Lie Down with Lions (1985)

happiness. I’m an intruder, a destabilizing factor. That’s why she hugs Bernard in front of me. She doesn’t mean to hurt me. She does it because she’s afraid of losing him. And it’s me who makes her afraid.”

“She’ll get over it,” Gill said. “America is full of kids with two daddies.”

“That’s no excuse. I fucked up, and I should face it.”

She surprised him again by patting his knee. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she said. “You just weren’t made for this. I knew that within a month of marrying you. You don’t want a house, a job, the suburbs, children. You’re a little weird. That’s why I fell in love with you, and that’s why I let you go so readily. I loved you because you were different, crazy, original, exciting. You would do anything. But you’re no family man.”

He sat in silence, thinking about what she had said, while she drove. It was meant kindly, and for that he was warmly grateful; but was it true? He thought not. I don’t want a house in the suburbs, he thought, but I’d like a home: maybe a villa in Morocco or a loft in Greenwich Village or a penthouse in Rome. I don’t want a wife to be my housekeeper, cooking and cleaning and shopping and taking the minutes at the PTA; but I’d like a companion, someone to share books and movies and poetry with, someone to talk to at night. I’d even like to have kids, and raise them to know about something more than Michael Jackson.

He did not say any of this to Gill.

She stopped the car and he realized they were outside the Eastern terminal. He looked at his watch: eight fifty. If he hurried he would get on the nine o’clock shuttle. “Thanks for the ride,” he said.

“What you need is a woman like you, one of your kind,” Gill said.

Ellis thought of Jane. “I met one, once.”

“What happened?”

“She married a handsome doctor.”

“Is the doctor crazy like you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then it won’t last. When did she get married?”

“About a year ago.”

“Ah.” Gill was probably figuring that that was when Ellis had come back into Petal’s life in a big way; but she had the grace not to say so. “Take my advice,” she said. “Check her out.”

Ellis got out of the car. “Talk to you soon.”

“Bye.”

He slammed the door and she drove off.

Ellis hurried into the building. He made the flight with a minute or two to spare. As the plane took off he found a newsmagazine in the seat pocket in front of him and looked for a report from Afghanistan.

He had been following the war closely since he had heard, from Bill in Paris, that Jane had carried out her intention of going there with Jean-Pierre. The war was no longer front-page news. Often a week or two would go by with no reports about it at all. But now the winter lull was over and there was something in the press at least once a week.

This magazine had an analysis of the Russian situation in Afghanistan. Ellis began it mistrustfully, for he knew that many such articles in news-magazines emanated from the CIA: a reporter would get an exclusive briefing on the CIA’s intelligence appraisal of some situation, but in fact he would be the unconscious channel for a piece of disinformation aimed at another country’s intelligence service, and the report he wrote would have no more relation to the truth than an article in Pravda.

However, this article seemed straight. There was a buildup of Russian troops and arms going on, it said, in preparation for a major summer offensive. This was seen by Moscow as a make-or-break summer: they had to crush the Resistance this year or they would be forced to reach an accommodation of some kind with the rebels. This made sense to Ellis: he would check to see what the CIA’s people in Moscow were saying, but he had a feeling it would tally.

Among the crucial target areas, the article listed the Panisher Valley.

Ellis remembered Jean-Pierre talking about the Five Lions Valley. The article also mentioned Masud, the rebel leader: Ellis recalled Jean-Pierre speaking of him, too.

He looked out of the window, watching the sun set. There was no doubt, he thought with a pang of dread, that Jane was going to be in grave danger this summer.

But it was none of his business. She was married to someone else now. Anyway, there was nothing Ellis could do about it.

He looked down at his magazine, turned the page, and started reading about El Salvador. The plane roared on toward Washington. In the west the sun went down, and darkness fell.

Allen Winderman took Ellis Thaler to lunch at a seafood restaurant overlooking the Potomac River. Winderman arrived a half hour late. He was a typical Washington operator: dark gray suit, white shirt, striped tie; as smooth as a shark. As the White House was paying, Ellis ordered lobster and a glass of white wine. Winderman asked for Perrier and a salad. Everything about Winderman was too tight: his tie, his shoes, his schedule and his self-control.

Ellis was on his guard. He could not refuse such an invitation from a presidential aide, but he did not like discreet, unofficial lunches, and he did not like Allen Winderman.

Winderman got right down to business. “I want your advice,” he began.

Ellis stopped him. “First of all, I need to know whether you told the Agency about our meeting.” If the White House wanted to plan covert action without telling the CIA, Ellis would have nothing to do with it.

“Of course,” Winderman said. “What do you know about Afghanistan?”

Ellis felt suddenly cold. Sooner or later, this is going to involve Jane, he thought. They know about her, of course: I made no secret of it. I told Bill in Paris I was going to ask her to marry me. I called Bill subsequently to find out whether she really did go to Afghanistan. All that went down on my file. Now this bastard knows about her, and he’s going to use his knowledge. “I know a little about it,” he said cautiously, and then he recalled a verse of Kipling, and recited it:

When you’re wounded an’ left on Afghanistan’s plains,

An’ the women come out to cut up your remains,

Just roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains,

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Winderman looked ill at ease for the first time. “After two years of posing as a poet you must know a lot of that stuff.”

“So do the Afghans,” said Ellis. “They’re all poets, the way all Frenchmen are gourmets and all Welshmen are singers.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s because they can’t read or write. Poetry is a spoken art form.” Winderman was getting visibly impatient: his schedule did not allow for poetry. Ellis went on: “The Afghans are wild, ragged, fierce mountain tribesmen, hardly out of the Middle Ages. They’re said to be elaborately polite, brave as lions and pitilessly cruel. Their country is harsh and arid and barren. What do you know about them?”

“There’s no such thing as an Afghan,” Winderman said. “There are six million Pushtuns in the south, three million Tajiks in the west, a million Uzbaks in the north, and another dozen or so nationalities with fewer than a million. Modern borders mean little to them: there are Tajiks in the Soviet Union and Pushtuns in Pakistan. Some of them are divided into tribes. They’re like the Red Indians, who never thought of themselves as American, but Apache or Crow or Sioux. And they would just as soon fight one another as fight the Russians. Our problem is to get the Apache and the Sioux to unite against the palefaces.”

“I see.” Ellis nodded. He was wondering: When does Jane come into all this? He said: “So the main question