The Second Saladin

8

The van had reached a suburb of Boston called Medford, up north of Boston, and pulled into a crowded parking lot — acres and acres of cars — surrounding a bar or something called Timmothy’s, a single low building of unsurpassing modesty. The name, in red neon, was written in about fifty places: on the roof, above the doors, on a huge sign at the entrance to the lot: This Is it! The Original! TIMMOTHY’S!

“We are here,” said Lanahan, “because it’s Saturday night. And every Saturday night, this studious intellectual lady, this gifted, brave, strong woman” — Chardy’s words, thrown back at him — “comes here, or one of several other similar institutions, and finds a man and leaves with him.”

“Last weekend she didn’t get home till Sunday afternoon,” said the driver, a wizard from Technical Services.

Chardy wondered if that was a smirk on Lanahan’s lumpy little face in the red glow of the neon. He felt like smacking him, but then the impulse vanished. Lanahan was nothing to him, not worth hitting.

“Nobody from Harvard would come way out here,” said the man up front. “They stick to Cambridge and snottier places like The Casablanca or Thirty-three Dunster Street. This place is too tacky, too crass, your suburban crowd, polyester.”

“She’s in there now,” Lanahan said. “That’s her car.” He pointed to a green VW parked nearby.

The wizard said, “She always goes for the same type. I’ve seen three of them now. Dark Irish. Big, six two, two hundred pounds.”

“She’s looking for some others off your assembly line,” Lanahan said. “She’s looking for you.”

“That’s shit,” Chardy said.

“We shall see. You all set? You ready? You still think you can handle it?”

“Uh-huh,” Chardy said.

“You don’t sound so convincing. Look, there are other ways of handling this.”

Chardy thought, you little bastard.

“Chardy. I have to answer to Ver Steeg on this one. Don’t fuck it up, all right? Just play it cool, don’t come on too strong. Don’t spook this girl. You do it wrong, she goes to the newspapers, makes a big—”

“I can handle it.”

Chardy slid the van door open, stepping into the chilly, damp evening.

Spring had not yet reached Massachusetts and he walked through the ranks of cars in a fog of his own breath. At Timmothy’s a short line formed and he ducked into it. They were all so pretty: the boys in their twenties had expensive haircuts, parted in the middle, that fell in glorious layered cascades; they wore rich, dark clothing, European almost. The girls all seemed small and dark and jocular and somehow Catholic; they would wear crucifixes on their delicate throats and not really believe what they were here for. He felt like some kind of grown-up among them, stiff and stupid, for he was easily a decade beyond the next oldest person in the line. He waited patiently in his drab suit for almost ten minutes, until at last he reached a set of doors that were opened to admit him. He took a last look at the van, far off, under a tall light, its windows impenetrable, and knew that Lanahan was watching, and by extension Yost Ver Steeg and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Entered, the bar was really a collection of bars, each to its own motif, each equally fraudulent. It took him a while to move through all these variations — each big room was jammed — but just as he was beginning to grow panicky, he found her.

She sat at a table with some guy. The room was tonier than the others, fashioned after the Victorian age, if the Victorians had discovered plastic. Chardy felt he’d stumbled on to a movie set. But there was Johanna, her flesh, her face, with some man: as the wizard had said, a big man, Chardy’s size or larger, in a three-piece suit.

Chardy squeezed in at the bar a discreet distance from them and ordered a beer. He could see her in the mirror, but just barely, for smoke hung in the dark space near the ceiling like a rain squall. She was so intimate with this man. She touched his arm. She laughed at his jokes and listened with rapturous attention to his anecdotes. Sheer jealousy almost crippled Chardy. He watched as they ordered another round — bourbon for the man, white wine for Johanna.

Chardy watched, mesmerized. When was the last time he’d seen her? He could call it back with surprising accuracy, even now, even here. It had been the day of the ambush, the day of his capture. She’d dressed after the Kurdish fashion, a gushing print peasant’s skirt, a black vest, several blouses and scarves, and her hair wrapped in a scarf. But not now. Now she wore dark slacks, a turtleneck under a tweed jacket. Her biggest glasses, to soften the slight angularity of her face. Her tawny hair pulled backward, though a sprig of it fell to her forehead. And when she smiled he could see her white teeth.

Chardy thought: Oh, Jesus, you look good. He could not take his eyes off her. If he had a plan in his head it abruptly vanished. He had some trouble breathing; she robbed him of air. Her hands were white and her fingers long and she reached and touched the man on the hand. He laughed, whispered something. They finished their drinks. They stood.

Chardy stood.

They walked through the crowd into the hall. The man had his arm around her. They got their coats from the checkroom and stepped out the door. Chardy followed and caught them in the parking lot under a fluorescent light as the man fumbled with the keys to his Porsche.

“Excuse me,” Chardy said.

She turned, recognizing the voice instantly but perhaps not quite believing it.

“Johanna?” He stepped into the light so that the man could see him. “I’d like to talk to you. It’s important.”

“Oh, Paul,” she finally said. “Oh, Paul.”

“Do you know this guy?” the man asked, stepping forward.

“This doesn’t concern you,” Chardy said.

“Oh, it doesn’t?” he said, taking another step forward. He turned to her. “Do you want to talk to this guy or not?”

She could not answer but only looked furiously at Chardy.

“Look,” the man said, “I don’t think this girl wants to talk to you. Why don’t you just go on and get out of here?”

“Johanna, it’s really important. It really is.”

“Just go away, Paul,” she said.

“Paul, you better get on out of here,” the man said.

Chardy felt electric with sensation. So much current was whirling through him he thought he might blow. She was so close. He wanted to touch her. He felt physically weak, but he could not draw back. Terror also gripped him. He knew he’d done this all wrong, coming on like this.

He stepped forward another step. “Please, Johanna.”

The man hit him in the ear, a sucker punch. He twisted his leg as he fell back on the asphalt. He felt for an instant as though a steeple bell had gonged through his skull, and found himself sitting oafishly in a puddle. He looked up, and murder boiled through his brain; but the man who’d thrown the blow looked absolutely stunned that he’d done such a thing.

“I didn’t mean to,” the man said. “But I told you to stay away. I warned you. You asked for it. You really did. You asked for it and I gave it to you.”

Chardy climbed to his feet. “That was a stupid thing to do. You don’t know who I am. Suppose I had a gun? Suppose I knew karate or something? Suppose I was just tough?”

“I–I told you to leave.”

“Well, I’m not going to. You better not try that again.”

“Wally,” Johanna said. “It was stupid. He’s a kind of soldier. He probably knows all kinds of dirty tricks. Anyway, I hate it when men fight. It’s so pointless.”

“Just don’t hit me again, Wally,” Chardy said, “and you’ll come out of this okay.”

“This is ridiculous,” Wally said. “Are you leaving with me or not?”

“Oh, Wally.”

“You certainly changed your tune in a hurry. Well, fuck you, and fuck your crazy boyfriend too. You two have fun; you really deserve each other.” He climbed into his car, pulled out, and roared away in a scream of rubber.

“Johanna,” Chardy said.

“Paul, stay away. Stay the fuck away. I don’t need your kind of trouble.”

He watched her walk away, through the pools of light in the parking lot.

“Johanna. Please.”

“Paul.” She turned. “Go away. Stay away. I’ll call the police — I swear I will.”

“Johanna. Ulu Beg is coming.”

They sat in her Volkswagen near a park. He could see the deserted playground equipment, a basketball court empty and dark, through some trees. He drank from a can of beer — he’d told her to stop at a grocery store and she’d silently obeyed — his third in twenty-five minutes. The car ticked occasionally and it occurred to him that this American thing, sitting in a car with a woman on a quiet night near a park, was as exotic to him as a Philippine courtship ritual. Moisture beaded the windshield, fogging it; the air was damp and the trees clicked together in a breeze. She had not yet spoken and then finally she said, “You’re working for them, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Temporarily.”

“I thought they fired you.”

“They did. They needed me back.”

“You said in that letter you’d never work for them again. You said you were all done with it. Were you lying then too?”

“No. I came back because I didn’t feel I had a choice.”

“Because of the Kurd?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t it a little late to be paying off your debts?”

“Maybe it is. I don’t know. We’ll see, won’t we?”

“How can you do it? Work for them? How can you stomach it?”

“If I didn’t there’d be another man here. He wouldn’t care about you. He wouldn’t care about Ulu Beg. These are cold people, from the Security Office. They want him dead.”

“What do you want from me?”

“They think he’ll come to you, because he has no other place to go. Or so they say. I’m not sure what they really think. But that’s the official line. So I’m here to get your help.”

“There was a time when I would have killed you. I thought about it. I thought about flying to Chicago, going to your door, knocking, and when you answered, shooting you. Right in the face.”

“I’m sorry you hate me so much.”

“You were part of it.”

“I never—”

“Paul, you’re lying. It’s part of the fiber, the structure of your life. I’ve done some research on your employers: they train you to lie without thinking about it. You can do it calmly and naturally, as if you were discussing the weather.”

“Agency people are just people. Anyway, I never did lie to you. The lying goes on at higher levels. They have specialists in it.”

He emptied the beer can and reached into the sack for another one. He wished he’d gotten another six-pack. He popped the new top, took a long swallow.

He finally said, “There probably hasn’t been a night in seven years that I haven’t thought of you and hated what came between us. That’s not a lie. But if you love him — and I think you do, and I think you should — then you’ve got to help me. Or he’s dead.”

“Don’t overdo the nobility, Paul.”

“Don’t overdo the betrayed woman, Johanna. While you’re busy feeling sorry for yourself, they’re going to put a bullet in his head.”

“Paul,” she finally said, “I lied too. I said I loved you. I never loved you.”

“All right. You never loved me.”

“I loved the idea of you. Because you were fighting for the Kurds, and the Kurds needed fighters.”

“Yes.”

“I was so impressed with force. I thought it was a great secret.”

“It’s no secret at all.”

“Do you know what happened? To us? After your mysterious disappearance?”

“Yes.”

“You lie!” she screamed. “Goddamn you, you lie. Again. Again, you lie. You don’t know. Nobody knows except—”

“A Russian told me. He doesn’t run with your crowd.”

“The details?”

“No. This Russian doesn’t bother with details. He’s too important to bother with the details. He told me the numbers.”

“Well, I think it’s important that you know the details. So that you can carry them around upstairs in that cold thing you call a brain.”

Johanna was beautiful in the dark, now, here, after so much dreaming of her. He ached. He wanted her, wanted her love or her respect. So many things had come between them.

“Come with me.” She got out.

He followed her. They crossed the street and stood before a big dark house. She led him up the walk into the foyer. She opened a second door with a key and they climbed three flights of stairs. He heard music coming from one of the floors. They reached the top, turned down a short hall. She opened another door. They stepped into her apartment.

“Sit down. Take your coat off. Get comfortable,” she said coldly.

He sat on a couch. The apartment had high ceilings and tall old windows and was modestly furnished in books and potted plants and odd, angular pieces. It was white and cold. Johanna went to a table and returned with a thick sheaf of paper.

“Here,” she said. “My memoirs. It turns out I’m not Lillian Hellman, but at least it’s the truth.” She paged through the messy manuscript and peeled off a batch of pages. “The last chapter. I want you to read it.”

Chardy took the chapter from her and looked at the first page. It bore a simple title: “Naman.”

“You didn’t tap it?” said Lanahan in the van outside, looking at the hulking old house.

“I couldn’t, Miles,” said the wizard, irritation in his tone because an old hand like him had to show deference to someone as young and raw as Lanahan. “Yost won’t let me. You get caught doing something like that and you got all kinds of troubles.”

“I don’t know how he expects us to bring this off if we can’t play it hard,” Miles said bitterly. “What about the other units? Are they in touch? Can we get in contact with them?”

“They’re here, Miles. At least they should be. We’ve got Chardy nailed. But I didn’t think we ought to have a radio linkup in this van. We knew we were going to be carrying Chardy around in this van. I bet if you wandered up the street you’d spot them.”

“Just so Chardy doesn’t spot them,” Miles said.

“He won’t. They’re good boys, ex-cops, private eyes. I set it up just the way Yost says. Yost says keep Chardy in a sling, and in a sling he goes. If that’s what Yost wants, that’s what I’ll give him.”

“Screw Ver Steeg. Ver Steeg is so small he doesn’t exist. He’s a gofer. We’re working for Sam Melman and don’t you forget it.”

Chardy read:

I did not have a great deal of time to feel grief over the sudden disappearance of Paul, because almost immediately our bad situation became much worse: we came under shell attack. In my seven months with Ulu Beg and his group we had never been fired upon. I had seen bombed-out villages, of course, but I had no experience to prepare me for the fury of a modern high-explosive barrage. There was no way to take cover and, really, no cover. Ulu Beg had made his camp in a high, flat place under a ridge. The black tents were lined up under the mouth of a cave. The explosions were so incredibly loud and came so quickly that in the first seconds I became totally disoriented. A few people made it to the cave but most of us fell to the earth. I have never been so scared. In the few seconds between the blasts I would look around and try to squirm into a safer position but it was very difficult because there was so much smoke and dust in the air.

I thought the shelling lasted for hours. When it let up I felt dizzy and disoriented. Additionally, I had breathed a lot of smoke. I could not stop trembling, and though I had seen many wounded men in my times in the mountains, nothing could prepare me for the shock of a firsthand view of what a high-powered shell can do to the human body. They could destroy it utterly.

I struggled to get some grip on myself, but even before the dust had settled Ulu Beg was running about. I had never seen him so desperate, yelling at people to move.

We ran chaotically through the dust. We ran up the sides of the hill and found a path along a ridge and ran along it, all of us, soldiers, their wives, all their children. I can still see that sight: over 100 men, women and children fleeing in abject panic. It looked like a scene from the beginning of World War II when the Germans bombed refugee columns in Poland. The women’s dresses and scarves stood out gaudily in the clouds of dust and I could see the turbans of the men, and their khaki pantaloons billowing over their boots. Most pathetic, along that lonely track, were the children, several of whom had been separated from their parents (if indeed their parents had not been killed in the shelling).

That night we hid in caves but were afraid even to light fires. We tried the radio, using the special channel as Chardy had instructed. But there was nothing. I even tried, thinking my English might be recognized by listeners back in Rezā’iyeh, but there was nothing at all. We felt alone in the world. I looked at the mountains in new fright. They had been so beautiful to me once, and now they scared me. If the Iraqis closed in we could hardly defend ourselves. If snow came and sealed us in a pass, we would certainly starve, for we had no food except what we could carry. And several people were badly hurt, including the wife of Amir Tawfiq, the man who commanded after Ulu Beg.

We saw Iraqis the next morning but they were far beneath us. Still, Ulu Beg believed it to be a large formation in pursuit of us. He said it would take them hours to reach us, but by that time we’d be gone.

“Gone to where?” asked Amir Tawfiq.

“To the border,” Ulu Beg said. He said the Shah would give us safety.

Amir Tawfiq spat into the dust. The cartridges on his chest rattled. He was about 25. Amir Tawfiq said that the Shah was a black pig who suckled jackals. Ulu Beg told him we had no choice, and that was the end of the discussion.

We marched through the mountains for four days. Twice more we were shelled. The first shelling was the worst and three of the group were killed and several more wounded. They screamed to go along with us. But we had no choice. We had to push ahead.

My memories are quite indistinct. At one time Russian jets seemed to hunt us. We crouched in a long ravine and hid behind rocks — over a hundred people. We could see the shadow of the airplane passing over the ground and hear its roar, but could not see it because the sun was so bright. Apo, Ulu Beg’s oldest boy, hid with me.

The nights were very cold. We huddled together in caves or ravines and were still afraid to light fires. It was at these moments I felt the most alone. I wasn’t really a Kurd. I was an American, a foolish one, caught where she had no business to be. I didn’t think we really had a chance. We were on foot, running out of food and energy. There were no donkeys. We had come a terrible distance, we had a terrible distance to go and we were being pursued by men in machines who wanted to kill us.

I heard some men talking. They said we were doomed. It was all over. We’d never get out. Ulu Beg said no. He said we had friends. Jardi’s friends. Jardi’s friends would help us.

We were almost there. I asked Ulu Beg how much farther? He pointed to a gap just ahead between mountains.

Ulu Beg asked me to come with him to talk to the Iranians.

We went down the trail and over the dusty rock, the two of us. The trail began to rise to the pass and we climbed between the forbidding cliffs. I fought to keep up. I wondered how the children would make this last, hardest part of the climb.

We were so close! The nightmare would soon be over! But I was also terrified that something would happen, so late, so close to survival.

We came over the crest. The land here was scorched. Nothing grew. For miles and miles it looked dead. There was no vegetation, no anything. It was the defoliated zone where the Iraqis had poured chemical poisons on the earth to prevent border crossings and resupply from Iran. I looked and could see where a stream had been cemented over.

We went ahead. If a Russian plane or helicopter came and caught us in the open, we’d be killed. Still, we didn’t have the luxury of waiting for nightfall. We picked our way through this wasteland until at last, several hours later, I could see the wire fence and the border station — and green plants again. The station was a low cinderblock building, with the Shah’s flag billowing on a pole near it. There were several military vehicles parked there too.

We raced to the gate. They had seen us coming and were ready. The officer in charge was a young major of very stiff and correct bearing. His name was Major Mejhati — he wore it proudly on a tag on the chest of his battle tunic. His uniform was heavily starched.

He asked me in Farsi if I was an American. I said yes. He thought I looked American, even though I was dressed like a Kurd. He had been in America for a year and knew what American women looked like.

I explained to him that 100 people would be coming shortly, that some were wounded, some were children and all were hungry and exhausted. They were being pursued by Iraqis in Russian tanks, I told him.

He asked me what part of America I was from. I don’t know why he asked that. Anyway I told him.

He considered Boston a lovely town. He told me that he’d been to some Army college in Kansas. He told me he really liked America, America was a very great country and that he wished Iran was more like America.

I was afraid we’d be there for hours. Iranians love to talk and move slowly. They hate to be confronted with an actual reality.

Then he asked if these Kurds were of the Pesh Merga, the mountain fighters making a war against the Iraqis. I said yes. He said they could admit no Kurds. It was a new policy. He said he would be glad to have me come into his country but it was a new policy and the border was now closed to the Pesh Merga.

I wasn’t sure I’d understood him. I thought I’d misheard. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. I tried to get my composure back.

“There’s an arrangement,” I said. “Between the governments. Between my government and your government and the Pesh Merga.”

“There is no arrangement,” he said. Several of his officers and soldiers had their guns out and came over to us. They looked at us rudely.

I pointed to Ulu Beg. I remember that I said, “This man is famous. This is the famous Ulu Beg. He is a high officer in the Pesh Merga.”

Major Mejhati said the American lady was free to come into his country but that the Kurd was not. He said he’d have his men shoot if the Kurd didn’t move away from the border.

I told him there had been an American officer with us, an important man, with high connections in Tehran ….

But they told us that all the Americans were gone.

Ulu Beg turned and began to walk back to his people.

I ran after him.

Chardy set the manuscript down. She was sitting across from him. She had not even taken her coat off.

“You should have crossed the border, Johanna. That was a foolish thing to do.”

“I couldn’t, Paul. Keep reading.”

We ran all that day and most of the next. We headed north, farther into the mountains. Our new goal was Turkey, where the border was not heavily guarded. It was a bitter solution to our problem, since the Kurds — and most of the Middle East — hate nothing more than the Turks, who for centuries, in their Ottoman Empire, ruled in corrupt greed.

The plan was then to continue north, into Russia. I knew that in his mind Ulu Beg was retracing the journey of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, who fled Iran after the collapse of the Kurdish republic at Mahābād in 1947. Barzani had gone into exile for 11 years in the Soviet Union. The irony of fleeing the Iraqis — who were led and supplied by the Russians — for Turkey and then Russia, did not strike me at the time. Now it seems to illustrate to me a basic principle of Middle Eastern history and politics: ideology means nothing.

Finally, it was the sixth day, in the morning. We had found some caves and at last dared light a fire. We had even found a spring that was not cemented over.

Somebody turned on the radio — it was a standard procedure, for Jardi, as the Kurds called him, had always tried to make his contact with Rezā’iyeh in the morning — and suddenly, where for five days there had been nothing, there was a signal.

There was, as I understand, a certain code sequence to be gotten through before communications commenced. I heard Ulu Beg speaking in his awkward English.

“Fred to Tom,” he was saying. “Fred to Tom.”

The radio, a Russian thing like all the equipment Paul had brought, hissed and crackled.

I heard English words — “Tom to Fred, Tom to Fred” — and recognized the voice. It was Paul Chardy’s.

“Do you remember that part, Paul?” she asked.

It was so still in the room. Chardy looked over at her. At last he said, “Yes, I remember,” and turned back to the pages.

We waited in the clearing. The helicopters would come at four, Paul Chardy had said. There would be six of them, and they’d have to make two or three sorties to get everybody out. It had to be orderly, he said, no panic, no crowding, and it would take some time but they’d get everybody out.

The men were praising Allah the Merciful for their deliverance but Ulu Beg said to praise Jardi and his friends from America.

We seemed to wait a year. It was really only a few hours. By now the skies had cleared and the sun was very hot. On higher peaks snowcaps reflected back at us. A few scrub oaks stood about in the clearing.

The people gathered in these few trees and I could see them laughing and lounging about, the bright colors of their clothes showing through the brown branches.

I had gone with Ulu Beg to a ridge above the clearing where we took some cover behind a group of rocks. I asked him if he was expecting trouble.

“I always expect trouble,” he said.

His face was caked with dust. The lips were cracked and almost white, his eyes a tired blue. He had taken his turban off and I was struck by his hair, which was almost a brownish blond. He had very powerful eyes.

He told me to go down below to wait for the helicopters.

“I will stay,” I said.

We heard the helicopters before we saw them. They rose over the crest of the hill. It was an extraordinary sight for me. I stared at them in almost dumb disbelief.

There were, as Paul had promised six of them. They hovered in the sky. On the ground, Amir Tawfiq ignited a green smoke bomb. A pillar of green rose through the trees.

The helicopters were gray things, and had the bull’s-eye Royal Iranian insignia on them. Their noses glittered in the sun because of all the glass or plastic. They were much bigger than I’d imagined. They generated a great deal of noise. They were in a formation of two lines, three each. They lowered themselves from the sky, dark and big. I could see the pilots in helmets and sunglasses behind the windshields.

Their rotors pulled up the dust, which spun and whirled. It rose and stung my eyes. Green smoke whipped through the air. Wind beat against us and I could see the leaves of the trees shaking off.

I could see the two little boys, Apo and Memed, sitting off to one side. I could see Amir Tawfiq and his wife, whose arm was heavily bandaged. I could see Kak Farzanda, the old man, waiting patiently. I could see Haji Ishmail, who had been a porter in Baghdad before leaving to join the fight in the mountains. I could see Sulheya, the old woman, in her black scarf, who had told me stories and myths that I had recorded, and her daughter Nasreen, who did the cooking. I could see … well, I could see them all, people I’d lived with for seven months and grown, as much as is possible for a foreigner, a foreign woman even, to love.

The helicopters hung over the trees and for a while I did not quite understand what was happening. I stood, quite stupidly. There was a commotion in the dust down below.

Ulu Beg had turned and I heard him say, “Russians.”

Men in the helicopter doorways were shooting into the trees. Dust flew. I could see tree branches breaking. Links of color began to spit from the guns the men were shooting. It was as if they were hosing the trees with light. Sparks flew and fires started.

Beside me, Ulu Beg fired with his Russian gun. I could see a helicopter tilt as the glass of the windshield broke. Kill them, I felt myself thinking. The machine began to fall, tilting crazily. It broke up when it hit. Its blade thrashed at the earth. It exploded into a huge oily wave of flame which spilled through the clearing. I was knocked back.

The men in the helicopters were shooting at us. Bullets were hitting rocks and banging off. The stench of burning gasoline reached my nose. I was so mixed up I almost walked into the terrible panorama beneath us, but Ulu Beg grabbed my arm and pulled me down the far side of the ridge to a dark ravine. We tumbled down its side, sliding through the rocks. In my sheer terror, I did not feel any pain. We moved deeper along it until pressed into a dark crevice. I could see a helicopter overhead. It hung there for the longest time. Ulu Beg had his Russian gun ready. But then the helicopter rose from the sky and vanished. Two columns of smoke rose in the sky, one huge and black and the other green.

“Did the Russian tell you about that?” Johanna asked him as he laid down the last page.

“No,” Chardy said. “Not the details.”

“Was the ambush the part of the other thing? Was it part of some larger betrayal? Were you under orders? All those months when I loved you, when you fought with the Kurds — did you know? Did you know how it would end?”

“Of course not.”

“But that was you on the radio?”

Chardy remembered it, but not very well. It was a Soviet LP-56 model, with double amplification and some kind of frequency scanner thing, standard issue in Soviet armored units. He remembered the microphone in his hand, a heavy, blocky thing. They were way behind in radios, he remembered thinking. He had felt so numb.

“What?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

He remembered the KGB colonel, Speshnev, had been pleased with his performance.

“Why, Paul?” she said quietly.

“I — it was very important to them to kill or capture Ulu Beg,” he said.

“But why did you help them?”

“I didn’t have any choice.”

“Did they torture you?”

“They had some fun. But it wasn’t that.”

“Tell me, Paul. Why?”

“Johanna, I can’t tell you. And I can’t change a thing now. I guess I’m really here to try and make it up.”

“Nobody made anything up for the Kurds.”

“Johanna, he’s here to kill. Suppose some more children get stuck in the crossfire? Suppose it’s another massacre? Suppose somebody innocent—”

“We armed Ulu Beg. We supported him. We urged him on. Paul, nobody’s innocent.”

“Johanna—”

“Paul, get out of here. I can’t help you, I won’t help you. What’s going to happen will happen. Insha ’allah: God’s will. The Kurds say, ‘Do not hesitate to let the vengeance fall on the head of your enemy.’”

He looked at her.

She said, “Get out, Paul, I’m so tired.”

He stood.

“Don’t ever try to see me again. I swear I’ll call the police.”

Chardy stood outside her house in the cold. He wondered if they’d followed him and after a few minutes the van pulled up. He walked across the street and got into it.

“How did it go?” asked Lanahan.

“Terrible,” he said, sitting across from the boy in back. The van started and he looked out the window as lights and dark houses fled by.

“Who the fuck does she think she is? What the fuck does she think this is all about? Okay, she won’t help us, we’ve got some tricks we can throw her way. We’ll—”

Chardy had the boy by the thick lapels of his raincoat and rammed him against the side of the van, feeling the head slap hard against the glass of the window.

“Hey, hey.” The wizard in front turned, horrified. “Take it easy, you guys.”

But Chardy planted a forearm against the boy’s throat, pinning his neck against the seat, and told him to watch his fucking mouth. Then he released him and sat back.

The boy shook his head woozily and touched his throat. Fear showed in his wide eyes and trembling fingers, but the fear turned to rage.

“You are an animal,” he said.

Chardy looked out the window, into the dark.

They returned to the hotel sullenly. It was nearly midnight. Chardy went to the bar and had a few more beers. He looked around the room — it was pretty packed — for the biggest man he could see, found him, and went to pick a fight. But the man turned out to be timid, and left quickly, and people stayed so far from Chardy after that that he finally decided to go to bed.

He slept poorly, thinking of helicopters.

The phone roused him early the next morning. He blinked awake in the gray light in a messy room. He had a headache and a sour taste in his mouth. He answered.

“Paul?”

“Yes?”

Her voice held promise of a question, but did not ask it. He gripped the phone so tight he thought he’d shatter the plastic.

She said, “I have to see you.”

“Why?”

“Paul, you son of a bitch. Why didn’t you stay in Chicago?”

He looked at his Rolex to discover it was 7:30.

“I haven’t slept,” she said. “I seem to be a little nuts. I did some speed a little while ago.”

“Take a nap, for Christ’s sakes. Then meet me someplace in the open. Outside.”

“By the river. By the boathouse. Off Boylston. Anyone can tell you where it is. At noon.”

“I’ll see you then.”

“Paul. Please come alone. Don’t bring any little men in overcoats.”