The Old Boys (36 page)

As all who have read the ninth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles will remember, it was on the road to Damascus that Saul of Tarsus, the Roman citizen afterwards known as Paul the Apostle, was blinded by the radiance of a vision in the sky. A thunderous divine voice spoke to him. Soon afterward, his blindness cured by a miracle that caused the scales to fall from
his eyes, he began preaching that Jesus Christ was the son of God. Surely Septimus Arcanus, who had so many reliable sources, knew about this. One wonders what he made of it. Not much, probably. By that stage in his career he must have been beyond surprise.

Suddenly, in the here and now, everything depended on the houbara bustard. How could this have been predicted? But then, how can anything be predicted? If Septimus Arcanus had recruited any other principal assets besides the unstoppable Gaius Julius Paulus and the schizophrenic Judas, would the Holy Roman Catholic Church be named after the empire instead of the triptych divinity it worships? Reading the Amphora Scroll had created a mood from which I was not sure I would ever escape. As if I were twenty again, existence seemed mysterious, events inexplicable, outcomes uncertain, meaning unknowable. Irony may be to life what gravity is to the universe, the invisible force that holds everything together and keeps everything apart.

On the spur of the moment (I really wanted to leave behind me, before dark if possible, the dank villa into which I had introduced the ghosts of Septimus Arcanus and his assets and targets), I decided to make myself useful by going to see Kalash el Khatar. I cannot account for this impulse, but I followed it. If hunting the houbara bustard was the favorite sport of the Prophet’s descendants, Kalash must know something about it. Or about Ibn Awad’s favorite hunting grounds. In any case it could do no harm to ask. I took a boat to the city and a taxi to the airport. Security was very tight—so tight that one of the black-jawed
unsmiling Turks guarding the outer doors of the terminal took my satellite phone apart and handed it back to me in pieces. Among other inconveniences, this made it impossible to call any of the Old Boys and tell them what I was up to. I supposed that any attempt to put the phone together again while in the airport or aboard a plane would lead to my arrest on suspicion of building an infernal machine, so I stowed it in my pocket. I bought a phone card and used a pay phone to call the number Kalash had given me after our meeting in Paris. To my amazement, he answered his own satellite phone. The word
allô
rang like a coin tossed onto the pavement in front of a beggar who was expected to scramble for it.

In English I said, “This is Paul’s cousin.”

Silence.

I said, “I have something to discuss with you.”

In French, Kalash said, “What could that be?”

“Are you in Paris?”

Kalash switched to English. “My phone says you’re calling from Istanbul. Take a flight to Cairo. Call again after you’re through customs.”

He disconnected.

Cairo? I had had my heart set on Paris, on a
plâteau de fruits de mer
and a bottle of Meursault, on French girls, on the light of the Impressionists, on thugs I knew, Kalash’s men, rather than Egyptians I did not know. The last place I wanted to be was in a city full of crazed louts, every one of whom was licensed to kill Horace Hubbard.

At Cairo airport, the passport control officer, who wore a full Islamic beard, examined my blue U.S. passport as if it were the head of a pig that I had passed through the wicket with my left hand. However, he waved me through after spitting on his stamp and slamming it down on a fresh page. Customs paid no attention to me. Neither did anyone else as I stood against a wall outside the arrival hall and put my phone back together.

This time, I got Kalash’s voice mail. I left a message. Two minutes
later, my phone rang. In the earpiece, Kalash’s voice said in English, “You are in Cairo?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“At the airport.”

“Go to the general aviation terminal. Ask for my pilot. His name is Captain Khaldun. Like the dead historian.”

“How will I know him?”

“He’ll know you. He will bring you to me. Do you have warm clothes in your kit?”

“Yes.”

“Good. It’s cold here at night and the women won’t sleep with a heathen.”

Click
.

Captain Khaldun turned out to be a handsome fellow in his thirties, mute as a stone. We took off at dusk in a venerable Learjet and landed about three hours later at an airstrip in a desert. Kalash was right about the temperature. It was cold. A sickle moon hung in a velvety field of stars, so bright against the blackness that I began remembering the names of constellations I had learned in the planetarium at the Museum of Natural History. Captain Khaldun disappeared. I was all alone in the desert (but which desert?) with nothing to be seen except the stars and nothing to be heard except the piano-tuner ping of the jet’s engines cooling in the frigid air.

A Greek sniper who hunted Turks when he was young told me that he always took a position downwind from the enemy when working at night. When a Turk urinated, as one almost always did sooner or later, he fired a whole clip of ammunition at the smell. He often got his man. It was a particular satisfaction, he said, to kill an enemy you hated while he held his most precious possession between his fingers and his thumb. I emptied my bladder. Urine drilling into the sand made quite a loud noise. Apart from the discordant music of the cooling engines, the silence was total, so any rifleman assigned to take me out would be able to put at
least two of the five senses to work as aids to marksmanship. It seemed unlikely that Kalash, even if he had had a reason to kill me, would have gone to all the trouble of flying me to a mysterious destination in order to shoot me. It would have been far easier and more economical to rub me out at the airport. One more dead Yank. Killer unknown, motive obvious.

An edgy wind blew. I dug my parka out of my bag and put it on. It was more than I needed against the desert chill, but it was all I had. Outside the bright spot created by the Lear’s parking lights, a vast noiseless pool of darkness stretched in all directions. I decided to take a little walk. I kept the Big Dipper over my left shoulder—not that I needed the stars as long as I did not lose sight of the airplane and the glowing bulbs on its tail and wingtips. There were shrubs and rocks in this desert. Walking in a straight line was difficult. After about ten minutes I turned around to orient myself with the Lear and saw nothing but darkness. Somebody had turned off the lights.

I sat down on a rock and searched the sky. There, by golly, was the Big Dipper, with the North Star off by itself just where a former second-class Scout would look for it. Since I had no idea where I was, this knowledge wasn’t particularly useful. In the absence of a map I had no way of knowing where I’d end up if I steered by Polaris. I said aloud, “Nice going, Horace.” I have been alone for most of my life—in half-empty houses smelling of absence after my parents divorced, in underheated snowbound schools where everybody else wanted to be a lawyer or a stockbroker, in a profession where no one was called by his true name, in Pennsylvania. I am in the habit of talking to myself. Even when not engaged in one-man conversations with him, I think of Horace as “he,” a man apart whom I am watching, listening to, not quite understanding.

A voice said, “You will end up as hyena dung if you keep this up. Do you know what hyena dung looks like?”

It was the inimitable Kalash. I said, “Hyena dung? Not actually, no.”

“It
looks like pulverized crockery because hyenas chew up the bones and digest them.”

It was not so dark as I had thought. There was enough light from moon and stars to make out my host, a very tall figure wearing Arab robes. The darkness in which I had imagined myself lost had been darkness only because there had been nothing to see.

Kalash said, “Why are you wandering about like this?”

“Enjoying the stars. They’re very bright tonight.”

“They’re very bright every night in the desert unless there is a sandstorm. Follow me.”

He turned around and strode off into the night as if walking up the Champs-Élysées with the Arc de Triomphe as his landmark. Now that my eyes had adjusted to starlight I found it possible to keep him in sight. I heard a noise behind me, looked over my shoulder, and saw two squat figures who looked like wrestlers dressed in windblown kaffiyehs and caftans. They carried AK-47s, unmistakable even in silhouette.

A couple of hundred meters away we came upon two Range Rovers, parked with their lights out. I must have walked right by them, or near enough. Another wrestler, Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, held open the door of one of the vehicles for Kalash. I made a move as if to follow him. The two bodyguards behind me steered me to the other car. Except for the driver I was alone in the vehicle. Melancholy Arab music played—a contralto singing in heartbeat rhythm about how the airplanes of the Great Satan had killed her one true love in Afghanistan.

For the moment the use of hereditary titles was inconvenient in Sudan, but by all that is holy and eternal, Kalash was an emir. In the desert as in Paris, he lived like one. The tent into which I was shown after the drive from the airstrip was used for dining. Handsome carpets, heavy and thick, covered the sand floor. There were the usual big pillows and a long low dining table. Tapestries embroidered in gold thread with verses of the Koran hung from the eaves, stirring gently in the moving air. Hidden musicians tuned their instruments. Servants scurried about. One of them
brought me a gin and tonic in a tea glass. Not my favorite drink, but I was glad to have it. Another offered me figs. I ate two, my first food since Istanbul. Behind the table, all in a row, a half dozen hooded peregrine falcons perched motionless on shoulder-high T-shaped perches inlaid with what looked like ivory and lapis lazuli.

After a half hour or so, Kalash entered. He had changed into camel’s hair robes. A servant followed, carrying a large, hooded falcon—Kalash’s favorite, I guessed—on his arm. Other servants marched in with five more falcons and placed them gently on the perches. When Kalash sank to a sitting position—a considerable sight to see in a white-bearded man dressed in flowing robes who could not have been less than six foot ten inches tall—the first handler took up station at Kalash’s elbow, falcon on his forearm, every muscle frozen. I wondered how much the bird weighed.

I wondered, too, when Sir Cecil Hardwicke would enter, costumed as a British general in scarlet tunic and decorations, and convey the best wishes of the Queen Empress to the emir, who would smile like the original serpent at this eunuch who was in the service of a woman.

Kamal gazed with affection at the birds. “Do you know what these are?”

Yes, I knew. But even on short acquaintance I also knew how much Kamal liked to instruct, so I lifted the end of the word with a question mark when I said, “Falcons?”

“Peregrine falcons. They are used for hunting.”

“What is the quarry?”

“Other birds,” Kalash said. “Sometimes small animals. A peregrine falcon kills its prey by grasping it in its talons while flying at more than two hundred miles per hour.”

“That must make the feathers fly.”

“Yes. And the blood. A man from
National Geographic,
an excitable fellow named Wilbur something, took some photographs of kills.”

“Do you still have them?”

“No.
Pictures lie. The colors were wrong, like a cartoon, and a kill really doesn’t look like that at all, frozen into a single instant, silent.”

“What
does
it look like?”

“Like what it is, an epiphany. Many things happen in a split second but it can seem much longer if you know how to look at what is happening. The impact, the talons, the prey fighting back, trying to escape, not dying at once. Tomorrow you will see.”

“I can’t wait.”

Kalash said, “My father hunted with eagles. An eagle can kill jackals, even antelope.”

“Not hyenas?”

“The hyenas would eat the eagle, then probably the other hyena because it was bleeding from the eagle’s talons. Once my father’s eagle attacked an ostrich. The ostrich ran away with the eagle. The eagle held on like a jockey for miles, trying to kill this enormous thing, then finally let go and flew back to the wrist.”

A servant arrived, holding aloft a huge platter on which an entire roast lamb was arranged. Other men followed with other platters of rice, vegetables, figs and dates, hot unleavened bread.

“As honored guest you’re supposed to eat the eyes, brain, tongue and so on,” Kalash said. “It’s a great honor.”

“No, thank you. Roasted sheep’s eyes and half-cooked brains disgust me.”

“Commendable honesty. Most kaffirs gobble them down to be polite. They are anxious not to insult the ancient customs of desert hospitality. They look like they’re going to vomit at any moment. ‘More, take more!’ we say. And usually they do. It’s a great joke among the servants.”

While we ate the delicious greasy meal with our right hands only—more difficult for a kaffir than you might suppose—Kalash continued his lecture on falconry. All the falcons in the room responded to his voice only, Kalash said. Most falconers of his rank employed underlings actually to launch the birds, but Kalash’s father had taught him that a man who did that was a mere spectator.