackers, terrorists, killers, and so there was no more dangerous place for a man with a gun in America than an airport.

  Lexington, Huntington. Always the same. Roll into a city bus station late at night, or, if arriving in the day, wait till nightfall. Then, with certainty, there will be a small hotel that caters to travelers without much money, without pasts and futures—transients, the sign will say. Take a cheap room. Leave it only to eat. Eat only in small restaurants, where you do not have to order elaborate meals. Stay for several days. If you stay more than three, change hotels. Then move on.

  Ulu Beg was becoming something of an expert on such a life, and the places required by it. The hotels were full of old men with bleak eyes who spat and smelled of liquor, who would talk to anyone or no one. This was no America of wealth and might; it was a mean place, like the slums in any country, especially for lonesome men with problems: no money, no homes, no job. Much hate. These men without women lived on and fed off their hate. They hated the blacks—who hated them in turn—and they hated the “others”—that mysterious remainder of the world which they did not fathom but which somehow seemed to have the skill to live nicely. They hated children, who had futures; and they hated women, for not seeing them; they hated each other; they hated themselves.

  Yet they did not seem to notice Ulu Beg, or if they did, because he fit into no category, they could not hate him. They ignored him.

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  They were right They could not prepare him for America. Nothing could prepare him for America. They had prepared him for much but they had not prepared him for the hate. It was as if he had never left the dangerous streets, the gun-haunted hills, the ugly free-fire zone of the Middle East. There was a war here too. The old men in the hotels that stank of disinfectant and had bugs that bit you in the night—as at home. The black men, in angry knots on the street corners: the young ones looked like tough young Hanafis in a Sunni area. Solitary old Negroes, who moved so slow you’d think they’d seen their own death waiting at the end of the block. The women, both inviting and hostile. Could they all be whores? Painted like Baghdad harlots for sure, thrusting their hips and breasts and fat mouths at you. Yet they were brittle with a kind of fear too. But worst of all he saw were the white men.

  Masters of this world? Rulers, emperors? Conquerors of the moon?

  He’d never seen masters so sullen and wan. It is worse to suffer dishonor in this world than death, the Kurds say. Kurdistan or death, the Kurds say. Life passes, honor remains, the Kurds say.

  No white American could say such things. They were like the corrupt old Ottomans—America a tottering Ottoman empire, as Byzantine, as greedy, as muscleless. American men sweated because they were so fat. They did not seem to own their own streets but merely to lease them at exorbitant rates. God willed nothing for them, because God could not see them.

  Or maybe it was the weather, or maybe it was the city. Whatever, the air seemed blue in the cities he passed through—blue with rising smoke, with rising steam, blue with the nighttime hues of huge lamps, blue with hate. At any moment it would break apart and the groups would begin to hunt each other in the streets. Beirut, Baghdad, Tehran, Tabriz: it had happened a hundred times in his part of the world, all the hate swirling madly until one red day it burst, spilling across the pavement. And it would happen here. Surely that was the message in all this. He saw no Jardis.

  America had lost her Jardis. Sent them away, pushed them, driven them, murdered them, blasphemed them, for whatever mad reason.

  In his travel he saw no Jardi—not the posture which had seemed to him in the mountains the very essence of America, which had been perhaps only the very essence of Jardi. Jardi always pushed them on.

  But Jardi had betrayed him.

  Jardi, Jardi: Why?

  His head ached. Jardi’s crime mocked him.

  Jardi, you were my brother. Jardi, I loved you. You had honor, Jardi, you could not do such a thing.

  Jardi, why? Who reached you, Jardi, who took you from us, who turned you against us? You would have died, Jardi, rather than betray us.

  You once gave life, Jardi. You gave life to my son, Apo. Why would you then take it, my brother?

  “Little Rock, folks. Municipal Station, ’bout ten minutes. Check the luggage rack overhead now.”

  The passengers stirred.

  Ulu Beg looked out the window: in a mean blue city again.

  “’Bout motha-fuckin’ time,” said the black man, turning another page in his newspaper.

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  10

  Trewitt felt as if he were at an audience with Lyndon Johnson. This huge old man who carried a nickel Peacemaker in his holster, who never sweated through his mummified skin, who had hands like hams and eyes like razor slits and spouted laconic Texas justice, hellfire and brimstone: these characters, these essays in human charisma, they always meant trouble for Trewitt. They enchanted him and he stopped paying attention, which he knew to be both stupid and dangerous.

  Vernon Tell was a supervisor in the U.S. Border Patrol, Agent in Charge of the Nogales, Arizona, station, and he was trying to explain to Trewitt and Bill Speight, who were sitting in his office under the weak fiction of being investigators for the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms interested in an automatic-weapons violation, just how little there was to go on in the case of the death of his two officers, 11 March last. He wore gigantic yellow-tinted Bausch & Lomb shooting glasses and had the shortest crewcut Trewitt had ever seen. Trewitt blinked in the heat, trying to sort it all out. Evidently a climax in the conversation had been reached, for now the bulky old cop and Bill Speight rose. Trewitt felt the situation squirming out of control and wanted urgently to have it in his fingers again—if it had ever been so in the first place—but he felt himself rising too, drawn by Vernon Tell’s creaky magnetism, and by the desire to demonstrate to a creep like Speight that he wasn’t confused.

  The old officer turned to him suddenly and said, “You in Vietnam, son?”

  Trewitt, startled, felt he was being tested.

  “No, sir,” he said.

  “Well,” said Tell, whose forest-green uniform was crinkleless even though the air conditioning in his office was on the fritz and both Trewitt and Speight had wilted in their clothes, “reason I ask is most nights it’s like Vietnam out there.” He gestured to his window, through which, in blazing, cloudless radiance, could be seen a representative vista of the Southwest, miles and miles of scrub and desert and mountains and, incidentally, as Trewitt could see, a Dog ’n’ Suds. “They come with dope and guns and they come just plain illegal. They come in planes and in Jeeps and on foot. It can get pretty wild and woolly.”

  “I’m sure it’s a tough job,” said Trewitt ineffectually.

  “This-a-way,” said Tell.

  He took them down a glossy hall under the gaze of various official portraits and through a double set of green doors. Beyond lay a gate, which the old cop swiftly unlocked. This led into another hall and into an atmosphere that rose in thickness and discomfort in direct proportion to their penetration of it. Cells, empty, flanked them, but there was still another destination: at the end of the hall two uniformed men sat in a prim little office.

  “How’s our boy today?” Tell asked.

  “’Bout the same, sir.”

  “These gents come all the way from the East to see him.”

  Another door opened, a room, half cell and half not, a private little chamber. In the cell a single Mexican boy lounged on the cot, slim and sullen.

  “This is what we drug up,” said Tell. “His name is Hector Murillo. He�
��s sixteen, from a village called Haitzo about a hundred miles south of Mexico City. Any of you speak Spanish?”

  Trewitt and Speight shook their heads.

  “We think Hector came over that night. The others are dead in the desert, or back on their side of the border, or got clean away. But from the tracks on the site, we know at least seven men went across. One of them, the man who did the shooting, in boots. We’re still trying to track the make on the boots.”

  “What’s his sorry story?” asked Bill Speight gruffly, mopping his face with a sodden handkerchief. Speight looked gray in the heat and his hair clung in lank strips to his forehead. Upstairs he’d been spry and folksy but the heat had finally gotten to him.

  “Funny thing, he hasn’t got one. We just found him wandering half-dead from thirst and craziness in the mountains a week after the shootings. Says he can’t remember anything. Hector. Cómo está la memoria?”

  “Está nada.”

  “Nada. Nothing.”

  The sullen boy looked at them without interest, then turned and elegantly hawked a gob into a coffee tin and rolled to face the wall.

  “These Mex kids, some of ’em are made out of steel,” said Tell. “But unless we get some kind of break on the case, he’s looking at Accessory to Murder One in the State Code and Violating the Civil Rights of my two men in the Federal.”

  “Jesus,” blurted Trewitt, “he’s only a boy,” and saw from the furious glare off Speight that he had made a mistake.

  “They grow up fast on that side of the fence,” Tell said.

  “Any help coming from the Mexican authorities?” Speight wanted to know.

  “The usual. Flowers to the widows and excuses. They’ll kick down the doors of a few Nogales whorehouses.”

  “Any idea of who ran them across?”

  “Mr. Speight, there’s maybe two dozen coyote outfits in Mexican Nogales that move things—illegals or dope—into Los Estados. And there’s hundreds of free-lancers, one-timers, amateurs, part-timers. Ask Hector.”

  But Hector would not look at them.

  “In the old days, we’d have him talking. But that’s all changed now,” said Tell.

  But Trewitt, studying the boy, who wore gym shoes, blue jeans, and a dirty T-shirt, did not think so. You could bang on that kid for a month and come up empty; a tough one; steel, the old cop had said. Trewitt shuddered at the hardness he sensed. He tried to imagine what made him so remote, tried to invent an image of childhood in some Mexican slum. But his imagination could not handle it beyond a few simpering visions of fat Mexican mamas and tortillas and everybody in white Mexican peasant suits. Yet he was moved by the boy.

  “Well,” said Speight, “thanks for your trouble, Mr. Tell.” He probably wanted to head back to the motel bar for a rum-and-Coke. Trewitt had never seen a man drink so many rum-and-Cokes.

  “Sooner or later Hector will decide to chat with us,” the supervisor promised. “I’ll give you a ring.”

  “Do you think you could let me run through your file on the border runners, the coyotes?” Speight asked.

  “Don’t see why not,” said Tell.

  They turned and left, and Trewitt made as if to follow. But his sense of poignancy for the rough, brave boy alone in an American jail, facing bad times, stormed over him. He paused, turned back.

  The boy had perked up and sat on his bunk, eyeing Trewitt. His dark brown eyes were clear of emotion. In the office Trewitt heard the two old men enmeshed in some folksy conversation about the old days, the way things used to be. But Trewitt, in the cell, felt overwhelmed by the present, by the nowness of it all. He yearned to help the boy, soothe him somehow.

  You should have been a social worker, he thought with disgust. This tough little prick would cut your throat for your wristwatch if he had the chance.

  But an image came to him: Hector and the others in some kind of truck or van, prowling through the night on the way to something they must have only vaguely perceived as better. They would have been locked in with the Kurd for hours, with a strange tall man. What would they have made of him?

  The boy looked at him coldly, and must have seen another gringo policeman. Trewitt felt he’d blundered again. He knew he should leave; he didn’t belong in here. He felt vaguely unwholesome. He turned to leave—and then a terrific idea, from nowhere, detonated in his head.

  “Hector,” he said.

  The boy’s eyes stayed cold but came to focus on him. Speight’s words boomed loudly behind him someplace and the supervisor and the guard laughed. Had they noticed his absence? His heart pounded.

  He could see before him a picture: it floated, tantalizing him. It was a picture of a high-cheekboned, tall, bright-eyed man with a strong nose and blondish hair. It was on a wall. It was the picture an artist had projected from the old photo of Ulu Beg.

  Blond. And tall. And strange.

  Trewitt said, in the Spanish he had so recently denied knowing, “I’m a friend of the tall norteamericano with the yellow hair. The one with the gun. He is a big gangster. He thanks you for your silence.”

  The boy looked at him cautiously.

  Trewitt could hear them laughing, old Speight and old Tell, two old men full of good humor. Would they miss him yet?

  “You were betrayed,” Trewitt invented. “Sold for money by the man who took you to the border. The tall man seeks vengeance.” He hoped he had the right word for vengeance, la venganza.

  “Tell him to cut the pig. Kill him. Make him bleed,” the boy said coldly.

  “The tall norteamericano gangster will see it happen,” he said.

  “Tell him to kill the pig Ramirez who let my brother die in the desert.”

  “It’s done,” said Trewitt, spinning to race out.

  Ramirez!

  He was so charged with ideas he was shaking. He couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  “Okay,” he said, “I think we ought to bump something back to Ver Steeg. The hell with cables. I think we can call it in. Then we can open a link to Mexican Intelligence—I’m sure we have some guys in Mexico City who are in tight with them—and get a license to do some nosing around over there. Then—”

  But Speight was not listening. He sat gazing thoughtfully into his rum-and-Coke. It wasn’t even noon yet!

  “Bill, I was saying—”

  “I know, I know,” said Speight, nodding. He took a long swallow. Trewitt knew he had once upon a time been a real comer, a man with a great future, though it was hard to believe it now. He looked so seedy and didn’t want to be rushed into some mistake.

  “You’re probably right,” he said. “That’s a great idea, a fine idea. But maybe we ought to hold off on this one. Just for a while.”

  “But why?” Trewitt wanted to know. They sat in a dim bar, at last safe from the bright desert sun that seemed to bleach the color from the day almost instantly. They were not far from the border itself. Trewitt had glimpsed it just a few minutes ago; it looked like the Berlin wall, wire and gates and booths, and behind it he had seen shacks crusted on suddenly looming hills, a few packed, dirty streets—he had seen Mexico.

  “Well …” Bill paused.

  Trewitt waited.

  “First, it never pays to make a big thing out of your own dope. Second, it never pays to rush in. Third, I am an old man and it’s a hot day. Let’s just sit on it, turn it around, see how it looks after the sun goes down.”

  “Well, the procedure is—”

  “I know all the procedures, Jim.”

  “I just thought—”

  “What I’d like to do—you can come along too, if you want; you might find it interesting—what I’d like to do is a little quiet nosing around. Let’s just see what we can develop in a calm way.”

  “Mexico? You want to go to Mexico? We don’t have any brief to—”

  “Thousands of tourists go over there every day. You just walk across and walk back, it’s that simple. It’s done all the time.”

  “I don’t know,” said Trewitt. Mexic
o? It frightened him a little bit.

  “We’ll go as tourists. Turistas. We’ll buy little curios and go to a few clubs and just have a fine time.”

  Trewitt finally nodded.

  “Turistas,” Old Bill said again.

  11

  He waited by the huge old boathouse, a Victorian hulk; it was a clear, chill day, almost a fall day, and before him he could see the wind pushing rills across the water. Some Harvard clown was out in a scull working up a sweat and Chardy watched him propel himself down the river toward the next bridge, bending and exploding, bending, exploding. The rower developed surprising velocity and soon disappeared under the arches, but by that time Chardy’s vision had locked on an approaching figure.

  It seemed to take a great deal of time for her to cross the shelf of worn grass that separated the Georgian mansions of several Harvard houses from the cold Charles. She wore jeans over boots and her tweed jacket over a turtleneck. Her hair was hidden in a knit cap. She had on sunglasses and wore no makeup. She looked more severe, perhaps more bohemian, certainly more academic than last night.

  Chardy walked to meet her.

  “You get some sleep?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, without smiling.

  “Let’s go down to that bridge.”

  His head ached and he was a little nervous. A jogger, ears muffed against the cold, loped by and then, traveling the other direction, a cyclist on one of those jazzy, low-slung bikes. They reached the bridge at last, and walked to its center, passing between trees only a little open to the coming of spring.

  Chardy leaned his elbows against the stone railing, feeling the cold wind bite; his ears stung. He had no gloves, he’d left them somewhere. Chardy could feel Johanna next to him. She had her arms closed around her body and looked cold.

  He scanned the left bank, Memorial Drive, which ran through the trees. Cars sped along it. He looked off to the right, where the road was called Storrow Drive and studied the traffic on it, too.

  “This should be all right,” he said.