The Second Saladin - Страница 53

Chardy could hear two grunting men shove the thing over, hear the squeak of the wheels.

“Paul?”

“Please,” Chardy said. “Please don’t.”

“Are you ready, Paul?”

“Please. Help me. Don’t hurt me. I’m begging, oh, Jesus, I’m begging you. Don’t hurt me. Please. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”

“Burn him.”

“No. No! PLEASE, OH, JESUS, PLEASE DON’T HURT ME! PLEASE! I’M BEGGING! OH, SHIT, I CAN’T TAKE IT! PLEASE!”

“You’ll talk then?”

Chardy hung on his ropes. He tried to pray. Dear God, spare me. Spare me, please, dear God. I pray to you, dear God, help me. Please, help me.

“Paul. Your answer?”

Chardy whispered.

“What? Louder, Paul. Louder.”

Chardy tried to find the words. His tongue caught in his throat. He could hardly see. He was so scared. He could feel his heart thumping.

“Yes, Paul? Yes?”

Chardy croaked, “I said, fuck you, cocksucker.”

They burned the sixth hole in his back.

Chardy lay in the ropes. How much time had passed? Pain-time or real time? Pain-time is different: longer. In pain-time, years, decades. In real time, maybe three hours. It was just night. He stared at the crumbling stone. He heard rats in the darker corners of the cell. He knew that tomorrow he would crack. It would be tomorrow. He was not even sure he could last the night.

He heard the cell door open. Off schedule. Were they going to give him his seventh day’s dosage now, and cheat him of the pleasures of brooding upon it? But he couldn’t turn to see. His neck barely worked.

Rough hands cut him down. He fell limbless to the straw. He was dragged toward light. They lifted him up.

“Ahhhhhhh!”

“His back, watch his back, you fool.”

“Yes, Agha.”

He seemed to sit.

“Get him some water.”

It was presented in an earthenware cup, held for him because his gray hands would not work. He felt the rough texture of the vessel with lips and tongue as the water sweetly entered him.

“Enough.”

The water was taken away. “Paul? Can you hear me?”

Chardy could not focus. He squinted and recognized the voice. He could almost see the face and then it swam into clarity. The Russian peered at him intently.

Chardy smiled stupidly, feeling the skin of his lips crack and split. A tooth fell out. His head lolled forward; he raised it again. He shook his head.

“Paul, listen to me. We’ve captured another Kurd from Ulu Beg’s group. A deserter. We broke him with the torch just minutes ago.”

Chardy thought about it. He almost passed out. More water was poured into his mouth, until he almost choked.

“I–I — I’m the only one who knows the fre — fre — fre—”

“Frequency, Paul. Frequency.”

“Frequency.”

“Paul, he didn’t have to tell us about the frequency or the codes. He told us enough. He told us about the woman.”

Chardy stared groggily at the man. His back fired off on him, curling him in a spasm of pain.

“Jo — Jo — Jo —?” he began weakly.

“Yes. Listen carefully. Here it is, a one-time-only offer. I’m not going to give you much time. You’ve got about thirty-seconds. Paul, either give us the information or I swear to you, I’ll bring you her head. If you talk, maybe we can get her out. We can try, at any rate. She’s beyond anybody else’s help. The Agency can’t help her. The Iranians can’t. She’s with his group and we’re closing in and we’ll have them in a matter of days, a week at the most. Only one man can help her, Paul. You, Paul. You decide, Paul. Does the woman live or die? You tell me, Paul, or I swear that within the week, in this very chamber, I will hand you her head. I’ll take it from her myself.”

Chary had begun to cry. He found the strength to lift his hands to his eyes to shield his shame. Fat tears fell onto his filthy body and ran into the straw. He choked on them.

“Paul. Ten seconds.” Speshnev stood.

Chardy fought for his strength as he watched the Russian go toward the light. He felt himself slipping into the straw. He watched the others join Speshnev at the door and begin to file out. Speshnev pulled the heavy door closed behind him.

“No,” screamed Chardy. “No. God help me. God help them all. God forgive me. No. No. No.”

“There, there, Paul,” he heard the Russian crooning, as he lifted Chardy’s head gently from the straw. “It’s going to be all right. You’re being reasonable at last.”

They cleaned him quickly after he told them, and shot him full of pain-killer. The rest he remembered poorly. They took him up several floors to some kind of operations center. He sat at a Soviet artillery radio, an older model. It had evidently already been adjusted to proper frequency. Several technicians hovered about and he could tell that his condition shocked them. He almost passed out twice. The radio crackled.

“What do you want me to say?”

Speshnev told him about the helicopters, and Chardy told Ulu Beg, and then they gave him some more pain-killer and he went to sleep.

He awoke in a hospital room, on his stomach, in the presence of two Soviet Marines with AK-47s. He was much improved, though groggy. Bright sunlight flooded in through the window, and beyond he could make out the city. They brought him a glass with some high-protein concoction in it, mostly egg and wheat, and he sucked it down.

The door flew open and the Russian came in.

“How are you, Paul? How are you?”

Chardy had no answer and looked at him stupidly. He could only think that he had just begun a day where there would be no torch.

“We broke it, Paul. Yes, we did it. I did it, Paul. Broke it, broke the revolt. We broke the Kurds, Paul. All American advisers have been ordered back to Rezā’iyeh. The mission there will be closed down. The Shah has arrested the Kurdish emissaries in Tehran, and closed the border. It’s all over.”

He looked carefully at Chardy.

Chardy had trouble concentrating. Even now his memories were beginning to jangle on him, to mix and twist and fabricate themselves. His back felt numb. He’d been jacked up to his eyeballs on narcotics. He could hardly remember his own name.

He looked away. Stupidly, he lurched from the bed. One of the Soviet Marines grabbed him, but he pulled away and stumbled to the window. He looked across Baghdad from a fifth or sixth story and saw a filthy sprawl of stone slums and crappy modern buildings spilling to the horizon. A sluggish bluebottle struggled against the dirty glass. The sun was shining, though a hump of clouds gathered in the distance, over the mountains far to the north.

“A wonderful city, eh, Paul? Beautiful Baghdad, storied Baghdad, city of princes and miracles. Beautiful, isn’t it, Paul?”

Chardy said nothing. He sensed the Russian beside him.

“Ah, Baghdad! Do you know in my last post I had a fine view. I could see a river, a giant old Ferris wheel, white baroque buildings. Europe. Civilization. Perhaps now I will be going back there.”

“The girl,” Chardy said. “Johanna. Please?”

“Well, Paul, the news is optimistic. We believe she got out. We have examined the bodies and hers is not among them. Unless she was killed earlier, of course, in which case of course I can take no responsibility. But—”

“Bodies?” Chardy said.

“Yes, Paul. We killed them. We killed them all.”

Chardy fell to his knees. He began to weep. He could not stop himself. He sobbed and gagged. He tried to hide his face from the Russian towering above him.

“You are truly a broken man, aren’t you, Paul? I wonder if you’ll ever be any good again? At anything? I hope when you get back you can find this woman and get her to marry you. You’ve certainly paid a dowry. Perhaps the highest in the world. You can marry her and live in the suburbs and work for an advertising agency. Tell me, Paul. Was it worth it?”

That night, on the flight to Moscow, Chardy managed to open both his wrists with a broken glass. He bled considerably, but they caught him and would not let him die.

Chardy blinked awake in his apartment, alone in the cold night.

Be reasonable, he told himself.

He rolled from the bed, went to the refrigerator. There was no beer; he had not gotten any. Was it too late? He badly needed something to drink. He looked at his Rolex and discovered it was the hour of four. He stared out the window above his sink. A sprawl of streetlights lay beyond the filthy glass.

Chardy stood barefoot in the kitchenette. He got himself a lukewarm glass of water in a plastic glass and was too spooked to chase down ice. He thought of Johanna, who was dead, and Ulu Beg who soon would be. He thought of Speshnev too, and even thought he heard the Russian’s voice now, lucid, full of reason and conviction. Speshnev said, and Chardy heard it as if the man were here, now, in this room: “In my last post I had a fine view. I could see a river, a giant old Ferris wheel, white baroque buildings.”

Chardy could see nothing. This was the suburbs; there was nothing to see. Chardy thought of the Russian looking at his white baroque buildings, and marveled that in the man’s mind there was room enough for pleasant views and baroque architecture and the theory and practice of the torch.

He shook his head, took another sip of his water. He looked at his watch, to discover that only a minute had passed since he’d last checked. He knew he’d never get back to sleep. He looked again into the darkness and at that instant, that exact instant, it hit him with such force as almost to drive him through the linoleum that in only one city in the world could there be such a congruence of rivers, Ferris wheels, and white baroque buildings. He’d been there himself.