The Second Saladin

35

This was his third day; by now he had established his talents and been nominally accepted, though no one had ever asked his name or inquired where he came from. They knew more important things about him: that he could hit from twenty-five feet out if given the shot, that he would dive for a free ball, that he set picks that would knock your teeth loose, that he was a furious rebounder, and finally, that he was honest.

“You do the pros, old man?” the tallest, the star, said to be a postman in real life, put to him sullenly.

“I had a week in the old Chicago Packers camp. But I couldn’t stick it.”

“Say, Jack: you think I could make it in the pros?”

Chardy paused a fraction of a second. He was, after all, a vulnerable figure, the only white man on the playground, even if the dome of the United States Capitol could be seen in the distance, across the river, an immaculate joke for the thousands of black teenagers who threw balls through hoops here.

“No,” he finally said. “No way. Sorry. You’re just not good enough.”

Chardy thought the postman might hit him. He was maybe twenty-two, six five, and had some great moves. He’d probably had a year or two of college ball before flunking out, or quitting.

But the postman thought it over and seemed to back off. Perhaps he was too elegant for a punch-out, or too smart; or perhaps he secretly knew the truth of Chardy’s judgment; or perhaps he sensed that Chardy didn’t give a shit about much of anything and would have fought him to the last bloody blow.

“Then let’s play, old man,” said the postman.

“Let’s do it,” Chardy replied, and they began again.

Chardy had by this time worked his way up to the best court, where the most talented players went five-on-five full distance. At first the blacks had let their rage show: they’d crowded and roughed him, and he’d been knocked to the asphalt more than a few times. But he fought back with elbow and hip, and his shots were falling. He was still the jump-shooter. You never forgot. It never left, that gift. He went for net, not rim or backboard, although these skirts were woven of chain, which clanked medievally when the ball fell through them. It was as though a kind of enchantment had fallen over Chardy. He played to lose himself forever, to hide, to vanish in the game, the glorious game. He knew only that he had to play or die. His limbs had ached for the sport.

He’d left Boston and driven straight from National into D.C., stopping only at a sporting-goods shop in a suburban mall to buy a luxurious pair of shoes — Nike high-tops, leather, the pro model — and a good Seamco outdoor ball, and headed deep into the city until he saw a playground, a good one, a big one, across a bridge in a meadow between a highway and a slow river. The place was called, after the river, Anacostia. He knew the best ballplayers would go there.

He felt he could play forever. At thirty-eight, he felt sixteen. If there was a heaven on this earth, he had at last found it: a playground, two hoops, and a shot that was falling.

Jesus, was it falling.

“Fill it.”

“Drop it.”

“Put it down, man.”

“Jam it.”

“Damn, you hot.”

He hit four in a row, then five, then six before missing. He fired rainbows that fell like messages from God, dead center, without mercy. He tried tap-ins and finger rolls and fallaway jumpers and drives off either hand. He fought to the baseline to receive a pass and curled backward through two defenders for a reverse lay-up. The ball felt like a rose, it was so light and smelled so sweet. In a trance he shot a wish from forty feet, only to watch it drop without a rattle. Even the postman gave him a tap on the butt after that one.

But eventually, in the hazy hour of twilight of the third day, when the moths had begun to gather in the cones of the fluorescent lights that would illuminate the hoops until midnight, into this athlete’s Eden there came a snake. Chardy pretended not to notice; but how could he miss the only other white face among so many black ones, even if it was far away, behind the windshield of a nondescript car.

Whoever was stalking him had patience. He waited like a grim statue in his car through several more games, even allowing Chardy to drink a can of cold beer that someone offered from a six-pack.

Finally, almost into full dark, as Chardy was firing from the baseline — a rare miss, too — the door popped and a short figure emerged.

Lanahan. They’d sent Lanahan.

Chardy missed the next two shots, and the man he was theoretically guarding put in two buckets.

Lanahan, in his disheveled suit, wandered over shyly, paused, and finally found a seat in some bleachers adjacent to the court.

Chardy missed another shot. All of a sudden he could not buy a basket. A terrible weariness suffused his limbs.

“Come on, Jack,” the postman ordered.

The ball came to him on the perimeter. Inside, a man on his team slipped open and Chardy should have hit him at the low post with a bounce pass; greedily he merely faked it. Chardy dribbled back and forth, the ball rising to meet his eager hands. He searched for an opening. Another teammate slipped out to set a pick and Chardy drove suddenly to it, losing his defender in the process.

He set himself for half an instant, and felt the ball rise and almost of itself decide to flee the thrust of his two hands as he leaned from behind the pick. The ball, obediently, disappeared through the basket.

Chardy got two quick baskets after that, and the postman finished the run with a ringing slam-dunk. Chardy raised his hand, announcing the desire to sit one out, and a high-school boy of great repute but few words jogged in emotionlessly to take his place.

“Nice stuff, man,” the kid said.

Chardy plucked a towel off the grass and circled the court to the bleachers. He flopped down a row behind Miles, stretching his legs out before him and working over his face with a towel. One of his knees was bloody. He couldn’t even remember a fall.

“You’re good,” said Miles, watching the new game before him, the cuffs and shouts and bounces now reaching them through the heavy summer air. “I had no idea how good.”

“I seemed to be on tonight,” said Chardy.

“We had a lot of trouble finding you.”

“I just had to play some basketball.”

“Sure.”

Chardy watched for a while. Before him, in the glow of the overhead fluorescents, the postman and the new kid went after each other.

“That tall guy is pretty good,” Lanahan said. “Not the kid, the other guy. He could play in the pros.”

“No, he couldn’t,” said Chardy. “Who gets the ax? I saw the papers. We got out of it pretty good. I didn’t see any mention of the Agency or any mention of the Kurds. Thank Christ, Danzig didn’t kick off anyway on a heart attack with all the excitement.”

“Two people did die, Paul.”

“Three. Johanna.”

“Well, I meant in the shooting.”

“Johanna was shot,” Chardy said stubbornly.

“Paul, it’s really not possible for us to see her as a victim.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t.”

“In any event, nobody ever connected her with Danzig. We didn’t ourselves until yesterday. Somebody must have moved her if she was close to the shooting.”

“She was across the street.”

“So it was you?”

“Yeah.”

“That was smart, Paul. It was real smart. It could have gotten so complicated, so lurid if the papers had tied it all together. Can you imagine Time?”

“I wasn’t thinking about the papers, Miles.”

“It doesn’t matter what you were thinking about, Paul. It only matters what you did.”

“You still haven’t told me who got the ax. But I can guess. Not you, or you wouldn’t be here. Not me, not with Ulu Beg still around with his machine pistol. I’m still an asset. That leaves—”

“He didn’t do very well. He deserves what he’s getting. He authorized the cutback on the surveillance of Johanna. He overcommitted to the Midwest. Sam called it a dreadful performance.”

“Ver Steeg is out?”

“Way out. They bumped him over to a staff job in Scientific Intelligence. Something to do with satellites. He’s one of the old guys; he goes way back with Sam, so they didn’t fire him. Imagine what they’d have done to one of us, Paul?”

“So Sam’s running things. They’ve moved it to Operations? He’s calling the shots?”

“Well—” Miles smiled. His fiery skin seemed neon in the fluorescent light. His teeth were still bad.

“You, Miles?”

“I was lucky. I didn’t catch the flak. And they needed someone who was all read-in. So I’m field supervisor.”

“But under Sam?”

“Sam’s a smart guy, Paul. He’s had his eye on me for some time. We work well together. But I’m not here about Sam. I’m here about you.”

“Suppose I say no? Suppose I say I’m tired of it, it’s only going to end in more senseless killing?”

“Well, you can’t say no. You signed a contract. We could make it pretty sticky. Your name’s on the dotted line. You can’t just back out. But Paul, consider. Danzig really wants you. He believes in you.”

“The jerk,” Chardy said.

“Paul, look at it this way. Danzig wants you Danzig’s got clout. That means Melman wants you. Melman’s going places, Paul. He’ll get the top job one of these days. He’s one of the inside boys. Paul, you and me, we’ve always been on the outside and we’ll always be on the outside unless we have an insider really pulling for us. Somebody who’s old Agency, Harvard, WASP, upper-management. That’s Sam, Paul. He can really help guys like us, Paul, two Irish-Catholic Chicago street kids. He wants to start over with you, Paul. Clean slate. No ’seventy-five hearings, no recommendation for termination. It all disappears. Paul, you could have your career back. You could have it all. If Sam owes you, Paul, you’re in extremely good shape when he lands on the top floor. He could take you with him.”

Playing the seducer in the Anacostia night didn’t suit Miles. His features were too squirrely, his acne too fierce. As he spoke his tiny dark eyes lit with conviction and he jabbed and gestured with his small hands. He pressed, crowded, yipped. A good case officer — Chardy had known a few in his time — could charm you into selling your mother, but Miles had no talent for it. It was a question of timing, of rhythm; he came to the point too fast.

Melman must be on the desperate side to have resorted to a clumsy operator like Lanahan. It was a curiosity: Why couldn’t Melman have come up with somebody smoother? No, he was recycling the people he’d started with, simply shuffling them around. For some reason he wanted to keep the operation contained, keep the number of players down.

Chardy looked across the river. The unlovely city gleamed cool and glossy on the far shore. The Capitol, arc-lit and melodramatic, loomed frozen against the night. Near it, also lit for drama, rose the shaft of the Washington Monument — cathedrals in the Vatican of government, a faith which just now Chardy saw as desperately hollow, as much a hoax as the Catholicism in which he’d been raised.

But did he have a choice? Of course not. Which perhaps was Melman’s real message in sending this awful kid.

He thought of Johanna and his promise to her. Was it invalidated by her treason? Or Ulu Beg? What did Chardy owe the Kurd, who had made him a brother? He wondered about all sorts of things too: why was Melman so desperate to have him back? Why had Melman been so driven to destroy him seven years ago? Who really was running Ulu Beg? And what about pitiful Trewitt, stuck out on his secret limb in Mexico?

He knew that whatever the answers were, they would not be found on a playground.

“Let’s go, then, Miles,” he said.