The Old Boys (6 page)

Jack said, “We’ll see about that. You have no actual objection to our following the rules of tradecraft?”

“No.”

“That’s good,” Harley said, “because we jes’ can’t help it.”

I told them the plan. Because of my physique I didn’t think it wise to stop off in Rome and call on Zarah’s ex-monk. Looking up from his deathbed at a six-foot-five American who speaks Italian like a Visigoth wouldn’t put a man in the mood to share confidences. On the other hand, Jack had a soothing personality and he spoke fluent Italian. I told him what we knew about Paul’s old friend and how we knew it, and handed him Zarah’s slip of paper with the man’s name on it.

“If he has anything to tell us,” Jack said, “what do I do then?”

“Tell everybody everything you know over the satellite phone,” I said. “Then follow up.”

“By
doing what?”

“Go wherever you think you should go, see whoever you need to see,” I replied. “but feed every scrap of information to every single one of us by satellite phone as soon as it happens. Don’t wait. Call the minute you know something.”

They all knew the reason for this: if every one of us knew everything, only one of us had to survive to carry out the last stage of the op.

Ben Childress, our Arabist, knew Ibn Awad’s German live-in doctor. This particular alumnus of the Schutzstaffel (SS) called himself Claus Bücher. If Bücher was still alive and still doctoring Ibn Awad, his whereabouts obviously would be unknown. We needed to know if he had dropped out of sight at the same time as his employer and, more important, if he had been sighted since. If he came into town every now and then, or flew somewhere for R & R, we might be able to get our hands on him, and if we did, miracles do happen. Who knows? If the incentive was right, he might take us to his patient.

Harley Waters had a wide circle of friends among the used-tobe’s of the former Soviet bloc. He would find out whatever he could in Moscow, then go to Prague and Budapest and sniff around for recent traces of Paul and old folklore about Lori Christopher. Harley’s prime target was the nobility of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. These people still existed, and in Lori’s day they had been a nationality of their own, living in a world of their own, and so much intermarried over the centuries that they were nearly all cousins.

The old aristocracy had despised the Nazis, who came out of the gutters. By 1942, these people were an undergroundin-waiting, and Lori was one of them. Had she gone to anyone for help in Prague, she would have gone to them. Unless they had come to her first and asked her help in liquidating Reinhard Heydrich.

Charley Hornblower, our scholar, would remain in Washington and work the files. He had an attic full of them and a Rolodex full of fellow pack rats.

I would go to Paris and sell the Hicks to finance the operation.

In my penury I continued to possess some of the accoutrements of the man of means: wardrobe, credentials, connections, manners, even a valid credit card. But I had almost no pocket money. I booked the cheapest available ticket to Paris and took a bus into town from the airport. At 8-bis, avenue Wagram, I presented one of my last calling cards to the burly servant who answered the door of Kalash al Khatar’s apartment. He took it from my hand and shut the door in my face. A long time passed. Had I not been dealing with a descendant of the Prophet I might have feared that I had been refused entry. However, I had in the past been kept waiting by this haughty breed on many occasions in many parts of Islam, so I loitered patiently in the corridor. The windows looked down on a cobbled courtyard where a fountain played. I heard the muted gargle of midday traffic in the place de l’Étoile. This reminded me of how Paris had smelled at rush hour in my youth, when the proportion of leaded exhaust fumes to fresh air was only slightly lower than the level needed to commit suicide.

Forty-five minutes passed. An hour. More. When Kalash’s man—a different one this time—opened the door, he was not smiling, he did not speak. He gestured me inside with a jerk of his bullet head.

He led me to an audience room. One very imperial overstuffed
chair faced several smaller, unpadded ones. Also visible were a collection of knives with rhino-horn hafts on one wall, a bronze tray inlaid with silver and copper on the opposite wall, phrases from the Koran in beautiful calligraphy on the back wall. The room was imposing but not overwhelming. However, the surrounding apartment was vast. One felt this spaciousness without actually seeing the rest of the place. It must have cost a fortune. I wondered if Kalash’s impoverished subjects made him an annual present of his weight in precious stones or metals, as did the followers of the Aga Khan.

After another hour Kalash appeared, wearing Arabian robes and carrying a carved and inlaid ebony staff. He was, indeed, remarkably tall—nearly a head taller than myself. He did not offer to shake hands, nor did he speak. Or sit down. I, of course, had risen to my feet when he entered.

“I apologize for arriving without notice,” I said.

Kalash said, “What do you want?”

“I have a letter for you.”

I handed over Paul’s letter of introduction. He banged his staff on the marble floor twice. Yet another flunky appeared. Kalash handed him the letter. The flunky bowed himself out and a moment later bowed himself back in, with the opened letter on a silver tray.

Kalash read the letter. “Is that the painting?” he asked, staring at the rolled-up canvas on the chair beside me.

“Yes.” I did not offer to unroll it. Kalash was a very annoying fellow.

He said, “How much do you want for it?”

“The price that you offered my cousin, plus ten percent. In cash.”

“Let me see the thing,” said Kalash.

I unrolled the painting and flattened it on the table. Kalash examined it inch by inch, like the expert he apparently was.

“This picture is not as it was when I saw it the last time,” he said. “It has been damaged by all this rough handling. Take it away.”

“As
you wish.” I began to roll up the painting.

“Stop that,” said Kalash. “You’ll make it worse.”

“If the painting doesn’t please you, what difference can that make? You’ll never see it again.”

“I don’t wish to be an accomplice to this barbarous destruction,” Kalash said. “So stop what you are doing.”

“I can hardly carry it through the streets like a flag,” I said. Kalash’s face was expressionless, as it had been throughout our encounter. I waited for him to speak again. At last he said, “Why did Paul send you on this errand, instead of coming himself or simply mailing the letter?”

There was no point in dissembling. I said, “We have a report that Paul died in China.”

“Where in China?”

“Xinjiang province. It is very remote.…”

“I know where Xinjiang is,” Kalash said. “What proof exists that this is true?”

“The Chinese have sent us his ashes.”

“Are they genuine?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you mean to find out.”

“If that’s possible, yes.”

We had been standing throughout this conversation. Now Kalash said, “Sit down.” He himself sat down, not in the larger chair, but in one of the smaller ones. Evidently we were going to be equals for a few minutes.

He banged on the floor again with his staff, just once. In seconds the household slave appeared with two glasses of very hot, very sweet mint tea on a tray.

Kalash said, not unpleasantly, “So you are the man who killed my cousin Ibn Awad.”

“So it was believed at the time.”

“And now?”

“Paul left me a letter. I know what you told him.”

“He wrote down everything?”

“The
main points. An outline.”

“So now you plan to kill my cousin again and you need money to do this and you think that I will give it to you? You
are
an extraordinary fellow.”

I said, “I have no plans to kill Ibn Awad. Obviously I’m not very good at that. And I am no longer in the business of saving the world.”

“Then what will you do with a million dollars?”

“A million one hundred. I’ll carry on with Paul’s search.”

“For what?”

“For his mother, my aunt. For the Amphora Scroll.”

“Do you plan to sell that, too?”

“Would you be interested in the right of first refusal?”

Kalash played deaf to this uppity remark. He said, “And if you happen to stumble on Ibn Awad?”

“We can talk about old times.”

“You should have let him set off one of his bombs and
then
murdered him. In those days Tel Aviv would have been his preference, so America would have come to no harm. You would have been the toast of the West instead of being driven into the wilderness.”

“Is that still your recommendation?”

“No. Times have changed. If I were the Crusader in charge of this manhunt, I would think it best to keep him from coming back from the dead.”

“And how would you accomplish that?”

“Not by killing him again. That would inflame the pious, because they would never believe that he was not immortal. If he lived through one murder, why should he not live through another? Murder him again and you create a Hydra.”

“What, then?”

“Capture him. I realize you’re an American, but for once, renounce braggadocio. Say nothing to the world. Let him stay dead.”

“And then?”

“Send
him off to some Saint Helena in the Indian Ocean— he couldn’t be happy in a cold climate—and let him live out his days in prayer and fasting. It would be a kindness to tell him that all twelve of his bombs had gone off as planned in American cities. Show him videos of the devastation. Lots of corpses clutching crucifixes.”

I said, “Very creative. But I thought we were doing all this to prevent devastation.”

“Obviously. But surely your organization can make very convincing fake footage for a fraction of what it would cost to rebuild New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and so forth. It’s said that you faked the moon landings, so this should be child’s play.”

“You believe that?”

“About the moon landings? No. But I am not my cousin nor one of his half-mad followers.”

What, then, was he? His callousness was so matter-of-fact that it was comical.

“Excellent advice,” I said. “But do you really think such an operation can be kept quiet forever?”

“You’re in a better position to judge such things than I am. But I say again, if this does not happen in impenetrable silence, if you advertise Ibn Awad’s return from the other world, if you describe what he has in mind, if you plaster CNN with his picture and pictures of his unexploded bombs, if you congratulate yourselves on saving the world in the usual all-American fashion, you will merely create another monster.”

I said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If you show the world that Ibn Awad, just one pious man no matter how rich, held in his hands the means to inflict a mortal wound on the enemies of Islam, and that he accomplished this miracle not once but twice, you will demonstrate that inflicting the mortal wound is feasible. Therefore you will create the next Ibn Awad. And if you kill
him,
yet another one. There will be no end to it.”

I said, “This is your cousin we’re talking about.”

“Exactly. I
am trying to save his life.”

“Naturally. But what else are you trying to save?”

Kalash said, “‘What else?’ I should think it was obvious. If the bombs go off in America, Islam will be incinerated by the United States Air Force. I’d like to prevent that.”

Heaven help me, I found this fellow entertaining. How in the world had Paul done without his company for forty years? This did not mean I was prepared to become a co-conspirator in whatever tangled web he was weaving. For all I knew he had sent Paul Christopher to his death with an irresistible lie and was hoping to do the same for me.

I said, “Where is Ibn Awad now?”

“I have no idea.”

“Who does know?”

“The people who are with him. But you will have to find them before you can question them, and if you find them you will have found him.”

“And if I don’t find them?”

“Then you must do what one does when lost in the desert,” Kalash replied. “Go back to where you started and begin again. Do you have pen and paper?”

I handed over my Bic and a page from my notebook. Kalash scribbled a man’s name and the name of a place, Manaus, on the paper.

“You should go talk to this man,” he said. “He knows interesting things, and he has seen Paul Christopher quite recently.”

Kalash stood up. The conversation was over. Apparently the negotiations were not.

He said, “Your demand for cash for the Hicks is ludicrous. Nevertheless I want it. I offered Paul one million dollars for the picture. I will have that sum deposited in Switzerland, if that’s acceptable. Do you have an account there?”

It so happened that I did. I gave him the particulars.

He said, “Very well. Have you a phone number?”

“Yes.”

I
wrote it down for him. He recited his own number—rapidly, of course, saying
naught
for
zero
and repeating it only once.

“And one more thing,” he said. “Ibn Awad has caused a fatwa to be issued against you. You understand what a fatwa is?”