The Old Boys (33 page)

Ben said, “Brilliant work, Zarah.”

And so it was—a breakthrough. I said, “Charley?”

“I’ll get right on it,” Charley said.

“How long will it take to draw a map?”

“Not long if all goes well. I know a bird man at the Smithsonian. We can use Landsat images.”

Ben nodded. This meant Charley would have to go back to Washington, a happy turn of events from Ben’s point of view. His thoughts were like slides projected clickety-click on a screen: Let Charley do the donkey work. I’ll do the thinking.

Ben said, “Zarah, will you be working with us?”

“From a distance,” she said. “I’m planning a little trip.”

A little trip?

Where to? Not, I was sure, to the faubourg Saint-Honoré for a shopping spree. In my bones I knew the destination would not be a safe and civilized one even if such a place existed in the chainsaw-massacre movie that was the world in the twenty-first century.

Any
plan I may have had to discuss Zarah’s itinerary with her in private went aglimmering because Ben decided that the lazy minutes after breakfast provided a good opportunity to test her Arabic. They sat at the table, conversing in that tongue, while Charley and I did the dishes. For me, who had not lived with the language for years, this was something like watching a film in Arabic without subtitles. At first I understood almost nothing. After ten minutes I was catching about half. Another ten minutes and I half understood nearly everything but the slang and the jokes. Both Ben and Zarah were too much at home in Arabic for me ever to understand everything they said. Had they wished to do so, they could have shifted into another gear and left me behind completely.

Ben was impressed. He treated Zarah as if she were a promising young man he was sizing up for recruitment. Given his reputation with women—I admit I had been reluctant to introduce him to my lovely young cousin—this was something to behold. Suddenly he was gender-neutral. It was not Zarah’s looks but her brain that enthralled him.

Ben’s conversation with Zarah was an interrogation, of course. “Where exactly in the Maghreb did you grow up?” he was asking Zarah when I finally plugged in.

“In the Idáren Dráren,” Zarah said.

“That’s the Berber name for the Atlas Mountains?”

It was Zarah’s turn to be impressed. Not many people knew that.

“That’s right,” she said.

“You speak Berber?” Ben asked.

“We lived with Berbers.”

“Which tribe?”

“The Jawabi.”

“Ah, Joab’s people. The hidden Jews. Are they still pretending to be Muslims?”

“If that’s what they’re doing it’s kept them alive for twelve hundred years.”

“You
spent your childhood with the Jawabi and you don’t
know
whether they’re faking it?”

“Religious questions have never interested me,” Zarah said.

It was clear even to Ben that this was the only answer he was going to get. In a sense, this pleased him. Zarah certainly knew the answer to the question, but she could keep a secret. She had a sense of duty to others who knew the same secret. Good signs. You could see Ben putting a mental checkmark beside “loyalty.”

Ben said, “Do I have the basics correct? The Jawabi believe that they left Israel under the command of King David’s great general, Joab, and after wandering all the way across Egypt and the Sahara, ended up in the mountains of the Maghreb?”

“In the highest place in the world, yes.”

“There were a number of tribes of Jewish Berbers,” Ben said. “All converted when the Arabs conquered the Maghreb except the Jawabi, yes?”

“Berbers have their own way of being Muslims,” Zarah said.

“Like eating wild boar and drinking alcohol and not fasting for Ramadan and not being too fussy about ablutions?”

“All of the above,” Zarah said. “However, the Jawabi go to the mosque and pray five times a day like everybody else.”

“Yes, and the Maranos in Spain went to mass like everybody else after they were converted to Catholicism by the sword, but continued for generations to worship in secret as Jews.”

No reply. Not even a change of expression.

Ben soon understood what was going on and to my amazement, apologized. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But the world you lived in is the one I’ve always wanted to experience.”

Zarah said, “You speak Arabic like a man who grew up with Arabs.”

“I’ve lived with Arabs, but I grew up in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Where were you born, may I ask?”

Ben was back in all-wheel drive. By the look in her eyes I could see that Zarah understood this and knew that the only
way to escape Ben’s questions was to answer the ones it was convenient to answer and feign deafness to all the others.

Patiently, Zarah said, “I was born in a cave in the Idáren Dráren when my mother was on her way to live with the Jawabi.”

“She’d been invited?”

“She was traveling with a friend of my grandparents who was a Jawab. They met in Europe when Mother was pregnant and alone. The friend, whose name was Lla Kahina, more or less adopted her.”

“Why?”

“Because she saw how unhappy and how out of love with life my mother was. And because Mother was carrying her friends’ grandchild and Lla Kahina was afraid that the child would be lost to the Christophers. She thought they had already lost enough.”

“This Jawabi woman told you all this?”

“After I was grown up and my mother died, yes.”

“Died how?”

“She was killed by terrorists. She camped by mistake near one of their training camps. Mother was a horsewoman. She liked to race ostriches on horseback. An ostrich is much faster than any horse and can go on at top speed for hours instead of minutes for the horse. The race was hopeless. That’s what Mother liked about it.”

“Is that why you dislike terrorists?”

This took my breath away. Didn’t he
know
? An elastic moment of silence ensued.

“It depends on the terrorist,” Zarah said at last, letting go of her end of the invisible rubber band. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pack.”

Ben practically exploded with disappointment. He was in a state of excitement. Zarah knew things that he had always hoped to know. And now would never know even if they met again, because she had made it clear that their conversation was
over forever. Zarah was perfectly still, as if under Ben’s onslaught she had turned herself into an oil portrait of herself— beautifully lighted by the golden sun of Asia Minor, perfectly attentive and frank of gaze. But silent, inert.

I tapped on the door of Zarah’s room.

Without opening the door—I suppose she had heard my tread in the hallway—she said, “Come in, Horace.”

She was standing in front of the mirror, combing her hair. She had changed into a soft wool sweater and a gray pleated skirt. A blue blazer lay on the bed beside her traveling bag, which was hardly larger than a briefcase.

“Did you have that outfit packed in that little bag?” I asked.

“Along with a couple of others,” Zarah said. “I pack like a sailor, everything rolled up so it won’t wrinkle.” “Who taught you that?”

“The Jawabi.” She smiled at me in the mirror. “The Sahara is a sea of sand, no?”

I said, “Look, I apologize for Sherlock Holmes.”

“No need,” Zarah replied. “Ben would have made a terrific psychoanalyst, founder of the listen-here-young-lady school of therapy, asking questions instead of avoiding them. Quite refreshing in his way.”

Her voice was light, but she kept her back to me. “Before you go, I want to thank you for all you’ve done,” I said.

A Gioconda smile in the looking glass. She was winding
her hair into a coil and pinning it with a barrette. Another painting.

“Sorry to apologize twice in the same breath,” I said, “but I had no idea that Claus Bücher was going to be as bad as he turned out to be.”

“Don’t worry. It wasn’t much of a surprise to me. I’d heard a lot about Heydrich from Lla Kahina. Same species.”

“I really appreciate your work in Vienna,” I said. “And now you seem to have solved the problem of finding Ibn Awad.”

“You think so?”

“It’s the first time we’ve had a pattern to work from.”

“It’s just a hunch,” Zarah said. “Even if it’s correct, we’ll be dealing with an awful lot of territory. Half of Asia, half of Africa, most of the biggest deserts in the world.”

I said, “Your point being… ?”

“The hypothesis could be wrong, a wild guess.”

I didn’t think so. For most of my conscious life I had watched her father have what might be called memories of the future. Feathered dinosaurs were the least of it. Why should Zarah, who was so much like her father, be different?

Zarah, coat on, bag in hand, hair covered by a scarf, ready to go now, watched me as though my thoughts were visible to her.

I said, “May I know where you’re going?”

“Kyrgyzstan.”

“Why?” I said, flustered.

Zarah did not have an automatic American-girl smile. She looked gravely into my eyes and said, “There are things I want to know, questions I have to ask.”

“What things, what questions?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Ah. Well, keep in touch.”

“You can count on it.”

Her room had French doors that opened onto a winter-brown garden. Beyond the garden lay Istanbul with its domes and minarets washed by watery morning light. She walked through the
doors and down the steps, a straight-backed young woman in a blue blazer, and as far as I knew, all alone in the world. And on her way to Kyrgyzstan.

Zarah had given us a new direction. Ben Childress left on the morning plane for Cairo, Charley Hornblower on the afternoon flight for New York. They had work to do. I had run out of things to do next and had nowhere to go unless I wanted to hang my birding binoculars around my neck and start walking toward Xinjiang, looking for the houbara bustard. As happens in life, especially in a life devoted to trying to catch slippery trout with your bare hands, I had come to an impasse. Thanks to weeks of methodical labor by the Old Boys and brilliant thinking by Zarah, I now knew far more than I had any right to know about the targets I had set out to acquire. But I did not yet know enough and I could not proceed further until I knew more. It seemed a good moment to read Zarah’s retranslation of the Amphora Scroll.

Bright sunshine notwithstanding, it was too cold to read in the garden, even if there hadn’t been sound reasons not to show myself outdoors in daylight. I put on a sweater, switched on the electric fire in the sitting room, made myself a cup of tea, and sat down with Zarah’s typescript. She had printed it out on heavier paper than is usual. Several minutes passed—long enough for the tea to cool—while I stared at the thing as if it were still written in the Greek alphabet. When at last I steeled myself to begin, I found
things to enjoy. It was uncanny how closely the voice of Septimus Arcanus, confiding and worldly, resembled the voices in the top secret cables and dispatches I had been reading for most of my adult life. Arcanus was a type I knew by heart—intelligent, truthful to a nicety, diligent, and infinitely condescending to the outlandish persons on whom he was reporting. It was no comfort whatsoever to remember that Simon Hawk had told me that he and Reinhard Heydrich had felt pretty much the same sense of kinship to this dead Roman. No doubt the similarity would have been even stronger had I been able to read the original in the author’s Greek but, as Homer and the New Testament have taught the world, translations from the Greek are quite powerful enough. In any case, the manuscript soon made the world I lived in go away.

Septimus Arcanus began by describing a lazy slave being beaten in the street by his red-faced master.

“Puffs of dust sprang from the slave’s filthy tunic with every blow of his owner’s staff,” he wrote. “These caused the master to sneeze but he went on with the beating anyway: Whack!
Ah-choo!
Whack!
Ah-choo!
It was hot in Jerusalem. As you know, dear Sejanus, Judea is a waterless country where the masses are caked with a lifetime accumulation of dirt and for the most part never feel water on their skins. Recently I watched a baptist at work dunking converts in a river. I am told that the baptized feel that their sins have been washed away, and no wonder. According to my information it was the specialty of a religious eccentric called Yohanan, a Hebrew name meaning ‘Yahweh has been gracious’— Yahweh being the local god who, unlike Jove, feels no need for subsidiary gods and runs the world unassisted. I say
was
because Yohanan, who had attracted a considerable following among the unwashed by predicting that a messenger from Yahweh would soon arrive and supplant earthly rulers, got his head chopped off by Herod for his troubles.”