The Second Saladin - Страница 8

They had prepared him well. But they had also warned him.

“America is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Women walk around with breasts and buttocks exposed. Food and lights everywhere, everywhere. Cars, more cars than you can imagine. And hurry. Americans all hurry. But they have no passion. Any Turk has passion. Among Turks and Mexicans and Arabs, passion runs high. But Americans are even lower, for they feel nothing. They move as though asleep. They do not care for their children or their women. They speak and talk only of themselves.

“In all this, you will be dazzled. Expect it. There is no way we can prepare you for the shock of it all. Even a small city in America is a spectacle. A large one is like a festival of all the peoples of earth. But remember also: the grotesque is common in America. Nobody will notice, nobody will care, nobody will pay you any attention. Nobody will ask you for papers if you are cautious. You need no permits, no licenses. Your face is your passport. You may go anywhere.”

Ulu Beg reinstructed himself in these lessons as he came down the last hill in the dawn light to the road. He moved swiftly. The distance was but a few twisting miles and the cars that sped by paid him no attention. The houses quickly became thick: small places of cinderblock in the sand and scrub. At each house was a car and in some of them men were leaving for work. Ulu Beg walked along the street. He paused to read the sign: SPEEDWAY, it said. He came to a group of men waiting by a corner. A bus arrived and they climbed aboard. He walked another few blocks and again the same thing happened. At a third corner, he climbed aboard himself.

“Hey. Fifty cents,” the driver said angrily. Ulu Beg searched his pockets. They had told him about this. Fifty cents was two quarters. He found the coins and dropped them in the box, and took a seat and rode down the Speedway toward the center of the city.

He got out near the bus station and looked for a hotel.

“Always stay near bus stations. Small places, dirty rooms, cheap. But a hotel, always a hotel. In a motel, they’ll ask about an automobile. You’ll have to explain that you don’t have one. Why not? they’ll ask. They’ll think you’re mad. In America it is exceedingly odd not to have an automobile. Everybody has an automobile.”

He chose a place called the Congress — the name proclaimed proudly on a metal frame on the roof — across from a Mexican theater in a crumbling section of the city. It was a four-story building with a bookstore, a barbershop, and a place that sold gems in it, across from the train station and behind the bus station.

He walked into the dim brown lobby.

A fat lady looked up when he came to the desk.

“Yes?”

“A room. How much?”

“It’s ten-forty, dear. You get your TV and a bath.”

“Sure, okay.”

“Just sign here.”

He signed quickly.

“One night? Two? A week? I have to put it down.” Her face was powdery and mild.

“Two, three maybe. I don’t know.”

“Oh, and hon? You forgot to say where you were from. Here, on the form.”

“Ah,” he said.

He knew what to put. He thought of the only American he knew. Jardi. Where had Jardi grown up?

“Chicago,” he wrote.

“Chicago, now there’s a nice town.” She smiled. “Now I have to have that money, hon.”

He gave her a twenty and got his change.

“You go on up. Those stairs there. Down the hall. It’s in the back, away from all the traffic.”

He climbed the stairs, went down the dark hall and found the room. He went in, locked the door. He pulled the Skorpion from his pack and set it before him on the bed and waited for the police.

Nobody came.

You did it, he thought.

Kurdistan ya naman.

4

Trewitt was nervous. First, so many big shots in the room at one time. The special men, the elect, some of them legends, who ran the place. Then, the equipment. He was not by nature mechanical. He was not good with things. Wouldn’t it have been easier to have brought in some technical wizard to handle this aspect of it? Well, yes, under normal circumstances. But these were extraordinary circumstances. Therefore he’d just have to run the equipment himself.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Yost Ver Steeg had said.

And then the slides. They were the key; they had to fall in the right order and he’d just got the last one down from Photographic a few minutes ago — it had been touch and go the whole way — and he wasn’t sure he’d gotten it into the magazine right. He might have had it in backward, which would have had a humorous effect in less intense briefings, but this one was big and he didn’t want to screw up in front of so many important people. And see Miles Lanahan snickering in his corner, removing one point from Trewitt’s tally and awarding it to himself.

“Trewitt, are we ready?” It was Yost.

“Yessir, I think so,” he called back, his voice booming through the room — he was miked, he’d forgotten.

He bent, switched on the projector, beaming a white, pure rectangle onto the wall. So far, so good. If he could just find … yes, there’s the bastard; it was a kind of toggle switch mounted in a cylinder, in turn linked by cord to the projector. Now, if this just works like the instructions say, we’ll be …

He punched the button and there was a sound like a.45 cocking.

A face came on the screen, young, tenderly young, say eighteen, eyes wild with joy, crewcut glinting with perspiration, two scrawny straps hooked over two scrawny shoulders.

“Chardy at eighteen,” Trewitt said. “His high school had just won the Class B Chicago Catholic League championship. March twelfth, nineteen fifty-eight. The picture is from the next day’s Tribune. This is a close-up; you can’t see the trophy, a hideous thing. Anyway, Chardy scored … ah, I have it right here ….”

“Twenty-one points,” Miles Lanahan called. “Including a free throw with time gone that gave St. Pete’s a one-point win.”

“Thanks, Miles,” said Trewitt, thinking, you bastard.

“Anyway,” Trewitt continued, “you can see he’s a hero from way back.”

Trewitt’s problem was heroes. His vice, his consuming passion, heroism. His deepest secret was that when he walked through the streets and saw his own bland reflection thrown back at him in shopwindows he projected onto it certain extravagances of equipage and uniform: jungle camouflages, dappled and crinkly, bush hats, wicked knives; and the weapons, the implements by which the hardened professionals performed their jobs — the M-16 and AK-47, antagonists of a hundred thousand firefights of the sixties and seventies; or the Swedish K so favored by Agency cowboys in ’Nam; or the compact little MAC-10 or -11, other racy favorites.

“The real name is C-S-A-R-D-I,” said Trewitt, “Hungarian. His dad was a doctor, an emigré in the thirties. His mom is Irish. A quiet woman who still lives in the apartment in Rogers Park. The dad was a little nuts. He was a drunk, his practice failed, he ended up a company doctor in a steel mill. He went into an institution after he retired, and died there. He was hard-core anticommunist though, and a staunch Catholic. He filled the kid’s head with all kinds of stuff about the Reds. And he wanted him to be tough; he really put him through some hell to make him tough. He—”

“Jim, let’s move it along.” Yost’s stern voice from out of the darkness.

“Sure, sorry,” Trewitt said, convinced he heard Lanahan snicker.

Two quick clicks: Chardy the college athlete; Chardy, hair sheared off, in the denim utilities of a Marine boot.

“Marine officer training, after college,” Trewitt announced.

Trewitt had known of Chardy for some time. His job on the Historical Staff, to which he’d so recently been attached, had been to edit the memoirs of retiring officers who were paid by the Agency to stay at Langley an extra year and write, the idea being, first, to allow any impulse toward literature to play itself out under controlled circumstances and second, to compile a history of the means and methods of the secret wars. Aspects or fragments of Chardy kept showing up in these accounts, memories of him echoing through a dozen different sources, sometimes under cryptonyms. He’d been pretty famous in his way.

“And here he is,” Trewitt announced, clicking his button, “among the Nungs.”

Chardy had been recruited out of the Marine Corps in Vietnam in the early days, ’63, ’64, where he was for a time a platoon commander and then a company commander and finally, having extended his tour, an intelligence officer, coordinating with South Vietnamese Rangers and running (and occasionally accompanying) long-range recons up near the DMZ. But an Agency hotshot named Frenchy Short talked him into jumping to the Company, which at that time desperately needed jungle-qualified military types.

The slide on the wall now was a favorite of Trewitt’s, for it seemed to express exactly a certain heroic posture — the two men, Paul and Frenchy, among Chinese mercenaries from the Vietnamese hill country whom they’d trained and led in a hit-and-run war way out in the deep, beyond the reach of law or civilization.

“He did two long stretches with the Nungs,” Trewitt said to the men in the quiet briefing room in Langley, Virginia, “with a stay in between at our Special Warfare school in Panama.”

The two of them, the younger, leaner Chardy, his black Irish face furious and pale, and the older Frenchy, a stumpy man with a crewcut, thick but not fat, his raw bulk speaking more of power than sluggishness. They wore those vividly spotted non-reg jungle camouflage outfits — called tiger suits — and were hatless. Paul had an AK-47 and a cigarette dangled insolently from his lip; Frenchy was equipped with a grease gun and a smile. They were surrounded by their crew of Chinese dwarfs, tiger-suited too, a collection of sullen Mongolian faces that in their impassive toughness seemed almost Apache. Wiry little men, with carbines, grenades, a Thompson or two, a gigantic BAR — this was before the fancy black plastic M-16s arrived in Vietnam. The picture had a nineteenth-century feel to it: the two white gods surrounded by their yellow killers, yet in subtle ways that the photograph managed to convey, the white men were turning wog themselves, going native in the worst possible way.