The Second Saladin - Страница 38

“Don’t worry none about them, baby,” she had said. “They ain’t comin’ in here.”

“Say, Jim,” she said now, “just who are you? You white? You look white, you walk white, you talk funny white. But you ain’t white. I can tell.”

“Sure, white.” He laughed now himself. “Born white, die white.”

“But you ain’t no American.”

“Many peoples come to America. For a new life. That’s me — I look for the new life.”

“Not with no gun, Jim. I looked in your bag.”

He paused a second. “Leah, you shouldn’t have.”

“You on the run? Running to or running from, Jim? It don’t matter none to me. Have some wine. You going to waste somebody’s ass? It don’t matter none to me. Just don’t get caught, you hear, because they put you away in a bad place forever and ever, Jim. You the strangest white man I ever did see.”

He stayed a long week. He made love to her every night. He felt full of power and freedom with the black woman in her small apartment in a ramshackle city in the fabulous country of America. He rode her for hours. He lost himself in the frenzy of it, sleeping all day while she worked, then taking her when she returned. He had her once in her kitchen.

“You a crazy man. I’m pushing the damn broom ‘round Old Man Rike’s store all day thinkin’ ’bout crazy Jim.”

“You’re a fine lady, Leah. American ladies are fine. They are the best thing about America.”

“You know another?”

“A long time ago,” he said. “A real fighter, like you, Leah.”

“A white girl?”

“White, yes.”

“No white girl know nothin’ ’bout no fighting.”

“Oh, this one did. Johanna was very special. You and Johanna would be friends, I think.” An odd vision came to him — he and Leah and Jardi and Johanna and Memed and Apo. They’d be at a meadow, high in the mountains. Thistles were everywhere, and the hills were blue-green. Amir Tawfiq was there too; they were all there. His whole family was there; everybody was there. His father, also Ulu Beg, hanged in Mahābād on a lamppost in 1947, he was there too. There were partridges in the trees, and deer too. The hunting was wonderful. The men hunted in the day and at night the women made wonderful feasts. Then everybody sat around in the biggest, richest tent he had ever seen and told wonderful stories. Jardi talked about his own crazy father, the Hungarian doctor. Johanna told of her sister Miriam. Leah told of her brother Bobby, and even as these people were mentioned they came into the tent also and had some food and told some stories and raised a great cheer. Kurdistan ya naman, they cheered, Kurdistan ya naman.

“Jim? Jim?”

“Ah?”

“Where you been? It sure wasn’t Dayton.”

“It’s nothing. Tomorrow I will go. I have to go. I stay too long; I must move on.”

She looked at him, her eyes furious and dark.

“You go off someplace with that gun, they kill you. No lie, they kill you, like my brother Bobby.”

“Not Jim,” he said.

“Baby, don’t go. Stay with Leah. It’s nice here. It’s so nice.”

“I have to go on. To meet a man.”

“To the bus station? Cops catch you sure.”

“No cops catch Jim.”

“Sure they do. Where you going?”

“Big city.”

“Big-city cops catch you in a bus station sure. I know they will.”

“I have to go.”

“Jim,” she said suddenly, “take my car. Go on, take it. It just sit there.”

An awkward moment for him.

“I cannot drive an automobile,” he said.

She threw back her head in laughter, sudden and light and musical.

“You some dude, baby, you some old dude.” She laughed again. “Hon,” she said, “you the strangest white man I ever heard of. You so strange you almost ain’t white.”

And so she said she’d drive him.

26

To Trewitt the world seemed considerably more attractive with a full meal in his belly, a shower, a night in a decent place — the Hotel Fray Marcos de Ninza, not exactly Howard Johnson’s, but it had TV and running water, hot if you waited long enough. And locks on the door. So a little confidence had returned to Señor Trewitt with the arrival of Chardy’s money; not that a sudden shadow, the report of a car backfire, a hard set of Mexican eyes flashing his way didn’t still wreck him, but he was at least done with cowering in a barn.

Look at me. Look at me! So pleased he thought he might burst, in love with this new image, for he was a clandestine operator now; he was an agent. He felt he’d finally joined a fraternity that had been blackballing him these many years.

Look at me. Look at me! And he did, too. He could not keep his eyes off himself in shopwindows, in the mirror of his room — lean young man, quiet, willful. The eyes deep and quick. The hand never far from his weapon.

For Trewitt was now an armed man.

He’d sent the boy out with $50 of Chardy’s money and specific instructions.

“An automatic. Not some ancient Colt or Remington or Pancho Villa special. An automatic, short-barreled if possible, but I’d settle for one of those Spanish nine-millimeter Stars or even a Llama from Spain if it’s big enough, nine mil at the least. Can you do it?”

“Sure I can.”

“Don’t screw me now.”

“I’m no screw you.”

“Just don’t.”

The boy returned with a worn yellow box, its faded label displaying a pale square of print. In, of all unlikely things, Italian.

“Italian?” wondered Trewitt, much concerned, and ripped the box open greedily. “Jesus, a Beretta.” he said in wonder. “Must be fifty years old.”

The small blue pistol glinted up at him, antiquated and stubby. It had an odd prong flaring off the butt-stock to give it an Art Deco look. Ten oily rounds stood upright in a tray along the box’s edge.

“That’s all you could get for fifty American?”

“Inflation,” the boy explained.

But Trewitt was secretly delighted with the small automatic. He fired one of the precious 7.65-millimeter rounds that night into a gully wall. The pistol was accurate to maybe seven feet, something out of an old Hemingway novel, fresh from the retreat from Caporetto, but it was his, his alone. Its weight in his waistband pleased him, and he carried it with a round in the chamber, but at half cock, pushed around on his hip. He tried his draw too, in private moments, groping quickly for the weapon. He needed to improve, and vowed to spend half an hour a day in practice.

Look at me! For the pistol was only the beginning. The shop-windows and the mirror also threw back the vision of a dashing young gangster in a yellow leisure suit, a double-knit polyester thing only recently arrived from Taiwan, and a white-on-white imitation-silk shirt (also Taiwanese) with a huge flappy collar and no buttons above the sternum. He looked like a pimp, an assassin, a failed movie star in the getup, a zoot suit, a blast of sheer arrogant yellow that would have burned the retinas of his friends. The bad taste of it was awe-inspiring and of his old self only his Bass Weejuns, tassel loafers in a muted oxblood, remained, because the Mexican shoes all ran to three-inch heels and seemed to be made of plastic.

And Trewitt had one more treasure of considerable significance to him: he had a new recruit, No. 2 in his network. The bartender Roberto had signed on. He had been sacked by Oscar Meza for stealing and like many another Latin male, unjustly dismissed only for playing by what he understood the rules to be — they had been Reynoldo Ramirez’s rules, after all — was insane with a desire for vengeance, la venganza, and dreams of glory. He too had an image problem: he wanted to be a tough guy, a knife fighter, the kind of man whom all the women wanted.

Roberto’s story: One of his less pleasing jobs in the brothel involved the sorting of laundry, going through the towels. “The whores use a lot of towels,” he explained, and Trewitt kept his face blank, remembering the job done on his privates by Anita with just such a towel.

“And guess what I find, three weeks running, every Tuesday?”

Trewitt could not, or would not.

“Bandages with pus. Yards of adhesive tape with hair in the sticky part. Bloody linen.”

“Maybe somebody got rough with the girls.”

“Not that rough,” said Roberto.

“So where’s it from?”

“I try to keep my eyes open. Where, I wonder, where does the Madonna go on Tuesday afternoon?”

“Who’s this Madonna?”

“The upstairs lady. The pecker-checker. Fat and ugly. Eeeeeiiii. She been a nurse or worked in the hospital or something, I don’t know. She takes care of the girls.”

Trewitt nodded, thinking about it. Where did the Madonna go?

Now it was Tuesday, and behind cheap sunglasses, in his yellow outfit, Trewitt lounged on a bench in the hot shade of a mimosa tree. He was among Indians, country peasants, shoeshine boys, hungry scabby dogs, an occasional cop, a more than occasional gaggle of Exclusivo cabdriver pimps, in a small park at the corner of Pesquirica and Ochoa streets. Beyond him were railway tracks glittery with broken glass; beyond them another hundred yards, the Casa de Jason; beyond it, the Ruis Cortina and on the other side of the Ruis Cortina, tucked into the rising bulk of a sandstone bluff otherwise bristling with shacks, Oscar’s. Weeds fluttered in the gritty breeze; skinny dogs and kids fled this way and that; banged-up Mexican cars roamed up and down the streets, jammed full. The sky was blue; the sun was hot.