Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

or anything. In the Amazon forest, by way of contrast, one never made an undetected move, for no matter how deeply one penetrated, how far removed one was from one’s fellows and milieu, one was always of great interest to a hundred pairs of eyes: slitty eyes, bulbous eyes, multifaceted eyes, eyes bloodshot, chocolatey, or hollow; eyes that saw without being seen; a blinking, squinting, spying paradise of reincarnated Joes. Here in the desert, though, nothing watched but the gods. Small wonder that religion was born hereabouts or that, for better or worse, hereabouts it had thrived.

The coolness that had come with the rain was only a sweet memory now. Switters sweltered but didn’t sweat: perspiration evaporated before it could pump out of his pores. The air that he gasped, due to the exertion of wheeling his chair over stony, pitted, thorn-bushed terrain, was so light and dry that it made but the weakest impression on his respiratory system and failed to inflate his lungs, although it tingled inside him in a faintly delicious way. For all its unsubstantiality, the air seemed as alive as the earth seemed dead. Massaging his wrists, he squinted through nets of rising heat at the oasis, still more than a mile away, and could not help but think how vastly different these bare, harsh, god-connecting surroundings were from the scene off the coast of Turkey, where he had yachted and sipped Dom Perignon only three weeks prior.

“Fuck the Dallas Cowboys.”

Switters had been expecting that declaration, had been nervously straining to hear it through a fog of jet lag and migraine and coffee-fueled Turk chatter all afternoon, but he hadn’t expected to hear it issued so abruptly, openly, and emphatically by a denim-clad black man striding toward him across lush oriental carpets and speaking English with a Swedish accent.

“Fuck Notre Dame,” Switters responded hopefully. Bobby hadn’t supplied him with a countersign. “Likewise the Los Angeles Lakers and the New—”

“Steady, man,” cautioned the contact. “You be speaking ill of the New York Yankees, you and me gonna have a problem. Ja, man, ya betcha.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t want that.” With just a hint of fierceness in his grin, Switters had looked the man over. He was trim enough for someone of his age—late forties would be a good guess—but his shoulders were stooped, and his hands, from which long, sensitive fingers dangled like licorice whips, seemed uncallused and spongy. “However . . .”

“Ain’t no however to it. You got luggage upstairs? Good. Tell the bellman to bring it to the yacht basin. And follow me.” He paused. “I’d offer to push your chair, but if you can’t get out of this lobby on your own, you sure as hell not be getting out of where Mr. Poe be sending you.” For the first time, he smiled. “Go Yankees,” he said softly. “Go Knicks. And by the way, man, nice suit.”

The contact was Skeeter Washington, chief lieutenant to the legendary Audubon Poe and, in certain circles, a minor legend, himself. The son of a fairly well-known Harlem jazz couple (mother a singer, father played bass), Louis Mosquito Washington, about to be drafted, had enlisted in the army in 1969 after a recruiting sergeant assured him he’d be assigned to a military band. Instead, he’d been put in the infantry and shipped to Vietnam. He’d been wounded and upon recovery, ordered to return to battle once he’d enjoyed a week’s R and R in Tokyo. At that point he deserted, threw himself upon the mercy of a group of radical Japanese pacifists, and a month or so later turned up in Sweden, where he resided for a quarter century, earning a living and a reputation as a bebop pianist. A couple of years back, still smoldering with resentment over the horrors wrought in Southeast Asia by America’s savage wrong-headedness and his forced participation therein, he’d sought out Audubon Poe and volunteered his services—although neither Skeeter nor anyone else seemed to know exactly what Poe was up to, aside from providing the international news media with a steady source of information damaging to the “defense” industry and the CIA. It would have been unlikely, however, that the services of a jazz piano player would have been refused by a man born and reared in New Orleans.

“Uh, I should inform you,” Switters had said as they waited on the dock for the hotel porter to arrive with his bags, “that the company seems aware of this.”

“This?”

“My coming here. To meet with Poe.”

“Aw, doesn’t matter.”

“But isn’t there a price on his head?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Ol’ Poe, he put out the story himself years ago that he was on a CIA hit list. After that, the government didn’t dare to smack him. Not in no obvious, violent way, nohow. Could always try and slip him a heart attack pill or something, I guess. But Anna, she be sneaking and tasting his food before he eat a bite of it.”

“Who is Anna?”

“His fifteen-year-old daughter.”

Switters’s Adam’s apple flopped in his throat like an eel in a creel. Good God! he thought. Why didn’t Bobby warn me?

Antalya’s marina, one of the most beautiful on the Mediterranean, was built on the site of an ancient Roman harbor next to a restored Ottoman village. From its main dock, in the shadow of crumbling ruins, a motor launch had carried Washington and Switters out to a gleaming white ninety-foot yacht, The Banality of Evil, anchored about a half-mile offshore. The boat, flaring in the distance like a millionaire’s teeth, belonged to Sol Glissant, a Beirut-based French national who had made a chunk of his fortune rebuilding Lebanon’s swimming pools after the war and was known as the Pool Pasha of the Levant. For reasons of his own, Glissant had put The Banality of Evil at the disposal of Audubon Poe, who behaved as if it were his, which for all practical purposes it was.

Switters had been shown to a stateroom, given time to “freshen up” (code for perform maintenance), and then summoned on deck, where he was handed a champagne glass as large as a fishbowl by none other than Poe, himself. Like Washington, Poe was dressed all in denim, but his fine, sharp, birdlike features, his slicked-back silver hair, his effluvium of cologne that made Switters’s Jungle Desire, in comparison, smell as cheap as its name, and the irony in his civil, confident quiver of a smile, produced an air of aristocracy that seemed to transform the egalitarian blue cotton into resort wear designed by a Riviera comte.

“So, you’re Switters,” Poe said, in an accent that managed to be both southern and refined. “The last I heard of you, you were hanging upside down over Baghdad.”

Sloshing his champagne, Switters demurred. “I believe you may have me confused with my friend Case. While I’ve passed many a merry hour in fair Iraq, my peripateticism there has been limited to its terrestrial surfaces.”

Poe regarded him curiously. “I see. Do please forgive my social blunder. But you are, are you not, the gentleman who knows how to refer to a lady’s treasure in seventy-five different languages?”

“Seventy-one.” Good God, he thought, is this to be my only claim to fame? The lone thing by which men remember me? My other achievements—academic, athletic, and political— eclipsed by this frothy exercise in linguistic trivia? They’ll probably engrave it on my tombstone, should I live long enough to get one.

“Myself, I dig the Swedish for it,” put in Skeeter Washington.

“Oh, yes,” said Switters. “Slida. One of my favorites. For its onomatopoeia.”

When Skeeter looked puzzled, Poe had said, “You must excuse Mr. Washington. He’s been a long time away from English. Why, I had to teach him to speak Ebonics, and as you may have noted, he’s not very fluent in it. Says things like ‘Ja, ya betcha, motherfucker.’ “ Laughing, he turned to his associate. “Skeet, onomatopoeia refers to a word that sounds like the thing it represents.”

“Slida,” said Switters, nodding. “And the Japanese for the organ in question is almost as onomatopoeic: chitsu.”

“Yeah, man, that ain’t bad, either.”

“Preferable, certainly, to the Japanese for the male equivalent: chimpo. Makes it sound like a trained monkey in a traveling circus.”

“Don’t know about yours,” said Skeeter, “but my dick behave like a trained monkey in a traveling circus most of the time.”

“Let’s change the subject, shall we, gentlemen?” said Poe. “Anna will be coming on deck momentarily with an hors d’oeuvre or two.”

The men hadn’t gotten down to business right away. In fact, nearly three days passed before Switters was