The Second Saladin - Страница 43

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“It sounds good, Miles. I’m sure you’ll do well.”

“Thank you, Sam,” Lanahan said. Tell him. Tell him.

“Was there anything else?”

“… No.”

The line clicked dead.

Now why hadn’t he said a thing?

I didn’t have enough dope. But in subtle issues like these there’s never enough dope.

Because even now I can’t believe such deviousness in Chardy?

Perhaps.

Because something was wrong? Somewhere, deep inside, Lanahan was puzzled. Something was wrong and he didn’t know what to do about it.

30

Chardy knew it was a bad idea but he couldn’t help himself. He was so close and Danzig was in his room safely, snoozing away on creamy Ritz sheets, and he told her he’d try to make it and the cabby smiled when he said Cambridge and now here he was, $8 the poorer, heading up the walk of the hulking old house. He buzzed in the foyer and she let him in and he bounded up the dark stairs with energy that seemed to arrive in greater amounts the nearer he got. He plunged down the old house’s hall, not caring that he thundered along like a fullback, and saw her door open.

“You made it,” she called.

“Even Danzig sleeps. He’s got a busy day tomorrow. He checked in early.”

He embraced her; they kissed in the doorway. “I’m so glad.”

“Jesus, I’m beat, Johanna, I’m so old. Look at me, an old man; I can’t take this running around.”

He went inside. He could see that she’d been working on her book at the typewriter, where books and manuscript pages were collected. He went to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer can and popped the top. He swilled half of it down, then paused long enough to shed his jacket and fling it to the couch.

“A pistol?”

“They want me to carry it. Johanna, how are you? You’ve been working, I see. Did you get a lot done on the book? I want to read it. I bet it’s good. I bet it wins prizes. Let’s just sit and talk like we’ve been married for fifteen years and bore each other to death. Come on, tell me everything. Tell me everything you’ve stored up. It’s—”

“Paul, that gun really bothers me.”

He realized suddenly she was upset. It hadn’t occurred to him; he’d been full of his own joy at seeing her.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize they bothered you. Let me dump it someplace.”

“Paul, not the gun itself, gun as object. Guns don’t scare me. Paul, that gun. It’s for shooting him.”

“Johanna, it’s a sidearm issued for an Agency security operation. They want me to wear it; they expect me to wear it. It’s that simple. Nothing has changed.”

“Paul. You were going to help. You said your first allegiance—”

“I’m on a security detail. They expect me to carry a gun. They expect me to protect him from Ulu Beg. If they feel I’m not willing to do that, then they have no more use for me. They’d get rid of me and I couldn’t do anything.”

“I hate it. Take it off — hide it. I don’t want to look at it.”

“Okay, sure.” He peeled off the complicated holster, a harness of elastics and leathers and snaps, a mesh of engineering surrounding and supporting the automatic, and tucked the whole ungainly thing under his coat.

“Better?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s not. I can see.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’m sorry. What’s wrong?”

“It’s really hopeless, isn’t it? We’re just pretending? It’s gone too far; there’s nothing we—”

“No.” He went to her and took her shoulders in his hands. “No, we can bring it off. We just need that first break. I have to be able to get to him. If I can talk to him, reason with him, explain things, then I can go to them. I can get them to help me set up a deal. I’ll go to goddamned Sam Melman; I’ll crawl to him, if that’s what it takes.”

“We haven’t brought anything off. We’re just sitting here.”

“They think he’s in the Midwest. Somebody stole his money, they think. I’ve been trying for a week to get them to send me out there.”

“So they’re closing in, and here we sit. Talking.”

“I’ll make something happen, I swear it. I’ll go to Sam on Monday, soon as we get back. I’ll tell him the whole story. I–I just can’t offer more than that, Johanna. I don’t have anything more than that.”

“Somehow it’s just not working out. They’re closing in, you’re spending your time with Joseph Danzig a thousand miles away, I sit around working on a book that I can’t finish, that I can’t make good, and — and we’re just not in control. It just isn’t working.”

“Johanna, please don’t say that. It’s working perfectly. I’m getting them to like me; I’m getting some influence. You just watch. And they’re not going to catch Ulu Beg in Dayton. He’s too smart. For Christ’s sake, I trained him. He’ll be all right. Johanna, I think he’ll be out here within the month. I know he’ll get in contact with you. Or with somebody who knows you. He’ll have thought it all out; he’ll be very careful. Johanna, we’ll bring it off, I swear we will.”

“I’m sorry, Paul. I went for a walk down by the river today. A helicopter, one of those traffic things, came screaming over the trees. It spooked me — it really did. I told you I was a little nuts. Oh, God, Paul, I get so scared sometimes.”

“Okay, okay, I understand. I understand.”

But she had started to cry.

“You’ve never seen me like this, Paul. But I can just crash for days, sometimes.”

“Johanna, please. Please.” He tried to comfort her.

“We’re just not doing anything,” she said. “We’re just sitting here. The whole thing is falling apart. It’s just no good.”

“Please don’t say that. It is good. We will get it done.”

“Oh, Paul. Since I got back, I’ve just become a basket case. I have a terrible darkness inside me.”

“Johanna, please.”

It terrified him that he could not reach her, that she was sealed off.

“Look,” he said, “would this help? I think I could get by, late tomorrow. Danzig’s got some kind of party not five blocks from here, on Hawthorne. It’s with old colleagues, faculty people. It’s not on any itinerary. I know I can skip out, about eleven o’clock. Would that help? And then Monday I’ll go to Sam. Shit, I’ll go all the way to the DCI. I’ll get the whole thing changed around, all right? I’ll get all the guns put away. We’ll work a deal of some kind, I swear it.”

“Oh, Paul.” She was still crying.

“Is that some kind of help?”

She nodded.

“Here,” he said. “Just let me hold you for a while. All right? Just let me hold you. We’ll get through this. I swear we will.”

He felt her warmth and thought he loved her so much he’d die of it.

She was not sure when he left finally; she drifted off and he had not awakened her. When she finally did awake it was around five; and he had covered her.

The television was still on, and she recognized the movie, White Christmas, with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. The scene involved a reunion among some ex-GIs at some hotel in Vermont that a general owned. It seemed a ridiculous movie to run in Boston in the spring.

But she did not have the energy to turn it off. She felt almost ill, feverish at the very least. She did not feel like doing a single thing and wondered again about her strength, her sanity. She tried to lock her mind up in White Christmas: idiotic Danny Kaye raced around; Bing just stood there and sang. Who were the women? Rosemary Clooney — whatever happened to Rosemary Clooney? Vera-Ellen. Did Vera-Ellen have a last name? Was it Ellen? Ms. Ellen? Johanna had seen the movie years ago on a giant screen; she remembered it now. The theater had been air-conditioned. The movie was Technicolor. She saw it with her big sister, Miriam, who was killed in a car crash, and her brother, Tim, who was now a lawyer in St. Louis. All this had been years ago, epochs ago, in the Jurassic of the ’50s. She remembered it with brutal clarity and had no urge to fabricate it, to make myths out of it. Miriam had been very pretty and bright, but she’d left them, Johanna and Tim, all alone, because she’d snuck off with her boyfriend, whom Mommy and Daddy didn’t want her to see anymore. Miriam was bad. She was fast. There was no controlling her. She had the hots. She had lots of boyfriends and worried Mommy sick. She was always in trouble. She was beautiful and bright and wicked and when she’d died her freshman year at Vassar in a car crash with a Yale football player (who survived) nobody was surprised. Johanna remembered that somebody whispered that Miriam got what she deserved. She was a bad girl. She deserved it.

Johanna started to cry again. She cried for Miriam, of whom she’d not consciously thought in years. Poor Mir. She was so bright and pretty and not until Johanna was in her twenties did she know what she should have said to anybody who said Miriam deserved it. She should have said, Fuck you. Miriam deserved the world. She was bright and pretty and good. Miriam was good. She was so good.

I am bad, thought Johanna. I’m the bad one.

She shifted her position slightly, with great weariness. Paul had sat there. And he was the man she loved. She would give herself to him. She would do anything for him, anything he wanted. She loved that chalky, locker-room body, that Catholic’s body, with its slight coating of fat under which there was great strength. It was a big, loose-limbed, hairy body (Paul had hair everywhere; he left a trail of hair), a scarred and hurt body. But she loved it. He was not brilliant and she loved that too. She’d known brilliant men her whole life and now she hated them. Clever, wicked, tricky, cunning bastards. Intellectuals, geniuses, artists. Great scholars, predatory lawyers, egomaniacal doctors. She was tired of brilliant, interesting men without guts. All the trouble in the world came from brilliant, interesting men without guts who loved to hear themselves talk. They were all babies. They were the real killers of this world.