the other is a lawyer in the employ of the Vatican.”
“They told you this?”
“They told my boss. I will transport them in his car with the four-wheel drive. No need for the truck, naturally. The gentlemen could not hire a car from the airport because the drivers there are under Ramadan.”
En route to Deir ez-Zur, they’d discussed Ramadan, and Switters had wondered why, if a people were at one with the Divine, was not
The foreign gentlemen at the garage . . . The younger, thinner one (late thirties, probably, and lithe as a bean vine) had a face like the instruction sheet that came with an unassembled toy: it looked simple at first and ordinary and frank, but the longer you studied it, the more incomprehensible it became. It was his body language that was troublesome, however. From his receding ebony hair to the points of his hand-tooled shoes, the Italian carried himself with the self-conscious grace of a commercially oriented martial artist. He feigned an attitude of disinterest, of relaxation, yet every muscle was spring-wound and tense, ready to pop into furious action. Switters had observed a similar look in many a street-level operative, in many a hitman. There was a time when he had observed the look in his own mirror.
The older man (well over sixty) had wispy gray hair and the ruddy complexion of a whiskey priest. His mouth was babyish and weak, a mouth meant for sucking a sugar tit; but behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were as hard and unfeeling as petrified scat. Although he seemed highly intelligent, Switters could detect that his was an intellect of the shrewd variety, the kind that grasped facts and figures and understood virtually nothing of genuine importance; a well-oiled brain dedicated to the defense, perpetuation, and exploitation of every cliche and superstition in the saddlebags of institutionalized reality.
Switters turned to the somewhat bewildered Toufic. “Beginning tomorrow, pal,” he said, “you’re going to have a new assistant. I hope your employer’s jalopy seats four comfortably.” He fixed the slack-jawed Syrian with what the unoriginal have described as his fierce, hypnotic green eyes. “I’ll be going back to the oasis with you.”
He unzipped his valise and, tossing aside C.R.A.F.T. Club T-shirts and socks with little cartoon squid on them, went straight for the false bottom. “First,” he said, “you’ve got to help me install this device in the rear seat of that car we’ll be driving. In English, we call it a
Switters grinned. Toufic looked numb. Above them, the third-quarter crescent of the Ramadan moon was itself a numb smile, perfectly suited, perhaps, for the human activities upon which its dry silvery drool seemed ever destined to fall.
Part 4
You only live twice:
once after you’re born
and once before you die.
—Basho
Once upon a time, four nuns boarded a jetliner bound from Damascus to Rome. Alitalia Flight 023 took off to the northeast and flew out over twenty or so land miles of the arid Syrian plain before banking with an avian grace and turning back toward the Mediterranean. From the air, the desert appeared a loose, lumpy weave of red and yellow strands, like a potholder made in the craft shack at a summer camp for retarded children. The nuns were sweating like mares, and as they . . .
Sorry. It’s no big deal, really; nothing major, not anything that wholly justifies this interruption. And yet despite the fact that the truths in narration are all relative truths (perhaps the truths in life, as well), despite the sovereign authority of poetic license, this report, claiming no kinship to Finnegan, has, in the interest of both clarity and expediency, endeavored never to indulge in the sort of literary trickery that actively encourages readers to jump to false conclusions. So, while it may be overreactive in this instance, while it may even smack of the kind of self- righteous puritanism that is to genuine purity what a two-bit dictator is to a philosopher king, let us reach into the inkwell jewel box and withdraw two sets of exquisite superscript signs— “ for the right ear, ” for the left—and hang them from the lobes on either side of the word
It was reported above that once upon a time in Damascus, four nuns boarded an airliner bound for Rome. To be absolutely factual, while they may have looked like ordinary holy sisters to their fellow passengers, three of those “nuns” had been long-since defrocked and the fourth “nun,” the one rolled aboard in a wheelchair, was a man.
The part about them sweating, however, was completely accurate. They perspired because it was a warm day in May, and they were dressed in dark, heavy winter habits that had been dug out of a trunk in the abbess’s storeroom, their lighter habits, customary in that area of the world, having been ceremoniously incinerated approximately one year before. They also perspired because they were nerve-racked, because their ability to board the flight had been in question to the very last moment; because recent history, already somewhat of a trial for them, had really gotten out of hand after the evening when that “nun” most deserving of apostrophic disclaimer— the imposter, the man—had reappeared at their convent.
The supply truck, when en route from Damascus to Deir ez-Zur, always stopped for the night in a hill village about thirty kilometers west of the Pachomian oasis. That was why it would arrive at the compound early of a morning. The car, an Audi sedan with reinforced suspension, heavy-duty shock absorbers, and four-wheel drive, traveled faster than the truck, even across that rude terrain; there were no deliveries to be made in the village, and the European clients would brook no delay. So, Toufic drove through the settlement with only a honk and a wave, and pressed on to the convent. They arrived just before sunset.
Ordering Toufic and his suspect “assistant” (again, the earrings of qualification) to wait in the car, the two men walked up to the great wooden gate. As they read its sign, Switters listened with interest to hear how many times they’d ring the bell. He watched even more intently to see which of the sisters would eventually admit them. He knew that in time the pair would be admitted. He knew their business. Their quiet conversation in the backseat had resounded in his ear chip like dialogue in a Verdi opera, and although his Italian was hardly
Not surprisingly, it was Domino Thiry who finally let them in. She couldn’t see him, and Switters caught only the briefest glimpse of her, but it was enough to set his pulses syncopating the way they used to do when Suzy entered the room. He wondered if Suzy would still affect him like that—and could think of no reason why she would not. He lit a cigar. There was little cause to rush. The churchmen were undoubtedly ruthless, but they would prefer negotiation to intimidation, intimidation to violence. There would be protocol to follow. On both sides. Right now, he imagined that tea was being served.
“Back there on the other side of Jebel ash-Shawmar?iyah,” said Toufic, referring to the central mountain range, “when we passed that band of Bedouins, you almost broke your eyeballs looking at them. I thought you were going to leap from the car and join them.”
“I almost did. But I didn’t see anyone I recognized.”
Scoffing, Toufic pulled the lever that allowed his seat to recline. He had driven for nearly nine hours, a lot of it spent dodging rocks and potholes in the roadless road. He lay back and lit a cigarette. If he was aware that his cigarette, any cigarette, was to Switters’s cigar what a two-bit dictator was to a philosopher king, he did not let on. “You may have been better off intruding on Bedouins instead of getting mixed up in the internal affairs of a church to which you don’t even belong.”
“I expect you’re right.”
“You Americans!”
