The Old Boys (27 page)

She spoke forcefully. This drew knowing glances from other travelers as they hurried by. Clearly she had been thinking unkind thoughts about me in my absence. It was pointless to reply. Information was not what she was after, and no answer I could make would mollify her.

“You might think in term of the peace of mind of Paul’s children,” she said. “Lori has nightmares about her father being back in a prison camp in China. Who knows what goes through Zarah’s mind since her father has already been presumed dead and come back to life once before in her lifetime.”

Stephanie had a good loud voice and as she spoke a steady stream of total strangers, conditioned by a lifetime of watching television to be entertained while their attention was elsewhere, caught bits and pieces of her monologue as they hurried by. We must have sounded mighty like a husband and wife whose marriage was on the rocks.

There was little I could say in my defense, since there was at least a chance that Paul was, in fact, back in a Chinese prison camp. This was a thought I had not permitted myself to have for several weeks. What a good psychotherapist Stephanie must be, to summon hidden thoughts to the surface in the way that she did.

I said, “Sorry about all that, Stephanie. Where are you off to?”

“A conference in Cancun. How long will you be in town?”

“I’m
not sure. When will you return?”

“What, so you can be sure to clear out before I come back?”

Talk about mind-reading. I was beginning to think that it was I, not my unfortunate cousin, who had once been married to this woman. On the other hand, it was impossible to imagine anyone talking to Paul as she talked to me. Silence and an understanding smile were the best defenses.

Stephanie said, “I’ll be gone for ten days. Are you going to be staying at your house?”

“As far as I know, yes.”

“I’ll call you when I get back.”

What a happy prospect.

She said, “I’ve got to run.”

Then, unaccountably, she smiled—a complete girlish smile, impish eyes and all. She was pink in the face from emotion and also, I guess, from the strain of refusing to put down all that luggage while she read me the riot act.

“I really am fond of you, Horace,” she said. “But you’ve gone around the bend again. You do know that, don’t you?”

Fond of me? I said, “Already? I’ve been standing here thinking that I might go around the bend at any moment.”

But she was gone before I could finish the sentence, dragging her hanger bag, weaving her way through the crowd.

My house, hardly larger than a garage, was tucked away between two far more imposing structures. It looked the same, but I assumed as a principle of tradecraft that it must have been entered by stealth in my absence. Perhaps listening devices had been planted, the phone bugged, the coffee poisoned, a trip wire connected to a bomb installed. I entered by the back door—the front door was blocked from the inside by a knee-high drift of junk mail—and checked the various traps I had set to tell me whether someone had been here in my absence. The hairs I had stretched across the cracks between the doors and doorframes had been broken, but then removed in a professional manner and replaced with substitute hairs of a slightly different color. Also, Uncle Horace’s patented waylay to catch meddlers had caught one. A toilet that I had left unflushed had been flushed in my absence. Very few intruders, no matter how highly trained they might be to leave everything exactly as they found it, can forget their mothers’ scolding voices when confronted by an unflushed water closet. They pull the chain before they think.

My stomach cramped. I sat down. Soon I was lost in thought. How would I avoid Stephanie? How would I see Zarah without exposing her to risk?

My body finished what it had been doing. Automatically, I
reached behind me for the lever on the water closet, I saw in my memory an image of the flushed bowl. A message snaked up my arm and into my brain. I took my hand off the lever, pulled up my pants, and went into the kitchen to find a paring knife and a flashlight. With these tools I examined the lid of the tank, and finding no wires, gingerly lifted it and peered beneath. And sure enough, folks, just like the tired old pulp fiction cliché that it was, there in the beam of the flashlight was about a pound of
plastique
taped to the underside of the lid. It was rigged with a simple trip wire to go off when the toilet was flushed. The bomber had flushed the foul toilet to make sure no one else did before I came home and pulled the chain myself.

I disarmed the bomb, which was about the size of an orange, then wrapped the
plastique
in aluminum foil and put it into the pocket of my raincoat for safekeeping. That done, I ate a bowl of instant oatmeal, then went upstairs and took a shower. I entertained more long thoughts while the hot water poured over me. What next? Who
were
these guys? Not that I didn’t know who they were in the abstract: in the particular, of course, they were nobodies and I wouldn’t have known who they were if someone whispered their names in my ear or showed me their pictures. But why all this thrillerish nonsense with bombs? Why not just shoot me or stab me? Who would care? I myself was too tired, too nauseated to care. Before retiring for the night I set a few traps just in case, but it didn’t seem likely that the people who rigged the bomb would wish to reenter my house until it had gone off. Wearily I climbed the stairs and lay down for the first time in weeks in a bed that fit my body and slept the sleep of the just.

When I awoke it was dark, but still only six o’clock in the evening. There was nothing in the house to eat or drink, so I walked down the hill to M Street and dialed Zarah Christopher’s home number from a sidewalk pay phone.

“It’s Horace. Can I take you to dinner?”

“Come to my house,” Zarah said. “You can cook.”

Since it behooved me to suspect everyone, I could hardly take a cab in a town where a clear majority of taxi drivers wore luxuriant whiskers and behaved like lookouts for the jihad, so I walked the whole way, a couple of miles as the crow flies but farther than that by the circuitous route I took. I kept a sharp eye behind me, of course, but Washington is not a walker’s town and I was the only pedestrian in the posh neighborhoods through which I passed, and was probably in less danger of assassination than of being mistaken for a prowler and reported to the police.

Zarah lived in an old underheated Tudor-style house that overhung, rather than overlooked, a brambly section of Rock Creek Park. Its former owner had equipped it with all sorts of gadgetry including a restaurant-style kitchen with a six-burner Viking stove, a full set of copper pots and pans dangling from an overhead rack, and a large selection of razor-sharp German knives. I loved this kitchen. Cooking, for me, is what golf seems
to be for more clubbable men, something that gets your mind off your everyday work because it requires a certain amount of skill and concentration, yet at the same time is a means to sociable ends.

While I made a
poule au pot
with the groceries I had picked up on my way to Zarah’s place, she sat on the countertop, ankles crossed, sipping a glass of Grgich chardonnay. An uncorked bottle of Beaune stood on the kitchen table, breathing. A wedge of Reblochon cheese softened on a board beside a bowl of black grapes. Zarah had provided the wines, fruit and cheese. Also the conversation. She said nothing about people we knew in common. She mentioned movies she had seen, books she had read, something out of her own childhood experience about hunting with falcons.

Zarah, it turned out, knew all about birds of prey—how they are trained, how they are handled and rewarded, how they kill. In the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, where she had grown up while her vengeful mother was concealing her existence from her father, the Berbers had hunted gazelles and jackals with golden eagles. It took a very strong man to carry one of these birds on his arm. To desert people, as I already knew, falconry was a mystical art, worth any amount of trouble or money. My superficial knowledge of such matters was nothing compared to Zarah’s. In ancient times, only kings had been permitted to hunt with eagles. Lesser nobility had been assigned peregrine falcons, the swiftest and most powerful of the many kinds of falcons and hawks—she named them all—used in the sport. Rich Arabs will pay almost any price for a particularly fine specimen. If they have unlimited money, like Saudi princes, they might own scores of the birds, gathered from all over Asia. The peregrine falcon can spot its prey at tremendous distances and when dropping out of the sky for the kill can fly at amazing speeds— diving as fast as a small airplane can fly. Zarah described explosions of feathers in blue desert skies, noted the absence of memory from the falcon’s yellow eye after a kill.

“Do falcons remember the last victim or does the brain send
them some imprinted instruction each time they spot their prey?” she asked. “Nobody seems to know.”

“Ibn Awad was a falconer,” I said. “His birds sat on perches behind him when he dined in company—twenty or more of them all in a row, wearing hoods.”

“Twenty?” Zarah said. “That’s about half a million dollars worth of birds.”

I’d had no idea. “He could afford it,” I said. “And he had no other vices.”

Except a thirst for murdering infidels, of course.

We drank what remained of the chardonnay, then moved on to the chicken and the burgundy. Conversation—at least Zarah’s half of it—sparkled until we arrived at the cheese and grapes. Then, all of a sudden, her smile faded.

She said, “Horace, do you think they’re alive?”

“Let’s go for a walk.”

Zarah lived in a quiet, not to say hushed neighborhood, and at that hour of the night we encountered no other pedestrians except dog walkers. It was cold and damp, but nothing compared to northern Europe. We walked for as long as it took me to tell her everything I had learned on my travels. Hours. She never once interrupted until I had finished.

Then she said, “Then you think they’re both alive?”

“I work on the assumption that the answer is Yes. Otherwise what would be the point of going on with this? Whether Paul and Lori are together is another question.”

“Even though he was on the point of finding her?”

“Lori may not have wanted to be found.”

“By her own son?”

“You’re asking me to read her mind. As nearly as I can make out, nobody has ever been able to do that. Not even Paul, and in a way he’s devoted his life to the effort.”

Zarah stopped. We were on the other side of the park, standing under a large tree in a softly lit, sleeping neighborhood of mansions. I had no idea where exactly we were.

“I’ve
done the same, you know,” Zarah said. “When I was a child, long before we met, my father was my imaginary friend. He told me wonderful stories.”

“Even though he was not present?”

“Exactly. He was in China, though I didn’t know that at the time. My favorite story was about dinosaurs. In his story they were feathered creatures and they sang as birds do except the sound was much grander, pipe organs instead of piccolos. He described a grassy plain crowded with them, a rainbow of color in the sunlight, each kind of dinosaur with its own plumage and its own voice, but all of them in some wonderful kind of harmony.”

“How old were you when you thought this up?”

“I was about ten. And I didn’t think it up. It came to me.”

I said, “You were an imaginative child.”

“Was I? I wonder.”

A figure approached out of the shadows—a middle-aged woman in a Gucci babushka and a Burberry coat, reeking of whiskey, staggering slightly on high heels and glaring at Zarah and me as her yapping miniature schnauzer tugged her down the street.

Zarah and I walked back to her house. Fortunately, she knew the way out of the strange neighborhood into which we had wandered. I had in my pocket the only copy of her grandmother’s translation of the Amphora Scroll. While still in Budapest I had realized, out of the blue, that Zarah was the person—the only possible person—to translate her grandmother’s German version of the Amphora Scroll. Now I handed her Lori’s manuscript, still in its oilskin packet. She opened the packet and saw the handwriting.