The Russian slid his tongue out and moistened his lips. “El Hakim has yet to approve the treaty granting the Soviet Navy port facilities. Anchoring privileges are very nice, but we need the warehouses and dock space provided for in the treaty.”
“Your masters should reconsider their position. A strong, united Arab people friendly to the Soviet Union and hostile to American imperialism would certainly fulfill many of the Soviet Union’s long-range diplomatic objectives. Yet, you ask for the politically impossible now as your price to assist in a great effort which will benefit you in incalculable ways.”
“If it succeeds.”
“First you must plant the potatoes, Anton.”
The Russian sneered. “We have it and you want it. The treaty must first be approved.”
Qazi stared into the Russian’s eyes. Then the Russian felt a sharp pain on the inside of his thigh. He looked down and saw the knife, ready to open an artery. “Your belt,” Qazi said.
“What?”
“Take off your belt and give it to me.”
Chekhov complied slowly, his eyes reflecting dismay. Qazi knelt as if to pray with the buckle a few inches from his lips. His eyes swept the chapel. “General Simonov, I would like to take delivery of the manual for the Mark 58 device tomorrow. I shall call the public telephone on the north side of Piazza Campo dei Fiori at ten o’clock. Please follow the directions you are given and come alone.”
Qazi laid the belt in Chekhov’s lap. The Russian watched him join a group of American students and leave the chapel. Chekhov slowly worked the belt with the transmitter in the buckle through the loops in his trousers as he wondered what General Simonov was going to say.
Qazi sat on a bench watching the lovers and office workers eating lunch near the lake. Through the trees he could see the Galleria Borghese and traffic in the Piazza le Brasile. This great green park in which he sat, the Villa Borghese, was one of his favorite places in Rome. The magnificent pines and oaks, the strolling lovers, and the squealing children seemed to him to epitomize the best of European civilization.
He sat on a bench under the trees. This walking area was covered with a mixture of dirt and pea gravel. When someone walked through a shaft of sunlight, he could see the little dust clouds rising every time a foot came down. Beyond the walkway there was grass, but it was spotty; the city didn’t water the grass and it suffered from the heat and too much traffic.
He wondered idly what his uncle would have said if he could have spent a few hours here watching the ducks upon the limpid blue water and feeling the soft breeze as it eased the effect of the heat and rustled the tree leaves.
Waterholes in the desert are always brown, and the sheep and camels wade in and urinate and stir the tepid mixture until it resembles thin mortar. Then in a few days, three at most, the water is gone, leaving only brown mud cracking and baking in the sun. Then one must dig, dig, dig, and haul the water from the well with skin bags. Could the old man have even fathomed wealth like this?
His uncle had insisted he join the army. Even though the old man had read only the Koran, had seen only that one book in his entire life, he sent Qazi to the city to join the army, the boy who loved the desert and the eternal wind and the free, wild life.
They had lain in the sand and stared into the blackness toward the waterhole. He heard only the wind and the whisper of sand moving across stone. But his uncle had announced, “They are there,” and told him to go around the wadi onto the escarpment, where the old man said he would be able to look down into the waterhole when the light returned. He could still remember leading the camel through the darkness, stumbling over stones while the animal strained against the leash, smelling the water, grunting against the rag tied around her muzzle. After an hour he saw the looming bulk of the escarpment on his right, darker than the surrounding night. It had taken hours to feel his way up leading the reluctant animal Once on top, he tied the camel securely to a stone and waited for her to lie down. He snuggled against her side, his rifle in his hands, exhausted, yet too excited to sleep. The stars wheeled in the sky above him and the wind sighed restlessly.
He had spent countless nights watching the stars and listening to the wind. He had tried to count them once, spent all night on just one segment of sky, numbering faithfully as the stars wheeled above him, on a night so black the stars were just beyond reach in the clear desert air. With his back against the earth there were only the stars and he was one with them, alone and yet not alone, a part of the undying universe. He had finally given up the counting. There were too many stars, flung like grains of sand against the eternal void.
Tonight he glanced at the heavens, but his thoughts were on the darkness around him. He gripped the rifle and rubbed the smooth metal, the blueing long worn off, and the scarred wood of the stock. He fingered the notch of the rear sight and the bolt handle and the trigger. His uncle had told him not to chamber a cartridge until daylight, and he obeyed. Yet the cartridges were in the magazine; all that remained was the opening and closing of the bolt. He caressed the rifle and knew its power, its tension, as he waited impatiently for the stars to complete their nightly orbit. The tension and the fear and the anticipation … of what he knew not, gave life a pungency that he had never known existed. At this time, in this desolate wilderness beneath the eternal stars, here and now he was alive.
A thick figure emerged from the back of the limousine in the Piazza le Brasile and set off alone down the sidewalk toward the entrance to the mall under the Villa Borghese, which also contained the parking garage where Qazi had changed cars on his arrival in Rome two days before. The man carried an attaché case.
Qazi checked his watch, then scanned the park in every direction. The lovers on the blanket near the lake had been there since he arrived and were sharing wine. A woman was walking her dog. Most of the office workers had finished their lunches and were leaving the area. Fifty feet away a middle-aged woman sat on a bench and watched two small children play in the dirt with plastic automobiles.
Qazi watched the traffic in the piazza to see if any more vehicles were going to stop to discharge passengers. None did. After five minutes he arose and began strolling slowly toward the upper mall entrance, his hands in his pockets, checking everyone in sight. He was perspiring, perhaps because he was wearing three shirts in this heat. On the sidewalk he stopped at a mobile ice cream stand and paid fifteen hundred lire for a cone, which he licked as he stood in the shade watching the pedestrians and the traffic. The ice cream melted faster than he could eat it. It dripped on his fingers. When he finished the cone, he returned to the stand and used one of their napkins to wipe his fingers and mouth.
Waist-high circular concrete walls sat amid the grass and trees on the other side of the street. Beyond these walls, which looked like the ends of huge concrete pipes set vertically into the earth, he could see the track and stables where wealthy Roman girls learned to ride. That area was known as the Galoppatoio. Qazi knew the concrete walls encircled shafts that opened on the underground mall and admitted air and light. Several of the shafts had stairs to the mall below. He noted that there was no one standing near the shafts. Without benches to sit on, that area of the park had only a few strollers.
Satisfied at last, he went down the stairs from the sidewalk into the mall.
The man from the limousine was standing on the side of the corridor directly across from an office of the Bank of Rome. He wore an ill-fitting suit and his tie was pulled away from his throat, his shirt collar open. When Qazi was near, he could see why the suit did not fit. The man’s shoulders and chest were massive, rising from a too-small waist. He was about sixty, with a tanned head that made his cropped gray hair almost invisible.