The Second Sight, page 49
“The whole thing is dangerous. We knew that from the start. But not as dangerous as letting Hassan Abdallah do what he wants to do.”
“All right. I’ll use another word. It’s foolhardy. If you’re with David they won’t just grab him. They’ll take you, too. They can’t do anything else.”
“I understand that.”
“Understand what?”
“That I may be in captivity for a while.”
“With no certainty that you’ll ever be released and the knowledge that the people who are holding you can kill you any time they like. Or not kill you. They’ll assume that you’re from the Outfit and nothing will make them believe otherwise. That means that you’re not human in their eyes. That you’re less than a Jew. Let me tell you something. You don’t understand what that’s like.”
Moonlight shone through the window, but there was no electric light. She groped for his hand. The bed she lay in, with the scratchy covers pulled up to her chin, was a low army cot. The floor and walls were made of splintery unplaned lumber; Spartan accommodations were part of the fun at Camp Panchaea. He leaned over slightly to give her his hand. She pressed it against her cheek for a moment, then released it.
“Turn off the flashlight for a moment,” she said. “I want to get dressed.”
Christopher went out into the hallway and waited. He was already wearing outdoor clothes because he had gone for a long walk after his conversation with the O. G. In a surprisingly short time Zarah emerged, carrying a jacket and a flashlight of her own.
They went outside. Walking on the grass beside the gravel path, rather than on the noise-making stones, Zarah led him along the trail to the firing range. The target silhouettes at which the Ibal Iden had been firing their Glocks were still in place, a rank of bullet-riddled cartoons with the faces of Bambi and Yogi Bear and Elmer Fudd grinning in the moonlight. They sat down on a sapling bench.
“Was tonight the first you heard about Patchen and me?” Zarah asked.
“Yes,” Christopher said. “You mean they told you before you got here?”
“No. I thought I’d be with the others. But I had the impression, when they told me what they wanted me to do, that you knew all about it.”
“They said that?”
“No. They didn’t even suggest it. It was a feeling.”
“And that’s why you said yes without talking to me first?”
“No, that’s not the reason. But why should I have to talk to you first?”
“Because I’m your father.”
“True. But I’ve only known you in the flesh for a month. I’ve known the Ja’wabi all my life—longer, according to Lla Kahina. I said yes for them.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“I am the enemy of their enemies. What other reason do I need?”
Christopher shrugged and turned away. Zarah gripped his arm.
“Are you thinking that there’s some kind of Cathy game going on here?” she asked in a harder tone of voice. “That I’m trying to be like you, trying to duplicate what’s happened to you in the past?”
“Are you? I’m not a mind-reader.”
“And I’m not my mother.”
“I know that. But I remember my own mistakes. And if I’d told your mother how I felt twenty-five years ago—yelled at her, shook her, forbidden her to do some of the things she did—she might be alive today.”
“Is that what you think?” Zarah lifted her arm and turned toward him. Her coat, swinging with the movement, thumped against the bench. Christopher realized that she was carrying a pistol in the pocket. She completed the gesture, laying a surprisingly rough palm on his cheek. “Nothing you could have done would have made a bit of difference,” she said. “Mother got the life she thought she was destined to live and she lived it. It was the life she wanted. It made her happy. You must know that.”
“You’re very hard on her.”
“You’ve pointed that out before. But you haven’t said I’m wrong.” She tossed her head to shake her hair out of her eyes. “And it won’t do you any good to yell at me or forbid me to live my life, either,” she said. “I’m your daughter, but I’m a lot of other things too. And I’ll say it again—I’m not my mother.”
“Which part of you wants to go to the Riviera and get itself kidnapped by the Eye of Gaza?”
“That’s obvious. The Ja’wabi part. I want to help get Hassan Abdallah.”
“And kill him and the rest of the enemies of the Ja’wabi?”
“Yes,” Zarah said. “That’s right. All of them. Even if we are ten against ten thousand.”
“They may kill you instead,” Christopher said.
“I know that.”
“Are you at all afraid?”
She shook her head. “No.”
Christopher believed her; he had believed her grandmother before her.
The plan that the O. G., Patchen, and Yeho had agreed upon was one of the oldest of all ruses, and therefore one of the best. Patchen and Zarah, a beautiful girl many years younger than he was, would be seen together in Washington. Patrick Graham would be led to believe they were lovers, that Patchen had lost his head over her. Then they would go to the Riviera together. If Graham took the bait they were going to offer, he would get word of their whereabouts to the Eye of Gaza, and one or both of them would be kidnapped. The Ibal Iden would follow them, and before drugs could be administered or questioning take place, they would rescue them and seize the kidnappers. There were many other elements of the plan, but these were the essentials.
“You understand,” Christopher said to Zarah, “that plans almost never work as they’re supposed to, that even Yeho and the O. G. make mistakes, that you’re dealing with professionals and the Ibal Iden may not be able to follow you or rescue you, that you may disappear forever. That you may not die for a long time. That under the drug you will tell them what you and Ja’wab did in the desert. That they will go insane when they hear it.”
“I understand. And I hear what you’re saying to me. Except for the part about the Ibal Iden. Whatever may be wrong with anybody else, they won’t fail. Now, please. Enough.”
“All right,” Christopher said. “What do you want to know about Patchen?”
“Only one thing, really. Why do you trust him?”
“Because he is the only completely sane person I have ever known.”
“Sane? With those wounds?”
“Sane because of them, maybe. I didn’t know him before it happened.”
“Is it true you saved his life on Okinawa?”
Christopher was taken by surprise. “Who told you that?”
“Wolkowicz. He said somebody in Vietnam told him that you carried two wounded Marines back to your own lines under fire. And that one of them was Patchen.”
“It’s possible that he was one of them,” Christopher said. “I’ve never been sure. We were in the middle of a fire fight. It was dark. His face was blown away. He was delirious from shock and loss of blood. So was I; I’d been hit a couple of times. And then when I got to our perimeter one of our own sentries fired his Ml right into the man I was carrying in my arms. I don’t know to this day which one I was carrying when the sentry opened fire, because he shot me, too—the rounds went through the other man’s body and hit me. Then Patchen turned up in the next bed in Hawaii with his face in bandages. It seemed impossible, too much of a coincidence, that he could be the same man.”
“But you know he was.”
“Sometimes I think so. I don’t know for sure. Evidently Patchen thinks he was the one. I think he’s thought so from the start.”
“Then why, if you saved his life, did he hand you over to the Chinese?”
“Who told you that?”
“Barney.”
Christopher laughed, explosively. In the moonlight Zarah’s face was intense, solemn, filled with suspicion—but plainly not suspicion of Wolkowicz. “He said that Patchen handed you over to the Chinese to save your life,” she said. “He said both sides wanted to kill you because of what you had found out, and a Chinese prison was the one place on earth where the Americans, the Russians, and the Vietnamese couldn’t touch you.”
“Barney told you that?” Christopher laughed, the loud ha-ha and chortle that was so surprising coming out of a man of such composure.
“Yes, he told me that. Why is it so funny?”
“It’s funny,” Christopher said, “because it was Barney who did it, and those were his reasons. He was trying to save my life. And, of course, he succeeded.”
“Barney said that was Patchen’s reason. He said that Patchen thought he was saving your life by having you put into prison for life. He kept repeating the sentence: ‘Death with twenty years suspension of the execution at solitary forced labor with observation of the results.’ I thought it was the most horrible thing I’d ever heard of one person doing to another. Barney said, ‘Don’t blame him; he did it for love. It’s okay to hate him, but you can’t blame him.’ He sympathized. Why would Barney tell me that Patchen did it if he was the one who did it?”
“Barney was never one to take credit for good works,” Christopher said. “Whatever you may have thought then, whatever you may still suspect, what Barney told you was a lie. Not about the motive; that was the truth. But it was Barney’s motive. He was the one who crashed my plane in China, not Patchen. He was the one who gave me to the Chinese for safekeeping. That’s how he knew what he knew about how the traitor felt and why he did what he did. Barney’s lies were always versions of the truth. That’s why he was so good at what he did, and why he got away with it for such a long time.”
“Are you absolutely sure of this?”
“Of the basic facts, yes. No one was ever absolutely sure of anything beyond the facts where Wolkowicz was concerned. He had his own reasons for everything. No wonder you liked him so much as a little girl. So did Stephanie. She says he was the King of the Fibs.” Christopher grinned again, shaking his head in a gesture that could easily have been mistaken for affection.
“Are you going to be with me in France?” Zarah asked.
Christopher opened his eyes and looked at her. All resemblance to Lori and Cathy had vanished from her face and body. She was herself and no one else he had ever known.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
On their way back to the lodge, father and daughter stopped for a moment to look at the glassy lake, in which the gibbous moon and some of the brighter stars were now reflected.
“Does this lake have a name?” Zarah asked.
“Can’t you guess?” Christopher said. “Mirror Lake. As a boy I swam across it one night with your Grandfather Christopher and the O. G.”
“Why?”
“It was something everybody was expected to do. It was a bright night like tonight. All of a sudden a moose swam past us, I suppose Uncle Snowden or one of the other Euhemerians had it shipped down from Maine, and when it got out of the water it stood on the shore looking at us. You could see its reflection in the water, dripping wet, antlers and all, like a photograph of a painting.”
“Hubbard was a Euhemerian?”
“Your great-great-grandfather was a charter member—I don’t know how, because the first Christophers didn’t appear in North America until around 1700. Membership was by inheritance.”
“So you’re a member?”
“I guess I would be if the club still existed. Hubbard used to bring me deer-stalking in these woods.”
“You shot deer?”
“No. I’ve never killed an animal. We stalked them with bow and arrow. The idea was to get close enough to hit a buck with a blunt arrow.”
“Did you ever do that?”
“Once or twice. You have to be able to do it with your eyes closed and think the arrow to the target because the deer will see the movement of your eyelids and run away if you blink.”
“Like shooting a pistol. Fire and look.”
“Not quite. But almost.”
“Did Barney ever swim across the lake?”
Christopher shook his head. “I doubt it. He hated to swim. But he swam across a river in Taiwan once. It was full of crocodiles.”
“Crocodiles?” Zarah said. “Tell me.”
“Another time.”
“No. Now, please.”
“All right,” Christopher said. “Barney didn’t learn to swim until he joined the Army. A connection of ours named Waddy Jessup taught him how during the war, but Waddy had a sense of humor, so instead of teaching Barney the crawl, he taught him an old stroke called the trudgeon that nobody had used since the Spanish-American War. After the war Wolkowicz found himself in Taiwan on an exercise for trainees, fellows who had just joined the Outfit—mostly Ivy Leaguers. One of them was a Waddy type. He’d been on the swimming team at Yale just like Waddy, and when he saw Barney thrashing across the pool with his head way up out of the water it tickled him—the trudgeon looks just like the word sounds. The kidding went on for weeks, and on the last night in camp, when there was a farewell party and a lot of drinking, it came to a head. So Barney said, ‘I’ll tell you what, Bulldog, if you’re such a great fucking swimmer, how about racing me across the river and back for a hundred bucks?’ The Yalie accepted the bet. The others were all’ too drunk to remember the crocodiles, or maybe they thought Barney wouldn’t actually do it, but when they got to the river bank Barney jumped right in with all his clothes on and started swimming. There was a very strong current; the water was muddy. The kid stripped and jumped in after him, possibly with the idea of rescuing him, and just as he caught up to Barney, about halfway across, a crocodile pulled him under. Wolkowicz swam on, doing his trudgeon, turned around, and swam back. He’d been so busy pounding the water that he had no idea of what had happened. The others told him.”
“What did Barney do?”
“He said, ‘Okay, which one of you is holding his wallet?’ “
TWO
1
WHEN CHARLOTTE GRAHAM SPOTTED DAVID PATCHEN AND THE LOVELY young blonde having lunch together at the Age of Enlightenment, it did not occur to her that it was anything but an innocent encounter—Patchen obliging some old war horse of the Outfit’s (probably a European, judging by the clothes and manners of the glorious being who sat next to him on the banquette) by taking his daughter to a trendy restaurant and paying the bill with secret funds. How, she wondered, had Patchen even known about this place? Had Martha told him? Was this tête à tête between beauty and beast her reward? Charlotte’s eyes met the blonde’s; they exchanged brief strangers’ smiles. She decided to stop by Patchen’s table on her way out; it never did any harm to have a warm little chat on the fly with the head of the secret service in full view of a room filled with Washington climbers.
“She knows we’re here,” Zarah said to Patchen. “We’d better look like we’re in love.”
“Don’t you think she’ll guess we’re acting?” Patchen said.
“Not if our faces register emotion.”
“Which one?”
“They all look alike from a distance.” She leaned against him and took his hand. “Tell me, why do you believe that my father saved your life in the war?”
Patchen’s arctic face seemed to break up into a number of floes and then reassemble itself into a slightly different surface—refrozen but subtly fretted and fractured beneath the surface.
“Who told you about that?”
“Barney. Father says he’s never been sure whether you were the one he rescued or not,” Zarah said. “What about you? This is our chance to clear up the mystery. I’ll be the detective.”
Charlotte watched while Patchen talked and the beauty listened. It was clear from the expressions on both their faces that this was no casual meeting of strangers. Once or twice Patchen seemed to be on the point of tears. The girl took his hand, the useless one, and warmed it between both of hers. Then she whispered something into his ear and they left, arm in arm, before Charlotte could approach them.
“I must say it was very odd, seeing that creature being fondled by a girl like that,” Charlotte told Patrick Graham that evening as they changed for dinner. “It was altogether too Frankenstein-meets-Snow White. D’you suppose old David is having a bit of that delicious stuff on the side? It must be very dear.”
Patrick boomed out his reply; they were conversing across the length of the bedroom through the open doors of their dressing rooms. “You think he’d cheat on that sweet little wife of his? Come on.”
“He’s quite alone and fancy-free, you know. Martha’s gone back to Guatemala or wherever it is to rejoin her drunken Indians. She called me to say goodbye; I thought that was rather sweet.”
“Who is this sexy girl?”
“I have no idea. They’d never seen her before at the Age, and I’m quite sure they would have remembered if they had. To give you an idea of the type, the waiters all thought she was the ghost of Madeleine Carroll; they’re old movie fans, it’s part of their customer chat.”
Patrick Graham appeared in the doorway of his wife’s dressing room, tying the silk polka-dot tie from Sulka that was his trademark. “I’ll cause inquiries to be made,” he said.
They dined that night at Ristorante Cerruti, an unfashionable little place in Alexandria, because the people they were entertaining, a propagandist for the Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) guerrilla movement in Peru and her live-in collaborator, an unkempt National Geographic staff writer, were not interesting enough to invite home. Also, Graham adored the many kinds of peppery sausages that were the specialty of the chef, his old friend Giacomo Pazzo. He preferred soft food; early in his television career one of his capped teeth had broken off as he chewed a steak sandwich an hour before going on the air, and he had been cautious ever since. To their surprise, Patchen and the blonde arrived soon after the Grahams were seated and were shown to a corner table.
“I see what you mean,” Graham said.
Charlotte’s eyes sparkled with the joy of the born gossip. The couple’s behavior was as she had described it. They were utterly absorbed in each other. The Grahams could not, of course, hear what Patchen and Zarah were saying on the other side of the babbling crowd, but in fact they were discussing the way in which Ja’wab and Zarah had slaughtered the terrorists.
