The Old Boys (30 page)

Mary strode away. Clattering heels, shapely legs, shortish skirt. Don followed along behind. He forgot his tomatoes.

When I emerged onto Wisconsin Avenue with a shopping bag full of groceries I found A, B, and C waiting for me. They stood in a cluster at the crosswalk like so many high school boys meeting on the corner. All three stared boldly at me, letting me know that they had testosterone to burn and no friendly intent. I joined them at the curb and waited for the DON’T WALK sign to change. With his eyes fixed on the traffic signal, A said, “Take a good look at the crowd.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Try ethnic characteristics.”

Across the street I saw three Middle Eastern types, one of them talking into a cell phone. A bit farther down the avenue, another one was talking into
his
cell phone. I assumed they were talking to each other and perhaps to others elsewhere in the crowd. Then I saw them everywhere I looked. It was like quitting time at the mosque. It was hard to believe, but it looked like I was being swarmed. This was an unexpected compliment. An exercise of this kind, called waterfall surveillance in the jargon, is very, very expensive and can also be seen as an admission of defeat on the part of the people who are watching you. Waterfall surveillance involves walking right at the target face to face and making eye contact instead of sneaking along behind in the usual way. It
requires a small army of agents, all targeted on a single person who would, of course, have to be blind and stupid not to understand what was happening.

The whole idea is that the victim
does
understand what is happening, that he cannot fail to understand. The objective is to make a show of intimidation, to spoil the day if not the life of someone you know to be a bad guy but who for one reason or another you cannot neutralize by the usual dirty tricks. Unless you want to keep this up for the rest of the subject’s life and bust your budget, the idea is to scare him so badly on day one that he’ll go into another line of work or flee the country. Or if you’re really upset, you can kill or maim him when you’re through playing big cat, little mouse with him. Was this some sort of zany Outfit operation? It seemed unlikely, but we were living in a new age with a new ethic and it was entirely possible that the people of the new Outfit had become what Hollywood and the media and academia had relentlessly taught the young the old Outfit always was—a ruthless outlaw agency staffed by homicidal maniacs.

Waterfall surveillance works most efficiently in deserted neighborhoods where the target can clearly see his adversaries and wonder when the fear in his heart is going to be extinguished by a bullet. However, this was a Friday evening in upper Georgetown, the day and hour when young people with money in their pockets, educated voices and radiant smiles hit the bars and restaurants. Apart from the ones with beards and angry eyes, these kids looked and sounded like a convention of Kevins. This was not the sort of crowd into which I could disappear. Of course, neither could the other guys. However, this was America, not Xinjiang or Russia, and all was not lost—at least not yet. Rescue was possible, at least in theory. I could call the police and tell them exactly what was happening. In that case the cops would have taken me to St. Elizabeth’s, the local loony bin, for a night of observation, and I would have been inaccessible—not such a bad outcome. What I needed was sanctuary, a place where my enemies could not enter. It was next to impossible to elude them, but I might be able to
confuse them, if only for the fraction of a minute I needed to slip out of the net.

The light had not changed. It was rush hour and cars had the right-of-way, so the signal was set for a long, long pause. A and his friends still stood beside me. Still gazing fixedly at the DON’T WALK sign, lips barely moving, A muttered, “Like we told you, you’ve got problems. And there’s not a thing we can do to help you.”

“I was thinking of calling the cops.”

“Nothing they could do. These guys haven’t done anything except stand on the sidewalk and talk on the phone. It’s a free country.”

Ah, was
that
the problem?

Still, I had certain advantages. Tactically, this was a bad place to execute a waterfall surveillance because we were in the middle of a steep hill and there were no cross streets for a couple of blocks in either direction. The way an operation like this works is that the operatives walk past the subject, turn into the first cross street, jump into a waiting car or van, and are ferried two or three blocks in the direction in which the subject is walking. Then they hit the sidewalk again and walk right at the poor fellow, making awful faces. This is great fun if you have the temperament for it.

My advantages were these: (1) I knew where I was going and my tormentors did not; (2) my pursuers stood out in this crowd at least as much as I did; (3) it was getting dark fast; and (4) I do have the temperament for it.

Needless to say I wasn’t thinking as sequentially as this suggests. The moment I’ve just taken such pains to describe was just that— a moment. What I did next I did without conscious thought. The only nanosecond in which it’s possible to escape the waterfall is the first one, before you are swept over the edge. So far all the thugs I had spotted were downhill from me. My house was only a few blocks in that direction. Evidently these people were thick-headed enough to assume that I was human enough to head for home.

Looking uphill, the only way out, I saw a Metro bus approaching
and people waiting for it half a block away on the opposite side of Wisconsin Avenue. The signal clicked at last and changed to WALK. I charged into traffic even before it stopped. It took about thirty seconds—though of course I remember all this in slo-mo—to dash across the street and leapt through the door of the bus just before it closed behind me with a whoosh and the vehicle lurched into motion. Along with a couple of other people who also had not had time to find seats, I fought for balance. I had never before in my life been on a Metro bus, and I had no idea where it was headed or what the fare was or how to pay it. A motherly Haitian woman wearing a maid’s uniform under her coat helped me count out the change as the bus rolled down the avenue, gathering speed with every turn of the wheels.

I rode the bus to M Street. No gorillas got aboard at either of the two stops in between, maybe because they were all pointed in the other direction and had to be reprogrammed. Leaving my groceries on an empty seat and hoping the Haitian lady would take them home with her, I exited by the rear door, jumped into a taxi that already had two witnesses in the backseat—sharing taxis is a quaint old Washington custom—and asked the Punjabi driver to take me to the club.

He turned out to be a natural-born getaway driver. While he weaved in and out of traffic and jumped red lights, we chatted about his cousins, half a dozen of whom were also cabdrivers in the District of Columbia. Finally he made a hard left turn across traffic, tires squealing, and sped into the club’s circular drive and dropped me at the door. I didn’t even have to cross the sidewalk. I gave him a handsome tip, walked into the foyer, and was as safe from my enemies as one of Dumas’s noble fugitives in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. None could enter here except members and their guests, and nobody I had met so far this evening had much chance of being nominated for membership—or, for that matter, even being invited to lunch.

Happily—this seemed to be my lucky day—the front desk had just received a cancellation from someone who had booked one of
the larger upstairs bedrooms for the weekend, so I was able to move right in. This had many advantages besides a comfortable bed, unlimited clean towels, and a shelf of unreadable books written by members. Chief among these was an unbugged telephone, safe to use at least for the time being.

I immediately called Zarah and described my circumstances. I invited her to lunch at the club the next day. Zarah accepted calmly. There was no need to explain to her that it wasn’t wise just now for me to go to her house. This would likely remain the case until the present excitement faded away. The way things were going, this might not happen in my lifetime.

“I’m finding it mind-boggling,” Zarah said.

“The fatwa?”

“No,” she said. “The job you asked me to do.”

We were seated at a small table in an alcove of the club dining room. I was conscious that Zarah wore no perfume and realized for the first time that she never had. She smelled of skin and hair, scrubbed teeth, the wool of her dress, the leather of her shoes, the tang of metal polish on the handsome Arabian silver belt that she wore.

“You’re finding the translation difficult?” I asked.

“No, Lori’s translation is in words that cannot possibly be misunderstood,” Zarah said. “But it’s disorienting to read a fifth Gospel that sounds like it was written by an investigative journalist. This man Septimus Arcanus has his own slant on the miracles. He sees them as a series of pranks cooked up by Roman case officers. He’s
laughing
at these dupes.”

“Does he describe Roman purposes in running this operation?”

“In the clearest possible terms. The Israelite priesthood was a thorn in the side of the Roman governor, fomenting unrest. The Romans wanted to put the priests in their debt so they could control them. So they manufactured a threat to their authority, namely one Joshua ben Joseph, financed the mischief he made, and then made the problem go away by crucifying him.”

“And
that bothers you?”

“Something keeps telling me not to believe it.”

“A voice from above?”

“From within,” Zarah said. “I feel as I read Septimus Arcanus’s dispatch that I’m doing something forbidden just to read it. I don’t feel alone in the house.”

She was serious. No deprecating smile.

“My goodness,” I said, “I didn’t realize you were a Christian. Had I known, I wouldn’t have put you in such an uncomfortable position.”

“I’m not a Christian. I wasn’t raised as a Christian. The Jawabi, the Berber tribe we lived with in Morocco, believed that they were Jews who had fled Israel in the time of King David. They regarded the God of the Old Testament as an unpredictable psychopath who would send plagues or floods or war or exile unless he was constantly appeased. They thought he was a local god they’d left behind, but they were still praying to him and sacrificing animals four thousand years later just in case he ever showed up again. Mother hired an English clergyman to teach me the Bible. He was very learned and devout, but after reading the whole text line by line, I came away with the impression that the Jawabi were right about Yahweh and that the story in the New Testament was just plain unbelievable. I’ve never been able to understand its power over so many minds.”

“Until now.”

“That’s right,” Zarah said. “In daylight I tell myself it’s just the effect of two thousand years of superstition. When the sun goes down I’m not so sure.”

“Maybe it’s the history of the Christophers rather than the story in the scroll that’s bothering you.”

“Maybe,” Zarah said. “It’s in my grandmother’s handwriting, after all, as if she were writing to me.”

The food arrived. Zarah, usually the soul of kindness to waiters, behaved as if the grilled grouper—we had ordered the same thing—and the woman who brought it were invisible.

She
said, “You must think I’ve taken leave of my senses.”

No Christopher I had ever known ever came this close to asking for reassurance. I was taken aback.

I said, “Not at all. I’ve put in a lot more time as a heathen than you, and I’ve had similar thoughts about the Amphora Scroll. But frankly, I don’t know why, it makes me nervous.”

Zarah had brought Lori’s translation with her. “I really don’t want custody of the original,” she said.

“But it’s yours by right of inheritance,” I said.

“If it hadn’t been for you I would never have known it existed,” Zarah said.

“Does this mean you don’t want to do the translation?” I asked.

“I’ve done it.”

She handed it to me, printed out in Times New Roman on sheets of white paper.

“You have this stored in your computer?”