The Second Saladin - Страница 26

Then he saw the crowd. It had gathered just up the street at what seemed to be a bridge at the corner of Calle Buenos Aires and the Ruis Cortina. Indians, a few Americans, Mexican teenaged girls in tightly cut American jeans and blouses, but mostly policemen. Three or four gray pickups had been parked nearby and by their uniformity Trewitt realized they were official vehicles.

Warily, he walked into the crowd; he could hear, among other things, the trickle of water.

It smelled here. Something? What? The odor was overwhelmingly familiar. His nose picked it apart but could not identify it — too many other odors were woven into it. But it was disgusting.

The crowd had gathered at the bottom of the street. It was a cobbled, climbing street that traveled up the side of a hill, lit intermittently by overhead lamps. He could see signs of the shops that ran partway up the hill, before the road disappeared into darkness: a dental clinic, a TV and stereo shop, a small food shop on the other side of the street, and a few others. But Trewitt pushed his way through the crowd and came soon enough to the wall, where he stood by three policemen who were talking rapidly among themselves. Lights — there were lights back here. He could feel the warmth, the human warmth, of people all around. He was aware that the blank brick wall that stared back at him twenty feet away was the wall of Oscar’s, of the whorehouse; the gurgle of water was very strong indeed, but he could not quite get to the edge, to look into the — the whatever it was that lay before him and had drawn all these people.

He gave a last, mighty shove, and broke through two men and came to the edge.

The scene, in fact, was a phenomenon of light. The Mexican faces, fat and slack, Indianesque in their unreadability, almost Asian, and the pencil moustaches; and the indifferently blazing headlamps from the police trucks, throwing beams that cut this way and that through the crowd, and a jumble of shadows on the wall beyond. And the Spanish, against it all, the Spanish in a thousand babbling tongues and incomprehensible dialects, jabbering, spiraling through the air. And the odor: he now recognized it for human waste, the stink of cesspool, of outhouse, of backed-up pipes, the smell of the toilet, the urinal, the smell of defecation. Miasmatic, it covered him like a fog, drilling through his sinuses; he winced at its power, feeling his eyes well with tears.

Bill Speight lay on his back in the sewer. Trewitt, at the edge, could just now make him out. Three or four different light beams pinned the old man against a cascade of stones and beer bottles and rusty pipes and assorted junk. The police were talking about las botas, Trewitt overheard as he stared at old Bill in the sewer.

Boots.

That was it: there was a delay until some high rubber waders could be found; no man would descend into the muck without them.

A flashbulb popped and in its brightness Trewitt could see that the old man had taken some kind of heavy-caliber or big-bore shell in the left side of the face. Shotgun, perhaps. The features had been peeled back off that side of his head; yet on the other, astonishingly, the old Bill prevailed. The vision so diverged from Trewitt’s assumptions of human anatomy that he could make no sense of it.

Speight was soaked by the rushing water from a pipe. A shoe had come off and floated downstream, where it wedged against a rock. It was an old Wallaby.

They’d blown the side of his head in and thrown him into a sewer behind a whorehouse, Trewitt thought dumbly. He accepted and did not accept it. Only yesterday, as he sat throwing down rum-and-Cokes, old Speight had numbed him with an endless tale of the Korean War, an account that could have been in a foreign language, so full was it of obscure references, improbable characters, unlikely events. Halfway through, Trewitt realized he must have missed something important, for he had no idea what the man had been talking about. Now he was dead. In a sewer. Shot in the face.

Trewitt gripped the bricks before him for steadiness. Oh, Jesus, poor old bastard. He realized he was trembling, that he was cold. He looked again at Bill. Bill had been so alive just a few minutes ago. Trewitt thought he might be sick. He didn’t know what to do. He could hear the police asking questions.

“Anybody know this old bird?”

“He was with another gringo in Oscar’s. A young one.”

“Where is he?”

“Still with his girl friend.” There was some laughter.

“They get those boots yet?”

“Yes, they just arrived. Who’s going down there?”

“Call Washington. Have them send a vice-president.” More laughter.

Then something occurred to Trewitt.

They — whoever they were — killed Speight for trying to find out about Ramirez.

He, Trewitt, had been with Speight.

He, Trewitt, had asked about Ramirez.

And then, and only then, did he panic.

16

On a Saturday night in Boston, in her high-ceilinged old room, Chardy lay beside her in the dark. Sleep had never come easily for him and it evaded him tonight. But that was fine; he would just listen to the breathing.

The night’s lacework of shadows lay across the far end of the room, webs and links and flecks of brightness; moonlight threaded through the dark, gleaming cold. Chardy anchored himself against the coming of a bad minute or two by putting a hand against her arm. In Chicago there’d never been anything to touch.

Sometimes, then, over those years — frequently, if he was honest about it — he’d awaken weeping. A secret shame: big guys don’t cry. Sometimes it was his back, which to this day became occasionally infected and could be quite painful. Or sometimes a sensation, a vision, would set it off: a twinge of pain, a picture of a hot blue flame. Or sometimes something even stupider: some police officer or fireman or boy scout’s sudden heroism, as vicariously experienced through the newspaper; or an old pro basketball player, on the line looking at a one and one with a whole season’s weight perched on his shoulder; or a young kid, a freshman, taking a jump shot in the last second of an NCAA game. It was the contrast that wrecked him each time: they’d passed their tests, he’d failed his.

Or he wept in confusion. There were so many things about it he didn’t understand even now. Some aspects of it just didn’t add up. He’d break it down and put it together again in a hundred different ways and it still never made sense. It was like one of those awful modern novels that everybody hated except three critics, full of fragments of plot, surrealistic moments of great vividness, odd discordant voices, textures achingly familiar but at the same time unknowable. He was not even certain what he did remember and what he did not; perhaps they’d used drugs on him. Whatever, it was all scrambled up; he could not get inside it.

Or he’d weep in rage. Punching walls was nothing new and once he’d broken his wrist. He dreamed of smashing heads: Speshnev’s, Sam Melman’s, his own. Them all: the Russians, for destroying him; his own side, for the cold, detached fury they’d directed at him; buddies like Frenchy Short for never coming by, whatever the rules — though of course Frenchy could not have come by, for even then he was dead; Johanna, for confirming his vision of himself. And, of course, last and most: himself. Sometimes he looked for fights. A cold need for pain would haunt him; he’d head for Rush Street and throw himself on somebody’s girl, not caring for her at all; and the guy would have to challenge him and the guy would always have friends and Chardy would always wear a black eye for days, or lurch about with cracked ribs; he’d had three teeth knocked out — he wore an old man’s bridge now — and a bad laceration on his chin, which the beard hid.

Nuts. Chardy, you are nuts.

Yet now, lying in the bed in the black New England night, it suddenly occurred to him with swift joy that he had a kind of chance. For with Johanna, all things were possible, a whole universe of things.

He felt he could save Ulu Beg from Ver Steeg and Lanahan. He could even save Joseph Danzig. He could save Sam Melman. All of them linked together by events of the past, chained and doomed, but he could break the chain; he felt the power. Ulu Beg, last reported at the border, moving probably toward them. He’d save him, and bind her to him forever. He’d make Beg in a crowd coming in on Danzig, and he’d nail him with a tackle and calm him down; then he’d talk to them; he’d get it all straightened out, somehow.

It’s only been a week; there’s plenty of time left.

Ulu Beg, I’ll save you. He owed him, for not only had Ulu Beg brought him together with Johanna in the first place, seven years ago as now, he’d also, by allowing however accidentally his target to be known, virtually removed Johanna from the realm of interest of Miles Lanahan and Yost Ver Steeg and whatever other dark lords the two of them served. Chardy, whose importance seemed also to have diminished in the past several days, was for now free to travel on weekends and be with her, as he was now.

She moaned in her sleep, and shifted. He could not really see her, for the moonlight did not touch this corner of the room, yet he felt her: warmth, weight, sweetness of odor, a presence. Her arm warm and dry against his hand.

The telephone rang.

Chardy jumped at the noise, pulled himself up in the bed, and looked at his Rolex, which announced the hour of four.

Johanna stirred in the dark and seemed to swim for the telephone. He heard her speak briefly; then she turned.