The Second Saladin

52

Thank God for baseball.

Danzig could hear the volume of the television set rising through the back stairwell. The agents talked animatedly among themselves. The system was breaking down: its vitality was spent; its energy had leaked away.

Suppose Ulu Beg had come here? What would these men have done? Where was their commander, the altar boy whom nobody liked, the dreadful little Lanahan. He certainly could not be here, for whatever his flaws, his individual failures of taste, he ran a taut ship; but now the agents clustered in the study, gathered around the game on television. Orioles against Yankees. Baltimore and hated New York. The provinces against the imperial city; of course. A natural, rich in drama.

Danzig paused in the littered kitchen. His housekeeper had left for the night. The agents had disturbed her by turning the kitchen into a sty. Empty Coke cans, sacks of cheese snacks, pretzels, crackers, everywhere. It was like a fraternity house.

Hoots rose from the study. Something important must have happened, but Danzig slipped into his backyard. Shouldn’t there be a man back here? It terrified him that his escape from his supposedly impregnable house was progressing so smoothly. It occurred to him that the mandate of these men had been to keep others out, however, and not him in; thus their defense would be calibrated for the perimeter, not the interior. He walked into the cover of the grape arbor and disappeared in the complexities of his garden. Yet he knew the way. He found the gate and paused, waiting for a challenge. Down the way in the dark alley he could see the glow of an orange cigarette tip.

So there was a man.

Then he heard a voice.

“Tango Bum, this is Foxcroft. Tango Bum, do you copy?”

A pause.

“Hey, Charlie, Yanks score? I heard you guys shouting. Twice? Off Palmer? Christ, that showboat. Okay, thanks.”

The cigarette arched out and bounced in the gravel of the alley. He could barely make out the shape of the man, visible against the lights out on the street, who walked to the cigarette butt and disgustedly ground it out.

Danzig stepped out and walked in the opposite direction, staying close to the wall. He passed swiftly to his neighbor’s backyard, where huge bushes overhung a low fence, and against them he felt safe. He walked swiftly on. He had escaped.

One alley led to another until he reached Thirty-second Street, which he followed to Wisconsin Avenue, there disappearing in the crowd that had begun to gather in the warm spring night. He stopped at a drugstore to buy a pair of $5 sunglasses — they cost him $10, of course — with which he hoped in some way at least to stall the recognition process, if not actually halt it. They were vulgar things — gold, swoopy, a Phantom pilot’s glasses that mocked the shape of angel wings or teardrops; the surface of the lenses was a mirror also, very much the style. If the clerk noticed him, he did not give it away; perhaps he was jaded by important government types slipping into the store at all hours to make degrading purchases — the Supreme Court justice who loads up on laxative, the famous hostess who buys a strawberry douche, the senator who purchases a salve for his hemorrhoids — or perhaps he simply did not recognize the former Secretary. It puzzled Danzig, who was used to being recognized, who expected it. Yet as he moved out of the store and into the crowd, sporting the ludicrous goggles, a feeling of curious invisibility began to seep through him. He had wondered, as he engineered his getaway, how he would handle what he expected to be the most difficult of all problems, the gawkers, the tourists, the autograph hunters, the flesh-pressers, all of whom, he supposed, would be drawn to his famous face, sunglasses or no. Yet he now slid through the crowd, down the jammed avenue, past the smart shops, virtually unnoticed.

It occurred to him that celebrity was largely trappings; that is, in a limousine, at a dinner party, at a meeting, a press conference, a seminar, people were prepped for him, expecting him, ready to genuflect to the heat of fame. Out here in the spontaneous world, it was every man for himself in a battle for sidewalk territory, for space near the windows full of fabulous swanky goods. His famous face on a magazine cover demanded respect; on a plump body clothed in nondescript polyester sport clothes, animated by a frantic awkwardness, among the many, it received only indifference. Though once or twice police cruisers prowled by, leaving him uneasy. Yet, he counseled himself, they had not in all likelihood discovered his absence; perhaps they would during a seventh-inning stretch. And again, what crime had he committed? None. What law had he broken? None. And therefore, what recourse had they? The answer was the same: none. Yet he knew legal niceties would not stop them; in his (or their) best interest they would snatch him from any public thoroughfare.

As he moved through the streets, wary in the crowd, eyes down, moving tentatively on his stubby legs, pausing now and then for a furtive glance about, a sense of déjà vu flooded through him. He had lived this moment before. But when, where? A dream? It had the quality of dream to it: the details, the seething streets, the young flesh all about, carnival rhythms, glossy goods on display. He associated it all with music, and could almost hear the tune. It played in his skull. South American? Asian? No, no, it had a Teutonic ring to it: it was the “Horst Wessel Song,” sung by valiant hordes of young athletes strutting through the streets on a glorious and torchlit spring night in the year 1934 in the city of Danzig. He was eight, with his father. He was a Pole then, but also a Jew, in a Polish city that was also a German city. Very much the same feeling then as now. So much animal strength about. So much color and muscle. Perhaps it was these odd lamps strung through Washington which had about them the earthy quality of torchlight. He could see no banners and remembered from those days the gammadion cross festooning everything, hanging everywhere. It had no evil association then to his young eyes; he found it a curiosity. He asked his dark father, who watched the parade bleakly.

“It’s a German thing,” his father had said. “Pay it no heed.” It was the first time his father had drawn a distinction between himself and others. It filled the young boy with unease. The man the boy became remembered in crisp detail that moment: the sense of unease overcoming innocence. A signal moment in a young life, perhaps the first moment he realized his future would not be European. And he remembered his father, who got them out in ’37, giving up a career in the university.

Danzig stood in the street, and felt in a totalitarian shadow once again. He glanced at his watch — a Patek Philippe, beautifully elegant, gold — and saw that he had three hours before meeting Chardy. He looked about nervously for sanctuary and located it at once — a movie theater down M Street. He walked swiftly to it and was pleased to find it uncrowded. He paid his admission — at last he thought somebody recognized him, because the girl gave him the oddest look — and ducked inside. Only then did he realize where he’d come.

No man sat next to another in here, in the darkness no man would look at another. On the screen, in blinding lucidity, so big and tangled that he could make almost no sense of it, a giant mouth sucked a giant penis, riding the shaft up and down. He could not tell if the lips were male or female; he wondered if it mattered. Moans and cheesy music issued from the screen. Danzig sat down, terribly embarrassed.

Yet at once he began to feel safe; in here, certainly, nobody would pay any attention to him.