The Second Saladin

“I feel like shit,” said Trewitt groggily, in English.

“You look like shit,” said Ramirez, also in English.

Trewitt moaned. Somebody had looped a metal band around his forehead and was tightening it with great strength and dedication.

“Where are we?” he finally asked, shivering and noticing that his breath soared out from his lips in a great billowing cloud.

“Hah!” howled Ramirez in great delight. “Jesus Mary, they really give it to this girl!” He looked at the comic with warmth and enthusiasm. “She’s a real stuck-up princess. They give her a smack on the bottom with a great big paddle. You’re in the mountains, my friend. Way up high. A long way from the city.”

Trewitt twisted so he could see out the window. In the distance, glittering in the sun, stood a ragged line of peaks. The haphazard up-and-down of the composition could have been a graph of his fortunes these last several days.

“Reynoldo was born down there,” Ramirez said, “in the village, before electricity. He used to come here to hunt.” He smiled, exposing two gold teeth which Trewitt had not noticed before. Gold teeth? This was getting to be like a movie.

“Who were those men? The killers,” Trewitt asked in his Spanish.

“Who knows? It’s a big mystery. Mexico is full of mysteries. It’s a land of mysteries.” Ramirez laughed.

“Gangsters? Pimps? Dope runners?”

Ramirez finished the drumstick and threw the bare bone across the room into a corner, where a dog scuffled after it, and wiped his hand on his pants. Trewitt was beginning to feel as if he’d awakened in the cave of the Cyclops.

“They make pretty good chicken,” said Ramirez. “That Colonel. I bet he’s a rich man.”

He yawned, then looked over at Trewitt. “Mister, I’ll tell you something. A man has to piss, somebody gets wet. Do you understand?”

“Ahh—”

“Oscar Meza, he get wet. The Huerras of Mexico City, anybody. It could go back years and years.”

Shakily Trewitt stood, discovering as he unlimbered from the skimpy blanket that he was now in cheap cotton trousers, the trousers of a rural peasant. He went to the doorway. Outside he saw a goat pen, a trash heap, a dirt road falling away rapidly, and a brown surge — scabby, scaly, dusty, stony-cold, and silent — of peaks.

“Where the hell are we?”

Below he could see a flash of trees and valley, and some cultivated land. But this was wild country, raw and high and scruffy.

“Near El Plomo. In the Sierra del Carrizai. Due west of Nogales. About sixty miles.”

“Where are the others?”

“Down below. In El Plomo. This is a big adventure. The little one, he cry for mama last night. But now he’s okay.”

Trewitt nodded, hurt. Poor little guy. Why the hell hadn’t they let him go? Now he was God knows where, involved in this.

“They’ll be here soon. But, hey, mister. Who are you?” The Mexican watched him carefully.

“Just some guy who got mixed up in some stuff,” was Trewitt’s lame response. “I was looking for adventures too.”

“Crazy people want adventures. Reynoldo wants to die in a nice bed somewhere. With a bottle of beer and a nice soft fat woman who don’t give you no trouble.”

Trewitt, leaning in the rough doorway, looked down the little road for the yellow rented car. Boy, was he going to have a bill!

“At least,” he said, “we’re safe. This is a good place to lie low.”

“Yes, it’s real safe up here,” Ramirez laughed. “Yes, it’s real safe.” The grin radiated blazing humor.

“What’s going on? What’s so funny?”

“The answer is I called my good friend Oscar Meza from El Plomo. I told him all about this wonderful, safe place.”

Trewitt stared at him. At first he thought he’d discovered an unusually perverse sense of humor in a surprising locality. Only when the man’s fiery, crazed grin did not break into something softer and wittier did Trewitt acknowledge what had been laid before him, and its force struck him with a physical blow.

Finding next a sudden rush of strength, he began to shout: “You did what? you what? you what? that was really stupid, you told him?”

Trewitt looked down the road. At any second it could yield a carload of Mexican hoods. And they had a Beretta. With four rounds left.

“Hey, mister, come look at this,” Ramirez called.

The Mexican led him to a corner, pulled aside a dusty rag to reveal the lid of some kind of cabinet or chest buried in the earth. Kneeling, he unlocked and opened it. He pulled out a rifle with a telescopic sight.

“We do some hunting up here,” he said. The grin did not diminish, yet to Trewitt it had turned savage.

There was a sudden sound, and Trewitt thought he’d die.

But it was the yellow car returning.

33

When he reached the door he had no idea what to say, no plan.

He knocked on the door, wondering what God willed for the next few minutes.

The door opened and he found himself face to face with a woman of advanced years who wore a look of great, eager American friendliness and who said only, “Helio.”

“Yes, hello, how are you?” he replied.

Something he did — he’d never know what — must have perplexed her.

“Yes? Are you here for the party?”

He had no idea what to say. Beyond the door lay a dim corridor and at its end a brightly lit room choked with smoke and people. He could sense them crowded in there; the noise was intense and laughter bellowed heavily in the air.

“Yes?” she repeated. She wanted to help him. He could tell.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, “you must be Dr. Abdul.”

“Yes. Dr. Abdul.”

“It was so nice of you to come. Joe admires your work intensely, even if he doesn’t quite agree on Egyptian hegemony.”

“I look forward to talk.”

“Come in, of course. Let’s not stand here. Oh, you’re so tall, I had no idea.”

“Yes. It is a gift from God.”

“Yes, I suppose so. How long will you be with the department? Do you return to Cairo at the end of the term or in the winter?”

“Term.”

“Oh, I hate those short appointments. Jack and I were in Munich, but the grant only lasted eight months. You can’t get a real sense of a culture in less than two years. How do you like America?”

“Ah. I love it.”

“Good. Go on in. Jack is over by the wall at the bar. He’ll get you a drink. And if you can fight your way to Joe, say hello to him for me. I haven’t said two words to him since he arrived.”

“Ah. Thanks.”

He stepped by her and walked down the hall to the noise. A few couples talked privately, lovers perhaps, in the darkness. He edged by them and stood in the room, at the edge of the crowd.