“The real reason, dammit.”
“You’re hurting me.”
“Of course I’m hurting you. Come on, goddammit, talk.” He squeezed.
“Ahhhhhhhh!”
A cock crowed and Trewitt looked nervously about and saw no movement, though a goat in a pen down the way seemed to stir. He knew he’d better get on with it. In a few minutes this place’d be crawling with people.
“Why, why?” he bellowed in righteous fury.
“Ahhhh. Let me go, please. Don’t hurt me no more.”
Trewitt relaxed his grip a bit. “Next time I break it. Why’d they kill the old man? Why?”
“He ask after Ramirez.”
“Okay. So?”
“The story they tell is that Oscar Meza set Ramirez up to take over his place. And here’s this old gringo asking questions. And Oscar no like the gringos and he no like the questions.”
“Oscar?” said Trewitt.
“Yes. Let me go. Oh, please, mister, it hurts so bad.”
Trewitt almost did. He was exhausted and he was running low on energy and purpose. But his fury boiled up again darkly.
“No, goddammit, there’s more.” There had to be. He gave the Mexican another jolt.
“Ohhhh. No, I swear. On Jesus, on the Virgin. He kill me if he finds out.”
If there wasn’t any more, then Trewitt was in big trouble. Next step? He had no next step. This wasn’t an intelligence operation, it was a gang war. He’d stumbled into the middle of it, and now the whole Mexican underworld was after him. Or was the youth lying?
He tried to think of what one of the old cowboys would do in his place. Chardy, a hero, a pro, an operator’s operator. What would they do? Maybe the kid was lying; maybe he wasn’t. There’d really only be one way to make certain, and that would be to take him all the way. Put him on the black edge of death and see what he said.
Trewitt knew in an instant that Chardy would be capable of a higher brutality here, for wasn’t the other side of bravery just the numb capacity to hurt and feel no guilt? Suppose now, suppose a Chardy broke the kid’s fingers, both hands, then his kneecaps, then his nose, all his teeth, then his wrists, and finally the kid broke. And this Chardy-type then used the dope he got from the kid and turned it into a real coup. Became a hero. A legend would grow, a reputation; maybe a career would blossom. But nobody, least of all Chardy, would remember the hurt youth, humiliated, debased, raped almost, in a gully in a scabby Mexican slum; the boy used, tossed away.
Weariness suffused Trewitt. His will vanished. “Ah, Christ,” he muttered, knowing he could hurt his victim no more. He felt the youth slip away.
“Go on. Beat it. Scram,” he said.
The young bartender fell back, rubbed his mouth and then his aching wrist and crossed himself quickly for deliverance.
“You should not do this,” said Miguel, perched on the lip of the gully. “You should make him talk.”
“Shut up. I cut your throat, little shit,” said Roberto, making a listless lunge that sent the younger boy scurrying.
“Go on, get out of here. Both of you.” For now Trewitt could not stand the sight of either of them.
Trewitt sat back in disgust and exhaustion. Next step? Departamento de Policía. And damned quick, before somebody from the mafia blew him away over the ownership of Oscar’s. Still, he dreaded it; it meant the coming to an end of a phase of his life. For surely he was done at the Agency; that much was clear — after a mess-up like this, there’d be no future.
It was also clear to him that he deserved to be done at the Agency. He simply was no good at this sort of thing — he hadn’t the hardness, the cunning, the fury. They never should have sent him; they should have sent somebody who knew what he was doing. He hadn’t even taken the Clandestine Techniques course out at The Farm in Virginia, a basic intro to the dark side of the Agency.
He wondered where the nearest Federal Police station was. Enough adventure for one day, and it was not even 6:00 A.M. He treated himself to a last smile for his own dumb folly — it was kind of funny, except for poor Bill — and set off in search of saner possibilities.
“Hey, mister,” somebody called — Roberto — “I tell you a lie.”
Trewitt turned. The youth stood with a taut look of defiance on his face. What, did he now want to mock Trewitt, or even, out of some Mexican macho thing, to fight him?
The younger boy lurked close at hand, eyeing the two curious antagonists, still hoping for a little action.
“Hey, mister,” said Roberto, “you got some money for Roberto?”
“Kid, I ought to—”
“’Cause, mister, Roberto thinks Reynoldo Ramirez is still alive. And he thinks he knows where he is.”
22
She wanted to walk.
“I just want to walk. Could we walk all weekend? I need the space — I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Sure,” Chardy said.
“I just have to walk. Do you understand? I want to be with you but I want to walk too. All right?”
“No, it’s fine. Show me this place. I want to see this place.”
She took him down Mass Ave to MIT and back again. They went up Garden Street, and she showed him Radcliffe. They got lost in the little places along Brattle. Then they went onto the campus, and walked among the red brick Georgian buildings, under the vaults of the trees.
“How was your week, Paul? Your trip?”
“Terrible. I don’t do anything. They won’t let me do anything. I just hang around Danzig, except when they’ve got him locked up — like now. How was your week?”
“I didn’t get much done. I didn’t make any progress. It was depressing. I’m glad it’s the weekend. I’m glad you’re here.”
The place was lousy with undergrads. They all dressed like hoboes in baggy, sexy rags, junk-shop clothes, insouciantly graceful. They seemed to Chardy like barbarians. Frisbees sailed all over the place, skimming the ground, bouncing. Some rock group sang an amplified tune called “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” from a speaker in a window.
“Look,” he said, “let’s sit down. Do you mind? You’ve really worn me out, all this trooping around.”
They found a bench and sat quietly for a long time.
“This is quite a place,” said Chardy lamely. “I always wondered what one of these places looked like. I went to college in a little town in Indiana. You could hear the grass grow. On Saturday night we used to hang out at—”
He stopped, because he could tell that she wasn’t listening.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.
“Look, something is wrong, I can tell.”
“I think what I like about this place,” she said, “is the safety. Paul, there are people here who never come out. They are troglodytes. They live totally interior lives. They spend forty years studying a certain molecule in an amino acid or a certain sixteenth-century Italian poet. It’s very safe. Nothing intrudes.”
Safe? Chardy looked out on the crowd scene before them.
“Johanna—”
“Paul,” she went on, “I get so scared sometimes. I lie there and I think of all the things that could happen. I think of him, of Ulu Beg. I think of the Kurds, a lost people. And I think of us, and how we’re so responsible for it all, how we tie it all together, and how we haven’t really done anything. Sometimes my mind gets going so fast I can’t get it settled down. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. Paul, I can get very crazy. You have no idea how crazy. I can act very strange.”
He turned to touch her but saw she was not agitated. In fact, he’d never seen her so calm.
“Paul,” she said suddenly, “teach me something. Will you? Help me.”