One wondered where that might be, in Claus Bücher’s case.
SEVEN
1
After her interview with Bücher, Zarah passed the tape recording she had made to Charley Hornblower, who bumped into her by prearrangement in a hospital corridor. She then went straight to the railroad station and took a train to Istanbul. When Charley and Ben and I got to Istanbul a few days later—we waited in Vienna until Bücher died and then traveled separately—we could not find Zarah. She was not registered at the Hilton as expected. According to the front-desk clerk, she had no reservation. This was alarming. We had not actually seen her board the train, nor had she telephoned or communicated in any other way.
Had she been snatched by the same pack of nitwits who were bloodhounding me—or, worse, fallen into the clutches of some Schutzstaffel equivalent of the Old Boys? Claus Bücher must have had money squirreled away somewhere. According to Charley Hornblower’s information and my own impressions of the threadbare Simon Hawk, Bücher’s old apparatus was starved for funds. Zarah had gone to the station in her Gretchen Zechmann disguise. Had Bücher’s old comrades assumed that she was the real heiress? Were they at this moment shining a blinding light into her eyes and asking her where her grandfather’s money was?
Ben Childress thought that my imagination was running amok. “Get a grip on yourself,” he said. “She may have gotten off the train somewhere. Did you say exactly when we’d be in Istanbul?”
“No.”
“Then why would she hurry?”
“Why would she get off the train?”
Ben gazed down from Olympus and said, “The train to Istanbul goes through Prague and Budapest, doesn’t it?”
Of course it did, and Zarah may well have gotten off to do some genealogical research on her own. Everything Ben said made sense. Making sense was his specialty. Nevertheless I had never in my life felt more anxiety than I felt now, gazing out the window over the endless jumble of roofs under which Istanbul was hiding itself.
Courtesy of another classmate of Charley’s, this one the heir to a Turkish chewing gum fortune, we were staying in a waterfront villa on an island in the Bosporus. We were being circumspect, of course—everyone arriving from a different point of the compass, no more than one of us outside the house at any one time and then only after dark, no telephoning, no faces in the windows, no loud music. Because our makeshift safe house was a summer place and it was now midwinter, the house was empty of servants. However, it came with a full larder and an unlocked wine cellar stocked with quite drinkable Turkish reds and whites and sparkling rosés. There was nothing to do but wait and sort through what we knew and talk about what might be next. We really had no idea. Pieces of the puzzle were missing. We had had our little successes but we didn’t know which way to go. We spent a lot of time listening to the tape of Bücher’s last conversation with Zarah. There were words we did not understand, references that baffled us.
“Does it mean anything?” Ben asked.
“This thing is not coming together the way it should,” Jack said.
What we really needed was a stroke of luck. All operations get to a point where nothing makes sense. Then one small isolated fact falls in your lap and the whole thing comes together. As Harley might say, this always happens, except when it doesn’t.
We were increasingly anxious about Zarah, Jack especially. He spoke Turkish and he had bought a cell phone in Istanbul. He used this, walking a long distance from the villa before switching on, to call the Hilton and check up on Zarah. At the end of the third day—that is to say, the eighth day since she left Vienna— there was no word. Even Ben began to look preoccupied.
On the fourth night, late, I was watching a Turkish-language version of Bonanza when I heard the doorbell ring. Ben, who was supposed to be asleep, beat me to the door. Zarah walked in. She wore jeans and sneakers and a black leather trench coat. Her hair was tucked under a knit cap that looked like the Roaring Twenties cloche my mother wore in family snapshots. All in all, this was a far more fetching costume than the one she had worn as Gretchen. I suppose I should have felt like kissing her, but no such thought crossed my mind. I settled for what I hoped was a warm smile but may have been more like a grimace of pain, judging by the puzzled look in Zarah’s eye.
I said, “Hi, there. Good trip?”
“Interesting,” Zarah said. “I stopped in Prague and Budapest You haven’t been worried, I hope?”
“A little impatient, maybe.”
Ben said, “Before I go back to bed, may I ask a question? How did you find this place?”
“Horace mentioned the name of this island in case we missed contact,” Zarah said. “I went down to the waterfront and asked a boatman if three Americans your age had hired a water taxi lately. He said, ‘Is one of them very tall?’ I said yes, and he brought me over to the island. After we landed, he asked a question or two of other boatmen and gave me directions to this house.”
“Wonderful,” Ben said. “Good night, my dear.”
2
The next morning, Zarah appeared at breakfast at six-thirty, looking as though she had slept for eight hours instead of the three or four she had actually spent in bed. I cooked a mushroom omelet with yogurt beaten into the eggs. Charley had found an electric coffeemaker and a pound of Maxwell House. Ben, who preferred Arab coffee, sipped this mild brew as if his tripes were being dissolved in battery acid. Before the dishes were cleared, Ben produced a Walkman into which was loaded the tape of Zarah’s conversation with Claus Bücher.
“This is you and Bücher,” he said to Zarah. “He speaks a word at the very end that none of us can quite make out. Maybe you can, since you were there.”
Zarah put on the headphones and listened. The expression on her face was perfectly neutral. She rewound the end of the tape once or twice, listening to the mystery word.
Finally she said, “He’s speaking Arabic, or thinks he is. At the time, I thought the word was houbara. Now I’m sure of it. He’s swallowing the final syllable, but maybe that’s the way the Arabs he knows pronounce it.”
“Houbara is an Arabic word?” Charley said.
“It’s a bird,” Zarah said. “The houbara bustard. I had just asked him where Ibn Awad or the bombs could be found and he was answering my question.”
“With the name of a bird?” Ben said. “What is it, a code name?”
“I don’t think so,” Zarah said. “The houbara bustard is the bird of birds if you’re a falconer.”
Ben already knew this, obviously.
“There are still falconers in the world?” Charley asked.
“Lots of them,” Zarah said. “Rich Arabs will travel hundreds of miles to hunt the houbara bustard with falcons. They do it partly for the thrill of the thing, but also because they believe this bird is an aphrodisiac. They eat them by the hundreds in season.”
“Flying Viagra,” Charley said. “Wow. Any truth in that belief?”
“You’d have to ask the man who ate one,” Zarah said.
Ben was annoyed by this badinage. This was no light moment. He was processing new information. I too was deeply interested.
Charley said, “Where is this bird hunted?”
“Any number of places, but always in the desert,” Zarah said. “It breeds in Central Asia and western China in summer, then migrates to Africa. During the later winter it flies north again. There’s a big hunt in Balochistan every January.”
“So where are the bustards now?” I asked.
“After Balochistan they continue on to Central Asia and beyond,” Zarah said. “Turkmenistan, northern Iran, western Afghanistan. After that, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Xinjiang, Mongolia. They don’t all start from the same place or at exactly the same time, so they don’t all arrive at the same time.”
“What’s the time spread?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know exactly.”
Ben was visibly disappointed by this gap in Zarah’s knowledge. So were the rest of us. We all understood
what this information might mean, if it turned out to mean anything.
Ben said, “Zarah, how do you happen to have all this lore at your fingertips?”
“I knew people who hunted the houbara bustard with falcons in Morocco,” she said. “They were fixated on the houbara. That’s why I thought I understood the Arabic word Bücher was using.”
I said, “So where do we go from here?”
Zarah said, “The key is the exact migratory pattern of the houbara.”
“Why is that the key?”
“Because Ibn Awad is a very rich Arab and you told me, Horace, that he was a keen falconer when you knew him.”
Charley said, “I thought he was an ascetic.”
“Once a falconer, always a falconer,” Zarah said. “If that’s true in Ibn Awad’s case, he will hunt the houbara bustard, maybe in several different desert places along their migratory route. Pinpoint those places and the time of arrival of the houbara and plot them on a map and you’ll know where to look for Ibn Awad.”
Ben said, “Brilliant work, Zarah.”
And so it was—a breakthrough. I said, “Charley?”
“I’ll get right on it,” Charley said.
“How long will it take to draw a map?”
“Not long if all goes well. I know a bird man at the Smithsonian. We can use Landsat images.”
Ben nodded. This meant Charley would have to go back to Washington, a happy turn of events from Ben’s point of view. His thoughts were like slides projected clickety-click on a screen: Let Charley do the donkey work. I’ll do the thinking.
Ben said, “Zarah, will you be working with us?”
“From a distance,” she said. “I’m planning a little trip.”
A little trip?
Where to? Not, I was sure, to the faubourg Saint-Honoré for a shopping spree. In my bones I knew the destination would not be a safe and civilized one even if such a place existed in the chainsaw-massacre movie that was the world in the twenty-first century.
Any plan I may have had to discuss Zarah’s itinerary with her in private went aglimmering because Ben decided that the lazy minutes after breakfast provided a good opportunity to test her Arabic. They sat at the table, conversing in that tongue, while Charley and I did the dishes. For me, who had not lived with the language for years, this was something like watching a film in Arabic without subtitles. At first I understood almost nothing. After ten minutes I was catching about half. Another ten minutes and I half understood nearly everything but the slang and the jokes. Both Ben and Zarah were too much at home in Arabic for me ever to understand everything they said. Had they wished to do so, they could have shifted into another gear and left me behind completely.
Ben was impressed. He treated Zarah as if she were a promising young man he was sizing up for recruitment. Given his reputation with women—I admit I had been reluctant to introduce him to my lovely young cousin—this was something to behold. Suddenly he was gender-neutral. It was not Zarah’s looks but her brain that enthralled him.
Ben’s conversation with Zarah was an interrogation, of course. “Where exactly in the Maghreb did you grow up?” he was asking Zarah when I finally plugged in.
“In the Idáren Dráren,” Zarah said.
“That’s the Berber name for the Atlas Mountains?”
It was Zarah’s turn to be impressed. Not many people knew that.
“That’s right,” she said.
“You speak Berber?” Ben asked.
“We lived with Berbers.”
“Which tribe?”
“The Jawabi.”
“Ah, Joab’s people. The hidden Jews. Are they still pretending to be Muslims?”
“If that’s what they’re doing it’s kept them alive for twelve hundred years.”
“You spent your childhood with the Jawabi and you don’t know whether they’re faking it?”
“Religious questions have never interested me,” Zarah said.
It was clear even to Ben that this was the only answer he was going to get. In a sense, this pleased him. Zarah certainly knew the answer to the question, but she could keep a secret. She had a sense of duty to others who knew the same secret. Good signs. You could see Ben putting a mental checkmark beside “loyalty.”
Ben said, “Do I have the basics correct? The Jawabi believe that they left Israel under the command of King David’s great general, Joab, and after wandering all the way across Egypt and the Sahara, ended up in the mountains of the Maghreb?”
“In the highest place in the world, yes.”
“There were a number of tribes of Jewish Berbers,” Ben said. “All converted when the Arabs conquered the Maghreb except the Jawabi, yes?”
“Berbers have their own way of being Muslims,” Zarah said.
“Like eating wild boar and drinking alcohol and not fasting for Ramadan and not being too fussy about ablutions?”
“All of the above,” Zarah said. “However, the Jawabi go to the mosque and pray five times a day like everybody else.”
“Yes, and the Maranos in Spain went to mass like everybody else after they were converted to Catholicism by the sword, but continued for generations to worship in secret as Jews.”
No reply. Not even a change of expression.
Ben soon understood what was going on and to my amazement, apologized. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But the world you lived in is the one I’ve always wanted to experience.”
Zarah said, “You speak Arabic like a man who grew up with Arabs.”
“I’ve lived with Arabs, but I grew up in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Where were you born, may I ask?”
Ben was back in all-wheel drive. By the look in her eyes I could see that Zarah understood this and knew that the only way to escape Ben’s questions was to answer the ones it was convenient to answer and feign deafness to all the others.
Patiently, Zarah said, “I was born in a cave in the Idáren Dráren when my mother was on her way to live with the Jawabi.”
“She’d been invited?”
“She was traveling with a friend of my grandparents who was a Jawab. They met in Europe when Mother was pregnant and alone. The friend, whose name was Lla Kahina, more or less adopted her.”
“Why?”
“Because she saw how unhappy and how out of love with life my mother was. And because Mother was carrying her friends’ grandchild and Lla Kahina was afraid that the child would be lost to the Christophers. She thought they had already lost enough.”
“This Jawabi woman told you all this?”
“After I was grown up and my mother died, yes.”
“Died how?”
“She was killed by terrorists. She camped by mistake near one of their training camps. Mother was a horsewoman. She liked to race ostriches on horseback. An ostrich is much faster than any horse and can go on at top speed for hours instead of minutes for the horse. The race was hopeless. That’s what Mother liked about it.”
“Is that why you dislike terrorists?”
This took my breath away. Didn’t he know ? An elastic moment of silence ensued.
“It depends on the terrorist,” Zarah said at last, letting go of her end of the invisible rubber band. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pack.”
Ben practically exploded with disappointment. He was in a state of excitement. Zarah knew things that he had always hoped to know. And now would never know even if they met again, because she had made it clear that their conversation was over forever. Zarah was perfectly still, as if under Ben’s onslaught she had turned herself into an oil portrait of herself— beautifully lighted by the golden sun of Asia Minor, perfectly attentive and frank of gaze. But silent, inert.
3
I tapped on the door of Zarah’s room.
Without opening the door—I suppose she had heard my tread in the hallway—she said, “Come in, Horace.”
She was standing in front of the mirror, combing her hair. She had changed into a soft wool sweater and a gray pleat
ed skirt. A blue blazer lay on the bed beside her traveling bag, which was hardly larger than a briefcase.
“Did you have that outfit packed in that little bag?” I asked.
“Along with a couple of others,” Zarah said. “I pack like a sailor, everything rolled up so it won’t wrinkle.” “Who taught you that?”
“The Jawabi.” She smiled at me in the mirror. “The Sahara is a sea of sand, no?”
I said, “Look, I apologize for Sherlock Holmes.”
“No need,” Zarah replied. “Ben would have made a terrific psychoanalyst, founder of the listen-here-young-lady school of therapy, asking questions instead of avoiding them. Quite refreshing in his way.”
Her voice was light, but she kept her back to me. “Before you go, I want to thank you for all you’ve done,” I said.
A Gioconda smile in the looking glass. She was winding her hair into a coil and pinning it with a barrette. Another painting.
“Sorry to apologize twice in the same breath,” I said, “but I had no idea that Claus Bücher was going to be as bad as he turned out to be.”
“Don’t worry. It wasn’t much of a surprise to me. I’d heard a lot about Heydrich from Lla Kahina. Same species.”
“I really appreciate your work in Vienna,” I said. “And now you seem to have solved the problem of finding Ibn Awad.”
“You think so?”
“It’s the first time we’ve had a pattern to work from.”
“It’s just a hunch,” Zarah said. “Even if it’s correct, we’ll be dealing with an awful lot of territory. Half of Asia, half of Africa, most of the biggest deserts in the world.”
I said, “Your point being… ?”
“The hypothesis could be wrong, a wild guess.”
I didn’t think so. For most of my conscious life I had watched her father have what might be called memories of the future. Feathered dinosaurs were the least of it. Why should Zarah, who was so much like her father, be different?
Zarah, coat on, bag in hand, hair covered by a scarf, ready to go now, watched me as though my thoughts were visible to her.
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