“You have my wallet.”
“Some kind of crazy motherfucker. Man, he tryin’ for a trip to Disneyland.”
“Let’s get outa here. Crazy motherfucker make me nervous.”
“Let’s cut his ass up some.”
“No, man. He motherfuckin’ crazy.”
“You have my wallet.”
The three boys began to back away, confirming for Ulu Beg their guilt.
He followed them.
“Shit, man, you nuts.”
He followed them into the night.
They crossed a wide street under bright lights and headed toward a railway viaduct. They turned and walked up a small road that led up an incline.
“Hey, boy, we goin’ up here, you come along and we bust yo’ face.”
“My wallet,” he called.
He could make out their dark forms standing at the end of the road on a kind of crest.
“Those boys hurt you bad, mister.”
He had not seen the woman. She stood just a few feet away, under the bridge.
“They cut your face up. They make you walk with a limp for a long time. They even kill you.”
“But my wallet. They have my wallet.”
“Honey, ’less you got a million dollars in that wallet, you stay here. Don’t be no crazy fool.”
He could no longer see them. Had they escaped? Urgently he began a kind of run, there was nothing here except mud and cinders as the road climbed up to track level. He reached into his pack and felt the Skorpion. But then he wondered what would happen if he shot them with it. There’d be a huge commotion, an extravaganza, a mess.
He reached the tracks. On either side the lights of this bleak Ohio city rolled away. He could see tall buildings, all lit up, a mile or so away.
“Boy, you some kind of motherfuckin’ dumb.”
“Gonna cut yo’ ass bad, motherfucker.”
They were behind him. He turned. He saw a blade spring out.
“Cut his fuckin’ ass. Go on, man, cut his fuckin’ white ass.”
The boy with the knife came at him. He was the bravest, the meanest. He led with his blade, feinted with it.
“Come on, motherfucker, come on,” he shouted.
He flicked the blade toward the Kurd’s throat and Ulu Beg hit him with his open hand across the neck, crushing him to the ground. The blade clattered away. Something lashed into his head. One of the others had a strange fighting device of two stout sticks united by a short chain, and he’d just caught Ulu Beg above the right eye. He twirled it menacingly and Ulu Beg felt the swelling on his forehead.
“Gonna git you, motherfucker,” the boy said and Ulu Beg leapt under the weapon and caught the hand that held it, then hit the boy an upward blow in the throat, knocking him back coughing and gagging. The third boy raced down the tracks.
Ulu Beg went and took the wallet from the boy he’d hit in the throat. It was not his. The boy lay on the ground, moaning.
“Somebody take from me, now I must take from you,” he said.
He picked up his pack and went down the hill to the road.
“Baby, I didn’t think you was comin’ back.”
She startled him again.
“I was about to call a cop.”
“No. No. No police.”
His sudden fierceness frightened her. She stepped back and he turned.
“Baby,” she said, “you don’t want no police botherin’ you, you best not go walkin’ nowhere lookin’ like that.”
He felt blood running down his face from where the boy had struck him with the stick. He reached, wiped it away with the back of his hand. His hand was bloody. More blood came to his face.
“You banged up.”
He looked at her. She was in her forties, a solid-looking woman. She wore a wig and smelled of perfume.
“Help me,” he said.
“You get your wallet back?”
“No. Yes!” He pulled the boy’s wallet out of his pocket. He opened it.
“There is no money here,” he said.
“Where you get that?”
“From the boy.”
“You done took them three?”
“I knock them down, yes.”
“Honey, you best come home with me.”
18
Chardy arrived bleary-eyed, his nerves edgy, ready for a fight. He had adrenaline coursing through his veins by the quart, he could feel his eyes dilated painfully, his breath shallow and tense. In the old days, when you lost somebody you’d go in and kick some ass. It was one of the oldest, the best rules, a rule that would have helped Bill Speight — or any agent — in his last moment or two. You always got back, you always went them one better; it was all personal. There were no truces. And maybe a part of him felt some joy, though he’d never admit it. For here at last was a prospect of action.
But when he crashed into the office, expecting men loading magazines into exotic automatics, others looking at maps, still others chatting bitterly in corners, he found only Miles, sipping coffee.
“Where is everybody?” Chardy barked, at first furious that they’d left without him.
“Relax, Paul. Jesus, you look half-crazy.”
“You said it was an emergency, you said to get down here, you said—”
It occurred then to Chardy that he’d misread it all. Something in Lanahan’s amused eyes, also the absence of stale, smoked-out air in the room, the absence of cigarette butts. Lanahan lounged at Yost’s desk, as though trying it on for size and finding it fit nicely.
“Things have cooled. Considerably,” Miles said, the half-smirk on his face.
“I don’t—”
“Certain realities have set in. We got some news on Bill. We’ve doped it out. We’ve also got some orders from up above, declaring Mexico off-limits. And—”
“Where is he?”
“Where is who?”
“Come on, Miles. I smell Sam Melman in here. I smell Melman all over this place. Come on, Miles, where is he?”
“This is Yost’s operation, Paul. This is Yost’s office. You’d better get that straight.”
“I smell Sam in this, Sam’s a great one for cooling down, for taking it easy and slow, for not making any mistakes, for—”
“Paul, here are facts. Fact number one: the Mexicans have raised all kinds of hell. We have an informal agreement with them and part of it is that we don’t run covert operations in their country without clearing it first with them.”
“For Christ’s sakes, this wasn’t any operation. It was some old man and a kid—”
“We know that. But try to tell it to them. Look, it’s a delicate working arrangement: they let us have all kinds of latitude in Mexico City around the Soviet Embassy, which is the hub of a lot of KGB activity. We have to protect that freedom. They’re very kind to us; we make a lot of mileage off that kindness. All right?”
Chardy looked at him sullenly, unsure suddenly of a reply.
“Fact number two: oil. Oil talks in this world, loud and clear, and the Mexicans have tons of the stuff. So over and above anything on our level is that long-term issue. What they have and we need. We have to be very careful with them these days so that we can drive our Cadillacs around. Okay? We don’t call them wetbacks or spics or greasers or zooters. We treat them politely, on all levels. So we’re not going to bust in, shooting up some place when—”
“Kid, one — maybe two — of our people got clipped. Now in the old days—”
“It’s the new days, Paul. Fact number three: we know who killed Speight.”
Chardy looked at him.
“There’s no Iron Curtain involvement, no Middle Eastern involvement. It doesn’t have anything to do with Ulu Beg. There’s no connection. It was plain, ugly, stupid luck.”