The Second Saladin

“Paul—” She grabbed him, as though to hold him down, hold him in, control and comfort him, but he spun out of her grasp.

“Look at this, Johanna. You might as well see it all. Look carefully — they’ve healed up pretty good now.” He showed her the scars on his wrists. “I cut ’em open on a flight to Moscow. But the Russians kept me alive.”

“Please, Paul. Please, it’ll be all right, it’ll be fine,” she said.

“No,” he said. “No, it’ll never be all right,” he screamed. Then, with an effort, he controlled himself. “Look,” he said, “I was raised by a crazy old Hungarian. He died in the nut house. He raised me to hate them. That old bastard — he used to whip it into me: ‘Paulie, you must always fight them, you must never rest, you must always be a fighter.’ Russians, Communists. But it was the way we lived, it was the way you lived in a city then. Fights every day, fights all the time, everywhere. Fights against everybody. You had to be tough or you were nothing. That’s the first lesson, the one you never forgot. You’re always showing them how tough you are. You had to do sports, do basketball, show them how tough you were out there. Listen, I was king in that world, that’s how hard I pushed myself. Listen to me, Johanna, are you listening?”

He could not stop. He could not close himself down.

“Listen, Johanna, I never bugged out. I never did. I never let anybody down and I was in some tough scrapes. I was in Vietnam for seven years, Johanna. I was a company commander in the Marine Corps when I was twenty- three years old, I had two hundred teenagers depending on me. This was ’sixty-four, first year of the big battles in places nobody can even remember today. The gooks came out of nowhere in motorized regiments like panzer troops, with Chinese advisers calling the moves and coordinating artillery support. And all we had were dumb teenagers and a few tough old noncoms from Korea and pretend tough-guy lieutenants like me, and goddammit, Johanna, goddammit, if there was ever a right time to run, that was it” — he punched the wall behind her bed with a sudden, terrifying fury — “and we didn’t move one fucking inch. That was some fight too, three days and nights without stop, and if you were going to run that was the time. Out of two hundred guys in that company, I had less than fifty left when the gooks finally quit.”

“Paul, you’re hurting yourself. Your hand is bleeding — please, don’t do tha—”

“No, no! You have to understand what he took from me. You have to see what this guy took from me. The motherfucker. The motherfucker!”

In his craziness he hit the wall again, crashing through the plaster. The blood ran down his arm.

“Paul, please, please.” She held him back, burying him in her warmth. “Jesus, you’ll hurt yourself — you’ll kill yourself,” but he squirmed free.

“I had a hundred chances to split, to jerk off, to lie down. Johanna, the Agency put me in some jams, Frenchy and I lived for jams, we loved jams. We specialized in jams, we looked for them, we took some crazy, some stupid crazy reckless chances looking for jams, Johanna, I’m a lot of terrible, terrible things, but I was never a coward, never a coward!” He smashed at the wall.

“Paul, oh, God, you’re hysterical, it’s all right.”

But he could not stop sobbing.

“I fought him. I never fought anybody like I fought this guy but he wanted inside my head so bad, so bad! Why? Why was it so important to him to crack me? Did his life depend on it or something? Did he hate Ulu Beg that much? He wanted to split my head open and get in there forever. Oh, Jesus, why? Why, for Christ’s sakes, why?”

Johanna suddenly realized what Chardy believed, and said as calmly as she could to the weeping, bleeding man in her bed, “Paul. He’s not in there now. He’s not.”

“Yes, he is,” Chardy said, furiously righteous in his conviction.

“You can drive him out. You can get rid of him.”

“No. Never. He’s in there.”

“Please listen to me. Please, please—” She tried to push the tears from his face but was crying herself at the same time. “Paul, we’ll get better. Jesus, what a pair. What a catch for the bin, you and I, Paul. God, we are so screwed up, God, what a freak show — the freak capital of America, this apartment.” She was even laughing a little by now. “We’ll get better, I swear to you — we’ll beat them. We’ll learn how to forgive ourselves, I swear we will.”

“We’ll help Ulu Beg. That will make us better.”

“It will mend us. It will heal us.”

She reached for his scars and touched them Her finger traced the cruelest of contours, traced it around whorls, in an expanding universe, a spiral radiation outward and outward.

“Oh, Paul.”

He heard her voice through the noise of his rage, his devouring self-loathing, and at last he let her reach him and calm him and they began to touch each other. Their mouths found each other and their bodies grew tense with physical hunger and he wanted her in the most piercing of ways but even as he held her, the first woman he had had in seven years, he thought he heard the Russian.

Dark had fallen. A buzzer rang in the apartment. Chardy could not identify the sound. She went to the wall and spoke into an intercom, asking who was there.

Chardy heard the name Lanahan.

“Paul,” she called. “They want you.”

“I heard,” he said groggily. “Tell them I’m coming.”

The wizard drove the van through the Cambridge traffic to a bridge over the Charles. The van reached a highway and turned toward the city and minutes later climbed the ramp to U.S. 93 toward Callahan tunnel, and finally Chardy said, “Where are we going?”

Lanahan sat up front, with the seat between himself and Chardy, and would not look back.

“You spend the day with her?”

“Where are we going?” Chardy repeated.

“I’m supposed to be able to tell them where you were all day. Were you with her?”

“I was doing my job, Miles. That’s all you have to know. I don’t report to you. All right?”

Lanahan considered.

Finally he said, “We’re going to the airport.”

“I thought Johanna was the point of this drill.”

“You sure did your bit,” Lanahan said.

“Don’t poke me, Miles. I’ll poke you right back.”

“You guys are worse than a married couple,” said the wizard.

“Just drive,” said Lanahan. “We’ve got a plane to catch.” He looked at his watch.

“You want to tell me what’s going on, Miles?”

Lanahan held the silence dramatically, making some stupid point Chardy did not care much about, and finally said, “We think we know where Ulu Beg is going. And it isn’t Boston.”

Chardy almost smiled. He had just learned something — something that Miles maybe didn’t want him to know. Now he saw it. Why was Miles so grumpy? He’d just gotten a big break. But Chardy knew why.

You bastards, he thought.

“You better tell me then, Miles,” he said.

“Look” — Lanahan turned — “at what level was your political dialogue with him back during the operation? They’re going to want to know back at Langley.”

“It was pretty simple.”

“Did you ever discuss the origin of the operation, its political context?”

“This was a few years ago. I don’t remember.”

“Well, you’d better try.”

“Well, again I’d say, nothing fancy. He was curious. He had a great deal of admiration for America. He was passably acquainted with various American personalities — he listened to the BBC, just like everybody in the Mideast.”

“And Johanna?”

“She talked with him. Of course. She speaks Kurdish, remember?”

“About?”