“Yes. Temporarily.”
“I thought they fired you.”
“They did. They needed me back.”
“You said in that letter you’d never work for them again. You said you were all done with it. Were you lying then too?”
“No. I came back because I didn’t feel I had a choice.”
“Because of the Kurd?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it a little late to be paying off your debts?”
“Maybe it is. I don’t know. We’ll see, won’t we?”
“How can you do it? Work for them? How can you stomach it?”
“If I didn’t there’d be another man here. He wouldn’t care about you. He wouldn’t care about Ulu Beg. These are cold people, from the Security Office. They want him dead.”
“What do you want from me?”
“They think he’ll come to you, because he has no other place to go. Or so they say. I’m not sure what they really think. But that’s the official line. So I’m here to get your help.”
“There was a time when I would have killed you. I thought about it. I thought about flying to Chicago, going to your door, knocking, and when you answered, shooting you. Right in the face.”
“I’m sorry you hate me so much.”
“You were part of it.”
“I never—”
“Paul, you’re lying. It’s part of the fiber, the structure of your life. I’ve done some research on your employers: they train you to lie without thinking about it. You can do it calmly and naturally, as if you were discussing the weather.”
“Agency people are just people. Anyway, I never did lie to you. The lying goes on at higher levels. They have specialists in it.”
He emptied the beer can and reached into the sack for another one. He wished he’d gotten another six-pack. He popped the new top, took a long swallow.
He finally said, “There probably hasn’t been a night in seven years that I haven’t thought of you and hated what came between us. That’s not a lie. But if you love him — and I think you do, and I think you should — then you’ve got to help me. Or he’s dead.”
“Don’t overdo the nobility, Paul.”
“Don’t overdo the betrayed woman, Johanna. While you’re busy feeling sorry for yourself, they’re going to put a bullet in his head.”
“Paul,” she finally said, “I lied too. I said I loved you. I never loved you.”
“All right. You never loved me.”
“I loved the idea of you. Because you were fighting for the Kurds, and the Kurds needed fighters.”
“Yes.”
“I was so impressed with force. I thought it was a great secret.”
“It’s no secret at all.”
“Do you know what happened? To us? After your mysterious disappearance?”
“Yes.”
“You lie!” she screamed. “Goddamn you, you lie. Again. Again, you lie. You don’t know. Nobody knows except—”
“A Russian told me. He doesn’t run with your crowd.”
“The details?”
“No. This Russian doesn’t bother with details. He’s too important to bother with the details. He told me the numbers.”
“Well, I think it’s important that you know the details. So that you can carry them around upstairs in that cold thing you call a brain.”
Johanna was beautiful in the dark, now, here, after so much dreaming of her. He ached. He wanted her, wanted her love or her respect. So many things had come between them.
“Come with me.” She got out.
He followed her. They crossed the street and stood before a big dark house. She led him up the walk into the foyer. She opened a second door with a key and they climbed three flights of stairs. He heard music coming from one of the floors. They reached the top, turned down a short hall. She opened another door. They stepped into her apartment.
“Sit down. Take your coat off. Get comfortable,” she said coldly.
He sat on a couch. The apartment had high ceilings and tall old windows and was modestly furnished in books and potted plants and odd, angular pieces. It was white and cold. Johanna went to a table and returned with a thick sheaf of paper.
“Here,” she said. “My memoirs. It turns out I’m not Lillian Hellman, but at least it’s the truth.” She paged through the messy manuscript and peeled off a batch of pages. “The last chapter. I want you to read it.”
Chardy took the chapter from her and looked at the first page. It bore a simple title: “Naman.”
“You didn’t tap it?” said Lanahan in the van outside, looking at the hulking old house.
“I couldn’t, Miles,” said the wizard, irritation in his tone because an old hand like him had to show deference to someone as young and raw as Lanahan. “Yost won’t let me. You get caught doing something like that and you got all kinds of troubles.”
“I don’t know how he expects us to bring this off if we can’t play it hard,” Miles said bitterly. “What about the other units? Are they in touch? Can we get in contact with them?”
“They’re here, Miles. At least they should be. We’ve got Chardy nailed. But I didn’t think we ought to have a radio linkup in this van. We knew we were going to be carrying Chardy around in this van. I bet if you wandered up the street you’d spot them.”
“Just so Chardy doesn’t spot them,” Miles said.
“He won’t. They’re good boys, ex-cops, private eyes. I set it up just the way Yost says. Yost says keep Chardy in a sling, and in a sling he goes. If that’s what Yost wants, that’s what I’ll give him.”
“Screw Ver Steeg. Ver Steeg is so small he doesn’t exist. He’s a gofer. We’re working for Sam Melman and don’t you forget it.”
Chardy read:
I did not have a great deal of time to feel grief over the sudden disappearance of Paul, because almost immediately our bad situation became much worse: we came under shell attack. In my seven months with Ulu Beg and his group we had never been fired upon. I had seen bombed-out villages, of course, but I had no experience to prepare me for the fury of a modern high-explosive barrage. There was no way to take cover and, really, no cover. Ulu Beg had made his camp in a high, flat place under a ridge. The black tents were lined up under the mouth of a cave. The explosions were so incredibly loud and came so quickly that in the first seconds I became totally disoriented. A few people made it to the cave but most of us fell to the earth. I have never been so scared. In the few seconds between the blasts I would look around and try to squirm into a safer position but it was very difficult because there was so much smoke and dust in the air.
I thought the shelling lasted for hours. When it let up I felt dizzy and disoriented. Additionally, I had breathed a lot of smoke. I could not stop trembling, and though I had seen many wounded men in my times in the mountains, nothing could prepare me for the shock of a firsthand view of what a high-powered shell can do to the human body. They could destroy it utterly.
I struggled to get some grip on myself, but even before the dust had settled Ulu Beg was running about. I had never seen him so desperate, yelling at people to move.
We ran chaotically through the dust. We ran up the sides of the hill and found a path along a ridge and ran along it, all of us, soldiers, their wives, all their children. I can still see that sight: over 100 men, women and children fleeing in abject panic. It looked like a scene from the beginning of World War II when the Germans bombed refugee columns in Poland. The women’s dresses and scarves stood out gaudily in the clouds of dust and I could see the turbans of the men, and their khaki pantaloons billowing over their boots. Most pathetic, along that lonely track, were the children, several of whom had been separated from their parents (if indeed their parents had not been killed in the shelling).