There are nights when Salamander’s need for Anna overwhelms us. I twitch inside the cage of him, I drink scotch to lull his nerves, but all that these delaying tactics achieve is an explosive moment when I am driven to explain in a rush to my wife that I have to meet someone, an urgent matter, a matter pertaining to national security (and this is true; oh, this is absolutely true), but I am not at liberty to say where. My breathing will be ragged. Elizabeth has already schooled herself to show neither sorrow nor surprise—I note this with helpless regret; it is one more thing for which atonement must be made—but she turns on me her large watchful eyes and observes me gravely and simply nods.
“Don’t wait up,” I say gruffly, to mask his panic (Salamander’s panic), and as soon as we have turned the corner, he will call Anna on my cell phone from the car, but the lovely Anna, dark lady, delights in cruelty. She has other clients, she will say. Aziz. Saleem. She uses these names to seduce and to alarm, perhaps she invents them, but it is true, of course, that she is a desirable taker-in and giver-out of information. (What does she pass on about Salamander? Whom does she tell?) I cannot see you for another two hours, she may say. Or she may say three, and in the second before he hears the imperious click and the high-pitched burr of disengagement, Salamander considers whether it might be possible to explain the delicate equilibrium involved, whether this would move her, whether the imminent loss of a regular source of income would matter to her, because it is only by paying in installments that he can keep the larger penalty at bay. He dials her number again and speaks so rapidly that he is scarcely intelligible. If you could understand, Anna, how critical, he says. In three hours, I might not even be still alive—but she hangs up and takes her phone off the hook, and so for two hours, or three, we are in torment and at terrible risk.
Sometimes we handle this fear with arcane gambling rituals. We park on a dark street east of the Capitol, on the border between safety and danger, and close our eyes and count: ten, twenty, one hundred. The rules vary. When we open our eyes, if the first car we see is a white one, it means our own people will get to us before anyone else; if a black car passes, Sirocco’s suicide zealots will; if the car is colored, we will never know who or how. Suddenness. That is what we pray for; and the odds are with us there.
It could come from anywhere, from anyone, any day now, or any night. It could come from Anna herself. Salamander thinks that he has found her, but it could be the other way around.
If the first car that appears before our eyes is a stretch limousine or a hearse, Salamander says to the face in the rearview mirror: So. It will be you.
And the face accuses back: You are the one who’s cracking up, Salamander. It will be you, and no one will weep for your going, least of all me.
Mostly we handle the fear by driving. We drive around the labyrinth of the city and cross its bridges, moving like a falling arrow toward Arlington Cemetery which waits for us like a temptation. So far, we have been able to resist this exit because there are things we must attend to first, there are reparations (pathetic and inadequate though they may be) that must be made to Isabella and to Lowell, to Françoise, to Elizabeth, and to the survivors of Flight 64, and so we turn resolutely south and then swing east and circle the Pentagon and drive back across the Potomac and north and east into the dangerous sections of potholed roads and broken streetlights, the car doors locked because at every red light someone might try the door handle, might smash a window, might push a gun into our face. This fear—specific and manageable—eases our anguish slightly, eases Salamander’s frenzy, but it is Anna he needs. When she stands over him in black leather and chains, when she cracks her whip, he tastes, very briefly, absolution.
Of course we are followed. We know we are followed. We understand the risk we have become.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed:
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered …
Once, in the presence of King Fahd, Salamander had to fight back an almost overpowering urge to recite those lines. He could feel them bubbling up in his throat because the king was telling a raucous sexual joke that involved faithless queens and poisons and bloody rites of accession to certain thrones. Salamander was not alone in the royal presence, needless to say. He was posing as a minor functionary, there to hear and not to be heard, but the Royal House of Saud has a superstitious fear of the murder of kings. They practice various forms of sympathetic magic to forestall fate—public floggings, amputations—but they never feel safe.
“Next to the Jews,” Sirocco told Salamander, “King Fahd hates the Palestinians most. I have this direct from his closest advisors.”
“And you?” Salamander asked. “Do you hate the Palestinians too?”
“Me?” Sirocco laughed in disdain. “The Jews, the Palestinians, what do I care? I am for myself. Enlightened self-interest, I would say. Those are my politics.”
Sirocco accepts large sums of money from assorted close advisors to those in power—I am speaking of power in assorted countries and of assorted political stripes—advisors who entrust him with certain offices and certain tasks. Sirocco demands, in return for this knowledge, even larger sums of money from us.
“King Fahd hates the Palestinians,” Sirocco said, “and he fears them, because what they’ve got is contagious. What they’ve got is a taste for democracy, for your decadent Western ways”—here Sirocco permitted himself an ironic smile—“and he’s afraid the plebs of his kingdom will catch it and then he’s done for.” He made a slitting motion with his index finger against his throat. “The House of Saud is a pack of cards waiting to collapse, and everyone knows it except the three thousand princes of the House of Saud.”
“And you?” Salamander needled. “How will you be affected? You’re a Saudi yourself.”
“Am I?” Sirocco asked. “Possibly. Not every Saudi is in love with the House of Saud.” Then he leaned close and whispered in Salamander’s ear: “Of course the three thousand princes also know they are doomed, deep down, but they prefer opulent denial, the king and Crown Prince Abdullah most of all. Which is why they keep a very active finger in the Palestinian pie and why they add Wahhabi pepper once a week.”
Salamander has amassed thick dossiers on the Wahhabis, the most extreme of Islamic sects, the most rigidly fundamentalist of all. The members of the Royal House of Saud are Wahhabis, though many exemptions to the stringent Wahhabi code, many behavioral exemptions, and many dispensations, apparently are made for royal blood.
As Sirocco spoke, he let the tip of his index finger draw a line from Salamander’s earlobe to his neck. It was like a caress, and a shiver walked across Salamander’s grave. “But you can’t do a thing with this knowledge, except pay me to exploit it, can you?” Sirocco murmured. He was so close that their cheeks were touching, and he smiled, and for a stunned and disconcerting moment Salamander thought Sirocco was going to kiss him on the lips. “Oil runs the world, and oil most certainly runs Washington, and the Royal House of Saud runs oil,” Sirocco murmured. His Oxford cadence was always more marked when he talked to Americans. He liked to look down from a high place. He liked to mock. “So, QED, the House of Saud runs Washington.” Sirocco laughed softly. “It is a constant source of amusement to me to see how much Washington can be made to take without triggering so much as an official reprimand.” And then, bizarrely, he did kiss Salamander, but on the cheek. “So no one in Washington wants to hear your sad stories, do they? No one wants to listen to your inside information predicting the death of kings unless the Saudis do this, or do that. Your people don’t want to know about unless.”
Well before Salamander’s time, before I was shackled to him, back when I was at Yale, we did Richard II and I played Bushy, a minor role, but one that now seems to me curiously prophetic, as though our fate is hard-wired into us and the body senses it from the start. Someone just walked over my grave, we used to say, a child’s joke to ward off dread when an involuntary shudder passed through us. But I remember, night after night, how I shivered when the guards dragged me onstage with Green, and Bolingbroke thundered: Bushy and Green, I will not vex your souls, since presently your souls must part your bodies … though perhaps it was a different sort of prescience since the classmate who played Bolingbroke, son of a Long Island banker, moved on to wealth and embezzlement and jail, and now that I think about it, there was something about him, that faint aura of the frat-boy sociopath, that air of well-bred ruthlessness, that reminds me of Sirocco. And I remember that night after night, when Bushy’s lines would speak me: More welcome is the stroke of death to me, than Bolingbroke to England. Lords farewell, I would feel unaccountably maudlin, tears would well up in my eyes (the New Haven reviewer mentioned this favorably), because there was something in Bushy that cleaved stubbornly to the old order—the oath of loyalty, the idea of an anointed king, fealty to Richard—when he could easily have jumped ship and sailed smoothly into Henry IV, Part I, but he would not do it, he could not, he was a true believer, and more welcome was the stroke of death to Bushy …
Like Richard, he knew it was on its way.
It is on its way. We can feel it coming the way you can feel winter coming.
It grows like a tumor, this certainty of the end barreling toward us, and I find myself wondering if murder always telegraphs its coming to the nerve systems far in advance of its arrival. I don’t think this is too fanciful. The Cree, for example, know when a major storm is coming many days before the meteorologists know. Native Americans, Dr. Reuben, are an esoteric security specialty of mine, and my expertise dates from those earlier times of unrest—how tranquil they seem, how innocent—the days of indigenous sit-ins and peaceful protests, so harmless in retrospect, though at the time we certainly kept our eye on the rise of the radical AIM. What I learned from those tribal elders and young rebel warriors was this: that there are ways of knowing that can fly in low, beneath the radar of rationality. I have a healthy respect for intuition.
You think I’m paranoid, of course, but then you have no idea, not the slightest idea, of how much Salamander knew about you before I called you, and if I were to tell you how much he knew, you would not sleep. A history could be written, should be written, of those who don’t sleep. Insomniacs International: a roster of the late and the great and the prescient. Napoleon would get the first chapter. He could not sleep, or would not sleep, or hardly ever, but when he did, he needed only four hours a night, no more, so the history books reveal, implying glandular dysfunction of some sort. I know better. I’m convinced he didn’t dare to stop watching. I’m convinced he knew. Even when he was a schoolchild in France, an uncouth Corsican, an outcast with his hick accent and his wretched French, even then, he knew that the inevitable fate of the outsider was lodged in the marrow of his bones. In every battlefield triumph, under the pungent smell of cannon smoke and singed horseflesh, he could smell St. Helena on its way. My thoughts dwell on death, he wrote in his diary when he was twelve years old—he was a desolate child in the Military Academy in Brienne—no doubt because I see no place for myself in this world.
And yet there was a man who dared his own fate and grabbed it by the lapels and stared it full in the face and defied it.
And how did he (both of him: the emperor and the one who always knew he was doomed) how did he try to keep an ignominious death at bay?
By recourse to the same old fool’s gold we all so stupidly bank on. Foreknowledge. Spies. Informers. He had an intelligence system to die for, the most intricate ever evolved by a ruling clique. Fouché, the head of his secret police, used to boast in the taverns that no one could speak two words without Napoleon hearing, not at table, not in bed, not in salon or brothel, not in my lady’s chamber nor in the arms of a man’s own wife. If you break gas in your privy, Fouché said, one of my men will be stationed downwind and will smell it.
And that’s what undid Napoleon in the end: his own intelligence network and the distrust it bred.
Here’s a conundrum: the better you train a secret agent, the less he will trust his peers; hence, as a logical consequence, the less able he is to work in tandem with anyone else, and the more likely he is—unintentionally—to sabotage the entire intricate project by the desperate need to know all.
And then there’s this: knowing too much can get you killed.
I could try to paint the scene when I understood all this at a visceral level, Dr. Reuben. I could describe the dinner where the moment of unraveling began. Salamander and Sirocco were to meet in a restaurant in Paris, and this was to signal go for Operation Black Death. What a triumph Black Death was going to be. That’s what we thought. The planning, the undercover work, the funding, there’s nothing I can fault. It was going to be a major Intelligence coup. I expected to make a dozen arrests, key figures, Sirocco had smoked them all out, we’d paid him a fortune, we’d given him enough arms and nerve gas to kill half the Soviets in Afghanistan (because he was a mercenary, basically; he had a finger in plenty of pies), and then, on the very eve of the operation, on my way to the restaurant, I received news from my own intelligence network, which was every bit as fine as Napoleon’s, and the message was this: Double-cross. Abort Black Death.
I had my own man, under cover, on Sirocco’s team, and he was the one who sent word. He paid a high price. The code name of my undercover man was Khalid. Before I even got to the restaurant, a second message reached me. Khalid’s throat had been cut.
Of course, I secretly taped our meeting in the restaurant. No doubt Sirocco did too. Here’s my own transcription and commentary.
“You lied,” Salamander says to Sirocco. He says it quietly and civilly (though his voice is intense) because they are in one of the most elegant restaurants in Paris. Waiters hover around them, discreet. “You were planning to double-cross me,” Salamander says. “I have proof. Operation Black Death is aborted. I’m calling it off.”
Sirocco smiles and signals the sommelier. “I’m afraid you’re too late,” he says. “Preparations are under way as we speak. I’ve moved Black Death forward.”
Salamander presses a button on the radio transmitter in his pocket. “We had an agreement,” he says, his voice low. “A sting operation. Let me remind you of the terms of our deal. No passenger deaths. You lure the entire Paris cell into the operation, we get them, or our sharpshooters do. Those that live, we keep for interrogation. We let you escape. And absolutely no passenger deaths, that was agreed.”
“Monsieur,” Sirocco says to the wine steward, though without shifting his gaze from Salamander. “Another bottle, if you please. My business partner and I are celebrating a new level of understanding of our deal.”
“Information has come to me,” Salamander says, and in spite of a lifetime of practiced disassociation, his voice trembles. “I have irrefutable information that you have other intentions. You are planning to double-cross me. Therefore the operation is now aborted. Charles de Gaulle Airport and the French police have been put on high security alert. You will contact your hirelings immediately, or I regret to tell you that the French police will suddenly become aware of the counterfeit nature of your carte de séjour. You will be arrested before midnight.”
“Ah, thank you, monsieur,” Sirocco says to the sommelier, though he takes the bottle from the wine steward’s hands and pours wine for Salamander and himself. “I think you have not fully understood our situation, my friend.” He touches Salamander’s glass with his own. “Certain people with whom we are both working (indirectly, in your case, but your partners nevertheless) would like to see a lot of Americans, especially American Jews, die all at once, and they are willing to pay a great deal of money to make this happen.”
“Willing to pay this money to you, for example,” Salamander snaps.
“Of course to me. How else can I gather the intelligence you want?”
“You want me to outbid them. You are auctioning lives.”
“I’m not asking you to outbid them. I am trying to explain realpolitik. I had to select a certain kind of flight, with a certain kind of passenger list. There’s no other way to lure the people you want into your trap. It’s true, you said the passengers must not die, but our partners whom we shall not name say they must. Why? Because that is the point of the exercise, as far as our partners are concerned. Not because they care much one way or the other about individual Jews, you understand, but because they want to goad Israel past endurance. This is their strategy: to push Israel to retaliate violently, and of course we know that Israel will oblige. If not this time, then next time, after a little escalation. It’s a very simple equation. You know it and I know it. All our governments know it. So please spare me your righteous surprise.”
Salamander is breathing rapidly. “At least,” he says coldly, “it is now clear where your priorities lie.”
“Please,” Sirocco says. “Can we skip the sanctimonious hypocrisy? The simplistic nature of American thinking is too tedious for words. And let’s not be disingenuous about the advantages to your government of a little redrafting of the plans. Believe me, martyrs are an ace up any sleeve.”
“A contract means nothing to you.”
“The desert wind bloweth where it listeth.” Sirocco smiles. “Incidents distressing to many of your countrymen (though not to all), and to Israel, will happen many times in the months and years ahead, whether or not you are leaning over the shoulders of the perpetrators permitting this, permitting that, saying, ‘That is enough; stop here.’
“You knew this perfectly well, whatever you wish to pretend with your hand held over your heart. Our agreement was to channel the obsession of the true believers, to reveal to you the names, the faces, the modus operandi of what you call a terrorist cell. How you catch them is strictly your affair.
“And please, spare me the complaining. We do the dirty work and take all the risks while you sit back in your armchair and watch on surveillance monitors, free to tut-tut and wring your hands if things go wrong. I’ve even written your speech for you, Salamander. These barbaric acts will not go unpunished …!”
Sirocco laughs and pours himself more wine. “You can’t ride a whirlwind,” he says. “It’s not so easy. You can’t order it to stop just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “No more than I can. I use the energy of the zealots, but I don’t control them. I can’t. They are the jokers in the pack. You understand?”
“I understand I have been betrayed.”
“Betrayed!” Sirocco seems genuinely amused. “That is wonderful. That you should speak of betrayal.”
“It is almost interesting,” Salamander says coldly, “in an anthropological way, to observe a monster close-up.”
Sirocco leans across the table and whispers, “It’s too late to stop. Weapons are already being loaded. The baggage handlers, the maintenance crew are our men. The target flight will be hijacked whether I am arrested or not.” He smiles. “I won’t tell you which flight. I don’t want to spoil the surprise. But if I’m not able to be on the plane myself, as planned, I cannot vouch for the relatively moderate outcome I would seek.”
“I already know what outcome you intend. It is not moderate.”
“Imperfect intelligence, my friend. Relatively moderate, I said. I wonder if even you understand how ugly things could get if I’m not there. There are fast deaths and slow deaths, there are deaths by ritual mutilation, there are others that linger much longer in the minds of those who are left behind.”
That was when Salamander knew that he was dealing with evil, but even then, Dr. Reuben, even then I could not have predicted the degree to which Sirocco took pleasure from personal revenge. I would not have believed the extent of the trouble he went to to give me pain. To give Salamander pain.
Salamander was a babe in the woods. But to return to the transcript.
“Within an hour,” Salamander says curtly, “the French police will have photographs, documents—”
“Please. Don’t agitate yourself.” Sirocco smiles. He has a way of smiling that makes Salamander think of Eichmann and of Goebbels. “I know you know that I have been living with your daughter,” Sirocco says, “when I am not otherwise engaged.” He spreads his open palms toward Salamander and smiles. “What can I say? Women throw themselves at me. They are willing to do anything I ask, no matter how painful or bizarre.” He takes a photograph from his wallet and shows it. Salamander covers his eyes and turns away. “What you don’t know, perhaps—because I’m aware that there is some friction between you; I’m aware your daughter does not always take you into her confidence; I’m aware that she doesn’t appreciate your protective surveillance—so perhaps you don’t know that your daughter has a ticket for the very flight that I’ve chosen to win our private little lottery. I bought it for her myself.”
There is a bodily sensation that can only be equated with going down on an elevator whose cables have snapped. The freefall leaves Salamander faint. Sirocco leans across the table. “But perhaps if I’m not arrested,” he says, “she could be persuaded not to get on the plane.”
Check. But not checkmate.
Salamander steadies himself against the table. There is a smell of sulphur and of failure in the air. They will put me out to pasture, he knows.
“Monsieur.” Sirocco signals a waiter, smiling. “I think perhaps we had a faulty glass. My companion has had a small accident.”
Salamander stares at the flood of red wine on the white linen cloth and at the blood in his palm. He still holds the snapped stem of the wineglass in his hand. “All right,” he says. “I concede this round. And you may pass on the assurance that we will agree to a further increase in the price of oil, but no deaths.”
“This I am not at liberty to guarantee,” Sirocco says, “but you may call your daughter and tell her to cancel her flight.” He smiles. “Honor among thieves, as you might say.”
“If there are deaths,” Salamander promises, “I will disable you. I will reveal who is bankrolling you.”
“But you are bankrolling me. The sarin canisters and the protective clothing are stamped USAF.”
“For use against the Russians in Afghanistan. That route will get you nowhere, you will find.”
“Get us nowhere?” Sirocco smiles. “No questions in Congress? No investigations into why you rob Peter to pay Paul?”
“Documentation will be found,” Salamander promises, “to show you are biting the hand that has fed you. You’ll be finished in Washington.”
“How naive you are,” Sirocco says. “I must say, it’s been greater than I expected, the pleasure of working with you. The personal aspect, I mean. I’ve enjoyed making this personal. You’ll see how I’ve worked at that aspect of the whole operation, and I do promise to keep you informed. I’ve set up a box seat for you, as it were, and I assure you, you’ll have a grandstand view of what’s going on.”
“If there are any deaths, you’ll be finished. I swear to you, so help me God.”
“I’m assuming I will not be arrested today”—Sirocco smiles—“and, interesting though this discussion is, I’m afraid I must go. Some people are waiting for me.” At the door, he turns and comes back to the table and says casually, loudly enough for several other tables to hear, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I collect on forfeits. Always. Every time.” He is smiling as he leaves.
The only words that would come to me were: Lords farewell.
And then I called Françoise and left a message on her answering machine. “Françoise? It’s Papa. I’m in Europe. I’m not at liberty to say where.”
I counted two beats. I was unnerved by the thought of her expression as she played back the tape. “I know you have a ticket for New York. On no account, Françoise, must you board that flight. This is a matter of life and death, do you understand? Don’t board that flight.”
I hung up, and then I called the French police. I urged extra precautions, especially for all flights to New York. Screen the baggage handlers, I said. Screen the maintenance crews. I was confident I could shut the operation down. I did what I could—every passenger was security-checked and all luggage was closely scrutinized—but Sirocco outmaneuvered me. Airport Security itself was in his pocket. The ground crew and the loading crew, and even two of the airport police, had been replaced by Sirocco’s men. All this I learned months later, from an internal security report. The results of the report—in the interests of national security—were never made public.
Salamander did what he could.
He was too late. He was out-double-crossed.
He lost his daughter. After the hijacking, he knew she knew and he knew the knowledge broke her. She would not speak to him again. She disappeared.
Even so, I played my trump card and saved the children. Later, I fought for the hostages and lost, but I refused to destroy the evidence of that struggle. I handed over the videotapes, as ordered, but I made secret copies of those tapes, and I hid them in burglar-proof ways, and I have made arrangements to send them forward through time.
I am surrendering my life, in the end, to preserve the tapes.
I know that what will be required is my life.
This is what Salamander and I would like our tombstone to say, Dr. Reuben:
In extremity, we yet achieved two good things: we saved the children; and we saved the tapes.