The Second Saladin

18

Chardy arrived bleary-eyed, his nerves edgy, ready for a fight. He had adrenaline coursing through his veins by the quart, he could feel his eyes dilated painfully, his breath shallow and tense. In the old days, when you lost somebody you’d go in and kick some ass. It was one of the oldest, the best rules, a rule that would have helped Bill Speight — or any agent — in his last moment or two. You always got back, you always went them one better; it was all personal. There were no truces. And maybe a part of him felt some joy, though he’d never admit it. For here at last was a prospect of action.

But when he crashed into the office, expecting men loading magazines into exotic automatics, others looking at maps, still others chatting bitterly in corners, he found only Miles, sipping coffee.

“Where is everybody?” Chardy barked, at first furious that they’d left without him.

“Relax, Paul. Jesus, you look half-crazy.”

“You said it was an emergency, you said to get down here, you said—”

It occurred then to Chardy that he’d misread it all. Something in Lanahan’s amused eyes, also the absence of stale, smoked-out air in the room, the absence of cigarette butts. Lanahan lounged at Yost’s desk, as though trying it on for size and finding it fit nicely.

“Things have cooled. Considerably,” Miles said, the half-smirk on his face.

“I don’t—”

“Certain realities have set in. We got some news on Bill. We’ve doped it out. We’ve also got some orders from up above, declaring Mexico off-limits. And—”

“Where is he?”

“Where is who?”

“Come on, Miles. I smell Sam Melman in here. I smell Melman all over this place. Come on, Miles, where is he?”

“This is Yost’s operation, Paul. This is Yost’s office. You’d better get that straight.”

“I smell Sam in this, Sam’s a great one for cooling down, for taking it easy and slow, for not making any mistakes, for—”

“Paul, here are facts. Fact number one: the Mexicans have raised all kinds of hell. We have an informal agreement with them and part of it is that we don’t run covert operations in their country without clearing it first with them.”

“For Christ’s sakes, this wasn’t any operation. It was some old man and a kid—”

“We know that. But try to tell it to them. Look, it’s a delicate working arrangement: they let us have all kinds of latitude in Mexico City around the Soviet Embassy, which is the hub of a lot of KGB activity. We have to protect that freedom. They’re very kind to us; we make a lot of mileage off that kindness. All right?”

Chardy looked at him sullenly, unsure suddenly of a reply.

“Fact number two: oil. Oil talks in this world, loud and clear, and the Mexicans have tons of the stuff. So over and above anything on our level is that long-term issue. What they have and we need. We have to be very careful with them these days so that we can drive our Cadillacs around. Okay? We don’t call them wetbacks or spics or greasers or zooters. We treat them politely, on all levels. So we’re not going to bust in, shooting up some place when—”

“Kid, one — maybe two — of our people got clipped. Now in the old days—”

“It’s the new days, Paul. Fact number three: we know who killed Speight.”

Chardy looked at him.

“There’s no Iron Curtain involvement, no Middle Eastern involvement. It doesn’t have anything to do with Ulu Beg. There’s no connection. It was plain, ugly, stupid luck.”

“Who?”

“Poor Speight walked into a gang war. We have it he and Trewitt were very interested in coyote outfits — that was their brief, their only brief, to see what they could dig up on whoever smuggled Ulu Beg into this country. That, and only that. But they had to go a little further, and got themselves into the middle of a big fight in the Mexican mafia. It was something over a bar, the Palace, El Palacio, really a whorehouse. Stupid Bill walked into it. Asking questions like he was some kind of crime reporter. I don’t know what got into him. It was a terrible, stupid accident.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Chardy.

“You don’t want to believe it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Yost believes it.”

“And where the hell is he?”

“Home.”

Chardy picked up the phone.

“Give me the number.”

“No, Paul. There’s no point. He’s had a long night, just like we—”

“Give me the number!”

“You’re in no state to be talking on the phone. To anybody.”

“Give me Melman’s number, then. Goddammit, Miles—”

He made a move toward Miles, realizing he was dangerously near being out of control.

But Miles held firm.

“Just take it easy. Just settle down. Jesus, you old cowboys, you just can’t wait to stir things up.”

“He didn’t have the guts himself to face me, did he, Miles? Yost.” He thought of Yost — an unusual occurrence; he seldom thought of the man at all, but only of Sam Melman — and could not really conjure up a face. He remembered glasses and neatness and placidity and suits and that was all. “So he left you to do the dirty work. And you’ll do it. You sort of enjoy doing it.”

“Paul—”

“And now we kiss Mexican asses. Mexican! Jesus, the fucking Mexicans!”

“You better get used to the real world, Paul. You better get used to the eighties. This isn’t ‘Nam or Kurdistan or somebody’s dirty little secret war. This is America. You do things certain ways here. All right?”

Chardy looked at him with great sadness. The world according to Lanahan was a dreadful place. In the old days, Special Ops always got its people out or at least back; and if it could only get the bodies, then it made certain someone on the other side had some burying to do too.

“Sometimes I wonder how things got so screwed up, Lanahan,” Chardy said, wanting Johanna very much all of a sudden.

But Miles wasn’t interested.

“They’re bringing the body back. There’s going to be a funeral. You’ll be there, I assume.”

Chardy nodded. He hated funerals but he’d go anyway. Old Bill. Frenchy. The business had turned so cold, and it was squeezing the old ones out so fast it wasn’t funny.

He looked at Miles, an inheritor, and wondered how he could ever explain all this to him, but the kid glared at him and muttered something about how he’d better get himself cleaned up.