The Second Saladin

They had prepared him well. But they had also warned him.

“America is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Women walk around with breasts and buttocks exposed. Food and lights everywhere, everywhere. Cars, more cars than you can imagine. And hurry. Americans all hurry. But they have no passion. Any Turk has passion. Among Turks and Mexicans and Arabs, passion runs high. But Americans are even lower, for they feel nothing. They move as though asleep. They do not care for their children or their women. They speak and talk only of themselves.

“In all this, you will be dazzled. Expect it. There is no way we can prepare you for the shock of it all. Even a small city in America is a spectacle. A large one is like a festival of all the peoples of earth. But remember also: the grotesque is common in America. Nobody will notice, nobody will care, nobody will pay you any attention. Nobody will ask you for papers if you are cautious. You need no permits, no licenses. Your face is your passport. You may go anywhere.”

Ulu Beg reinstructed himself in these lessons as he came down the last hill in the dawn light to the road. He moved swiftly. The distance was but a few twisting miles and the cars that sped by paid him no attention. The houses quickly became thick: small places of cinderblock in the sand and scrub. At each house was a car and in some of them men were leaving for work. Ulu Beg walked along the street. He paused to read the sign: SPEEDWAY, it said. He came to a group of men waiting by a corner. A bus arrived and they climbed aboard. He walked another few blocks and again the same thing happened. At a third corner, he climbed aboard himself.

“Hey. Fifty cents,” the driver said angrily. Ulu Beg searched his pockets. They had told him about this. Fifty cents was two quarters. He found the coins and dropped them in the box, and took a seat and rode down the Speedway toward the center of the city.

He got out near the bus station and looked for a hotel.

“Always stay near bus stations. Small places, dirty rooms, cheap. But a hotel, always a hotel. In a motel, they’ll ask about an automobile. You’ll have to explain that you don’t have one. Why not? they’ll ask. They’ll think you’re mad. In America it is exceedingly odd not to have an automobile. Everybody has an automobile.”

He chose a place called the Congress — the name proclaimed proudly on a metal frame on the roof — across from a Mexican theater in a crumbling section of the city. It was a four-story building with a bookstore, a barbershop, and a place that sold gems in it, across from the train station and behind the bus station.

He walked into the dim brown lobby.

A fat lady looked up when he came to the desk.

“Yes?”

“A room. How much?”

“It’s ten-forty, dear. You get your TV and a bath.”

“Sure, okay.”

“Just sign here.”

He signed quickly.

“One night? Two? A week? I have to put it down.” Her face was powdery and mild.

“Two, three maybe. I don’t know.”

“Oh, and hon? You forgot to say where you were from. Here, on the form.”

“Ah,” he said.

He knew what to put. He thought of the only American he knew. Jardi. Where had Jardi grown up?

“Chicago,” he wrote.

“Chicago, now there’s a nice town.” She smiled. “Now I have to have that money, hon.”

He gave her a twenty and got his change.

“You go on up. Those stairs there. Down the hall. It’s in the back, away from all the traffic.”

He climbed the stairs, went down the dark hall and found the room. He went in, locked the door. He pulled the Skorpion from his pack and set it before him on the bed and waited for the police.

Nobody came.

You did it, he thought.

Kurdistan ya naman.

4

Trewitt was nervous. First, so many big shots in the room at one time. The special men, the elect, some of them legends, who ran the place. Then, the equipment. He was not by nature mechanical. He was not good with things. Wouldn’t it have been easier to have brought in some technical wizard to handle this aspect of it? Well, yes, under normal circumstances. But these were extraordinary circumstances. Therefore he’d just have to run the equipment himself.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Yost Ver Steeg had said.

And then the slides. They were the key; they had to fall in the right order and he’d just got the last one down from Photographic a few minutes ago — it had been touch and go the whole way — and he wasn’t sure he’d gotten it into the magazine right. He might have had it in backward, which would have had a humorous effect in less intense briefings, but this one was big and he didn’t want to screw up in front of so many important people. And see Miles Lanahan snickering in his corner, removing one point from Trewitt’s tally and awarding it to himself.

“Trewitt, are we ready?” It was Yost.

“Yessir, I think so,” he called back, his voice booming through the room — he was miked, he’d forgotten.

He bent, switched on the projector, beaming a white, pure rectangle onto the wall. So far, so good. If he could just find … yes, there’s the bastard; it was a kind of toggle switch mounted in a cylinder, in turn linked by cord to the projector. Now, if this just works like the instructions say, we’ll be …

He punched the button and there was a sound like a.45 cocking.

A face came on the screen, young, tenderly young, say eighteen, eyes wild with joy, crewcut glinting with perspiration, two scrawny straps hooked over two scrawny shoulders.

“Chardy at eighteen,” Trewitt said. “His high school had just won the Class B Chicago Catholic League championship. March twelfth, nineteen fifty-eight. The picture is from the next day’s Tribune. This is a close-up; you can’t see the trophy, a hideous thing. Anyway, Chardy scored … ah, I have it right here ….”

“Twenty-one points,” Miles Lanahan called. “Including a free throw with time gone that gave St. Pete’s a one-point win.”

“Thanks, Miles,” said Trewitt, thinking, you bastard.

“Anyway,” Trewitt continued, “you can see he’s a hero from way back.”

Trewitt’s problem was heroes. His vice, his consuming passion, heroism. His deepest secret was that when he walked through the streets and saw his own bland reflection thrown back at him in shopwindows he projected onto it certain extravagances of equipage and uniform: jungle camouflages, dappled and crinkly, bush hats, wicked knives; and the weapons, the implements by which the hardened professionals performed their jobs — the M-16 and AK-47, antagonists of a hundred thousand firefights of the sixties and seventies; or the Swedish K so favored by Agency cowboys in ’Nam; or the compact little MAC-10 or -11, other racy favorites.

“The real name is C-S-A-R-D-I,” said Trewitt, “Hungarian. His dad was a doctor, an emigre in the thirties. His mom is Irish. A quiet woman who still lives in the apartment in Rogers Park. The dad was a little nuts. He was a drunk, his practice failed, he ended up a company doctor in a steel mill. He went into an institution after he retired, and died there. He was hard-core anticommunist though, and a staunch Catholic. He filled the kid’s head with all kinds of stuff about the Reds. And he wanted him to be tough; he really put him through some hell to make him tough. He—”

“Jim, let’s move it along.” Yost’s stern voice from out of the darkness.

“Sure, sorry,” Trewitt said, convinced he heard Lanahan snicker.

Two quick clicks: Chardy the college athlete; Chardy, hair sheared off, in the denim utilities of a Marine boot.

“Marine officer training, after college,” Trewitt announced.