The Second Saladin - Страница 35

“Shut up. I cut your throat, little shit,” said Roberto, making a listless lunge that sent the younger boy scurrying.

“Go on, get out of here. Both of you.” For now Trewitt could not stand the sight of either of them.

Trewitt sat back in disgust and exhaustion. Next step? Departamento de Policía. And damned quick, before somebody from the mafia blew him away over the ownership of Oscar’s. Still, he dreaded it; it meant the coming to an end of a phase of his life. For surely he was done at the Agency; that much was clear — after a mess-up like this, there’d be no future.

It was also clear to him that he deserved to be done at the Agency. He simply was no good at this sort of thing — he hadn’t the hardness, the cunning, the fury. They never should have sent him; they should have sent somebody who knew what he was doing. He hadn’t even taken the Clandestine Techniques course out at The Farm in Virginia, a basic intro to the dark side of the Agency.

He wondered where the nearest Federal Police station was. Enough adventure for one day, and it was not even 6:00 A.M. He treated himself to a last smile for his own dumb folly — it was kind of funny, except for poor Bill — and set off in search of saner possibilities.

“Hey, mister,” somebody called — Roberto — “I tell you a lie.”

Trewitt turned. The youth stood with a taut look of defiance on his face. What, did he now want to mock Trewitt, or even, out of some Mexican macho thing, to fight him?

The younger boy lurked close at hand, eyeing the two curious antagonists, still hoping for a little action.

“Hey, mister,” said Roberto, “you got some money for Roberto?”

“Kid, I ought to—”

“’Cause, mister, Roberto thinks Reynoldo Ramirez is still alive. And he thinks he knows where he is.”

22

She wanted to walk.

“I just want to walk. Could we walk all weekend? I need the space — I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Sure,” Chardy said.

“I just have to walk. Do you understand? I want to be with you but I want to walk too. All right?”

“No, it’s fine. Show me this place. I want to see this place.”

She took him down Mass Ave to MIT and back again. They went up Garden Street, and she showed him Radcliffe. They got lost in the little places along Brattle. Then they went onto the campus, and walked among the red brick Georgian buildings, under the vaults of the trees.

“How was your week, Paul? Your trip?”

“Terrible. I don’t do anything. They won’t let me do anything. I just hang around Danzig, except when they’ve got him locked up — like now. How was your week?”

“I didn’t get much done. I didn’t make any progress. It was depressing. I’m glad it’s the weekend. I’m glad you’re here.”

The place was lousy with undergrads. They all dressed like hoboes in baggy, sexy rags, junk-shop clothes, insouciantly graceful. They seemed to Chardy like barbarians. Frisbees sailed all over the place, skimming the ground, bouncing. Some rock group sang an amplified tune called “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” from a speaker in a window.

“Look,” he said, “let’s sit down. Do you mind? You’ve really worn me out, all this trooping around.”

They found a bench and sat quietly for a long time.

“This is quite a place,” said Chardy lamely. “I always wondered what one of these places looked like. I went to college in a little town in Indiana. You could hear the grass grow. On Saturday night we used to hang out at—”

He stopped, because he could tell that she wasn’t listening.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.

“Look, something is wrong, I can tell.”

“I think what I like about this place,” she said, “is the safety. Paul, there are people here who never come out. They are troglodytes. They live totally interior lives. They spend forty years studying a certain molecule in an amino acid or a certain sixteenth-century Italian poet. It’s very safe. Nothing intrudes.”

Safe? Chardy looked out on the crowd scene before them.

“Johanna—”

“Paul,” she went on, “I get so scared sometimes. I lie there and I think of all the things that could happen. I think of him, of Ulu Beg. I think of the Kurds, a lost people. And I think of us, and how we’re so responsible for it all, how we tie it all together, and how we haven’t really done anything. Sometimes my mind gets going so fast I can’t get it settled down. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. Paul, I can get very crazy. You have no idea how crazy. I can act very strange.”

He turned to touch her but saw she was not agitated. In fact, he’d never seen her so calm.

“Paul,” she said suddenly, “teach me something. Will you? Help me.”

“Anything.”

“Teach me bravery. Your kind of bravery, a man’s kind of bravery. War bravery, battle bravery. There must be a trick. You were so brave. Whatever else, for so long you were so brave. That attracted me from the first. I fell so in love with it. Teach it to me. I’m sick of being scared.”

“I don’t know much about it anymore. It used to be so important to me. A guy I thought was the bravest man in the world — the guy that taught me everything — ended up floating in the Danube. He left me a message, and it had an eerie ring to it. He told me to fetch the shoe that fits. The shoe fits? It was a joke, I thought. But now I don’t know. Frenchy was trying to tell me something. About all this. He was scared too, because he was going in solo and Frenchy hated to work solo.”

“He was a hero?”

“In our line of work, he was the best. Yes, I suppose he was a hero. Yet even the Frenchman came unglued at the end. His wife — his widow — told me about it. He grew up, he burned out, he got tired.”

“Still, he died for something. Scared and tired and old, he died for it. That’s really it. That’s the lesson I want to learn. This Frenchman — he went ahead. He pressed on.”

“Yes. You’d have to give him that.”

“He died for something he believed in?”

“The joke is, when you think you’re dying, the last thing you think about is what you believe. You think about crazy things. I thought about basketball.” I thought about you, he thought.

“Still, it’s the act that counts, not the motive. That’s a shoe that fits.”

“I suppose it does.”

“Paul, I want to go back to the apartment now. Can we go back and make love?”

He looked at her in the hard light. It was noon, the sun harsh, the breeze stirring old limbs in this leafy place. Slivers of light cutting through the overhead canopy lay about them on the ground, on the walk. She was without color, a severe profile, almost stylized in her beauty.

“Of course we can. Sure. Let’s go. Let’s run back.”

She laughed.

“Johanna, I hardly recognize you.”

“No, I’m fine. It’s you, Paul. I really do draw from you.”

“Johanna, I—”

“Please, Paul. I want to go back. Let’s go. The shoe fits.”

He had always thought beautiful women a breed apart, and maybe they were, some mutant species, made crazy by all the hits on them, or made cynical, contemptuous of the twerps kissing their asses so desperately, or, the worst, made devious, unable to respond until they had figured out just what they stood to gain or lose. But not Johanna: she seemed to him none of these things except achingly, innocently beautiful as she sat before the mirror working on her hair, an abundant woman, flawless in the late afternoon light, after their lovemaking. “Jesus, are you fun to watch,” he called from the bed.

She smiled, but did not look over.

The telephone rang. Chardy rolled over to look at the ceiling.

Johanna said, “It’s for you. A woman.”

He took the phone.

“Hello?”

“Paul?”

The tone, queerly familiar, seemed to arrive from another universe.

“Yes, who is this?”

“Paul, it’s Sister Sharon.”

“Sister Sharon! How are you? How in the world did you find me?”

The nun taught at Resurrection, back in his other life. She had the third-graders, and was a funny, quiet, plain girl, so young, who’d always liked him.

“Paul, it wasn’t easy. You left an address with the diocese to forward your last check; one of the secretaries gave it to me. It was a government office in Rosslyn, Virginia. I went to the library and got out the Northern Virginia phone book and looked up the government offices. I finally found one with the same address. It took an hour. I called the number. I got a young man named Lanahan. I told him who I was and he was very helpful.”

Lanahan. Sure, he’d break his Catholic neck to help a nun.

“Finally he gave me this number. Am I disturbing anything?”

“No, uh-uh. What’s up?”

“There’s a telegram for you. It came to the school. They were just going to send it along but I thought it might be important.”

Who would send him a telegram?

“I had to open it to see if it was an emergency.”

“What’s it say?”

“It’s from your nephew. He wants money.”

Chardy, an only child, had no nephew.

“Read it to me.”

“‘Uncle Paul,’ it says, ‘onto something, need dough. I beg you. Nephew Jim.’”

Trewitt.

“Paul?” Sister Sharon said.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said, but he was calculating. Trewitt had found a soft route back in, trusting no one except his hero, and reaching him through his whole other life. Trewitt, you surprise me. Where’d you get the smarts — from some book?