The Old Boys (26 page)

Harley’s voice trailed off even before he dropped the final
g
. His eyes closed. His mouth fell open. He uttered a wordless gargle. Frightened, I spoke his name. When he didn’t answer I stuck my head out the door and shouted for the doctor. She came at the run, ringlets bouncing, but Harley had merely fallen asleep.

I met Kevin on the bridge at the appointed hour. The murky city seemed to be sound asleep. Street lamps traced the outline of a hill with a bulbous church steeple at its summit. During the Soviet occupation, Harley had told me, this bridge had been such an ideal rendezvous point for spies and counterrevolutionaries and subversive lovers that the secret police had planted microphones in the railings. Under Communism there had not been enough traffic noise to interfere with the mikes. Evidently Kevin had never heard this story or believed that the new democratic Hungary had torn out the wiring, because when I asked him again why he had Harley under surveillance, why he had gone into the business of rescuing us, and what I was supposed to think of him, he began to talk as if there were no tomorrow.

“Look,” he said. “You’re being tracked. Every phone call you make, every flight you book, every car you rent, every person you meet shows up on the screen. Example: Yesterday you met with Marie Károlyi, a former party girl of Yuri Andropov’s, among other enemies of humanity, and every word of your conversation, which lasted two hours and forty-two minutes, was picked up by a transmitter. You’re on somebody else’s turf, trampling on the footprints, sir. They want you off it.”

I said, “Who wants me off it?”

“It’s
not just you. It’s the whole gang of you. The Over the Hill Gang—that’s what they call you guys. They’re very annoyed.”

“I’ve got the picture. Now let me ask you again, Who is
They
?”

He said, “The system.”

“Ah, the Keystone spooks. For whom you’re the designated messenger?”

Kevin winced. “The world has changed,” he said. “No matter what you and your chums used to be, you’re amateurs now. You’re out of date, out of the loop, senile, a danger to yourselves and everybody else. After all, we’re talking about nuclear weapons.”

“You concede that Ibn Awad has nuclear weapons?”

“I’m talking about the hypothesis. That’s one of the objections to you. You’ve got this hypothesis you’re trying to prove instead of relying on cold facts.”

Cold facts, in my experience, mean about as much in relation to one another as a spoonful of iron filings stuck to a magnet. It is what people actually do that counts, not what you think you know about their intentions. I said, “Is that your personal objection?”

Kevin smiled. He said, “You mentioned a fabulous one-time offer in the message you left for me.”

“That seems to have been bad timing,” I said. “Maybe I’ll get back to you.”

Kevin nodded and handed me an engraved calling card:
Mr
.
Osborn Denison.
A number with an unfamiliar country code was written on the back.

“If you do, use this number,” Kevin said. “Call on a land line, from outside the United States.”

My turn to smile. Was it was possible that I had made a friend?

My German was never more than adequate. During my apprentice tour in Frankfurt, English-speaking German assets—supercilious veterans of the Abwehr who acted, not without reason, as if their American handlers were working for them instead of viceversa—did all the sidewalk work. I scarcely ever set foot outside the I. G. Farben building. After staying awake most of the night with Lori’s translation of the Amphora Scroll and my German-English dictionary, I realized that deciphering the manuscript was beyond me. I would need help from someone I could trust and trust absolutely. A member of the family. I made two reservations on an afternoon flight to Washington.

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

I asked him how he was feeling.

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

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

“What’s in Frankfurt?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alas, nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said, “Let me take those bags.”

“Not necessary.”

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

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

“What negative is that, Stephanie?”

“That Paul is not dead.”

“Proved it? No.”

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

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

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