The Second Saladin

“Who knows? All kinds of things. She was there seven months.”

Lanahan nodded.

“We just got a terrific break. One of our computer analysts — a real smart guy, they say — happened across a line of poetry Ulu Beg had written way back in ’fifty-eight. Did you know he was a poet?”

“They’re all poets. Just like they’re all revenge-crazy. It doesn’t surprise me.”

“And then he came across an anonymous political broadside, written years later, just after Saladin Two. It’s from a radical Kurdish group calling itself HEZ. Do you know what that means?”

“Yes. ‘Brigade.’ The Pesh Merga was divided into ten hez, each composed of three to five battalions. Back in the mid-sixties Ulu Beg fought in big battles against the Iraqis around Rawanduz and was a battalion commander in the Fourth Hez.”

“Well, HEZ is the name of a bitter group of veterans, violently anti-Western. Anyway, our analyst — he found an exact repetition of a phrase from Beg’s poems in the broadside. Exact. It couldn’t be coincidence. And the poem was too obscure for it to be quotation or allusion.”

“He wrote the broadside then?” Chardy said.

“Yes. Do you know what it was about?”

“No.”

“It was about a great and famous American villain, the mastermind behind the betrayal of the Kurds. It concluded with a sentence of death.”

“The President?”

“No. Joseph Danzig.”

Chardy smiled. “Old Joe,” he said.

“Paul.” Lanahan was furious. “Do you have any idea of the consequences if an Agency-trained and sponsored Kurdish guerrilla with an Agency-provided automatic weapon were to put nine bullets into the head of one of the most famous men in America? You might somewhere, someplace find an obscure government document with a record of there once having been a Central Intelligence Agency, but you’d have to work awfully hard to find it.”

But Chardy could see the logic to it. He could see the Kurd’s fierce sense of justice. Joseph Danzig had pushed the CIA, which pushed Paul Chardy, who pushed Ulu Beg — into an abyss. Now the years have passed and here is Ulu Beg to push back: all the way to the top man. The same linkages, the same progression.

“Paul, you’d better stop smiling. They’re very upset about this. They’re very upset. Now they have to go to Danzig, of course, and they don’t like that. They’ve sent people to Nogales, to try and backtrack. They’ve—”

“I’ll bet they’re upset, Miles. Come on, Miles, tell me how upset they are?”

Lanahan said nothing.

The van had arrived by this time at Logan, but Chardy was not finished.

“You must have really thought I was stupid, Miles. You and Yost and — who? Sam? Is Sam in on it?”

“Chardy, I—”

“Shut up. Miles. Because didn’t you think I’d notice we never spent much time on Ulu Beg’s target possibilities in the first briefings? Did you think I’d miss that? Did you think I’d miss how important it was to keep me in sight — to follow me? Did you think I’d miss how upset you were when you couldn’t find me this morning?”

Miles faced dead forward.

“You thought you knew who the target was. Your analysts told you so. The same boys who said he’d head for Johanna. You thought the target was me.”

The van swooped into the cab lane and pulled to a halt at the Eastern terminal.

“You guys better hurry,” said the wizard. “You can just make the six-thirty shuttle.”

“Just a minute,” Chardy said. “That was the real plan, wasn’t it? Not to control Johanna at all, but to put me in the center ring and draw him to me.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Chardy,” Miles said furiously. Then he said, “We had to use our assets the best way we could. You were covered the whole way.”

“By you, Miles? I’d like to see you try to stop Ulu Beg from getting what he wanted.”

“We did what was best. For everybody. Somebody has to make the hard decisions, Chardy. That’s what —”

“There’s a joke in this, Miles, though I doubt you’ll find it funny. The joke is no man is safer from Ulu Beg in America than Paul Chardy.”

Chardy choked on the bitter irony of it, and if he smiled now before these men, it was because he had trained himself not to show his pain. “In what the maps call Iraq but you and I know to be Kurdistan, Miles, in a battle in a foreign war, I saved the life of his oldest son, and Ulu Beg made me his brother.”

14

His own capacity for adjustment sometimes amazed him; perhaps it was his real secret — and people were always asking him his “secret.” In fifty-six years, for example, he had gotten used to being a Jew in Poland, then a Pole in the Bronx. He’d gotten used to Harvard, first as student, then as professor. Then he’d gotten used to government, to politics. And with politics, power. And with power, celebrity. And with celebrity —

Lights.

It seemed a journey from the darkness of ignorance to the lights of knowledge and in more than the metaphorical sense. Literally: Lights. He lived in them and sometimes felt as though his eyes would burn out from the strain of the flashbulbs, the glare of the TV minicams, as they were called (he knew the latest technical jargon), or, as now, the lights of a television studio.

This silly woman counted herself an expert on world affairs. She was a great toucher, as though her brains were in her fingertips. Even on the air she’d reach across and press them with gentle greed against his plump legs, and her eyes would radiate the warmth of love — or the warmth of enough barbiturates to flatten a dinosaur; it was difficult to say which — as she asked some astonishingly stupid question about the State of the World.

It was Danzig’s habit — indeed, almost his trademark — that he consider gravely each nuance, each phrase, solemnly tensing his forehead, willing the light to drain from his eyes, before answering. He had studied himself on television — in fact, the administration in whose service he had labored as Security Advisor and Secretary of State (Oh, Glorious Days!) had paid a media consulting firm $50,000 to improve his televisability — and knew that his charm, so charismatic with one or two people, or small groups, or meetings, or parties, almost vanished on the airwaves, where he became an ominous, pedantic screwball. Thus he’d adopted (at the consultant’s expensive counsel) the camouflage of the little professor. He even tended to overstate the slight Polish accent left in his syllables, on the ground that it forced reporters to listen more carefully, so they were less inclined to garble the quotes.

“And so, Dr. Danzig, in conclusion, would you say that we are again to enter a period of chill? Is the Cold War to begin again, or is there a thaw in sight?” She touched his knee again and looked at him warmly with those vacant, bagged-out eyes. You could have flown a plane through those pupils. More irritating, it was a question which proved conclusively that she had been paying not an iota’s attention during the past several minutes. Still, this network paid him a handsome yearly retainer to fly up to New York once a week or so, and perform like a seal; and so he would.

But as Danzig took just an instant to formulate a response to the idiotic query, blinking against the fierce light, he was aware of several other aspects of his own circumstances.

He was aware that though this woman was stupid, and vain, and frighteningly trivial, he’d like to make love to her just the same, even taking into account that as a rule television women were so punchy on barbs or their own faces, in bed they were rotten. Still, she was a star; and to have her was in a certain way to have America. Not to ignore the merely physical, however, of late he’d become conscious of his own long-sublimated libido, a buried secret self. In him, deep down, beneath the intellectual, beneath the political figure, beneath the celebrity, beneath even the old Jew: something prehistoric, primordial, a lecher, a rapist. He’d never needed sex before; now he thought of it all the time. He feared it would consume him; he half wanted it to.