The Second Saladin - Страница 31

They sat in a downstairs study, a room that belonged in a department store window or an ad for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Chardy felt like a tourist among the shelved books, several of which must be by Danzig himself. He looked around at leather furniture, at polished wood, at muted damask curtains.

“It’s a wonderful house,” he said stupidly.

“The wages of sin, Mr. Chardy,” said Joseph Danzig.

Nervous Yost kept making patter, small phony jokes at which neither principal in this peculiar blind date would laugh. Finally he said it was time to go and excused himself. In the confusion of his leaving, Chardy stole a glimpse at his watch and saw that he had forty minutes until the caravan left for the airport. He wondered how he’d kill them. He looked out a massive paned door — hate to have to clean the son of a bitch, all those tiny panes, hundreds of them — across a veranda to a backyard garden. Gardens in G-town were not large, but Danzig had more land than most, and his garden was consequently more than ample, reaching back to the brick wall that enclosed his yard. It had not quite sprung to blossom, though Chardy could make out its outlines, its plan: it was a place of severe order, of symmetry. It balanced, neat and crisp. The plots were cut squarely into the earth and low precise hedges ran geometrically through them. Four — not five, not three — four white wooden arbors stood to the rear, bulked with vines, two on each side of a simple fountain. When filled out, the garden would be a composition of immense order.

Chardy suddenly sensed a presence. Danzig, who’d last been heard from announcing he had to run upstairs to his office, was standing next to him, holding a sherry — Chardy had been offered one earlier and had refused.

“What do you think of that garden, Mr. Chardy?”

“It’s very nice, sir,” he said lamely. Nobody had ever asked him about gardens before. Then he added, “Do you garden?”

“Of course not,” Danzig said tartly. “That is, I do not go out there with a hoe and a little set of clippers. But I designed it. The people who lived here before had a terrible Italian grotto fantasy. It looked like the sort of place where homosexuals go to meet each other. I made certain improvements. That fountain was a gift from the President of France. The trees along the left came from Israel. The trees along the right were imported from Saudi Arabia. Many of the plants and bushes come from other countries. It will never be beautiful, of course, but then, that is not its purpose. I do not care much for beauty, and having looked at your record I would say that you do not either. Perhaps on that basis we’ll get along. But back to the garden: it expresses an idea, an idea I hold in extreme importance. It stands for perfect harmony, all components kept in check by other components. Do you understand?”

Chardy understood exactly, and the point was driven home by Danzig’s sudden, wicked, facetious smile.

Just smile mildly, they’d told him; he’ll eat you up otherwise.

But Danzig had been so vastly superior, so condescending, so celestially regal that Chardy’s Hungarian blood began to steam and in his fury he came up with a rejoinder which surprised even him.

“I worked in a garden like that for a while,” he said. “From the big house, far away, it looks great. But up close it’s terrible work — sweaty, dangerous, grubby, disgusting. You might want to talk with your gardeners some hot July Saturday, Dr. Danzig. They might surprise you.”

Behind their lenses, Danzig’s eyes held him for a long moment, not quite in astonishment but at least in surprise. He considered a moment, then smiled again, wickedly.

“But, Mr. Chardy,” he said, “to do it right — to make the right decisions, the long-term decisions — demands perspective, a cool intellect. You have to see the whole plan, the final limits. Gardening, after all, is not missionary work.”

Danzig could not keep his eyes off him; the reflex surprised him and he found that charming, for there had been no surprises in his life lately.

The man kept to himself: big, somewhat sour, perhaps even shy. He was presumably under orders to keep his distance, and the beard helped, masking the features. But the eyes were lively, watchful.

You always wonder about them; all statesmen do. At the bottom of every policy, every necessary decision, there are people: infantrymen, bomber pilots, very junior consular personnel, intelligence operatives. And here was one of the last, the cutting edge of all the chatter in Washington offices, all the committee meetings, the working groups, the papers. Here was the man who had to make it happen.

Chardy had been good at it, the reports said, until his misfortune. Danzig had seen and studied the dossier, being not at all surprised at certain things — the military background, the athletics, the temper, the impatience — and stunned at others — the high IQ, for example. And of course he’d seen Sam Melman’s final judgment: unreliable under stress.

Well, perhaps. Yet this Chardy seemed on first glance anything but unreliable. He seemed stolid, effective, prosaic even. The mind would be dull, although focused. He’d be the technical type, wholly uninterested in things beyond his arcane craft. It was hard to see him as one of the Agency glamour boys — a cowboy, they called them — most alive among far-off little people with grudges, in mountains or jungles, amid guns and equipment.

“I’m told, Mr. Chardy, that the most famous Kurd of all time was Salāh-al-Dˉ Yūsuf ibn-Ayyūb, Saladin of the Crusades, who fought against Richard Coeur de Lion and forced the Crusaders to abandon practically all of Palestine except for a few coastal forts. Perhaps giving crusades a bad name that we should have taken cognizance of in our own times, eh? Did you know that, Mr. Chardy?”

“You can’t be around the Kurds without hearing of Saladin,” said Chardy. “Like he was, they are superb soldiers.” He paused. “When they’ve got the right gear.”

“Are they a colorful people? I always expected Arabs to be colorful and they turned out to be simple boors. But what about the Kurds? Were you disappointed in them?”

Another leading question. What capacity would Chardy have to determine what was “colorful,” what was not?

“They’re obsessive. And obsessives are always colorful. Unless it’s you they’re obsessed with.”

Danzig smiled. Chardy insisted on surprising him. He admired the capacity to astonish, which was rare, as opposed to the capacity to be astonished, which was commonplace.

“You respect them, I take it?”

Chardy went blank and would not answer, as if he were holding something back. Danzig could guess what: his outrage, his contempt, his fury, his disappointment over his — Danzig’s — “betrayal” of the Kurds. But Danzig could figure it out. The man had been among them, had known this Ulu Beg, had probably come to identify with them. The process was common. And when the operation had, of every urgent necessity, to be aborted, Chardy, and many others, would have taken great offense.

But Chardy did not express these sentiments directly. He said only, “Yeah, you have to,” turning quickly moody. It was not difficult to calculate why either: Chardy would share with his hard-charging brethren the conviction that the Kurdish thing had been a No-Win situation from the start. Then why get involved, why spend the money, the lives, if you’re not prepared to stick the course? the beef would run. Danzig had no doubt he could draw him out at great length: we needed more weapons, more ammo, SAMs, better commo and logistics, more sophisticated supply techniques, satellite assistance, naval support, germ warfare, psywar, defoliants, another front, tactical nukes. It would go on and on, no end in sight, a funnel down which could endlessly be poured gear and people and hopes and dreams.

“You do not approve of how it ended, I take it?”

The athlete in Chardy spoke. “I hate to lose,” he said.

“Perhaps if you recall, at that precise moment in history certain events were taking place across the world.”

Chardy nodded glumly. No, he wouldn’t recall from living memory, since he’d been in his cell in Baghdad that week. But he would know by now: the Republic of South Vietnam was falling.

“A very complex and difficult time,” Danzig pointed out.

“Yeah.” was all Chardy could manage. His was not a particularly interesting mind. Still: Danzig was attracted. Not to the mind, but to the mind and the man, to the organic whole. Like an athlete who has nothing to say but is fascinating when he runs or shoots or dodges or whatever, that aspect — man-in-action, man-of-will, man-of-force — had a Nietzschean grandeur to it, a fascination, because it was in part how Danzig saw himself, although in a different realm: the man who makes things happen.

Not to declare Chardy a total original, of course. These crypto-military types had their limits, just as surely as they had their uses. Curiously, they almost always had a sports background; at the very heart of their vision of the world was an image of the Playing Field, on which there are certain teams and certain rules, and if A happens, then by all that’s logical B must follow, mustn’t it? and thus to the swift, the strong, the brave, go the spoils. A heavy, masculine, sentimental fascism ran through it all, a painful juvenile strain. It was best summed up by Kipling, the Imperial apologist and poet laureate of nineteenth-century British Steel, when he coined a brilliant term for it which caught at once the athletic component and the masculine component and the sentimental component: the Great Game. It was of course by now a useless, a worthless concept. Especially as the world progressed exponentially in its complexity, became more densely and dangerously packed with oddball nationalist groups, with sects and cults of personality, with zealots, with madly proliferating technology, up to and including nuclear weaponry.