The Second Saladin

seething streets, the young flesh all about, carnival rhythms, glossy goods on display. He associated it all with music, and could almost hear the tune. It played in his skull. South American? Asian? No, no, it had a Teutonic ring to it: it was the “Horst Wessel Song,” sung by valiant hordes of young athletes strutting through the streets on a glorious and torchlit spring night in the year 1934 in the city of Danzig. He was eight, with his father. He was a Pole then, but also a Jew, in a Polish city that was also a German city. Very much the same feeling then as now. So much animal strength about. So much color and muscle. Perhaps it was these odd lamps strung through Washington which had about them the earthy quality of torchlight. He could see no banners and remembered from those days the gammadion cross festooning everything, hanging everywhere. It had no evil association then to his young eyes; he found it a curiosity. He asked his dark father, who watched the parade bleakly.

“It’s a German thing,” his father had said. “Pay it no heed.” It was the first time his father had drawn a distinction between himself and others. It filled the young boy with unease. The man the boy became remembered in crisp detail that moment: the sense of unease overcoming innocence. A signal moment in a young life, perhaps the first moment he realized his future would not be European. And he remembered his father, who got them out in ’37, giving up a career in the university.

Danzig stood in the street, and felt in a totalitarian shadow once again. He glanced at his watch — a Patek Philippe, beautifully elegant, gold — and saw that he had three hours before meeting Chardy. He looked about nervously for sanctuary and located it at once — a movie theater down M Street. He walked swiftly to it and was pleased to find it uncrowded. He paid his admission — at last he thought somebody recognized him, because the girl gave him the oddest look — and ducked inside. Only then did he realize where he’d come.

No man sat next to another in here, in the darkness no man would look at another. On the screen, in blinding lucidity, so big and tangled that he could make almost no sense of it, a giant mouth sucked a giant penis, riding the shaft up and down. He could not tell if the lips were male or female; he wondered if it mattered. Moans and cheesy music issued from the screen. Danzig sat down, terribly embarrassed.

Yet at once he began to feel safe; in here, certainly, nobody would pay any attention to him.

53

Miles, Chardy had said, it has to be you. You have to go in and fish it out.

Now he was by the first checkpoint, Badge Control, had traveled the length of the D Corridor and reached the elevator. He passed several sets of guards patrolling the halls even now, after hours; they’d smile politely and look straight to the ID he wore around his neck on a chain. He waited until the elevator arrived, stepped in it. He descended in silence, feeling the subtle suction of gravity. He could see the green light flicking through the floors. Finally he touched bottom and the doors opened to deposit him in another green hall where guards waited.

“Hi,” he said, overplaying the breeziness, and they looked at him with barely concealed uninterest. “Lanahan, Operations. Headed to the pit.”

Their eyes locked on the image of himself annealed into the plastic of his badge, then to the letters around the edge which designated his rights of passage, then up to the living face, then back to the picture.

“You’ve got to sign, Mr. Lanahan.”

“Sign? You didn’t used to—”

“They changed it last month, sir,” the younger guard said evenly.

“They’re always changing things, aren’t they?” Miles said, scrawling his name on a card.

“Just a second,” said the guard. He took the card, inserted it into a device that drew it up by roller and spat it back just a second later.

“The machine says you’re all right. Here—” With some ceremony the guard reached into a drawer and removed a new necklace, whose centerpiece was a blank plastic card. He handed it over. “It’s coated with alloy. If you wander into the wrong section, the sensors will pick you up and off go the alarms.”

The prospect of alarms did not fill Miles with joy. He smiled weakly as he dipped to accept the new jewelry and turned to face a double set of doors, which opened with a lazy pneumatic gush to reveal another long corridor down which he now propelled himself. The walls were blank; he knew he walked the tunnel adjacent to the pit. Then at last he came to the entrance, which had not changed since his years there: desks at which sat the Computer Control officer and his staff flanking the door itself, a revolving affair, by which one was transported from this world to that.

This late no supergrade would be around; indeed, the man calling the shots was Miles’s age, or younger, who’d drawn his turn at night duty. He looked vaguely familiar and when he saw Miles approaching, he stood with a smile.

“Mr. Lanahan!”

It occurred to Miles that he must be some kind of a hero to the people in the pit; first, because he’d done so well down there, with his Hun-like mind especially suited to working with green symbols in electraglow, in a great cool space in which no wind would ever stir; and secondly because he’d done the impossible: he’d got out, joined the mainstream. He was already case officer on a big operation too!

“Hi,” he said.

“Bluestein. Michael Bluestein. I was just breaking in your last couple of months.”

“Oh, yeah. Thought I recognized you.”

Next to Miles, Bluestein was a giant, a blondish freckled giant. Miles had never seen a Jew who looked so Protestant — to the blue eyes, in fact, and the large bony hands and wrists. Bluestein grabbed Miles’s hand, pumping it, at the same time swallowing it.

“I was here the night you blew the whistle on that Israeli tunnel. Do you remember?”

Lanahan remembered.

“You proved the Israelis had built a listening tunnel up close to the Soviet cipher room in the Berne embassy. You tracked down the actual building permits they’d used in their cover project, if I remember correctly.”

“I predicted, based on the data, where the permits could be found,” Lanahan, stickler for accuracy, corrected. But Bluestein was right. Because with Lanahan’s break, American operatives in subsequent weeks had been able to tap into the Israeli land lines, helping themselves to anything the Israelis got. It was a great source for six months, free of charge. And when the Israelis, said to be so good in the trade, tried to sell them the same dope, they could never understand why the Americans said no. And all because Lanahan, sitting at a terminal ten thousand miles away, had happened to come across a low-graded report from an English free- lancer claiming he’d observed in a Berne cafe an Israeli national with whom he’d been at Oxford years ago when the chap had taken a first in mine engineering.

Lanahan nodded, remembering the evening of glory two years ago. He hadn’t had much glory since.

“I was very lucky that night.”

“I had a lucky night — a lucky Sunday actually — a few months back. I—”

“Of course you really make your own luck. The better you are, the luckier you get. Right?”

Bluestein smiled.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s really true.”

This was going to be easy. Lanahan puffed with confidence.

“I’m on a funny one for some upstairs people. I wanted to run a ’seventy-four disc, see what I can shake out of it.”

“We’re slow tonight. I can get somebody to do it for you.”

“No, don’t bother, it won’t take long. And maybe I just miss the keys a little too.”

“No problem. I’ll call the Disc Vault and set it up.”

“Great,” Miles said.

“Just let me see your Form Twelve,” Bluestein said, smiling down at Lanahan.

My what? thought Lanahan, and began to panic.

“How long now?” asked Chardy.

“Only about twenty minutes,” said Leo Bennis.