The Second Saladin - Страница 21

Bluestein sat back.

It was the same.

Could it be a coincidence? No, not by any law of probability. Could it be a quote, an allusion? No, if this were a famous line, the preliminary note would have said so.

U. Beg, you bastard, he thought, you wrote the second version, too. You were quoting yourself.

And who was U. Beg talking about?

Bluestein checked, just to make sure, and then he began to dig through his directory for Yost Ver Steeg’s emergency code. And a single image jumped into his head: it had nothing to do with Kurds or kernels or honey or bones. It was a picture of a huge, gleaming plate of chicken salad.

13

It was an awkward process. Chardy had not been with a woman for a long time. Among other anxieties he was frightened that he could not control his sudden appetite. But she understood and was helpful, guiding his hands, touching him when he was shy, pressing him where he was reluctant. Chardy felt himself passing through a great many landscapes, a great many colors. Was he in a museum? At some points he seemed to walk down a stately corridor at a stately pace; and at others he was racing upstairs or tipping dizzily down them, terrified of falling.

It seemed to last forever. When it finally finished, they were both sweaty and exhausted, worn in the pale light that suffused the room from the drawn shade. He could barely see her, she was only a form, a warmth in the darkness.

“It’s been so long,” he said.

She put her hand on his arm and they slept.

Around five, she roused him.

“Come on. Let’s go to a restaurant. A really nice one. Let’s spend some money. I haven’t been out to dinner in years. You can wear your tie. I’ll put on heels.”

“Great,” he said. “Can I get a shower?”

“Go ahead. It’s through there.”

He rose, walked absently to the bathroom.

“Paul?” Her voice had something in it, and as he turned he knew, and it astonished him that for a moment or two — or ten minutes or three hours or whatever — he’d actually forgotten, it had left his brain totally. Or maybe he’d willed himself to forget it so he could initiate her into his secret without shame.

“Paul,” she said. “God, your back.”

“Yes,” Chardy said. His back: the living image of his weakness, written in flesh, a testament to his failure at the one important thing he’d ever tried to do.

“Oh, Jesus, Paul. My God.”

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.