Second sight, p.54
Second Sight, page 54
“I’m going to stop the drip,” Hassan said. He ripped the needle from Patchen’s arm. “When he wakes up we’ll talk man to man.” He began to feel Patchen’s naked body, inch by inch, as if searching for something under the skin.
Maria turned to Zarah. “I know this is painful to watch,” she said in English. “Just remember: This is mild compared to what Patchen did to Barney Wolkowicz after he framed him—drugged him, put him into a cell, took away everything, even his clothes, tortured his body, manipulated his mind and his emotions, threatened to have his wife committed to an insane asylum. Barney wrote it all down. Here, read it.”
She handed Zarah an envelope. Inside, written in Wolkowicz’s unmistakable hand, was a letter providing details of his captivity in a secret Outfit installation after he had been seized by Patchen’s men. Zarah read it; the first two pages were missing.
“It’s as clear as clear can be,” Maria said. “Patchen charged Barney with the crime he had committed himself, delivering your father into a Chinese prison, and got away with it. Even your father believed him. Paul Christopher was the one who caught Barney. Patchen couldn’t have done it without him, he’s never been able to do anything without Paul. He always lived on your father’s talent like a snake sucking milk. I told you about the bugged raincoat; typical Christopher. Here, read for yourself.”
She handed over the missing pages from the letter. It described Paul Christopher’s homecoming, his investigation of his own case, the trap he and Patchen laid to capture Wolkowicz and brand him a traitor. Maria, anxious and maternal, waited until Zarah was through reading.
“Barney Wolkowicz wasn’t the first good person the two of them destroyed,” Maria said. “Far from it. Patchen did the same to my husband with your father’s help, and to me because I loved my husband and believed in your father’s honesty. There were others, a lot of them, before and after us. Remember your mother. She was a victim. Patchen used your father to do his dirty work for him, to win people’s trust, because everyone always loved Paul Christopher. No one has ever loved Patchen … Zarah, I want you to tell me why Patchen isn’t affected by the drug. Did he take something?”
Zarah did not answer. Maria rearranged her tangled hair for her with a few deft movements and gazed lovingly into her eyes. “Please tell me,” she said. “Because if you don’t, that man will ask you the same question.”
Hassan was cutting into Patchen’s chest with a small Swiss Army knife, delicately, feeling for something with a finger inserted beneath the skin. Suddenly he uttered a triumphant grunt and ripped out the implant. “Clever bastard!” he said, holding it aloft. A trickle of blood, surprisingly dark, meandered among the purple contours of Patchen’s scars.
Hassan took a stun gun out of his pocket and pressed it against the reopened incision. Zarah saw Patchen’s body leap convulsively under the electric shock; he appeared to stop breathing for a moment but then uttered a strangled scream. Hassan jammed the intravenous needle into another vein in Patchen’s arm. “Now we’ll see,” he said.
“Don’t be upset,” Maria whispered. “He can feel it now but he won’t remember it later. It will be like the pain never existed.”
Hassan used the stun gun on Patchen again, this time on his face. Patchen saw the Japanese grenade explode and heard himself screaming for a corpsman. Christopher appeared out of the smoke of battle in helmet and denims, carrying another Marine in his arms like a child. A naked Japanese soldier, gibbering in terror and missing a hand, rose up in front of him. His stump spurted blood. Christopher stopped in his tracks, immediately understanding what was happening, and waited for the man to finish bleeding to death; he did not seem to be afraid or compassionate or even curious; he did not touch a weapon, he simply watched. Then he laid the American he was carrying on the ground and gave Patchen an injection of morphine. Patchen’s vision cleared momentarily and he saw Christopher’s face quite distinctly in the blue-white flash of exploding naval ordnance. In a confidential murmur, Christopher said, “I’m going to carry you for a few yards, put you down, then come back for the other fellow. Then I’ll come back for you. I won’t leave you. You’ll be taking turns. Do you understand?” Patchen opened his mouth to reply but instead of the civil “yes” he had intended to utter, he shouted hysterically for the corpsman; Christopher gave him more morphine, his own syrette. The Vietnamese girl began to sing again. Christopher carried Patchen and the other Marine across the mud; Christopher himself was wounded and paused to bandage his injury. Because he could no longer walk he dragged first Patchen then the other man toward the American lines, counting softly in German. A mortar shell exploded nearby. The Vietnamese girl, dancing in her white ao dai on the sun-drenched River of Perfumes, continued to sing. With grave Oriental courtesy Vo Rau said, “I’m very sorry, I don’t understand German, but she is singing that when God decides to make himself visible to us he approaches not in fire and majesty from the immensity of the heavens but shyly and intelligently, as a buddha, out of the body of a woman.” On hearing these words, Patchen saw the Inward Light. It was immensely small though it contained innumerable collapsed universes with all their indescribable luminosity; inside, as from inside his mother, the light was rosy, but vast. The rescue complete, Christopher laid him down in the sampan and went back for the other wounded Marine. One of the troops fired eight rapid shots from an Ml rifle which ejected the empty clip with the familiar SPANG! Martha stood in the bow of the sampan with gossamer sails billowing around her beautiful young body. “O David, I am so happy for thee,” she said. Patchen opened his lips to thank her for her patience and understanding, and once he began to speak he could not stop. He told her over and over again that he loved her. He had never been so happy as he was now, even though he heard mortar shells exploding all around him and he knew that he was dying of his wounds at last.
7
HASSAN ABDALLAH HAD THROWN HIS RED-CHECKERED KAFFIYEH aside, baring his face. He looked, Zarah thought, like a disgruntled clerk who had never been given the promotions he knew he deserved. While Patchen made his intoxicated confession, Hassan operated the television camera himself, as a means of showing his displeasure at the inefficient way in which Patchen had been searched. There were three of his people in the room, but he ignored them. The four he had sent outside to take prisoners had not come back. The others stood idly by, shamefaced, with their weapons in their hands, Hassan was peering through the camera lens at Patchen’s smiling features when the charges set by the Ibal Iden went off, blowing off the doors of the mas. These first two explosions were muffled and far away, but there was a louder bang as the trap door to the tunnel that led into the room blew inward. The pressure wave knocked Patchen off his chair and staggered the guards who stood beside him.
All this Hassan saw through the lens of the camera. Then he, too, was knocked off his feet—not by the explosion but by an assailant who came out of the hole in the floor and struck him from behind with terrific force, jamming the camera against his face and starting a nosebleed. Using the camera as a weapon, Hassan struck hard at his attacker, thinking to smash his face, but the blow struck only empty air. He felt an excruciating pain in his leg, and looking downward, saw that he was being bitten by an enormous black dog. He smashed the camera against the animal’s skull with one hand in a series of frantic but ineffectual blows while reaching for his pistol with the other.
Ja’wab and Tammuz came into the room shooting. All three of Hassan’s men died in less than three seconds. Hassan had reached his own pistol by this time and holding off the dog with his other hand, he shot Tammuz through the forehead. Tammuz’s pistol, fitted with an elongated ammunition clip that protruded from the butt, spun from his hand. Maria picked up the weapon, and with her eyes fixed on Ja’wab, began to raise it expertly into the firing position. Ja’wab’s pistol was pointed straight at Hassan’s head, but Hassan knew that he had no intention of killing him. Ja’wab shouted something in incomprehensible Arabic, then saw Maria out of the corner of his eye and leaped backward through the door just as she fired the first round at him; it slammed into the rocks. Maria charged the door and fired half a dozen rounds into the darkness. Hassan jabbed the muzzle of his weapon into the dog’s rumbling chest, pressed the trigger three times, and saw the Parabellum bullets, trailed by streamers of blood, strike the wall on the other side of the room. He rolled free of the dead animal and leaped into the tunnel.
Zarah, her ankles still shackled, had floundered across the floor to the place where Patchen lay. Just as she reached him Patchen got to his feet. He was smiling joyously, oblivious to the hail of bullets ricocheting off the masonry walls. Zarah saw Maria pointing her captured Glock, loaded with Yeho’s copper bullets, at the two of them. Zarah, fighting her shackles, stood up and threw her arms around Patchen, intending to pull him back to the floor, but Patchen saw Maria, too, and with his one incredibly strong arm whirled Zarah off her feet, placing his body between hers and the gun. Maria fired two shots, Outfit-style, into Patchen’s thorax. The soft copper bullets opened within him just as Yeho had said they would, then stopped before they reached Zarah. Ja’wab stepped back into the room and killed her, too late.
Patchen grunted loudly and said, “I remembered.” It seemed to Zarah, then and for the rest of her life, that he spoke these words with his last breath, after he had stopped the expanding bullet with his body. He was talking to Christopher, who had climbed out of the tunnel carrying the splayed, unconscious person of Hassan Abdallah in his arms. Patchen’s weight pulled Zarah to her knees when she tried to keep his smiling corpse from falling.
EPILOGUE
THANKSGIVING
LLA KAHINA AND SEBASTIAN LAUX STOOD BY A STONE WALL WITH the O. G., a little apart from the other mourners among the tilted headstones in the graveyard at the Harbor. It was very early in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, and a wind that smelled of winter howled in the surrounding forest. The moss beneath their feet was brittle with frost. The gravestones of the Hubbards and Christophers had been planted in rings, one for each generation. Christopher and Martha stood in the center among the elongated shadows thrown by the barely risen northern sun, holding the funeral urn between them. Christopher removed the lid and the wind stirrred David Patchen’s ashes. There were no prayers, no stone engraved with his favorite verse from Housman, no eulogy by the O. G.; everyone knew that the deceased hated ceremony.
“It’s very strange,” Lla Kahina said, “but I never saw this man, never.”
“In life, you mean, or in the cards?” Sebastian asked.
“Not in either. What did he look like?”
Stephanie gave them a surprised look. They were not whispering. Sebastian, taking Meryem’s arm in his, drew her closer. “The truthful answer,” he said, “is ‘like a corpse.’ Tall, thin, limping, mournful, with a scarred face and a crippled arm. He was wounded in the war, almost mortally.”
Martha and Christopher tipped the urn and shook it. At first Patchen’s ashes were a little too heavy for the wind, but after a short delay they ascended in a fluttering cloud before breaking apart, as it seemed, molecule by molecule, and disappearing into swirling air.
“You say he was almost killed in the war?” Lla Kahina said. “That explains it. Sometimes people die before they die. He must have had some debt to pay and remained in this life to pay it.”
Although he had not seen her since the summer of 1939, Sebastian knew from the tone of her voice that she thought that Patchen’s long-ago escape from death explained everything. Maybe it did; he was willing to think so. The beaky, shrunken Meryem standing beside him now was the same Meryem who had been able to see through mountains and across the deeps of time when he first loved her; she knew things that were too simple for others to understand. As if she had read Sebastian’s thoughts, Zarah smiled at him across the concentric, weatherworn headstones.
The O. G. thought Zarah was smiling at him. “Lovely young woman,” he said in a hearty voice, grinning back with his healthy square old teeth. “David did right to do what he did for her.”
Lla Kahina gave him a questioning look. “What was that?”
“Died to save her life,” the O. G. said. “You didn’t know?”
“No. I told you, he was invisible to me.”
“You weren’t the only one,” the O. G. said. “Anyway, it was about time somebody died for a Christopher instead of the other way around.” He signed, lost in his own memories. “Circles within circles,” he said. “I first laid eyes on David right here, on this very spot, when we buried Hubbard Christopher. That must have been forty years ago, wasn’t it, Sebastian?”
“Nineteen hundred and forty-eight,” said Sebastian, who never forgot a number.
They turned to go, each old man holding one of Meryem’s arms to assist her over the rough path that led down through the overgrown pasture to the Harbor, which lay with smoking chimneys in the vale below.
At Thanksgiving breakfast the O. G. made a toast in ale that included Patchen: “Absent friends.” Nothing more than that was said about him. Under the rules of marriage and friendship and the laws of the United States of America, no one present, not even the O. G., was free to discuss in the presence of others secrets they knew about the deceased. In his last operation Patchen had achieved what he wanted. The White House had already announced that the Outfit had been irreparably compromised by the capture of its last Director, and that it must be replaced by a new intelligence service that could operate in a world in which there would be no deadly enemies, only the disappointed, the disillusioned, and the deluded. This string of evocative words beginning with “d” was Patrick Graham’s invention; Graham had coined the phrase while announcing not just the death of the Outfit but the dawn of a new era. He suggested in his wrap-up remarks from the White House (at the O. G.’s confidential suggestion, the President had given him an exclusive interview in which he had revealed his thoughts about the future of American espionage and intelligence) that the future might see a world without secrets in which Americans and Russians, Israelis and Arabs, Hindus and Moslems, Christians and Communists worked hand in hand on earth as they were already doing in outer space. Both activities, after all, were intelligence missions, searches for pure knowledge as opposed to the pathological appetite for secrets that had driven the Outfit throughout its short, anti-democratic, maddeningly obscure history. (“Jeepers Ned!” responded the O. G., watching at home, among his souvenirs.)
After breakfast Martha said goodbye; she had to catch a plane for Guatemala.
“Will you be back?” Christopher asked.
“Oh, quite soon,” Martha said. “I’m only going to say goodbye to my Indians.”
“After all these years?”
“There’s no reason to go back. The children will all be gone soon; the guerrillas keep coming back for more. Maybe they’ve got a Zarah of their own. David would be so happy that our Zarah did the great thing for the Ja’wabi that she was born to do.”
“Do you think he believed in such things?”
“Everyone does, inwardly. Doesn’t thee?”
Her unwavering eyes looked deep into Christopher’s. He kissed her, gently, on both cheeks.
“Of course I do,” he said.
Soon after Martha departed Christopher got out the treasure map and marked the square to be searched this year. There were very few left. Only he and Zarah and Lori went on the treasure hunt; everyone else except Stephanie was too old, and she did not believe that the treasure existed.
It was Lori who found the ledge with the letter “T” carved on it. It was only a few paces from the fallen maple that had concealed the Mahican burial ground. Christopher had walked past it many times without seeing it, and Lori had only noticed it because the angle of the light was exactly right. The “T” was not printed but carved in script, like a note of music, so it mimicked the natural cracks in the granite.
Christopher took a compass sighting while Zarah and Lori stretched a cord thirty-five paces straight north from the ledge. Kneeling in a circle, they dug into the soft forest floor with their hands and sharp stones. They uncovered a rusted log chain about eighteen inches below the surface. “That’s from the apple tree split by lightning,” said Lori, who knew her Harbor lore. “The treasure chest will be more than three feet down, below the frost level.”
They found it at four feet, a tin box inside another tin box. Within the second box were mad Eleazer Stickles’s treasures: a handful of gold pieces, a locket containing a picture of his wife, a letter to posterity confessing the murder of her lover and of the innocent man who hanged for the crime.
There was something else in the box, something that did not belong there: a title page torn from a rag-paper copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel published forty years after Stickles died. A row of numbers was written across it in pencil with the date abbreviated below in the European style, 27.XI.47—the day that Wolkowicz found the Mahican burial ground.
“What is it?” Lori asked.
“A book code,” Christopher said. “Go down to the house and tell them the news, and bring back Tom Sawyer from the library. We’ll meet you in the graveyard.”
It was the right book; the title page was missing. Sitting on the stone wall, Christopher looked up the pages and the letters of the alphabet corresponding to the scribbled numerals and decoded Wolkowicz’s message: KILROY WUZ HERE.
Christopher laughed out loud. Tears rose in Zarah’s eyes. The wind roared inside the forest. A wedge of Canada geese, wintering against nature on some Berkshire pond where city people gave them food, flew overhead. Lori pressed her cheek against her father’s and gestured for her sister to do the same. All three joined hands, and in the rapturous, slightly hoarse voice that filled Christopher’s heart with love and his mind with memories, the little girl recited the lines he had taught her in the only language that lions understand:
