The Second Saladin

16

On a Saturday night in Boston, in her high-ceilinged old room, Chardy lay beside her in the dark. Sleep had never come easily for him and it evaded him tonight. But that was fine; he would just listen to the breathing.

The night’s lacework of shadows lay across the far end of the room, webs and links and flecks of brightness; moonlight threaded through the dark, gleaming cold. Chardy anchored himself against the coming of a bad minute or two by putting a hand against her arm. In Chicago there’d never been anything to touch.

Sometimes, then, over those years — frequently, if he was honest about it — he’d awaken weeping. A secret shame: big guys don’t cry. Sometimes it was his back, which to this day became occasionally infected and could be quite painful. Or sometimes a sensation, a vision, would set it off: a twinge of pain, a picture of a hot blue flame. Or sometimes something even stupider: some police officer or fireman or boy scout’s sudden heroism, as vicariously experienced through the newspaper; or an old pro basketball player, on the line looking at a one and one with a whole season’s weight perched on his shoulder; or a young kid, a freshman, taking a jump shot in the last second of an NCAA game. It was the contrast that wrecked him each time: they’d passed their tests, he’d failed his.

Or he wept in confusion. There were so many things about it he didn’t understand even now. Some aspects of it just didn’t add up. He’d break it down and put it together again in a hundred different ways and it still never made sense. It was like one of those awful modern novels that everybody hated except three critics, full of fragments of plot, surrealistic moments of great vividness, odd discordant voices, textures achingly familiar but at the same time unknowable. He was not even certain what he did remember and what he did not; perhaps they’d used drugs on him. Whatever, it was all scrambled up; he could not get inside it.

Or he’d weep in rage. Punching walls was nothing new and once he’d broken his wrist. He dreamed of smashing heads: Speshnev’s, Sam Melman’s, his own. Them all: the Russians, for destroying him; his own side, for the cold, detached fury they’d directed at him; buddies like Frenchy Short for never coming by, whatever the rules — though of course Frenchy could not have come by, for even then he was dead; Johanna, for confirming his vision of himself. And, of course, last and most: himself. Sometimes he looked for fights. A cold need for pain would haunt him; he’d head for Rush Street and throw himself on somebody’s girl, not caring for her at all; and the guy would have to challenge him and the guy would always have friends and Chardy would always wear a black eye for days, or lurch about with cracked ribs; he’d had three teeth knocked out — he wore an old man’s bridge now — and a bad laceration on his chin, which the beard hid.

Nuts. Chardy, you are nuts.

Yet now, lying in the bed in the black New England night, it suddenly occurred to him with swift joy that he had a kind of chance. For with Johanna, all things were possible, a whole universe of things.

He felt he could save Ulu Beg from Ver Steeg and Lanahan. He could even save Joseph Danzig. He could save Sam Melman. All of them linked together by events of the past, chained and doomed, but he could break the chain; he felt the power. Ulu Beg, last reported at the border, moving probably toward them. He’d save him, and bind her to him forever. He’d make Beg in a crowd coming in on Danzig, and he’d nail him with a tackle and calm him down; then he’d talk to them; he’d get it all straightened out, somehow.

It’s only been a week; there’s plenty of time left.

Ulu Beg, I’ll save you. He owed him, for not only had Ulu Beg brought him together with Johanna in the first place, seven years ago as now, he’d also, by allowing however accidentally his target to be known, virtually removed Johanna from the realm of interest of Miles Lanahan and Yost Ver Steeg and whatever other dark lords the two of them served. Chardy, whose importance seemed also to have diminished in the past several days, was for now free to travel on weekends and be with her, as he was now.

She moaned in her sleep, and shifted. He could not really see her, for the moonlight did not touch this corner of the room, yet he felt her: warmth, weight, sweetness of odor, a presence. Her arm warm and dry against his hand.

The telephone rang.

Chardy jumped at the noise, pulled himself up in the bed, and looked at his Rolex, which announced the hour of four.

Johanna stirred in the dark and seemed to swim for the telephone. He heard her speak briefly; then she turned.

“For you.”

He took the phone.

Miles said, “Chardy? What the hell are you doing there?”

“It’s the weekend, Miles. I can go anywhere.”

“Not anymore you can’t.”

Chardy waited, and finally the young man said in a breathless, unpunctuated sentence, “Trewitt and Speight in Mexico and we lost Speight somebody blew his face off with a shotgun behind some whorehouse in Mexico where he wasn’t supposed to be.”

Chardy closed his eyes at the image. Behind a whorehouse. Old Bill, who was always around.

“Paul,” Johanna said, “Paul, what is it?”

“Yost wants you down here. There’s an early flight into National from Logan. We’ll have somebody meet you.”

Old Bill. In Mexico? Now why kill him? What had he come across? Who did it — the opposition, some jealous boyfriend, gangsters, a hunter whose shotgun wasn’t on safe?

But there weren’t any accidents in this sort of game.

“Paul, that flight. You’ll be on it?”

“Yeah, sure,” Chardy said, feeling suddenly that things had just changed and that the safety of the bedroom in which he lay hidden just seconds ago was forever gone. It frightened him a little. And then he had another thought.

“Look, Miles, you better get some people down there to bring that kid in. I could go myself. Without an old hand like Speight, that kid could get himself in a lot of trouble.”

“Trewitt is missing,” said Lanahan coldly.

“I see,” said Chardy.

“He’s dead too, you know,” said Lanahan.

Chardy sighed. It was how these things worked.

“Yes,” he said, “yes, I suppose he is.”