AS HE RECEDED INTO HIS OWN PAST ON THE WINGS OF THE DRUG, Patchen grew younger and younger and smaller and smaller. He felt that this rewinding of his life must end at the moment of conception, when sperm penetrated egg and created the microscopic Patchen. This event and its meaning were blindingly clear to him. He had been unwounded then, perfect, the receptacle of all information about himself, an infinitesimal being that was all mind.
This marvelous speck of pure intelligence, traveling down the Fallopian tube, possessed the secret of its own unique genetic nature and fate. Because it was already Patchen and could not be anything but what it was designed to be, it immediately set about transforming itself into his body. Patchen’s rudimentary heart appeared by the fourteenth day; his spine, brain, eyes, ears, alimentary canal, and the buds of his limbs by the twenty-first, and then, day by day and organ by organ, all the rest of his parts sprang into being. Floating in the fragrant amniotic fluid, Patchen heard voices from outside, saw light filtered through membranes, heard the beating of an enormous heart above his head, felt his mother’s emotions coursing through his own body and so learned that there were others like himself.
Was it possible to go farther back than this, beyond the muted rosy light inside the womb, was it possible to break in two again and rise up through the blood vessels and cells of his parents’ bodies, to swim into their very brains and find the storage places of their own original memories of themselves, in which, surely, he himself was already present along with all his ancestors and all his descendants that he would never have? Was it possible to go farther back, even, than that, possible to know everything by crossing the brilliant constellation of these innumerable generations of tiny minds like stepping-stones to their source, the Original Mind? Was knowing what Patchen had known in the first microsecond of physical being, before he set about manufacturing himself and forgot the secret of life in the travail of breaking its code, the same as knowing everything? Was this knowedge the bliss of Samadhi, satori, salvation, Martha’s Inward Light? Was he on the threshold of understanding the infinite?
Even under the influence of the Versed that was dripping into his arm and the amphetamine that was being released into his bloodstream by the implant in his chest, Patchen could not bring himself to think so. If he was traveling through the infinite, how was it that he remembered things about the nature of the infinite that the speck-mind of the fertilized egg could not possibly have known and had no need to know? His bedtime reading flooded his memory with what he now recognized as false data—verses from the Upanishads, the arithmetical formula based on the Ceylon Chronicles for computing the dates of Gautama Buddha’s birth and death, passage after passage from Genesis and Aquinas’s Summa Theologica poem about ghosts written in Vietnam by Paul Christopher. He fought to bring his brain back to equilibrium. His conscious mind began to function again. A brilliant light shone into his eyes. No longer deceived, he knew it was a camera light. He saw strange figures moving through the glare and knew they were his captors. But what had happened to him before he began to think again? Where had he been? Had he gone farther back than he knew? Was he not where he thought he was now, but somewhere else? Where was his dog? Where were the Marines of his patrol, Corporal Bobby Poole and all the others? Where was Zarah? Where was Christopher? Where?
“You’re home,” a kindly voice said. “You’re among friends. Everything is already known about everyone here; that’s why we’re so close. Nobody has any secrets. You can talk about anything to us. Anything.”
It was an Outfit voice, female. Patchen thought he recognized it, but he could not place it. He hadn’t heard it in years. To whom did it belong? He tried hard to visualize the face that went with the voice, but it was like a forgotten name.
“Don’t try to remember anything in particular,” the voice said.
“Particulars are not important. Relax. You can talk about anything. Anything at all. Start with a name. Any name. Tell me someone’s name.”
Patchen’s head cleared as one drug momentarily overcame the other, and in this moment of lucidity he recognized his questioner. He was astonished. It was a face from the far past. How could this be? Was he hallucinating? He knew that he was not, that the face he saw before his eyes, though much older and more disappointed than the one he remembered, was the face he thought it was.
He said, “Joshua.”
“Joshua?” the voice said. “Joshua who?”
“Joshua Josephson,” Patchen replied. The amphetamine was helping at last. He was no longer dreaming. The heart he had heard beating was his own, accelerated by the drug. It pounded in his ears and temples. A thrill of pure energy coursed through his whole body, so strong that he had the brief illusion that he could use his left arm and leg or see out of his left eye if he wished to do so. His glass eye was still in place; he could feel it, or, rather, not feel the toothachey movement of air on the empty socket.
“Tell us about Joshua Josephson,” the familiar voice said. “Is that a funny name or a real name?” The enunciation was not quite flawless, as happens with people who live too long abroad. He remembered that, too. He now remembered everything about this person in a long string of memories.
“Joshua was an unwitting asset,” Patchen said. “We were having trouble with the priests.”
“Where?”
“In Joshua’s country. They were a threat to our authority. We wanted to put them under an obligation, make them easier to handle. So we sent in an agent to recruit this Joshua and run him against them. It was a political action operation. The objective was to put a thorn in their side, make them come to us for help getting rid of him.”
“What was your agent’s name?”
“Judas.”
“I mean his true name. Please don’t use cryptonyms.”
“That was his true name. His father had been executed by the imperialists for underground activity; the son belonged to the same secret underground his father had, twenty years earlier. He built a cell around Joshua, eleven assets besides himself. They weren’t much as revolutionaries go. It was low-grade agit-prop—street-corner speeches about bribery and corruption in high places, demonstrations and rabble-rousing, nothing serious. But it was enough to alarm the priests. Joshua was beginning to have a following. So they came to us for help. We set Joshua up, asked the local police to arrest him. Judas was supposed to finger him for the cops, who didn’t even know who he was, but he had the case officer’s disease, he loved his agent more than he loved the operation. He tried to warn him. Joshua wouldn’t listen; he wanted to be arrested, he wanted to be a martyr to the cause; it happens. He got his wish, and after he was arrested and executed, Judas hanged himself. We planted some money on the corpse to make it look like he had been bribed by the police to turn in his leader. Everybody bought it; he was branded a traitor, a police spy. Nobody suspected us. The op was a success. We had the priests where we wanted them, they owed us. And we had ten assets under discipline for future reference. But the problem was, what might Judas have written to give the game away before he died? He was twice as smart as any of the others, and he was the only one who knew we were involved. We had to discredit his version before it was published, assuming it even existed. So we got the others to write reports of the operation making Judas the villain. That was the end of it.”
“Very funny, David,” the voice said to him, patting him maternally on the cheek. “But it won’t work.” And then to somebody else who was concealed behind the lights, the voice said, “He’s resisting the drug.”
“But he’s talking.”
“Yes. And telling us the story of Jesus Christ as a Roman spy thriller. Step up the dosage. I’ll go talk to the girl.”
NEARBY, YEHO SAID, “WE LOST HASSAN ABDALLAH.”
“Lost him?” Christopher said. “How can you lose somebody on a road that has no crossroads?”
It was well after midnight. They were standing in a light snowfall on an unpaved road in the Alpes de Haute Provence. The ground was beginning to be dusted, and the dark coat of Patchen’s Doberman, quivering at Christopher’s knee, was also turning white.
“We should get into the car,” Yeho said. “Otherwise we’ll leave tracks.”
Inside the automobile, Yeho continued his narrative. Abdallah and three companions had vanished. Yeho’s team, who had followed their car all the way from Geneva, had bracketed it with vehicles of their own, two in front and two behind. Because of the switchbacks it was impossible to stay completely out of sight and still maintain contact, but they had maintained a considerable distance so as to allay suspicion. After all, where could they go? There was not so much as a gravel pit into which to turn, much less hide. But when the lead car reached the bottom of the mountain just after dark and pulled off the road to let the next vehicle to take its place, it was observed that the terrorists’ car was empty except for the driver, Hassan Abdallah’s French girlfriend. She continued on, under surveillance, and checked in, alone, at a mountain hotel a few kilometers away on the Italian side of the Lombard Pass.
Christopher said, “That means Hassan and two others got out of the car and continued on foot.”
“But which way?” Yeho said. He began to unfold a large-scale topographical map of the area.
“Did anyone try to follow them?”
“What was the point? They were already gone. Besides, the tag team were not Ibal Iden. Like you and me, they’re too old to go scrambling over Alps. They did the correct thing—continued on their way and reported. So we can assume Hassan Abdallah doesn’t know he was being followed.” Yeho shone a flashlight on the map. “The Nazi and his friends got out somewhere in here,” he said, drawing a circle with the beam. “They could either go east to Italy, where they have absolutely no reason to go, or they could go over the top of this hill to the mas, which is here.” He switched off the torch. “They can’t get inside without being seen by the Ibal Iden, so what have we lost?”
“Certainty,” Christopher said. “That’s all.”
The mas, a stone farmhouse, was built into a steep hillside. From the top it looked like a shepherd’s hut of uncut stone, but seen from the bottom it was a three-story structure cut into the living rock and finished with stone and mortar. From the military point of view it was an almost impregnable position, because the tall side of the house commanded a clear field of fire along its entire front, and there was no other visible way in except through the back, which could be defended by one armed man, or even sealed with a small explosive charge if the defenders were willing to die inside.
“I’ve told the boys and girls to let Hassan and his men go inside in peace,” Yeho said.
“You’ve told them?”
“I know you’re in charge of them, but there was no time to go through channels.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Over two hours. One of them is supposed to report here at fifty-five minutes after midnight.”
It was now 12:50. Exactly five minutes later Ja’wab appeared, his parka covered with snow. The road was white with it. Yeho rolled down his window.
“They haven’t approached the house,” Ja’wab said. “I think we should start hunting them. We can take Hassan before he goes in, then go into the house and get the others.”
“No,” Christopher said.
“No?” Ja’wab said. “How long do you think Zarah will last after she starts talking under the drug?”
Christopher, who had got out of the car, looked down on Ja’wab, surprised again at how small he was, and by the worry in his face. He said, “If you didn’t see them, Ja’wab, they’re inside by now.”
“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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.”
Zarah understood them with difficulty because they spoke Palestinian Arabic which was so different from the Maghrib pronunciation.
“I’m going to stop the drip,” Hassan said. He ripped the needle from Patchen’s arm. “When he wakes up we’ll talk man to man.” He began to feel Patchen’s naked body, inch by inch, as if searching for something under the skin.
Maria turned to Zarah. “I know this is painful to watch,” she said in English. “Just remember: This is mild compared to what Patchen did to Barney Wolkowicz after he framed him—drugged him, put him into a cell, took away everything, even his clothes, tortured his body, manipulated his mind and his emotions, threatened to have his wife committed to an insane asylum. Barney wrote it all down. Here, read it.”
She handed Zarah an envelope. Inside, written in Wolkowicz’s unmistakable hand, was a letter providing details of his captivity in a secret Outfit installation after he had been seized by Patchen’s men. Zarah read it; the first two pages were missing.
“It’s as clear as clear can be,” Maria said. “Patchen charged Barney with the crime he had committed himself, delivering your father into a Chinese prison, and got away with it. Even your father believed him. Paul Christopher was the one who caught Barney. Patchen couldn’t have done it without him, he’s never been able to do anything without Paul. He always lived on your father’s talent like a snake sucking milk. I told you about the bugged raincoat; typical Christopher. Here, read for yourself.”
She handed over the missing pages from the letter. It described Paul Christopher’s homecoming, his investigation of his own case, the trap he and Patchen laid to capture Wolkowicz and brand him a traitor. Maria, anxious and maternal, waited until Zarah was through reading.
“Barney Wolkowicz wasn’t the first good person the two of them destroyed,” Maria said. “Far from it. Patchen did the same to my husband with your father’s help, and to me because I loved my husband and believed in your father’s honesty. There were others, a lot of them, before and after us. Remember your mother. She was a victim. Patchen used your father to do his dirty work for him, to win people’s trust, because everyone always loved Paul Christopher. No one has ever loved Patchen … Zarah, I want you to tell me why Patchen isn’t affected by the drug. Did he take something?”
Zarah did not answer. Maria rearranged her tangled hair for her with a few deft movements and gazed lovingly into her eyes. “Please tell me,” she said. “Because if you don’t, that man will ask you the same question.”
Hassan was cutting into Patchen’s chest with a small Swiss Army knife, delicately, feeling for something with a finger inserted beneath the skin. Suddenly he uttered a triumphant grunt and ripped out the implant. “Clever bastard!” he said, holding it aloft. A trickle of blood, surprisingly dark, meandered among the purple contours of Patchen’s scars.
Hassan took a stun gun out of his pocket and pressed it against the reopened incision. Zarah saw Patchen’s body leap convulsively under the electric shock; he appeared to stop breathing for a moment but then uttered a strangled scream. Hassan jammed the intravenous needle into another vein in Patchen’s arm. “Now we’ll see,” he said.
“Don’t be upset,” Maria whispered. “He can feel it now but he won’t remember it later. It will be like the pain never existed.”
Hassan used the stun gun on Patchen again, this time on his face. Patchen saw the Japanese grenade explode and heard himself screaming for a corpsman. Christopher appeared out of the smoke of battle in helmet and denims, carrying another Marine in his arms like a child. A naked Japanese soldier, gibbering in terror and missing a hand, rose up in front of him. His stump spurted blood. Christopher stopped in his tracks, immediately understanding what was happening, and waited for the man to finish bleeding to death; he did not seem to be afraid or compassionate or even curious; he did not touch a weapon, he simply watched. Then he laid the American he was carrying on the ground and gave Patchen an injection of morphine. Patchen’s vision cleared momentarily and he saw Christopher’s face quite distinctly in the blue-white flash of exploding naval ordnance. In a confidential murmur, Christopher said, “I’m going to carry you for a few yards, put you down, then come back for the other fellow. Then I’ll come back for you. I won’t leave you. You’ll be taking turns. Do you understand?” Patchen opened his mouth to reply but instead of the civil “yes” he had intended to utter, he shouted hysterically for the corpsman; Christopher gave him more morphine, his own syrette. The Vietnamese girl began to sing again. Christopher carried Patchen and the other Marine across the mud; Christopher himself was wounded and paused to bandage his injury. Because he could no longer walk he dragged first Patchen then the other man toward the American lines, counting softly in German. A mortar shell exploded nearby. The Vietnamese girl, dancing in her white ao dai on the sun-drenched River of Perfumes, continued to sing. With grave Oriental courtesy Vo Rau said, “I’m very sorry, I don’t understand German, but she is singing that when God decides to make himself visible to us he approaches not in fire and majesty from the immensity of the heavens but shyly and intelligently, as a buddha, out of the body of a woman.” On hearing these words, Patchen saw the Inward Light. It was immensely small though it contained innumerable collapsed universes with all their indescribable luminosity; inside, as from inside his mother, the light was rosy, but vast. The rescue complete, Christopher laid him down in the sampan and went back for the other wounded Marine. One of the troops fired eight rapid shots from an Ml rifle which ejected the empty clip with the familiar SPANG! Martha stood in the bow of the sampan with gossamer sails billowing around her beautiful young body. “O David, I am so happy for thee,” she said. Patchen opened his lips to thank her for her patience and understanding, and once he began to speak he could not stop. He told her over and over again that he loved her. He had never been so happy as he was now, even though he heard mortar shells exploding all around him and he knew that he was dying of his wounds at last.
HASSAN ABDALLAH HAD THROWN HIS RED-CHECKERED KAFFIYEH aside, baring his face. He looked, Zarah thought, like a disgruntled clerk who had never been given the promotions he knew he deserved. While Patchen made his intoxicated confession, Hassan operated the television camera himself, as a means of showing his displeasure at the inefficient way in which Patchen had been searched. There were three of his people in the room, but he ignored them. The four he had sent outside to take prisoners had not come back. The others stood idly by, shamefaced, with their weapons in their hands, Hassan was peering through the camera lens at Patchen’s smiling features when the charges set by the Ibal Iden went off, blowing off the doors of the mas. These first two explosions were muffled and far away, but there was a louder bang as the trap door to the tunnel that led into the room blew inward. The pressure wave knocked Patchen off his chair and staggered the guards who stood beside him.
All this Hassan saw through the lens of the camera. Then he, too, was knocked off his feet—not by the explosion but by an assailant who came out of the hole in the floor and struck him from behind with terrific force, jamming the camera against his face and starting a nosebleed. Using the camera as a weapon, Hassan struck hard at his attacker, thinking to smash his face, but the blow struck only empty air. He felt an excruciating pain in his leg, and looking downward, saw that he was being bitten by an enormous black dog. He smashed the camera against the animal’s skull with one hand in a series of frantic but ineffectual blows while reaching for his pistol with the other.
Ja’wab and Tammuz came into the room shooting. All three of Hassan’s men died in less than three seconds. Hassan had reached his own pistol by this time and holding off the dog with his other hand, he shot Tammuz through the forehead. Tammuz’s pistol, fitted with an elongated ammunition clip that protruded from the butt, spun from his hand. Maria picked up the weapon, and with her eyes fixed on Ja’wab, began to raise it expertly into the firing position. Ja’wab’s pistol was pointed straight at Hassan’s head, but Hassan knew that he had no intention of killing him. Ja’wab shouted something in incomprehensible Arabic, then saw Maria out of the corner of his eye and leaped backward through the door just as she fired the first round at him; it slammed into the rocks. Maria charged the door and fired half a dozen rounds into the darkness. Hassan jabbed the muzzle of his weapon into the dog’s rumbling chest, pressed the trigger three times, and saw the Parabellum bullets, trailed by streamers of blood, strike the wall on the other side of the room. He rolled free of the dead animal and leaped into the tunnel.
Zarah, her ankles still shackled, had floundered across the floor to the place where Patchen lay. Just as she reached him Patchen got to his feet. He was smiling joyously, oblivious to the hail of bullets ricocheting off the masonry walls. Zarah saw Maria pointing her captured Glock, loaded with Yeho’s copper bullets, at the two of them. Zarah, fighting her shackles, stood up and threw her arms around Patchen, intending to pull him back to the floor, but Patchen saw Maria, too, and with his one incredibly strong arm whirled Zarah off her feet, placing his body between hers and the gun. Maria fired two shots, Outfit-style, into Patchen’s thorax. The soft copper bullets opened within him just as Yeho had said they would, then stopped before they reached Zarah. Ja’wab stepped back into the room and killed her, too late.
Patchen grunted loudly and said, “I remembered.” It seemed to Zarah, then and for the rest of her life, that he spoke these words with his last breath, after he had stopped the expanding bullet with his body. He was talking to Christopher, who had climbed out of the tunnel carrying the splayed, unconscious person of Hassan Abdallah in his arms. Patchen’s weight pulled Zarah to her knees when she tried to keep his smiling corpse from falling.