The Old Boys Read online

  Every morning bright and early, we delivered this iffy data to the president of the United States in the form of the Daily Intelligence Briefing. It was up to him to decide for himself what might be true and what might not be, and on occasion, whether to blow up the world on a hunch. No president ever chose to do that, so I guess you could argue that the perverse ambiguity of the system saved civilization by making certitude impossible for the most powerful man in the world.

  To David Wong’s report on Paul’s ashes I assigned a B-3: source reliable, information possibly true. But just as possibly false. Ashes had certainly been delivered, but were they Paul’s? I had received bad news about my cousin many times before, but he had always turned up alive in the end. I am told that I cried bitterly when told, as a child, that he had been wounded on Okinawa, but a few months later he came home in his Marine Corps uniform and gave me a captured Japanese pistol (firing pin removed) as a present. A quarter of a century later, I was the first person in the Saigon station to receive the news that he had been kidnapped into China. As we know, he survived that. The list is long, and the point is that Paul always survived, more or less unchanged physically though always quieter, as if his melancholy fate was gradually turning him to stone.

  This time, during the months he had been gone, I naturally assumed that he would come back. One afternoon, the telephone would ring and I would hear his murmuring voice inviting me to dinner, as if there had been no interruption of our habit of dining together once a fortnight. The problem now was to establish whether Paul Christopher was or was not a dry quart of ashes inside a gaudy Chinese urn and, far more difficult than that, to accept that this Prince Valiant of my childhood had at last encountered an ordeal he could not survive. Above all, if I wanted peace of mind, David Wong’s report meant that I had to figure out what Paul had been up to. Whatever drove him to Ulugqat must have been a matter of great significance, at least in his own mind— something he felt he absolutely had to do, had to know, had to find in order to make sense of existence.

  Now there was a thought: Paul seated on some dusty rock in the barrens of Xinjiang, waiting for his ancient soul to escape from a body that had served its purpose. In my prosaic way, I had hoped that he would die with a book in his lap, seated in a leather chair after a light dinner and the aftertaste of, say, a 1973 Château Pétrus lingering on his palate. No last words, no explanations. Everything complete and at peace, picturesque and tidy. I imagined for him a gentle, well-earned and entirely harmonious end to a tumultuous life. And if despite his very strong doubts on the question, there happened to be a heaven, he would be greeted when he opened his eyes by the smiling, ever-young love of his life. Her name was Molly.

  As this picture formed in my mind, ten minutes or so after my talk with David, I smiled at Paul in this vision of eternal happiness. And then suddenly I found myself weeping. Such a thing had not happened to me for a long time, apart from sentimental tears shed in a movie house. My emotional shadow, a creature that usually follows tamely behind me, picked me up without warning and shook me—shook a sob out of me, then another. I was astonished, even a little angry. I had been taught from earliest life to keep emotion at bay. As a child, after a tantrum, my father sat me down and played me a game of rummy. He let me win, then said, “Think of feelings as cards, Horace. They’re nothing on their own. It’s how you play them that makes a fellow happy, wealthy, and wise—putting the ones that are alike together, making runs of consecutive numbers, discarding the ones that are no good to you and keeping the ones that are.”

  Although, as the Old Man had suggested, life turned out to be a lot like rummy, I had never been dealt a hand of cards quite like this one. Paul, dead or alive, had left unanswered a question on which he had bet his life.

  But what was the question? And why did I feel that I had inherited Paul’s quest? I didn’t want the cursed thing.

  3

  In darkness, by sense of touch, I put the key that Paul had given me into the front-door lock of the house on O Street. It didn’t fit. Someone had changed the lock. I briefly considered picking it, then reflected that the alarm code probably had been changed as well. Breaking and entering in the nighttime was an unwise course of action for an ex-con when the only person who would go to the trouble of getting him out of jail, Paul Christopher, was either dead or otherwise unreachable by telephone.

  It was about five o’clock on a brisk fall morning, a lovely time of day and year. The city, projecting misty streetlight onto low cloud cover, was all but silent. Up and down the block, a few bedroom windows showed yellow lamplight—workaholics getting an early start for the office. Out of the corner of my eye I caught an incandescent flash and saw that a light had come on upstairs in Paul’s house—not the master bedroom but a smaller bedroom across the hall. I knew the floor plan well, having lived in the house during one of Paul’s protracted absences. I walked around the block to kill time. When I came back the kitchen light was on. I rang the bell.

  The doorbell is not a sound one expects to hear in the hour before dawn, but as soon as it chimed footsteps approached, quick and confident. The light above the door came on. Paul’s house was equipped with surveillance cameras installed by myself. I was dressed like a ninja in navy blue sweats and sneakers and a watch cap. I took off the cap, scrooched down, and looked directly at the tiny lens imbedded in the door knocker. A brief pause, then the click of deadbolts. The door opened a crack, chain lock still in place.

  “Horace?”

  It was Paul’s ex-wife Stephanie, also dressed in running clothes, battered Nikes on her small feet, a cell phone in her hand, her thumb on the SEND button, 911 already dialed, no doubt. Stephanie was a well-organized woman.

  She said nothing. Stephanie had never liked me; I was too close to Paul, knew too many things about him that she imagined she had not been told. But she let me in, after first stepping out to look up and down the street to make sure I hadn’t brought along a squad of street people. She wore a faded red varsity baseball cap, vintage 1950, embroidered with the Harvard H, an odd affectation in this day and age for someone who had actually gone to Harvard (Ph.D. in psychology). It was a man’s cap, one of Paul’s no doubt (he played second base in college), too large for her small round head, the beak too long for her face. She had made it smaller with a safety pin at the back.

  Neither smiling nor cold, she looked me full in the face. Stephanie was not a pretty woman, but she was an interesting one, determinedly unfeminine for political reasons in manner, dress and conviction, but intensely female just the same.

  “I gather you’ve heard the news,” she said.

  “I’ve heard what they’re saying in Beijing.”

  “And?” Stephanie was looking at me as if I were a Jehovah’s Witness who had knocked on her door at the crack of dawn— harmless, perhaps, but having nothing sensible to say and far from welcome.

  I said, “I find it troubling.”

  “Troubling in what sense?”

  “I’m not sure I believe he’s dead.”

  “So you came over to commune with the family spirits by the light of the moon?”

  “No, I came over to open Paul’s safe and get whatever he left in it addressed to me.”

  “His safe?” Stephanie said, genuinely surprised. “Paul doesn’t have a safe.”

  “Then he misinformed me.”

  “Paul told you he had a safe?” Her tone suggested that I must be lying. She continued to stare, expressionless, annoyed by my every word but in perfect control. “Why come at this hour?”

  What to say at this stage of the conversation that would not lead to misunderstanding, quite possibly to the end of what was left of our brittle friendship? With a kidder’s grin I said, “Frankly, Stephanie, I came at this hour because I hoped to avoid bumping into you.”

  She did not see the joke, or refused to see it. “Why?” she said. “I don’t live here. How did you plan to get in?”

  “Paul gave me a key. It didn’t fit.” />
  “No, I changed the locks. One of the paintings was missing and I didn’t know if Paul had taken it with him or what.”

  “Which painting?”

  “The Hicks. The one with the dopey cows.”

  Not a picture that would be missed, I thought, though it must be worth a lot of money.

  “I heard you fiddling with the key,” Stephanie said. “That’s why I got up.…”

  Her voice broke slightly—a tightening of the throat, nothing so spontaneous as a sob. But something changed in her eyes; she looked away. Had she thought, climbing out of sleep, that it was Paul at the door?

  She said, “This really is something Paul asked you to do?” I said, “Yes, Stephanie, it is. I have no idea why.”

  “I do,” she said. “He trusted you.” She was holding herself together with what was becoming visible effort. Her next words, unspoken, could be read in her eyes, in her lip that quivered ever so slightly: Why did he trust you? Why not me?

  Gathering herself, Stephanie said, “How much time do you need?”

  “I don’t know. I have to find the safe first.”

  “Do what?” she said.

  I said, “Find the safe. Paul just gave me just a general idea of its whereabouts. You really don’t know where it is?”

  Her hand was on the latch. She said, “No, I don’t. I didn’t even know it existed.”

  “He was quite specific.”

  Now there were tears in her eyes. I had put them there and, male that I am, I felt a twinge of guilt.

  Stephanie said, “Make yourself at home.” She shook her head, wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “Who but Paul could hide a safe from his wife in a house where they lived together for fifteen years?”

  Who indeed?

  Recovered, Stephanie said, “I’m going running. After that I’ll go home and get dressed and go to the office. Do what you have to do, but please be out of here by evening. I want to sleep here again tonight, God knows why.”

  I thought I knew why, but for once I held my tongue.

  4

  Apart from the film of dust that had accumulated during his absence, Paul’s office was in apple-pie order. He was tidy by nature. The furnishings were spartan: an antique leather-top writing table with sturdy legs that he used as a desk, a rolling chair, bookshelves with volumes arranged in alphabetical order according to author and subject, an unlocked cabinet containing his correspondence (meager) and the manuscripts of many poems. As a young man Paul had published a couple of books of verse, and it looked as though he had continued to write poetry. I read a few lines of the unpublished stuff and thought it slow and far too sad. His early poems had been melancholy, too, but with a lilt, something like A Shropshire Lad. All this was not much, taken as the record of a lifetime. Had I been searching an enemy’s house I would have suspected that the suspect had left these harmless documents out in the open as bait while hiding the incriminating stuff somewhere else. But this was Paul, who knew that there was no such thing as a safe hidey-hole, so what I found was probably all there was.

  He had said that the safe was under his desk. I sat down in the chair and, rolling myself around the desk very slowly, examined the floor from every angle. It seemed to be nothing but what it was, a well-waxed oak parquet, very likely the original nineteenthcentury flooring, with a black geometric inlay, somewhat warped by time and usage. I saw no sign of new boards or inlay or variation in color, but of course there would be none if the secret compartment had been properly installed. I got down on hands and knees and felt the floor, inch by square inch, with my hands and fingertips, searching for irregularities in the surface or differences in tension. Wood, even oak nailed to floor beams, is flexible because, between beams, it is a bridge over empty space. A steel floor safe placed under the flooring between two beams will create a numb space that the fingers will feel, like a kneecap at the end of a pliant thigh.

  No luck. The art of searching is as ancient as the impulse to conceal and like any other art, it has its rules. The first of these is that an object can be hidden in a limited number of places, all of them obvious. Inside a book or between two books, under the rug or the mattress, between a picture or a mirror and its backing, in a plant or buried in the backyard, taped to the back of a drawer or in a secret compartment, in the refrigerator, in the garbage, in milady’s intimate effects, even in plain sight. Finding what you are looking for is usually a simple matter of looking in the places where such things have been hidden since the dawn of time, or at least since the invention of furniture. But not always. One of my old Outfit teams found a strip of microfilm inside a turd floating in a toilet bowl; they extracted the film with tweezers, copied it, and put it back where they had found it.

  By now the morning had advanced to the point where I could feel the sun on my legs. I felt sleepy; reluctance has that effect on me, always has had, and I was reluctant to find whatever Paul had left for me. Paul had never before asked me for a favor. Now that he had done so, how could doing it be anything but the first step toward some far larger obligation and who knew what beyond that? I rolled over onto my back. My mood darkening by the moment, I stared upward at the bottom of Paul’s writing table. It was a partner’s desk, with four large drawers, two in front and two in back. It exuded the faint sour smell of very old, unpainted wood. I tapped a table leg and heard solid mahogany, tapped another and heard the same, then tapped the third and heard and felt metal beneath the surface.

  I cleared the desk top and turned the table over onto a rug. The leg in question unscrewed quite easily. I turned it upside down and a heavy-gauge steel cylinder about twice the diameter of a standard mailing tube slid out. At one end of the tube was a safe dial. I entered the combination that Paul had provided and the cap came off.

  Inside the cylinder I found Paul’s handwritten will, a letter addressed to me, a photograph of a woman’s hand holding a holograph manuscript written in an alphabet I did not even try to read, and the Hicks painting, dismounted from its frame and stretcher and rolled into a tight sausage.

  5

  Dear Horace,

  It’s a temptation to begin this letter, “If you are reading this…” But the reason you hold it in your hands will be obvious. I am either dead or have failed to do what I set out to do a year ago. I want to make it clear that I am not asking you to finish what I started, and that you are under no obligation of blood, friendship, or previous employment to do anything that you do not wish to do. However, as you will see, you are an interested party.

  These seem to be the facts:

  1. Your old friend Ibn Awad, whose assassination you thought you had arranged ten years ago, is alive.

  2. It is possible that my mother, who would now be ninety-four years old, is also still alive and may have in her possession a firstcentury manuscript, written in classical Greek, that is coveted by Ibn Awad. The manuscript is said to be the report of a Roman official sent on a secret mission to Judea around the time of the Crucifixion to investigate a Roman covert action operation that went wrong. Apparently this failed operation bears a close resemblance to certain events described in the New Testament. The report could therefore be interpreted as evidence that Jesus Christ was an unwitting asset of Roman intelligence. And that, of course, is what interests Ibn Awad. If the manuscript is authentic, he can argue (and might sincerely believe) that Christianity is a false religion.

  3. Awad has obtained and concealed—no one knows exactly where—at least twelve compact nuclear warheads of the type designed by the Soviets to be backpacked into combat by their special forces. These are said to be one- or two-kiloton fission devices. You will find attached a document that is said to be a photocopy of the report of an official Russian investigation into their disappearance.

  I was made aware of these matters by a man named Kalash el Khatar, a Sudanese I knew in Geneva in the fifties. We had not seen or heard from each other in forty years until he came to see me in Washington last May. You may know about Kalash f
rom your days in the Middle East. He’s a descendant of Muhammad, and is the hereditary ruler and religious leader of a sect of Muslims in Sudan. He is Ibn Awad’s first cousin. The latter, of course, is also a descendant of the Prophet. Like nearly everybody else on earth, Kalash had believed his cousin to be dead. But then, at the wedding of one of Kalash’s grandsons to a member of Awad’s family, he saw Ibn Awad himself.

  “He was being pushed in a wheelchair by one huge beetling thug while others stood guard in a ring around him, so it was very difficult to catch a glimpse,” Kalash said. “Nevertheless, because I was taller than the thugs, I saw at once that it was him.”

  Kalash being Kalash, he simply walked over to the wheelchair, brushed aside the bodyguards, and greeted his cousin.

  “He may have got the impression from my greeting that I had always known that he was alive, but whatever he thought, he was delighted to see me,” Kalash said. “We were chums when we were boys because I got him Somali girls when he came to visit and could find my way in the desert. I taught him the stars.”

  That evening the two cousins had a long chat. Ibn Awad told Kalash that he had survived the attack on his life, though barely, and because he was afraid the Outfit might try to finish him off, he had decided to let the world think him dead until the moment to strike back at America came. Though still in danger of death from his wounds, Ibn Awad commanded that he be carried into the desert, taking with him doctors and nurses and a complete U.S. Army field hospital that the Outfit had given him in happier times. He had always preferred desert to town, and apparently believed that he would be healed by the wilderness.

  Eventually he did recover. Protected by his palace guard, Ibn Awad has lived the life of a bedouin for all these years while one of his brothers ostensibly ruled the country and he laid his plans for revenge against the United States of America. And, presumably, against you personally.