The Old Boys (55 page)

She said, “What will he do with it?”

“That’s not going to be a concern.”

“What are you saying to me?”

“That the scroll will be out of your life. Out of Zarah’s life. It will cease to exist right in front of your eyes. Do you understand?”

“You’re certain of that?”

“On my honor.”

Lori looked at Zarah, a long look, which must have been like gazing at herself in another time and place, and perhaps she remembered Heydrich and who knows what else. And then this woman who had guarded the Amphora Scroll, who had carried it next to her skin for more than sixty years and given up everything for it, reached under her voluminous Kyrgyz skirts, brought it out and handed it to me. Tarik gasped. She laid a motherly hand on his cheek, and for a brief moment when she smiled at her son, the one that she loved, she looked as she must have looked when she still looked like Zarah.

I handed the scroll over to Kevin. Solemnly we marched Ibn Awad to the plane. A hostile young man in a white coat whom I knew must be Mubarak and a male nurse met us at the bottom of the ramp. They helped him up the stairs. Kevin and I followed, Kevin carrying the portable oxygen tank as well as the Amphora Scroll. On board the aircraft, he handed the oxygen tank to the nurse and the Amphora Scroll to the doctor, who snatched it from his hand and tossed it into an overhead compartment.

Ibn Awad was being strapped into a large seat like a dentist’s chair, more suitable for an execution than a journey. The male nurse strapped his oxygen tank into the seat next to him. I tried to catch Ibn Awad’s eye; this would be the last time I would ever see him and to my surprise I found myself wishing to exchange some sort of good-bye. The old man breathed easily through his
nose tube, eyes seeing afar, a little smile on his face, his head cocked. He seemed to be listening to something pleasant. There would be no good-byes. God had sent messengers for him. He had forgotten me already.

Mubarak said, “Get out.”

He looked as if he might plunge a syringe full of cyanide or plague into my arm if I did not depart immediately and take my revolting kaffir germs with me. I disembarked.

On the tarmac, while Captain Khaldun taxied the plane toward its takeoff point, I gave the impatient Turkmen the Saker falcon and what gold we had left in payment for their dead. They were not happy with the price. Kevin helped with the negotiations, speaking to the Turkmen in their own language, shouting above the whine of the jet engines as the plane taxied, pivoted, then hurtled down the runway for its takeoff.

It rose from the runway and climbed steeply, almost vertically, to avoid the hills in front of it, then banked sharply to avoid the pillar of flame dead ahead. And then, just as I was beginning to fear that the things had been discovered and removed, the grenades I had tossed into the left-hand engine detonated. The engine disappeared in a gout of flame and smoke. The plane shuddered and kept flying. I looked at Kevin, who had taken such an interest in Ibn Awad’s oxygen tank. He was looking at his watch, as if timing something. A second later there was a second explosion, this one inside the cabin. Flames shot from the portholes. A wing fell off. Like a flaming checkmark, the plane cartwheeled, spewed parts, then disintegrated.

Kevin smiled a brilliant smile. “Oxygen,” he said. “You really can depend on it.”

The Turkmen were all looking upward and pointing to the shower of debris.

Kevin said, “Get ready.”

One of his men pulled up beside us in a brand-new SUV.

Kevin said, “Go. Fast.”

I jumped into the driver’s seat and took the wheel. Tarik swept
his mother into his arms and leaped in after me. Zarah and Paul took the back seat. Courtesy of Kevin, there was a loaded Kalashnikov for every passenger. We drove away. Kevin and his men made no attempt to interfere with the Turkmen who started to pursue us. It was the Old Boys on the hilltop who got us away. They dropped half a dozen mortar shells on the Turkmen, overturning a couple of their vehicles. The survivors turned around and fled.

It was only my imagination, of course, but I thought I heard schoolboy cheering from the hilltop.

Paul Christopher decided to remain dead to everyone except his mother and Tarik and Zarah. The four of them went off together, where I do not know and will not follow. It is my hope that I will see Paul and Zarah again, but if this doesn’t work out we will always have Uzbekistan, not to mention Xinjiang and the several other places where it would be unwise of their little family to settle down.

After we returned to the United States, we Old Boys saw little of each other. We had not really been friends before our search for the grail, just a bunch of fellows who had lived the same life and had more or less the same scores to settle. We did not so much drift apart, as soldiers do after a war, as doze back into ennui. On the whole, I think, we were happier than we might have been if we had not committed this one last folly. Everyday life is a cover identity for operational types. Inside the golfer, the backyard chef, the fond grandfather, the cutthroat remembers what is hidden and listens for the phone to ring at midnight and the muffled voice he knew so well to say, “You’re needed in Berlin.” Most of us had never really expected the phone to ring again, so Jack and Charley and Harley and David and Ben, and I most of all, had reason to be grateful to Paul Christopher for one last trip on the expense account.

With
the proceeds of the sale of my house in Georgetown, I lived a comfortable life. Washington did not seem the place to do this. I moved to the Harbor, the family homestead in the Berkshires and rattled around in the company of ghosts whose measured tread across the squeaky attic floor I had known since childhood. Living alone, I limited myself to two vodkas per day, sometimes dared to eat a peach, and cast my mind entirely in the future, which was a tuneful Ruritania in relation to the scorched continents of my several pasts.

It was Harley, naturally, who decided that a reunion was in order. He handled all the arrangements and one November day, the anniversary of the memorial service for the vermilion urn that supposedly contained Paul’s ashes, the Old Boys arrived. They seemed older, smaller, quieter, less opinionated. Conversation lagged. There was no reason to tell one another what we already knew, which was that whatever we had done did not really matter. Our work did not exist, had never existed, not in the annals of history or in the memory of those who had asked us to do it. All of it, going back to our dewy youth, was a laugh, a prank, a game, and like any other game, the one we had just played, our last, had not really changed a thing. There was no
remember the day Horace and Kevin blew up the same airplane,
no mention of the album of odd new friends we’d made on our travels, then lost forever. Or so we hoped, although we knew there would always be another bomb, another believer, another game of blindman’s buff, and one day a different outcome.

During dinner, Christopherian in its undercooked simplicity— smoked fish, cold soup, rare meat, and the inevitable asparagus—we drank several bottles of Montrachet and Romanée Contis from the well-stocked cellar that Paul had bequeathed to me. We talked about his taste for the pinot grape and his luck with women. At sunset we walked up the hill to the family burial ground, a bottle of Perrier-Jouët in an ice bucket, to drink a toast on Christopher’s grave.

What, Horace? You actually went so far as to mark a fake grave with his name?

Not
me—Stephanie, for whom one burial at Arlington had not been enough. She had saved a cupful of what she insisted were his ashes and planted them here and raised a handsome polished stone with Paul’s name and dates carved upon it. I found the thing when I came back from Kazakhstan, and I guess you could say that in a way, for Stephanie at least, Paul had been fastened to the earth at last. In two places, with a third yet to be designated—and if I knew Paul, unmarked.

I poured the bubbly. Memories moved in the circle of dimming eyes that gazed down on Paul’s monument, a last disguise written in stone.

“Old times, old friends, old everything,” said Harley.

We drank. Plastic glasses bounced off the mock headstone. The champagne, as it should, left its half-sweet lingering aftertaste on the tongue.

Old Boys
is a work of fiction in which no reference is intended to anyone who ever lived or anything that ever happened. This disclaimer applies in particular to Ibn Awad, who appeared in two of my earlier novels,
The Better Angels
(1979) and
Shelley’s Heart
(1997). In the earlier works, he sponsored a wave of suicide bombings, a flight of the imagination so bizarre thirty-five years ago that it was regarded by many an obstacle to the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. Conversely, some of the events described in the Amphora Scroll are based closely on the Gospel According to John. Where mere information is concerned I have, as usual, attempted to stick to the facts. For details of life, landscape and archeology in Xinjiang province, I drew on the recollections of Robert M. Poole and the writings of Tom Allen. Some details of life on a country estate in Hungary were suggested by András Nagy’s review in the autumn 1999 issue of the
Hungarian Quarterly
of
The Memoirs of a “Proud Hungarian”
by Tibor Scitovsky. The material on falconry is drawn largely from the eleventh edition of
Encyclopedia Britannica
but also from memories of a long-ago friendship with a falconer who presented my children with a fully trained golden eagle from the Atlas mountains. (Their mother declined the gift.) For data on satellite tracking of the migration of the houbara bustard, I am indebted to an article
in
Arabian Wildlife
by Thery Bailey and Dr. Fred Launay. The material on Soviet Naukograds was mined from the Web site globalsecurity.org. Details of “peaceful” underground nuclear tests in the USSR were drawn from nuclearweaponarchive.org. Everything else came from thin air.

C. McC.