The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  At the hospital I found Harley wide awake and bright-eyed, reading Hetek, a Budapest newspaper. He seemed to read Magyar as easily as Russian.

  I asked him how he was feeling.

  “A-number-one applesauce,” Harley said. “Waitin’ for the doctor to set me free.”

  “Good, because we’re on the two o’clock flight to Frankfurt.”

  “What’s in Frankfurt?”

  “Nothing except a connection to Dulles. We both need a little R and R.”

  To my surprise, Harley didn’t argue. He hardly had time to do so because in the next moment the long-legged Dr. Józsa Fodor arrived on the fly. Without a word of greeting to either of us she applied her stethoscope to the patient’s breast. Commanding him to take deep breaths, she tapped and sounded his chest and back for a moment or two, took his blood pressure, pressed his bare ankles with a fingertip to check for fluid.

  “You are no longer in fibrillation,” she told Harley. “Your heart rate and blood pressure are low, but back in the normal range. All this is thanks to electrical shock and drugs and it will not last. You should see a heart specialist as soon as possible. In America.”

  “Does that mean I can travel?” Harley said.

  “Today, if you wish, and I advise you to go immediately to America. But avoid situations that excite.”

  Dr. Fodor touched Harley’s rumpled newspaper with a forefinger and asked a question in Magyar. He replied in the same language, and being Harley, went on for a few more sentences. She smiled in surprise, a glowing transformation, and replied, also at length. I noticed for the first time that the doctor had freckles—strange in a darkhaired girl. I imagined her in love, arriving headlong at a tender rendezvous. She gave me a female sidelong glance as if intercepting my thoughts. I was as surprised by these stirrings within my disused body and imagination as she seemed to be by Harley’s idiomatic Magyar. I had not thought about a woman as a woman since I went to prison.

  Then, with a brisk handshake for Harley and a curt nod to me—was there womanly amusement in her eyes?—Dr. Józsa Fodor dashed away.

  I said, “What was all that Magyar about?”

  “You, mostly,” Harley said. “She wanted to know if you were the same big, tall fella she saw on American TV a couple of years ago.”

  Ah, fame again. I said, “Did you get her phone number?”

  “Yep,” Harley said with a lascivious grin. “How much is it worth to you?”

  Alas, nothing.

  SIX

  1

  There was nothing to be seen between Budapest and Frankfurt from the window of the Airbus. At thirty thousand feet the sunlight was brilliant, but an uninhabited continent may just as well have lain beneath the unbroken ceiling of clouds that sealed Central Europe from the winter sun. Down there, I knew, the world was the color of concrete, joyless and dank, and would remain so until June. No wonder the summer solstice had been such a fun day in northern Europe before Christian missionaries arrived from the sunny south. If priests had not driven sex underground, what would the north have been like? Would art have flourished in the absence of sexual repression? What about artillery and fortification? The Reformation? The Thirty Years’ War? The French Revolution? The final perfection of murder as blood sport at Verdun and Dresden and in the Gulag?

  In short, where would we be without Jesus? I had understood enough of the letter of Septimus Arcanus to make me wonder. What the Amphora Scroll told us, assuming that what I had read was a faithful translation of a document that had, in turn, been a faithful description of events, was this: Joshua ben Joseph had in fact existed, and had done the things the Gospels said he had done. Whether his acts were miracles or the result of clever manipulation by a Roman case officer was a matter of belief, so we were right back where we started from. It was entirely possible that the case officer who handled this particular operation made the common mistake of overestimating the importance of his own role. He could not possibly have overestimated the unintended consequences of a minor dangle project that he probably regarded as a lark. For the second time that day I was feeling something human move within me. First Józsa Fodor had made me remember passion. Now across centuries Septimus Arcanus was making me remember religious feeling. What a miraculous joke it would be on everyone if this letter from Jerusalem which seemed to cross out the Jesus story ended up by confirming it.

  Harley Waters, back from the door of death, slumbered restlessly at my side, talking Magyar in his sleep and dreaming, perhaps, of Marie Károlyi when she was young. Or, the old lecher, of Józsa Fodor as she was now.

  2

  The last person I wanted to encounter in Washington was Dr. Stephanie Webster-Christopher, so naturally hers was the first familiar face I saw after landing at Dulles. She was getting out of a taxi, great swollen purse like a sheep’s stomach slung over one shoulder, laptop over the other, hanger bag on wheels bumping along in her wake, bulging attaché case in her free hand.

  I tried to slip away, but Stephanie hallooed. I was looking straight at her, so I could hardly pretend I didn’t see or hear her.

  “Stephanie!” I said. “Coming or going?”

  “Going,” she said, bowed and unsmiling under the weight of her luggage. “That’s why I got out of the taxi.”

  Score one for the girls. Stephanie was a small woman and she always seemed to be in tip-top condition. She ran five miles a day, worked out at the gym, and for all I know, boxed. All in all she tended to expect more of herself physically than her body could deliver.

  I said, “Let me take those bags.”

  “Not necessary.”

  This was a two-word political autobiography of the giveno-quarter feminist that she was. Stephanie’s maladroit patterns of speech had been rather endearing when she was younger and prettier and softened by her love for her husband. They were less so now.

  “So,” she said, packing all the exasperation she seemed to feel into the little word. “Have you proved the negative?”

  “What negative is that, Stephanie?”

  “That Paul is not dead.”

  “Proved it? No.”

  She stared at me, expressionless. “What, then?”

  “I’ve heard some interesting stories, but I haven’t gotten close enough to take Paul’s picture.”

  “Where Paul is concerned there are always interesting stories and no one ever gets close,” Stephanie said. “Has it occurred to you that you’re creating false hope, and that that’s a very cruel thing to do?”

  She spoke forcefully. This drew knowing glances from other travelers as they hurried by. Clearly she had been thinking unkind thoughts about me in my absence. It was pointless to reply. Information was not what she was after, and no answer I could make would mollify her.

  “You might think in term of the peace of mind of Paul’s children,” she said. “Lori has nightmares about her father being back in a prison camp in China. Who knows what goes through Zarah’s mind since her father has already been presumed dead and come back to life once before in her lifetime.”

  Stephanie had a good loud voice and as she spoke a steady stream of total strangers, conditioned by a lifetime of watching television to be entertained while their attention was elsewhere, caught bits and pieces of her monologue as they hurried by. We must have sounded mighty like a husband and wife whose marriage was on the rocks.

  There was little I could say in my defense, since there was at least a chance that Paul was, in fact, back in a Chinese prison camp. This was a thought I had not permitted myself to have for several weeks. What a good psychotherapist Stephanie must be, to summon hidden thoughts to the surface in the way that she did.

  I said, “Sorry about all that, Stephanie. Where are you off to?”

  “A conference in Cancun. How long will you be in town?”

  “I’m not sure. When will you return?”

  “What, so you can be sure to clear out before I come back?”

  Talk about mind-reading. I was beginning to thi
nk that it was I, not my unfortunate cousin, who had once been married to this woman. On the other hand, it was impossible to imagine anyone talking to Paul as she talked to me. Silence and an understanding smile were the best defenses.

  Stephanie said, “I’ll be gone for ten days. Are you going to be staying at your house?”

  “As far as I know, yes.”

  “I’ll call you when I get back.”

  What a happy prospect.

  She said, “I’ve got to run.”

  Then, unaccountably, she smiled—a complete girlish smile, impish eyes and all. She was pink in the face from emotion and also, I guess, from the strain of refusing to put down all that luggage while she read me the riot act.

  “I really am fond of you, Horace,” she said. “But you’ve gone around the bend again. You do know that, don’t you?”

  Fond of me? I said, “Already? I’ve been standing here thinking that I might go around the bend at any moment.”

  But she was gone before I could finish the sentence, dragging her hanger bag, weaving her way through the crowd.

  3

  My house, hardly larger than a garage, was tucked away between two far more imposing structures. It looked the same, but I assumed as a principle of tradecraft that it must have been entered by stealth in my absence. Perhaps listening devices had been planted, the phone bugged, the coffee poisoned, a trip wire connected to a bomb installed. I entered by the back door—the front door was blocked from the inside by a knee-high drift of junk mail—and checked the various traps I had set to tell me whether someone had been here in my absence. The hairs I had stretched across the cracks between the doors and doorframes had been broken, but then removed in a professional manner and replaced with substitute hairs of a slightly different color. Also, Uncle Horace’s patented waylay to catch meddlers had caught one. A toilet that I had left unflushed had been flushed in my absence. Very few intruders, no matter how highly trained they might be to leave everything exactly as they found it, can forget their mothers’ scolding voices when confronted by an unflushed water closet. They pull the chain before they think.

  My stomach cramped. I sat down. Soon I was lost in thought. How would I avoid Stephanie? How would I see Zarah without exposing her to risk?

  My body finished what it had been doing. Automatically, I reached behind me for the lever on the water closet, I saw in my memory an image of the flushed bowl. A message snaked up my arm and into my brain. I took my hand off the lever, pulled up my pants, and went into the kitchen to find a paring knife and a flashlight. With these tools I examined the lid of the tank, and finding no wires, gingerly lifted it and peered beneath. And sure enough, folks, just like the tired old pulp fiction cliché that it was, there in the beam of the flashlight was about a pound of plastique taped to the underside of the lid. It was rigged with a simple trip wire to go off when the toilet was flushed. The bomber had flushed the foul toilet to make sure no one else did before I came home and pulled the chain myself.

  I disarmed the bomb, which was about the size of an orange, then wrapped the plastique in aluminum foil and put it into the pocket of my raincoat for safekeeping. That done, I ate a bowl of instant oatmeal, then went upstairs and took a shower. I entertained more long thoughts while the hot water poured over me. What next? Who were these guys? Not that I didn’t know who they were in the abstract: in the particular, of course, they were nobodies and I wouldn’t have known who they were if someone whispered their names in my ear or showed me their pictures. But why all this thrillerish nonsense with bombs? Why not just shoot me or stab me? Who would care? I myself was too tired, too nauseated to care. Before retiring for the night I set a few traps just in case, but it didn’t seem likely that the people who rigged the bomb would wish to reenter my house until it had gone off. Wearily I climbed the stairs and lay down for the first time in weeks in a bed that fit my body and slept the sleep of the just.

  4

  When I awoke it was dark, but still only six o’clock in the evening. There was nothing in the house to eat or drink, so I walked down the hill to M Street and dialed Zarah Christopher’s home number from a sidewalk pay phone.

  “It’s Horace. Can I take you to dinner?”

  “Come to my house,” Zarah said. “You can cook.”

  Since it behooved me to suspect everyone, I could hardly take a cab in a town where a clear majority of taxi drivers wore luxuriant whiskers and behaved like lookouts for the jihad, so I walked the whole way, a couple of miles as the crow flies but farther than that by the circuitous route I took. I kept a sharp eye behind me, of course, but Washington is not a walker’s town and I was the only pedestrian in the posh neighborhoods through which I passed, and was probably in less danger of assassination than of being mistaken for a prowler and reported to the police.

  Zarah lived in an old underheated Tudor-style house that overhung, rather than overlooked, a brambly section of Rock Creek Park. Its former owner had equipped it with all sorts of gadgetry including a restaurant-style kitchen with a six-burner Viking stove, a full set of copper pots and pans dangling from an overhead rack, and a large selection of razor-sharp German knives. I loved this kitchen. Cooking, for me, is what golf seems to be for more clubbable men, something that gets your mind off your everyday work because it requires a certain amount of skill and concentration, yet at the same time is a means to sociable ends.

  While I made a poule au pot with the groceries I had picked up on my way to Zarah’s place, she sat on the countertop, ankles crossed, sipping a glass of Grgich chardonnay. An uncorked bottle of Beaune stood on the kitchen table, breathing. A wedge of Reblochon cheese softened on a board beside a bowl of black grapes. Zarah had provided the wines, fruit and cheese. Also the conversation. She said nothing about people we knew in common. She mentioned movies she had seen, books she had read, something out of her own childhood experience about hunting with falcons.

  Zarah, it turned out, knew all about birds of prey—how they are trained, how they are handled and rewarded, how they kill. In the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, where she had grown up while her vengeful mother was concealing her existence from her father, the Berbers had hunted gazelles and jackals with golden eagles. It took a very strong man to carry one of these birds on his arm. To desert people, as I already knew, falconry was a mystical art, worth any amount of trouble or money. My superficial knowledge of such matters was nothing compared to Zarah’s. In ancient times, only kings had been permitted to hunt with eagles. Lesser nobility had been assigned peregrine falcons, the swiftest and most powerful of the many kinds of falcons and hawks—she named them all—used in the sport. Rich Arabs will pay almost any price for a particularly fine specimen. If they have unlimited money, like Saudi princes, they might own scores of the birds, gathered from all over Asia. The peregrine falcon can spot its prey at tremendous distances and when dropping out of the sky for the kill can fly at amazing speeds— diving as fast as a small airplane can fly. Zarah described explosions of feathers in blue desert skies, noted the absence of memory from the falcon’s yellow eye after a kill.

  “Do falcons remember the last victim or does the brain send them some imprinted instruction each time they spot their prey?” she asked. “Nobody seems to know.”

  “Ibn Awad was a falconer,” I said. “His birds sat on perches behind him when he dined in company—twenty or more of them all in a row, wearing hoods.”

  “Twenty?” Zarah said. “That’s about half a million dollars worth of birds.”

  I’d had no idea. “He could afford it,” I said. “And he had no other vices.”

  Except a thirst for murdering infidels, of course.

  We drank what remained of the chardonnay, then moved on to the chicken and the burgundy. Conversation—at least Zarah’s half of it—sparkled until we arrived at the cheese and grapes. Then, all of a sudden, her smile faded.

  She said, “Horace, do you think they’re alive?”

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

&n
bsp; Zarah lived in a quiet, not to say hushed neighborhood, and at that hour of the night we encountered no other pedestrians except dog walkers. It was cold and damp, but nothing compared to northern Europe. We walked for as long as it took me to tell her everything I had learned on my travels. Hours. She never once interrupted until I had finished.

  Then she said, “Then you think they’re both alive?”

  “I work on the assumption that the answer is Yes. Otherwise what would be the point of going on with this? Whether Paul and Lori are together is another question.”

  “Even though he was on the point of finding her?”

  “Lori may not have wanted to be found.”

  “By her own son?”

  “You’re asking me to read her mind. As nearly as I can make out, nobody has ever been able to do that. Not even Paul, and in a way he’s devoted his life to the effort.”

  Zarah stopped. We were on the other side of the park, standing under a large tree in a softly lit, sleeping neighborhood of mansions. I had no idea where exactly we were.

  “I’ve done the same, you know,” Zarah said. “When I was a child, long before we met, my father was my imaginary friend. He told me wonderful stories.”

  “Even though he was not present?”

  “Exactly. He was in China, though I didn’t know that at the time. My favorite story was about dinosaurs. In his story they were feathered creatures and they sang as birds do except the sound was much grander, pipe organs instead of piccolos. He described a grassy plain crowded with them, a rainbow of color in the sunlight, each kind of dinosaur with its own plumage and its own voice, but all of them in some wonderful kind of harmony.”

  “How old were you when you thought this up?”