“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 t
hree 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.
7
Ramirez did not like them. He should have loved them, for they were throwing money around like American millionaires or Colombian cocaine merchants, yet they were neither American nor Colombian. Tips for all the poor girls. American whiskey only, and lots of it. Cigars, a foot long, for themselves and for anybody else.
But who were they?
Ramirez took another sip of his Carta Blanca, which was warm and flat from sitting so long in his glass, then set the drink before him on the table. The room was long and dark but he could see their profiles by looking across the room into a mirror which in turn looked into a second mirror. They had just ordered another bottle of Jack Daniel’s and given the boy Roberto, who brought it, a five-dollar bill. Ramirez knew his clientele well: college boys down from Tucson for a night of whoring, lonely tourists, an occasional Mexican businessman or two. It was a prosperous enterprise but no gold mine, and it didn’t draw the big spenders such as these two.
He knew he should feel safe. He had journeyed to Mexico City after the fiasco at the border to make personal amends to the Huerra family. He had waited patiently for an appointment and been finally escorted into the old man’s office at the top of one of Mexico City’s finest buildings and there apologized abjectly and cravenly for his errors in judgment on the evening in question and offered to do a penance. Could he pay a fine, make a donation? Could he offer a service, do a task?
And Huerra, the elder, the patriach, an old gentleman with the courtly manners of a Spanish grandee, had said, “Reynoldo, you have served our family well and long. Two old friends such as ourselves should feel love toward each other, not hate or distrust. It is good that you come and ask forgiveness and I grant it to you. You are forgiven. You owe us no penance.”
“Thank you, Don José,” Ramirez had said and had dropped swiftly to his knees and kissed the old man’s hand.
“I would ask one thing,” said Don José.
“Anything. Anything.”
“It is said you are no longer a religious man. I hear you do not give to the Virgin, you do not talk to priests. This bothers me. As I get older, I see the importance of the religious life.”
“I have sinned. I have been a vain and greedy man. I have lived a terrible life, Don José.”
“Go back to God, Reynoldo. God will forgive you, just as I have. God loves you, just as I do. The Church is your mother; she will forgive you as well.”
“It is done. I will light a candle every day. I will give half to the Mother Church.”
“Not half, Reynoldo. I should think a quarter would be sufficient.”
And so Reynoldo had taken up again the religious life. He lit candles, he wen to early mass, he made ostentatious donations. He became a changed man, a new man. It lasted about two days.
He took another sip of his Carta Blanca. He looked about for Oscar Meza who had disappeared. Had he left? Where was Oscar Meza? He looked again into the mirror and saw the two men—one wore a fine cream suit, elegantly cut, the other a pale blue leisure suit with an open-collared shirt, after the American style, though both were Latins—and saw that they had lit another pair of cigars and were laughing madly at some private joke.
What was so funny?
An hour later, Ramirez glanced at his gold watch. It was nearly 3:00 A.M. Things would die soon; the quiet hours before dawn would arrive, when even a poor whore might sleep. Ramirez pulled his bulk from behind his table and walked through clouds of stale smoke, past a few lingering drunken college boys who were trying to decide which girl to give their business to, and went behind the bar.
Instantly, the youth Roberto appeared.
“Patrón?”
Ramirez threw open the register and made a big show of fingering through the bills. He counted them twice, then turned to the boy.
“Stealing again, Roberto?”
“No, patrón.”
“There should be at least a thousand here. I have watched carefully.”
“A slow night, patrón.”
“Not that slow. Steal only a little, Roberto. If you steal too much at once, the big machine gets out of alignment and maybe you get caught in the gears and squashed.”
“I—I steal nothing, patrón,” the youth said, but could not look into Ramirez’s eyes.
Ramirez knew exactly how much Roberto stole each night and that it was within permissible limits, just as he knew how much Oscar stole—more and more lately—and how much the old lady who sat by the top of the stairs and checked peckers stole. Everyone stole; everybody took only a little for themselves, but by certain rules. There were rules. Nobody was allowed to break them.
“Just do not get so greedy, Roberto. I want to see you live a long, wonderful life and have fifty children. Be fruitful, populate the earth with your seed.”
“Yes, patrón.”
He turned, edged his large body away from the register. He paused for a moment, then moved along. In the pause his fingers had touched a Colt Cobra .38 Special in a holster under the register, he plucked the little revolver out and slid it into the waistband of his trousers, thinking, I wish I had my big Python instead of this little lady’s gun. And thinking, I wish I lit a candle this morning.
The two men in suits continued to drink steadily at their table.
“Roberto,” Ramirez called.
The boy hurried over.
“Take a bottle of the finest American stuff to our two friends. Say it is a gift of the proprietor.”
“Yes, patrón.”
Roberto fetched the bottle and took it to the table. The two looked up as he explained with his stiff little bow. The two men laughed warmly and asked where the proprietor was.
Roberto pointed.
“With great appreciation we accept the gift of the proprietor,” the man in the cream suit called in Spanish.
Ramirez nodded. Oscar Meza should have been back by now. Where was he?
“You run a nice place, Señor Proprietor,” called the man in the cream suit.
“Thanks much, my warm friend,” called back Ramirez. “It is a humble place but honest and clean.”
“An excellent prescription for success in any endeavor,” said the man dreamily. He had slicked-back black hair and was pockmarked, yet he was handsome in a mean way that attracts certain women. His friend in blue was fatter and more solemn—the sort who speaks only when spoken to, and then curtly. Also, he needed a shave.
“Did you have a visit with my girls?” Ramirez asked. “They’re the prettiest in Nogales. In all Sonora.”
“They are flowers. Each and every one. They know tricks, too, all kinds of tricks. I suppose the proprietor taught them himself.”
“These modern girls, you can’t teach them a thing. They already know everything,” he said. “There’s a young one with a magnificent mouth. A mouth of uncompromising sweetness. She’ll play you like a trumpet for only a little extra.”
“Is that Rita? I had Rita. Rita, a most refined and gifted young lady.”
“Rita is truly a rare bloom,” Ramirez called, and kissed his fingertips in homage to her skills. Under the kiss his fingers seemed to blossom, grow light and float away. Rita was fifty and needed dental work.
“We ought to be going,” said the man in the blue leisure suit. “It’s getting late.”
“You’ll come back, I hope?”
“Sadly, no. Our business in Nogales is almost finished.”
“A great pity. But I hope you’ll remember our little establishment fondly.”
“I have a great affection for it,” the man in the cream suit said, rising enthusiastically. He had an automatic pistol in his hand and he brought it to bear on Ramirez’s center, aiming carefully, and Ramirez shot through the table, hitting him in the chest, spinning him around. The report in the closed space was sharp and ugly, but it did not bother the man in blue, for he shot at Ramirez, hitting him under the heart and knocking him back off his chair.
Ramirez felt as though he’d been punched. He fought to get his breath back and to find feeling in his fingertips and when he looked he could see the man in blue tugging at his wounded partner, trying to bring him to his feet, but the man’s limbs were floppy and indifferent and the body kept collapsing forward. Ramirez pushed himself to his knees and rushed a shot at the man in blue, missing, and fired again quickly, hitting him in the jaw. The man sat down stupidly next to his friend. He held his head in his hands and began to moan. He started to weep.
“Oh, it hurts,” he said brokenly, with blood spilling from his mouth.
Ramirez climbed to his feet and walked over and shot him in the back of the neck, pitching him forward.
“Jesus Mary,” said Roberto. “Who are they?”
“Evil men,” said Ramirez. But who were they?
“Run,” he said to Roberto, “go get the Madonna. Quickly, boy, before I bleed my life away.”
The boy dashed off to get one of the prostitutes who claimed to have been a nurse.
Ramirez sat down on a chair. He still had the pistol in his hand. He dropped it.
The room began to flutter before his eyes. He wanted a priest, he hurt so bad. He looked at the two women on the couch, who stared at him in horror and shock.
“Get out of here, whores!” he bellowed. “Whores may not watch a man die.” They scurried off.
He wished he’d lit a candle that morning. He wished he’d been to mass. He wished there was a priest.
Where was the Madonna?
8
The van had reached a suburb of Boston called Medford, up north of Boston, and pulled into a crowded parking lot—acres and acres of cars—surrounding a bar or something called Timmothy’s, a single low building of unsurpassing modesty. The name, in red neon, was written in about fifty places: on the roof, above the doors, on a huge sign at the entrance to the lot: This Is it! The Original! TIMMOTHY’S!