Or he wept in confusion. There were so many things about it he didn’t understand even now. Some aspects of it just didn’t add up. He’d break it down and put it together again in a hundred different ways and it still never made sense. It was like one of those awful modern novels that everybody hated except three critics, full of fragments of plot, surrealistic moments of great vividness, odd discordant voices, textures achingly familiar but at the same time unknowable. He was not even certain what he did remember and what he did not; perhaps they’d used drugs on him. Whatever, it was all scrambled up; he could not get inside it.
Or he’d weep in rage. Punching walls was nothing new and once he’d broken his wrist. He dreamed of smashing heads: Speshnev’s, Sam Melman’s, his own. Them alclass="underline" the Russians, for destroying him; his own side, for the cold, detached fury they’d directed at him; buddies like Frenchy Short for never coming by, whatever the rules — though of course Frenchy could not have come by, for even then he was dead; Johanna, for confirming his vision of himself. And, of course, last and most: himself. Sometimes he looked for fights. A cold need for pain would haunt him; he’d head for Rush Street and throw himself on somebody’s girl, not caring for her at all; and the guy would have to challenge him and the guy would always have friends and Chardy would always wear a black eye for days, or lurch about with cracked ribs; he’d had three teeth knocked out — he wore an old man’s bridge now — and a bad laceration on his chin, which the beard hid.
Nuts. Chardy, you are nuts.
Yet now, lying in the bed in the black New England night, it suddenly occurred to him with swift joy that he had a kind of chance. For with Johanna, all things were possible, a whole universe of things.
He felt he could save Ulu Beg from Ver Steeg and Lanahan. He could even save Joseph Danzig. He could save Sam Melman. All of them linked together by events of the past, chained and doomed, but he could break the chain; he felt the power. Ulu Beg, last reported at the border, moving probably toward them. He’d save him, and bind her to him forever. He’d make Beg in a crowd coming in on Danzig, and he’d nail him with a tackle and calm him down; then he’d talk to them; he’d get it all straightened out, somehow.
It’s only been a week; there’s plenty of time left.
Ulu Beg, I’ll save you. He owed him, for not only had Ulu Beg brought him together with Johanna in the first place, seven years ago as now, he’d also, by allowing however accidentally his target to be known, virtually removed Johanna from the realm of interest of Miles Lanahan and Yost Ver Steeg and whatever other dark lords the two of them served. Chardy, whose importance seemed also to have diminished in the past several days, was for now free to travel on weekends and be with her, as he was now.
She moaned in her sleep, and shifted. He could not really see her, for the moonlight did not touch this corner of the room, yet he felt her: warmth, weight, sweetness of odor, a presence. Her arm warm and dry against his hand.
The telephone rang.
Chardy jumped at the noise, pulled himself up in the bed, and looked at his Rolex, which announced the hour of four.
Johanna stirred in the dark and seemed to swim for the telephone. He heard her speak briefly; then she turned.
“For you.”
He took the phone.
Miles said, “Chardy? What the hell are you doing there?”
“It’s the weekend, Miles. I can go anywhere.”
“Not anymore you can’t.”
Chardy waited, and finally the young man said in a breathless, unpunctuated sentence, “Trewitt and Speight in Mexico and we lost Speight somebody blew his face off with a shotgun behind some whorehouse in Mexico where he wasn’t supposed to be.”
Chardy closed his eyes at the image. Behind a whorehouse. Old Bill, who was always around.
“Paul,” Johanna said, “Paul, what is it?”
“Yost wants you down here. There’s an early flight into National from Logan. We’ll have somebody meet you.”
Old Bill. In Mexico? Now why kill him? What had he come across? Who did it — the opposition, some jealous boyfriend, gangsters, a hunter whose shotgun wasn’t on safe?
But there weren’t any accidents in this sort of game.
“Paul, that flight. You’ll be on it?”
“Yeah, sure,” Chardy said, feeling suddenly that things had just changed and that the safety of the bedroom in which he lay hidden just seconds ago was forever gone. It frightened him a little. And then he had another thought.
“Look, Miles, you better get some people down there to bring that kid in. I could go myself. Without an old hand like Speight, that kid could get himself in a lot of trouble.”
“Trewitt is missing,” said Lanahan coldly.
“I see,” said Chardy.
“He’s dead too, you know,” said Lanahan.
Chardy sighed. It was how these things worked.
“Yes,” he said, “yes, I suppose he is.”
17
Someone in the Dayton bus station had stolen his money.
Ulu Beg sat very still and tried not to panic. But without money he was dead. Any man in America without money is dead, but he would be deader than most, with no place to turn, no one to go to, and nothing but the Skorpion. He was still hundreds of miles from shelter.
They had given him a lot of money.
“By their standards you are a rich man. You could buy a Chevrolet car or a motorboat.”
“I do not desire a Chevrolet car or a motorboat.”
“Of course not. But remember, in America money is life. All things are possible for the man with money, all doors open, all women eager, all policemen friendly.”
He sat in a plastic chair in a bright waiting room and tried to reconstruct the last seven or eight minutes. The bus from Louisville to Dayton was late, held up in traffic in Cincinnati. There had been a rush to get off. He had been mostly among black people, emotional, and at the arrival gate much hugging and squeezing had occurred as families reunited. He pushed through into this main room, all pale plastic, shiny and new. A few policemen and many more blacks stood about, also airmen in their blue uniforms.
And that is when he felt the lightness in his pocket.
Now seven or eight minutes had passed. He knew it had to have happened as he pushed through the blacks. So: a black person.
He examined them, wondering if the thief had fled instantly, and thought not. His eye searched out the blacks. An old man, invalid, in huge overcoat, talking crazily to himself. A beggar? Two tough boys with mounds of hair dancing to radios in a corner. A dapper businessman sitting three seats away, reading a magazine. Or a fat old woman in a flowered hat.
He didn’t know what to do; he was helpless.
In the wallet, he had over $3,000. He could not go to the police. He ached at the loss of it.
He saw a third boy approach the two with the radios. They conferred quietly and then a ceremony began: one, then the other, slapped the outstretched hand, then clasped him by the wrist.
They were big young men in their late teens with unreadable faces and brown, blank eyes.
Ulu Beg stood, gathered his pack, and walked across the bus station to the three of them.
“You have a thing of mine. So give it back.”
“Say what, Jack?” They looked at him suspiciously.
“You have a thing of mine. Give it back. Then, no trouble.”
“What you talkin’ ’bout, man?”
“A wallet. A wallet is missing.”
“Don’t know no motherfuckin’ thing about no wallet.”
“My wallet. I take it back now, please. Okay. No trouble.”
“This dude lookin’ for some trouble.”
“You have my wallet,” Ulu Beg said.
“Jack, take your face outa here.”