The Second Saladin - Страница 11

Toward the end even the cool black kids were working the ball to him, just to watch it fall.

“Man, you hot,” one called.

“Put it down,” another yelled.

He hated to see it end, but it did. The team he played for, which represented a manufacturer of surgical instruments, easily vanquished a team that represented a linoleum installer; the margin was twenty-eight points and could have been greater. A buzzer sounded and the bodies stopped hurtling about. Somebody slapped him on the ass and somebody clapped him on the back and somebody shook his hand.

“You had it tonight,” somebody said.

“Couldn’t miss, could I?”

“No way, man, no way.”

Chardy took a last glance toward the floor — two other teams, the Gas Stations and the Ice Cream Stores, were warming up. It meant nothing, but Chardy hated to leave it. A ball came spinning his way and he bent to scoop it up. He held it, feeling its skin springy to his fingers. He looked at the hoop and saw that it was about fifty feet away.

Shoot it, he thought.

But a black man came galloping up to him and without a word Chardy tossed him the ball, and off he went. Chardy pulled on his jacket and headed for the doors and what lay beyond.

6

He stared at the picture. Yes. Ulu Beg. Years younger, but still Ulu Beg.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Good. Getting it was no easy thing,” said Trewitt, the young one, a wispy pseudo-academic type who was tall and thin and vague.

“Once upon a time,” Chardy said. “Years and years ago.”

“Okay,” said Trewitt. “Now this one.”

The projector clicked and projected upon the screen on the wall of a glum office in Rosslyn a plumpish face, prosperous, solid.

“I give up,” said Chardy.

“Look carefully,” said Yost Ver Steeg. “This is important.”

I know it’s important, Chardy thought irritably.

“I still don’t — oh, yeah. Yeah.”

“It’s an artist’s projection of Ulu Beg now. Twenty years later, a little heavier, ‘Americanized.’”

“Maybe so,” said Chardy. “But I last saw him seven years ago. He looked” — Chardy paused. Words were not his strong point; he could never get them to express quite what he wanted — “fiercer, somehow. This guy was in a war for twenty years. He was a guerrilla leader for nearly ten. You’ve got him looking like a Knight of Columbus.”

A harsh note of laughter came from the other young one, Miles something-Irish. It was a caustic squawk of a laugh; Miles was a kind of Irish dwarf, an oily little jerk, but he’d know what a Knight of Columbus was.

“Well,” Trewitt said defensively, “the artist had a lot of experience on this sort of thing. He worked all night. We just got the picture in yesterday. It’s the only one of Ulu Beg extant.”

“Try this one, Paul,” said Yost Ver Steeg.

Johanna. Chardy stared at her. The face could have been spliced out of any of a thousand of his recent nights’ worth of dreams. It meshed perfectly with all those nights of memory and struck him with almost physical force.

“It’s very recent,” said Yost.

Chardy stared at the image projected against the wall. He felt as if he were in a peep-show booth for a quarter’s worth of pointless thrill with other strange men in a dark place.

“A week ago, I think. Is that right, Miles?” Yost said.

“Tuesday last.” Miles’s voice was sure and smug and had a recognizable Chicago tang to it.

“Has she changed much in seven years?”

“No,” was all Chardy could think to say, offended by the ritual he knew the shot to represent: some seedy little man from Technical Services, up there with a motor-driven Nikon with a 200-millimeter lens, parked blocks away in his car or van, shooting through one-way glass after three days’ stalk.

Chardy rubbed his dry palms together. He glanced over at the three shapes with whom he shared Johanna’s image: Yost, almost a still life, a man of deadness, and the two younger fellows, dreamy Trewitt and the loathsome Miles What-was-it? the dumpy little Irish guy from Chicago.

“Did you know” — Miles spoke from the comer — “that in the years she’s been back she’s tried to kill herself three times?”

A kind of pain that might have been grief seemed to work up through Chardy’s knees. He swallowed once, feeling his heart beat hard, or seem to, at any rate. He clenched his fists together.

“I didn’t know that. I don’t know anything about what happened to her.”

Chardy could almost feel Miles smile in the dark. He’d only glimpsed him in the hurried introductions — Speight had said something about a computer whiz — and remembered a short, dark, splotchy man, a boy really, not quite or just barely thirty, with unruly oily black hair. He had the look to him of a priest’s boy, the one in every parish who’d seek a special relationship from the father or the mother superior and draw power off it for years. He’d seen it at Resurrection too, and maybe elsewhere; maybe it wasn’t Catholic at all.

“Once in ’seventy-seven, wrists,” Lanahan amplified, “once in ’seventy-nine, pills, and a real bad one last year, pills again. She almost went the distance.”

Chardy nodded, keeping his eyes sealed on the woman’s image before him.

Johanna, why?

But he knew why.

“The university has had her in and out of various shrink programs,” Lanahan continued. “We got the records. It wasn’t easy.”

But Chardy was not listening. He looked at his own wrists. He’d cut them open in April of 1975 after his lengthy interrogation by the KGB. He knew the feeling of comfort: the blood draining away and with it all the problems of the world. An immense light-headedness fills you, seductive, gratifying. You think you’re going to beat them. He remembered screaming at the officer who had supervised his interrogation, “Speshnev, Speshnev, I’m going to win.” But they’d saved him.

“Is that it?” Trewitt asked.

“Yes,” said Ver Steeg, and the image vanished. Trewitt pulled the curtains open and light flooded the room.

Chardy stared at the wall from which her image had disappeared. Then he turned back to the others.

“So — Paul. May I call you Paul?” Yost asked. Chardy could not see his eyes behind the pink-framed semi-academic glasses he wore, a style beloved of high-level government administrators.

“Please,” Chardy said.

“Ulu Beg knows only two people in the United States. You and Johanna Hull. And it seems unlikely he’d come to you — for help.”

Chardy nodded. Yes, it seemed unlikely Ulu Beg would come to him — for help.

“That leaves this woman.”

“You think he’ll go to her?”

“I don’t think anything. I see only probabilities. It seems probable that he’s aware how difficult it would be to operate in this country without some kind of base. It seems probable, then, that he’d try and obtain one. It seems probable that he’d be drawn to somebody he felt he could trust, somebody who shared his sentiments about the Kurds. It seems probable, finally, that he’d go to her. That’s all.”

“You could try and anticipate his target,” said Chardy.

“You could. And if you anticipated wrong you might put yourself into a posture you’d never get out of. We have no data to operate on at this point as to his target; there are no probabilities. That may change; until it does I’ve decided to concentrate on the probabilities.”

Chardy nodded.

“So we have to wonder, Paul,” Yost continued It was a freak of optics that kept his eyes hidden behind the twin pools of light reflected in his lenses. “You’re our authority. You know them both. Is it feasible he’d approach her? To you, I mean. Does that feel right? And if so, how would she react? And finally, would she cooperate with us? Or, more to the point, with you?”

Miles spoke before Chardy could form an answer.

“She’s not an activist type, we know. She’s not affiliated with any zany political group, she’s not a demonstrator, a kook. She doesn’t sleep with fruity revolutionaries. She’s quiet, she’s solid — except for her head troubles. She doesn’t have a history of doing screwy things.”

He fingered through some pages before him — Johanna’s dossier, probably. God, they knew so much about her, Chardy thought. The idea of this Miles’s small fingers riffling through Johanna’s life offended him. His damp hands on her picture, her documents.

Miles smiled, showing dirty teeth.

Who’ll save you, Johanna, from these guys?

I will, he thought.

And then he thought of her only contact with him, an answer to the fifteen-page letter he’d sent her when he returned from the Soviet prison. It had been a postcard with a cheesy picture of the Doral Hotel in Miami Beach on it, and it had said, “No, Paul. You know why.”

“Paul?”

“Sorry, I was—”

“The question,” Yost said politely, “is: will he approach her? And, would she help him?”

“She’d help us,” Chardy said.

“Come on, Paul,” said Miles … Lanahan! That was it. “For Christ’s sakes, she was sold on the Kurds. If you look at her record the way we did, you cannot escape that conclusion. She went to Iran in ’sixty-nine with the Peace Corps. She came back in ’seventy-three to teach at the college in Rezā’iyeh. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Kirmanji, a Kurdish dialect. She made the pilgrimage to Mahābād, where they had their republic in ’forty-six, and one of her Peace Corps chums told us she wept at the Street of Four Lamps, where the Iranians hanged the Kurdish martyrs.”