He had gone to the rejuvenation center in Switzerland, submitted to surgical erasing of wrinkles, the sanding of his skin, the injection of animal fetus pulp into his own veins. But nothing could be done for the shrinking of his skeleton, the freezing of his joints, the very turning of his blood into water.
Though it no longer did him any good, the Oracle believed he understood men and women in love. Even when he was past his sixtieth year young mistresses adored him. The whole secret was never to impose any rules on their behavior, never to be jealous, never to hurt their feelings. They took young men as their true loves and treated the Oracle with careless cruelty. It didn’t matter. He showered them with expensive gifts, paintings, jewelry in the best of taste. He let them call on his power to get unearned favors from society and the use of his money in generous but not lavish amounts. He was a prudent man and would always have three or four mistresses at one time. For they had their own lives to lead. They would fall in love and neglect him, they would take trips, they would be working hard at their careers. He could not make too many demands on their time. But when he needed female company (not only for sex but for the sweet music of their voices, the innocent deviousness of their wiles), one of the four would be available. And of course to be seen at important functions in his company gave them entree into circles it would be more difficult for them to penetrate on their own. Social cachet was one of his assets.
He made no secrets, they all knew about one another. He believed that in their hearts women disliked monogamous men.
How cruel that he remembered bad things he had done more often than the good. His money had built medical centers, churches, rest homes for the elderly; he had done many good things. But his memories of himself were not good. Fortunately he thought about love often. In an interesting and peculiar way, it had been the most commercial thing in his life. And he had owned Wall Street firms, banks, airlines.
Anointed with the power of money, he had been invited to share in world-shaking events, been adviser to the powerful. He had helped shape the very world people lived in. A fascinating, important, valuable life. And yet the managing of his countless mistresses was far more vivid in his hundred-year-old brain. Ah, those intelligent headstrong beauties, how delightful they had been, and how they had vindicated his judgment, most of them. Now they were judges, heads of magazines, powers in Wall Street, TV news queens. How cunning they had been in their love affairs with him and how he had outwitted them. But without cheating them of their due. He had no guilt, only regrets. If one of them had truly loved him, he would have raised her to the skies. But then his mind reminded him that he had not deserved to be so loved. They had recognized his love, it was a hollow drum that made his body thump.
It was at the age of eighty that his skeleton began to contract inside its envelope of flesh. Physical desire receded and a vast ocean of youthful and lost images drowned his brain. And it was at this time he found it necessary to employ young women to lie innocently in his bed just so that he could look at them. Oh, that perversity so scorned in literature, so mocked by the young who must grow old. And yet what peace it gave his crumbling body to see the beauty he could no longer devour. How pure it was. The rolling mound of breast, satiny white skin crowned with its tiny red rose. The mysterious thighs, their rounded flesh giving off a golden glow, the surprising triangle of hair—a choice of colors—and then on the other side the heartbreak of buttocks divided into two exquisite haunches. So much beauty, to his bodily senses dead and lost, but sparking the flickering billions of cells in his brain. And their faces, the mysterious shells of ears spiraling into some inner sea, the hollowed eyes with their banked fires of blue and gray and brown and green looking out from their private eternal cells, the planes of their faces descending into unshielded lips, so open to pleasure and to wounds. He would look upon them before he went to sleep. He would reach out and touch the warm flesh; the satin of thigh and buttocks, touch the burning lips, and oh so rarely smooth the crinkled pubic hair to feel the throbbing pulse beneath. There was so much comfort there that he would fall asleep and the pulse would soften the terror of his dreams. In his dreams he hated the very young and would devour them. He dreamed of the bodies of young men piled high in trenches, sailors by the thousands floating fathoms deep beneath the sea, vast skies clouded by the space-suited bodies of celestial explorers spinning endlessly into the black holes of the universe.
Awake he dreamed. But awake he recognized his dreams as a form of senile madness, his digust of his own body. He hated his skin, which gleamed like scar tissue, the brown spots on his hands and bald pate, those deadly freckles of death, his failing sight, the feebleness of his limbs, the spinning heart, the evilness tumoring his brain clear as a bell.
Oh, what a pity that fairy godmothers came to the cradle of newborn infants to bestow their three magical wishes! Those infants had no need; old men like himself should receive such gifts. Especially those with minds as clear as a bell.
BOOK
II
EASTER WEEK
CHAPTER
4
Monday
Romeo’s Escape from Italy had been meticulously planned. From St. Peter’s Square the van took his cadre to a safe house, where he changed clothes, was furnished with an almost foolproof passport, picked up an already packed suitcase and was taken by underground routes over the border into southern France. There in the city of Nice he boarded the flight to Paris that continued on to New York. Though he had gone without sleep for the past thirty hours, Romeo remained alert. This was all tricky detail, the easy portion of an operation that sometimes went wrong because of some crazy fluke or hitch in planning.
The dinner and wine on Air France planes were always good, and Romeo gradually relaxed. He gazed down at endless pale green water and horizons of white and blue sky. He took two strong sleeping pills. But still some nerve of fear in his body kept him awake. He thought of passing through United States customs—would something go wrong there? But even if he was caught at that time and place, it would not make any difference to Yabril’s scheme. A treacherous survival instinct kept him awake. Romeo had no illusions about the suffering he would have to endure. He had agreed to commit a self-sacrificing act to atone for the sins of his family, his class and his country, but now that mysterious nerve of fear tautened his body.
Finally the pills worked and he fell asleep. In his dreams he fired the shot and ran out of St. Peter’s Square, and now still running, he came awake. The plane was landing at Kennedy Airport in New York. The stewardess handed him his jacket, and he reached for his carry-on case from the overhead bin. When he passed through customs, he acted his part perfectly, and carried his bag outside to the central plaza of the airport terminal.
He spotted his contacts immediately. The girl wore a green ski cap with white stripes. The young man pulled out a red billed cap and put it on his head so that the blue stencil reading “Yankees” was visible. Romeo himself wore no signal markers; he had wanted to keep his options open. He bent down and fiddled with his bags, opening one and rummaging through it as he studied the two contacts. He could observe nothing that was suspicious. Not that it really mattered.
The girl was skinny and blond and too angular for Romeo’s taste, but her face had a feminine sternness that some serious-minded girls have and he liked that in a woman. He wondered how she would be in bed and hoped he would remain free long enough to seduce her. It shouldn’t be too difficult. He had always been attractive to women. In that way he was a better man than Yabril. She would guess that he was connected to the killing of the Pope, and to a serious-minded revolutionary girl, sharing his bed might be the fulfillment of a romantic dream. He noticed that she did not lean toward or touch the man who was with her.
That young man had such a warm, open face, he radiated such American kindliness, that Romeo immediately disliked him. Americans were such worthless shits, they had too comfortable a life. Imagine, in over two hundred years they had never come close to
having a revolutionary party. And this in a country that had come into existence through revolution. The young man sent to greet him was typical of such softness. Romeo picked up his bags and walked directly to them.
“Excuse me,” Romeo said, smiling, his English heavily accented. “Could you tell me where the bus leaves for Long Island?”
The girl turned her face toward him. She was much prettier up close. He saw a tiny scar on her chin and that aroused his desire. She said, “Do you want the North Shore or the South Shore?”
“East Hampton,” Romeo said.
The young girl smiled, it was a warm smile, even a smile of admiration. The young man took one of Romeo’s bags and said, “Follow us.”
They led the way out of the terminal. Romeo followed. The noise of traffic, the density of people, almost stunned him. A car was waiting with a driver, who wore another red billed baseball cap. The two young men sat in the front, the girl got into the backseat with Romeo. As the car rolled into traffic the girl extended her hand and said, “My name is Dorothea. Please don’t worry.” The two young men up front also murmured their names. Then the girl said, “You will be very comfortable and very safe.” And in that moment Romeo felt the agony of a Judas.
That night the young American couple took great pains to cook Romeo a good dinner. He had a comfortable room overlooking the ocean, though the bed was lumpy, which made little difference because Romeo knew he would sleep in it only one night, if he slept at all. The house was expensively furnished, but with no real taste; it was modern, beach America. The three of them spent a quiet evening talking in a mixture of Italian and English.
The girl, Dorothea, was a surprise. She was extremely intelligent as well as pretty. She also turned out not to be flirtatious, which destroyed Romeo’s hopes of spending his last night of freedom playing sexual fun games. The young man, Richard, was also quite serious. It was evident that they had guessed he was involved in the murder of the Pope, but they did not ask specific questions. They simply treated him with the frightening respect that people show to someone slowly dying of a terminal illness. Romeo was impressed by them. They had such lithe bodies when they moved. They talked intelligently, they had compassion for the unfortunate and they radiated confidence in their beliefs and their abilities.
Spending that quiet evening with the two young people, so sincere in their beliefs, so innocent in the necessities of true revolution, Romeo felt a little sick of his whole life. Was it necessary that these two be betrayed along with himself? He would be released eventually, he believed in Yabril’s plan—he thought it so simple, so elegant. And he had volunteered to place himself in the noose. But the young man and woman were also true believers, people on their side. And they would be in handcuffs, they would know the sufferings of revolutionaries. For a moment he thought of warning them. But it was necessary that the world know that there were Americans involved in the plot; these two were the sacrificial lambs. And then he was angry with himself, he was too softhearted. True, he could never throw a bomb into a kindergarten, as Yabril could, but surely he could sacrifice a few adults. He had killed a Pope, after all.
And what real harm would come to them? They would serve a few years in prison. America was so soft from top to bottom that they might even go free. America was a land of lawyers who were as fearsome as the Knights of the Round Table. They could get anybody off.
And so he tried to go to sleep. But all the terrors of the past few days came over the ocean air blowing through the open window. Again he raised his rifle, again he saw the Pope fall, again he was rushing through the square, and heard the celebrating pilgrims screaming in horror.
Early the next morning, Monday morning, twenty-four hours after he had killed the Pope, Romeo decided he would walk along the American ocean shore and get his last whiff of freedom. The house was silent as he came down the stairs, but he found Dorothea and Richard sleeping on the two couches in the living room, as if they had been standing guard. The poison of his treachery drove him out the door into the salt breeze of the beach. On sight, he hated this foreign beach, the barbaric gray shrubs, the tall wild yellow weeds, the sunlight flashing off silver-red soda cans. Even the sunshine was watery, and the early spring colder in this strange land. But he was glad to be out in the open while treachery was being done. A helicopter sailed overhead and then out of sight; there were two boats motionless in the water with not a sign of life aboard. The sun rose the color of a blood orange, then yellowed into gold as it rose higher in the sky. He walked for a long time, rounded a corner of the bay, and lost sight of the house. For some reason this panicked him, or perhaps it was the sight of a veritable forest of thin high mottled gray weeds that came almost to the water’s edge. He turned back.
It was then that he heard the sirens of police cars. Far down the beach he saw the flashing lights and he walked rapidly toward them. He felt no fear, no doubt in Yabril, though he could still flee. He felt contempt for this American society that could not even organize his capture properly, how stupid they were. But then the helicopter reappeared in the sky, the two ships that had seemed so still and deserted were racing toward shore. He felt fear and panic. Now that there was no chance of escape he wanted to run and run and run. But he steeled himself and walked toward the house surrounded by men and guns. The helicopter hovered over its roof. There were more men coming up the beach and down the beach. Romeo prepared his charade of guilt and fright; he started to run out into the ocean but men rose out of the water in masks. Romeo turned and ran back toward the house, and then he saw Richard and Dorothea.
They were chained, in handcuffs, ropes of iron rooted their bodies to the earth. And they were weeping. Romeo knew how they felt—so he had stood once long ago. They were weeping in shame, in humiliation, stripped of their sense of power. And filled with the unutterably nightmarish terror of being completely helpless, their fate no longer determined by whimsical, perhaps merciful, gods but by their implacable fellowmen.
Romeo gave them both a smile of helpless pity. He knew he would be free in a matter of days, he knew he had betrayed these true believers in his own faith, but after all, it had been a tactical decision, not an evil or malicious one. Then armed men swarmed over him and linked him with steel and heavy iron.
• • •
Far across the world, that world whose roof of sky was riddled with spying satellites, its ozone patrolled by voodoo radar, across the seas filled with American warships sweeping toward Sherhaben, across continents spaced with missile silos and stationary armies rooted to the earth to act as lightning rods for death, Yabril had breakfast in the palace with the Sultan of Sherhaben.
The Sultan of Sherhaben was a believer in Arab freedom, of the Palestinian right to a homeland. He regarded the United States as the bulwark of Israel—Israel could not stand without American support. Therefore America was the ultimate enemy. And Yabril’s plot to destabilize America’s authority had appealed to his subtle mind. The humiliation of a great power by Sherhaben, militarily so helpless, delighted him.
The Sultan had absolute power in Sherhaben. He had vast wealth; every pleasure in life was his for the asking, but all this had become stale and unsatisfying. The Sultan had no vices to add spice to his life. He observed Muslim law, he lived a virtuous life. The standard of living in Sherhaben, with its vast revenues of oil, was one of the highest in the world; the Sultan had built new schools and new hospitals. Indeed his dream was to make Sherhaben the Switzerland of the Arab world. His only eccentricity was his mania for cleanliness, of his person and in his state.
The Sultan had taken part in this conspiracy because he relished the sense of adventure, the gambling for high stakes, the striving for high ideals. And there was little personal risk to himself and to his country, since he had a magic shield, billions of barrels of oil safely locked beneath his desert land.
Another strong motive was his love for and gratitude to Yabril. When the Sultan was only a minor prince, there had been a fierce struggle for
power in Sherhaben, especially after the oil fields proved to be so vast. The American oil companies had supported the Sultan’s opponents, who naturally favored the American cause. The Sultan, who had been educated abroad, understood the true value of the oil fields, and fought to retain the fields for Sherhaben. Civil war broke out. It had been the then very young Yabril who helped the Sultan achieve power by killing off the Sultan’s opponents. For the Sultan, though a man of personal virtue, recognized that political struggle had its own rules.
After his assumption of power, the Sultan gave Yabril sanctuary when needed. Indeed in the last ten years Yabril had spent more time in Sherhaben than in any other place. He established a separate identity with a home and servants and a wife and children. He was also, in that identity, employed as a special government official in a minor capacity. This identity was never penetrated by any foreign intelligence service. During those ten years he and the Sultan became close. They were both students of the Koran, educated by foreign teachers, and they were united in their hatred of Israel. And here they made a special distinction: they did not hate the Jews as Jews; they hated the official state of the Jews.
The Sultan of Sherhaben had a secret dream, one so bizarre he did not dare to share it with anyone, not even Yabril. That one day Israel would be destroyed and the Jews dispersed again all over the world. And then he, the Sultan, would lure Jewish scientists and scholars to Sherhaben. He would establish a great university that would collect Jewish brains. For had not history proved that this race owned the genes to greatness of the mind? Einstein and other Jewish scientists had given the world the atom bomb. What other mysteries of God and nature could they not solve? And were they not fellow Semites? Time erodes hatred; Jew and Arab could live in peace together and make Sherhaben great. Oh, he would lure them with riches and sweet civility; he would respect all their stubborn whims of culture. Who knew what would happen? Sherhaben could become another Athens. The thought made the Sultan smile at his own foolishness, but still, where was the harm in a dream?