This was reality, geopolitical reality. Danzig orchestrated it; it was his legacy to the nation. He had the strength, the fierceness of will to do so. If it meant that he himself had to become ruthless and cynical, feeling the huge weight of having to betray so many times, then that was a part of the price too. In the long term he knew himself to be a moral man, perhaps the highest moralist, because he acted on behalf of the greatest number of people over the greatest length of time.
And if men like Chardy, like Ulu Beg, like the Agency’s generation of cowboys had to be used up in the same process, then that too was a part of the price; they were not innocent victims and should not be mourned — suffering was their duty, their contribution. Their ignorance of the mechanisms that destroyed them in no way qualified them for pity or martyrdom. They took their wages and they died.
But damn them! Of course they didn’t understand, or wouldn’t; of course they’d take it all personally and insist on mad notions of honor and vengeance, and travel half the globe to strike back. And so here was Danzig’s newest geopolitical reality — and his smallest: a big man with a beard and a cheap corduroy suit who moved like an athlete and had a boy’s unformed rhythms of speech. And his counterpart, equally fascinating, a Kurd, born in the wrong century, now hunting him. It was a paradigm of the entropic absolute — fragmentation, randomness, strangeness, disorder, dissipation of energy, in a world too desperate to entertain such extravagances. The three of them locked crazily, linked by coincidences, odd twists, unreal developments, veering toward their strange fates. It was Kafkaesque, Nabokovian, Pynchonian, a ludicrous Master Plot from the crazed imagination of some Modern Novelist high on drugs and paranoia.
Yet Danzig, in all this, could not deny that it filled him with a certain excitement. There was that same rush, that dizzy, swooping, immensely satisfying sensation of being at center again.
“Would you shoot him to save my life?” Danzig asked. “I do have a right to ask.”
“It’ll never come to that,” Chardy said laconically. “There’ll always be people around: backup teams, men with rifles and scopes, with infrared gear, with dogs. The works. You have your own bodyguards too. Finally, after all that, there’s me.”
“Mr. Chardy, I have probably told more lies in good causes than any man on this planet. And so I recognize a lie in a good cause. And I have just encountered one.” Danzig smiled, pushed ahead merrily. “It’s not at all difficult to concoct a scenario in which he is raising his weapon and I am defenseless and you have — a pistol, I presume?”
“Yes.”
“Are you any good with it?”
“Pistols are very hard to shoot with any accuracy.”
“Very reassuring, Mr. Chardy. In any event, there you are. He’s a man you’ve fought with, hunted with, trained, whose sons you knew. And I am a fat old Jewish professor with a bit of the heavy Polish about me and I show up on television a lot, was once upon a time an important man and to this day remain controversial. I am not remotely humble and can be numbingly unpleasant to be around for long periods of time. I once had a date with a movie starlet, I expect doors to be opened and other people to stop talking when I open my mouth. Those are your choices, Mr. Chardy. You have less than a second to decide.”
He watched Chardy turn the question over in his mind.
“I’d fire,” said Chardy eventually.
“You have not convinced me. I believe I have a right to be convinced.”
“I’d shoot, that’s all.”
“Even though to you he is the victim and I am the villain?”
“I never said that.”
“It’s true, though; I can sense it. I have very good instincts in these matters.”
Chardy seemed to grow irritable.
“I said I’d shoot. It’ll never come to that. I just know it won’t.”
“Now that is reassuring,” Danzig said. “That is reassuring indeed.”
Yet, whatever Chardy’s doubts, his interesting mesh of alliances and confusions, Danzig had to admit that in the capacity of bodyguard he functioned well. Chardy was at his side the whole time, a step ahead in crowds, though things had been set up in such a way as to minimize passage through public areas. The hotel, for example, was selected because it did not begin until the twelfth floor, being mounted atop a marble shopping center across from the Water Tower on Michigan Avenue. Where but America — and certain Arab countries — could such a gawky extravagance be conceived, much less executed? The wealth of the Midwest — the sheer, staggering accumulation of capital — always stunned Danzig, new to wealth himself, though he trained himself not to show his shock.
Chardy seemed equally unimpressed — or perhaps he was too busy. He looked at faces and stayed close, taking his leave only when security was tightest — closed rooms, Chicago cops, strange men with radio jacks in their ears, like Secret Service, but spiffier, and therefore probably a private service, rented at government expense for the weekend. Melman was really throwing the money around on this. God, it made Danzig happy to imagine Melman at an Agency budget committee meeting, bluffing his way through. But Chardy: Chardy was always there, in his one glum suit.
“Don’t you ever get tired, Mr. Chardy?”
“I’m all right.”
“I would think for a man of your special talents, your flamboyant background, this would be very boring.”
Chardy was a robot today.
“No, sir.”
“They warned you to keep your conversations with me to a minimum, didn’t they?”
“No, sir.”
“Mr. Chardy, you are a poor liar. You do not even try to disguise the falsehood.”
Chardy’s face began to show irritation. Danzig had heard the man had a furious temper. Hadn’t he once beaten up some high Agency official? Chardy stewed in silence, however, disappointing Danzig.
“Chicago is your home, isn’t it?”
Chardy looked around at the lush suite, the huge bed, the silks, the David Hicks wallpaper and carpet.
“Not this Chicago,” he said.
Danzig gave his seminar on international relations to the American Management Association on Wednesday morning in a banquet room, and then was driven to the University of Chicago, where he addressed a hundred graduate students after a luncheon; and then back to the Ritz-Carlton for a cocktail party with the steering committee of the Association, where he was charming and gossipy and wicked and where Chardy stood around like a jerk, awkward but always close; and then on to the banquet for his formal address, a hell-raiser on Soviet domination; and then another hotel party, a more intimate one with the Management Association’s board of directors; and then to his room to dictate into a recorder for an hour. An exhausting day, much photographed, talked at, pressed upon by the occasional autograph seeker, yet he remained by and large pleasant through it all, because of the adulation he’d received, which he loved, and because of the $30,000 he’d just earned.
“A busy Wednesday, Mr. Chardy.”
“Extremely.”
“We leave for the airport at ten.”
“I know.”
“No Kurds.”
“Not this time.”
“You’ve got that pistol?”
“I do.”
“Good, Mr. Chardy.”
Everywhere Danzig went it was the same. That’s what TV did, Chardy guessed.
Everybody was drawn to Danzig. They tracked him, came to him, were mesmerized by him. And Danzig fed on it, he grew in it.
And these weren’t teenagers either, but grown men from the world of business, who made decisions, hired other men, fired them. They inhabited a Chicago Chardy had never seen, and their confidence, their sense of rightful, silver-haired place, irritated him. Most had lovely younger wives too, girls who were beautiful and distant and did not see him except by accident.