The Second Saladin

“Huh?”

She laughed. “I can see how much this all meant to you.”

“I’m sorry. Do I seem preoccupied? I do apologize. Forgive me, won’t you?”

“I just said I was going.”

“I’ll see you out, of course.”

“No. That’s fine.” She worked quickly on her makeup. Seeing her sitting before the mirror, one fine leg stockinged and crossed over the other (Danzig loved their legs), in her sensible plum wool suit, mundanely studying her own face and making improvements in it, he stirred.

With a moan of lust singing between his ears, he walked to her almost uncontrollably and reached to touch her breast, inserting his hand quickly between her buttons and the elastic of the bra, feeling the weight, the heaviness of it.

“Joe! God, you frightened me!”

“Don’t go.”

“Oh, Joe!”

He had his whole hand inside her cup now and the nipple was between his third and fourth fingers and he was squeezing it with what he took to be finesse.

“Please, I do have to go.”

“Don’t. Please.” He was startled at the urgency of his need.

“Joe, really—”

“It’s still early. Please. Please.”

He could feel the nipple tighten.

“Oh, God,” she muttered.

He bent and began to lick her earlobe, another trick he thought especially stylish; they all loved it. He reached and touched the inside of her leg and ran his finger up it and rubbed her, feeling the contours, the definitions, the fleshy rolling mounds of her cunt through her pantyhose. He kissed her on the mouth, their tongues groping.

For a second time they were finished and Susan rose to dress.

“Please,” she laughed. “I’ll get fired if I don’t get back. You’re a maniac.”

He smiled, seeing it as a compliment. He had not had sex twice the same day before in his life, much less in the same hour. He was astounded at his power. What was reaching him?

He looked and she was at the mirror working on her face again, dispassionately. He watched her sadly. Women were leaving him all the time; it had never bothered him before.

“I’m going,” she said, “this time.” She laughed; she was a friendly girl, good- hearted.

“I’ll call you.”

“Sure,” she said.

“No, I will.”

“It’s all right, Dr. Danzig.”

“Call me Joe.”

“It’s all right, Joe, I do have to go. ’Bye.”

“Goodbye, Susan.”

And she really did leave. He could hear her steps receding in the hall until she reached the stairwell and descended. A minute later he heard a quiet thud as the door closed. He wondered if the agents down below were polite to her. He hoped so. Damn, they’d better have been; if they weren’t, he’d have them reassigned faster than the coming of night. He told himself to check on it later.

Now he stood again at the window. He felt vulnerable, unprotected. Could this odd state of affairs be traced to the presence of this phantom Kurd assassin, who everybody is so confident will be shortly apprehended wandering desperately in the greater Columbus-Dayton-Cincinnati triangle? Perhaps. But he felt, rather, another presence, a brooding thing that pressed at him from beyond the wall.

For beyond the wall was another room, almost the twin of this one. It was high-ceilinged and immensely bright. Potted plants stood green and smart against cream-white walls, and muslin curtains softened the blaze of the sun. It afforded a view almost the duplicate of the one he now enjoyed, the downward vantage to the mazelike perfection of the garden. That room, like this, was neat and orderly; that room, like this, had a red-hued Persian on the floor; that room, like this, had a desk, a mahogany worktable, a sofa bed. But unlike this room, that room had: one Xerox 2300 tabletop-size copier, four cans each of Xerox 6R189 toner and Xerox 8R79 fuser oil, three IBM Selectric typewriters, one DCX Level III Dictaphone, six Tensor steel-jointed lights, several dozen pounds of Xerox 4024 dual-purpose paper, to say nothing of carbons, erasers, Bic fine-line pens, Eagle No. 3 pencils, a Panasonic Point-O-Matic electric pencil sharpener, a blotter. And against one wall, tightly locked and as yet unopened, his files, his logs, his documents, his reports, his minutes, his clippings, his borrowings — his past.

That was the room of the book, and it terrified him.

In that room, in one thirteen-month period of intense effort, he, three research assistants, two exceedingly patient secretaries, and two editors down from an august publishing firm on Madison Avenue, had written a book. It was a book largely of triumph.

But soon another book was due from that room and there was, as Danzig saw it, no sadder thing in this world than a room in which a book must be written if you do not want to write the book.

Danzig did not want to write the book.

He preferred to ad-lib speeches and doodle in television and avoid his wife and pursue the limelight and make love to an endless procession of curiously pliant young or youngish women. But not the book: the book would take him back to the season of catastrophes, the year 1975, when Vietnam came tumbling down, take him back to sad, groping days with a new and short-lived President. It would be a book of defeat.

He secretly feared he’d lost his edge, his ambition. Poof! Here one day, gone the next. His reputation was that of a fiercely ambitious man, a ruthlessly ambitious man; and perhaps once it had been true. But another Danzig, a softer, a lonelier man, a man more anxious to explore the realms not of power but of the senses was beginning to emerge from under the shell of the old Danzig. He hoped it was a process of transformation or transfiguration. But he was terrified that he’d reached the age of entropy.

He thought he’d call another girl, because he did not think he could be alone in this room, next to that room, another second.

24

It occurred to Chardy that he would not tell them — not Lanahan here, not Yost, expecially not the man whose presence he thought he felt in it all, Sam Melman — about Trewitt, about Mexico.

“Paul, I guess you’ll just have to get back to Danzig,” Lanahan said. “Ver Steeg” — Lanahan said it bitterly, for he was turning out to be no fan of Yost’s — “says he’ll have it wrapped up in a day or so.”

They sat in the Rosslyn office, a ghost office, full of echoes and silence and stale air, on the Monday morning following the news from Trewitt.

Miles was bitter — he was not on the Dayton team. He had been shelved, it seemed, in favor of men Yost either trusted more or feared less.

“Relax, Miles. You’ll get a shot at Ulu Beg. Yost won’t get him in Dayton.”

“They’ve got Dayton sealed. They’ve got it nailed. It’s only a matter of time,” said Lanahan bleakly. He was sweating. Drops of pure ambition ran from his hairline.

It occurred to Chardy that Lanahan flatly, coldly did not want Yost to take the Kurd. Not without having a hand in it himself.

“No, Miles. Yost doesn’t really know this guy. He thinks he’s some gun-happy Third World terrorist. Just a brainless hooter, a man with a gun and a screwball cause. He doesn’t realize: Ulu Beg’s got it.”

It? What?

But Lanahan didn’t ask, merely stared angrily at Chardy. “Little rats like Yost don’t catch hero-types like Ulu