The Second Saladin

10

Trewitt felt as if he were at an audience with Lyndon Johnson. This huge old man who carried a nickel Peacemaker in his holster, who never sweated through his mummified skin, who had hands like hams and eyes like razor slits and spouted laconic Texas justice, hellfire and brimstone: these characters, these essays in human charisma, they always meant trouble for Trewitt. They enchanted him and he stopped paying attention, which he knew to be both stupid and dangerous.

Vernon Tell was a supervisor in the U.S. Border Patrol, Agent in Charge of the Nogales, Arizona, station, and he was trying to explain to Trewitt and Bill Speight, who were sitting in his office under the weak fiction of being investigators for the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms interested in an automatic-weapons violation, just how little there was to go on in the case of the death of his two officers, 11 March last. He wore gigantic yellow-tinted Bausch & Lomb shooting glasses and had the shortest crewcut Trewitt had ever seen. Trewitt blinked in the heat, trying to sort it all out. Evidently a climax in the conversation had been reached, for now the bulky old cop and Bill Speight rose. Trewitt felt the situation squirming out of control and wanted urgently to have it in his fingers again — if it had ever been so in the first place — but he felt himself rising too, drawn by Vernon Tell’s creaky magnetism, and by the desire to demonstrate to a creep like Speight that he wasn’t confused.

The old officer turned to him suddenly and said, “You in Vietnam, son?”

Trewitt, startled, felt he was being tested.

“No, sir,” he said.

“Well,” said Tell, whose forest-green uniform was crinkleless even though the air conditioning in his office was on the fritz and both Trewitt and Speight had wilted in their clothes, “reason I ask is most nights it’s like Vietnam out there.” He gestured to his window, through which, in blazing, cloudless radiance, could be seen a representative vista of the Southwest, miles and miles of scrub and desert and mountains and, incidentally, as Trewitt could see, a Dog ’n’ Suds. “They come with dope and guns and they come just plain illegal. They come in planes and in Jeeps and on foot. It can get pretty wild and woolly.”

“I’m sure it’s a tough job,” said Trewitt ineffectually.

“This-a-way,” said Tell.

He took them down a glossy hall under the gaze of various official portraits and through a double set of green doors. Beyond lay a gate, which the old cop swiftly unlocked. This led into another hall and into an atmosphere that rose in thickness and discomfort in direct proportion to their penetration of it. Cells, empty, flanked them, but there was still another destination: at the end of the hall two uniformed men sat in a prim little office.

“How’s our boy today?” Tell asked.

“’Bout the same, sir.”

“These gents come all the way from the East to see him.”

Another door opened, a room, half cell and half not, a private little chamber. In the cell a single Mexican boy lounged on the cot, slim and sullen.

“This is what we drug up,” said Tell. “His name is Hector Murillo. He’s sixteen, from a village called Haitzo about a hundred miles south of Mexico City. Any of you speak Spanish?”

Trewitt and Speight shook their heads.

“We think Hector came over that night. The others are dead in the desert, or back on their side of the border, or got clean away. But from the tracks on the site, we know at least seven men went across. One of them, the man who did the shooting, in boots. We’re still trying to track the make on the boots.”

“What’s his sorry story?” asked Bill Speight gruffly, mopping his face with a sodden handkerchief. Speight looked gray in the heat and his hair clung in lank strips to his forehead. Upstairs he’d been spry and folksy but the heat had finally gotten to him.

“Funny thing, he hasn’t got one. We just found him wandering half-dead from thirst and craziness in the mountains a week after the shootings. Says he can’t remember anything. Hector. Cómo está la memoria?”

“Está nada.”

“Nada. Nothing.”

The sullen boy looked at them without interest, then turned and elegantly hawked a gob into a coffee tin and rolled to face the wall.

“These Mex kids, some of ’em are made out of steel,” said Tell. “But unless we get some kind of break on the case, he’s looking at Accessory to Murder One in the State Code and Violating the Civil Rights of my two men in the Federal.”

“Jesus,” blurted Trewitt, “he’s only a boy,” and saw from the furious glare off Speight that he had made a mistake.

“They grow up fast on that side of the fence,” Tell said.

“Any help coming from the Mexican authorities?” Speight wanted to know.

“The usual. Flowers to the widows and excuses. They’ll kick down the doors of a few Nogales whorehouses.”

“Any idea of who ran them across?”

“Mr. Speight, there’s maybe two dozen coyote outfits in Mexican Nogales that move things — illegals or dope — into Los Estados. And there’s hundreds of free-lancers, one-timers, amateurs, part-timers. Ask Hector.”

But Hector would not look at them.

“In the old days, we’d have him talking. But that’s all changed now,” said Tell.

But Trewitt, studying the boy, who wore gym shoes, blue jeans, and a dirty T-shirt, did not think so. You could bang on that kid for a month and come up empty; a tough one; steel, the old cop had said. Trewitt shuddered at the hardness he sensed. He tried to imagine what made him so remote, tried to invent an image of childhood in some Mexican slum. But his imagination could not handle it beyond a few simpering visions of fat Mexican mamas and tortillas and everybody in white Mexican peasant suits. Yet he was moved by the boy.

“Well,” said Speight, “thanks for your trouble, Mr. Tell.” He probably wanted to head back to the motel bar for a rum-and-Coke. Trewitt had never seen a man drink so many rum-and-Cokes.

“Sooner or later Hector will decide to chat with us,” the supervisor promised. “I’ll give you a ring.”

“Do you think you could let me run through your file on the border runners, the coyotes?” Speight asked.

“Don’t see why not,” said Tell.

They turned and left, and Trewitt made as if to follow. But his sense of poignancy for the rough, brave boy alone in an American jail, facing bad times, stormed over him. He paused, turned back.

The boy had perked up and sat on his bunk, eyeing Trewitt. His dark brown eyes were clear of emotion. In the office Trewitt heard the two old men enmeshed in some folksy conversation about the old days, the way things used to be. But Trewitt, in the cell, felt overwhelmed by the present, by the nowness of it all. He yearned to help the boy, soothe him somehow.

You should have been a social worker, he thought with disgust. This tough little prick would cut your throat for your wristwatch if he had the chance.

But an image came to him: Hector and the others in some kind of truck or van, prowling through the night on the way to something they must have only vaguely perceived as better. They would have been locked in with the Kurd for hours, with a strange tall man. What would they have made of him?

The boy looked at him coldly, and must have seen another gringo policeman. Trewitt felt he’d blundered again. He knew he should leave; he didn’t belong in here. He felt vaguely unwholesome. He turned to leave — and then a terrific idea, from nowhere, detonated in his head.

“Hector,” he said.

The boy’s eyes stayed cold but came to focus on him. Speight’s words boomed loudly behind him someplace and the supervisor and the guard laughed. Had they noticed his absence? His heart pounded.

He could see before him a picture: it floated, tantalizing him. It was a picture of a high-cheekboned, tall, bright-eyed man with a strong nose and blondish hair. It was on a wall. It was the picture an artist had projected from the old photo of Ulu Beg.

Blond. And tall. And strange.

Trewitt said, in the Spanish he had so recently denied knowing, “I’m a friend of the tall norteamericano with the yellow hair. The one with the gun. He is a big gangster. He thanks you for your silence.”

The boy looked at him cautiously.

Trewitt could hear them laughing, old Speight and old Tell, two old men full of good humor. Would they miss him yet?

“You were betrayed,” Trewitt invented. “Sold for money by the man who took you to the border. The tall man seeks vengeance.” He hoped he had the right word for vengeance, la venganza.

“Tell him to cut the pig. Kill him. Make him bleed,” the boy said coldly.

“The tall norteamericano gangster will see it happen,” he said.

“Tell him to kill the pig Ramirez who let my brother die in the desert.”

“It’s done,” said Trewitt, spinning to race out.

Ramirez!

He was so charged with ideas he was shaking. He couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“Okay,” he said, “I think we ought to bump something back to Ver Steeg. The hell with cables. I think we can call it in. Then we can open a link to Mexican Intelligence — I’m sure we have some guys in Mexico City who are in tight with them — and get a license to do some nosing around over there. Then—”

But Speight was not listening. He sat gazing thoughtfully into his rum-and-Coke. It wasn’t even noon yet!

“Bill, I was saying—”

“I know, I know,” said Speight, nodding. He took a long swallow. Trewitt knew he had once upon a time been a real comer, a man with a great future, though it was hard to believe it now. He looked so seedy and didn’t want to be rushed into some mistake.

“You’re probably right,” he said. “That’s a great idea, a fine idea. But maybe we ought to hold off on this one. Just for a while.”

“But why?” Trewitt wanted to know. They sat in a dim bar, at last safe from the bright desert sun that seemed to bleach the color from the day almost instantly. They were not far from the border itself. Trewitt had glimpsed it just a few minutes ago; it looked like the Berlin wall, wire and gates and booths, and behind it he had seen shacks crusted on suddenly looming hills, a few packed, dirty streets — he had seen Mexico.

“Well …” Bill paused.

Trewitt waited.

“First, it never pays to make a big thing out of your own dope. Second, it never pays to rush in. Third, I am an old man and it’s a hot day. Let’s just sit on it, turn it around, see how it looks after the sun goes down.”

“Well, the procedure is—”

“I know all the procedures, Jim.”

“I just thought—”

“What I’d like to do — you can come along too, if you want; you might find it interesting — what I’d like to do is a little quiet nosing around. Let’s just see what we can develop in a calm way.”

“Mexico? You want to go to Mexico? We don’t have any brief to—”

“Thousands of tourists go over there every day. You just walk across and walk back, it’s that simple. It’s done all the time.”

“I don’t know,” said Trewitt. Mexico? It frightened him a little bit.

“We’ll go as tourists. Turistas. We’ll buy little curios and go to a few clubs and just have a fine time.”

Trewitt finally nodded.

“Turistas,” Old Bill said again.