The Second Saladin

But serious matters also consumed him: he was aware that the first volume of his memoirs — Missions for the White House — had just dropped two notches on the Times best-seller list, to Number 9, and that his paperback auction floor in Great Britain had been a meager ?2,000, a great disappointment.

He was further aware that he was contractually obligated to deliver a second volume of Missions for the White House, the years 1973–1976, within two years; and that he did not want to. He faced that particular mission with an enormous reluctance, weariness even. There was, in fact, over half a ton of documents stored in his office in Washington and he had not even begun to examine them, and they would have to be absolutely mastered before he could ever begin to deliver up his vision of the past.

He was aware that the floor manager — more TV jargon — was standing just beside the bulky gray camera, circling his finger madly, signaling in the private language of television to speed it up, already.

And he was aware that standing a few feet behind the director, with a mild look on his calm face, a pinkish, healthy hue that set off his gray pinstripe suit, was an old friend and antagonist, Sam Melman of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Karen,” Danzig said, “these next years will be a test of our will, our nerve, our resolve as never before in human history. The Soviet Union must be put on notice that its raiding parties into the free world cannot and will not be tolerated. In this, I firmly support the President and the Secretary of State.”

“Thank you, Dr. Joseph Danzig.” She turned to the camera, smiled in brainless glee, and said, “And now to Terry, with this word.”

“Cut to ad,” somebody said. Onto a monitor a detergent commercial sprang to immediate life.

“Good, Kay, that was fine” — the godly voice from the booth. “You too, Doc, nicely done.”

“You’re a pro, Joe,” said Kay — only the millions knew her as Karen. “You even read the camera cues, don’t you?”

God, she was a beautiful woman.

“I have been on television a few other times,” he said and she laughed. Beauty began with the teeth and hers were extraordinary. Her mouth. A shiver ran through him as he contemplated it. He ached for her. Now that the cameras were off them, she was not touching him. He wished she would. A beautiful, stylish woman. He ached for her ….

But she was up, unhooking her mike, and with a last nod raced back to the show’s main set, which was surprisingly close by, just a few feet away, in fact.

The lights flashed off, leaving Danzig in darkness as he stood and demiked himself. He’d have to get the makeup off before he left — he looked like a Hamburg tart. He had a speech before the Council of Life Underwriters today at noon, for $7,500. As he unclipped the mike, his bodyguard — a shadow, but a shadow with a.357 magnum — slipped discreetly into place a step back. Uckley today, the ex-marine — and a step behind came Sam Melman, with his bland, pleasant smile.

“Hello, Dr. Danzig,” the intelligence executive said.

“Hello, Sam.”

No hand was offered. Melman stood in his quiet suit — he must be here alone, Danzig realized in amazement, for he saw no entourage of earnest young men, no staff to open doors and call cabs and get coats, which surely a comer like Melman would have by this time earned — and waited patiently. He was a deputy director now, was he not? They’d been curiously friendly adversaries years back on the 4 °Committee, when Danzig had been the White House adviser and Melman the slick Agency liaison.

“Has World War Three begun?” Danzig joked, for what else would bring a hotshot like Melman up from Langley to intercept him this early — not yet eight?

Melman smiled quietly — he had a deceptive easy warmth about him for such an ambitious man, a charm not unlike Danzig’s own. A clever man, it was said, who if he played his cards right might one day be Director of Central Intelligence. Perhaps even now he had begun to fish for allies.

“Hello, Dr. Danzig. No, it hasn’t, at least not the last time I checked. A certain matter has come up and I thought I might presume on our earlier relationship for a little chat.” Sam was smooth; Sam was facile. His modest smile and warm eyes beckoned to Danzig.

“Of course.”

“Preferably outside the precincts of a network show.”

Danzig laughed. Yes, sensible.

“I’m free till noon, when I’ve got a seminar and a speech a few blocks away. Time enough?”

“More than enough, sir.”

“Sam, let’s dispense with the ‘sir.’ But I would appreciate it if you’d kneel and kiss my ring.”

Sam laughed at this standard Danzig line.

A few minutes later they strode through the Rockefeller Plaza entrance of the RCA Building into the brisk, dirty New York morning. People swirled by, and Danzig coughed once, dryly, in the air.

“My limo? All right, Sam?”

“Would you be offended, Dr. Danzig, if I said I’d prefer one of our cars?”

Danzig, for the first time, began to see the urgency behind Sam’s pleasant demeanor; the Agency didn’t want anything on tape it didn’t control.

The black Chevy drove aimlessly through the hectic Manhattan traffic, guided by a grim young man, next to whom sat Danzig’s bodyguard. In back, Danzig listened while Melman talked. Danzig held — and occasionally looked down at — the Skorpion shell.

“And so I think you’ll agree I’m somewhat understating the situation when I say we’ve both got problems,” Melman was saying. “And for once your problem and our problem are the same problems.”

Danzig looked at the shell. One penny’s worth of metal from the farthest corners of the earth, and everything had changed. He looked up, out the window. Gray buildings lurched by as the car jerked uncertainly through the traffic. New York, always such a festival of sensation. Too much data, too many patterns, too many details, nothing coherent. Washington was a slower, saner city; here you never knew what you were going to get.

But it all dropped away; it meant nothing. A bullet in this world, in this most violent of all the decades in the most violent of all the centuries, was the ultimate reality, and Danzig was a collector of realities.

Of course there were always risks, especially in the Middle East, all those zealots, the whole thing so unstable, those fanatics, those bitter exiles. It had been rumored, for example, more than once that the PLO or various of its factions or units had put a mission out to eliminate him during one of his trips; but nothing had ever come of it. Or here, too, in America, there were always risks: cranks, nuts, screwballs, loonies with preposterous grudges; you could never guard against the crazy. But all that was generalized, distant, statistically improbable. That was then; this was now. Were those windows bulletproof? Perhaps. And how do you bulletproof glass, really bulletproof it? Can’t the gunman simply get a bigger gun? And in these crowds of milling, insolent New Yorkers, angry and swarthy, could there really be this special man? Damn him, Melman had said a good man, a trained man. “We trained him ourselves, Dr. Danzig — that’s the tough part. He’s exceedingly competent. I’ll show you the files.”

No, Danzig had not wanted to see the files.

He looked again at the cartridge case and realized that while he had authorized airplanes to fly on missions in which so many tons of bombs were dropped on so many square miles in a certain North Vietnamese city, in full awareness of what statistically must ensue, he had never in his life held in his fingers this smallest common denominator of statecraft: the bullet.

He imagined one striking him, right now, through the glass, in the head. A blinding flash? A sense of surprise, of enveloping darkness? Or would the lights just blink off?

“It’s not going to do us any good if he gets you; it’s certainly not going to do you—”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, I’d like to think we can work together on this thing.”

Danzig didn’t say anything. He stared gravely ahead.

“To begin with, we’ve got some suggestions.”

Danzig remained silent.