The Old Boys (32 page)

He said, “When I returned from the front”—apparently that’s where he thought he had been when he was performing his experiments
in Treblinka—“and saw the wanton damage the British and the Americans had inflicted on German cities and the poor German people, I knew I could never rest until those who had committed these crimes against our people and our culture themselves felt the pain and the loss and the sorrow that we had felt.”

He had wandered the world, Bücher said, living in secret, doing his duty, but always looking forward to the day when things were once again what they used to be. Never for a moment had he ever doubted that this would happen. His granddaughter should not doubt it, either. And because they would never meet again, and because in his mind his children and their children had always been messengers to this wonderful future that he had tried all his life to achieve for them, he was going to tell her some marvelous news.

His wheezing, stoked by emotion, grew worse with every word.

“I have taught you by the example of my life the power of an oath,” Bücher told her. “Now you must swear to me that you will never tell the secret I am about to tell you.”

Zarah nodded. This was not enough.

“Put your hand on my heart and swear,” Bücher said.

Zarah did this. Again I cannot imagine how she overcame her own blood memories and actually touched this man, but somehow she did.

“Good,” Bücher said. “Now listen. There is a man, an Arab, a sort of king, who is the enemy of our enemies. Fate works in marvelous ways. I could never have imagined that this hook-nosed old man, bearded and circumcised and looking so amazingly like…”

Here Zarah’s stomach warned her not to let him go on. She said, “Save your strength. Who is this man?”

“I cannot tell even you his name, but you will soon know it. Our worst enemy, America, destroyer of the old Germany, thinks that its assassins killed him years ago. But they are wrong. This man lives. Only last week he embraced me and thanked me and said good-bye to me. We both knew we would never meet again. Nor will you and I, my dear. For years I have lived with this man. I saved his life after he was wounded by an American assassin. I
have taken care of him ever since, because he has a great plan and the means of carrying it out.”

Zarah waited in silence for the rest.

“Soon he will come back to life—that’s what the Americans will think—and do to vulgar ugly American cities what American bombers did to our beautiful ancient German cities. New York will burn like Hamburg. San Francisco will be pulverized like Dresden. Washington will be turned to ashes.”

Zarah said, “This Arab has nuclear weapons?”

“Many, many, many,” said Bücher. “Hidden in the desert. No one will ever find him.”

“Which desert?”

Bücher actually answered her with what sounded like a name. But the name, if that’s what it was, was wrapped up in such a paroxysm of coughing that the rest of us could not understand it, no matter how often we listened to the tape, no matter how Charley’s wizards tried to enhance it.

It really was his last word. We could not trick him into repeating it because he sank into a coma immediately after speaking it. It took him almost a week to die, but during that time he never regained consciousness. The nurses said he did not know he was suffering, that mentally he was elsewhere, in some place where the dying often went.

One wondered where that might be, in Claus Bücher’s case.

After her interview with Bücher, Zarah passed the tape recording she had made to Charley Hornblower, who bumped into her by prearrangement in a hospital corridor. She then went straight to the railroad station and took a train to Istanbul. When Charley and Ben and I got to Istanbul a few days later—we waited in Vienna until Bücher died and then traveled separately—we could not find Zarah. She was not registered at the Hilton as expected. According to the front-desk clerk, she had no reservation. This was alarming. We had not actually seen her board the train, nor had she telephoned or communicated in any other way.

Had she been snatched by the same pack of nitwits who were bloodhounding me—or, worse, fallen into the clutches of some Schutzstaffel equivalent of the Old Boys? Claus Bücher must have had money squirreled away somewhere. According to Charley Hornblower’s information and my own impressions of the threadbare Simon Hawk, Bücher’s old apparatus was starved for funds. Zarah had gone to the station in her Gretchen Zechmann disguise. Had Bücher’s old comrades assumed that she was the real heiress? Were they at this moment shining a blinding light into her eyes and asking her where her grandfather’s money was?

Ben Childress thought that my imagination was running amok.
“Get a grip on yourself,” he said. “She may have gotten off the train somewhere. Did you say exactly when we’d be in Istanbul?”

“No.”

“Then why would she hurry?”

“Why would she get off the train?”

Ben gazed down from Olympus and said, “The train to Istanbul goes through Prague and Budapest, doesn’t it?”

Of course it did, and Zarah may well have gotten off to do some genealogical research on her own. Everything Ben said made sense. Making sense was his specialty. Nevertheless I had never in my life felt more anxiety than I felt now, gazing out the window over the endless jumble of roofs under which Istanbul was hiding itself.

Courtesy of another classmate of Charley’s, this one the heir to a Turkish chewing gum fortune, we were staying in a waterfront villa on an island in the Bosporus. We were being circumspect, of course—everyone arriving from a different point of the compass, no more than one of us outside the house at any one time and then only after dark, no telephoning, no faces in the windows, no loud music. Because our makeshift safe house was a summer place and it was now midwinter, the house was empty of servants. However, it came with a full larder and an unlocked wine cellar stocked with quite drinkable Turkish reds and whites and sparkling rosés. There was nothing to do but wait and sort through what we knew and talk about what might be next. We really had no idea. Pieces of the puzzle were missing. We had had our little successes but we didn’t know which way to go. We spent a lot of time listening to the tape of Bücher’s last conversation with Zarah. There were words we did not understand, references that baffled us.

“Does it mean
anything
?” Ben asked.

“This thing is not coming together the way it should,” Jack said.

What we really needed was a stroke of luck. All operations get to a point where nothing makes sense. Then one small isolated
fact falls in your lap and the whole thing comes together. As Harley might say, this always happens, except when it doesn’t.

We were increasingly anxious about Zarah, Jack especially. He spoke Turkish and he had bought a cell phone in Istanbul. He used this, walking a long distance from the villa before switching on, to call the Hilton and check up on Zarah. At the end of the third day—that is to say, the eighth day since she left Vienna— there was no word. Even Ben began to look preoccupied.

On the fourth night, late, I was watching a Turkish-language version of
Bonanza
when I heard the doorbell ring. Ben, who was supposed to be asleep, beat me to the door. Zarah walked in. She wore jeans and sneakers and a black leather trench coat. Her hair was tucked under a knit cap that looked like the Roaring Twenties cloche my mother wore in family snapshots. All in all, this was a far more fetching costume than the one she had worn as Gretchen. I suppose I should have felt like kissing her, but no such thought crossed my mind. I settled for what I hoped was a warm smile but may have been more like a grimace of pain, judging by the puzzled look in Zarah’s eye.

I said, “Hi, there. Good trip?”

“Interesting,” Zarah said. “I stopped in Prague and Budapest You haven’t been worried, I hope?”

“A little impatient, maybe.”

Ben said, “Before I go back to bed, may I ask a question? How did you find this place?”

“Horace mentioned the name of this island in case we missed contact,” Zarah said. “I went down to the waterfront and asked a boatman if three Americans your age had hired a water taxi lately. He said, ‘Is one of them very tall?’ I said yes, and he brought me over to the island. After we landed, he asked a question or two of other boatmen and gave me directions to this house.”

“Wonderful,” Ben said. “Good night, my dear.”

The next morning, Zarah appeared at breakfast at six-thirty, looking as though she had slept for eight hours instead of the three or four she had actually spent in bed. I cooked a mushroom omelet with yogurt beaten into the eggs. Charley had found an electric coffeemaker and a pound of Maxwell House. Ben, who preferred Arab coffee, sipped this mild brew as if his tripes were being dissolved in battery acid. Before the dishes were cleared, Ben produced a Walkman into which was loaded the tape of Zarah’s conversation with Claus Bücher.

“This is you and Bücher,” he said to Zarah. “He speaks a word at the very end that none of us can quite make out. Maybe you can, since you were there.”

Zarah put on the headphones and listened. The expression on her face was perfectly neutral. She rewound the end of the tape once or twice, listening to the mystery word.

Finally she said, “He’s speaking Arabic, or thinks he is. At the time, I thought the word was
houbara
. Now I’m sure of it. He’s swallowing the final syllable, but maybe that’s the way the Arabs he knows pronounce it.”

“Houbara is an Arabic word?” Charley said.

“It’s a bird,” Zarah said. “The houbara bustard. I had just
asked him where Ibn Awad or the bombs could be found and he was answering my question.”

“With the name of a bird?” Ben said. “What is it, a code name?”

“I don’t think so,” Zarah said. “The houbara bustard is the bird of birds if you’re a falconer.”

Ben already knew this, obviously.

“There are still falconers in the world?” Charley asked.

“Lots of them,” Zarah said. “Rich Arabs will travel hundreds of miles to hunt the houbara bustard with falcons. They do it partly for the thrill of the thing, but also because they believe this bird is an aphrodisiac. They eat them by the hundreds in season.”

“Flying Viagra,” Charley said. “Wow. Any truth in that belief?”

“You’d have to ask the man who ate one,” Zarah said.

Ben was annoyed by this badinage. This was no light moment. He was processing new information. I too was deeply interested.

Charley said, “Where is this bird hunted?”

“Any number of places, but always in the desert,” Zarah said. “It breeds in Central Asia and western China in summer, then migrates to Africa. During the later winter it flies north again. There’s a big hunt in Balochistan every January.”

“So where are the bustards now?” I asked.

“After Balochistan they continue on to Central Asia and beyond,” Zarah said. “Turkmenistan, northern Iran, western Afghanistan. After that, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Xinjiang, Mongolia. They don’t all start from the same place or at exactly the same time, so they don’t all arrive at the same time.”

“What’s the time spread?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know exactly.”

Ben was visibly disappointed by this gap in Zarah’s knowledge. So were the rest of us. We all understood what this information might mean, if it turned out to mean anything.

Ben said, “Zarah, how do you happen to have all this lore at your fingertips?”

“I
knew people who hunted the houbara bustard with falcons in Morocco,” she said. “They were fixated on the houbara. That’s why I thought I understood the Arabic word Bücher was using.”

I said, “So where do we go from here?”

Zarah said, “The key is the exact migratory pattern of the houbara.”

“Why is that the key?”

“Because Ibn Awad is a very rich Arab and you told me, Horace, that he was a keen falconer when you knew him.”

Charley said, “I thought he was an ascetic.”

“Once a falconer, always a falconer,” Zarah said. “If that’s true in Ibn Awad’s case, he will hunt the houbara bustard, maybe in several different desert places along their migratory route. Pinpoint those places and the time of arrival of the houbara and plot them on a map and you’ll know where to look for Ibn Awad.”