The Second Saladin

We must fight the merchants of honey
who offer sweet promises
and scents of delight
yet sell bitter, dead kernels
that become bones under the earth.
We must be lions.

And on and on it went. Spare me, please. Give me North Vietnamese agricultural production tables or Libyan import quotas or the price of oranges in Marrakech or the detonation sequence in Soviet intermediate range ballistic missiles. What can they want, what do they expect? Get an English major, for Christ’s sakes; and Bluestein knew, because he dated one once, fierce and goofy and promiscuous and dramatic; she’d hurt him very badly.

He swiftly sent the item back into the computer memory and diddled up another from the Kurdish file, and while he waited for it to arrive he nursed his aching finger. His legs ached a little too; he was very tall, and they didn’t quite fit in the cubicle without bending in places where they oughtn’t bend. He wiggled the finger. Broken? No, probably not. He could bend it; it wasn’t swollen too badly.

A new item trundled up across the screen. Poetry? Blessedly, no. The prelim note explained that it was an anonymous propaganda bulletin issuing from HEZ, a radical Kurdish underground group in Iraq, dated June of 1975, just a few months after Saladin II was closed down. It was predictably vitriolic, a torrent of abuse directed at the United States in general and one of its public figures in particular.

Bluestein had read a hundred of them and doubtless would read a hundred more. Pity the people in Translation who sit there all day long and work the stuff into English, so that it can be programmed into the computer memory. Don’t they ever get tired? Bluestein supposed they did not; it was their job, after all. He knew they were all from the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade and must be grinds. Dreadful, uncreative work, and the way they were pouring it out meant somebody had lit a fire over there too, more evidence that this thing was big and that it had people worried. Yost Ver Steeg, the Security chief. It was his name on the system-time authorization forms, and he must have had some clout if he could get this stuff on-systemed this fast, and take up hundreds of pit hours in poring through it. But what could even this Yost Ver Steeg expect? Miracles? It didn’t matter how hard you worked, how many computer hours were invested: the principle involved was the famous one involving poultry — i.e., chicken shit and chicken salad and the impossibility of transmogrifying one substance into the other. Like this grim denunciation he was reading — it proved only that there was hate in the world. We already knew that, thought Bluestein. That’s why we’re here, for God’s sake. So the Third World hates the First. It should surprise nobody and it proves nothing.

Bluestein scanned the green letters, the columns of type flying across the screen. How long is this one, how long will it go on, what the hell is he looking for, why are they so scared, why is this so big, who is Yost Ver Steeg, why doesn’t my finger stop hurting, why did Shelly Naskins dump me three years ago, when is that going to stop hurting and —

Bluestein halted.

Something just went click.

He looked very closely at the words before him, almost saying them aloud, feeling their weight, lipping their shape.

“… a merchant of honey, who offered us sweet promises” — this was an American somebody in HEZ was describing — “and scents of delight. Vet he sold bitter, dead kernels that became bones under the earth.”

Bluestein sat back.

It was the same.

Could it be a coincidence? No, not by any law of probability. Could it be a quote, an allusion? No, if this were a famous line, the preliminary note would have said so.

U. Beg, you bastard, he thought, you wrote the second version, too. You were quoting yourself.

And who was U. Beg talking about?

Bluestein checked, just to make sure, and then he began to dig through his directory for Yost Ver Steeg’s emergency code. And a single image jumped into his head: it had nothing to do with Kurds or kernels or honey or bones. It was a picture of a huge, gleaming plate of chicken salad.

13

It was an awkward process. Chardy had not been with a woman for a long time. Among other anxieties he was frightened that he could not control his sudden appetite. But she understood and was helpful, guiding his hands, touching him when he was shy, pressing him where he was reluctant. Chardy felt himself passing through a great many landscapes, a great many colors. Was he in a museum? At some points he seemed to walk down a stately corridor at a stately pace; and at others he was racing upstairs or tipping dizzily down them, terrified of falling.

It seemed to last forever. When it finally finished, they were both sweaty and exhausted, worn in the pale light that suffused the room from the drawn shade. He could barely see her, she was only a form, a warmth in the darkness.

“It’s been so long,” he said.

She put her hand on his arm and they slept.

Around five, she roused him.

“Come on. Let’s go to a restaurant. A really nice one. Let’s spend some money. I haven’t been out to dinner in years. You can wear your tie. I’ll put on heels.”

“Great,” he said. “Can I get a shower?”

“Go ahead. It’s through there.”

He rose, walked absently to the bathroom.

“Paul?” Her voice had something in it, and as he turned he knew, and it astonished him that for a moment or two — or ten minutes or three hours or whatever — he’d actually forgotten, it had left his brain totally. Or maybe he’d willed himself to forget it so he could initiate her into his secret without shame.

“Paul,” she said. “God, your back.”

“Yes,” Chardy said. His back: the living image of his weakness, written in flesh, a testament to his failure at the one important thing he’d ever tried to do.

“Oh, Jesus, Paul. My God.”

Across Chardy’s back were six clusters of scar tissue. Each identical to its five brothers: a central scar, a knot of curled piebald about the size of a half-dollar, a small, fiery sun, and around it a system of tinier agonies recorded in the flesh, smaller scars, streaks and comets and whorls of dead skin.

“Oh, Paul,” she said.

She was staring at him.

“I sold you out, Johanna. I gave him you and Ulu Beg and the Kurds, I gave him the whole operation. I guess at the end I would have given him anything. But he didn’t get it off me easily. It took him six days. Six sessions. I figured later he knew just how much my body could take. So he spaced it out. He took me as far as he could each day and then he quit and went to the officers’ club. And I had to think about it that night.”

“Oh, Jesus, Paul.”

“He did it with a blowtorch. His name was Speshnev; he was the senior KGB officer in Iraq.”

He looked at her.

“The fucker made me crazy. He scrambled my brain.”

“Paul. They never told me. Nobody ever told me.”

“Nobody ever knew. Nobody ever asked. You’re the only person that knows. You and Speshnev.”