The Second Saladin - Страница 52

Chardy’s wrists were tied before him; he could see old stone and smell his own sour perspiration. He’d spent the night thinking about his back.

“Paul, please. Help me on this. We can work together.”

They burned the second hole in his back.

“How was your evening, Paul? The guards say you screamed all night. They say you woke several times with nightmares. I would imagine the psychological pressure is immense. I know this business weighs heavily on me as well. I hope we can finish it today and that you’re able to cooperate. What do you say, Paul? Do you think you’ll be able to help me?”

Chardy was silent; in his peripheral vision he could see Speshnev standing behind and beside him in his rumpled uniform.

“Paul, now let’s think about this. At this very moment an American from the IBM Corporation is selling a Russian from the Committee on Scientific Research highly sophisticated computer software whose intricacies are a thousand times more complex than you or I could ever understand. A traitor? No, it’s done in the open! Businessmen! With the support and endorsement of both governments. It’s simply trade. Also being sold are licenses for the bottling of Pepsi-Cola and the manufacture of Ford Pintos. In exchange we fork over tons of our desperately needed minerals, crude ore, and so on. So against this panorama of exchange, this Technicolor extravaganza of commercial greed, of ideological co-option, what can you expect to accomplish? Paul, be reasonable. You prevent one man, me, from becoming a full colonel. It’s really quite humorous, Paul. I wish you’d work with me on this.”

They burned the third hole in his back.

“Paul, they tell me you had a terrible evening. The guard says he thinks you did not sleep at all. And you do look feverish, Paul. Frankly, you look awful. You look terrible. I think yesterday I let them go too far. That wound is terrible. Paul, if you could see it you would be disgusted. And the flies. The flies must drive you insane. Paul! How much longer can you let this go on. You are destroying yourself!”

Chardy had given up, by this time, any idea of heroism. Courage had no meaning in a cellar among men with blowtorches. He’d quit caring for the Kurds; they could have the Kurds, they could have Ulu Beg and his band of lunatics. And the Agency — what good was it? They’d let him hang on ropes for three days now, in his own filth, in a cell with rats, a medieval place full of damp straw where other men screamed in the night, and his nightmares were huge and terrible and he could think of nothing but the torch.

“It’s not as if anybody cares,” Speshnev said. “Do you really think all those Ivy Leaguers care? I mean, think about it, Paul: have you been really satisfied with your treatment from them? Haven’t they always regarded you with contempt as some sort of working-class adventurer, just a shade above a mercenary? Do they even bother to conceal their superiority? Tell me if I’m not right: they all wear pinstripe suits and black shoes, don’t they? I’m right; I know I’m right. They seem to pad along. They wear those pink-rimmed glasses, plastic things. They all know each other, and each other’s fathers, and all went to the same schools. They play squash. They send their children to the same schools. They all live in the pleasanter Washington suburbs. McLean or Chevy Chase. They drink wine and know about French food. They speak a different language. And you terrify them. You scare the pants off them because you are one of those rare men with talent. How ordinary people hate talent! They despise it! It terrifies them! You have a talent for action, a will, a courage. They envy it fiercely and they hate you for it. Think about it, Paul. Be reasonable. Are those men worth suffering these torments for? Think about what I’m saying, Paul. They’ll leave you here to the next century. They have no capacity to imagine what you are undergoing. Paul. It would be so easy to tell me.”

And it would. Speshnev wanted the frequencies, the times of transmission, the code system of the radio linkup with the Kurds. It was so simple. The frequency was 119.6 MhK, nothing fancy at all, but the Kurdish receivers and the Agency transmitter in Rezā’iyeh were calibrated exceedingly fine so there was very little band waver going in or out. Radios were an Agency specialty. You had to be parked right in the groove to intercept and if Speshnev didn’t get the frequency he had no chance. The codes were easy too: Fred to Tom on the odd days, Tom to Fred on the even ones. It was so simple it was primitive, straight out of a World War II OSS handbook. He could tell Speshnev in ten seconds. He could be off the hook in ten seconds.

“Please don’t hurt me again. Please,” he said.

“You’ll cooperate?”

Chardy twisted on his ropes until he made eye contact with the Russian. He begged forgiveness with his eyes and the Russian responded.

“Don’t you understand?” Chardy said hoarsely, whispering. “I–I — just can’t.”

Johanna was among the Kurds. He’d have to give them Johanna and he would not.

They burned the fourth hole in his back.

By the fifth day Speshnev was growing desperate. Chardy could hear him pacing in the cell, hear his boots scrunching on the straw.

Chardy tried to think of Johanna.

“The early burns are festering badly, Paul. There are maggots in them, and flies. The infection looks gruesome. The pus is something terrible, Paul. I’d like to get a doctor in here. I don’t know how you can stand the pain. The pain must be intense.”

He had never seen her naked. He never would see her naked. It had always been in a sleeping bag. He tried to imagine her naked. He tried to put her nakedness between himself and this room.

“Those flies can lay eggs, Paul, that get into your bloodstream. Your blood distributes them throughout your body. They hatch in odd places, Paul. They hatch in your lungs, in your toes, in your genitals, in your heart, in your brain. Paul, all those little insects in you, eating you up. All that corruption and filth spreading through your body, devouring you, absorbing you.”

Her breasts. He tried to imagine their heft and weight, the size of the nipples. He concentrated desperately.

“Paul, a little antibiotic and the problem is instantly taken care of. It’s just a pill, a shot, and modern medicine takes over, vanquishing the invaders. Or they eat and grow fat on your flesh, grow corpulent on your organs, Paul. And out there, eating you from this side, Paul, is the torch. Always the torch, Paul. The torch is here. Tell me, Paul, are you ready for the torch again? Paul, you are making it so hard on me. But you force me to do my duty. Help me, Paul. Let me save you from the torch and the insects, Paul. Help me.”

But Chardy was thinking of nothing else in this world except Johanna and could not help him. They burned the fifth hole in his back.

The Russian was desperate on the sixth day.

“Damn you, Paul! Damn you, Chardy, the codes! The codes, damn you. The frequencies.”

Chardy hung on the rope. Before him, the wall. He could hear the wheel of the cart as they brought the heavy acetylene torch in. He had never seen it, but he’d heard it bang against the walls, heard the squeak as its metal wheels rolled across the stone floor. He had no idea who was working the torch, who actually applied it, but for certain, whatever happened, happened at Speshnev’s direction.

He could hear them now adjusting the nozzle, could hear the soft turning of valves as the gas and oxygen mixed. He smelt the gas, as he always did, and he began to gag reflexively, to choke and twist on his ropes, to retch up food that wasn’t there.

“It’s here, Paul. The torch. It is once again the hour of the torch. Are you ready, Paul? The torch is here; he’s got it lit. Its flame is blue, Paul. Its pain is indescribable. He’s going to wait a second, adjust the flame.”

Chardy’s head lolled idiotlike on his chest. Drool played across his chin. Very little was real to him except the torch, whose approach he could feel all the way to his inmost cells. The rope cut into his hands. His fingers looked like blue sausages. Blood ran down his arms. He hung in his own waste.

“Paul, don’t make me debase you again! Don’t!”

Chardy fought them with his last weapon. It was his game. He tried to think of basketball. He tried to keep the game at the front of his brain. He tried to remember what he loved most about it: the pebbly feel of the ball as it came up to his hand on the dribble; the exultation that fired through his veins when a long one went in, especially late in the last period in a close game; the sheer fury, the physical ferocity of the struggle under the boards. He saw himself in a vast dark gym. He could not tell if there were fans in the seats or not, for he could not see. He could not make out the people he was playing against either: they seemed to be shadows, swatting at him, throwing their bodies at him. But he could see the hoop, the only spot of light in this great arena, an orange circle, crisp and perfect, its white net hanging beneath it. And he could not miss. He kept putting it in. He kept firing that ball up there and it kept going through. He could smell his own foul sweat, and exhaustion clouded his vision. His legs didn’t work and fatigue blurred the precision of his moves. He could get it in, though. He thought he could get it in.

“Paul, it’s working now. The torch is working now. We are ready. They tell me you screamed all night, Paul. You’re feverish, you’re in great pain. You’ve fought so hard. But you’re not going to make it. You are not going to make it, Paul. I’ve won. You knew I would. Paul, it’s a matter of time. It’s only a matter of time. The torch is ready.”