“Of course.”
“Preferably outside the precincts of a network show.”
Danzig laughed. Yes, sensible.
“I’m free till noon, when I’ve got a seminar and a speech a few blocks away. Time enough?”
“More than enough, sir.”
“Sam, let’s dispense with the ‘sir.’ But I would appreciate it if you’d kneel and kiss my ring.”
Sam laughed at this standard Danzig line.
A few minutes later they strode through the Rockefeller Plaza entrance of the RCA Building into the brisk, dirty New York morning. People swirled by, and Danzig coughed once, dryly, in the air.
“My limo? All right, Sam?”
“Would you be offended, Dr. Danzig, if I said I’d prefer one of our cars?”
Danzig, for the first time, began to see the urgency behind Sam’s pleasant demeanor; the Agency didn’t want anything on tape it didn’t control.
The black Chevy drove aimlessly through the hectic Manhattan traffic, guided by a grim young man, next to whom sat Danzig’s bodyguard. In back, Danzig listened while Melman talked. Danzig held — and occasionally looked down at — the Skorpion shell.
“And so I think you’ll agree I’m somewhat understating the situation when I say we’ve both got problems,” Melman was saying. “And for once your problem and our problem are the same problems.”
Danzig looked at the shell. One penny’s worth of metal from the farthest corners of the earth, and everything had changed. He looked up, out the window. Gray buildings lurched by as the car jerked uncertainly through the traffic. New York, always such a festival of sensation. Too much data, too many patterns, too many details, nothing coherent. Washington was a slower, saner city; here you never knew what you were going to get.
But it all dropped away; it meant nothing. A bullet in this world, in this most violent of all the decades in the most violent of all the centuries, was the ultimate reality, and Danzig was a collector of realities.
Of course there were always risks, especially in the Middle East, all those zealots, the whole thing so unstable, those fanatics, those bitter exiles. It had been rumored, for example, more than once that the PLO or various of its factions or units had put a mission out to eliminate him during one of his trips; but nothing had ever come of it. Or here, too, in America, there were always risks: cranks, nuts, screwballs, loonies with preposterous grudges; you could never guard against the crazy. But all that was generalized, distant, statistically improbable. That was then; this was now. Were those windows bulletproof? Perhaps. And how do you bulletproof glass, really bulletproof it? Can’t the gunman simply get a bigger gun? And in these crowds of milling, insolent New Yorkers, angry and swarthy, could there really be this special man? Damn him, Melman had said a good man, a trained man. “We trained him ourselves, Dr. Danzig — that’s the tough part. He’s exceedingly competent. I’ll show you the files.”
No, Danzig had not wanted to see the files.
He looked again at the cartridge case and realized that while he had authorized airplanes to fly on missions in which so many tons of bombs were dropped on so many square miles in a certain North Vietnamese city, in full awareness of what statistically must ensue, he had never in his life held in his fingers this smallest common denominator of statecraft: the bullet.
He imagined one striking him, right now, through the glass, in the head. A blinding flash? A sense of surprise, of enveloping darkness? Or would the lights just blink off?
“It’s not going to do us any good if he gets you; it’s certainly not going to do you—”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, I’d like to think we can work together on this thing.”
Danzig didn’t say anything. He stared gravely ahead.
“To begin with, we’ve got some suggestions.”
Danzig remained silent.
“First, of course, your cooperation. That is, your silence. If the whistle is blown, if the media are brought in — God only knows what sort of a circus this thing could become. And it wouldn’t make you any the safer. In fact, it might put you in more danger.”
Danzig could see it: pools would be formed all across America, especially in the liberal areas, though also in the South and the Southwest, where he was also hated. When will the Kurd get Danzig? Money would be wagered. It would end up on the nightly news.
“Yes,” he said.
“Good. Then, most importantly, we’ve got to cut down his access to you. If you stay still, you can be protected. If you don’t, then you can’t. You’ve got to cut down on your activities.”
“I make my living that way. I’m booked for months. For years.”
“Dr. Danzig, it’s—”
“Yes, I know. Of course I’ll cut down. I have to. But there are certain commitments that — damn, why did this have to happen?”
“Then, of course, beef up your security.”
“Yes.”
“And lastly—”
“Yes?”
“Well, we do have something of an advantage in this matter. We happen to have a man who knows this Kurd, who worked closely with him in fact. He even trained him. He was the Special Operations Division officer who went into Kurdistan in ’seventy-three.”
“Yes?”
“His name is Chardy. He—”
“Chardy? My God, Chardy! I remember. He was captured, spent some time in a Soviet prison.”
“Yes.”
“Chardy,” Danzig said again, turning the name over in his mind.
“The fact is, Chardy knows Ulu Beg, how he looks, how he thinks; that makes him immeasurably valuable. And he used to be a pretty good officer in a shooting situation.”
“Well, I certainly hope this doesn’t come to that. Is he going to run the effort to capture this Kurd?”
“Not exactly. He’s no policeman. No, we had something else in mind for Chardy, something to take greater advantage of his knowledge.”
“Yes?”
“We want to place him with you.”
“Good God!” Danzig coughed. “With me? I just don’t believe this is happening.”
15
They discovered quickly that he was dead. Reynoldo Ramirez, killed by assailants in his own establishment in the prime of life, the newspaper said. What assailants? The newspaper was silent; so was the Departamento de Policía.
“They’ve been paid off,” Speight said ominously.
Come on, thought Trewitt, but he didn’t say anything. He had taken an almost instant dislike to Nogales — to Mexico. Blue and pink slum shacks hanging on the stony hillsides over a cheesy turista section of souvenir stalls, bars, dentists’ offices and auto-trim shops. He hated it. A different quality to the air even, and the jabber of language that he could only partially follow did not ease his anxiety. Trewitt just wanted to get out of there.
But Old Bill sniffed something.
“I want to see Reynoldo Ramirez’s grave,” he said. “I want to know the man is dead.”
Oh, God, thought Trewitt.
But they had hailed an Exclusivo cab and journeyed to the grave site. The place nauseated Trewitt. No clean Presbyterian deaths in Mexico: the cemetery was a kind of festival of the macabre, primitive and elemental. Crosses and sickly sweet flowers and hunched, praying Virgins painted in gaudy colors. And skulls.
Trewitt shuddered. He’d never seen the naked thing before, and here it was lying in the dust. Or rather, they: bones and heads everywhere, spilling out of vaults in the dusty hills, clattering out of niches and trenches. A wind knifed across the place, pushing before it a fine spray of sand that stung Trewitt’s eyes and whipped his coat off his body like a flapping cape. He leaned into it, tasting grit.