The Second Sight, page 53
“Inside?” Yeho said. “How can they be inside?”
“If you lived in a house built into the side of a mountain,” Christopher said, “and you used it as a place to interrogate people you had kidnapped, and it had a front door and a back door that everyone could see, what would you do?”
“I’d make a hidden door, a secret way to get out.”
“Or in,” Christopher said. “A tunnel. Ja’wab, I want to talk to you again an hour after sunrise. Go back now. Yeho and I are going to get up higher, where we can see the house and wait for the sun to come up.”
3
CHRISTOPHER CHOSE A LOOKOUT POINT A MILE OR TWO UP THE ROAD. It commanded a view of the back of the villa. The snow squall was slackening; Christopher put the Doberman outside and told it to guard the car.
Yeho unzipped an airline bag and handed Christopher a Glock pistol. “Take this,” he said. Christopher made no move to accept the weapon. “Take it,” Yeho repeated. Christopher did so, and worked the action to make certain it was unloaded. Yeho handed him two clips of ammunition, one of ordinary size and the other twice as long. “In the regular clip are all copper rounds, the ones that expand after hitting the target. I know you hate guns even though you’re such a good shot, but do me a favor and load it. I want to be able to sleep without worry.”
Christopher shoved the shorter clip into the pistol, worked the slide and the safety, and placed it on the passenger seat beside him.
“You can sleep first,” he said.
“Okay. Here,” Yeho said, handing over a large buff envelope. “It’s the sunbathers.”
There wasn’t enough light to look at photographs and Christopher did not want to use the flashlight, so he dropped the envelope on top of the pistol. Yeho stretched on the backseat—he could do so without discomfort—and began to snore.
At dawn Christopher got out of the car and located the mas on the lower horizon. This was no easy task even with nine-power binoculars. Like the rest of the landscape, the house was floured with last night’s snow, and from Christopher’s vantage point, two miles distant or more, the part that could be seen against the low horizon looked like a heap of rubble left by an avalanche. Using Yeho’s map to measure distances, he located and memorized a dozen landmarks in a semicircle around the mas. As the sun, rising to his left so that it threw visible shadows, grew stronger, he watched the snow melt. After about twenty minutes he saw what he was looking for—a dark, unnaturally square spot where the snow melted faster than elsewhere because there was air beneath it rather than earth and rock. This was the entrance to the tunnel. A clearly discernible track led to it from the road.
Something moved at the edge of Christopher’s field of vision. He put the glasses on the object. It was Tammuz, one of the Ibal Iden, rising up out of the scrub where he had lain hidden throughout the night. Hassan Abdallah and the others had virtually stepped over him on their way inside.
Yeho drove. As the car moved slowly down the steep road, shocks jittering on the washboard surface of the road, Christopher opened the envelope and began to look at the thick sheaf of large photographic prints inside.
“You were right about something else,” Yeho said. “It’s truly amazing how many pictures these photographers take. They shoot everyone. Out of maybe ten thousand slides we found twenty-five shots of our friend and his wife. In about a dozen of those they’re talking to other people, or just in proximity to them. We didn’t know any of them. How about you?”
Christopher shuffled the prints. Beach scenes: umbrellas, blankets, soft drink bottles, sand castles. All the human subjects were nude. The photographs, taken mostly through long lenses, were slightly distorted, but faces and bodies were sharp enough: Hassan Abdallah, hairy and stringy, and his Genevese wife talking in a beach café to a bloated man with his arm around a stout woman; chatting to a slimmer couple by a beach umbrella; playing volleyball with flaccid breasts and penises flying. There were also a dozen candid shots of what seemed to be an intense conversation with a well-preserved woman in her fifties. It was obvious that she had possessed a lovely figure when young; even now it photographed beautifully, which was why the photographer had kept the camera on her for such a long sequence. In one particularly artistic frame, the woman had thrown her head back in order to inhale deeply from a cigarette, inflating, as it seemed, her large, girlishly uptilted breasts.
It was Maria Rothchild.
“You dwell on that one,” Yeho said, watching out of the corner of his eye. “Are you admiring the cantaloupes, or do you see something else?”
“I know this woman,” Christopher said.
Through the windshield, he saw Ja’wab waiting at the appointed spot beside the road ahead, and got out of the car before it stopped moving.
4
THE DARK, WINDOWLESS ROOM INSIDE THE MAS WHERE ZARAH WAS being held had walls of unplastered rock and a concrete floor. She knew this much from having explored the space around her with her bare feet. She was naked, handcuffed to the head of the iron cot on which she was lying. Her cell was so cold and damp, and such a good place for the rats she thought she heard scampering in the darkness, that she supposed that she was in a cellar.
A bosomy middle-aged woman in a thick sweater and a tartan skirt opened the plank door and turned on the feeble French light bulb that dangled from the ceiling. She checked Zarah’s handcuffs to make sure they were still locked, then leaned against the rough wall and looked her up and down.
“Are you all right?” she asked in brisk Oxbridge English.
“I have to go to the toilet,” Zarah said.
“Of course you do, you poor thing. It’s been hours.”
The woman’s tone was filled with womanly solidarity, as if she herself had often been handcuffed naked to a bed in a frigid dungeon while longing to urinate, and only the two of them could understand the feeling. She freed Zarah’s left wrist, snapping the empty cuff back on to the frame of the bed, and set a galvanized bucket closer.
“It’s more comfortable if you don’t sit all the way down,” she said.
Zarah, crouching over the bucket, tried to turn her back, but this was impossible.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” the woman said. “I took care of an invalid husband for many years. I am beyond disgust.”
“Lucky you.”
The woman smiled, very brightly. “You sound like your mother.”
“You knew my mother?”
“We were at school together.”
“What school was that?”
“Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Connecticut.”
“Is that where you learned to talk like that?”
“This is a very strange conversation, Zarah. Do you always try to catch people you’ve just met in lies?”
“It depends on the circumstances. What name did my mother know you by?”
“Maria,” the woman said. “Maria Custer.”
“I’m sorry,” Zarah said. “Mother never mentioned that name.”
She pushed the bucket away but remained crouched by the head of the bed. It was that or lie down on the bare straw mattress; the cuffs were too short to permit standing up. She was clear-headed, even exhilarated. The effects of the Versed that had been injected into her neck at the moment of capture had worn off.
“You don’t look like your mother,” her jailer said in a conversational tone. “But then, who ever did? Paul Christopher is your father?”
“That’s right.”
“You resemble him. He’d do anything for old men when he was young. But you can’t really be in love with a freak like David Patchen, can you?”
Zarah said, “You don’t really sound like a friend of the family, you know.”
The woman laughed again, evidently delighted by Zarah’s spunk. “Oh, but I’m not; I never was more than a useful acquaintance.” She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and produced a pack of French cigarettes. She lighted one with a match, inhaled so deeply that the paper crackled, and blew the acrid smoke out through her nose. After this one prodigious drag she flicked the long stub of the caporal into the bucket.
“Anyway I’m glad to meet you,” she said. “You may think, considering the circumstances, that it would have been better if we never met.” She lifted an eyebrow, waiting for Zarah to say something, but she did not. The woman shrugged and continued. “All I can tell you is, I did my best to prevent it when you were still a tadpole. But Cathy wouldn’t listen.”
She handed Zarah her clothes. “Now you’d better get dressed. I’m sorry about the enforced immodesty, but we had to check out your garments. Your father once caught a Russian spy, who just happened to be his best friend, by loaning him his raincoat—an Aquascutum, of course; Paul would never have been so uncouth as to wear a Burberry. It had a bug sewn into the hem. Did anyone ever tell you that story?”
“No.”
“Well, now you know. There are so many stories about your father. He was the best ever at what he did, a member of the all-time Outfit backfield. I’m sure David has told you that. Question is, are you really your father’s daughter?”
Zarah said, “Can I get dressed now? It’s cold in here.”
“I know. And the stones make it seem colder than it is. Sorry. It was the men who undressed you. I would have done it myself, but I was totally occupied with David. He’s a very difficult man. Were you insulted in any way?”
“I was searched.”
“But not harmed?”
“It’s hard to remember. My head was swimming.”
“Allah is merciful.”
“Does Allah have something to do with this situation?”
The woman laughed at this new defiance. “No.” She smiled broadly. “All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, nothing. Much older gods than him are at the bottom of this. Now turn your back, please, while I unlock the handcuffs.”
Zarah felt the muzzle of a pistol pressed against the base of her skull, on the exact spot where the Versed had been injected. She got into her underwear, skirt and sweater. The pistol remained pressed against her head, following her every move. She expected to feel the sting of another injection at any moment, but this did not happen. When she was fully dressed the woman cuffed her ankles together, then turned her around. She had put the pistol away, probably in the back of her tartan skirt because Zarah could not see its outline from the front. She grasped Zarah’s jaw and gently turned her face this way and that.
“Do you know what I think, Zarah?” she said. “I think we’re going to be great friends. We have a lot more in common than you may realize.”
Zarah did not speak or make a gesture. Her hands were free now; she knew that she could overpower this woman, kneel on her back, break her neck, take her weapon. It was the wrong time.
“Do you?” Zarah said. “Do we?”
“Oh, yes. You’re going to be astonished at what a long way we go back, you and I. I may have been the first person to know that you were coming into the world. And that’s not all. Give me your hand.”
Zarah complied. The woman pressed something into her palm, a piece of paper folded into a very small square. Zarah unfolded it. It was the other half of the hundred dollar bill that Barney Wolkowicz had given her ten years before when he said goodbye to her under the Ja’wabi date tree, on the road to Tinzár.
5
“IT CANT BE DONE IN THE DARK,” YEHO SAID. “YOU SHOULD WAIT until dawn tomorrow. It has to work the first time. There’ll be no second chance.”
He had just heard Christopher’s plan for attacking the mas at nightfall and rescuing the prisoners.
“Dawn tomorrow is almost twenty-four hours from now,” Ja’wab said. “If what Paul says about this woman is true, if she’s out for revenge, they may both be dead by then. We have to go in as soon as it’s dark.”
“People like Hassan Abdallah get away in the dark,” Yeho said. “If he runs away through his tunnel you’ll lose him.”
“Then we’ll go in now, in daylight.”
“If you do that you’ll lose your people,” Yeho said. “All of them, maybe. Hassan is not alone. He has lookouts, weapons, hostages. I know you want to save Zarah because to you she’s one of the Ja’wabi. But if you save her life and let Hassan get away, all the Ja’wabi may die a year from now or ten years from now. She will have died for nothing. Your people will have died because you didn’t think about them. Remember what this operation is all about. The objective is to capture Hassan Abdallah. He’s your enemy, not some hysterical female with an old grudge against Patchen and Christopher. She’s irrelevant; shoot her and forget her. He’s a lunatic, a Nazi, a carrier of disease. Paul, remind him.”
“Ja’wab remembers all that,” Christopher said. “It isn’t just the woman and what she might do. You should remember who Patchen is. If we don’t go in now we may be brushed aside. The Director of the Outfit has disappeared in France. What if that’s on television this evening? What if the French police come in? What if the Outfit decides to send in an assault team to rescue him? Then everybody inside the house will die, and we’ll never see Hassan Abdallah again.”
“You’re a thinker,” Yeho said. “A real thinker. I admire that. I understand all the risks, maybe better than you. But wait for the right time. What difference can a few hours make?”
Christopher was kneeling on the wet road beside Patchen’s Doberman, examining the battery pack and radio receiver riveted to the leather strap around the dog’s neck.
“My friend, forget about fancy dog collars,” Yeho said. “This is no time for bright ideas. Don’t put into the soup kettle something new and complicated at this late hour. Just go inside when it’s dark and kill them all. Except Hassan.”
Christopher stood up with the collar in his hands. “I hear you, Yeho,” he said.
“Hearing is not enough,” Yeho said. “I hope you’re listening to me. Forget gimmicks. This is a cave we’re dealing with, and the mentality of the cave. We’re in the Stone Age with this murderer, so fight him with stones.”
6
PATCHEN KEPT HEARING MARIA ROTHCHILD’S VOICE AND SMELLING the smoke from her stinking Gauloises Bleues cigarettes, but he knew these sensations were only a dream. In reality he was floating in a sampan on the River of Perfumes, listening to a tinny phonograph record of a girl singing in Vietnamese. Vo Rau translated the lyrics: “She says that God is the smallest thing in the universe, so small that he cannot be imagined; he does not wish to be imagined, so he fills the sky with the stars that are his uncountable thoughts and we look not at the place where he is, but at the places where he has never been.” Patchen nodded sagaciously; this much of the truth he had already perceived. How beautifully the girl sang, how the river smelled of the flowers that turned its torpid waters into perfume, how much like his own mind and voice were the mind and voice of Vo Rau! It was uncanny.
Someone seized Patchen’s lower lip and twisted. The pain changed his idea of where he was. Maria Rothchild said, “Wake up, David.” His right eye focused, briefly, and he glimpsed Maria’s face. A second later he was back in Vietnam; evidently it was midday, because the sun was almost unbearably bright. The phonograph started up again. Vo Rau murmured, “Now she is singing about war.” Someone twisted Patchen’s lip again. Maria’s voice said, “What is your name?” Patchen replied, “Patchen, David S., 041167, second lieutenant, USMCR.” His vision cleared completely this time. The woman before his eyes was Maria Rothchild, no longer young and speaking with a different accent, as though like one of Gertrude Stein’s characters she had come to Europe to cultivate her voice. She had the angry face of someone who has made herself ill with politics. Beyond her looming figure Patchen saw a television camera with its blinding lights, and beyond that, Zarah Christopher in shackles. “David, listen,” Maria said. “David, where are you?” She twisted his lip again. “Judging by the personnel,” he replied, “Hell.” Maria went on talking to Patchen in an urgent British voice. He didn’t bother to listen because he was straining to hear what Vo Rau, who had been joined in the sampan by Christopher, was saying. They were speaking a language he did not understand. It did not sound like Vietnamese.
Hassan Abdallah, wearing a Palestinian shawl drawn across his face in the presence of his prisoners, took Patchen’s blood pressure and listened to his heart through a stethoscope. He shined a flashlight into his right eye. “He’s telling us nothing,” he said in Arabic. “Something is wrong.”
He aimed the beam of the flashlight into Patchen’s other eye and recoiled. “What is this?” he cried, ripping the false eye from its socket and throwing it to the floor. He smashed it with his heel and found among the shards a tiny transmitter and the battery, no larger than a fish scale, that operated it. “Why wasn’t this found before he was brought here?” he cried. “Put it in water at once! I want four men outside immediately to sweep the area for surveillance. If you find anyone, bring them to me for questioning. Bring two if you can.”
Zarah had been given no more Versed, or any other drug, since Maria came for her. She knew that this meant that her captors intended to kill her, because she saw, heard, and understood everything and they did not seem to care. Hassan slapped Patchen’s face. Maria put a comforting arm around Zarah’s shoulders. Patchen was counting in German, “Eins, zwei, drei, VIER!” Maria said, “Why is he doing that? He doesn’t speak German.” Zarah shrugged. Maria had been questioning her about Patchen’s every word and movement for more than an hour now. It was obvious that Patchen was not reacting to Versed as they had expected. He displayed the euphoria that was one of the drug’s effects but not the usual cooperativeness and urge to confess. When he talked at all he babbled nonsense, quoting long passages from books, reciting lists of wines, conversing with unseen companions about baseball, but saying nothing useful.
“Can you give him more?” Maria asked.
“Only if you want to kill him.”
“Not yet,” Maria said.
