The Second Saladin

6

He stared at the picture. Yes. Ulu Beg. Years younger, but still Ulu Beg.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Good. Getting it was no easy thing,” said Trewitt, the young one, a wispy pseudo-academic type who was tall and thin and vague.

“Once upon a time,” Chardy said. “Years and years ago.”

“Okay,” said Trewitt. “Now this one.”

The projector clicked and projected upon the screen on the wall of a glum office in Rosslyn a plumpish face, prosperous, solid.

“I give up,” said Chardy.

“Look carefully,” said Yost Ver Steeg. “This is important.”

I know it’s important, Chardy thought irritably.

“I still don’t — oh, yeah. Yeah.”

“It’s an artist’s projection of Ulu Beg now. Twenty years later, a little heavier, ‘Americanized.’”

“Maybe so,” said Chardy. “But I last saw him seven years ago. He looked” — Chardy paused. Words were not his strong point; he could never get them to express quite what he wanted — “fiercer, somehow. This guy was in a war for twenty years. He was a guerrilla leader for nearly ten. You’ve got him looking like a Knight of Columbus.”

A harsh note of laughter came from the other young one, Miles something-Irish. It was a caustic squawk of a laugh; Miles was a kind of Irish dwarf, an oily little jerk, but he’d know what a Knight of Columbus was.

“Well,” Trewitt said defensively, “the artist had a lot of experience on this sort of thing. He worked all night. We just got the picture in yesterday. It’s the only one of Ulu Beg extant.”

“Try this one, Paul,” said Yost Ver Steeg.

Johanna. Chardy stared at her. The face could have been spliced out of any of a thousand of his recent nights’ worth of dreams. It meshed perfectly with all those nights of memory and struck him with almost physical force.

“It’s very recent,” said Yost.

Chardy stared at the image projected against the wall. He felt as if he were in a peep-show booth for a quarter’s worth of pointless thrill with other strange men in a dark place.

“A week ago, I think. Is that right, Miles?” Yost said.

“Tuesday last.” Miles’s voice was sure and smug and had a recognizable Chicago tang to it.

“Has she changed much in seven years?”

“No,” was all Chardy could think to say, offended by the ritual he knew the shot to represent: some seedy little man from Technical Services, up there with a motor-driven Nikon with a 200-millimeter lens, parked blocks away in his car or van, shooting through one-way glass after three days’ stalk.

Chardy rubbed his dry palms together. He glanced over at the three shapes with whom he shared Johanna’s image: Yost, almost a still life, a man of deadness, and the two younger fellows, dreamy Trewitt and the loathsome Miles What-was-it? the dumpy little Irish guy from Chicago.

“Did you know” — Miles spoke from the comer — “that in the years she’s been back she’s tried to kill herself three times?”

A kind of pain that might have been grief seemed to work up through Chardy’s knees. He swallowed once, feeling his heart beat hard, or seem to, at any rate. He clenched his fists together.

“I didn’t know that. I don’t know anything about what happened to her.”

Chardy could almost feel Miles smile in the dark. He’d only glimpsed him in the hurried introductions — Speight had said something about a computer whiz — and remembered a short, dark, splotchy man, a boy really, not quite or just barely thirty, with unruly oily black hair. He had the look to him of a priest’s boy, the one in every parish who’d seek a special relationship from the father or the mother superior and draw power off it for years. He’d seen it at Resurrection too, and maybe elsewhere; maybe it wasn’t Catholic at all.

“Once in ’seventy-seven, wrists,” Lanahan amplified, “once in ’seventy-nine, pills, and a real bad one last year, pills again. She almost went the distance.”

Chardy nodded, keeping his eyes sealed on the woman’s image before him.

Johanna, why?

But he knew why.

“The university has had her in and out of various shrink programs,” Lanahan continued. “We got the records. It wasn’t easy.”

But Chardy was not listening. He looked at his own wrists. He’d cut them open in April of 1975 after his lengthy interrogation by the KGB. He knew the feeling of comfort: the blood draining away and with it all the problems of the world. An immense light-headedness fills you, seductive, gratifying. You think you’re going to beat them. He remembered screaming at the officer who had supervised his interrogation, “Speshnev, Speshnev, I’m going to win.” But they’d saved him.

“Is that it?” Trewitt asked.

“Yes,” said Ver Steeg, and the image vanished. Trewitt pulled the curtains open and light flooded the room.

Chardy stared at the wall from which her image had disappeared. Then he turned back to the others.

“So — Paul. May I call you Paul?” Yost asked. Chardy could not see his eyes behind the pink-framed semi-academic glasses he wore, a style beloved of high-level government administrators.

“Please,” Chardy said.

“Ulu Beg knows only two people in the United States. You and Johanna Hull. And it seems unlikely he’d come to you — for help.”

Chardy nodded. Yes, it seemed unlikely Ulu Beg would come to him — for help.

“That leaves this woman.”

“You think he’ll go to her?”

“I don’t think anything. I see only probabilities. It seems probable that he’s aware how difficult it would be to operate in this country without some kind of base. It seems probable, then, that he’d try and obtain one. It seems probable that he’d be drawn to somebody he felt he could trust, somebody who shared his sentiments about the Kurds. It seems probable, finally, that he’d go to her. That’s all.”

“You could try and anticipate his target,” said Chardy.

“You could. And if you anticipated wrong you might put yourself into a posture you’d never get out of. We have no data to operate on at this point as to his target; there are no probabilities. That may change; until it does I’ve decided to concentrate on the probabilities.”

Chardy nodded.

“So we have to wonder, Paul,” Yost continued It was a freak of optics that kept his eyes hidden behind the twin pools of light reflected in his lenses. “You’re our authority. You know them both. Is it feasible he’d approach her? To you, I mean. Does that feel right? And if so, how would she react? And finally, would she cooperate with us? Or, more to the point, with you?”

Miles spoke before Chardy could form an answer.

“She’s not an activist type, we know. She’s not affiliated with any zany political group, she’s not a demonstrator, a kook. She doesn’t sleep with fruity revolutionaries. She’s quiet, she’s solid — except for her head troubles. She doesn’t have a history of doing screwy things.”

He fingered through some pages before him — Johanna’s dossier, probably. God, they knew so much about her, Chardy thought. The idea of this Miles’s small fingers riffling through Johanna’s life offended him. His damp hands on her picture, her documents.

Miles smiled, showing dirty teeth.

Who’ll save you, Johanna, from these guys?

I will, he thought.

And then he thought of her only contact with him, an answer to the fifteen-page letter he’d sent her when he returned from the Soviet prison. It had been a postcard with a cheesy picture of the Doral Hotel in Miami Beach on it, and it had said, “No, Paul. You know why.”

“Paul?”

“Sorry, I was—”

“The question,” Yost said politely, “is: will he approach her? And, would she help him?”

“She’d help us,” Chardy said.

“Come on, Paul,” said Miles … Lanahan! That was it. “For Christ’s sakes, she was sold on the Kurds. If you look at her record the way we did, you cannot escape that conclusion. She went to Iran in ’sixty-nine with the Peace Corps. She came back in ’seventy-three to teach at the college in Rezā’iyeh. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Kirmanji, a Kurdish dialect. She made the pilgrimage to Mahābād, where they had their republic in ’forty-six, and one of her Peace Corps chums told us she wept at the Street of Four Lamps, where the Iranians hanged the Kurdish martyrs.”

“That’s all true,” said Chardy. “But it’s also true she’s too smart to get involved in anything stupid like you’re talking about. This is a very smart woman. She’s brilliant. She just wouldn’t get mixed up in something goofy like this. Ulu Beg or no Ulu Beg.”

“If he approached her, she’d help us?”

“Yes. If we could tell her we wouldn’t hurt him.”

“Paul, he’s already killed two police officers.”

“A terrible accident. And the FBI and the Border Patrol haven’t made the connection to Ulu Beg yet. Because you want to play this thing low-profile. You wouldn’t have brought me in unless you wanted to play it low-profile, and I don’t think you want the FBI nosing through some old Agency business.”

There was stifled silence in the room. Chardy had them, he knew he had them.

“Let me tell her we’ll try and pick him up and let him walk on it. That’s the key. If you say, ‘We’re going to throw this guy in the slammer for two hundred years,’ then it’s all over. But if you say, ‘Look, it’s terrible, but we can still deal with it,’ then maybe you’ve got a chance.”

“You love them. Both. Still.” It was the boy, Trewitt.

“No matter,” said Yost Ver Steeg. “But I’m sure Paul understands” — he seemed to speak to the younger man but in reality talked by echo to Chardy — “no matter what his personal feelings are, just how potentially serious a problem this is. An Agency-trained Kurd with an Agency-provided automatic weapon. Suppose he commits some terrible act of random violence — like the Japanese terrorists at Lod Airport. Or kills an important public figure. The Agency doesn’t need to be tied up in a scandal like that.”

Chardy nodded. They were scared. He could see the headlines, one of the Agency’s secret little wars exploding in America’s own backyard, American blood on American pavement for the first time. They were terrified — of what it would do to the Agency.

“You can see that, Paul, can’t you?”

“Yes.”

“After all, it’s your past, too. It was your operation originally. You have some responsibility.”

“Of course I do,” Chardy said.

“What happened, in the end, to the Kurds was — well, you must take some responsibility for that, too.”

“Of course,” said Chardy.

“So if this woman is the key, we have to find out. We have to know. And if you want to tell her something to help, you go ahead and tell her. But remember what’s at stake.”

“Yes.”

The rest was unsaid, and would be represented on no paper: Ulu Beg must be stopped to spare the Agency grotesque embarrassment.

“You’ll do it then? You’ll see her. You’ll bring her in, you’ll help us. You’ll work with us.”

“Yes,” Chardy said. He wondered if he meant it, or if it mattered.

After that it was a matter of details. Who would accompany Chardy to Boston as backup, what approach would he take, how would he handle it, what could he expect? The answer to the first question was Lanahan, who’d done the preliminary work in “developing Johanna,” in Yost’s words, and that simply it was set. They would leave in two days; the hotel reservations were already made. But when Chardy was finally done with them and wanted nothing more than to go find a beer, he looked up to see he was not yet alone. The boy Trewitt, the one who had said so little, had waited in the foyer for him.

“Mr. Chardy?”

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Trewitt. Jim Trewitt.”

“Sure, I remember.”

“They had me working on the Historical Staff — I’m actually a historian; I have my master’s — before all this.” He seemed a little nervous.

Chardy did not know what to make of this. There’d been no Historical Staff in his time, just as there’d been no Operations Directorate. “Uh-huh,” he said.

“We work with a lot of the older men; they’re asked to spend their last year working on a memoir. So I’ve picked up a lot of loose information on — well, on Agency people. Your career, the stuff you pulled, you and some of those other Special Operations guys. Tony Po, Willie Shidlovisky, Scamp Hughes, Walter Short—”

“Frenchy. Frenchy Short,” said Chardy, warming at the sudden memory of his best and oldest Agency friend.

“You and Frenchy. You really did some things. All that time with the Nungs in Vietnam. Hunting guerrillas with the Peruvian Rangers.” He shook his head in admiration, embarrassing Chardy with his own gaudy past.

“I just wanted you to know how glad I was that you’re back with us. And I wanted to tell you that I think you got the shaft when Saladin Two fell apart.”

“Somebody had to get it,” Chardy said. But then he stupidly smiled at the boy, winning his loyalty forever. He just hoped the kid wouldn’t get in the way. But then he saw a purpose for him, so perhaps this business would work out after all.

“By the way, maybe you can tell me: what have they got the Frenchman doing now?” he asked, and learned the answer instantly from the sudden stricken look on the boy’s face.

“I thought you knew. I thought they told you, or you’d heard or something,” Trewitt said.

“They didn’t tell me anything,” Chardy said.

“I’m sorry I brought it up. I apologize. Somebody should have told you. Frenchy Short was killed in ’seventy-five on a solo job. In Vienna. They found him floating in the Danube. You were off in Kurdistan.”

Chardy nodded and said something to reassure Trewitt, who looked sick with grief. He told him it was all okay, not to worry.

“I just — I’m really sorry.”

“No, don’t worry. I should have known. I just thought he was overseas or something. I was out of contact for so long.”

“Is there anything—”

“No, no. The Frenchman always figured to catch it on a job. It had to happen. He liked to play them close. Don’t worry.”

He finally sprung himself from the boy and walked in the gray gloom across a grassy field in the center of a traffic circle toward the Marriott Key Bridge Motel, where he was staying. He could see Georgetown at the far end of the bridge, and the far side of the river down to the Kennedy Center, a magnificent view of white buildings and monuments. But Chardy wanted only to find a bar. He reflected that he had loved three people in his life and now one of them, his friend and perfect master, Frenchy Short, who had taught him just about all there was to know about their kind of business, was dead and he hadn’t even known it. And the other two, Johanna and Ulu Beg, were coming back into his life in almost the same instant after what seemed ages, as part of the same phenomenon, linked as before; and this necessarily evoked a complicated and melancholy response, not only because he was charged to hunt the one and control the other, but more terribly because just as surely as he had loved them both, he had in a cellar in Baghdad in 1975 betrayed them both.