The Second Saladin Page 2

  Jesus Mary, it would be simple.

  “Turn here?” Oscar Meza asked.

  “No.”

  “Keep going?”

  “Yes.”

  “Reynoldo, I—”

  “Keep going.”

  “We are going into the mountains. I—”

  “Keep straight.”

  Ramirez reached down and turned on the radio. He fiddled with the dial until he found a Tucson station. He left it on, thinking of Tucson, a flat new city on a plain surrounded by mountains. He thought of it as a city of money, full of Americans with money, full of blond women and swimming pools.

  So simple.

  The American country music rolled softly against his ear. The jarring in the cab was thunderous. He prodded his cowboy hat lower down his face, masking off his eyes, set his head against the seat back, and stretched and crossed his legs. He chewed a toothpick and thought of himself as a don, with a palatial estate in the hills outside Mexico City like Don José Huerra. He thought of blond women and horses.

  So how did he know so much? And who was he working for?

  This was the crux of Ramirez’s dilemma. In three or four sentences he had delivered up Ramirez’s most closely held secret. If he knew of Ramirez’s connection to the Huerras and the mountain route into America, then—

  “Reynoldo, I can tell. This gringo scares you. Say the word and I’ll go back and finish him. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Drive on, stupid one,” Ramirez said. Oscar was really getting on his nerves this night. He’d found him five years ago driving an Exclusivo cab and pimping for American college boys down from Tucson; now the fool considered himself a right-hand man. Ramirez spat out the window.

  “Lights. And go slower.”

  “Yes, Reynoldo.”

  The lights vanished.

  “Keep the side lights on, idiot. Do you want to go over the side?”

  Oscar immediately turned on the lower-powered orange lights.

  Ramirez got out a stick of gum as the truck lurched forward. Soon they were on a ledge and the two Nogaleses were visible, the small and pretty American one and its larger, less neat brother, spilling awkwardly over the hills, spangles of light these many miles away. But Ramirez was not a man for views; in fact, he was looking now in the other direction.

  “There,” he said suddenly. “Jesus Mary, almost missed her. I’m too old for this.”

  Oscar stomped the brake and the van skidded for a breathtaking moment on the gravel and dirt as its treads failed. Ramirez shot a bad look toward the idiot Oscar, whose fingers whitely fought the wheel. But the van did not slide off. Ramirez, cursing, got out, pulling his jacket tight against him. Cold up here, so high. The men in back would have no coats; they’d shudder and whimper in the chill. But the gringo?

  Ramirez’s breath billowed before him. He fished in the brush with gloved hands until his finger closed on something taut; pulling, he opened a crude gate wrapped with an equally crude camouflage of brush to reveal a smaller road leading off the main track.

  “She’s ready,” he called.

  The truck eased through the gap, turning. It began to slip and drop. Oscar double-clutched as the vehicle tipped off; it seemed to fall, sliding down the incline in a shower of dust, coming at last to rest on an even narrower road. Ramirez swung the gate shut and scrambled down.

  The truck picked its way down the switchback in the dark. Ramirez hung out of the cab, watching. It was tough work. Twice the fool Oscar almost killed them, halted by Ramirez’s cry, “No! No! Jesus Mary,” only inches before spilling them off into blank space. It was a younger man’s game and Ramirez’s heart beat heavily. Once he even walked ahead, aware of the dark peaks all around him, of the stars and the scalding cold air and the half-moon, whose presence unnerved him. He’d never been here before in the gray moonlight. He crossed himself and swore to light a candle at the shrine of the Virgin.

  Finally he ordered, “Kill it.”

  Ramirez climbed out of the cab and went back to the rear doors.

  If you’re going to do it, here’s the time.

  He took out the pistol. He opened the doors. He could smell the men inside, dense and close.

  “Let’s go, little boys. Nothing but American money up ahead,” he joked in Spanish, and stood back to watch them clamber gingerly out. They came one by one—five youngsters and an older man—shivering in the piercing cold. Ramirez waited, not sure what he would do.

  He backed off a little and whispered, “Hey, gringo. Come ahead. We’re waiting. Cold out here.”

  There was no sound from the truck.

  “Hey? You fall out? What’s with this hombre, eh?” He leaned forward, into the interior, and could not quite make out if—

  The blow smashed him to the earth. Before he could rise, the man was on him. He could feel a blade.

  “Patrón, patrón!” shouted Oscar, rushing to them with a shotgun.

  The pistol was pried from Ramirez’s fingers; the man rose and stood back.

  “Hey,” called Ramirez. “Don’t do nothing stupid. The gun is for your protection. From federales.”

  “What should I do, patrón?” asked Oscar.

  “Tell him to drop that shotgun,” said the man.

  “Drop it,” yelled Ramirez. The gun fell to the dust.

  “Now get up,” the man said.

  Ramirez climbed to his feet, shaking his head. He’d been hit with something heavy, something metal.

  “I was just making sure you don’t bounce out,” he said. “Don’t do nothing crazy with that gun.”

  The tall man tossed the pistol into the scrub. Ramirez marked its fall next to a saguaro cactus that looked like a crucifix. He could pick it up on the way back.

  “Okay?” he asked. “No guns now. We’re friends.”

  “Let’s go,” said the man.

  Ramirez walked ahead, pushing through the knot of men. He didn’t wait to see what the tall man would do. He walked ahead a short way down a path, hearing them shuffle into line behind him. The moon’s soft light turned the landscape to the color of bone. Ramirez turned.

  He spoke in Spanish, quickly and efficiently.

  “Now say it for me,” said the tall man. “I don’t have that language.”

  “Just telling them how it goes from here. Two hundred meters down the slope. Then a flat place, over a dry creek, then through some trees. A gully, a last field to cross. Okay? No tricks. Just the truth, just a walk in the moon. Some compadres of mine wait on the other side. And you are with your Tio Sam, eh?”

  “Then do it,” said the man.

  Ramirez led them down the incline, thinking of himself, stupid! stupid! and trying not to mourn excessively the lost fortune. This hombre was a smart one!

  The ground was stony and treacherous, strewn with cactus and jumping cholla and other bitter little plants, leather things that caught and tore at him. The feathery moonlight fell, light as powder. Ramirez licked his dry lips. The trees, twisted little oaks, were widely spaced among tufts and rills of scrub and he guided the clumsy party until at last they passed between the last of the trees and came to a stream, dry now, leaped the bed, and gathered finally at the edge of a moon-flushed meadow.

  “Hold up, muchachos,” he called. He could hear them breathing laboriously behind him.

  He scurried ahead. Here was the guarantee: a geographic freak in the landscape, where the underlying sandstone had been drained away until the land itself collapsed, forming this depression, this sudden, unexpected, unmapped flat stretch in the heart of otherwise impassable mountains. Accessible only by the lost road, it was a place where a man could walk across, where no fences had yet been built, where no border patrolman had ever set foot. He’d discovered it in 1963 and had been guiding the drug shipments through since then, three, maybe four times a year, during the dark of the moon, and never been caught.

  But never before in the moonlight. He glanced at the white thing above him, feeling its cold.

&nbs
p; He crossed himself.

  He peered ahead. A cool breeze pressed against his face.

  He took a flashlight from his coat.

  Out there, if the arrangements had worked, were two Americans awaiting his signal.

  Holy Mother, let them be there. Let them be efficient, dedicated gringos who follow orders.

  He blinked twice.

  Come on, damn you. You had plenty of time to get ready. The money is good.

  A minute passed.

  Come on, damn you.

  Two blinks in answer.

  He scuttled back.

  “Done,” he said. “Another five hundred meters. Then you pay—right, amigos? Then they’ll take you to Arivaca by back roads. And you’ll be in the American Nogales by sunup.”

  “Thank you, Virgin,” somebody said.

  “Hurry, damn you all. They won’t wait. You too, gringo.”

  They filed past him, the norteamericano last, his pack across one shoulder.

  Good-bye, strange man. I hope never to see you again.

  They picked their way across the flat in the moonlight. In a little while Ramirez lost them, even with the moon. They’d made it, made it easily, and then the searchlight came on and a harsh voice was yelling over the loudspeaker, “Manos arriba! Manos arriba! Hands up, hands up, motherfuckers!”

  They froze in the light. Ramirez watched.

  Curse my mother, that whore, he thought.

  The voice from above: “Don’t move, amigos. Get those hands up. Get ’em up! Manos arriba.”

  They stood stiffly, hands high in the glare of the single beam.

  Ramirez thought, I ought to get out of here. Jesus Mary.

  For Christ Jesus’ sake, run, he told himself. But he watched in sick fascination.

  An American officer—in the deep green of the Border Patrol and a baseball cap and carrying a shotgun—came into the light.

  “Face down. Down, goddammit. Descendente pronto!”

  The men in the light looked at each other in panic. One young boy turned back to Ramirez. The gringo stood erect.

  “Down, down,” screamed the policeman.

  They went to their knees. The officer walked behind them and with his boot nudged one forward into the sand. The others followed.

  “Jimmy, get that chopper on the horn again.”

  “It’s coming,” came a voice from back near the light.

  Luck. Maniac luck, the true law of God. Ramirez cursed his mother for bearing him and himself for his selfishness to the Virgin. He made a vow to change all that, crossed himself quickly and spat into the dust.

  Clearly this was no raid; he had not been betrayed. There would have been hundreds of them, with bullhorns, machine guns. And on his side federales. He’d seen it before, down below, and once had to run half the night with an American .38 in his side. But this was just two stupid gringos with a four-wheel-drive truck. They had been lucky; Ramirez had been unlucky; the stranger with a million dollars in his knapsack had been unlucky. Fate, a whore like his mother with clap and no teeth and ribbons in her filthy hair, laughed at him, spat his way.

  The border patroman had walked around in front of them again and stood nervously with the shotgun, shifting his weight from leg to leg.

  “Buzz him again, Jimmy.”

  “I just did. He’s on his way.”

  They would wait for the helicopter, for more men, before searching and cuffing their captives.

  Ramirez thought: If the tall man is going to do anything he’d better do it now.

  If he’d had the Python, he could have fired for the light, or even the patrolman. But that was bad business, shooting norteamericanos. They were a crazy people; they’d get you for sure. Besides the range was over two hundred yards, a long shot for a pistol, even a big one.

  Ramirez looked again. The long figure lay on the stony soil. His pack was inches beyond his fingers.

  Gringo, do something, do it now. They’ll put you away for a century if they catch you.

  Ramirez rubbed his mouth nervously.

  A sound of engines, low and pulsing, rose in the distance and began to build.

  “There he is,” yelled the one at the truck.

  “Okay,” yelled the one with the shotgun, easing back a step, half twisting. He turned his head toward the sound—

  It happened with the speed of a snake’s strike. The patrolman turned, the tall man seemed to elongate upon the earth, and in the same half-second he had in his hands a small gun with a blunt barrel, and a spurt of flash broke from the muzzle and the patrolman fell.

  A machine gun! A small machine gun! thought Ramirez, astonished at the treasure.

  The others began to flee the light. A hasty shot rang out to kick at the dust near the tall man. He stood, holding his weapon with two hands, the left cupped under the grip for support, and fired carefully into the vehicle on the ridge. Ramirez heard the glass shattering, the metal shuddering as the bullets tore through. The searchlight vanished. The tall man dropped to one knee and swiftly changed magazines in his weapon. He rose and fired again, and the truck detonated in an oily orange flash that filled the night with heat and color.

  Ramirez blinked as the dust and gas from the blast pushed across him. He saw purple spinning circles before his eyes from the bright flash. He squinted them away and turned back to the spectacle before him. Rolling flames from the ridge illuminated the valley.

  The tall man had moved to the fallen Border Patrol officer. Ramirez watched in astonishment as the tall man bent to the man he’d just slain, and seemed to close his eyes and a hanging jaw. Then with one hand he pushed the flattened body to its side and turned it toward Nogales. Then he grabbed his pack and ran into the darkness.

  The roaring of the helicopter became huge. Dust began to whirl and rise and Ramirez could see the dark shape of it, lights blinking, start to settle out of the sky. A searchlight beam sprang from the port to play across the stones.

  Ramirez drew back. He knew that inside an hour the federales would arrive, summoned by the Americans. He knew that more Americans would come, and more and more. He knew he’d better get the hell out of there. He prayed that the Americans wouldn’t find his gringo compadres, who’d obviously been spooked by the passing patrol. If they found them and they talked and they told of Ramirez …

  Ramirez crossed himself. Holy Virgin, I’ve lied and cheated and stolen and killed, but spare your sinning child. He prayed intently as he scurried through the moonlight up the hill. He saw his van ahead and knew he’d make it. He even paused by the cactus to fetch his pistol.

  “What happened?” asked Oscar. “Mother of Jesus, it sounded like a war.”

  “Mother of Jesus, it was a war,” Ramirez said, thinking of the tall one, for he suddenly realized he’d seen a kind of soldier.

  2

  Bill Speight pulled the Chevette to the side of the road, puzzled by what he saw. He must have lost track of the numbers a while back—some of these little houses out in the western Chicago suburbs were set so far back from the street you couldn’t read the figures. He reached for and opened his briefcase and sifted through the papers.

  Come on, come on, old fool, he told himself, and at last located the address. Yes, it was 1104 Old Elm Road. Could he have gotten off the expressway at the wrong town? But no, he’d seen the exit—he’d been careful, very careful so far. He was in the right place.

  A Roman Catholic church? He searched his memory, yet he could unearth no remembrance of Paul Chardy that touched on any issue of religion. Had Chardy gone strange—the brave ones had more than a little craziness in them anyway—and joined the priesthood? Another priesthood. As if Special Operations wasn’t religious order enough. Yet he could not imagine that famous temper hidden beneath a priest’s habit, nor could he see a large-boned, impatient, athletic man like Chardy, a man of Chardy’s peculiar gifts, listening in a dark booth to pimply teenagers telling tales on themselves.

  But he looked at the church and saw it was one of those
modern things, more roof and glass than building. A spindly cross way up top stood out against the bright blue spring sky; otherwise the place could have been some new convention center. Speight’s watery blue eyes tracked back to the sign and confronted it squarely: OUR LADY OF THE RESURRECTION ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCHOOL, the letters white and blocky, slotted onto a black background, and beneath them the legend: LEARN TO FORGIVE YOURSELF. Speight winced at the advice. Could he? Could Paul?

  But the school part made some sense. He could imagine Chardy among children, not among nuns and priests. For Chardy had still a little of the athlete’s boyishness, the gift for exhilaration which would captivate children. That was his best half, his mother’s half; but what about the other side, his father’s side, the Hungarian side, which was moody and sullen and turbulent?

  At that moment a class of kids came spilling out from behind the church onto an adjacent blacktopped playground. So much energy; they made Speight feel his age. The panorama was raucous and vast and not a little violent, and the one bearded old geezer in a raincoat, who was supposedly in command, stood so meekly off to one side that Speight feared for him.

  It was nearly noon. What lay ahead filled him with melancholy and unease; he wasn’t sure he could bring it off. Sighing heavily, he pulled the car into the church’s parking lot and found a place to park, marked VISITOR—he searched for it at some length, not wanting to break any rules—and began a long trudge to the buildings, his briefcase heavy in his hand.

  His walk would take him through the playground, where balls sailed and bounced and kids hung like monkeys off the apparatus. All the boys wore scrawny ties, he saw—now that’s not a bad idea; his own kids dressed like tramps—and the girls kilts. But the imposed formality didn’t cut any ice with the little brutes. They still fought and shoved and screamed at each other, and at one point the supervisor had to bound over to break up a bad scuffle. Kids. Speight shook his head, but he wasn’t really paying much attention.

  He was worried about Chardy. You don’t just go crashing back into somebody’s life after seven years—or was it now eight?—and take up where you left off. And it was true that at the end, at the hearings, Bill hadn’t done Paul much good. He’d just told the truth, and the truth hadn’t helped Chardy at all, and maybe even now Chardy would hold it against him. Chardy had a famous temper; Chardy had once slugged a Head of Station.